Page 49 of Summer Longing
What? This couldn’t be happening. Olivia unplugged her headphone and held the phone directly to her ear. “I’m sorry—did you just say—”
“I approached April Hollis, hoping to regain her business. She had an interesting theory as to why you botched her Instagram feed. It appears you might be distracted, considering your plans to go out on your own.” A pause. And then: “Olivia, you can’t log in to your e-mail because you’re no longer an employee of HotFeed Media.”
Olivia stammered something, a lame murmur of there having been a misunderstanding. Peter repeated the instruction that she meet with the company’s human resources department.
Trembling, Olivia tried to restart the car. She had to get back to New York, to fix this somehow. But she could barely lean forward to turn the key in the ignition; pain radiated from the base of her spine up through her shoulder blades.
A pink pedicab passed in front of the car, and the driver waved at her with a smile.
She burst into tears.
Ruth would not sit around the house all day moping about how the visit had turned out. After Olivia had driven off—ill-advised, but her daughter was nothing if not stubborn—Ruth borrowed one of the bikes resting on the back porch and rode to the beach.
She needed inspiration for her mosaic. She had her design, but she didn’t yet see how to bring it to life. Working with tile seemed like the easiest way to go, but she suspected the end result would be far from the shimmering glory of the Beach Rose Inn starfish. Frankly, she wasn’t sure she had even the slightest aptitude for this particular art form. And yet she liked having something to focus her energy on, so, for now, she would stick with it.
“Go to the beach,” Amelia had advised her when she’d confessed her creative impasse.
In general, Ruth foundGo to the beachto be sound advice. Need to get some reading done? Go to the beach. Looking to clear your head? Go to the beach. Need some exercise? Go to the beach.
Need to forget about the fact that your weekend with your daughter was a huge failure?
Ruth walked along the edge of the ocean, adjusting her wide-brimmed sun hat and scanning the wet sand for sea glass.
Had she made a mistake in inviting Olivia out in the first place? The time she’d spent here had certainly not brought them closer together. If anything, Olivia seemed angrier when she left than when she’d arrived.
I don’t think you understand how painful it is for me to see the mother you could have been.
Ruth did understand, because this weekend had given her a glimpse of what her life might have been like if she’d had more of a relationship with her daughter. She saw it in Amelia and Rachel. She certainly saw it in the Barros family. In contrast, she and her daughter might as well have been strangers.
What had she hoped? That Olivia would find herself as transformed by the town as Ruth had been when she first saw it? She had been a teenager. Olivia was a grown woman—again, a fact she sometimes lost sight of. Maybe, if Ruth had first set foot on the shores of P’town at an older age, it wouldn’t have made such an impression on her. But as it was, the town had always been synonymous with her youth. Although, in reality, she had spent only one summer in P’town. The reason Provincetown was so indelible, she decided, was that it had been the hinge in her life between youth and adulthood. If pressed, she might say her final moments of true, unencumbered happiness and, yes, innocence had been spent on that spit of land.
She and her mother had had a routine when they were here: They woke up early, took a walk on the beach, bought bread or pastry at the Portuguese bakery, then made eggs for breakfast. There were no bagels to be found but that was a minor culinary sacrifice for the summer. They spent the rest of the day at the beach, her mother coating herself with oil (oil!). Ruth met a few other teenagers, and they reveled in their understanding that there was no better place to spend the precious time between high school and college than in a town that felt separated from reality.
It was the last night of June when a friend invited her to attend a reading for a play at the Fine Arts Work Center. The center had been founded ten years before as a place for emerging artists to live and work together while developing their craft. Ruth, who had never been particularly artistic, was amazed not only by the prevalence of art and artists in Provincetown but by the casual way people pronounced themselves painters, writers, or actors. It was something she never encountered in Philadelphia; there, either you were a famous artist or you had a real job. In P’town, there was no such distinction.
She had little sense of time that summer; the only clues offering structure to her day were hunger pangs reminding her to eat lunch or dinner and the changing light. As a result, she and her friend arrived late to the play reading, missing most of it. The part she did manage to catch barely held her attention; she was distracted by a boy. He stood a few feet away from her, holding a plastic cup of red wine. Unlike Ruth, he was focused completely on the reading, his eyes locked on the actors. (Or were they the writers?) He was tall and lanky with glossy dark hair. He was dressed in a red T-shirt with a Coke logo on the front and jeans.
If Ruth had a type, this guy was it. He was boyishly handsome. Not gorgeous, but solidly good-looking. More than that, she felt a pull toward him that could only be explained as chemical. She felt it even before she saw his big hazel eyes, but when he did finally look at her—after the reading, during the cocktail portion—it sealed the deal.
They were standing in a small group. Ruth had worked her way into the loose circle just to be near him.
“You can’t help but think of Lillian Hellman,” he said to the small group, talking about the play everyone had just experienced. “And I mean that in a positive way—not to suggest it’s derivative.”
Ruth had no idea who Lillian Hellman was and didn’t really care. “The play probably couldn’t exist without Hellman,” Ruth said.
“That’s so reductive,” a woman said, turning to her, her face red with anger. “Just because it’s feminist, it’s Hellman?”
Ruth, realizing she was most likely being confronted by the writer, said the only thing she could think of in the moment: “He said it first!” She gestured to Coke T-shirt boy. Incredibly, he laughed.
“This is some high-level discourse,” he said.
Ruth, embarrassed, slunk away. She walked around in search of her friend, failed to find her, and returned to the room with the bar. She poured herself a cup of wine. No one seemed to care that she was underage.
“Don’t feel bad; Shari gets defensive, but we all do.” It was Coke T-shirt boy, right behind her.
“You’re a playwright too?” She said.
“Guilty as charged,” he said, extending his hand. “I’m Ben Cooperman.”
