Endless Summer, page 8
Barbie likes the color of Hope’s dress so much that she calls Flowers on Chestnut and orders three bridal-party bouquets in roses just that color.
She contemplates her own dress. She’s forty-one years old, hardly an ingénue, and it’s a midweek, midafternoon ceremony. She should probably wear a suit. But Barbie doesn’t want to get married in a suit! She wants a dress. She could ask Grace to go with her to Boston to the Vera Wang boutique or Musette on Newbury Street. But that feels like too much—a beaded bodice, a train, even a veil.
She decides to stay within her comfort zone. She orders a long lace gown from Diane von Furstenberg in a color called blush, which is the palest, palest pink. The gown has an open back, which is perfect—Glenn always says he loves Barbie’s back. He’s mentioned it so often that Barbie has contorted herself to get a glimpse of her back in the full-length mirror.
The dress problem is solved. Barbie will go barefoot at the beach, and she buys a pair of shocking-pink patent leather Manolos with four-inch heels for the reception.
She and Glenn meet with the chef-owner and the chef de cuisine at the Company of the Cauldron. They pick out a lavish menu: an appetizer of lemon-thyme linguine with pan-roasted lobster, followed by a seasonal salad of greens, roasted butternut squash, and warm goat cheese coated in spiced pepitas, followed by grilled sirloin, rosemary potatoes, and asparagus drizzled with maple-bacon hollandaise. The cake will be a triple-layer devil’s food with two layers of mocha mousse and house-made chocolate buttercream icing.
Barbie is excited. This is starting to feel like a wedding!
Barbie picks out favors: hand-milled pillar candles in three autumnal colors—pumpkin, burgundy, and caramel. She orders fireplace matches with her and Glenn’s joint monogram on the cover—GDB—and secures a box to each candle using gold wire ribbon.
Responses to the invitations start to arrive. Glenn’s best friend from college declines, which seems to bum Glenn out. Madeline and Timothy are coming as well as everyone from the office. Glenn’s brother Bruno has a business trip to Dallas that can’t be rescheduled. He calls Glenn and says, “Who the hell gets married on a Wednesday?” Glenn’s brother Leon can come with his wife and their grown son, Bodie, who is unemployed and living in their basement. Barbie’s friend Molly Brimmer-Crawley is coming alone—Jimmy Crawley has to work—but Molly seems to be happy to be flying solo, and she offers to take Barbie out drinking the night before the wedding.
“A little bachelorette party!” Molly says.
They end up with exactly forty-two people attending. What are the chances?
To celebrate hitting their mark, Glenn takes Barbie out to dinner at Le Languedoc. They sit at an intimate corner table overlooking Broad Street. Their relationship has been secret for so long that going on a date like this still feels illicit. Le Languedoc is romantic; the service is impeccable; the French food is exquisite. It’s civilized. Barbie orders the chopped salad and the steak frites; Glenn orders the escargots and the duck and he selects an expensive bottle of Bordeaux.
Once their food is ordered and their wine poured, Glenn pulls a velvet box out of his blazer pocket and sets it on Barbie’s bread plate.
“For my beautiful bride-to-be,” he says.
Barbie gasps. He’s already given her a diamond ring worthy of Marilyn Monroe. What could this be? She opens the box. It’s a delicate gold chain with a gold, diamond-encrusted sand-dollar pendant.
“Oh my,” Barbie says. “You…”
Glenn puts his hand over hers. “First of all,” he says, “you’re getting married, and every bride needs a ‘something new.’ And second, I can’t tell you how damn jealous it’s made me that you still wear the necklace that Earl Fischer gave you. But then I said to myself, ‘Now, Glenn, you can’t expect her to take that necklace off until you give her something to replace it with.’ So will you please, please take the pearl off and put this on?”
Barbie blinks. Now is the time to tell him that not only did Earl Fischer not give her the pearl, Earl Fischer doesn’t exist. Tell him now! Barbie commands herself.
Glenn notices her hesitation. “Do you not like it?” he asks.
“Like it?” she says. “I love it.” She hurries to unclasp the chain that her pearl hangs from. She hasn’t taken the necklace off since the day she bought it, eight years ago. She can’t believe she is doing so now. The necklace—like her Triumph and her cottage, both of which she is relinquishing—defines her. It was the first nice thing she ever bought herself.
She should never have told Glenn that a man bought it for her. She should correct that misconception right now; she won’t get a better opportunity than this.
But… if she tells Glenn, the evening will be ruined. Barbie lays her pearl next to her bread plate and secures the sand-dollar pendant around her neck. The chain hangs longer than Barbie likes and the sand dollar feels light and insubstantial compared to the heft of the pearl.
“How does it look?” Barbie asks.
“Beautiful,” Glenn says.
Between dinner and dessert, Barbie rises and goes to the ladies’ room. As she’s washing her hands, she gives herself a long, hard look in the mirror. Without the black pearl, she feels like another person. But, she reminds herself, she is still the same. She is not defined by her possessions.
When Barbie emerges from the ladies’ room, she finds a tall brunette standing in the narrow hall, waiting. The woman looks very familiar. It’s… it’s…
“Barbie,” the woman says. “Hi.”
It’s Andrea Kapenash, the police chief’s wife.
Barbie smiles. This is the civilized thing to do. “Hello, Andrea,” she says, and she scoots past.
Barbie can’t keep herself from peering into the other dining room. Sure enough, there’s the Chief, checking his phone. Barbie tries to steady her breathing, which is becoming rapid and shallow. The Chief definitely knows that Barbie was involved in the shenanigans on Low Beach Road. (Shenanigans makes it sound like a sorority prank. What Barbie was involved in was international underage sex trafficking!) Has the Chief told his wife? Has he told anyone?
The Chief looks up, sees Barbie, and offers half a wave. Which means… what?
Barbie can’t stand to think about it. She heads back to her table.
She is still the same person she ever was. She is a woman who lies to the man she loves.
Later that night, after Glenn is asleep and snoring in her bed, Barbie tiptoes out to the living room and takes the crystal ball off the top shelf of her coat closet.
She puts her hands over the globe until it starts to glow.
Barbara Ann Pancik and Glenn Harlan Daley, she thinks. What does the future hold?
The ball glows with a dull gray light, just as it did the one other time that Barbie asked. Dark, thick clouds, like the kind one sees from an airplane, obscuring what’s below.
She won’t get a clear read until she tells Glenn the truth.
Barbie tries not to feel hurt that no one is throwing her a bridal shower. Her only close friend is Molly, who lives off-island, and her bridesmaids are seventeen years old and can’t know what’s expected. Barbie thought perhaps Grace would organize something, but Grace is busy packing and moving as well as raising the girls and dealing with all the matters that Eddie left behind.
Barbie also thought maybe one of the women in the office might throw together a tea or a luncheon. Rachel McMann lives to plan happy events like that, and for a while, Barbie enters the office each morning anticipating a surprise. She wouldn’t even care if Glenn told the associates they had to plan something. Barbie would still be thrilled.
A week passes, then another, and no shower. Barbie decides that she can’t expect the women in her office to feel anything toward her but jealousy and resentment. She was hired one day and proposed to the next and she receives the best listings because she’s the boss’s fiancée.
She reminds herself that a shower would be pointless anyway. Any household item Barbie might receive, she already owns. She has a KitchenAid mixer in bright pink, she has maple cutting boards in three sizes, she has Henckels knives and a full set of All-Clad stainless-steel pots and pans. She has a French mandoline, a potato ricer, a chinois strainer, a Crock-Pot. She has sumptuous bath towels and Frette linens on her bed.
Possibly everyone thinks that, at the age of forty-one, a successful woman like Barbie has everything she could want.
Barbie makes a series of appointments at R. J. Miller—one to get her hair frosted, one for a facial, one to get her eyebrows and bikini line waxed. On the Saturday before the wedding, she and Grace and Hope and Allegra all go and get their nails done, and afterward, Barbie suggests they go to the Nantucket Hotel for lunch.
“My treat,” Barbie says.
“You can’t pay,” Grace says. “You’re the bride.” Then her eyes grow wide with guilt. “I should have thrown you a shower. I’m so sorry, Barbie. I dropped the ball.”
Barbie waves a hand through the air as if this is the most ridiculous thing she’s ever heard. “A shower?” she says. “For what? I have everything a woman could want.”
“And now you have Glenn,” Hope says.
Molly Brimmer-Crawley arrives the afternoon before the wedding, and Barbie drives to the airport in her Triumph to pick her up.
“You still have the Triumph!” Molly says. “I adore this car!”
Molly hasn’t been to Nantucket in three or four years, and the last time she came, she was with her kids, one of whom was teething. She is free as a bird now, and she announces that there is no need to stop by Barbie’s cottage to drop off her suitcase. “Let’s go straight to the bar,” she says. Then she puts her hands in the air and whoops.
They head to the Pearl for passion-fruit cosmos—three, in fact, in rapid succession. Whoa! Barbie hasn’t felt this loose, this light in a long time. Molly Brimmer is the one person other than Eddie who has been a constant since childhood. Barbie and Molly sang into hairbrushes in front of a mirror to the Grease soundtrack; they smoked cigarettes for the first time outside the ice-skating rink; they bleached their jeans and pierced their ears with a needle, an ice cube, and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. They were perceived as bad girls—Molly was shanty Irish and Barbie a gypsy Slovakian, both from the most undesirable part of a dying town—but they were smart girls. They took honors classes; they were secretly intent on doing their homework, getting into college, and leaving New Bedford forever.
Molly and Jimmy live in Newport, Rhode Island, where Jimmy owns a marina. Molly insists on paying for their drinks.
“All of our drinks,” Molly says. “All night. This is your bachelorette party.”
Barbie went to Molly’s bachelorette party sixteen years earlier, when they were both twenty-five. Barbie had been one of Molly’s bridesmaids, but Molly’s college roommate Amber had been the maid of honor, and Barbie’s feelings were hurt. The other bridesmaids were also Molly’s college friends, so Barbie had suffered from a bad case of odd man out. She marveled that Molly had been able to make close friends so easily out of high school. Barbie hadn’t been successful at it; she had never found a friend as good, fun, and loyal as Molly.
They go to Lola for ruby-red grapefruit martinis.
Then to 56 Union for espresso martinis.
And then Barbie surrenders. “I can’t drink any more,” she says.
Molly smiles triumphantly.
They end their evening at Steamboat Pizza with a couple slices of pepperoni, olives, and mushrooms. From there, they can walk home to Barbie’s cottage; she has to remove her Manolos and go barefoot, but she’s so drunk, she doesn’t care. They leave the Triumph in town; Barbie will walk back in the morning to get it.
It’s on the walk home that Barbie decides to confess. “I lied to Glenn,” she says.
“About what?” Molly says.
“Oh,” Barbie says, swinging her Manolos by the straps in a wide circle. “Everything.”
“Everything like what?” Molly says.
“Like I made up an old boyfriend and told Glenn that he was the one who gave me the black pearl necklace. And I made up other men. Just, you know, so Glenn would be jealous and wouldn’t think I was a loser who had never had a boyfriend.”
“You’re not a loser,” Molly says. “You dated Tony Harlowe.”
Barbie winced. She had never admitted, even to Molly, the brutally honest things Tony Harlowe had said to her after the senior prom. He loved her, he said, but his parents didn’t think Barbie Pancik was good enough for him and he knew in his heart that they were right. Tony Harlowe had gotten into UPenn and had his sights set on law school after that. He wanted to be a judge someday.
“I never told Glenn about Tony Harlowe,” Barbie says.
“You didn’t?” Molly says. “Why not? Tony Harlowe was a catch.”
“It was high school,” Barbie says. But the real reason she never told Glenn about Tony Harlowe was that Tony Harlowe had been the person who made Barbie believe she would never measure up.
“What else have you lied to him about?” Molly asks.
“The thing Eddie went to jail for?” Barbie says. “I was involved in that, and Glenn doesn’t know.”
“The prostitution ring?” Molly asks.
Barbie nods. She says, “Do you think I should call Glenn up tonight, right now, and just tell him?”
“No,” Molly says. “There’s no need for any night-before-the-wedding drama. Listen, you have your past transgressions, and Glenn, I’m sure, has his. The important thing is that the two of you are going to leave those behind and start a life of eternal bliss tomorrow.” She stops in her tracks. “Jeez, I sound like a Hallmark card.”
“That’s okay,” Barbie says. “I like it.”
When Barbie wakes up, she can’t believe how stunning the day is. It’s unseasonably warm—nearly 65 degrees—and the sky is a bright, cloudless blue.
Molly makes a breakfast of poached eggs on rye toast and wedges of honeydew melon. She pours them each a mimosa.
“Hair of the dog,” Molly says. Molly looks very hungover.
They eat on Barbie’s back deck, enjoying the sun. Barbie plays the Grease soundtrack on her iPod speakers and they sing along. Summer lovin’, had me a blast. Barbie can’t remember ever being this happy.
Molly’s words from last night have put Barbie’s mind at ease. As of today, her life is a tabula rasa, a clean slate; this is a fresh start.
There is only one sore spot for Barbie. She misses her brother.
Because Eddie is in jail, there is no one to give Barbie away, so Barbie will walk by herself up and over the dune, then down to the waterline, where forty chairs are set up, twenty on each side of the white wooden trellis that has been pounded into the sand. Judith, the Unitarian minister, will marry them in her flowing white robe. There will be a classical guitarist.
It feels like a wedding!
Barbie is “hiding” behind the tinted windows inside Grace’s Range Rover, which is parked at the far end of the beach lot. She has carefully arranged her blush-pink lace gown around her. She wears her new gold sand-dollar necklace and old button-stud earrings—replicas of the ones she and Molly pierced each other’s ears with decades earlier. Barbie never wears anything more than mascara and lipstick on a regular day, but today her something borrowed is Allegra’s makeup; her stylish niece has done Barbie’s face. Her hair has been smoothed and twisted into a chignon. For her something blue, there are discreet violets embroidered on her underthings.
She’s ready to go!
From behind the tinted windows of the Rover, Barbie catches glimpses of the guests as they pull up. They are escorted over the dunes by two brokers at Bayberry Properties, Gary and Chris, and Glenn’s brother Leon, all of whom look dashing in pink Vineyard Vines ties and navy blazers.
When it’s five minutes to three, Grace and Molly climb out of the car, and then they too are escorted over the dunes. Allegra, Hope, and Barbie remain in the back seat, awaiting Leon’s signal. One finger means they are to get out of the car, two fingers means the processional music has started.
They wait, and they wait. It’s ten after three, then three fifteen. Barbie isn’t sure what’s causing the holdup, but she doesn’t like it. The sun is sinking in the sky. It will set in a little over an hour, another disadvantage to getting married in late October.
Hope tugs at the top of her dress. Allegra sighs with impatience. “Maybe they forgot about us,” she says.
Finally, Leon appears at the top of the dune. He holds up no fingers. He hurries down.
Carefully, Barbie climbs out of the car, and the twins follow.
Leon looks at Barbie. “Can I talk to you for a second?”
His voice contains bad news. Did the altar blow over? Barbie wonders. Did the classical guitarist break a string? “What’s wrong?” she says.
“Glenn isn’t here,” Leon says.
“What?” Barbie says. She glimpsed the setup on the beach when they first arrived, but then Barbie was so intent on not letting anyone see her that she didn’t notice exactly who had come and who hadn’t. She just assumed Glenn was on the beach, waiting for her. “Where is he?”
“Right before he left the house,” Leon says, “he told me he had to go on a special mission and that he’d meet me here.”
“A special mission?” Barbie says.
“His exact words.”
Well, all Barbie can think is that a “special mission” is Glenn’s nifty euphemism for cold feet. He doesn’t want to marry Barbie after all. He found out about Earl Fischer or, worse, about Barbie’s part-time job this summer as a madam. The thick fog inside the crystal ball meant this: a botched wedding, a bride left standing at the altar. Tony Harlowe had been right; Barbie Pancik wasn’t good enough.
Leon puts a strong hand on Barbie’s bare shoulder, and the kindness and pity contained in this gesture is what makes Barbie cry. Just a few salty tears—she’s too tough for anything more. Plus, there’s her makeup.
