The Shore, page 10
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“Let’s go this way instead,” Liz said. She and Gabe had closed up Sumner Ave for the day and she steered him north, toward the lights of the pier and the fireworks-night crowds instead of south toward the quiet stretch of dunes closer to her house. Tonight Margot would be calling the last of the extended family to tell them Brian was in hospice. And probably posting stuff online to strangers about what a good mom she was for lying to her kids. Liz was staying away for a few hours.
Not home for dinner tonight, Liz texted Margot. LMK when you’re off the phone and I can come home whenever! she added, feeling fake and wanting to text Oh, also, are we moving? Did you decide where? Fun! Also LMK!
Liz’s head throbbed, thinking about how much she missed the mom she thought she’d taken such good care of, the mom she’d thought had her back. It was nauseating going back and forth between the versions of herself before and after this anger and distrust, and asking herself if Margot had been like this all along.
They walked past Miss Della the psychic and the raw bar, past the whirring wheel games, ignoring the guys yelling at them to try to win oversized SpongeBobs. They didn’t stop at Sal’s, where Evy was still working. They moved into the flow of the crowd and its backlit shadows.
What version of Margot would she find when she finally went home? The one repeating the halting, hoarse script one last time into the phone with an I’m-fine lilt; the one giving terse orders to Liz to take your junk back to your room, for Christ’s sake; the one drinking wine on the patio and staring at the fence? Or would she find the one asking strangers online if some new, anonymous place was what her daughters needed instead of asking her daughters themselves about that?
She still thought: Those phone calls will be hard. If a message from her mom buzzed saying to come home, she didn’t know what she would do. For so long, she would have done exactly what she thought her mom needed. But Margot texted No hurry, I’m fine, and Liz shoved her phone in her back pocket.
Liz asked Gabe where his band had traveled, and she listened to his stories about staying up all night, about driving around in vans jammed with equipment. She had guessed he was smart from the way he name-checked books from her AP reading list, but when he told her about his earned and rejected college scholarship, that gave his band-wanderlusting an extra layer of glamour.
This stolen time with Gabe before going home was like the one-minute break between 400-meter repeats on the track, where she gulped in air, felt her heart rate ease but never enough, where she anticipated the pain ahead and counted down to it and willed her body and mind to recover and find their rhythm before she demanded they do more.
Gabe teased her about how tough she was with the Sun and Shade customers, and about the playlist she put on her little portable speaker while they were packing up at the end of the day. Liz turned away from the gray-on-gray pattern of clouds hanging low over the ocean and toward the rainbow strobe lights of the bars, toward him.
Evy
Evy sat on the counter at Sal’s ignoring the trash she was supposed to take out and the sticky floors she was supposed to mop before closing for the night. A new girl named Miranda was on shift with her, unloading boxes and ignoring her. Evy stole her own phone from Irene’s basket in the back and scrolled through the GBM Wives forum. Margot had posted something new:
Dreading these calls to update everyone, hearing that beat of silence and scrambling to fill it for them. Then I’ll write some emails pretending to care about other people’s vacations.
I’m not hanging on, I’m not making it work, I’m neglecting what we’ve built. I’m making these calls and going to sleep alone, then I’m doing it all again tomorrow, alone.
I know my posts have been emotional—especially when it comes to the girls. I’ve been reading a few self-help books you all recommended that give great scripts for conversations like the one I’ll have to have if—when—I tell them we’re going to move. I have all the pages I’ll need marked. I was skeptical of those books, but the FLHC method (feel, listen, honor, calm) in Radical Change for the Better is really interesting, and I’d love to hear if anyone’s used it with teenagers??
I promise I’ll tell you all as soon as I’m sure where our new place will be (!!!!). I’ve been clicking through to see the cafés and libraries, the theaters and the parks, scanning house listings, and I’ve got it narrowed now, and it feels so much like in the early days of our business, this balance of imagination and logic, doing all the research you can and then going for it.
PHXmamma9 responded:
Good for you! You can’t stay in that town. I left Boston for the desert, I sold our business too. I gave away my furniture and flew my family here, and now we swim in the pool all winter, we made brand-new friends who never knew him. The grief follows you, of course, but you’re more in control of it, if every damn landmark you drive by every day isn’t reminding you of him.
Evy left Sal’s five minutes early and made Miranda finish closing up, walking past three E&E signs on her way to a party.
Staying out after work tonight, Evy texted Margot. Liz was staying out too, and Evy texted her: don’t tell mom about GBM Wives stuff until we talk again, ok?
Margot saying she was alone in her post confused Evy—she and Liz were there all the time; she wasn’t alone. Even if Evy spent the rest of the evening with her, it somehow wouldn’t count?
Margot texted: Sure—don’t walk home alone after midnight. That was the protective, instructing-mother Margot, not a broken-open woman, not a self-help-scripts woman. Evy needed a break from all of them.
Evy hit send on a Pamplemousse7 post she’d saved to drafts. She still hated it, but it was better than nothing:
It might seem like a good idea, to change everything, but what if it’s worse? What if the girls don’t want their town to be different after everything else already is?
Margot
She poured a glass of cabernet and sat on the edge of the bed as she proceeded through her scribbled-down notes, through her we don’t really knows and her we’ll just have to sees and her I need you to know that it will be soons to the extended family.
She had tried to listen to what people said back to her, but fragments of old, naughty little non sequiturs that had wormed their way into her long-term memory interrupted other people’s I’m sorrys and if there’s anything we can dos. Time to make the donuts! Roto-Rooter, that’s the name, and away go troubles down the drain. Every Good Boy Does Fine. He measured out his life with coffee spoons. Call me maybe.
It was her weakened defenses doing the best they could, scattershot searching, reordering and rewriting reality, shortcutting to anything familiar while what she said out loud to all these people was the opposite: decentering and dizzying. So many patterns and facts stuck in her memory without any effort, but she couldn’t learn to survive this quiet the way she learned the order of the notes on the treble clef.
Margot saw her daughters’ texts about staying out, and she wanted them home with her immediately. She wanted to sit on the couch together and then she wanted to know they were in their rooms, she wanted to have another presence in the house besides Brian and her own untethered mind. She knew they needed time away, a luxury she hadn’t had since last September, but, really, she hadn’t had in seventeen years.
She tidied up their rooms for them and left them each a stack of magazines. She changed their sheets, emptied their clothes hampers, and opened their windows to let in the cross-breeze. She opened a few packages, new contact lenses for Liz, allergy medicine for Evy, and sports bras she’d ordered for both of them when she noticed how old their other ones were getting. She sat on the edge of Evy’s bed; along the baseboard she could see the tiniest shadow of yellow paint, the color this room had been when she was a baby, peeking through the dark blue.
Then she brought her cabernet into Brian’s room. Lorraine had tucked the sheets in so even and smooth, set a small night-light on his table so there would always be a little glow over him while he slept. Margot took a big sip of her wine. How did she begin these one-sided conversations with him? She imagined all the ways she’d invited inertia and momentum to take over before, the times she’d been awkward and stubborn but undaunted, a true beginner.
“Do you remember how bad I was at tennis, when I first started to play?” she said. She’d bought a racket and a case of tennis balls when they finally moved back to Seaside after Hurricane Sandy, when long walks weren’t enough to calm her down and she wanted to whack the hell out of something. She didn’t even set foot on a court until she’d hit the ball against the concrete wall ten thousand times. Then she served wild, crooked shots to no one, collected the balls in a bucket, and tried again until she got her serve to arc into that sweet spot somewhere near where it was supposed to land.
“You came to the court with me a couple times, but you were lobbing that ball high and slow, not keeping score or anything, and I was still so bad but hitting it hard, throwing that racket around and yelling cusswords—I think I scared you a little.”
She’d finally figured out how to get her shoulder, elbow, and grip into a rhythm consistent enough to play against some other people. “And then”—she paused—“you called and got the town to keep the lights on for me at the courts an hour later? I don’t know how you convinced them, I never asked.”
She beat some other beginners right away, but it had taken another year before she beat her first intermediate player.
“God, I was obsessed,” she said. Tennis made her feel agile and alert even off the court. She hadn’t played now in over a year. She’d neglected every part of her own body since Brian got sick; the trap muscles between her shoulder blades and the base of her neck were always sore, but every other muscle had gone soft. “Anyway. Yeah.”
She would survive this quiet by forcing herself to do it again, and again, even when it felt unnatural. She texted her daughters and told them she was fine.
Liz
Liz caught the eye of a guy she knew working at the soft-serve stand, a shot-putter who rated the entire girls’ track team on a fuckability scale. She inched a little closer to Gabe, putting on a show that said, See, this is how it turns out for girls like me, the sevens and seven-point-fives on your scale, you neckless piece of shit. We get interesting, tattooed band guys. The shot-put guy finished ringing someone up and then saw Liz; he grinned the same dumb-face grin he did when he was around all his friends, and yelled across the boardwalk at her, using his hands as a megaphone, “The gun means go!”
He and the other shot-put guys had started yelling that to her at the end of the season, after she’d frozen on the starting line of the state championship meet in May.
An hour before her race, Brian had gotten lost in a crowd of sprinters in the paddock area, then insisted on napping on another family’s belongings. When Margot said he had to move, he’d called her a shrivel-titted bitch loud enough for half the crowd to hear. She’d dragged him away, and Liz had followed them to the car.
When she came back, Liz’s teammates had stared at her, waiting for her to make a joke like she usually did, but instead she jogged past them and stretched by herself in the shadow of the concession stand. She’d tried to focus on the race she still had to run by staring at the dirt and listening to her headphones, but it didn’t work. The gun went off, and she froze.
After that she stopped running, stopped showing up at practice and meets. She ignored her track coach’s calls and texts. This summer was the longest she’d gone without running since she was twelve.
“Thanks, got it, Randy!” Liz yelled back. The shot-put guy’s name wasn’t Randy, it was Zach, but Liz had started calling him and his friends middle-aged guy names whenever they yelled, “The gun means go!” at her. She couldn’t tell if it bothered or confused them, but it always got them to leave her alone.
Randy/Zach was also a football player. Only a few people could escape the strict categories in high school, like the few students who started midyear, the Olympic-hopeful figure skater, and the daughter of parents who died in a tragic car wreck.
A parent dying of an organic disease wouldn’t do the trick, though. That would only make teachers give you extra time for assignments if you missed class, or allow you three or four passes to the guidance office during times of acute emotion.
She wanted to tell Gabe everything about her dad, but she was still afraid it would feel like spending too much money on something you really wanted, only to find out it was cheap and flimsy, and you wished you could take it back and have the money again instead of the thing, to feel the heft of a wad of warm cash again instead.
“What was that about?” Gabe asked. “ ’Cause that guy is huge and I probably can’t fight him.”
“Oh, inside track-team joke,” she said.
“You’re on the track team?”
“Not anymore, I quit.”
“Because of Randy?”
“No, definitely not because of Randy. I would never decide anything because of, uh, Randy.”
“Well, why, then?”
“Oh, I pulled a quad muscle,” she said. She waited for him to hear the fakeness in her voice.
“Should you be spending all day running around the beach dragging giant umbrellas around with a pulled quad, boss?”
“I’m doing some hamstring strengthening, which actually helps the quadriceps, so it’s a lot better now,” she said, marking the first thing track-team Jesse had ever said to her that had been officially helpful. Jesse’s favorite topic was his hamstring-strengthening regimen.
They got ice cream from a different non–Randy/Zach place, and then a couple, hands wrapped around each other’s hips, stumbled out of Jimbo’s, drunk-weaving in and out of the crowd. The guy was dressed in a tight shirt, with bulging biceps, and was doused in body spray. The girl had black flat-ironed hair and wore tiny shorts with SEXY written across the butt. They were both spray-tanned to a smooth shade of orange-brown. It had been years since Snooki and The Situation spent their summers here, and Liz had been too little to watch their show when they had, but these two were their doppelgängers.
“Well, if it doesn’t interrupt your hamstring-strengthening regimen or anything, you want to come over tonight?” Gabe asked.
She didn’t know if she would ever win a race again. She didn’t know how many more times she would play her dad’s scratched Radiohead and R.E.M. albums for him before he was gone, but she knew you want to come over tonight? meant Gabe didn’t think she was too young, too awkward, too quiet, too serious, too sad, too nervous, too shy, too all-of-those-things she believed about herself whenever she’d been ignored.
“Tonight?” she asked. She wanted her first time to be private, important, a necessary transformation from awkward adolescence to whatever came next. A way of staking her claim on some fraction of this summer as hers, and on this place, especially if she had to leave it soon. A way of wielding a new kind of power and proving that all the Randys had always been wrong about everything, especially her, and always would be.
“I—yeah—I mean, yes.” She was ready, but she didn’t want her first time to be at the end of this confusing, complicated day; she didn’t want her burgeoning anger at her mom’s lies to distract her. “But I can’t tonight? Another night?” she asked, or maybe she said it like a fact that was already true: “Another night.” She wasn’t sure how it came out. He told her that after tonight, he was staying at his mom’s house across the bridge for a few days, while some people rented his aunt’s place. But then he’d have his aunt’s house to himself again.
“I’ll cancel the band’s show at Giants Stadium next week, you know, if you’re free then,” he said, fake-texting someone on his phone. “There, I did it, it’s done.”
“I am excited to check out the rental house competition your aunt has going on over there,” she said. “Maybe she’ll put us out of business one day.” She didn’t say, At least until my mom does that herself.
“It’s probably not up to your standards,” he joked.
She didn’t know whether he’d ever call her on a Sunday and make her laugh from a thousand miles away, or whether her first time would give her everything she wanted. When she went home tonight, she didn’t know if she would blurt out everything she knew about Margot’s plans to make them move in a righteous stream-of-consciousness speech, or choose to sit with her mom on the couch and wait her out.
She did know that the feeling of Pop Rocks crackling in the back of her throat distracted her from the day’s secrets and sadnesses, making them feel so far away. She kissed him, faster than she wanted to, before she pulled away.
Margot
Liz came home without her usual whispered “Hey” a minute into the opening credits of Ted Bundy Uncovered. Margot heard the shower, then Liz’s footsteps slipping into Brian’s room; then she heard her in the kitchen, slamming cabinet doors before emerging with a bowl of chips. She slumped down in the chair on the other side of the room.
“Evy’s still out?” Liz asked. “You finished all the calls?” She stared down into her bowl.
“Yeah, Ev’s out, and I think I called everyone. Your aunt Eileen is such a mess.”
Liz shoved a handful of chips into her mouth and nodded once, which Margot took to mean she did not want to hear about the other ten awful calls. “You didn’t have to come home early,” Margot said.
Margot paused the show during an interview with a woman half-hidden in a shadow: an invitation in case Liz wanted to say more. Liz said, “Mom. It’s fine,” so Margot hit play again.
The girls hurled accusatory, acidic fines at her sometimes, but this tone was different, more detached. Liz looked at the TV screen, leaning forward at the pivotal reveals, then staring off past the TV or down to scroll on her phone. Margot knew enough not to ask anything more of her in this moment—the fact that she was sitting here, and not behind her bedroom door, said she didn’t quite want to be alone, but whatever was on her mind was protected and private, inaccessible to her mother.
