Endless Summer, page 33
“Mom,” Jessie says. “There’s something I have to tell you.”
“Is it about Bitsy?” Kate says. “Or Genevieve? Or, hell, George and Sallie? Because I don’t want to hear it.”
“Lorraine is on Nantucket this summer, Mom,” Jessie says. She takes a beat, waiting for this information to sink in. “Lorraine Crimmins. She’s working at an organic farm on Polpis Road, apparently. She’s telling people to call her Rain. She’s been selling strawberries on Main Street.”
Kate turns to Jessie with wide eyes. “She’s selling strawberries on Main Street?”
Jessie nods. “Yes.” Does Kate get it? Does she understand? She’s talking about Lorraine Crimmins, daughter of their beloved caretaker Bill Crimmins and mother of Jessie’s boyfriend, Pick. She’s talking about Lorraine Crimmins, who served as housekeeper, cook, and nanny to Blair, Kirby, and Tiger but who then had an affair with Kate’s first husband, Wilder Foley, and became pregnant with his child, causing the downfall of the Foley family.
She’s talking about Lorraine Crimmins, Kate’s sworn enemy.
Kate doesn’t yell; she doesn’t break down and cry; she doesn’t spit out that Lorraine Crimmins knows better than to set foot on this island: It’s my island, she gave up her right to it when she slept with my husband, when she caused his death!
Kate does none of these things. Instead, Kate chuckles. “That’s why Bitsy came back without any strawberries. She said it was gnats, but really, she’s just a good friend. The best I’ve ever had.” When Kate looks at Jessie, her eyes are shining with tears. For all her youthful hijinks this summer, Jessie thinks, her mother in this moment looks every one of her sixty-eight years. And she looks so much like her own mother, Exalta, that Jessie is spooked.
“Let’s get you up to bed, Mom,” she says.
Kate allows Jessie to help her to her feet. “Yes,” she says. “I’m tired.”
7. WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE
She hasn’t slept in twenty-seven hours—Kirby’s last-minute decision to fly east landed her in the middle seat of the back row of the plane, where she could enjoy the smell of the chemical toilet—so when she finally boards the ferry at the fresh hour of eight a.m., she buys herself a Bloody Mary and tells herself she’s earned it. What’s that saying? Fifty percent of life is just showing up.
Here I am, Kirby thinks when the ferry docks in Nantucket. The prodigal aunt.
She goes into the terminal to use the pay phone, stopping at the ladies’ room first. Kirby flew without bags, but one look in the smudged mirror tells her they’re under her eyes. (Ha-ha.) Her skin is blotchy and dull, her hair, which she cut into a bob and permed in an attempt to look younger (her long, straight hair screamed sixties flower child), is crispy with product (so much mousse, too much). But the vodka on the boat has given her a little spark—just enough, she hopes, to get her to Red Barn Road, where she will experience the “authentic high” (she’s using rehab-speak here) of taking her family completely by surprise.
She has to hurry; the buzz feels like a lit match burning to its end.
She calls the house and a voice says, “Good morning, Levin residence.”
It’s not Kirby’s mother, which would have been Kirby’s first choice, or Genevieve, which would have been her second. It is, in fact, her last choice.
“Jessie?” Kirby says. “It’s me.” She pauses. “Kirby.”
Jessie hangs up.
Fair enough, Kirby thinks. She deserved that. She calls back. The phone rings five times, then it’s picked up and slammed down. It’s like they’re children again. Kirby searches through her Gucci change purse that she bought on Rodeo Drive in more prosperous times, but she can’t find another quarter so she slides in three dimes. She’s so broke that wasting that extra nickel pains her.
Jessie picks up on the first ring. “No one wants to talk to you.”
“But I’m—”
Jessie hangs up.
“Here,” Kirby says.
Fine, Kirby thinks. She’ll walk. She has only her purse and a loden suede weekend duffel that she bought at Joan and David, also in more prosperous times. She’s wearing Capezio ballet flats, black leggings, an oversize white button-down. She puts on Ray-Ban aviators, hoping she evokes Kelly McGillis in Top Gun, and off she sets.
Her spirits start to sing as she passes all of the familiar landmarks in town. There’s Steamboat Pizza, the Whaling Museum, and the Sunken Ship, where she and Blair and Tiger used to buy new rope bracelets at the start of every summer. Kirby knows that if she goes inside, there will be, next to the register, a glass jar of pristine new bracelets, white as bone. Is she too old to wear one? Yes, she thinks. She’s forty-freaking-one! She keeps going.
She passes Hardy’s General Store, with its familiar smell of sawdust and paint, then takes a right on Main. The sun is already hot; she’s sweating in her tight black leggings. How will she make it all the way to Red Barn Road?
She passes a farm truck parked in front of the Camera Shop. A woman who really does look like a sixties flower child is selling quarts of organic strawberries for six bucks. Ha! Kirby thinks. She thought that calling something organic and selling it for twice as much as normal was only a California thing.
She heads up to Mitchell’s Book Corner and stops for a minute to check out the titles in the window: John le Carré, Mary Higgins Clark, Salman Rushdie. As Tyesha always says, Reading is a great place to find your next movie, and it’s not always the bestsellers that are hits. Right, Kirby thinks. What she needs is a sleeper. She wants to pluck a book out of obscurity, pitch it, make it a blockbuster, and save her reputation—if it’s not beyond saving. There’s a book called A Time to Kill by John Grisham. Kirby has never heard of him, but it looks like a legal thriller and Scott Turow already has that territory covered. There’s a novel by someone named Kazuo Ishiguro called The Remains of the Day—definitely obscure, probably too obscure to be made into a film.
Kirby continues up Main Street and rounds the corner onto Fair. She needs to make a pit stop. When she reaches All’s Fair, she rounds the corner onto Plumb Lane, unlatches the gate, and steps into the backyard, just in case someone else in her family is in residence. She sees that the glass in the back door has been papered over. Vandalism, here on Fair Street? Burglary? Kirby eases the door open—someone must be staying here—and tiptoes into the kitchen, where she sets her bag down for one blessed second. She opens the fridge to find a carton of juice, a quart of strawberries that she’s betting came from the hippie on Main Street, a gallon of milk that’s three-quarters gone, eggs, a pound of bacon, a bowl of plump green grapes, a jar of apricot preserves, and—Kirby can hardly believe her eyes—a bottle of Moët et Chandon champagne.
It’s the answer to her prayers.
She hears what sounds like a herd of cattle upstairs, then little-person voices, and she swears under her breath—Tiger and the kids are here. While Kirby would love nothing more than to sit in the backyard with her brother and a couple of mimosas, she can’t handle Magee for even one second. Kirby grabs the bottle of champagne and slips out the back door.
She waits until she’s halfway down Lucretia Mott Lane before she pops the cork. It flies into someone’s rosebushes, and Kirby brings the bottle to her lips. She lets the bubbles run down her chin and all over her white shirt. It’s official, she thinks. She’s a lush, a derelict, a poseur, and a grifter. If Tyesha Bradford, Kirby’s girlfriend of the past two years, could see her now, walking down the charming, leafy Nantucket streets drinking Moët straight from the bottle at nine thirty in the morning, she would think… what? That she’d wasted eight grand sending Kirby to rehab at Clarity Farms? That she was justified in firing Kirby from her production company, Silver Dollar? That she was even more justified in breaking things off with her?
Kirby takes another slug off the bottle as cars pass—the usual Jeep Wagoneers and woody wagons. Kirby is relieved that she hasn’t seen anyone she knows, but as she reaches Caton Circle and starts out the Madaket Road bike path, she becomes annoyed. She could really use a ride. How dare Jessie hang up on her!
She should have returned the message that Jessie left on her machine a few days ago. But she had done one better—she had come in person. And she was staying. (What does that mean, staying? she wonders. Would she move into the house on Red Barn Road for the remainder of the summer and into the fall? Would she do the unthinkable and stay on Nantucket through the winter? There was, at this point, nothing left for her in LA.)
The more Kirby thinks about this, the more she dreads what lies ahead.
Namely: explaining herself.
As far as her family knows, she’s a success. When she moved to LA, she immediately got a job as the fifth assistant to the director John Hughes. (Basically, she made coffee and dinner reservations for the first four assistants.) But even so, she had worked on the movies that defined a generation: Sixteen Candles. The Breakfast Club. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. She befriended the second assistant, Tyesha Bradford—and then, one night at a party in Malibu, they became more than friends.
What a surprise that had been! Kirby had dated only men up to that point but her chemistry with Tyesha was undeniable. Tyesha had been born and raised in LA; her family was in real estate. She was smarter than Kirby, better educated, sexier, savvier, more seasoned. She had that elusive thing called class. Kirby could see it in the way Tyesha layered her thin gold necklaces and wore her Stanford class ring on her index finger. She had buttery leather accessories—bags with the right-length straps, the perfect compartments for keys and wallet, boots with the right heel, the most stylish silhouette. She could order wine, speak Spanish with her doorman, discuss the latest work of Alice Walker, of Walker Percy.
The summer before, Tyesha started her own production company, and Kirby went with her. Kirby was technically a production assistant, but Tyesha treated her like a partner. When they produced an independent film called The Drum Major, Tyesha was launched into the spotlight, and she grabbed Kirby’s hand and pulled her into the bright circle right beside her. For a few golden months, they were courted by studios, invited to glamorous parties.
They needed a follow-up. Kirby suggested pitching their own story, a movie about a girl from Boston who moves to LA to escape her emotionally stunted family and meets a stylish, ambitious African American woman. They fall in love.
“You haven’t given me any conflict,” Tyesha said. “I’m falling asleep.”
“How about if the chick from Boston is a bad girl,” Kirby said. “What if she has a secret cocaine habit and sleeps with men behind her lover’s back?”
Even now, Kirby can feel the tension that had filled Tyesha’s apartment in Silver Lake.
“Do you have a secret cocaine habit?” Tyesha asked. “Are you sleeping with men behind my back?”
The answers were yes and yes. In fact, Kirby had been high the moment she said it. It was a testament to how screwed up she was that she hadn’t even meant to confess; the truth had just popped out.
Kirby scoffed. “Of course not.”
But smart, savvy Tyesha had gleaned the truth in the slight pause that preceded these words, and when she pressed, Kirby folded. Her lame defense: She had been using cocaine long before she even moved to LA (does Tyesha not remember her talking about her Studio 54 days with Warhol?); she’d thought Tyesha was fully aware and turning a blind eye. But Kirby had her habit under control. She only called her dealer, Brody, once a week and occasionally she scored at a party. When she did a line or two at a party, she sometimes found herself making out with some lighting guy or second grip named Scott or Dean, which led to having forgettable sex in the host’s closet while Tyesha was out at the party chatting up the most influential person in the room (one night it was Brigitte Nielsen, another night, Danny Glover).
“I know Glover is a legitimate big deal,” Kirby said. “But when I asked you to introduce me, you swatted me away.”
“Are you listening to yourself?” Tyesha asked.
With infinite graciousness, Tyesha had paid for Kirby to go to rehab and promised that when she got out, she would still have a job. In the four weeks that Kirby was at Clarity Farms, Tyesha landed not one but two movies with major studios and hired a new partner, a woman named Alicia who had formerly produced movies with both Brigitte Nielsen and Danny Glover. Kirby still had a job but she no longer had any influence. The people who made the decisions now were Tyesha and Alicia.
“So many vowels,” Kirby joked, but Tyesha didn’t find it funny.
The dramatic end came when Kirby went to pitch a film called The Secret Pasture. It was a girl-and-her-horse screenplay set in Canada. Kirby knew the pitch was a throwaway and wouldn’t get picked up anywhere, and in her resentment about this (and, face it, about Alicia), Kirby called her dealer, Brody, and did a couple lines right before taking the meeting. Then, instead of pitching The Secret Pasture, she pitched a made-up movie called The Porn Star’s Girlfriend.
“It was just a variation on a girl-and-her-horse,” Kirby deadpanned. But Tyesha didn’t find it funny. Tyesha fired her and broke up with her. In response, Kirby jumped on a plane, and now here she is, drunk in the sun, trying to get home.
She’s crossing Millbrook Road when a shiny Humvee pulls over. Kirby knows that men who drive cars like this are compensating for something, but the dude who pokes his head out the window asking, “Want a ride?” is as handsome to her in that moment as Richard Gere in his naval officer uniform. She feels the searing heat of the pavement through the soles of her Capezios; she doesn’t care if it’s Freddy Krueger behind the wheel, she’s getting in.
“Hell yes,” she says. She hoists herself up into the passenger seat and offers the driver the last of the champagne, which he sucks down as he hits the gas.
Kirby has found a soul mate!
“I’m Kirby Foley,” she says. “Thank you for stopping. I live out on Red Barn Road but I’ll ride as far as you’re going.”
“I’m going where you’re going,” her new soul mate says.
Kirby narrows her eyes at him. He’s younger than her, maybe closer to Jessie’s age. He’s a bit rumpled-looking. If Kirby had to guess, she would say he’d stayed out all night and was only now heading home. “My name’s Charlie,” he says. “But everyone calls me Blowman.”
Kirby hoots. “Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah,” he says. “You want to party?”
“What, you mean now?”
“Of course now,” Blowman says, tossing the empty champagne bottle into the back seat. “Seems like you started without me.”
“I should get home,” Kirby says. The turn for Red Barn Road is up ahead. “Take a left here.”
“How about we do a line before I drop you off?” Blowman asks.
Kirby takes a deep breath. Tyesha was all about breathing, centering herself, flow, yoga, fruit smoothies, vegetables in the juicer, fresh air, karma, mantras, chakras—the whole California cliché. Tyesha would forbid Kirby to do a line with this young, handsome stranger. Go home! she’d say. You’re already drunk!
That’s correct, Kirby is already drunk. A little cocaine might straighten her out.
“Sure,” she says.
That’s all Blowman needs to hear. He pulls off into the low brush alongside Red Barn Road, takes a mirror and a vial out of the Humvee’s console, and cuts two lines with his Discover card. Kirby would have pegged Blowman for the kind of guy who snorted through a rolled-up hundred, but no, he has a little straw. Fine. Kirby hoovers up a line, then she wipes under her nose and rubs her finger across her gums. Derelict. She stares out at the landscape before her—the ribbon of ocean and her mother’s house in the distance. She would never have made it by herself, walking. She would have dropped long ago and become breakfast for birds of prey.
Birds of Prey sounds like a movie title. Maybe Blowman can star in it.
She can’t believe how utterly hopeless she is.
Blowman pulls into the driveway, pestering Kirby for her phone number, but she’s finished with him. As she’s climbing out of the Hummer, the front door opens and Jessie steps out, glaring.
“Oh my God,” Blowman says. “Not her again.”
“That’s my sister,” Kirby says. “You know her?”
Blowman throws the Humvee in reverse and screeches out of the driveway. Kirby looks after him with something like longing before turning to face her reckoning.
“Surprise,” she says to her sister. “It’s me.”
8. TOTAL ECLIPSE OF THE HEART
Kate wakes with the dawn, although wakes isn’t quite accurate because she never managed to fall asleep. Whatever she’d thought Jessie wanted to talk about, it never occurred to her that it would be Lorraine Crimmins. Lorraine is back on Nantucket. Living here. Growing things.
This is ironic, since in Kate’s experience, Lorraine has only been successful at destroying things.
Lorraine Crimmins—back in the sixties, she changed her name to Lavender, and now apparently she’s Rain. While Lorraine was working for their family as a housekeeper, cook, and nanny back in the 1950s, she and Wilder had an affair and she became pregnant. Kate had left Wilder, but he came crawling back. And then, when Kate announced that she was divorcing him, he shot himself.
Afterward, Lorraine moved to California and raised her son, Pickford, in a commune. She abandoned Pick in 1969 when she wanted to do some “traveling.” Bill Crimmins had driven out to the West Coast to pick the boy up and bring him back to Nantucket.
The last time Kate had seen Lorraine was in August of 1969, when she showed up—barefoot, grungy, and probably high on all kinds of drugs—to take Pick back to California. By way of Woodstock. (Kate rolls her eyes every time she thinks about this. What kind of mother takes her child to Woodstock!)
Kate had been crystal clear—with Lorraine, with Bill, with Pick. She never wanted to see Lorraine again. Kate didn’t own Nantucket, of course, but she’d thought it was understood that Lorraine had forfeited her right to be here. This was Kate’s turf!
