Page 23 of Endless Summer: Stories
She won’t get a clear read until she tells Glenn the truth.
Barbie tries not to feel hurt that no one is throwing her a bridal shower. Her only close friend is Molly, who lives off-island, and her bridesmaids are seventeen years old and can’t know what’s expected. Barbie thought perhaps Grace would organize something, but Grace is busy packing and moving as well as raising the girls and dealing with all the matters that Eddie left behind.
Barbie also thought maybe one of the women in the office might throw together a tea or a luncheon. Rachel McMannlivesto plan happy events like that, and for a while, Barbie enters the office each morning anticipating a surprise. She wouldn’t even care if Glenn told the associates theyhadto plan something. Barbie would still be thrilled.
A week passes, then another, and no shower. Barbie decides that she can’t expect the women in her office to feel anything toward her but jealousy and resentment. She was hired one day and proposed to the next and she receives the best listings because she’s the boss’s fiancée.
She reminds herself that a shower would be pointless anyway. Any household item Barbie might receive, she already owns. She has a KitchenAid mixer in bright pink, she has maple cutting boards in three sizes, she has Henckels knives and a full set of All-Clad stainless-steel pots and pans. She has a French mandoline, a potato ricer, a chinois strainer, a Crock-Pot. She has sumptuous bath towels and Frette linens on her bed.
Possibly everyone thinks that, at the age of forty-one, a successful woman like Barbie has everything she could want.
Barbie makes a series of appointments at R. J. Miller—one to get her hair frosted, one for a facial, one to get her eyebrows and bikini line waxed. On the Saturday before the wedding, she and Grace and Hope and Allegra all go and get their nails done, and afterward, Barbie suggests they go to the Nantucket Hotel for lunch.
“My treat,” Barbie says.
“You can’t pay,” Grace says. “You’re the bride.” Then her eyes grow wide with guilt. “I should have thrown you a shower. I’m so sorry, Barbie. I dropped the ball.”
Barbie waves a hand through the air as if this is the most ridiculous thing she’s ever heard. “A shower?” she says. “For what? I have everything a woman could want.”
“And now you have Glenn,” Hope says.
Molly Brimmer-Crawley arrives the afternoon before the wedding, and Barbie drives to the airport in her Triumph to pick her up.
“You still have the Triumph!” Molly says. “I adore this car!”
Molly hasn’t been to Nantucket in three or four years, and the last time she came, she was with her kids, one of whom was teething. She is free as a bird now, and she announces that there is no need to stop by Barbie’s cottage to drop off her suitcase. “Let’s go straight to the bar,” she says. Then she puts her hands in the air and whoops.
They head to the Pearl for passion-fruit cosmos—three, in fact, in rapid succession. Whoa! Barbie hasn’t felt thisloose,thislightin a long time. Molly Brimmer is the one person other than Eddie who has been a constant since childhood. Barbie and Molly sang into hairbrushes in front of a mirror to theGreasesoundtrack; they smoked cigarettes for the first time outside the ice-skating rink; they bleached their jeans and pierced their ears with a needle, an ice cube, and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. They were perceived as bad girls—Molly was shanty Irish and Barbie a gypsy Slovakian, both from the most undesirable part of a dying town—but they were smart girls. They took honors classes; they were secretly intent on doing their homework, getting into college, and leaving New Bedford forever.
Molly and Jimmy live in Newport, Rhode Island, where Jimmy owns a marina. Molly insists on paying for their drinks.
“All of our drinks,” Molly says. “All night. This is your bachelorette party.”
Barbie went to Molly’s bachelorette party sixteen years earlier, when they were both twenty-five. Barbie had been one of Molly’s bridesmaids, but Molly’s college roommate Amber had been the maid of honor, and Barbie’s feelings were hurt. The other bridesmaids were also Molly’s college friends, so Barbie had suffered from a bad case of odd man out. She marveled that Molly had been able to make close friends so easily out of high school. Barbie hadn’t been successful at it; she had never found a friend as good, fun, and loyal as Molly.
They go to Lola for ruby-red grapefruit martinis.
Then to 56 Union for espresso martinis.
And then Barbie surrenders. “I can’t drink any more,” she says.
Molly smiles triumphantly.
They end their evening at Steamboat Pizza with a couple slices of pepperoni, olives, and mushrooms. From there, they can walk home to Barbie’s cottage; she has to remove her Manolos and go barefoot, but she’s so drunk, she doesn’t care. They leave the Triumph in town; Barbie will walk back in the morning to get it.
It’s on the walk home that Barbie decides to confess. “I lied to Glenn,” she says.
“About what?” Molly says.
“Oh,” Barbie says, swinging her Manolos by the straps in a wide circle. “Everything.”
“Everything like what?” Molly says.
“Like I made up an old boyfriend and told Glenn that he was the one who gave me the black pearl necklace. And I made up other men. Just, you know, so Glenn would be jealous and wouldn’t think I was a loser who had never had a boyfriend.”
“You’re not a loser,” Molly says. “You dated Tony Harlowe.”
Barbie winced. She had never admitted, even to Molly, the brutally honest things Tony Harlowe had said to her after the senior prom. He loved her, he said, but his parents didn’t think Barbie Pancik was good enough for him and he knew in his heart that they were right. Tony Harlowe had gotten into UPenn and had his sights set on law school after that. He wanted to be a judge someday.
