Page 42 of Endless Summer: Stories
Summer of ’89
(Read withSummer of ’69and “Summer of ’79”)
1. SHEDRIVESMECRAZY
Jessica Levin (rhymes withheaven) endures “planes, trains, and automobiles”—the subway from her Midtown law office to JFK, a flight from New York to Boston, a bus from Boston to Cape Cod—and reaches the ferry to Nantucket with five minutes to spare.
Phew! When the bus got stuck in traffic going over the Sagamore Bridge, Jessie became convinced she was going to miss her boat, and the next forty-five minutes played out like a thriller—would she make it or wouldn’t she?
She would! She’s here! The adrenaline coursing through Jessie propels her all the way to the top deck, where she liked to sit when she was a kid.
She collapses in a molded plastic chair in the midst of what feels like a wild Friday night at the Odeon; she has unwittingly joined partycentral. Leaning against the railing is some guy in Nantucket Reds, an alligator shirt, and a navy blazer with a can of Meister Bräu in each hand, a boom box wedged between his L. L. Bean moccasins, and a Brat Pack snarl on his face. Jessie overhears a girl in a snug neon-pink minidress call him “Blowman”—no surprise there.
Blowman appears to be a few years older than Jessie; he’s probably a bond trader at Drexel Burnham, where all the criminals work. While she’s assessing him, he catches her eye and offers her one of the beers in his hand.
“You look like you could use an attitude adjustment,” he says.
Jessie glares at him over the tops of her Wayfarers. “No, thank you.”
Blowman recoils like Jessie has tried to bite his nose and she nearly laughs. She loathes all Wall Street types and has made it her job to hold them accountable. She would love to tell Blowman that she has just represented three women in a sexual-harassment case against the investment bank behemoth Arnolds and Major and only the day before won her clients a million-dollar decision.
One million dollars! The decision had been called “landmark” that very morning in thePost. Suddenly, it seems not impossible that Jessie will be made a senior partner before she turns thirty-five. The only thing better than the win is that the opposing counsel was Theo Feigelbaum, Jessie’s boyfriend during her first and second years at law school. The reason Jessie took the case for the three plaintiffs (other than wanting to help out womankind) was that she knew Theo was Arnolds and Major’s in-house counsel and she couldn’t resist going head-to-head with him.
The boom box between Blowman’s feet plays a halfway decent mixtape—Billy Joel, Dire Straits, the Cure. Jessiedoesneed an attitude adjustment, because despite the million-dollar decision and despite slicing Theo as thin as the corned beef he used to love so much, Jessie is filled with leaden dread about the weekend ahead. She’s heading to the island to celebrate her niece’s and nephew’s twentieth birthday; Jessie has been dreaming about the beach, about floating in her mother’s swimming pool and playing tennis against her nephew George at the Field and Oar Club. But the night before, Jessie’s longtime boyfriend, Pick Crimmins, received a phone call with some unsettling news. Now Jessie suspects her weekend will be spent trying to keep her mother, Kate, from committing murder.
And Pick isn’t there to help her. He left that morning for West Berlin, where he’s representing the UN’s Economic and Social Council; he thinks it will be only a matter of months, maybe weeks, until the Berlin Wall comes down.
Jessie sighs. She misses him already. The conflict between East and West Germany might be easier to sort out than what Jessie is facing on Nantucket.
After disembarking, Jessie watches as her fellow passengers are picked up by friends in beat-up Jeeps or frosted-haired matrons in woody wagons or—in the case of Blowman—by a shiny beige Humvee with tinted windows that very clearly has never seen a day of combat. Soon Jessie is the only one left waiting, her weekend bag and her bulging briefcase at her feet. She looks toward the terminal, wondering if she’ll have to go in and use the pay phone. She called her mother immediately after Pick shared his news the night before. But it was late and Kate had just gotten home from an evening out with her friend Bitsy Dunscombe. They had gone for a “Madaket mystery or two” at the Westender, and because Jessie wanted to deliver Pick’s news when Kate was sober, she ended up telling her mother only that she would be arriving the next day on the five o’clock ferry.
Kate might have had three or four Madaket mysteries, Jessie thinks, because it seems she’s forgotten all about her promise that “someone” would drive “all the way to town” to pick Jessie up.
Jessie’s father, David, had died of prostate cancer in January, and Jessie is, frankly, alarmed at how tidily Kate has dealt with her grief. She is having a far easier time of it than Jessie, who still cries several times a week in a stall of the firm’s ladies’ room. Kate, meanwhile, seems lighter, sprightlier, possibly evenhappierthan she’s ever been.
That happiness will be dampened once Jessie talks to her.
Jessie wanted to call one of her siblings to share the burden of what Pick had learned, but Blair is in Paris doing research for her dissertation on Edith Wharton and Tiger and Magee have four little boys ages nine to three, which is the definition of “having their hands full.” So Jessie set aside a months-long grudge and called Kirby out in Los Angeles, where it was still a reasonable hour—but she got Kirby’s answering machine. Despite Jessie’s vow not to speak to Kirby until she issued an apology for what she’d done, Jessie left a desperate message. “Kirby, it’s Jessie, I really need to talk to you. Really, Kirby, so please call me back, no matter how late.”
Kirby had made no secret of the fact that she moved to California to escape her family. How she described them to the fabulous Hollywood people she met wasn’t something Jessie liked to dwell on. She probably claimed she was an orphan.
Was that harsh? Maybe—but Jessie lay in bed awake half the night and Kirby didn’t call back.
Kate has been billing this coming weekend as a “family reunion.” (Do two more troublesome words exist?Jessie wonders.) While it’s true that Tiger and Magee and the boys will be arriving tomorrow, and that George, who is interning for Massachusetts congressman Bill Welby, is bringing his “new girlfriend,” and that Genevieve is spending the entire summer living on Nantucket with Kate, it can’t properly be called a family reunion when neither Blair nor Kirby will be there. Jessie will be the only one of her mother’s daughters present. This feels like a setup.
Just as Jessie is starting to regret not taking Blowman up on his offer of a beer, the family’s rattletrap car pulls into the parking lot—a 1967 International Scout that still somehow runs.
Behind the wheel is… it takes Jessie a second to realize that the person with the hot-pink flattop crew cut, a left ear pierced with safety pins, and a tattoo of a toadstool on her forearm is her niece, Genevieve Foley Whalen.
Things are even worse than Jessie thought.
“Genevieve, hey!” Jessie says, her mind reeling. The hair, the piercings, the tattoo—it’s a lot to take in. What does Blair think about this? Jessie wonders. What doesKatethink about it? And why didn’t anyone warn Jessie that Genevieve looks like someone pulled from the bottom of a mosh pit? Jessie has tried to be a good aunt, monitoring the twins’ interests and styles over the years. In middle school, Genevieve was into thePreppy Handbook;she wore Fair Isle sweaters, a grosgrain-ribbon headband, pearl earrings. Then Genevieve fell prey to Madonna fashion—lace hair bows and fifty rubber bracelets. When Jessie saw Genevieve two summers ago, before she started at Brown, she had been wearing acid-washed jeans shorts and a banana clip in her unfortunately permed hair.
“Hey.” Genevieve stares straight ahead, her black-lipsticked mouth in an impatient line.
Jessie is tempted to make a comment about Genevieve’s appearance, but she practices her lawyering skills and considers Genevieve’s motives. Why the piercings? Why the tattoo? Is it just teenage rebellion, which Kirby perfected a generation earlier? Or is it self-loathing?
The twins have experienced their share of upheaval. Blair and Angus split when the kids were in fourth grade and then Blair married Angus’s brother, Joey Whalen. Blair had tried to normalize this—Joey was the brother sheshouldhave been with all along, she claimed. He was the charming, outgoing one, whereas Angus was strange, antisocial, and too smart for his own good. This may have been so, but the arrangement left her children with a stepfather who was also their uncle. It had a whiff of incest about it until it was explained to people. (Of course, the same might be said about Jessie and Pick’s relationship, since they are both the half siblings of Blair, Kirby, and Tiger, albeit on different sides.)
