Perennials, page 12
She and John had met as campers when they were nine years old. They were both from Westchester, she from New Rochelle and he from Scarsdale (Scarsdale was only twenty minutes away from New Rochelle but infinitely fancier). He had been a skinny boy with a pale complexion and freckles who bought a cherry Popsicle from the canteen every day after lunch, which turned his lips and tongue a bright red. Before he had braces, he had buckteeth, and he was goofy with his friends, always giggling in a way that felt, before Amy could put words to it, both masculine and feminine. He was great at archery. He called her by her last name, like she was another one of the boys. Amy liked this: She had brothers, and so it made her feel at home, safe. She and John goofed around like this for three summers, and then when they returned for their fourth, when they were twelve, John had sprung four inches, and his voice had changed, taking away any scraps of that latent femininity. Amy’s denim shorts and V-neck T-shirts clung differently, though it took a comment from a girlfriend (“That V is mighty deep, huh, Ame?”) for her to realize she looked any different. She and John kissed under that elm tree that summer. They lost their virginities to each other two summers after that, in the oar house down by the lake, when they were fourteen (it sounded so scarily young now, and she took pause when she thought of her own daughters, thirteen and eighteen, almost nineteen). Amy thought about those times often, how simple it all was, how easily it all came to her.
People, when they heard their story, thought it was romantic. But she often wondered: Did he fall in love with girl me and then fall out of love with adult me? Or is adult me still the same as girl me? Both possibilities were depressing. Though she felt the second was more true and that he was both happy she had not changed and disappointed in her for it.
They had taken some time apart to date other people when they went away to college, but when they graduated, it was clear to the two of them that there was no other person with whom either wanted to spend a comfortable, reasonable life. They never fought, simply because it felt like they never had anything to fight about. John was a kind, moral person; and yes, he was occasionally stubborn about something like what movie they would see on a date or where they would go to dinner, but these were unimportant things: What did it matter where they went to dinner, anyway, so long as they were together? One boy she dated in college was something of the opposite: He let her make all the decisions, always saying something like “lady’s choice” when she asked what they should do that night. Rather than provide her with a sense of autonomy, the pressure of being in charge filled her with dread. She much preferred it when her partner took control.
The break had made her want John more, and him her. Amy knew nothing about the girls he had dated in college, though her imagination of them caused intense amounts of jealousy and desire to build over the years she and John were apart. She had never seen him so excited to rip off her clothes as he was the first time they had sex after they got back together (and to her delight, he did literally rip them, popping a button off her blouse). And so she moved with him to D.C., where they knew no one, for him to attend law school there, and she took a job as a waitress at an upscale oyster bar in Capitol Hill. She was so good at that job; she could have done it forever. She could tell you the difference between each oyster on the menu—of which there were normally around two dozen, depending on the month—and not just which were larger and which were smaller, but she could also extoll the virtues of the sweet and meaty bluepoints or the tender, briny Malpeques. She could carry a tray of four martinis and place each one in front of its respective customer, remembering who had the twist and who had three olives, without so much as spilling a drop. She remembered the names of her regulars, and once they had begun to request her, she remembered the names of the grandchildren they gushed about too. At Christmas, she received store-bought greeting cards with cash inside.
She remembered one night before she was pregnant: It was after a particularly busy shift, and she was sitting at the bar drinking a white wine and organizing her credit-card receipts. There were a couple of older men on the stools around her, and her co-worker and friend Jill was tending bar.
“How’d you do tonight, Miss Fancy Pants?” Jill asked.
Amy tried to give a sly grin, though she was sure it didn’t look as cool as she wanted it to. “I did okay.”
Jill reached across the bar to refill Amy’s glass. Jill was in her forties, with decades of restaurant experience, much like the other bartenders and servers. They’d made fun of Amy at first for being innocent and somewhat prissy—which, until then, she hadn’t realized was the case. She hadn’t known, for instance, that she was expected to roll silverware at the beginning of every shift, and this made the other servers take a slower liking to her than she would have hoped. But she proved herself quickly: She was small and fast; she had killer timing and killer instincts, always seeming to know exactly when that kitchen door was going to swing toward her.
“That husband of yours ever gonna come see you at work?” Jill asked.
“Nah,” Amy said. “He knows this is my thing.” The truth was she’d never invited him, and he’d never asked to come either.
Then law school was over, and Amy got pregnant, and John got a job at a New York law firm, and they bought a house in Westchester, and Amy’s regulars gave her one last card before she left and patted her growing belly on the way out. She never did share the tips with him.
—
Amy and John walked up the hill to the Hemlock section, Amy relishing the memories this place produced, as she always did. This camp was a marker for all her firsts: a bunk in the Hemlock section, where Helen lived now, was where she’d woken up one August morning and found blood in her underwear; in the bathroom in the same section was where Jenny Smalls had coached her, from outside the bathroom stall, on how to put in her first tampon; and down in the oar house, that was where she had sex for the first time and where, a summer later, she had her first orgasm. Now those things felt so long ago. She did not want her girls to grow out of the camp life, because that would mean the end of their firsts too.
Helen’s blond curls bounced as she bounded over to her parents. Physically, Liam was a miniature version of his father and Fiona an amalgamation of both parents, but Helen was all Amy. They had the same toothy, uninhibited smile, which John had said was one of the first things he noticed about Amy when they were kids: that she smiled no matter what was happening, even if it wasn’t something particularly delightful. Helen, like Amy, gave her smiles away easily, to anyone and everyone. This made them both likeable people. It had taken longer than it should have for Amy to learn that it also gave the impression that they were simple people.
“How’s Dandelion?” Amy asked. “How’s Josie?” These were Helen’s and Fiona’s horses, which the Larkins kept at camp during the summer. Amy missed spending time with them like she was able to during the school year. Now that Fiona was away at college, Amy had taken on the care of Josie as if she were her own, and she and Helen would go on rides together on weekend mornings. The Larkins had bought the horses for their girls because they could. This was the consolation that came with being married to a man who didn’t touch you anymore but who did well: At least you could give your daughters what you never had.
“She’s so good,” Helen said. “There’s a horse expo later, so you’ll see everything I’ve been working on. I want to surprise you.”
“Okay, sweetheart,” Amy said, running a hand through her daughter’s hair.
She then realized she had forgotten Helen’s goodies in the car, things she thought Helen might miss: magazines, nail polish, and hair scrunchies; provisions such as peanut butter and ramen noodles; necessities like face wash and sunscreen.
John put an arm around Helen and playfully pulled her closer. Helen beamed as she looked up at her dad. Amy loved how much they loved each other, because she was their link; she had everything to do with it. She had chosen this man, and she had birthed this girl.
“I have a few things for you,” Amy told Helen, still glowing at the sight of the two of them. “I guess we were so excited to see you, we forgot to bring them up.” She turned to John. “Keys?” He nodded, reached into his pocket, and tossed them to her. She caught them effortlessly.
She walked back down the hill, smiling at the kids running ahead of their parents.
“Luke, slow down!” a man yelled. The woman next to him was cradling a tiny bundle to her breast. Amy could not stop herself from peeking into the sling as she passed. The baby’s face was tiny, red, wrinkled. Fast asleep.
“How old is he?” Amy whispered to the mother.
The woman smiled, that tired smile exchanged only between mothers, which contained so much intrinsic knowledge, and happiness, and pain.
“Three weeks,” the mother said. “It’s a girl.”
—
Liam was Amy’s first, a baby with bright eyes who was so easy that he cried only when it was something Amy could easily fix and almost always slept through the night. At first, she did not understand all the fuss about babies being hard. But then came the girls: Fiona, who had an inquisitive, worrying face—such a serious girl—and who, between her third and fifth months, refused to be put down even once. When feeding her, when taking her out, even when puttering around the house, Amy had to be standing and holding Fiona in her arms and moving in a back-and-forth motion, or else Fiona’s unhappiness would be irreparable, and Amy would have to pay for it in painful, deafening screams that could last for hours. And so she paid in constant, tireless attention and chronic low back pain instead. Fiona eventually got excited by her own crawling, an immense relief to Amy until the baby started eating paper and chewing on remote controls and drinking water from the toilet bowl.
Then long after Amy thought she was done—six years after—Helen came. She was not planned—this was when Amy and John still had sex—but how Amy loved being pregnant again, how she loved having a second girl, how she loved that she would have two daughters and they would be sisters. She had never had a sister of her own.
Yet her girls did not like each other. As a baby, Helen did not like anyone, in fact, except Liam. Helen would let herself be held by Amy only when she was feeding, and then she wanted to spend the rest of her time with her older brother, who doted on her so much that Amy worried for Helen’s future with boys. There was no way to explain why she was smitten with Liam and yet so uninterested in Fiona, who wanted desperately to be Helen’s friend. When Helen was six months old, Fiona wanted to bring her into her first grade class for show-and-tell, and Amy suspected how it would turn out, but she took the chance anyway—hoping, against the odds, to be proved wrong. At the entrance to the classroom, an excited Fiona, wearing a new pink dress, took Helen from Amy’s arms carefully, the way she had been taught, holding Helen’s butt with one hand and her head with the other.
Once she was transferred to her sister, Helen cried so passionately and flapped her arms and legs so violently that she literally wriggled herself out of Fiona’s tenuous grip and fell, butt first, onto the linoleum floor. Fiona was still small, so Helen’s fall to the ground was neither too far nor too hard, but it was enough to startle the baby, enough for her to stop, look up in that surprised, delayed way that children do, in the moment of confusion between being fine and being hurt, and then break into a stunning scream.
Amy took Helen home before Fiona could show her sister off. Helen would not stop crying. Amy fed her, changed her, sang to her, rocked her. She was inconsolable. Two hours later, Amy drove back to the school and had the principal call Liam, who was in third grade, out of his class. When he saw his crying sister, he very calmly sat down in the chair across from the principal’s desk and put his arms out for Amy to place the baby in them. Helen fell asleep within minutes.
“Thanks, sweetie,” Amy whispered, kissing Liam on the forehead and placing Helen gingerly into her carrier.
The whole drive home, with Helen fast asleep in the backseat, Amy wept quietly. She had never felt more useless.
—
Amy opened the trunk of their SUV and unloaded the shopping bags onto the ground. As she was about to close the trunk, she heard the distinct bleep of John’s cellphone. Odd that he had left it in the car; he was always so connected to work, even on the weekends. But she thought perhaps he was trying to unplug by leaving it, and that thought was heartening to her.
She shut the trunk. She was walking away with the bags when she stopped and thought, Maybe John didn’t mean to leave the phone in the car. Maybe he’d meant to slip it into his pocket and had forgotten. It might be best to get it in case something important came up.
This was the narrative Amy was telling herself, though she knew she wasn’t going back for the phone for John’s professional well-being. She knew she was going back to check the thing that she never checked.
Amy opened the driver’s-side door and looked at the display panel on the phone. It read, “Molly: One New Message.” It was not the first time she’d seen this name pop up on John’s phone. He thought Amy was so clueless that he didn’t need to take any precautions to remain discreet. Or perhaps he simply didn’t care.
But this time, she did not turn the phone over and pretend she hadn’t seen the notification. This time, she opened the phone and read the message.
“Are you staying in Connecticut tonight?” it read.
Amy’s heart pounded as her fingers rested on the keypad. Then she moved them along the keys, the answer coming to her quickly, thoughtlessly.
“Yes,” she responded, though this was a lie. They would drive back to Larchmont when the day was over. “Don’t wait up.”
She hit SEND. She held the phone open, watching it, waiting for a response. It came fast.
“:( Tomorrow night?”
Again, she did not hesitate. “Yes,” she typed. “I’ll say I have to work late.” Sent.
“Okay :)” Molly responded.
Amy closed the phone fast and threw it across the car like it was too hot to hold. She had things to bring Helen, a day to spend with her daughter. She hoped Fiona would at least stop by and say hi. She carried the shopping bags up the hill.
And as she approached the section, she could see Fiona was already there, wearing her navy camp staff polo. John was standing at the entrance to Helen’s tent, and the girls were standing close to each other, and—could Amy believe it?—they were laughing.
Fiona looked over and noticed her mother. “Mom!” She waved. Amy felt that uninhibited smile come on.
She placed the bags on the ground and approached the girls.
“Hi, sweetheart,” she said to Fiona. “You look marvelous.”
“I’ve missed you, Mom,” Fiona said. She had not said that once during her first year of being away at college.
“I’ve missed you too,” Amy said. She put an arm around each of her girls’ shoulders and kissed each of their foreheads and held them close to her breast.
Since she was a teen, she had been afraid of what had, long ago, become true: that she could, at any moment, lose her luster. That for John, she could so easily become old news.
8
There was something rebellious in Nell that Mo did not have an iota of in herself. Nell did not do things because she was supposed to; she just did what she wanted. She decided very quickly whom she liked and whom she didn’t and never pretended otherwise. She did not buy into the scene at the staff lodge where, every night after lights-out, the counselors made out with one another and in front of one another on the seedy couches, drank cans of cheap beer, and filled the basement with clouds of smoke. Sometimes Mo went to be social, but often Nell convinced her to do things as just the two of them, like walk down to the lake with bottles of beer.
One evening, with their bottles of Heineken—which they’d bought on their day off and hidden in the back of one of the kitchen’s industrial fridges—they sat with their denim shorts in the sand and their feet in the temperate, murky water. On their third beers—more than they usually drank—Nell began to talk about her life at home. They were about four weeks into camp, though as Nell began to talk about her conservative parents, about the oppressive boarding school she had attended, Mo realized how little they had told each other about their outside lives. What they had bonded over was their Englishness, their newness to the camp, their love of horses, and, perhaps most profoundly, the feeling Mo had that both of them didn’t really belong there. They were different somehow, not just because they were foreign or new—because plenty of the counselors were foreign or new—but because they both, for reasons Mo couldn’t quite explain, couldn’t assimilate into the Camp Marigold universe.
Nell was explaining how her parents had tried to put her on an antidepressant a couple of months earlier.
“It was all a secret, of course,” she said in her posh accent, and took a swig of her beer. “They’re too upper-crust for anything like that to get out.”
“What was wrong?”
“I was ‘unstable’ after graduating school,” she said, using her fingers to make quotation marks in the air. “And my A levels weren’t good enough to get into any uni they liked.”
“So you’re not going to uni?” Mo asked.
“I am,” Nell said. “Just not to one they think is good enough.”
Nell looked like a classic beauty—long red hair, porcelain skin, thin but curvy—but didn’t act like one. She was disdainful of other pretty girls, as if she didn’t know she was one of them, and of men too, like they all had some agenda she wasn’t buying into. She had a dirty mouth, and Mo, who was in charge of the section of thirteen-year-old girls, often had to remind Nell, the head horseback-riding counselor, to watch herself in front of the campers. Mo wasn’t actually sure what had appealed to Nell about working with kids to begin with or if she had just come to the camp to get away from a life back home.
“What does that mean, ‘unstable’?” Mo asked.
