Page 43 of Summer of '69
“Isn’t it obvious?” Blair says.
“You’re awfully big,” Pick says. “Although I once watched a woman give birth to triplets.”
“You…what?” Blair says.
“I assisted in a birth where a woman had triplets,” Pick says. “My mother is friends with the midwife at the commune we live on in California.”
Blair is rendered speechless. Lorraine allowed—orencouraged—Pick to assist in abirth?Blair also notes Pick’s use of the present tense and she wonders if he’s going back to California at the end of the summer. She’s dying to ask about Lorraine but she holds her tongue all the way to the bank of pay phones alongside the Nantucket electric company. There’s no one else using the pay phones, so Blair chooses the phone at the far end, and Pick, tactfully, chooses the phone closest to Main Street.
Blair opens her change purse. “Need a dime?”
“I’m planning to reverse the charges,” Pick says, and he holds Blair’s gaze for a second. He has the long sun-bleached hair of a surfer and startling ice-blue eyes. He’s a beautiful child, really. Blair can see Lorraine in his features and it’s like bumping into someone she knew long, long ago. There’s something so familiar about Pick that Blair immediately feels protective of him.
“Okay,” she says. “Wait for me and we’ll walk back together.”
When she calls Angus at work, the newly hired receptionist, Ingrid, informs Blair that Dr. Whalen hasn’t been in the office since Monday.
This is such startling news that Blair stammers when she asks, “H-h-has he gone to Houston?” That’s the only explanation. Maybe the moon launch was moved up or possibly there’s some problem that only Angus can fix.
“Houston?” Ingrid says. “No, not yet.”
Blair waits, but she offers nothing else. “Thank you, Ingrid,” Blair says, and she hangs up.
Blair dials the apartment next but the phone rings and rings.
Blair stares at her distorted reflection in the mirrored front of the phone. Angus must be having an episode. He’s lying in bed in their darkened room, unable to move. Blair castigates herself for having wished this on him. She should have realized this would happen as soon as she left; theybothshould have realized this.
Blair calls the apartment again.Pick up!she thinks. But there’s no answer.
She wishes she had befriended some of their neighbors. The other unit in their building is occupied by a couple from Japan; they’re perfectly lovely but they don’t speak much English. Blair supposes she could call her father or her friend Sallie to check on Angus, but then she imagines how mortified Angus would be to have either David or Sallie witness his infirmity. Nobody other than Joey knows about Angus’s episodes. Should Blair askJoeyto check on him?
Blair’s next thought is one she has been trying to push away. What if Angusisn’tat home, immobilized by an episode? What if he’s with Trixie? What if Angus and Trixie have gone away together? Angus has access to Blair’s trust fund. What if he used it to take Trixie to Aruba or Tahiti?
Blair is hit by a strong wave of nausea and her stomach lurches. Is she going to vomit right here on Union Street? If so, that will be the humiliation that finally breaks her.
Breathe,she tells herself.In through the nose, out through the mouth.She presses her swollen feet into the sidewalk and imagines herself as a tree, strong and majestic. She inserts another dime to call Joey Whalen at work.
“Blair,” he says when he hears her voice. “What’s wrong? Is it time?”
She bites her lower lip. During the picnic on Craigville Beach, Joey described the first time he ever saw her. She had been walking down Newbury Street with Sallie.You were wearing a sweater of robin’s-egg blue,he said.Your hair was pulled away from your face with a tortoiseshell barrette. You were laughing and I thought,I want to be the one to make that girl laugh for the rest of her life.
Remembering these words were a salve on the wound in Blair’s heart. Had Angus ever noticed the color of one of Blair’s sweaters or appreciated the sound of her laughter? She suspects not. The quality of Angus’s love is different—more urgent, more desperate. Or at least it had been until his work consumed him and Blair got pregnant.
Blair is confused. Does she have feelings for Joey? Didn’t she feel a secret, delicious rush every time she pulled out the silver lighter with the love note engraved on it? Hadn’t she melted away in Joey’s arms after only one sip of the cold duck and one bite of the chocolate babka? If Angus hadn’t walked in, wasn’t it possible that things might have progressed even further, not because her hormones were going haywire and not because she was upset about Trixie, but because she desired him?
“Not time yet,” Blair tells Joey. “But I’m settled now and I want to see you. Will you come this weekend? Get a hotel? The Gordon Folger has nice rooms. Maybe not quite as nice as your hotel in Boston, but—”
“Aw, shucks, Blair,” Joey says. “I just found out I have to go to Rhode Island this weekend. I have a client in Newport who invited me to sail on his friend’s yacht,Shamrock,and then there’s a cocktail party on the front lawn of one of the Vanderbilt mansions. I want to see you, but I’ll have to take a rain check.”
Sailing on a yacht. Cocktail party at a Vanderbilt mansion. This could have been Blair’s life if she’d married Joey instead of Angus.
Rain checksounds vague and far away. Where is the man who hunted down whipped cream for her cake? She needs that man…now. Blair chastises herself—ten minutes earlier she yearned to be her own person, and yet here she is, pining away for a man, any man. But both of the Whalen brothers are proving unavailable.
“No problem,” Blair says coolly. She can at leastsoundnonchalant. “Have fun in Newport.” She hangs up and imagines Joey on a rolling green lawn with a Tom Collins in his hand, chatting up girls in patio dresses with hair piled high on top of their heads and long, dangly earrings. She knows there is no way he will give a second thought to his brother’s hugely pregnant wife.
She bows her head. She has madesucha mess of things. She should have listened to her mother and kept her mouth shut, let Angus’s little affair run its course. She’s so bewildered that she considers just giving the twins up for adoption.Shewill take a lover and disappear for days! She will go to parties with socialites and sail on yachts! She will pretend that none of thisever happened!
She turns around in time to see Pick slam down the receiver of his pay phone in obvious frustration.
