Page 26 of Endless Summer: Stories
The Country Club
(Read withThe Identicals)
Because her mother is the most unreasonable of WASPs, Eleanor is required to stand in the foyer of the Country Club and greet every last one of the guests attending her parents’ Christmas party, held each year on December 22. This receiving-line duty—or “doody,” as Eleanor’s younger sister, Flossie, calls it—can last up to an hour. Eleanor’s parents invite three hundred people to the party, and few dare to decline. The Roxies’ Christmas party is known throughout Boston and its suburbs as simply “the Christmas Party,” the same way that the country club in Brookline is “the Country Club.” Are there other Christmas parties, other country clubs? If so, it hardly matters.
Eleanor is twenty-one years old, a senior at Pine Manor, where nearly all of Eleanor’s classmates are engaged to be married, many of them to boys at Babson, many of them in June, right after graduation. The mere concept of marriage is nauseating to Eleanor. Her parents have set a miserable example. Eleanor can count on one hand the number of times she has heard her mother, Vivian Harper Roxie, laugh. Eleanor’s father, Edgar Winford Roxie, “Win” for short, is the president of Boston’s oldest bank. He flirts with whatever woman is in front of him, an attempt, Eleanor supposes, to find validation of his masculine charms. He teases waitresses, jokes with coat-check girls. Has he ever been unfaithful? Ever taken one of the sweet young tellers or his secretary—whom he always refers to as Miss Pitch, though, as Eleanor knows, her name is Jennifer—to lunch at the Marliave? It’s not impossible.
Eleanor herself has been dating a boy named Glendon Bingham; he attends Harvard Business School. When Eleanor’s mother met Glen, she awarded him a genuine smile, as rarely seen as the California condor. Glen is appropriate in every way—handsome, pedigreed, from a suitably but not ostentatiously wealthy family. However, he is also a terrific bore. When Eleanor looks at Glen, she sees in his dull brown eyes a center-entrance colonial in Wellesley or Weston, summers spent by the pool at the Country Club, dutiful attendance at this very party every year, two children (a boy and a girl), a golden retriever, a woody wagon, and the missionary position. Eleanor will be expected to serve on committees, bring a fruited Jell-O mold to potlucks, and organize the carpool.
She has no interest. She wants to work. She wants not only a job but a career. In fashion design. Her idol is Priscilla Comins Kidder, otherwise known as Priscilla of Boston, the woman who designed the wedding gowns of Princess Grace and President Johnson’s daughter Luci.
Eleanor’s parents know nothing of her ambitions. She is an art history major at Pine Manor, specializing in Rembrandt and Rubens—two vastly different artists. She brings home respectable A minuses and B pluses even though her notebooks are filled with sketches of dresses, skirts, blouses, pantsuits, even shoes.
In fact, Eleanor has designed the dress she is wearing this evening, a strapless black velvet sheath. It’s probably snugger than her mother cares for, but it does hit below the knee, an anachronism in this, the age of miniskirts. Vivian doesn’t know the dress is her daughter’s design and creation, sewn on a turquoise Singer sewing machine that Eleanor bought in Chinatown and keeps in her dorm room; Eleanor told Vivian that she bought the dress at Filene’s. She is wearing it with black slingback heels and—her nod to the holiday—a crimson velvet ribbon tied around her neck as a choker. Her mother cast a jaundiced eye at the ribbon, saying, “Pearls would have been better.”
Eleanor had merely rolled her eyes. Pearls—how unimaginative.
Flossie, who is thirteen but, because she has a baby complex, acts eight, takes advantage of the lull after greeting the Dennis Paiges, the Thomas M. J. Kingslands, and the Paul Henry Koglers. “I’m thirsty,” she says. “And my feet hurt.”
“Your shoes are too small,” Eleanor points out. Here is one example of Flossie’s childishness—her insistence on wearing last year’s Mary Janes instead of the black silk ballet flats that their mother had bought for her in Paris last fall. (What had Eleanor received from Paris? An umbrella.)
Flossie ignores Eleanor. “Daddy, may I please get a Shirley Temple?”
“Go on, then,” Win says.
“I’d like a drink as well,” Eleanor says. “Something stronger.”
“All in good time,” her father says. He gives a skyward glance that lets her know he, too, is dying for a drink. Since Eleanor has been home on holiday break from college, Win Roxie has been educating her in the world of spirits, a paternal duty he seems to particularly relish. Each night before they watchBewitched(Eleanor’s favorite) orThe Red Skelton HourorThat Girl(her father’s favorite; he likes looking at Marlo Thomas’s legs, Eleanor suspects), Win pours himself a drink and brings a scant finger in a highball glass for Eleanor as well. Mount Gay rum is her favorite so far, especially after her father added tonic and a wedge of lime.
Vivian doesn’t know about these tastings. She would not approve. She believes that ladies drink wine and, on special occasions, champagne.
“Where is Glen this evening?” her father asks. His voice contains a hint of playfulness. The evening that Win Roxie introduced Eleanor to bourbon—or truth serum, as Eleanor now thinks of it—she confessed to her father that she was more than ready to break things off with Glen. She doesn’t want to spoil his holiday, however, so she has decided to wait until the new year to drop the ax, which her father agreed was the politic thing to do.
“He’s working on a project about franchises,” Eleanor says now.
“And he couldn’t leave it just for one night?” Win asks.
“Alas, no,” Eleanor says. Harvard’s semester doesn’t end until after the holiday break, a brutal cruelty if ever there was one. Eleanor is secretly thrilled that Glen can’t make it. She plans on drinking as much as she wants—it will have to be champagne; her mother is watching—and dancing to the Philip Becker Orchestra.
Who will she dance with? None of her parents’ friends; the men are all hands. Maybe her childhood friend Topher. His girlfriend, Liesl, is here tonight, although she has a sprained ankle.
“Are we done?” Eleanor asks her mother as they stand on the receiving line.
“A roast is done,” her mother says.
“Are wefinished?” Eleanor asks impatiently. She wants a flute of champagne and a chance at a canapé or two. The shrimp will be gone, as they are every year, but she might get salmon mousse on a Ritz cracker or a stick of celery stuffed with pimento cheese if they end this pointless formality right now.
“We still have more guests, darling,” Eleanor’s mother says, turning the worddarlinginto a pitchfork and offering her phony smile, her lips tight across her teeth.
The Nutcracker Suite,which her mother insists on, ends and the Philip Becker Orchestra launches into “Mistletoe and Holly.” Eleanor is certain that Mr. and Mrs. Charles Eaton, Mr. and Mrs. Richmond Collier, and Aunt Lizbet and Uncle Myles have started dancing. That’s one good thing about WASPs, Eleanor thinks. The instant the band starts playing, they get up to dance. Probably it’s their frugality surfacing; they can’t stand to think of the money their parents spent on years of ballroom-dancing lessons going to waste.
“Daddy?” Eleanor implores.
Win Roxie straightens up—shoulders back, hands clasped in front of himself, eyes resolutely forward. “Look,” he says. “Your cousin is arriving.”
Her cousin? Eleanor raises her eyes to see Rhonda Fiorello slink through the door with a young man at her side.
What?Eleanor thinks.
