Page 3 of Winter Solstice
“I assume so?” Eddie says. He searches the invitation for dress code. It says nothing except that it’s a birthday party for Bart Quinn at the VFW at 7:00 p.m. on Halloween. Halloween is a Tuesday night, not a usual night for a party, so it must be a Halloween party, which means costumes. Eddie’s wheels start turning.
“I don’t know about you,” Eddie says, “but I’m dressing up.”
“I have a Japanese geisha costume,” Allegra says. “I’ll wear that.”
Japanese geisha?Eddie thinks. He supposes it could be worse; at least she’ll be fully dressed. “That’s my girl,” he says.
AVA
She’s still struck by the novelty of it: pushing through the turnstiles of the subway and trudging up the stairs, just one of ten million people. She stops by the dry cleaner on the corner of Lexington and Eighty-Second Street and picks up her laundry from Nina Hwang. It’s clean, folded, and bagged for fifteen bucks, an urban miracle as far as Ava is concerned. She ducks into the deli next door and gets a bunch of red Gerber daisies, as it’s Friday and Ava has made a practice of purchasing fresh flowers every Friday, which is the night Potter comes all the way over from the West Side for dinner at Ava’s apartment.
As Ava approaches her building, she fumbles for her keys. Keys, she’s still not used to keys. In her life on Nantucket she had only one key, the key to her Jeep, which she always kept on the passenger seat. She never had a key to the inn. It was an inn and therefore always open. Even when it was closed—January, February—it was unlocked. Does a key even exist? If so, Ava has never seen it.
Now her ring jangles with a key to the front door of herbuilding on Eighty-Second Street; two keys to her apartment—doorknob and dead bolt; a key to her mailbox; and three keys to Potter’s apartment, which heinsistedshe take at the end of August when she moved, permanently, to Manhattan. Potter had wanted Ava to move in with him on the Upper West Side from the get-go, and Ava’s mother, Margaret, had wanted Ava to either move in with her and Drake on Central Park West or take over Drake’s apartment in the West Village. All these offers were tempting, but Ava, at the age of thirty-two, had never lived alone. She had spent her entire adult life living with her father, Mitzi, her brothers, and sixteen rooms filled with virtual strangers. How had she evenconsideredmarrying Nathaniel or Scott? She would have missed out on this seminal experience: a place all her own.
Ava’s one-bedroom apartment is a fifth-floor walk-up, meaning four flights of stairs, but nothing about the climb—even carrying her heavy school bag and a load of laundry—diminishes the joy Ava feels each and every time she walks into her apartment. It is, absolutely, nothing special. The kitchen is the size of a piece of pie, a four-square-foot triangle that features a fridge with a microwave above it on one side and a small stove on the other, a sink in the middle, and enough countertop to either drain dishes or place a cutting board, but not both at the same time. The bathroom floor is made up of tiny hexagonal tiles in black and white, but whole rows of them are missing against the walls. There is exposed brick in the living room, Ava’s sole point of pride, as she knows exposed brick to be valued in Manhattan real estate, although she’s not sure why, since she can’t hang anything on it. The bedroom has two windows, both with bars, and a reasonable closet. Granted, Potter’s apartment has cathedral ceilings and a butler’s pantry off the kitchen and one and a half baths and original crown molding. Both Margaret’s and Drake’s apartments fall into the luxury category. Margaret’s apartment is a three-bedroom overlooking Central Park—meaning that if you tossed a water balloon, that’swhere it would land—and Drake’s apartment, thoughsmaller,is sleek and modern and filled with actual art that he buys from a dealer in Chelsea. Both Odell Beckham Jr. and Jimmy Fallon live in Drake’s building, and there’s a pool on the roof and a fondue restaurant on the first floor that is presently the hottest reservation in the city.
But what Ava treasures about her apartment is that everything in it is hers. Her books are lined up on the shelves, her music plays on the wireless speakers—she can play Natalie Merchant whenever she wants, and no one is around to complain—her favorite foods are in the fridge, her twelve pillows dominate the head of the bed. She bought a Persian rug for the living room at the flea market on Columbus Avenue, and she has hung photographs of Nantucket on every available bit of wall space. Set up in the corner is a stepladder that she has decorated with white fairy lights and houseplants. It’s not sophisticated, but Ava doesn’t care. She loves it because it’s hers.
Ava puts the Gerber daisies in her white scallop shell vase and places it in the center of her round white dining table from IKEA (the table is an eyesore; Ava will replace it after she saves up), and she pours herself a glass of white wine. Potter is due at seven. Ava is making tomato soup from scratch, grilled ham and cheese sandwiches, and a green salad with creamy lime dressing. Her past Friday-night endeavors have included roast chicken, pork chops braised in milk, and a gluey mushroom pasta that they decided to throw away after the first bite in favor of pizza from Ray’s. Ava takes both her successes and her failures in stride. She isn’t cooking to please Potter as much as she is cooking to please herself.
She realizes she may seem solipsistic, but she doesn’t care. She is reveling in being her own person.
She needs to go to Gristedes and get started on the soup and the dressing, but an envelope among the pile of mail—a purple envelope?—catches her eye. She recognizes Mitzi’s handwriting on the front, and suddenly the purple makes sense. Why settle for a white envelope when you can send purple? That would be Mitzi’s logic.
Ava opens the envelope. It’s an invitation to Bart’s twenty-second birthday party on Halloween at the VFW on Nantucket.Well,Ava thinks,if anyone deserves a party, it’s Bart.He missed his twenty-first birthday. There were no kegs, no streamers or cake, in the prison camp on the barren plains of southern central Afghanistan.
Halloween is a Tuesday this year. There’s no way Ava can attend the party, and that’s the God’s honest truth; she won’t feel guilty because her circumstances flow with her personal preference. She doesn’twantto go. It’s not only that she detests Halloween—every teacher in America hates Halloween, with all the kids hyped up the day of and in a sugar coma the day after—it’s also that Ava doesn’t want to go home. She’s afraid that if she sees that her father is sicker than anyone is letting on, and that Bart is clinically depressed, and that Kevin and Isabelle are underwater from the birth of their second baby in two years, and that Mitzi is incapable of holding everyone together—instead of dealing with the real issues, here she is, throwing a party at the VFW—Ava will feel like she has to move back.
Move back! Impossible. She has her apartment; she has a job she adores. Copper Hill is the best place to teach music in the whole country. First of all, music is an elective, so every single one of Ava’s seventy-five students—five classes of fifteen—wantsto be there. Not only do they want to be there, they want to achieve. Ava has singers and piano players and composers and musical history students. And she runs the madrigal group and a club for recording music videos.
Also, Ava has a boyfriend whom she ishealthilyin love with. There’s no drama with Potter, no theatrics, no jealousy (notmuchjealousy), no tears, no senseless yearning, no insecurities (or notmuchinsecurity, anyway).
Ava isnotgoing home, even for a party, even for Bart. She doesn’t want to feel guilty.
Halloween is rapidly followed by Thanksgiving, and Thanksgiving is rapidly followed by Christmas. She’ll go home for Thanksgiving and Christmas… well, actually, Potter said something about taking a trip to Austria over Christmas—Salzburg and Vienna. Ava nearly shrieked with joy. To visit the birthplace and breeding ground of so manygreat composers—Mozart, Schubert, Haydn, Mahler,Strauss. She is thirty-two years old and has never been to Europe!
But… she has to wait and see how her father is doing.
Her cell phone rings. It’s Potter.
“Hey, baby,” Ava says.
“Ava,” Potter says. The tone of his voice makes Ava think that something awful has happened. Maybe Gibby, Potter’s grandfather, has died. Oh, Gibby!
“What’s wrong?” Ava says.
“I have to cancel on dinner tonight,” Potter says. “Trish just called. At the last minute she and Harrison decided to fly in from San Fran to attend the Shakespeare symposium at Bard College, so she asked if I could take PJ for the weekend. Of course I said yes.”
“Of course you said yes!” Ava says. “This is good news, right? I mean, a bit unexpected and last minute, but still good. I finally get to meet him! Please, bring PJ here for dinner. I was planning on making grilled cheese anyway. Or we can go out. We can go to Serendipity and get foot-long hot dogs and frozen hot chocolates. And then tomorrow we can go to the Museum of Natural History! He’s the perfect age for the planetarium, and I think they’re having an exhibit on arachnids.”
Potter laughs. “You’re much more enthusiastic about this than I thought you’d be. You’re much more enthusiastic about this than I am.”
“You always say you wish you had more time with PJ,” Ava says. “You always say you wish he lived closer.”
“You’re right, you’re right,” Potter says.
“So do you want to bring him here, or shall we go out?” Ava asks.
