Page 51 of Endless Summer: Stories
“Do you not own a collared shirt?” she asked. She wondered what kind of mandidn’t own a collared shirt. “Couldn’t you go to the Gap?”
As Genevieve gets dressed for the day—as a concession to the family reunion, she pulls on a black jersey sundress and scrubs her face of her usual Goth makeup—she realizes that her feelings about Mouth’s arrival aren’t what she expected them to be. This makes no sense. For the past four weeks, all Genevieve has wanted was for Mouth to leave his wife, for him to pickher. But now that this has actually happened—Mouth claims he’s coming to Nantuckettoday—Genevieve is experiencing what can only be described as second thoughts.
She hopes to talk to her grandmother alone, ask if maybe Andrew can sleep on the sofa on the sunporch, but when Genevieve enters the kitchen, she finds Kate, her aunt Jessie, and her aunt Magee deep in conversation. They’re discussing something private—Genevieve can tell by their tone and by the way they clam up the second she sets foot in the kitchen.
“Hi,” Genevieve says. “What’s going on?”
Aunt Magee, whom Genevieve’s mother describes as “very high-strung,” glowers at Genevieve. “We found out about George’s girlfriend.”
“Found out what?” Genevieve asks. She vaguely recalls hearing that George was bringing a girlfriend to Nantucket for the weekend, but Genevieve hasn’t given one second’s thought to what the girl would be like, because she figured she already knew. The girl would be named Molly or Cassie and be blond and perky and wearing a madras shift dress and Tretorns. But now Genevieve’s mind wanders from this stereotype. Is George, too, dating someone “inappropriate”? Someone with a thick Southie accent, someone without a college diploma, without ahigh-schooldiploma, or a neo-hippie who doesn’t wash her hair or shave her armpits, or a punk like Genevieve? Or maybe—this is too juicy to even contemplate—George got Molly/Cassie pregnant!
“It’s Sallie,” Jessie says. “George is dating Sallie Forrester.”
When Genevieve returned to Boston from Cape Canaveral, people asked what it had been like, watching the space shuttle explode before her very eyes. Genevieve’s honest answer—which most of her friends and acquaintances found disappointing—was that she didn’t understand what was happening. She saw the shuttle burst into flames and she heard her father shouting, but there were long, suspended seconds where she just didn’tgetit.
George is dating Sallie Forrester. Theirmother’sSallie Forrester?TheirSallie Forrester?
That’s absurd, Genevieve thinks. It’s impossible. “No, he isn’t,” she says.
“She’s here with him,” Magee says. “They’re together. They’ve been seeing each other for weeks.”
Genevieve breaks out into a light sweat as she tries to keep herself from imagining her brother George, who is nineteen—a freaking teenager—sleeping with Sallie Forrester, their mother’s best friend.
Ew,she thinks.Ew, ew, ew!
Genevieve has always looked up to Sallie, worshipped her, even. Sallie is so… cool; she’s alwaysbeencool. And the coolest thing about their mother is that she has a best friend like Sallie. Genevieve wobbles; she feels like her feet aren’t touching the ground. She’s come unmoored.
“Here, sit down,” Jessie says. “Can I bring you a coffee?”
“Yes, please.” Genevieve sits and stares at the table until the mug lands in front of her; she’s afraid to look up. Her grandmother and her aunts are clearly gauging her reaction, but whatisher reaction? It feels like her emotions are wedges on a spinning game-show wheel. Where will she land: amused, disgusted, betrayed, unconcerned? She herself has no idea. “How did this happen?”
“They bumped into each other at a bar,” Jessie says. “George went to meet a blind date and Sallie was there.”
“She preyed on him!” Magee says. “It’s appalling.”
Genevieve is quiet for a moment; she sips her coffee. “Well,” she says. “He’s always had a crush on her.” She only realizes the truth in these words as they pass her lips. She isn’t even sure how she knows this; George certainly never admitted to anything of the sort. But Genevieve now remembers the puppy-dog look in his eyes whenever Sallie was around and the mean nicknames he would invent for Sallie’s boyfriends and the way he would offer to play with Sallie’s son, Michael, the world’s most annoying child, turning down Sallie’s offer of babysitting money. Genevieve doesn’t believe all the hooey about twins having a secret channel of communication, but in this instance, she would say that what might have been invisible to everyone else was obvious to Genevieve.
Genevieve can easily picture the scene when George ran into her at a bar. He was going on a blind date, probably dressed in his young Republican getup of bow tie and suspenders (like a circus clown!), and he’d obviously procured a fake ID (as Genevieve had from a guy at Brown who started a cottage industry supplying underclassmen with Louisiana driver’s licenses for fifty bucks a pop). What had George thought when he saw Sallie? Probably he’d tried to duck her, because who wants to see a friend of your parents when you’re out at a bar underage? Genevieve imagines Sallie tapping George on the shoulder as he chats up Molly/Cassie and then Sallie, for whatever reason, deciding it would be fun to steal George’s attention away, which she does easily because she, too, has always known about George’s crush. Then they proceed to drink together—martinis or champagne, though in this case, Genevieve guesses martinis—and after two or three or four, Sallie begins to wonder if she’s too old to be attractive to George and decides she’ll find out.
But that leads Genevieve only to a one-night stand. How did Sallie not wake up the next morning and shrivel at her own poor decision-making? Sleeping with a child who is like a nephew to her? Well, either Sallie is more insecure than Genevieve would have guessed and is using George to prove her own ageless desirability… or they’ve fallen in love.
What had their mother, Blair, told them when she announced she was marrying their uncle?The heart wants what it wants. Genevieve has learned that only too well in the past year, and apparently, George is learning it too.
Genevieve realizes her grandmother has been awfully quiet. “What do you think about it, Grammy?”
Kate sighs. “Is it really the end of the world? George is turning twenty tomorrow. Tiger went to war at nineteen. My parents were married at twenty-one, and I was married at twenty-two. There have been May-December romances since the beginning of time. This will end for its own reasons, probably sooner rather than later. We don’t need to get involved. Nobody has died.”
Right,Genevieve thinks. When she closes her eyes, she sees the fiery ball of theChallengerin the sky. For a split second, it had looked like a shooting star.Nobody has died.
“That’s very liberal of you, Kate,” Magee says.
“Yes, Mom,” Jessie says. “You sound like a modern woman.”
“Who knows,” Kate says, winking at Genevieve. “Maybe I’ll take a younger lover myself.”
5. YOURLOVE
Sallie insists on taking George to the Nantucket Cottage Hospital’s emergency room so that a doctor—“preferably a surgeon”—can look at the cut on his hand. Initially, George protests. Yes, he fainted in the kitchen, but part of that was due to his hangover and his shock at finding his uncle’s family at the house, and he probably shouldn’t have made that trip to the store, it was a hot morning already and All’s Fair didn’t have air-conditioning. He’s babbling, he realizes, and his hand is throbbing and he’s bleeding through the towel someone brought him. He hears Sallie telling Tiger that they need a ride in the minivan.
