Page 20 of Endless Summer: Stories
It’s almost embarrassing how excited Barbie is. She has lived on Nantucket for over twenty years and has never been invited inside the yacht club. Dating Glenn Daley was her best chance to go, but in the eighteen months that they’ve been together, he’s never once invited her. Their relationship was under wraps, but Barbie hinted that Glenn might bring her there as a colleague. Real estate agents have lunch together all the time. But at the Nantucket Yacht Club, business is verboten, so if Glenn had taken Barbie to lunch there, it would have to have been as a friend, and then, possibly, people would have figured out their secret.
“Why do you want to go to lunch there so badly, anyway?” Glenn had asked.
Barbie shrugged. We all want what we can’t have. Eddie had sat on the waiting list of the Nantucket Yacht Club for over ten years until he eventually joined at Great Harbor. Eddie told Barbie once, in confidence, that he knew he would never get into the Nantucket Yacht Club. He’d said, “They don’t want people like us.”
Barbie didn’t have to ask what he meant; she knew. He meant they didn’t want people with Slavic last names. They didn’t want kids who had grown up above a dry cleaner’s in New Bedford. The Nantucket Yacht Club was for blue bloods. Glenn Daley was a member because his ex-wife, Ashland Daley, was old summer money, and when they’d divorced and Ashland moved to California, Glenn wisely held on to the membership.
Glenn parks the Cadillac and escorts Barbie inside.
Barbie tries to absorb every detail; she had such elevated expectations that even if it looked like the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, she might be disappointed. The inside of the Nantucket Yacht Club is unremarkable, although Barbie realizes the word she should use isunderstated.She clicks in her heels down the blond polished-wood floors, past a glass cabinet that displays sailing and tennis trophies. In front of her is a ballroom where, at the moment, children are playing badminton. The whole place smells of bacon and French fries; Barbie’s stomach rumbles.
The receptionist smiles at them and says, “Good afternoon, Mr. Daley. A little lunch?”
Glenn leads Barbie through French doors to the back patio. Here is the true beauty of the yacht club, Barbie sees: the brick patio with wrought-iron tables under navy-blue canvas umbrellas. At the end of the patio is a thick green lawn that reaches all the way to the harbor. There are sweeping views of the Brant Point lighthouse. The sky is bright and cloudless; the flags snap; sailboats bob in the harbor.
A raven-haired woman whom Barbie recognizes from an exercise class she took a million years earlier is playing “Falling in Love Again” on an upright piano. Barbie waves at her enthusiastically and thinks of saying,I didn’t know you worked here!She hadn’t expected live music at lunch, but she sees how civilized it is.
Civilizedhad been Mrs. Schaffer’s favorite word. Barbie wishes Mrs. Schaffer were still alive so that Barbie could tell her about her engagement. Mrs. Schaffer had worried about Barbie ending up alone.
Barbie scans the other tables for people she recognizes. There is no one. But is thispossible?No, wait—there’s a retired lawyer at a corner table; they did at least a dozen real estate closings together, but Barbie doubts he will recall her name. Barbie sees the smart-looking woman who was married to the late superintendent of schools. Everyone else is unfamiliar. Most of the people are older, although there is one convivial table of beautiful mommies all wearing tennis whites. The members aren’t as dressed up as Barbie thought they might be; in her mind, this place had taken on such a grandeur that she expected couture. She is definitely among the best dressed of the women in her DVF wrap dress and nude Manolo stilettos. If anything, she is overdressed; she wonders if it looks like she’s trying too hard.
Glenn pulls out a chair for Barbie at a table for two. He says, “Can you see yourself being a member here, Mrs. Daley?”
Mrs. Daley.Barbie’s head spins.A member here.When Eddie gets out of jail, the first thing she will do is bring him here for lunch.
“I think Iwillsell the Triumph,” she says.
Part of Barbie thinks that, before she makes a single wedding arrangement, she should right her wrongs and tell Glenn the truth about everything: There is no man in her past named Earl Fischer, and she “dated” Comanche Jones for all of twelve hours. And shewasinvolved in the prostitution ring on Low Beach Road; in fact, the whole thing had been her idea. She tries to remember if she’d lied to Glenn about anything else.
There was the matter of the crystal ball.
Barbie’s crystal ball has created more problems than it’s solved. It told her flat out that Grace would cheat on Eddie and that Madeline would do something unspeakably awful to Grace. Glenn has expressed what Barbie considers an “unhealthy interest” in her supernatural powers in general and the crystal ball in particular.
A few weeks earlier, Glenn had run his hands over the crystal ball and said, “Do you ever ask this thing about us?”
“About us?” Barbie had said, gently lifting Glenn’s hands off the globe. Other people’s energycoulddisrupt the ball the same way a magnet made a compass go haywire.
“Yeah,” Glenn said. “Do you ever ask about our future?”
“Yes,” Barbie said. For a long time, she had been afraid to get a read on her relationship with Glenn. She was so happy, and if the relationship was doomed, she didn’t want to know. But one night, after too many prickly pear margaritas, she cuddled the ball in her lap like it was a baby or a puppy and asked about her and Glenn.
The ball had glowed as it did when it was thinking for Barbie, but the answer it had eventually arrived at was… muddled. It was a mass of thick gray clouds; it was a pea-soup fog. Indecipherable.
“What did it say?” Glenn asked.
“It said we’re going to be very happy,” Barbie answered.
At lunch, Glenn introduces Barbie to an endless stream of people. “Please meet my fiancée, Barbara Pancik.”
He uses the name Barbara, not Barbie, and Barbie can’t really blame him.Barbieis the name of a doll.
The men slap Glenn on the back; the women squeal. There are congratulations all around. As much as Barbie enjoys being introduced to Glenn’s friends, she bristles at all these people she hadn’t even realized Glenn knew. It’s like he had a secret life. Barbie wonders if any of the people she’s meeting are Ashland’s friends. She has to assume some of them are, and she wonders how she measures up in their eyes.
Everyone seems genuinely happy for Glenn. He did survive a hellish divorce. It’s amazing that Glenn wants to get married again. Amazing!
Barbie wonders if Glenn will ask her to sign a prenup.
One of the women from the beautiful-mommy table approaches. “Glenn Daley!” the woman says. “I didn’t think you ever left your desk in the middle of the day!” The woman is blond and very tall, and her voice is so loud that Barbie wouldn’t be surprised if she’s breaking the yacht club’s decibel rule.
