Page 14 of The Identicals
The ferry is nearing land, and Tabitha goes to stand at the window. Ainsley refuses to join her, but she cranes her neck. There’s an expansive green park to the left with a white gazebo in the middle.
Ainsley touches her grandmother’s arm. “Have you ever been to the Vineyard?”
“Not since my honeymoon,” Eleanor says. “Your grandfather and I traveled to both Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard on a motor yacht my father chartered for us. I’m sure you can guess that I preferred one island and Billy the other. This was Billy’s place.”
Ainsley processes this. Eleanor and Billy not only split up their possessions, their money, and their twins, they also split up the islands—Nantucket for Eleanor, the Vineyard for Billy.
“Has my mother ever been here?” Ainsley asks.
“Oh, certainly,” Eleanor says. “Back before…”
“Before what?” Ainsley asks.
“Before everything happened,” Eleanor says. “I believe the last time she came to visit Billy here was when she was pregnant.”
“With me?” Ainsley says. “Or with Julian?”
“Who can remember?” Eleanor says. She waves a hand laden with rings. Eleanor is seventy-one years old and the most elegant woman Ainsley knows. She has traveled to Paris and Milan and Shanghai and Bombay and Marrakech and Sydney and Rome and Tokyo. She has boutiques in Nantucket and Palm Beach. The Nantucket store closes in the winter; the Palm Beach store closes in the summer. Eleanor’s flagship store, on Newbury Street, shut down for good last year because of declining sales. Ainsley suspects her grandmother’s designs are becoming dated.
Ainsley is shocked that her mother and grandmother are even attending Billy’s memorial reception. (It’s not a funeral. Billy has been cremated, and his ashes will be kept in an urn.) Ainsley saw the photos of Eleanor and Billy together in the album, but for as long as Ainsley can remember, there has been a Hatfield-and-McCoy-type feud between the two halves of the family. Tabitha hates Harper for reasons Ainsley isn’t privy to, and she assumes that Eleanor hated Billy as well. She would ask Eleanor, but she’s too intimidated.
Tabitha turns to Ainsley. “Oak Bluffs has this thing called the Methodist campground,” she says. “It’s all these different-colored gingerbread houses, and in the center is the Tabernacle, which is a large outdoor church-type thing.”
“It sounds like a cult,” Eleanor says.
“Oh, dear God,” Tabitha says, looking at the people who have amassed on the dock to await the ferry’s arrival. “There she is.”
Ainsley sees her mother’s double standing in the crowd. The sight is so surreal that Ainsley turns to look at her mother to make sure she is standing right there, then she looks back in the crowd at Aunt Harper. Aunt Harper wears her hair just as her mother does—long, heavy, and dark—but of course her clothes are different. Tabitha wears the Roxie—the linen shift with the obi—in black and a pair of black patent leather Manolo Blahnik pumps that she normally reserves for the city. Aunt Harper is wearing a pair of black pants that looks like something a waitress at a Red Lobster might wear and some kind of black lace shell that Ainsley—who has developed a pretty sharp eye when it comes to other people’s poor fashion choices—suspects came off the sale rack at Banana Republic. The top and pants don’t make sense together—the pants utilitarian, the shell dressy—and black lace, according to Eleanor, always referenceslingerie,which makes it inappropriate for a funeral or memorial reception. Despite Aunt Harper’s pitiful outfit—or perhaps because of it—Ainsley’s heart is captured. Aunt Harper is the underdog here, the first one Ainsley has found herself rooting for in sixteen and a half years.
Harper looks very tense as Eleanor, Tabitha, and Ainsley—in that order—step off the ramp.
“Hello, Mommy,” Harper says.
Eleanor takes an appraising look at her daughter. “Hello, darling,” Eleanor says. She leans forward to air-kiss Harper’s cheek, then she takes the lace material of Harper’s top between her fingers. “Where did you getthis?”
“I don’t know,” Harper says. “At the store? I’m roasting in it.” When she plucks the top away from her body, Ainsley notices that her aunt is wearing her grandfather’s gold watch.
Evidently so does Eleanor, because she says, “I can’t believe your father managed to keep that watch out of hock. He left it to you?”
“He did,” Harper says.
“Be certain to follow his example and hold on to it no matter what circumstances you find yourself in,” Eleanor says. “That watch is valuable. It belonged to his father, Dr. Richard Frost. It was Billy’s prize possession.”
“I realize this, Mommy,” Harper says. “I’m saving it for when Ainsley has a son.” She looks past Tabitha to Ainsley. “Hello, Ainsley.”
Ainsley hasn’t seen her aunt in three years. Somehow Ainsley had been allowed to go with Billy to Fenway, and Aunt Harper had been there. Four years beforethat,when Ainsley was nine, she had gone to the Cape with Billy, and they met Harper for lunch in Woods Hole. So this is only the third time Ainsley can remember seeing her aunt, yet Ainsley feels comfortable rushing into her aunt’s arms and, inexplicably, starting to cry. “I loved Gramps,” she says.
“He loved you,” Harper says. She gives Ainsley a hug that feels more maternal than any hug she has ever received from Tabitha.
When Ainsley pulls away, she watches her mother and aunt face each other. The moment is so awkward, soawful,that Ainsley’s insides twist.Hug each other,she thinks. Her mother hates Harper, but is the opposite true?
“Tabitha,” Harper says.
“Harper,” Tabitha says.
They do not move toward each other, and in fact it feels like the air between them is thrumming with bad energy. It’s like they’re two magnets with the same poles, repelling each other.
“All right, then,” Eleanor says, clearly already weary of the reunion. “Shall we go?”
