Page 48 of The Identicals
This is also Eleanor’s excuse for not hiring a nurse.
“I’ll call Felipa,” Tabitha says. “She’ll be here tomorrow.”
Eleanor has an actual bell—an antique she inherited from her great-grandmother, who was a member of Boston society and a friend of Isabella Stewart Gardner—that she rings when she wants Tabitha to adjust her pillows or findLaw & Orderon the TV (Eleanor lovesLaw & Order,which is convenient, as the show pretty much plays twenty-four hours a day). Tabitha brings Eleanor fresh ice water, portions out her pain meds, and makes three trips a day to the Paramount on Charles Street—breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Tabitha would complain about this, but it gives her a chance to get outside. It’s June, and the city is experiencing the most beautiful days of the year. The Common is lush and leafy. New mothers are out with their baby carriages, and there are skateboarders and bikers and joggers with their sinewy muscles; college girls in Ray-Bans and ponytails bob along, talking on their phones:like like like.Carefree. When Tabitha goes to fetch lunch for Eleanor, she ambles through the Boston Public Garden; she can always blame the delay on the Paramount’s perpetual line. The garden is in full bloom—iris, peonies, roses. The pond is clear and clean, and the swan boats paddle along with barely a ripple.
Tabitha’s childhood here had been storybook in many ways. Eleanor had taken Tabitha and Harper to the Boston Ballet to seeThe Nutcracker,to the Museum of Fine Arts to see the Renoir exhibition, and Billy had season tickets at Fenway. As a family, they had a regular table at Marliave on Friday nights because Eleanor loved the Welsh rabbit; they brunched on Sundays at Harvest in Cambridge. Tabitha first got drunk at a party in Grays Hall after the Head of the Charles regatta her sophomore year in high school and late that night puked at the feet of the John Harvard statue.
Her Boston pedigree is impeccable in its details, but after so many years on Nantucket, she now feels like a visitor—and, under present circumstances, a captive.
But she has no choice. She must care for Eleanor. When Harper calls with the news of Ainsley’s suspension, however, Tabitha announces she’s returning home.
“Please don’t,” Harper says. “It won’t change anything. Ainsley is experiencing some pretty wicked backlash from her friends at school, and unfortunately this is my area of expertise. Being ostracized.”
Tabitha is ashamed at how relieved she feels at being let off the hook. She is livid at Ainsley—she hates thinking that her daughter is capable of an act so stupid and cruel—but neither can she bear to think of Ainsley suffering at the hands of the other kids. She sends Ainsley a text.
Tabitha:You okay?
Ainsley:What do you care?
Tabitha:I’m still your mother.
Ainsley:So?
Tabitha:So I love you.
Ainsley:Whatever, Tabitha.
Tabitha reads this exchange over again and again until tears blur her eyes. She wants to go back to Nantucket and shake her daughter—or hug her. But she tells herself that the way to be the best parent right now is to stay away. If Tabitha were to walk in the house and take back the reins, Ainsley would do something even more destructive than she’s already done. Tabitha is sure of it.
Deliverance shortly arrives in the person of Tabitha’s aunt Flossie, Eleanor’s sister, from Palm Beach.
Flossie is a firecracker. She’s eight years younger than Eleanor, but she looks and acts like she’s Tabitha’s age. She is a self-declared trophy wife, married to an eighty-five-year-old descendant of Henry Flagler. She plays tennis, she shops, she lunches, and, in the winters, she works three days a week at the Eleanor Roxie-Frost boutique on Worth Avenue.
When Flossie arrives at the town house on Pinckney Street, she apologizes for not coming sooner. “I was on a cruise when you called, and then when I got home, I still didn’t want to come. Boston is depressing, and my sister is a bitch on her best day. But then I thought about you. No one should be subjected to Eleanor like this. You’ve done enough, Pony.” She makes a shooing motion with her hand. “I hereby set you free.”
Tabitha goes up to her room to pack her things to go home—but then she remembers that she and Harper have a deal.
The thought is not unappealing: she will go to the Vineyard.
HARPER
Meghan is the most miserable pregnant person Harper has ever seen. It doesn’t help that the island has been experiencing record high temperatures and that Meghan is four days past due. And yet still the poor creature comes to work at the boutique—because the boutique has air-conditioning and her house does not. She also wants to make sure Harper and Ainsley learn everything about the store before she goes into labor. Harper gets the feeling Meghan is saying a permanent good-bye; she has the giddy air of escape. But maybe that’s just the hormones.
The Nantucket boutique is different from the Palm Beach store because, in addition to selling the Eleanor Roxie-Frost label, it sells Milly, Tibi, DVF, Nanette Lepore, Parker, Alice and Olivia, and Rebecca Taylor.
“This was Tabitha’s idea, and she really had to push your mother to do it,” Meghan confides. “I think Tabitha was growing weary of all ERF all the time.”
“Tell me about it,” Harper says. Working at the boutique is part of the deal, she knows, but she is, quite possibly, the least qualified woman in America to do so. In the twenty years she’s lived on the Vineyard, she has spent a sum total of two or three minutes thinking about what to wear. Now, as she browses the racks and shelves of dresses and skirts, pants, blouses, summer-weight sweaters, halter tops, shorts, blazers, sandals, belts, scarves, and the impulse-buy display of lacy thong underwear and stick-on bras, she sees that maybe she has missed out. The prints, the silks, the sequins, the feathers—it’s all alluring, sexy, chic.
“I’m going to be frank with you,” Meghan says. Meghan’s dishwater blond hair is pulled back in a sweaty bun, and her pale face is puffed like a marshmallow. Her fingers and ankles are swollen. She is wearing a stretch maternity dress in kelly green, which makes her look like a vegetable—a pea or a brussels sprout. “This store has a bad reputation.”
“How so?” Harper says.
“People think we’re snooty,” Meghan says. “Because wearesnooty. Your mother and your sister train us to sniff out who’s buying big and who’s not, and we are to treat the customers accordingly. Tabitha doesn’t like browsers, and she positively hates tryer-oners.”
Ainsley nods emphatically. “She complains about them all the time. The people who try on eight or nine different outfits but buy nothing.”
“There are a couple of people she’s banned from the store,” Meghan says.
