Page 55 of Endless Summer: Stories
“George isnota child,” Sallie says. “He’s plenty old enough to make decisions about who he wants to spend time with.”
Jessie can see where this is going, and the last thing she wants to do is stay and referee. She picks up the bowl of nuts and heads outside. She needs another drink anyway.
But getting another drink comes at a cost because next to the rum punch, Kate is talking to Andrew Flanagan.
“Tell me what you do for a living,” Kate says. “I’m assuming your drumming doesn’t pay the bills?”
“I’m an auto mechanic, ma’am,” Andrew says.
“Wonderful!” Kate says with such over-the-top enthusiasm that one would think she had spent all day searching for an auto mechanic. “You know, we Nichols women have a penchant for blue-collar men. My mother, God rest her soul, spent over a decade in a relationship with our property’s caretaker. Lovely man, Bill. It never mattered to Mother that he worked with his hands.” She pauses. “Of course, Genevieve attends what’s known as an Ivy League school—”
“He knows what an Ivy League school is, Grammy,” Genevieve says. “Everyone does.”
“So you twoarea bit of a mismatch from that perspective. Genevieve isquitebright. Her father is arocket scientist,has she told you that? We don’t talk about Angus often around here, but I think this family agrees that there’s such a thing astoosmart.” She pauses and Jessie fills her glass to the top. “Do you have any college, Andrew?”
“Not a day,” Andrew says, and a mortifying silence follows that is blessedly broken when Bitsy Dunscombe and her daughter Helen walk in.
Their arrival coincides with Magee presenting the seafood tower with a “Ta-da!” But everyone is too distracted by the Dunscombes’ arrival to notice. Magee appears at Jessie’s elbow and says, “I thought this was afamilybarbecue. I’m not sure there’s enough food for extra guests. Why didn’t anyone tell me?”
Jessie plucks a shrimp off the top tier and drags it through the herbed mayonnaise sauce. “You have enough to feed the entire island here, Magee. It’ll be fine, please relax.”
“I’ll relax when that hussy leaves,” Magee says, and she storms back to the kitchen, giving Sallie a wide berth. Sallie is holding the plate of Iberian ham with a sad hill of sun-dried tomatoes dumped in the middle, glistening with orange oil. It does sort of ruin the aesthetic, Jessie thinks, but Sallie sets the plate down with triumph on her face.
Jessie fills a glass with punch for her childhood friend Helen and says, “Let’s go to the beach. You’ll thank me later.”
“I’ll thank you now,” Helen says. “My mother dragged me here even though I told her I couldn’t stand to be around a happy family at the moment.”
Ha-ha-ha-ha!Jessie thinks, and she leads Helen to the beach path.
“I forgot how beautiful it is out here,” Helen says. “We’re stuck on Main Street. The only water I see is the harbor. This is so… wild.”
Wildis a good word for it. The beach at Red Barn Road is a curve of wide golden sand backed by dunes and eelgrass. At this time of the evening, the only person visible in either direction is a lone surf caster to the west, silhouetted by the setting sun.
Jessie is eager to disabuse Helen of the notion that they’re a happy family, but before she launches into describing the Byzantine twists and turns of the weekend, she says, “How are you doing?”
Helen kicks off her Pappagallo flats—she’s been through hell but still looks like a catalog model—and plunks herself at the base of a sand dune. “How much do you know?”
Jessie knows what Kate has told her, which is some version of what Bitsy told Kate. “I know that Colin died.”
“Of AIDS,” Helen says.
“Yes, I’m so sorry,” Jessie says. She’d sent a card as soon as she’d heard; the service had been private.
“He was gay,” Helen says. She takes a healthy slug of her drink. “My husband was gay and I had no idea. He told me he had late rounds at the hospital; I believed him. For years I believed him, and he was visiting those bathhouses, going to raves in Alphabet City, stripping down and dancing in black light.” Helen looks at Jessie. “One day I found fluorescent paint on one of his good white dress shirts and when I asked him about it, he said he’d done arts and crafts in the pediatric cancer wing.”
“Oh, Helen.”
“We never had sex,” Helen says. “I mean, a few times when we were dating and then once on our honeymoon, and that was it. And I washappyabout it. I was thrilled that Colin wasn’t all over me the way that Robert was with Heather…”
Yes,Jessie thinks. Helen’s twin sister, Heather, had given birth to three children in three years and then, according to Bitsy, had her tubes tied.
“Because honestly, Jess? I think I’m frigid.”
“You do?” Jessie says. She buries her feet in the sand and takes a sip of her drink. She doesn’t have a lot of women friends and isn’t used to talking about sex with anyone except Blair and Kirby—and those conversations are well in the past.
“I think it was all that shit with Garrison,” Helen says. “It scarred me.”
Jessie nods. Garrison was the tennis instructor at the Field and Oar Club the summer Jessie and Helen were thirteen, and he had abused them both. It happened to Jessie only once; Garrison pressed his erection into Jessie’s buttocks while he was showing her how to swing a backhand. Jessie hadn’t had the words to tell anyone what happened, though she’d immediately asked her grandmother to switch her instructor. Jessie wasn’t frigid, but she still refused to get on a crowded subway car and she was intent on making a name for herself by nailing the jerks who took liberties with their female colleagues in the office. Oh, was she!
