Sailing
When Phoebe wakes, it takes a moment to remember who and where she is. But then she sees the tassel lamps. She smells the coconut pillow.
“I am alive,” she says out loud, just to make sure.
Outside, the patio is quiet. The party is over. And the pillow smells so much of coconut, it actually makes it difficult to get back to sleep. So does the giant alarm clock, keeping time quite dramatically. It’s three a.m. The grief hour, according to Phoebe’s therapist. The demon hour, according to medieval peasants. The hour that you wake up when you have excess cortisol in your body, according to a doctor Phoebe once saw.
Whatever it is, it’s the hour that Phoebe often wakes up.
The bride is right. Phoebe has been to enough weddings to know that the bride is always right. Phoebe has to do a thing. She has to get up and do any single thing because she knows the feeling that will come if she lets herself sit in the empty shame of three in the morning, especially after trying to kill herself.
Normally, she would just sit in bed and ask herself questions that made her feel like garbage, like, What kind of psycho tries to kill herself? And, What is her husband doing at this exact moment? Was he sleeping? Was he having sex with Mia this very second? Was he still at a bar somewhere, getting free drinks because people always liked to give him free things for some reason? Then she would probably pull up Mia’s Instagram page, even though it made her feel like shit. Because it made her feel like shit. There Mia always was, in bright lipstick, saying, Look at my big red lips. Look at us on our autumnal weekend. Look at this pie that I made for July Fourth and look at my baby taking a tiny baby bite of this pie, isn’t she such a baby.
But luckily, Phoebe’s phone is dead. She decides never to look at her phone again. She doesn’t see the point in staying alive only to do all the same things that made her want to die.
So Phoebe thinks: What is one thing I can do right now instead?
Lila’s question surprised Phoebe, and she’s not sure if that’s because she didn’t expect insightful questions from someone wearing so much self-
tanner or if it’s because she spent the last few years overwhelmed by all the things she could not do, the papers she could not grade, the conversations she could not bear to have, the baby she could not create, the awards she’d never win, the marriage she could not fix.
It’s time, she knows, to imagine the things she can do.
Right now, it’s not much. Her body feels worn out and weary. But she can brush her teeth. She can use mouthwash. She can drink a bottle of water. Then she can take a very long bath in the beautiful soaking tub.
But when she turns on the faucet, she realizes she can’t actually take a bath. There’s no drain stopper.
But that’s fine, she thinks. Even better. She can go down to the hotel’s hot tub and look at the ocean instead.
She undresses to her underwear. Black lace, the fanciest she owns, because she had refused to die in bad underwear. She wraps herself in the giant fluffy robe, the kind she’s seen at hotels before but for some reason has never once thought about wearing. Yet now it seems like it was put there by God just so she could feel soft in this moment.
She reaches for the door handle and looks down at her wedding ring. She takes it off, puts it on the black marble tray in the bathroom, and decides never to wear it again.
DOWNSTAIRS, SHE WALKS through the empty lobby. She passes the built-in oak bookcase and for the first time notices something very wrong with the books. They are all turned backward so only their pages show. It creates a monochromatic scheme—a trend she saw once on an HGTV show. Madness. She was offended by it then and is more offended by it now in real life.
She pulls out one of the books.
Sonnets by Shakespeare.
She looks back at the front desk to see if Pauline is watching, but it’s Carlson.
“Hello, Phoebe,” Carlson says.
It must be a house rule to say hello to each guest, to learn their name, the way it is also a house rule never to set any house rules. Never question what the guest is doing. The guest is paying too much money to be questioned. Make the guest feel the hotel is their home, even at three-thirty in the morning when the wedding people at the bar demand one more Manhattan. She sees the bartender pour them with the energy of a man who just woke up.
“Hello,” she says.
She puts the book back on the shelf so that the spine is showing. Then she walks out to the hot tub, proud to have saved Shakespeare.
PHOEBE THINKS YOU can tell a lot about a hotel by its hot tub, the way she could tell a lot about her husband by looking at his fingernails when she first met him in the computer lab. She could see that he clipped them short, all the same length. He was not a nail-biter. If he had fixations, they had nothing to do with his hands.
And this hot tub—if it has flaws, she cannot see them. It sits right on the edge of the deck, like nothing separates it from the ocean in the distance.
She steps into the tub and feels her whole body warm. She sits with her back against the jets. It doesn’t really feel like a massage, but she pretends it’s a massage. She closes her eyes. Lila is right. Water helps. It feels good to be warm. Good to have a body. She dangles her arms out and lets them float. She sits like that for a long time in a sleepy haze. When she finally opens her eyes to look up at the stars, she sees a man stepping into the tub.
“Hello,” the man says.
There really is no getting away from the wedding people here. And this one—he looks directly at her as he gets in. Normally, this would be enough human interaction to make her leave a hot tub, but she’s electrified by the direct eye contact. It’s nice to be seen in this moment. Nice not to fear the sight of other people. She is the only person she is afraid of now—she is the only one here who just tried to kill her.
“Hello,” she says.
The man has a long, angular face, softened at the edges by a beard. He is handsome in the way Phoebe always imagined coastal New Englanders to be. A kind of beauty that’s been weathered by wind and water, like he’s been out sailing every day of his life for a little too long. And maybe he has been. Maybe that’s why he’s wrinkled around the eyes or why he slowly sits down in the tub with a long sigh.
“I didn’t think anyone would be here at four in the morning,” the man says.
“Neither did I.”
“Well, don’t worry,” he says. “I promise I won’t make you talk to me.”
“That’s too bad,” she says. “I was actually hoping you would talk to me.”
He seems surprised by her frankness.
“Really? You aren’t tired of talking yet?” he asks. “All I’ve been doing at this wedding is just talking to people and then talking to more people.”
“What have you been talking about?”
“How was your flight?” he says. “What do you think of the hotel? What shows did you watch during the pandemic? How did you better yourself with all that free time?”
“Well?” she asks. “How did you?”
The man strokes his chin as if he’s thinking hard. “Mostly, I just grew this quarantine beard.”
“It’s a better beard than that,” she says. “Very trendy.”
“Oh, come on! Don’t say that,” he says. “Beards cannot be trendy. People have always had beards.”
“Have they?”
“Jesus had a beard,” the man says. “Darwin had a beard. Marx had a beard.”
“Yeah, but not the way people have beards now.”
“How do people have beards now?”
“People now have … ironic beards.”
“And what did Darwin have?” he asks. “A sincere beard?”
“My best guess,” she says, “is that Darwin’s beard was a product of Victorian notions of masculinity and naturalist beliefs, all coming
together…”
“On the bottom of his chin…”
“To form Darwin’s beard.”
“Right,” he says. “Right. Okay, well, very good. Thank you for this peer review of my beard. I’ll certainly incorporate your feedback.”
She laughs. Who is this man? Is he an academic? Is he flirting? Is she flirting? It’s been so long, Phoebe can’t remember the difference between having fun and flirting. Maybe there is no difference. She lifts up her feet, lets her legs float in the water.
“What about you?” he asks. “How did you better yourself during lockdown?”
She could lie, give him the answers he’s likely been hearing all day, the things she told her colleagues when she got back on campus yesterday. Oh, I wrote a ton during the pandemic. The book is really coming along!
But that is how it happens, she realizes. One moment of pretending to be great leads to the next moment of pretending to be great, and ten years later, she realizes she’s spent her entire life just pretending to be great.
“I drank a lot,” she says.
“Did it help?” he asks.
“It helped me not care about the fact that I basically stopped changing my clothes,” she says. “Or that my dissertation was actually a piece of shit.”
She waits for him to break eye contact, to look at his phone, find some excuse to get out of this conversation. But he keeps looking at her, so she continues.
“And my advisor kept emailing me being like, Who cares if it’s a piece of shit! Everybody’s dissertation is a piece of shit. That’s what dissertations are.”
He laughs. “Are you in grad school?”
“I’m a professor.”
“I didn’t know we had a professor in the family.” He looks at her like he’s trying to figure something out. “You don’t look familiar. Are you in the Winthrop family?”
“No.”
“The Rossi family?”
“I’m not actually here for the wedding.”
He looks confused. “I thought Lila said everyone was supposed to be here for the wedding. I distinctly remember that being a very big deal to her.”
“Well, I’m not.”
“So you’re on vacation and you get surprised by a wedding?”
“I’m not here on vacation.”
“This is becoming very mysterious.”
“I came here to kill myself,” she blurts out.
This is the gift random strangers can give you, Phoebe is realizing—the freedom to say or be anything around them. Because who cares? He doesn’t know her, will never know her. He will list all kinds of reasons why she shouldn’t die, and she will tell him that she is not planning to die anymore, and then they will get out of the hot tub and carry on with their lives and never think about each other again.
But all he says is “Shit,” like she stepped in a puddle of mud. It makes what she said sound small and fixable. Like something he understood.
“Perhaps I should have added that I decided not to,” she says.
“That’s actually a pretty crucial detail,” he says. Then he adds, “I shouldn’t joke like that. I’m sorry.”
“No, please. Joke,” she says. “It’s the only part of this that could ever be any fun.”
“May I ask how you were going to do it?”
“Professor Stone, with the cat painkillers, in the Roaring Twenties,” she says.
“Cat painkillers? That’s a little…”
“Cliché?”
“No,” he laughs. “Ineffective. Who uses cat painkillers?”
“Apparently people who are not setting themselves up for success.”
“So, you came all this way to kill yourself with some cat’s painkillers —”
“I mean, it wasn’t just some cat. It was my cat.”
“—and get surprised by a fucking wedding?”
“Yeah,” she says. “That’s why I couldn’t do it. That and the lack of room service.”
“Personally, I never kill myself unless there’s room service,” he says.
She laughs—it feels like a cloud slipping out her mouth, floating up to the sky.
“And the air conditioner,” she says, “smelled weird.”
“Say no more.”
Suddenly, it all seems so ridiculous to her. So funny.
“I’m sorry you’ve been in that much pain,” he says. “I know what that can feel like.”
She stares at him. Now she’s the one surprised by his honesty. “Have you ever … tried?”
“Not exactly,” he says. “But I came close. A few years ago, I used to think about it a lot.”
“And now you don’t?”
“Now I don’t.”
“How did you stop?”
“Honestly, I think I just waited. That, and I watched Breaking Bad every night for a month.”
“The therapeutic cures of drug deals gone awry.”
“You joke, but by the end of it, I felt actual relief that I was not Walter White. Like, at least I didn’t shoot myself with my own machine gun after being hunted by my own brother-in-law.”
“Hey, spoiler,” she says.
He laughs. “It’s been ten years! Come on.”
Then they just sit there in silence, heads rested back against the tub, and enjoy the warmth, as if they’ve shared something vital. As if they are no longer alone with themselves or their secrets. She looks up at the sky, and his foot brushes against her leg.
“Sorry,” he says, very quickly, but she likes it. She feels a flutter of something she hasn’t felt in a long time. She has just been touched after hours by a man who is not her husband, and yes, it was just an accidental foot tap, but it felt unbelievable to her. Maybe because she is supposed to be
dead by now or maybe because she is supposed to be her husband’s wife. Or maybe she just wants to fuck him?
“Do you have any other secrets?” she asks.
“Of course.”
“Tell me one.”
“I don’t even know you,” he says.
“Isn’t it better that way?” she asks.
He considers this. “Once in college, I became addicted to my girlfriend’s romance novels. We started reading one together as a joke, but then I actually got hooked. I mean, I got completely addicted. Read them for months. So there you have it.”
“That’s not that embarrassing. What’s wrong with that?”
“Clearly there is something very wrong with that,” he says. “A twenty- one-year-old boy in his dorm reading Confessions of a Victorian Virgin?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “I’ve always been weirdly impressed by people who read four hundred pages just to have a single orgasm. That’s a lot of work. Watching a video would have been astronomically easier.”
“Thanks for the support, but I have a feeling my time might have been better spent actually finishing Moby-Dick or something.”
“Moby-Dick is porn, too,” she says.
“Moby-Dick is not porn.”
“It’s ship porn!” she says. “The total fantasy of being a man on a ship, having a wild adventure. But instead of it ending with a woman having a triple orgasm, it ends with a…”
“Hey, no spoilers!”
“Giant whale…”
“Having a triple orgasm?”
“Exactly. Then it smashes into the ship and basically everyone dies.”
“Ugh, I knew it,” he says, and they laugh. She spreads her arms out and trails her fingers along the warm water, looks up at the moon. Life is unbelievable, she thinks. Last night, she was about to die alone in her hotel room and now she is here, in a hot tub, flirting with a man she would have deemed “too attractive” before. She would have seen him out at a bar and dismissed him because he was beautiful. And how ridiculous is that? That
she made rules about not being attracted to people who were too attractive for the same reason her husband refused to hire a philosopher with an agent. “I mean, we have to ask ourselves, Is someone that famous going to want to teach our Intro to Ethics course?” he asked her. “I think not.” And she agreed, because this is often what she wondered when she met men. Is someone that handsome going to want to wipe up the spills on the counter? Hold our daughter’s hair when she vomits with the flu? Listen to me talk at length about the ideological underpinnings of the Victorian beard trend?
No. She couldn’t imagine it. She could only imagine beautiful people doing beautiful things. But right now, she feels equally beautiful. More beautiful. She is alive. Enchanted. I have fingers, she thinks, and brings them to the surface of the water. Look at these magical fucking fingers.
“So what’s your specialty, Professor?” he says. “Your field? Not sure how you say it.”
“My field is Victorian literature,” she says. “Novels, mostly. The marriage plots. The Jane Eyres.”
“The book about the orphan girl?” he asks. “Or am I thinking of Annie?”
“They’re both orphans.”
“So your field is … orphans?”
“Yes,” she jokes. “I specialize in … orphans.”
She tells him she was always drawn to their stories.
“Were you … an orphan?” he asks.
“No. But I always wanted to be one.”
“Who doesn’t?” he says. “Orphans, they’re living the life.”
“I mean, my mother died when I was born.”
“Okay. So you were halfway to the dream.”
“But my father raised me.”
“I’m so sorry to hear that.”
“Yes, a real tragedy.” She laughs. “No. He was a good man. I loved him. But he also was so depressed about my mother being dead that much of the time it was like he was hardly there at all. So I think I convinced myself that I functionally had no parents, yet was still bound by the rules of my father.”
“An orphan without all the perks.”
“Lonely with no street cred.”
“Strange the things we convince ourselves as kids,” he says. “I always wanted to get the shit kicked out of me when I was younger.”
“Why?”
“Boys were always getting the shit kicked out of them in movies, and it just seemed like a rite of passage. Like I couldn’t grow up and be a real man until someone deviated the hell out of my septum or something.”
“That’s what all the real men say.”
“Unfortunately, it never happened,” he says. “A notorious people pleaser.”
He grows quiet. He leans back.
“Did you just get tired of talking?” she asks.
“No,” he says. “I just got actually tired. This doesn’t really feel like talking.”
“What does it feel like?”
“Just feels like being here,” he says. “It’s relaxing.”
Then he looks at her, like he is somewhat astonished by her presence. Like maybe he doesn’t quite believe in this moment, the way she can’t quite believe it. She wants to reach out, touch him. She wants to believe that something even more amazing can happen next. She feels certain that this moment, and moments like this, are what she stayed alive for.
“I know what you mean,” she says.
But at a certain point, a person can no longer be in a hot tub anymore, no matter how much they want to be. It’s just too hot. The body can’t take it. She stands up and remembers that she is only in her black lingerie.
The man looks away. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry,” she says. “I mean, I’m the one in my underwear. I should be sorry.”
But she’s not. She doesn’t even reach for her robe. She just continues standing there. Because why should underwear be more embarrassing than a bathing suit?
“To be honest, I never really understood the logic of it,” she says. “I mean, underwear covers the same exact parts of my body, and yet because it’s made out of different fabric, it’s suddenly inappropriate?”
“I’ve wondered that myself before,” he says. “But it does seem categorically different somehow.”
“Well,” Phoebe says.
She could invite him up to her room. And why not? Her marriage is over. He’s not wearing a wedding ring. And they have a connection. Phoebe is certain of it, because it has been so long since Phoebe has felt connected to anybody, even herself. Their connection is the most obvious thing—the only thing she can feel at the moment.
But Phoebe hesitates. The old Phoebe never made the first move. Not even with her husband after years of marriage—she always waited for him to initiate. She was always too embarrassed to admit that she ever wanted anything, as if there was something humiliating about being a person with desires. But what would it feel like to be different? To be totally honest about what she wants?
“I want to fuck you,” she says to the man.
“Oh,” the man says. He sits up straighter in the tub, no longer relaxed. “I really wasn’t expecting you to say that.”
“I wasn’t, either,” Phoebe says. “Just figured in the spirit of total honesty—”
“In the spirit of total honesty, I should tell you that I—”
“You’re with someone,” she interrupts, because there is the old Phoebe, rushing back to save her. The old Phoebe who assumes she knows all the terrible things that people are thinking, so she says them first, as if this somehow protects her from the truth. “Of course.”
But he doesn’t seem offended or embarrassed by what she said. He doesn’t say anything for a moment. He just watches her with curiosity, like she’s some kind of rare deer spotted in the woods that will vanish if he makes another sound. And suddenly, the old Phoebe seems like the fool. So defensive, so afraid, so silly in the face of this very honest moment of two people just wanting each other.
“I am,” he finally says.
She nods, ties her robe closed.
“Well, I sincerely hope someone beats the shit out of you this week,” Phoebe says.
“Thanks,” he laughs. “Me too.”
She smiles the whole way to the elevator. Her heart pounds wildly as she stands there. She feels alive. She feels so real. Like she could do just about anything, so she starts to turn around more books on the shelf. The House of Mirth. Huckleberry Finn. She doesn’t stop until she pulls out Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf.
She holds Mrs. Dalloway in her hand as if it is a message from the universe, even though the old Phoebe doesn’t believe in messages from the universe. It’s just a book that belongs to the hotel. It’s just a book they probably got when they ordered books in bulk from some used bookstore. But it’s also the last book she never finished.
She puts it under her arm, gets in the elevator, and that’s how it becomes hers.
UPSTAIRS, SHE THROWS out the cigarettes. She opens the minibar, which the room literature insists is a “beverage cooler.” She pulls out a guava hibiscus kombucha.
“Don’t eat from the minibar,” her husband always said.
But she doesn’t care if she gets ripped off. She wants to get ripped off. She has chosen this overpriced hotel just to be ripped off. She feels giddy as she cracks open the can. Then she opens Lila’s gift bag and takes out the Oreos that are not Oreos because they are made from love and not trans fats. She holds up a not-Oreo in her palm and then eats an entire sleeve, like her husband used to. Until his affair, Oreos were the one thing her husband couldn’t keep under control.
“They’re just so damn good,” he would say. “I don’t know how anybody stops eating them.”
And they were. She bites into one and thinks, Even not-Oreos are so damn good.
She opens Mrs. Dalloway. She doesn’t want to think of her husband anymore. She has already thought about her husband so many times, and she has never once finished Mrs. Dalloway. She always told herself it was because she didn’t care for Woolf’s style, the circular sentences, the never-
ending thoughts punctuated with semicolons; like this; and this; and then this.
“If you ever want to learn how to use a semicolon, don’t go to Woolf,” she used to tell her students.
If she were being honest, though, Phoebe would have admitted that she didn’t care about Mrs. Dalloway’s inner life. Mrs. Dalloway was too old, too unhappy, too married, already beyond the years of life that interested Phoebe at the time. And she hated Septimus for the same reasons—he was back from the war, threatening suicide, and after he jumped out the window, she felt betrayed by the book, betrayed by Woolf and all the other great authors who killed themselves. It was too horrible to know that getting married wasn’t enough. That creating their masterpieces hadn’t been enough, that going to World War II hadn’t been enough, that being a valedictorian of both her high school and then her college wasn’t enough— her father was still depressed. Still alone, always just sitting on his chair watching Vietnam War movies.
That’s how she found him when she returned from St. Louis after her first year of graduate school—dead on his chair. She assumed it was suicide, because that’s what she had always worried about, but then she saw the cereal bowl spilled all over his potbelly and she looked away. A stroke, she thought. Or maybe a heart attack. And when she looked at him again, the sadness was blinding.
She went back to school, and the darkness was all she could see for days. She was alone. Truly alone. She would walk around the Forest Park gardens and notice only the fungus on the leaves. The whiskey smell of Bob’s breath in the hallway. And Nancy, the department administrator, who ate tuna for lunch every day of her life and then got cancer and then quietly died offstage and was replaced by someone with the same exact haircut.
So she read the novels about slow, incremental improvement, about sisters who were also good friends, women who were too witty for the sincerity of their landscapes, women who were above marriage and its conventions and, yet, got to be beautiful and experience the joys of it anyway. She devoted her career to these books because she needed them. She didn’t care that most of the other graduate students thought this was
boring. These stories were like little bibles to her, teaching her how to be normal, how to dream, how to believe that happiness and a new family would arrive in a single moment, on a single page, like the sudden crescendo of a symphony. She needed to believe these people were out there looking for her, these good and moral people with big estates and bigger hearts who would fall madly in love with just how alone she was, because wasn’t life fucking hard enough?
But now she needs something else. Now she rests her head on the coconut pillow and begins to read Mrs. Dalloway. Now she knows what it feels like to be beyond the traditional plot points of a life, to sit on a chair in an empty room feeling like there is nothing more than this solemn march forward. Yet, there must be something else. She is suddenly gripped with such curiosity it feels primal. She needs to know: After the war, after the marriage, after the suicide—what happens next?
Before they fell in love, Phoebe and her husband sat next to each other in the graduate computer lab for two months, not talking to each other. They were both busy trying to finish their dissertations before their sixth year ended, both gifted with some ungodly ability to focus relentlessly on a task, even on the hottest St. Louis afternoons when thunderstorms split open the sky above. They typed and typed and typed, and probably would have gone on like this forever if the power had not gone out.
“Shit,” Phoebe said.
The room shut down like a body that had died. For a moment, it was too quiet.
“I can’t remember the last time I hit Save,” Phoebe said.
Matt walked over to her immediately, like an emergency responder.
“It’ll be okay,” he said. “It’s fine. There’s always a way to recover the document.”
She had been reworking a chapter all morning, pages she no longer had to rework, according to Bob, who was just starting to become very concerned about what he called her unproductive perfectionism. “Just finish by May,” Bob said, and now it was April.
“We’ll get it back,” Matt said with the certainty of a boat captain. Phoebe didn’t yet know where Matt was from, didn’t yet know he had a very devoted mother who put up a real Christmas tree every year. But she could feel it.
“I hope so,” Phoebe said, relaxing.
Bob walked in, picked up papers at the printer, and said, “Oh, good! These printed in the nick of time.” Then he looked at Phoebe with the glassy look of a man who hadn’t been outside all day, and said, “Oh, hi Phoebe, I didn’t recognize you for a moment. You don’t look all Virginia Woolfish today.”
Phoebe looked down. Did she normally look Virginia Woolfish? She was confused. She had never thought of herself that way before.
“Oh,” was all she said. “Yeah.”
Her advisor left and the room was quiet until she said, “Was that a compliment or an insult?”
“I guess it depends,” Matt said. “Was Virginia Woolf … hot?”
Phoebe laughed. “I mean, I never think of any historical figure as hot. They’re just these bodiless, dusty, sepia-toned entities.”
Matt agreed. “Even the US presidents, the ones who are famous for being hot presidents, like JFK, aren’t really what we’d call hot.”
They sat there and talked about the US presidents, saying things like, “I mean, Lincoln had nice bone structure, I think,” and “What? Lincoln was famously ugly.” They debated whether Nietzsche would be hot if one of his aunts had shaved his mustache, but it was too hard to say, too impossible to imagine the man’s face without that mustache, so Matt finally said, “Hey, want a beer?”
Matt and his friends kept beers upstairs in their departmental fridge because you could do that kind of thing in Philosophy, where the new admin was everybody’s best friend. They sat in the eerie purple light of the storm and talked about how nice it was not to be writing, and how did every waking moment become about our dissertations?
“When my parents call, my mom is always like, But are you doing anything fun for the summer? And I’m like, Well, I’ve been thinking a lot about Platonic forms.”
Phoebe laughed. She felt like she was skipping school, not like she had ever done that before.
“Same,” she said. “I mean, my father. He didn’t really get it, either.”
She told him that her father didn’t understand why she read so much. It had worried him, something he told her during her first Thanksgiving break from graduate school. She had spent it reading instead of going out with her friends or on dates with men. And yes, sometimes she read too much. Sometimes, she read books instead of living a life, but didn’t that just mean that her life was about reading books? And couldn’t that be a life the way his life was all about floating on a river? Every night, she watched her father put on gear and wordlessly get in the boat and try to hook the same fish he’d fished for years and he never thought this was strange at all. But he looked at her reading Emma and said, “Go outside, live a little.”
“Power’s back,” Matt said.
She wished for a tornado to tear through the quad and keep them hidden in the basement for so long, they’d be forced to start a new life together. But the room was lit up now, the computers were alive again, and Matt said, “Okay, let’s see the damage.”
She pulled up the Word document. The morning’s work was gone.
“Is that really bad?” Matt said.
“Yes,” she said. “Very bad.”
She had two weeks to finish her dissertation. And she didn’t have a tenure-track job lined up for the fall like Matt—a stroke of luck, he told her, a retirement at the right time, but Phoebe knew it was more than that. Phoebe knew everybody in the philosophy department must truly love Matt, the way she could already feel herself start to love him. He was the boat captain in every room, who made you feel like everything was going to be okay. He would run the internship program and he would help figure out why nobody cared about philosophy anymore and he would publish a book to much acclaim—a book so popular, he actually made money off it.
But Phoebe wasn’t beloved by her department. She wasn’t hated, but she wasn’t a star—she didn’t have any real publications like many of her colleagues, because she was always in the computer lab, just trying to finish her dissertation.
But it had been worth it, Phoebe thought—to lose the morning’s work in exchange for his company. And maybe this was what her father had been talking about. Maybe this is the life he had wanted for her.
“I’m impressed by your calm,” Matt said. “If I lost this morning’s work, I’d be under the table right now, crying and drinking gin.”
“Well, there’s no gin, so…” Phoebe said.
“Oh, there’s gin. Every academic building statistically has at least one bottle of gin.”
“Let’s go find it.”
“First, work,” Matt said. “Gin, later.”
They went back to work, but she couldn’t focus. The energy of the room had shifted. She wanted to sit there and drink gin with this man. She wanted to know: What did Virginia Woolf look like again? She pulled up her photo
online and realized that she never properly looked at the woman before. Yes, she saw her square photo on the back of books her colleagues were reading, but that afternoon, she could see Woolf in a new way, the way she could suddenly see herself—through Matt’s eyes. And through the eyes of a man falling in love, she could see how spirited Woolf had been, how beautiful she was at the right angle. Phoebe had always felt this way about herself. Pretty, but only at certain angles.
“Okay, I give up,” Matt said. “All I’m doing over here is googling photos of Virginia Woolf.”
“Me too,” she confessed.
“Well, let me just say this,” Matt said. “Bob was definitely giving you a compliment.”
She smiled in the privacy behind her computer.
AFTER THEY BOTH finished their dissertations, they spent the summer together, not working. There were long nights at the bowling alley. They listened to the drum circles on Delmar. They took long drives along the Mississippi. Had barbecue at beaver-trapping festivals. She started reading Mrs. Dalloway and fell in love with that, too. She would text Matt her favorite lines without any explanation and he understood.
But nothing is so strange when one is in love (and what was this except being in love?) as the complete indifference of other people, she wrote.
It’s like today when I was at the gas station filling up my tank, Matt texted back. I thought, So I still have to do chores?
But then Septimus killed himself and the fall semester began. She put down Mrs. Dalloway for good, and Matt moved into his new office. She started teaching her first class as an adjunct, while applying to jobs all over again. Each time they said goodbye before one of her interviews, it was upsetting—felt like practice for the real thing. She called him from the hotels, which made her feel like a kid in high school, trying to learn everything about Matt over the phone. Tell me more about your mother, about your father, about the little dog you held in your arms as it bled out in
the street, and do you like chocolate or citrus desserts, do you like lakes or oceans, cats or dogs, and why does the world always make us choose?
“People love creating false binaries,” Matt said. “It’s clarifying.”
In November, she was offered her first job—a tenure-track position at a college in Wisconsin. She looked up the town online, researched it like a book, agonized about what to do. She knew it was an opportunity, but when she pictured herself there, she could only picture herself as her father, sitting on a chair in a dark room, entirely alone.
“It’s your decision, of course,” Matt said, and Phoebe was disappointed. She didn’t want it to be her decision. She wanted him to decide—to be the captain.
She made no decision. She read drafts of Matt’s new article, and it was easier to fix his work than her own. She made suggestions in the form of questions: Do you know the shape of your argument? When you close your eyes, can you see it?
“Let’s go to the park,” he said one afternoon.
Everyone they knew was going to the park. Everyone had been obsessed with the eclipse for two days now. Even their friends who didn’t believe in things seemed to think it meant something. There was a metaphor in it. Somehow, it represented something. And she wanted to feel it, whatever it was, so she looked straight at the dark center that was once the sun. The red light was supposed to be blinding, but they were fine, protected. They were in love, not to mention wearing special glasses, holding hands in a park, surrounded by mansions built during the World’s Fair. Phoebe thought it was all so beautiful.
“Hey,” Matt whispered in her ear, “want to get married here?”
He whispered it so casually, it stunned Phoebe. The same way he said, Hey, let’s have a beer. Like their marriage was a thing so natural, so organic, it grew all around them like grass.
At noon, Phoebe wakes to a loud knock on her door.
“I knew you wouldn’t do it,” Lila says. She walks in and stands in front of the bathroom mirror. “What do you think of this hat?”
The mother of the bride was right, Phoebe thinks. The bride has little imagination. Phoebe can’t imagine being a person with so little curiosity about other people. Can’t imagine walking into someone else’s hotel room, someone who is openly suicidal, and not asking, “How are you?” She couldn’t even start her therapy session on Zoom without asking her therapist, “How are you?” which made her very annoyed because wasn’t she paying him just so she didn’t have to consider the fact that he was a human being? But when she saw his face, he was so clearly another human being, and she began to wonder what it was like to sit on Zoom for nine hours a day listening to people like her talk about how they don’t want to fuck their husbands anymore.
“Too much like a sailor’s hat?” Lila asks.
“I guess it depends,” Phoebe asks. “How much do you want to look like a sailor?”
“I don’t really know,” Lila says, like this is a big problem.
Yesterday, Lila’s lack of concern would have seemed like more evidence for her aloneness. But this morning, Lila’s indifference is a gift. Because Phoebe can’t explain last night. She doesn’t want to explain last night. It feels like a secret that she has with only the universe—and the man in the hot tub—a secret that will become a foundational memory she will carry with her everywhere she goes. Like the memory of meeting her husband, which was so life-affirming, it sustained her for a decade.
“We’re going sailing,” Lila says. “And Nat and Suz said it looked cute. But now I feel like I can’t even trust them anymore.”
Lila looks out at the ocean view, as if it is an old lover walking by.
“God, I fucking love your view,” Lila says. She walks out to the balcony, sits down. Sighs. “I swear, you’ve become the only one I can trust here.”
Phoebe joins her on the balcony, waits for Lila to speak, because Phoebe is sure any minute now, the bride will begin her monologue. But Lila doesn’t say anything.
“Why can’t you trust Nat and Suz?” Phoebe asks, like she knows them.
“They’re supposed to be my best friends, but they just let me humiliate myself yesterday, walking around with food in my teeth,” Lila says. “Then, after the reception, they were like, Such a perfect night! Such great speeches! Your mother was so so so wonderful! And I mean, just no. Did they hear my mother last night?”
“She turned it around at the end, I thought.”
“No. Like, I’m sorry I don’t speak to ducks,” Lila says. “Jesus. My entire life this woman has been expecting things from me that I just don’t think mothers should expect from their children. And she didn’t even get the story right! Gary didn’t buy the painting that first day we met at the gallery. He came again a week later to buy it. And she wasn’t even there!”
Lila takes off the hat.
“And now I don’t know what my friends mean when they tell me something is wonderful,” she says. “That’s the only word Suz and Nat have been able to use since they got here. Oh, Lila, Gary is so so so wonderful!”
“Is Gary not wonderful?”
“He’s Gary.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Christmas is wonderful. A vacation in Tuscany is wonderful. A kayak around the lake is wonderful. Those tiny soufflés that you have to order an hour in advance at restaurants are wonderful. But Garys are not wonderful. That’s just not what they are meant to be.”
Phoebe feels the professor come alive in her. The professor is always tempted to say something wise that will get the student to reflect on their own words—something like, If you don’t think he’s wonderful, maybe everybody else isn’t the problem. Because isn’t that what Lila is coming here for? The truth about her sailor hat?
“What are Garys supposed to be?” Phoebe asks.
But Lila doesn’t answer. She suddenly looks confused, like maybe she has no idea what Garys were put on this earth to do.
“Ugh,” she says, looking at her phone. “I have to go. Apparently there’s something wrong with my mother’s room.”
Lila walks to the door but is stopped by the sight of Phoebe’s unmade bed.
“If you’re depressed, you should really try making your bed in the morning,” Lila says. “It’s supposed to make you happier. I read a study.”
“Well, you should tell the researchers that you know a woman who made her bed every single day of her life for forty years and it didn’t work.”
“But maybe it did work. Maybe you would have killed yourself years earlier if you hadn’t been making the bed. See? You never know.”
“I invite you to make the bed then. This is your wedding week. You should have all the happiness that’s available.”
“No, I mean, it literally has to be your bed to get the happiness.”
“Well, this isn’t really my bed, so.”
“Oh, and don’t you love the coconut pillow? I thought they would be fun for everyone.”
“It’s very coconutty. Maybe too coconutty. Then again, I’m not sure how coconutty a pillow is supposed to be.”
“It’s the perfect ratio of coconut to pillow, I think. I simply cannot sleep without one anymore.”
Phoebe feels a tiny headache start, the kind she gets when she waits too long to drink coffee.
“I need some coffee,” Phoebe says, reaching for the pot.
“Oh, no. Don’t,” Lila says. “Even in a five-star hotel, the room coffee is shit. It’s simply a rule of hotels. Let’s order some. It’s going to be a long day.”
It is. Phoebe’s first day back to life. Because if she is not going to die, she is going to have to live. She is going to have to book a plane ticket. Email Bob. Think of something wise and life-changing to say to Adam. Return to St. Louis. Bury Harry, which is already more than she can think about right now.
“Do you take your coffee black?” Lila picks up the phone.
“Cream,” Phoebe says. “And sugar.”
“Thank God. People who take their coffee black are always so smug about it, you know? Marla this morning was like, Oh no, no, I don’t need things in my coffee. I like it just black, thanks. And it’s like, Well, I’m sorry, excuse me, but I happen to be a human being and I like sugar.”
Then she dials room service.
“Yes, I’d like to order coffee with cream and sugar,” Lila says into the telephone. “Two eggs. And the Patriotic French Toast.”
“Patriotic French Toast?” Phoebe asks when Lila hangs up. “What war did it serve in?”
“Maybe it’s shaped like a flag or something,” Lila says.
“Maybe it votes.”
Lila gives a half laugh, like a horse caught by surprise. “For a suicidal person, you’re kind of funny.”
“Thanks.”
Lila walks to the door but looks at Phoebe as though she’s leaving behind a sad couch at Goodwill.
“So this is what is going to happen,” Lila says. “You’re going to eat your patriotic breakfast, and then join us in the lobby to sail at two.”
“Why would I come sailing with you?”
“Because I want you to.”
“Why would you want a random depressed woman on your sailboat?”
“You honestly don’t seem that depressed,” she says. “And the captain said we need a certain number of bodies in the boat to keep it balanced. And most of the people here are apparently too hungover to be on a boat right now. And if you don’t come, I’ll have to ask my mother to come. So don’t even bother telling me you have plans, because I know you were planning on being dead right now.”
Yes, Phoebe is supposed to be dead. She is supposed to be a cold slab at the morgue right now, but instead she is going to eat Patriotic French Toast and go sailing. Because isn’t that why she had chosen the Cornwall with Matt? To go sailing on an America’s Cup winner? To feel the ocean breeze in her hair? To be the people who ordered ridiculous breakfasts to their rooms?
“But I have to check out at eleven,” Phoebe says.
“No need,” Lila says. “I already told you I would book the room for the week.”
“And I told you not to.”
“Well, I don’t want any more randos coming in here. You’re the only acceptable rando.”
“I’ll be sure to put that on my tombstone. Phoebe Stone: the only acceptable rando.”
But Lila doesn’t laugh. Instead, she lifts her eyebrows in alarm.
“I’m kidding,” Phoebe says. “And besides, I don’t have anything to wear sailing. All I have is that … dress.”
They both look at the green dress that Phoebe left crumpled on the floor. The dress looks like a corpse, fallen where it was shot dead. Phoebe wonders if she’ll ever be able to touch it again.
“I’ll have this laundered,” Lila says, picking up the dress. “For now, buy something in the gift shop. The stuff there isn’t too awful.”
“But I don’t even have anything that will get me to the gift shop, other than this robe.”
“I see.”
They scan each other’s bodies to have that moment that women often have with each other—will my clothes fit you? Do we have the same body? And the obvious answer is no. Lila has the spindle legs of a Shaker table. Meanwhile, Phoebe has the body of a woman who has been drinking gin and tonics in bed for a year.
“I’ll get something from my mother’s,” Lila says.
Phoebe objects, but Lila cuts her off.
“It’s fine. It makes her feel like a better woman every time she donates,” Lila says. “This is actually a service you’re doing for her.”
“Well, in that case,” Phoebe says, “okay.”
This is exactly what Phoebe has always hated and loved about life— how unpredictable it is, how things can change in an instant. One moment she could be wondering what to make her husband for dinner and the next moment he could walk into the room and tell her he is in love with someone else. But it is also true that one day she can be alone in a room preparing to
die, and the next, she can be preparing to be on a boat with beautiful strangers.
“I’ll see you in the lobby at two.”
THE PATRIOTIC FRENCH TOAST is not shaped like a flag. There is nothing at all patriotic about it. Phoebe is disappointed by this.
But she eats it anyway. She is very hungry, she realizes. She washes her face in the sink, then brushes her hair, and what a goddamned beautiful brush. Carved out of a solid piece of wood like a boat.
She takes a long shower, using all the products, so elegantly packaged she wants to eat them, too. She rubs what smells like a wooded forest all over her body. She hears another knock on the door but opens it to find only a bag of clothes that Lila left. She peers in. She sees something shiny.
“Jesus,” Phoebe says.
But it feels exciting, actually, to put on some other woman’s sequins for the day.
“Everybody, this is Phoebe,” Lila says.
The group says a collective hello, like they are all in a cult. High Bun is the first to hug her.
“I’m Suz,” High Bun says, though High Bun no longer sports a high bun. She now wears a long fishtail braid hanging casually over her right shoulder. Her hair is endless. There is something almost prehistoric about it. No wonder the bun was so high. “I’m Lila’s friend from Portsmouth Abbey.”
“Portsmouth Abbey?” Phoebe asks.
“Don’t worry, we’re not nuns,” says Neck Pillow, who now has a tiny diamond necklace resting at the center of her throat. “Just Catholic boarding school survivors. Hi, I’m Nat.”
No one else hugs Phoebe, but each wedding person continues to introduce themselves by stating their relation to the bride or groom. The groom’s sister, Marla. The groom’s daughter, whose name is Mel but prefers to be called Juice.
“Right,” Lila says. “I keep forgetting you want to be called Juice. And why is that again?”
Lila waits with a smile, as if she’s giving Juice the chance to tell a really funny story about herself. But the groom’s daughter just stands there, fiddling with a small green plastic circle in her hand. Her aunt is the one who speaks.
“We just always have,” Marla says with a cool tone, smoothing the dark hair that frames her face. She has gray splints on both her wrists. She takes a sip of her black coffee.
“Yeah, like since the dawn of time,” Juice says, with a learned coolness that sounds years older than eleven, which is what Phoebe guesses she is. Her outfit seems years older, too—big black combat boots, a cropped top that sits just below her navel. It looks uncanny against her childlike features —the baby fat, the missing canine tooth she must have recently lost.
Phoebe waits for Lila to say something snarky back, but Lila is flattened into silence by their tones. By their jokes, if that’s what they even are. Lila
puts her arm around her future stepdaughter, and when Juice slinks away, Lila looks at Phoebe like, See? And Phoebe does see. Phoebe feels suddenly protective of Lila, who already seems different around the wedding people. Quieter, more subdued. She does not talk at length about all of her family members at once. She is polite, gracious, cheery to a fault, and Phoebe remembers feeling pressure to be the same way at her own wedding. She feels glad she can say things when Lila cannot.
“Like on the sixth day, God created the oceans, and on the seventh day, people started calling you Juice?” Phoebe asks.
“That’s very funny, yes,” Marla says, without laughing. “That’s exactly how it happened.”
“I’m pretty sure God created the oceans on the second day, though,” Lila says.
“Yeah, they were definitely, like, a priority,” Neck Pillow says, and the women laugh.
But Marla ignores them.
“And who are you again?” Marla looks at Phoebe’s outfit, as if the outfit will answer, though Phoebe has no idea what she communicates with this oversize sequined sweater, leggings made from some plastic faux- leather fabric that Phoebe avoided buying for nearly twenty years of her adult life, and sandals with a fake sunflower wedged between the toes that she bought from the gift shop.
“I’m Phoebe,” she says. It feels surreal to introduce herself to the wedding people. They can hear her now. “I was asked to be a body on the boat.”
The women laugh.
“Phoebe and I met at my mother’s gallery,” Lila says.
Phoebe is surprised by how coolly and quickly the lie comes out of Lila’s mouth. It seems unnecessary to Phoebe. But as soon as she hears it, Marla’s face lights up with interest.
“Oh, interesting, you work at the gallery?” Marla asks.
“No. I’m a professor,” Phoebe says.
“Phoebe just came in one day to look,” Lila says. “And we hit it off!”
“That’s how you met Gary!” High Bun says.
“Yes, we all know the story,” Marla says.
But that doesn’t stop Lila from telling it, because it seems that nobody, not even Lila, can get over the coincidence of it all.
“When Gary came into the gallery, I had no idea he was my father’s doctor,” Lila says. “At the time, I just thought he was this guy.”
“Wasn’t Jim there, too?” Marla says. “You always leave Jim out of the story.”
“Jim is not the point of the story,” High Bun says.
“Jim was just there for Gary,” Lila says. “Jim didn’t actually come to see the art.”
Gary was the one who cared about art, who was transfixed by the painting of her mother and just stared at it for what felt like ten minutes. Finally, Lila went over, and he had all these questions. Was this acrylic? Did Lila know the artist? Were they local? No—he was a painter who lived in New York. William Withers.
“I can’t believe Gary had no idea that the painting was of your own mother,” Neck Pillow says.
“How could he?” Lila asks. “We didn’t know each other yet.”
“But of all the paintings to be moved by,” High Bun says.
“Wasn’t it a nude?” Marla asks. “You always leave that part of the story out, too.”
“Wait, it was a nude?” High Bun asks.
“You definitely never told us that part,” Neck Pillow says.
Lila blushes. “Just a partial. And it’s a little abstract, so it’s like, she’s not even really a person. She’s more like a bunch of cubist nude color squares.”
“Color squares with breasts,” Marla says.
Neck Pillow and High Bun lean on each other as they laugh.
“Oh God, I bet your mother loves that part of the story,” Neck Pillow says.
“It honestly was really more about the garden behind her,” Lila says.
“Well,” Phoebe says. “That’s a really lovely story.”
But then it gets quiet. Nobody seems to have anything more to say about the nude painting, not even High Bun and Neck Pillow, who stand on
either side of the bride like soldiers. Phoebe doesn’t know what she expected from these wedding people, but she expected conversation. They’ve been so loud from afar, so chatty on the patio last night. And Lila, so forceful in the room with Phoebe, now trying her best to be polite.
“Well, I guess we should go get the car,” Lila says.
“I thought we were waiting for the car?” Marla asks.
“No. We were just … talking,” Lila says.
As they walk out of the lobby, the men in burgundy rise. High Bun asks one of them to get the car, and then the women stand there in another long silence. Everybody looks at their phone or does whatever they can to pretend like the silence is totally normal, until Marla looks around, concerned.
“Where are Gary and Jim, anyway?” Marla asks.
“They’re meeting us at the wharf with your dad,” Lila explains.
“Oh,” Marla says. She is visibly disappointed by the answer, as if she had not realized she’d have to spend the morning driving with Lila and not her brother. Or maybe she’s just one of those people who look perpetually disappointed, with hair annihilated by a straightener, dyed so black that it makes her look like a grown-up version of Wednesday Addams. Her brown sweater, too stiff and formal for a day on a boat. And then there are the wrist splints, which Lila keeps periodically looking at, until Marla notices and finally says something about having a combination of carpal tunnel and tennis elbow.
“I don’t even really like tennis! Just something to do with other women, you know? I mean, there’s like no other sport you can just casually play with other women,” Marla says. “How sad!”
“I don’t think anyone should play sports,” High Bun says. She is anti- sport now. A nurse–turned–physical trainer during Covid who has officially grown weary of all competition. Now High Bun specializes in yoga and nostril-breathing and calming down her system. “Competition is not good for the body or the soul. That’s my gospel. It keeps us in trauma. Keeps us inflamed. That’s probably what’s going on with your hands. You’re all inflamed. Do you take vitamin C?”
“I’m not inflamed,” Marla insists. “I’m injured.”
“I had bad carpal tunnel once,” Neck Pillow says. She explains that she’s a musician. A harpist for the Detroit Symphony. “It was a total disaster. I couldn’t work for months.”
“You’re a harpist?” Phoebe asks.
“Nat is going to play for us at the clambake tonight, and she’s amazing,” Lila says to the group. “She’s an experimental harpist.”
Marla finally laughs. “An experimental harpist? Oh, that’s not a joke. I’m sorry, I thought you were joking. I truly didn’t know experimental harpists existed.”
“There aren’t many,” Lila says. “Nat sort of pioneered the style, isn’t that right?”
“You could say that,” Neck Pillow says.
“How interesting,” Marla says.
It is very easy to imagine Marla playing tennis or speaking in a courtroom or standing behind a podium running for mayoral office, less easy to imagine her in a hotel room, fucking a federal judge. But as they stand there in a new silence, Phoebe tries to imagine Marla giggling in lace lingerie, spread over the bed, the way she has imagined Mia laid out for Matt so many times.
“God, look at these cobblestones!” High Bun says.
Phoebe is starting to realize that this is a wedding like all others—here are people who came from very different corners of the bride’s life, only to gather in a room and have no idea what to say to one another.
“Lila got us a vintage convertible for the week,” High Bun says.
“Suz rented it,” Lila says.
“But it was Lila’s idea.” High Bun smiles and pets her braid.
“Only Lila would have thought of something like that,” Marla says, and it’s unclear whether this is a compliment or an insult. Marla looks back down at her phone, and Phoebe wonders what it was about the federal judge that was so irresistible. Why was Marla willing to give up her whole life?
“The car is here!” Neck Pillow says.
The man in burgundy pulls up the vintage convertible.
“What a beautiful car!” High Bun says.
“How are we all going to fit in it, though?” Marla asks.
“We’ll squeeze in it, no problem!” High Bun says. “We’ve put more people in a car than this.”
“Remember my wedding on the Vineyard?” Neck Pillow asks. “We fit seven people in that car!”
“I’m sitting in the front,” Marla says. “I get carsick in the back.”
“I’ll drive,” the bride says.
“You’re the bride!” High Bun says. “You shouldn’t have to drive.”
It’s the bride’s big week. The bride should be rendered helpless, given drinks, fluffed and complimented at every turn, put out like a kitchen fire, appeased like an angry toddler, prodded like a doll, then driven by a well- dressed stranger to the altar of her new life.
“But I want to drive,” Lila says. “That’s why I got the convertible.”
Nobody, not even Marla, challenges the bride. If the bride wants to drive, the bride gets to drive.
But when Lila gets in the car, she can’t. “Why did you ask for a stick shift?”
“I didn’t,” High Bun says. “I asked for their fanciest, most vintage-y convertible.”
“Well, of course it’s a stick shift,” Marla says. “It’s a car from like, 1940 or something.”
“Well, I didn’t know that,” High Bun says.
“Does this mean that nobody here knows how to drive this car?” Marla asks.
Lila looks lost at the steering wheel.
“I can drive it,” Phoebe says from the back. “For the most part.”
“For the most part?” Marla says.
“I mean, I knew how to do it once upon a time,” Phoebe says. “My father taught me.”
“That sounds good enough to me.” Lila gets out of the car and looks at Juice squished in the back seat.
“Mel, would you be more comfortable sitting on my lap?” Lila asks.
“No,” Juice says. “And I told you I wanted to be called Juice.”
“Right. Sorry,” Lila says. She climbs in the back, and High Bun and Neck Pillow do a little dance to welcome her. In the driver’s seat, Phoebe
puts her hand on the gear shift, her foot on the clutch. It’s been years, but it’s a kind of muscle memory from childhood that she’ll never forget, driving up the road in her father’s Saab, learning how to change gears as he said, “Easy, now, easy.”
“Onward,” Marla says, tapping the dashboard.
“Where am I going?” Phoebe asks.
“Bowen’s Wharf,” Marla says. “Waze will know.”
“I don’t have a phone with me,” Phoebe says.
The women are mystified. “Seriously?”
“I’ll pull it up,” Marla says, and hands Phoebe her phone.
As they drive, this is what they can all agree on: Newport is beautiful. The women in the back seat keep saying, Wow. Look at that mansion. And that one. And that one. And isn’t that the Vanderbilts’? Aren’t they all the Vanderbilts’?
“Who are the Vanderbilts?” Juice asks, but nobody answers, because the air is too crisp, the trees are too green. The people so rich-looking. The roads so roadlike.
“They were one of the richest families in Newport,” Phoebe finally says, following the directions and trying to ignore the messages that silently pop up on Marla’s phone from somebody named Robert.
I am thinking about your sweaty cunt, Robert writes.
Phoebe flinches. She wonders if it’s the judge. She looks over at Marla, but Marla seems to have no idea what’s happening to her phone, her gaze steady on everything outside the car—the high boxwoods, the crepe myrtles.
“That’s the Vanderbilts’,” Marla says, pointing to the Breakers.
“I can’t believe that’s where you’re having your wedding!” High Bun says.
“I know. It’s amazing. Especially because they never host private events,” Lila says.
“Why did they let you, then?” Marla asks.
“My mother is on the board of the Preservation Society,” Lila admits. “She gave a very large donation.”
“Gary did tell you that our mother will never recognize your marriage unless you do it in a church, right?” Marla asks.
“Wait, what?” Lila asks. “Are you joking?”
High Bun leans over and turns up the music. Alicia Keys. She sings loudly, and changes the words to “Now we’re in New-pooorrrrt!!! These streets will make you feel poo-ooorr!”
“And rich people will juddddge you!” Neck Pillow sings.
“Let’s hear it for Newpooort, Newpooort, Newpooort!” Lila adds.
The three Portsmouth Abbey girls laugh hard at their song, and for the first time since Phoebe met them, she feels the shared history, the fact that High Bun and Neck Pillow are really Suz and Nat. Lila’s best friends from high school, curling their hair before parties and doing Tae Bo workouts in the mornings and making blueberry muffins on Sunday afternoons and menstruating at the same exact time and being so proud.
“I can’t believe we’re here!” Suz shouts and Nat adds, “Woot, woot, bitches!”
“What?” Marla says, turning around. “I can’t hear you over the music!”
“I just said, Woot, woot bitches!” Nat says.
“Hoot hoot?” Marla asks, then looks to Juice for help, but Juice is silent and humiliated against the door. She just shrugs, returns her gaze to her green toy.
I want to slam it with my hard cock, Robert writes.
“Turn right,” Waze orders.
At some point, Marla suggests putting the top up so they can all hear each other better, but Lila says that defeats the point of renting a convertible.
“We already have cars with tops,” Lila says.
Suz agrees immediately. “That’s true. All my cars do have tops.”
Phoebe heads down Ocean Drive and everyone squeals, hands in the air. Phoebe is quiet but is glad to be in motion. The wind makes talking almost impossible. Though Suz keeps trying anyway. Suz shouts something about convertibles being fun. And Phoebe can feel it, too. Some kind of satisfaction feeling the car sticking to the road as she rounds the curb a little faster. She never drove her father’s car like this.
“Jesus, slow down!” Marla says.
“I’m going the speed limit,” Phoebe says.
The child is in the back, entirely silent, traumatized. Her face looks comical in the rearview mirror—exactly the same when in motion and not in motion. Sort of like a dog. Phoebe wonders when the child will speak, what she might possibly report from the depths of her consciousness. Juice reminds Phoebe of herself when she was younger, always silent in the car. Silence is her communication.
“No, go faster!” Lila cries. “I love it. I just love it.”
But when they approach downtown, they hit traffic. A long line of red taillights in front of them. Phoebe can’t see the end of it. She slows down, and the car keeps lurching just enough to make them jostle. She is not very good at being in first gear, but nobody complains.
“I can’t believe we’re actually here!” Suz says.
The nurse, despite all she has seen these past two years being a nurse, lives in a constant state of disbelief about the most ordinary things.
“I feel like we’ve been planning this forever,” Nat says.
“We seriously have!” Suz says.
But Lila is concerned they are going to be late to the boat. “Does Waze say how long the traffic will be?”
“Twenty minutes,” Phoebe says.
“Guess this is what happens when you plan a destination wedding,” Marla says.
“This isn’t a destination wedding,” Suz says. “They live here.”
“Anywhere farther than thirty minutes in Rhode Island is a destination wedding,” Marla insists.
“We were actually thinking of doing a destination wedding in Germany, until Covid,” Lila says.
“Why Germany?” Nat asks.
“They got engaged there!” Suz says.
“I only vaguely sort of remember that,” Nat says.
“Ooohh, tell the story!” Suz says to Lila, clapping her hands. “Tell the story.”
“We’ve heard the story,” Marla says.
“Well, I don’t know it,” Nat says.
“Neither do I,” Phoebe says.
So Lila tells the story.
“Six months after we met, Gary and I decided to take a big trip to Europe because my father was doing really well,” Lila says, leaning forward. She sounds very excited to tell the story, and Nat and Suz are excited to hear the story, and Phoebe imagines they could probably listen to it a thousand times the way that her father could watch Vietnam War movies over and over again. Bridesmaids need the same kinds of stories soldiers do, stories that justify why they do what they do. Why they are willing to sacrifice who they are and a good night’s sleep for the noble cause of defending democracy and Lila and Gary’s love.
“Germany was our last stop,” Lila says. “We went to the Black Forest to see the Walt Disney Castle.”
“Oh, wow, you actually went to the Mad King’s Castle?” Phoebe asks. “I’ve always wanted to go there.”
“No, I said, the Walt Disney Castle,” Lila clarifies.
“I know, but it’s also called the Mad King’s Castle,” Phoebe says. “Or, the Neuschwanstein Castle.”
“Well, I don’t know what it’s really called,” Lila says. “We just called it the Walt Disney Castle because Gary told me it was the castle that Disney used as a model for Sleeping Beauty’s. And Gary knows that I love all things Disney. So he planned to rent a car, drive us to the castle, and then propose outside the front doors. But we had been driving this stupid shitty rental thing that wouldn’t go above like sixty, and we were going to be late and miss the last tour of the day. So Gary stopped at a BMW rental place on the side of the Autobahn and picked up a new car that could go super fast.”
“There’s no speed limit on the Autobahn,” Lila adds. “It was exhilarating.”
Phoebe can see them so clearly. Gary, whoever he is, with his only- faintly-receding hairline blowing back in the wind, and Lila, her mouth big and full, laughing, eyes toward the sky.
“And when we got to the castle, he proposed,” Lila says with a smile. “I was actually really surprised. We had only been dating six months.”
“That’s so romantic,” Suz says
“He really is so wonderful,” Nat says.
But something isn’t sitting right with Marla. “Why is it also called the Mad King’s Castle?”
In the rearview mirror, Phoebe sees Lila’s eyes roll and Juice’s flicker up in interest.
“Because people thought the king who built it was insane,” Phoebe says.
“But why?”
“Because he built the castle using all his money, even though he had already built two other castles. He went into debt building this elaborate third castle just for himself, and so there were rumors that the king must be going mad.”
“Was he?” Marla asks.
“Eventually they found him drowned in the pond outside the castle.”
“He was murdered outside the Disney castle?” Lila asks.
“Actually, they suspect he killed himself,” Phoebe says, and meets eyes with Lila in the mirror.
“Of course he did,” Lila says, and leans back, defeated.
So Phoebe adds, “But not in front of the Disney castle. It was actually at one of his other castles.”
“Well, that’s good then,” Suz says, and like a loyal bridesmaid, she won’t let them linger on the Mad King’s suicide. “He went to Cornell, right?”
“The Mad King?” Marla asks.
“Gary!”
“Yale,” Lila says.
“He must be really smart,” Suz says.
“He is,” Lila says. “So smart.”
“He’s not that smart,” Marla says. “You know how many idiots get into Yale every day?”
Phoebe is irritated by Marla’s desire to ruin everything, even though Phoebe was the one ready to ruin Lila’s wedding last night. But there is
something awful about doing it right in front of Lila’s face, in the middle of the afternoon.
“So wait, what’s your point?” Phoebe asks.
“My point is, Gary is not this Yale doctor hero. Sometimes Lila talks about him like he’s this god,” Marla says. “But I’ll have you all know that once, Gary lit our house on fire.”
“He lit your house on fire?” Lila asks. “How did I not know that?”
“He doesn’t lead with that,” Marla says. “Burned the entire kitchen down by accident and we had to live in a Marriott for a month. Best month of my life, to be honest. But don’t tell my brother that.”
The sun feels very hot above Phoebe. Marla starts covering herself with sunscreen.
I’m stroking it right now, Robert writes. Where are you?
Phoebe feels a twinge of delight, thinking about how embarrassed Marla will be at some point later when she realizes that Phoebe saw the messages.
“I really think we should put the top up,” Marla says.
“But it’s a convertible,” Suz says. “We got the convertible so that we could put the top down.”
“I’ve already had skin cancer and survived, twice, thanks. I don’t feel like dying because I got stuck in traffic,” Marla says.
“You’ve had skin cancer twice?” Nat says. “Holy shit.”
“Okay,” Lila says. “Fine. Let’s put the top up.”
In the enclosed car, in traffic, everything feels too quiet. There is something wrong here. People who are supposed to be bonding are not bonding.
“There’s never any traffic in The Gilded Age,” Suz says.
“My wife is obsessed with that show,” Nat says. “But I think it’s a bore.”
But Suz doesn’t care. Suz will watch anything when the Little Worm is sitting quietly on her lap. “I literally watched seven hours of Wife Swap the other day because she had stopped crying and I didn’t want to move the Little Worm and get the remote.”
“The Little Worm?” Phoebe asks.
“That’s what Suz calls her child,” Nat says. “And why I, for one, am now no longer sure I want a child.”
“This whole time the Little Worm has been your child?” Marla asks.
“I should check on her, actually.” Suz reaches for her bag.
“How far are we?” Lila asks again.
According to Waze, they are only a tenth of a mile away from the wharf.
“I bet it’s a beautiful fucking wharf,” Suz says.
“If we ever get there,” Marla says.
“Of course we’ll get there,” Nat says.
“Waze says twenty minutes,” Phoebe says.
“But it’s right there?” Lila says. “How can that take twenty minutes?”
Suz looks up from her phone. “Shit. The Little Worm is sick.”
“Oh, no,” Lila says, but nobody in the car asks with what.
THEY SIT IN traffic for so long, Phoebe learns that each woman specializes in something. Suz, the trainer, specializes in celebrities. Nat, the musician, specializes in nontraditional plucking instruments like quarters and paper clips. And Marla, the lawyer, specializes in sexual harassment. She hears cases about whether something is or is not sexual harassment, and the women are intrigued.
“I didn’t know someone actually decided that,” Suz says.
“What did you think happened?” Marla asks.
“I don’t know, I guess I never thought about it.”
Then everyone starts wanting to know if they have been legally sexually harassed or not. Even Phoebe.
“On Monday, the Americanist in my department looked at me at the printer and said, ‘Woweeee! Nice dress!’” Phoebe says. “Is that sexual harassment?”
“If you think you are being sexually harassed, you are,” Marla says.
Phoebe didn’t think it was harassment at the time, because the Americanist was so old, in that abyss of age just beyond sex, but also because she agreed with him. Yes, the dress was nice. That’s why she
bought it. That’s why she wore it. That’s what she wanted her husband to think! She wanted him to look at her and say, Woweeee, nice dress!
“So why would I be offended when the Americanist finally said it?” Phoebe asks.
“Of course the Americanist was the one who said it,” Marla says.
“What’s an Americanist?” Suz asks.
“What do you do?” Nat asks.
“I’m a professor,” Phoebe says.
“A nineteenth centuryist,” Lila says, sounding proud.
“My point is, Phoebe,” Marla continues, as if she were actually providing legal counsel, “if you weren’t offended, you weren’t sexually harassed. That’s how the law works.”
“That doesn’t sound like the law,” Suz says.
“The law is partially subjective,” Marla says. “Would you have complimented the Americanist’s outfit?”
“No,” Phoebe says. “Never. But mostly because the Americanist just wears the same thing every day. Dockers and some blue shirt. I mean. What do you even say about that?”
“I have a lot to stay about that,” Lila says.
All the women laugh. Phoebe picks up speed. They lower the top again. Suz turns up the music. Katy Perry. “Teenage Dream.” “I hate this song,” Marla says, and they all agree that yes, they kind of hate this song, yet listen to it anyway. They finally get to the sign that says WELCOME TO BOWEN’S WHARF. Everybody on the street looks like they’re on vacation. Khakis and Nantucket reds. Soft baseball caps. Maybe they are all on vacation, or maybe this is just how you dress if you live in Newport. Phoebe parks.
“Lila! I can’t believe you’re getting married!” Suz shouts.
AT THE WHARF, all the men are dressed in polo shirts and khaki shorts except for one: the man from the hot tub. He stands there in his jeans and windbreaker with keys in his hand. It’s weird to see him dressed, in daylight, out in the open. He is no longer a man in a hot tub. He is taller than she expected and looks very prepared to get on a boat.
“Gary!” Lila shouts.
He kisses Lila, and everyone claps like they did on the patio last night. He pulls away, smiling, until he sees Phoebe.
“Hello,” he says, giving her a puzzled look.
He’s the groom? The man in the hot tub is Gary? Even though he stands by Lila’s side, she can’t picture it. She can’t see him speeding in a BMW on his way to the Disney castle. She can only imagine him in the hot tub, so resigned, so solitary, so unconnected to anything else in the universe except for Phoebe and his beard.
But maybe that’s the trick night performs. Darkens everybody, highlights the nothingness around them. Maybe in the dark, everyone seems more alone than they are. Because he is clearly not alone. He is holding Lila’s hand. He is putting his arm around his daughter. He is standing tall in front of a handsome sailboat.
“Hello,” Phoebe says.
She suddenly doesn’t know what else to say. The tension between them feels so palpable to Phoebe, so embarrassing, but nobody else seems to notice. Marla starts slathering Juice in sunscreen. Suz starts asking one of the men if he got the orders to stock the boat with Lila’s favorite drink, which she keeps calling a Vacation in a Cup.
“Phoebe is a good friend,” Lila says to Gary.
“Is that so?” Gary asks.
If Phoebe is being honest, she has no idea if she and Lila are friends. No idea what it means to be a friend. She’s forgotten what it’s supposed to feel like. Mia was the last good friend she made in her adult life. So what does Phoebe know?
“And here I thought I met all your friends,” Gary adds.
“Well, here’s one more,” Phoebe says, and sticks out her hand.
“The more the merrier,” Gary says, and shakes it.
He isn’t going to acknowledge it, and so it is confirmed. Had everything been normal between them, he would have acknowledged that they already met. He would have said, Oh, how funny, I met Phoebe in the hot tub! But he doesn’t say anything like that, which makes Phoebe feel like their meeting was remarkable. Like when Phoebe used to say, “Mia is so
beautiful” to her husband, and he would say, “Yes, Mia is a good laugh,” when what he really meant to say was: I want to fuck Mia.
“We already—” Phoebe is in the middle of saying when Juice screams.
“My dog is dead!” Juice shouts. She immediately starts crying, and Phoebe is shocked to see her transform from sullen teen into crying child in a matter of seconds.
“Oh, sweetheart,” Gary says.
Gary kneels down to become Juice’s size. In that one swift motion, Gary is no longer the man in the hot tub. He is no longer the groom. He is just a dad wearing white sneakers. Probably orthopedic. Phoebe can see their years of history, the way Gary must have held Juice after Wendy’s funeral. The meals he made her in the lonely afternoons. And is that what made him want to die? Losing his wife?
But then Gary stands up, puts his arm around Lila, and becomes the groom again, addressing his crowd.
“Don’t worry,” he says. “It’s just a virtual dog.”
“It’s not just a virtual dog!” Juice shouts. She holds up the green plastic circle for all to see. “My mom gave her to me. Her name is Human Princess.”
The people are silenced either by the mention of the dead wife or the fact that the dog’s name is Human Princess. Lila does not speak. Marla does not speak. Not even Suz speaks. Nobody knows what to say to the crying child about the dead mother, except for Gary’s father.
“I told you to get the girl a real dog,” Gary’s father says, but this is not the right thing to say.
“Dad,” Gary warns at the same time that Juice shouts, “It’s real to me!”
Phoebe can see the wedding people blankly stare at Juice the same way her therapist stared at her when she told him Harry was sick—as if he wanted to care, but he just couldn’t, because who cares? It’s a cat. “And I know it’s just a cat,” Phoebe went on. “But Harry was with us that whole time we were married. Harry was there for us. And now he’s just going to slowly die?” And yet she could see that the therapist didn’t understand the horror of this.
“How did Human Princess die?” Phoebe asks.
Phoebe is starting to wonder if this is why she is here, to fill the silences between the wedding people that they don’t know how to fill, to ask the questions nobody can bring themselves to ask. Phoebe has nothing to lose here. She is not part of this family. She is not part of anything anymore. She is free in a way none of them are, so she kneels down and looks directly at the girl, as if it’s her from many years ago.
“Lung cancer,” Juice says.
“Since when do virtual dogs get cancer?” Gary’s father whispers loud enough to hear.
“Apparently, Dad, it happens.”
“Are you sure you didn’t drop it in the water, though?” Marla asks.
“No!” Juice says. “She just was in my hand and then she … died of cancer.”
“My cat died of cancer, too,” Phoebe says. What she would have given to have Matt there with her when she found Harry—to have anybody with her yesterday morning helping her figure out what to do. She extends her hand to Juice. “Come on. We’ll have a funeral for her on the boat.”
Juice nods. Suz and Nat look horrified. Lila just looks out at the water.
Suz takes a deep breath, puts on a smile, claps her hands, and says, “Well, I don’t know about you guys, but I’m ready for a Vacation in a Cup.”
“Let’s get on this boat!” the other man shouts. He leans forward to shake Phoebe’s hand. “I’m Jim, Gary’s brother-in-law.”
“Phoebe,” she says.
Jim holds her hand for a moment too long—like maybe he’s checking for a ring, and maybe Lila is right. Maybe Jim really is always hitting on everyone. Even Phoebe.
“Very nice to meet you,” Jim says.
“You, too,” Phoebe says.
Jim lets go and takes a sip out of a bottle called Muscle Milk. Lila smooths out her shirt and adjusts her sunglasses.
“Okay,” the bride says, taking the groom’s hand. “Let’s get on this boat.”
They all sit against the sides of the narrow sailboat. The captain tells them not to lean too far back. “The boat will tip,” he says.
“Seriously?” Marla asks.
“Just kidding,” the captain says. “Though not really. There is, of course, a tipping point.”
Marla gives the captain a look, like a captain has no right to joke about tipping while they are trapped in open water, but Lila looks unconcerned. Lila sits perched on the boat like she’s sitting in her own living room— upright, poised, with the confidence of a woman who has systematically removed all of her body hair. Nothing bad can happen to a woman like that during her wedding week, not even in the middle of the ocean.
“So how about those Vacations in a Cup?” Lila asks, and Nat immediately opens the cooler.
“It’s Vacation in a Cups,” Marla says.
“Excuse me?” Lila asks.
“The plural is actually Vacation in a Cups,” Marla repeats.
“That’s how people have always said it,” the groom says with a smile, and Phoebe can recognize what Gary is doing because it’s what Phoebe does. He is trying to de-escalate the situation, trying to tease Marla’s comment into sounding funny. But Lila does not laugh.
“How do you know how the drink is pronounced?” Lila asks Marla, as if she is genuinely curious. “It’s a drink I made up.”
Before Marla can answer, Suz starts telling everyone the story of how Lila created the cocktail in their dorm one night and changed their lives for the better.
“Before that, we were always drinking stolen church wine,” Suz says.
“You stole sacramental wine?” Jim asks, looking at Lila like he’s both surprised and proud.
“For the record, I was never comfortable with it,” Lila says.
“Well, you certainly drank enough of it to get sick,” Nat says.
“It was … not award-winning wine,” Lila says.
Jim pretends to be a parishioner pausing before the Eucharist. “Excuse me, Father, is this a pinot?”
Everyone laughs, including Lila. Gary smiles, takes her hand.
“The last time we drank the sacramental wine, Lila vomited all night,” Nat says.
“The whole time she kept asking, Do you think we’re going to Hell, you guys?”
“After that, I swore I’d never drink again,” Lila says. “Unless the drink tasted like a vacation in a cup.’”
“And voilà, the Vacations in a Cup were born,” Nat says.
They spent many months during high school perfecting the recipe. And it’s clear that this is where the women want the conversation to stay—on the things they used to do together, the special, funny moments that had once bonded them.
“Right,” Marla says. “But if the singular is a Vacation in a Cup, then the plural has to be Vacation in a Cups.”
“That just sounds really dumb, though,” Suz says.
“Yeah,” Nat agrees.
“It’s not many vacations in one single cup, is it?” Marla says. “It’s a single vacation. Spread out in each individual cup.”
A heavy silence falls over the group. They are hardly away from land, and everybody already seems to have had enough of Marla. Lila just sits there, made speechless by her future sister-in-law, twice in one afternoon.
“Let’s drop it, Marla,” Gary says.
Gary says it with the weary tone of a brother who has been saying, “Let’s drop it, Marla,” his entire life. He puts his hand on Lila’s back and the gesture surprises Phoebe, even though it shouldn’t. There is nothing surprising here; they are a classic older man and younger woman combo. Gary is the stage and Lila is the song. Or maybe it’s more like, Gary is the house and Lila is the chandelier. Blond and dazzling in the way that suggests she’s never bought a loaf of bread at the store. And Gary, so handsome and sturdy, a man who is always bringing bread home from the store.
And yet, when she looks at Gary, she can only see the man in the hot tub, the man who once wanted to die. The man who read romance novels in college. She can feel that invisible wire between them, until Gary pulls Lila onto his lap and holds her close, as if he’s protecting her from his overbearing sister.
“For instance, you wouldn’t say, Please pass me some Sexes on the Beach,” Marla continues. “That just sounds gross.”
Nat and Suz look at each other and raise eyebrows, like there is nothing left to do at this point but ostracize the disturbance. Phoebe can tell that this is how they got through high school together, searching for each other’s eyes in the classroom, doubling over with laughter about a teacher who was more embarrassing than they were. But Lila doesn’t join in. She can’t openly mock her future sister-in-law, the future aunt to her children, the person who will be at her Christmas dinner table for all time.
Instead, Lila looks at Phoebe for help.
“Well, what is it?” Lila asks Phoebe. Then she turns to Gary. “Phoebe actually knows everything. She’s an English professor.”
How funny it feels to be looked at by all the wedding people. All these strangers who can see her. They are waiting on her to speak. To say something that will settle the moment, return them to normalcy, neutralize Marla. Phoebe is moved to be called upon like this. For too long, she had felt stuck in the depths of her house, in the void of her depression, where she was not actually real. Where nothing was real. As if she had slipped out of the known world without anybody noticing, except for Harry, who would follow her around all day, up the stairs, down the stairs, into the bathroom where he would sit with his serious face and watch. When she found him dead two days ago, she felt certain it was all over for her.
But now here she is, in daylight, on a boat, with the wedding people.
“Well?” Gary says. “How do you say it, Professor?”
He looks over at her for the first real time since they got on the boat, probably because the rest of them are also looking at her now. It has become safe to stare, safe to rest his eyes on her. She wants to savor this feeling. Package it, drink it later when she needs it, when she is back at home in the dark of her bedroom tomorrow, feeling like a piece of shit.
“It’s Vacations in a Cup,” Phoebe says. “You have to pluralize the head noun, not the modifier.”
“But no one would ever say Sexes on the Beach,” Marla protests.
“Right, but that’s because ‘sex’ isn’t really a count noun and so it sounds unnatural to pluralize it.”
“A count noun?” Suz asks. “Huh?”
“I just mean we don’t say ‘We had two sexes,’” Phoebe clarifies. “We say ‘We had sex twice.’”
“Speak for yourself,” Jim says. “I had two sexes last night.”
Everybody laughs, except Marla, who looks half-irritated, half- impressed. “Did you study languages or something?” she asks.
“In college,” Phoebe says. “I thought I wanted to be a philologist.”
“But you’re not currently a philologist,” Marla says.
“No. But I also know that language is determined naturally by the people who speak it,” Phoebe adds, for Marla’s benefit. “That’s how we wind up with different languages. People in different regions make it their own. So, in theory, you can pronounce the drink however you want and ten years from now, it’ll be correct.”
“So it sounds like you’re saying there’s no right answer?” Gary asks.
“Spoken like a true English professor,” Phoebe says.
Everybody laughs.
“Well, now that we know the drink’s entire etymology, can we just drink one already?” Nat asks.
Suz pours everyone drinks, and it feels like the party has really begun. But Marla leans back against the boat, turns on her phone, and looks horrified.
“Oh, God,” Marla says.
Has she seen the sexts from Robert?
Phoebe waits for Marla to explain, but nobody from the group asks her to. Gary and Jim talk to Gary’s father. Juice quietly holds her dead virtual dog and looks out at the water. And Lila, Nat, and Suz seem set on ignoring Marla now. They are deep in giggly conversation about their past, the stolen church wine, the things they used to confess to priests, how attracted Suz
used to be to Jesus, that time Nat told Father Leon she was gay—and it’s a place where the rest of them can’t go. Especially not Marla.
“Everything okay?” Phoebe finally asks her.
“I just realized my car registration is expired,” Marla says.
Phoebe wonders if she’s lying, but then Marla pulls out her wallet, starts typing things furiously into her phone. This is too much for Gary to ignore.
“Are you really reregistering your car while we’re sailing?” Gary asks.
“It’s a literal crime to drive an unregistered car,” Marla says.
“But you’re not driving a car right now. Do it when we get back on shore.”
“I’m a lawyer, Gary. I need to stay on the right side of the law. And I’m getting shockingly amazing service here in the middle of the sea.”
Gary looks down at his Vacation in a Cup. So does Phoebe. When she peeks, she meets Gary’s eyes. Gary raises his eyebrows and then they both smile. A big release that makes Phoebe feel giddy. Phoebe can’t help it— Marla is too much. But Phoebe doesn’t want to laugh at another woman for being too much, not even Marla. So she takes a big sip and she will admit: the drink is so fucking good. Because it’s so fucking terrible. Like Kraft mac & cheese. Like a Dunkin’ donut. The kinds of things Phoebe could never properly enjoy before, because she was too worried about her body, about sugar levels, about fructose. Even when she was drunk, she would binge by eating a bowl of flax berry cereal that would always make her shit at eight in the morning, give or take a few minutes.
“What’s actually in this drink?” Phoebe asks. She sits back against the side of the boat and the wind picks up her hair. “It’s so good.”
“A vacation,” Gary says.
“Right,” Phoebe says. “But what kind of vacation? Like a beachfront condo in St. Thomas?”
Gary takes another sip as if he’s a sommelier. “I’m getting more, RV visiting Civil War battlefields in the South for three days.”
Phoebe takes another sip. “Really? I don’t taste any battlefields.”
“No?” Gary says. “You clearly don’t have a complex palate. Or a father who once dragged you to all the Civil War battlefields as a child.”
She laughs. He laughs. Jim just watches them talk as if the conversation is too weird to join.
“No, he was more of the we-already-live-in-a-tiny-fishing-cabin-on-a- river-so-we-don’t-ever-have-to-go-on-vacation kind of a father,” Phoebe clarifies.
“Oh, I didn’t know about that father,” Gary says.
There are some people in this world who remind you of exactly how you like to speak. She hasn’t met a person like this in a long time, not since she met her husband, which was why it was so painful when she started to forget how to speak to her husband. When she looked at him, she was too often reminded of what not to say, what never to mention, like ovulation, or depression, or anything that might carry a hint of sadness. Perhaps that’s why she didn’t tell him that Harry died. She didn’t want to give him any more proof of her unlovability, of her failure. Perhaps that’s why she just put a blanket over Harry and ran away, too.
“That father is out there,” Phoebe says. “Well, not technically anymore. He’s dead.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Gary says. “So you’re a real orphan now.”
She blushes. The conversation.
“And surprise, surprise, being an orphan doesn’t feel like I imagined,” Phoebe says.
“The perks are even better than you thought?” Gary asks.
“What the hell are you guys talking about?” Jim asks.
They all laugh.
“Phoebe used to dream of being an orphan,” Gary explains.
“Gary wants someone to beat the crap out of him,” Phoebe adds.
“I’ll have you know this explains nothing,” Jim says.
Phoebe takes another sip of her drink. “Oh, okay, I think I am tasting the battlefields now.”
“See?” Gary says. “It’s like just the tiniest note at the very end.”
Jim gives up on them and turns to Juice. “So how are you doing, my beautiful niece?”
Marla puts down her phone with a deep sigh.
“You on the right side of the law now?” Gary asks Marla, putting his hand around her neck, giving her a faux massage. It looks like an apology for being short earlier. “Don’t want any fugitives on this boat.”
“I know you’re making fun of me, so I refuse to answer that,” Marla says.
Sitting side by side, Phoebe can see that Marla and Gary look very similar. They both have dark brown hair, dark eyes. Long, angular faces they have inherited from their father, whose face is so long, he looks somewhat like a pelican at the bow. But Gary is a little soft where Marla is hard. Phoebe wonders if this is what losing his wife has done to him. If it has rounded out his edges. Or maybe it’s just the beers over the years that Marla likely refused, filling out his shoulders and his face.
“You think you’ll get to an age where your brother stops making fun of you, but no,” Marla says to Phoebe, “it will never happen. I’m forty-two and I am ready to accept this now.”
Then she offers a long list of all the things Gary did over the years to ruin her life, and yet, Gary is still the Golden Boy in their father’s eyes.
“No,” Gary says. “Roy is the Golden Boy.”
“Is Roy your brother?” Phoebe asks.
“Cousin,” Marla says.
“You talking about Roy?” Gary’s father shouts through the wind.
“See?” Gary says. “It’s like catnip to him. He can’t get enough of Roy.”
“Roy’s a goddamned hero,” Gary’s father says to Phoebe. “The only hero we have in the Smith family.”
“Every time,” Gary and Marla say in unison and then laugh. Laughing changes Marla’s entire face. She becomes soft like Gary.
“What did Roy do?” Phoebe asks.
“He was a sniper in Iraq,” Gary’s father says.
“Then Roy wrote a memoir about it,” Gary says.
“And someone turned it into a movie,” Marla adds.
“Phenomenal film,” Gary’s father declares to Phoebe. “Jude Law.”
“It wasn’t Jude Law,” Marla corrects. “Jude Law is like fifty now.”
“You’re thinking of that movie where Jude Law played a Russian sniper,” Gary adds.
“I know who Jude Law is,” Gary’s father says.
“Okay, fine, whatever. The point is, Dad watches it at least once a year and then immediately calls us to say that Roy is the only true hero in the family,” Gary says.
“I mean, I went to law school for you, Dad!” Marla says.
“I thought you went to be a feminist?” Gary’s father asks.
She elbows him. “That, too,” Marla says. “But honestly, what was the point of going to law school if your dad doesn’t respect it?”
“Oh, stop it. You’re the goddamned mayor!” Gary’s father says. “Of course I’m proud of you.”
Marla sips on her drink.
“Anyway, that’s Roy,” Gary says, and they all laugh.
“Roy got really wasted last night, huh?” Marla says.
“Speaking of,” Jim says, and hands Gary a beer, because yes, yes, there are only so many Vacations in a Cup he can have, and then the two men start telling everybody about the actual vacation they went on before the pandemic.
“A cross-country road trip we all took together after,” Jim says and then trails off. He takes a sip of beer and then a sip of Muscle Milk.
“We went camping in the Wind River Range out in Wyoming,” Gary says.
“Taught this one how to fish, huh?” Jim says, and elbows Juice. “And remember when that bunny got eaten right in front of us?”
Juice nods. “A hawk just picked it up right in front of us.”
“It was gruesome,” Jim says.
Phoebe can feel Jim trying to impress them all with his stories of adventure and battle and death. She scans his face for evidence of his sister. Was Wendy a brunette, too? Did she have the same big oval eyes? The same aggressive stance, always leaning forward a little too much when she talked? Jim has the energy of someone who should be an investment banker or a car dealer or a wedding singer, someone who is out there in the world, but this is probably because Phoebe is a reader, always expecting people’s careers to match their personalities exactly. In real life, Jim is an engineer.
“In my free time,” Jim tells Phoebe, “I’m building a seaplane.”
“That’s impressive you know how to do that,” Phoebe says.
“He doesn’t actually,” Gary says.
“You build it,” Jim says. “That’s how you learn. And actually, you become certified, too. In the state of Rhode Island, you build a plane and voilà, you’re a certified plane mechanic.”
“But how do you know it’s a good plane?” Phoebe asks.
“Oh. You don’t,” Jim says. “Not until you’re up there.”
“But then it’s too late,” Phoebe says.
“That’s right,” Jim says.
They all laugh, and Lila finally looks over. For a second, Phoebe feels like she’s in class and she’s gotten in trouble. But for what?
“Jim, are you talking about that plane you haven’t even bought parts for yet?” Lila asks, and the group falls silent.
“Well, now I’m fucking not,” Jim says, and everyone laughs again.
Marla leans back against the side of the boat, satisfied now that she’s on the right side of the law. The boat tips in her direction, and her drink spills all over her shirt.
“Shit,” Marla says, and Suz comes over to refresh her cup.
“So you’re a professor?” Jim asks Phoebe.
Phoebe can feel Lila and Gary both watching them now, as if a match is being made, like maybe this was Lila and Gary’s plan: for Jim to meet someone at this wedding, finally settle down.
“I am,” Phoebe says, even though it feels less true as they get deeper out to sea. She feels very far from her old life out here on the ocean with the wedding people. She hasn’t checked her email in one full day. Her students are supposed to be reading something for tomorrow’s class—Shelley—but Phoebe already knows she will not be reading Shelley tonight. She will not make it back in time for class, and yet she feels no guilt. Only relief. Only the good feeling of the steady wind on her cheek. The sweet drink in her cup. The knowledge that she has finally done something she never thought she could do—she has made it out of the dark bedroom of her life. She is here.
“That’s cool,” Jim says. “Very cool. Wasn’t much of an English guy myself.”
He finishes the last of his Muscle Milk, and Juice says, “You know that’s not really milk.”
“I know,” Jim says. “It says right here, This Product Contains No Milk.”
“Then why do you drink it?”
“Because I don’t want it to be milk,” Jim says.
“That makes no sense,” Juice says.
The captain takes them to Fort Adams, to an old lighthouse, and as they circle around it, Jim asks more questions as if he really wants to get to know Phoebe. What do you teach? What are the students like? Does it feel good up there, knowing everything? She can feel him advancing toward her, like he knows they are destined to fuck, the two unmatched partners on the boat. She can feel everyone watching out of the corner of their eyes, hoping it’ll happen, as if they are on a TV show.
It’s a relief when Juice finally taps Phoebe’s shoulder.
“Can we do it now?” Juice asks, holding up the virtual dog so Phoebe can see.
Phoebe looks at Gary, even though it’s clear that Juice is asking Phoebe and nobody else. Phoebe remembers this feeling, too. How going over to her next-door neighbor’s house and eating dinner there was somehow easier than sitting in her own kitchen with her family, because Mr. and Mrs. Blank would ask her questions about her book report, about her concert recital, and she could say anything in response because the Blanks didn’t matter to Phoebe at all—they were just neighbors and she didn’t need their love, yet somehow got it because of this. She could even ask them about her own mother, what she used to be like, what she used to sound like, and when Mr. Blank cleared his throat before he answered, she didn’t feel that tense knot in the middle of her chest every time her father did.
“Yes,” Phoebe says.
“What do we do?”
Anything would be better than what Phoebe did. She should have buried him. Harry deserved a grave. He had been Harry, she would have said over his tiny tombstone, our little psychiatrist who never solved one problem.
“First, it’s customary to say something about the deceased,” Phoebe says. “Something you love. What did you love about Human Princess?”
Juice says something about Human Princess always being there for her in her pocket, the dog always being such a good dog, something she could hold whenever she was nervous during school presentations or at night. Phoebe can see Gary leaning toward them, trying to hear what his daughter is saying, but her voice is too quiet. The wind too loud.
“And now do other people say something about Human Princess?” Juice asks.
Phoebe thinks it’s amazing how easily children ask questions. They don’t think there’s anything wrong with it. They know that they don’t know everything, and it’s a little jarring to Phoebe, a woman who spent her entire career pretending that she had been born knowing everything. Bob had suggested it, said it can be precarious for a female scholar to be caught asking too many questions, and so she sat at happy hour with her colleagues, and she nodded her head, and listened to them talk about the Protestant Reformation or the printing press in early America and how their students lacked a basic understanding of history, and when the conversation got too dark, too depressing, too angry (which it always did by the end of happy hour), her husband would say, “But honestly, I think my students teach me so much more than I could ever teach them.” Phoebe raised her eyebrows, waited for him to catch himself on the bullshit, because that was just something they said on their teaching statements in order to not sound like assholes, no?
But now she understands what he meant. There are so many things Phoebe doesn’t know anymore. Things children know that Phoebe has forgotten, like how to look at a green plastic circle and see a beloved dog.
That’s how she got in trouble, Phoebe thinks. When she was alone, she stopped seeing the meaning in things. She stopped writing in her journal, stopped making elaborate meals, stopped combing her hair, let Harry just stay there on the basement floor, because what did it really matter? What did anything matter when she was alone?
But everyone on the boat is so quiet, staring at the green little dog, it starts to feel like a real funeral.
“May I hold her?” Jim asks.
Juice gives him the dog, and Jim talks directly to it.
“You know, Human Princess, I remember when my sister bought you,” Jim says. “She was so excited that I remember thinking, Wow, that’s real love, you know? When you get that excited by the thought of making someone else happy. So thank you for making my niece happy.”
“Dad?” Juice asks. “Your turn.”
Gary looks startled. But he comes forward. He takes the dog in his hands. He is quiet for a moment.
“Jim is right. We were very excited to bring you home to Juice,” Gary says. “We knew you’d be a great dog and you were. Thank you for keeping my daughter company all these years. Thank you for being here when—”
Then Gary pauses, looks down, as if he’s about to cry. Phoebe looks over at Lila, who is unreadable in this moment, with her head down, her hands in her lap like she’s at church—though Phoebe already knows Lila well enough to imagine what she’ll say later.
Jim pats Gary on the back. Eventually, Gary composes himself. Chokes out the final few words.
“Anyway. We really appreciate that, little fella. Rest in peace.”
Gary wraps the dog up in a napkin like it’s a soldier. Hands Human Princess to Phoebe, which makes her feel like the girl’s mother, who should have some words, too.
“Thank you,” Phoebe says to Juice’s dog, but also to Harry.
Thank you for keeping us company. Thank you for being the only witness to our marriage. Thank you for always waiting for us in the mornings outside our bedroom door, and especially that night you sat outside the shower, keeping careful watch. Because Harry always knew when something was wrong. And something was very wrong—Phoebe was ten weeks pregnant and she was bleeding. Look at the blood, she kept saying—and Matt brought her to the shower, put his hands between her legs, as if to catch it. Or maybe to just to feel it. To be a part of it. After, Harry followed them silently to the bed, and Matt curled around Phoebe, and Phoebe curled around Harry.
“I really loved you,” Phoebe says, because now that the horror of it is over, Phoebe can feel the good part—this love for her little family, the one
she had and the one she never will have. It is so strong, it makes her sob momentarily in her hands. Nobody says a thing, except Juice.
“Did you like, know my dog?” Juice asks.
Phoebe laughs. They all laugh. Phoebe wipes her tears and looks up to see Gary returning her gaze, smiling.
“No,” Phoebe says. “I didn’t know your dog.”
Phoebe didn’t know the dog. Didn’t know her mother. Didn’t know her daughter. Didn’t even know if it would have been a daughter, but she imagined the girl so many times, how they would read plays aloud in the open field behind their house, because there would be an open field. Phoebe would make sure of it. They would take the girl out to the field, and teach her how to dance, how to skip. They would find frogs. They would go camping. They would tell stories at night and in the morning, too, and Phoebe would show the girl how to write the story down, bind the pages together with yarn, as her father had once showed her. She wanted to give that same feeling to her child. She wanted to teach her child how to create, how to make a lot of applesauce from scratch and harvest strawberries and when the child would fall asleep, Matt would make them strawberry cocktails and they would curl up and watch a terribly wonderful awful movie that they’d seen a million times, like Terminator or Dune or all the Austen adaptations.
This vision of her family sustained her through her entire marriage, through all five rounds of IVF. When she injected the drugs into her belly fat, she thought of the girl, her little fingers plucking the strawberries. She pictured these fingers so often, and so vividly, at a certain point, she couldn’t imagine them not existing.
But they won’t. They never will.
“Now we let her go,” Phoebe says.
“Should I just throw her in the water?” Juice asks.
“Maybe lightly toss,” Phoebe suggests.
“Goodbye, Human Princess,” Juice says, and as she holds the dead dog above the water, Phoebe thinks, Goodbye, Harry. She hears it inside her head like the final lines of Ophelia in Hamlet: Goodbye Harry. Goodbye
daughter. Goodbye mother. Goodbye father. Goodbye husband. Goodbye, goodbye.
But before Juice releases the dog, Marla shouts, “You can’t actually drop it in the ocean! That’s littering.”
“It’s not littering, it’s my dog, Aunt Marla.”
“It’s plastic,” Marla says. “It’ll take millions of years to decompose.”
“Decompose?” Juice cries.
“We do ask that you keep all your belongings inside the boat,” the captain says softly.
Juice looks at Phoebe as if she is making a choice about who to be, and Phoebe makes a choice, too.
“Go ahead,” Phoebe says, because fuck it. If she is going to live, she’s going to live differently this time. “Let’s have our funeral.”
Juice drops the dog in the ocean. When it’s immediately swallowed up by the white foam of the water, Juice actually laughs a little. It’s the glee of a child who has done something she shouldn’t, and Phoebe feels it, too, which is why she waits to get scolded by someone.
But the captain doesn’t scold. He starts doing something to the sails. The others have restarted their conversations. The funeral is over. They skid along the water, while the adults return to being wedding people on a boat. They drink like nothing happened. But something did happen. Phoebe can feel it as Juice leans into her. And Gary must feel it, too, she thinks, because he looks wistful, like he knows he just watched something important happen in his daughter’s life but is not sure what to do now.
“Hey, how about some ice cream?” Lila says, coming over to be a part of it all. She hands Juice a little sandwich from the cooler.
But Juice doesn’t want it. She holds it up to the light because she’s suspicious of even that. “This isn’t really ice cream, you know.”
“What do you mean, it’s not ice cream?” Gary asks.
“These things don’t melt. It’s not real food.”
“Well, you don’t have to eat it, I guess,” Lila says. “I just thought you might be hungry.”
“Well, I’m not.”
Gary gives Lila an apologetic look, and Juice puts the ice cream sandwich down on the seat next to her. Juice opens her phone and calms herself by reading the Wikipedia page for the Cornwall Inn. Lila returns to her friends on the other side of the boat, and Gary follows his bride. Phoebe can feel Juice’s whole body relax against her as she reads aloud.
“So the hotel was built in 1844,” Juice says to Phoebe. “By a man named Albert Schuyler. He built it for his mistress.”
Gary slides his arm around Lila, and the two of them kiss.
“Hey ho!” Jim shouts, and everybody cheers.
Phoebe is ready to believe in them as a couple. She waits to hear what it sounds like when Gary and Lila talk directly to each other. She wants to understand what makes them laugh. How they flirt. She is ready to accept things as they are. But after they kiss, they are entirely public-facing, embracing their guests, telling stories to them, and not each other. And every so often, Gary looks back at Juice and Phoebe like he wants to say something. Eventually, he does.
“Juice, please throw the sandwich away if you aren’t going to eat it,” Gary says. “It’s melting on this man’s boat.”
“It’s not actually melting, though!” Juice says. “See?”
Juice is sort of right. It doesn’t really melt. It still keeps its shape, which Phoebe admits is disturbing. But her father is not impressed. The father can only see litter. “Throw it out,” he says.
“Fine!” Juice yells.
Juice throws the sandwich overboard, and Marla says, “See? I knew this would happen. Littering is a slippery slope,” and Gary says, “Drop it, Marla,” and then looks at Juice like he’s about to punish her but doesn’t. He returns to his bride, and Juice looks out at the water like she’s contemplating something damning about her father, or Lila, or her life in general, but Phoebe knows she’s just trying to keep herself from crying. Phoebe knows this move. She watches Juice pick up her phone again.
“Do you think he really loved his mistress?” Juice asks.
“Excuse me?” Phoebe asks.
“Albert Schuyler.”
“I suppose he must have,” Phoebe says. “You don’t make buildings for people who are just sort of okay.”
But it’s a different kind of love, Phoebe knows. The wife is the reason the man becomes the architect. The mistress is the reason the architect keeps building. The blueprints of his dreams that he may never realize, so he keeps it in his drawer.
“Good point,” Juice says. “Though to be honest, I could never love anyone named Albert.”
“Alberts are people, too,” Phoebe says.
Juice cracks up. She repeats the line to herself, “Alberts are people, too.”
Juice continues reading to Phoebe about the hotel in hushed tones, like she’s telling a secret story after bedtime, and Phoebe is surprised to find herself genuinely interested, though she doesn’t know why she’s surprised, since this is exactly the kind of thing that she likes to think about.
By the time they are almost back to the wharf, everybody seems drunk and happy again. Gary and Lila are laughing at something Nat is saying. Marla and Jim are deep in conversation with Marla’s father about Roy. And Juice is really leaning on Phoebe now like she’s a bookend. As the people prepare to get off the boat, Phoebe closes her eyes. She doesn’t want to move. Like when Harry was on her lap and he was so cute, Phoebe wouldn’t even take a sip of coffee. Phoebe doesn’t want to ruin the moment.
But then they are docked, and Phoebe looks up at the wharf, at all the people and the houses and the new life that waits behind it.
“That was so fun,” Lila announces as she stands up.
“So fun,” Suz agrees.
Nat holds up her camera. “Kiss!”
And so they kiss.
Back at the hotel, Pauline stands behind the front desk in a navy linen dress. She has the expression of a woman who has been fielding requests that are impossible to field all day long, yet when she sees the wedding people, she gives a cheerful, “Hello! Welcome back! How was your sail?”
“Phenomenal,” Lila says. “Oh, that reminds me. I need to talk to you about my mattress.”
Lila turns to Pauline, and the group scatters. Nat and Suz are off to get their nails done. Marla and Juice require naps. Jim heads to the bar with Gary’s father to meet Uncle Jim. And Gary and Phoebe wait for the elevator in silence, listening to Lila explain to Pauline that the mattress is not soft enough.
“Not as soft as I was hoping,” Lila says.
Phoebe wonders if this is how Lila operates. Lila is upset about the funeral on the boat, but she can’t say anything about that, so she complains about the mattress to Pauline, because that’s where Pauline stands most of the day, waiting for complaints. Pauline is ready to fix any problem, which is why Phoebe is not surprised to see that Pauline has already restored the books on the shelf to their original positions, pages facing out.
“Is there anything you can do?” Lila asks.
“I’m just not sure there is anything we can do about the actual mattress,” Pauline says. “I mean, they’re brand-new mattresses.”
“Unfortunately, those brand-new mattresses are not very comfortable,” Lila says.
Gary looks down at his feet like he’s embarrassed, but then again, what does Phoebe know about Gary really? Gary could like this about Lila. Many men do—it took her a long time to realize that. Some men like the fuss. Some men like being told what to do, because then they never have to make any decisions, never have to think. It was probably very helpful when Lila told him where to hang the nude painting, probably for the same reasons that Phoebe always liked watching Matt roll up his belt into a neat and tidy ball. She liked watching his hand sweep the gutter clean. It’s arousing to see someone passionately take care of all the problems. Especially for someone
like Phoebe, the perpetual passenger of the relationship, according to her therapist—the one who always asked, “Where do you want to go to dinner?” hoping the other person knew where they wanted to go.
But then Gary reaches out and makes a decision. He turns a book around just like she had.
Great Expectations.
Gary holds up his fist. “Free the books,” he says, and Phoebe laughs. She is surprised. Maybe she doesn’t know Gary at all. Maybe Gary makes decisions like that all the time. And why is she always trying to reduce people, squeeze them into these knowable, tiny boxes where there is room for only one or two personality traits? Gary is the stage and Lila is the song, she thinks. But then she thinks: Nobody is ever like anything all of the time. Because one day, Phoebe woke up and decided to kill herself, and that is not what the perpetual passenger of life does. The perpetual passenger of life just continues sitting in bed.
“Free the books,” Phoebe says.
Phoebe turns a book around, too. They continue on like that, freeing the books, while Pauline tries to appease Lila.
“The mattresses may take some time to, you know, break in,” Pauline says.
“Don’t mattresses famously get worse over time?”
“Well, I just don’t know what we can do about the mattresses, to be honest. They are, unfortunately, already here.”
“What about a topper?” Lila asks.
“A topper?” Pauline says. “Yes. That’s what we’ll do. We’ll get you a topper.”
Pauline says the word topper as if it’s foreign, and Phoebe imagines she is writing down on a little pad, What’s a topper? Either way, Pauline sounds relieved.
By the time Lila returns, Gary and Phoebe have freed two shelves of books.
“What are you doing to the décor?” Lila asks. She looks at them like she’s stumbled upon a bank robbery.
“They’re books, not décor,” Phoebe says.
Phoebe doesn’t have too many beliefs, but this is one of them.
“Are you going to tell me that books have souls now or something?” Lila asks.
The elevator doors open.
“I am going to tell you that they are books,” Phoebe says. “They’re meant to be read. That’s what books are.”
“Okay, Siddhartha,” Lila says, then pauses, as if she caught herself being too much like the Lila that she is around Phoebe. “Pauline says she’ll get me a topper. Do you want one, too?”
“No,” Gary says. “I need a firm mattress.”
“Right,” Lila says. “Your back. How is it?”
“It’s, you know, still my back,” he says, and chuckles softly to himself. Then they ride in silence until Lila says, “Why is this elevator so slow?”
“It’s from 1922,” Phoebe says, reading the plaque.
“But why wouldn’t they have renovated it when they redid the hotel?”
“Beats me,” Gary says, and then they are at the top.
“Well, that was fun,” Lila says. “A fun day.”
“Absolutely,” Gary says. “Very fun. A great idea.”
But Phoebe hates the word fun. Phoebe thinks that if people could just stop using the word fun, stop expecting everything to be fun, everything could be fun again. She was exhausted by her husband’s insistence that everything should be fun. He never used to speak like that, when things were actually fun, but at the very end, when nothing was fun, he would say, “Let’s go for drinks, it’ll be fun.” “Let’s go hiking, it’ll be fun.” And wasn’t that why she suggested they go to the Cornwall in the first place? “Let’s do something fun for spring break,” he had said.
“So Vivian, my maid of honor, will be flying in from Chicago tonight,” Lila says. “She’s my best friend from college. She’s amazing. I know you’re both going to love her.”
“I’m sure we will,” Gary says.
Then Lila lists off other good things that will happen today: “The reception will start at seven on the patio. Nat will be playing the harp with an award-winning cellist who served in Iraq and learned to play cello as part of his PTSD treatment, and maybe it would be good to tell Roy that.”
“I’ll let him know,” Gary says.
The doors open.
“Oh, good,” the mother of the bride says, kissing Gary and Lila on the cheek. “You’re back.”
She looks like the kind of woman Phoebe might see at a very high-end flea market. Flowy linen that matches the color of her hair. She gives Phoebe a kiss on the cheek.
“My sweater looks good on you,” the mother says, and pulls away to get a look at her.
Phoebe forgot she wasn’t wearing her own clothes, though how she could forget about sequins on her shoulders and a sunflower wedged between her toes, she’s not sure.
“Mom,” Lila says. “This is Phoebe.”
“So you’re the woman from Missouri who didn’t bring a sweater to the ocean.”
Phoebe smiles and shrugs. “First-timer.”
“I didn’t realize there were people still like that! Well, you certainly need this sweater more than I do.”
Up close, the mother of the bride has a strong jaw, like it’s been strengthened over the years from staring blankly at the ocean. She smells faintly of booze, though what kind Phoebe cannot tell.
“Do be kind to it,” the mother says. “It was the last gift your father ever bought me, you know.”
“Oh,” Phoebe says, horrified. “You know what? I’ll take it off.”
“Don’t be silly,” the mother says, waving her hand. She gives Phoebe a look that suggests she is not, at this point in her life, ever getting anything back. “Enjoy it. It’s yours.”
“Mom,” Lila says, looking at her mother’s door. “Why are there a bunch of statues lined up outside your door?”
“Oh, Carlson is going to remove them,” she says. “This hotel is very lovely, but the art in the room is just terrible. So morbid.”
She picks up one of the statues. “Who would put a sculpture of this dead bird in an old woman’s room?”
They all study the bird sculpture. Lila looks disturbed by it but says, “I don’t think that bird is dead.”
“Is it sleeping?” Phoebe asks.
“I bet it’s just sleeping,” Gary says.
“Since when do birds sleep with their necks all crooked like that?” the mother asks. She points to the other birds against the wall. “Look at them all. They look like they’ve been assassinated.”
“Well, yeah, when you line them up against the wall like that, it’s creepy,” Lila says.
Phoebe takes a closer look. “Ravens actually sleep like that.”
“Of course you know things about the sleeping habits of ravens,” Lila says.
“They tuck their heads into their chests,” Phoebe adds.
“Well, that doesn’t seem very comfortable for them,” the mother says.
“And why is everybody messing with the hotel’s décor?” Lila asks. “The Cornwall hired award-winning designers to plan out every detail of this place. You can’t just move things around.”
“Carlson said I can do what I like,” the mother says.
Lila looks at Gary and Phoebe. “Go on without me.”
Lila starts to bring the bird sculptures back inside her mother’s room as Gary and Phoebe walk down the hall. They don’t say a word until they turn the corner.
“How do you know things about the sleeping habits of ravens?” Gary asks.
“At some point, every lit professor has to spend a full day researching ravens,” Phoebe says. “They’re everywhere. Writers can’t resist a raven. You know, symbols of death and grief and the underworld and all that jazz.”
“Oh, yeah, love that jazz,” Gary says. “Poe, right? That was the raven poem?”
“Nevermore, nevermore.”
“God, I haven’t read that since high school,” he says. “I remember liking it, but now I don’t remember why.”
“It’s very emo,” she says. “Most of my students tend to respond to it for that reason. Brokenhearted man never gets over dead wife.”
She says it without thinking, but he doesn’t seem rocked by her words.
“I’m just impressed they care about the middle-aged longings of a grieving widower, to be honest,” Gary says.
“My students tend to love characters who sentence themselves to never- ending grief,” Phoebe says. “It seems noble to young people, I think.”
“Little do they know the truly heroic thing is somehow … taking a shower and getting yourself to the grocery store.”
They laugh.
“I just want to say thanks for helping Juice with her dog,” Gary says, still sounding caught up in some emotion from earlier that day. “I know it probably seemed weird, making such a fuss over a little toy, but she got the dog from her mother just before she died.”
“Oh, trust me, I get it,” Phoebe says. “I could tell it wasn’t just any dog.”
He said that even as Juice got too old for it, she checked on Human Princess every day. She still announced her major achievements at breakfast, like, “The Human Princess is eating,” or “The Human Princess has not been tucked in,” and he and his wife would laugh so hard they’d cry.
“I told her I’d get her a new one after the wedding,” Gary says. “But that’s crazy, right? I mean, even as I said it, I didn’t believe myself. We probably won’t get her a new one. I mean, she’s going to be twelve soon. And my dad’s probably right, it’s probably best we get her a real dog, no?”
“Probably,” she says. “But then again, real dogs require real work. You can’t just drop them in the ocean when they die.”
She and Matt debated for years about how much work a dog would be and would it be worth it. Sometimes, she thought just getting a dog would have been easier than endlessly debating about whether to get a dog.
“But maybe it’s a good thing you can’t just drop them in the ocean?” he asks.
They both seem to feel confused for a moment, thinking about Human Princess falling to the floor of the ocean, not being fed, not being tucked into its virtual bed, when Gary’s Uncle Jim and Aunt Gina come out of their room.
“Gary, the man of the hour,” Uncle Jim says, and pats Gary on the back.
“How are you two doing?” Gary asks, in what sounds like his doctor voice. He turns it on very quickly—smooth, controlled, friendly without being overbearing.
“Oh, just terrible,” Aunt Gina says. “Your uncle slipped on the floor yesterday and hurt his ankle, then played a terrible round this morning.”
“Just terrible,” Uncle Jim says.
Some days Uncle Jim does great. Some days Uncle Jim stinks.
“Lost my swing,” he says.
“You’ll get it back,” Aunt Gina says. “You always do.”
“I’m not worried, Gina,” Uncle Jim says. “I know I’ll get it back. Jesus.”
Then Uncle Jim leans in and says, “Hey, son, we have a question for you. It’s about your Aunt Gina’s bowels.”
“It’s terrible,” Aunt Gina says. “I haven’t gone since Friday. Travel always does this to me.”
“You just came from Cranston,” Gary says. “It’s only thirty minutes away.”
“Just the idea of traveling gets me,” Aunt Gina says.
“I can come by later,” Gary says, and pats his uncle on the back. “But you know I can’t give you actual medical advice, right? I’m not your doctor.”
“Oh, stop it,” Uncle Jim says. “You’re our nephew. Of course you can. What’s the point of my nephew being a shit doctor if we can’t get some free medical advice?”
When they walk away, it takes only one look from Gary to make Phoebe burst into laughter. Everything is light between them again, like earlier on the boat. Like last night in the hot tub.
“You must get that a lot, don’t you?” Phoebe asks.
“Let’s just say that I know the shape and size and color of the shits of about fifty percent of the inhabitants in any given room,” Gary says.
They laugh. She knows she should head into her room now. She knows they have been talking for too long. But she is not quite ready to leave yet. She doesn’t want to go back to being entirely alone in her room again.
“Hey, I’m sorry I was so forward in the hot tub last night,” Phoebe says. “Had I known.”
“Please don’t apologize,” he says. “I should have told you I was the groom.”
“Yeah, why didn’t you tell me you were the groom?”
“I don’t normally go around introducing myself as a groom.”
“You might need to start. You made me think you were…”
“What?”
“A regular person in a hot tub.”
“You made me think you were a regular person, too. But apparently you’re Lila’s friend from the art gallery?”
“I’m not,” Phoebe says. “I mean, I guess I became her friend, like literally last night. Or maybe this morning. I’m not sure. But we didn’t meet at an art gallery.”
“Why would Lila say you met at the gallery then?” Gary looks concerned, as if Phoebe is going to say something that might reveal the true character of his future wife. And Phoebe doesn’t know why Lila lied to them all but suspected it had something to do with how Marla’s face lit up when she mentioned the gallery. Or how embarrassing it would be to explain to everyone how Phoebe and Lila really met.
“Better to lie than tell everyone on the boat that I’m the crazy suicidal woman she met in the elevator yesterday,” Phoebe says.
“You’re not crazy,” Gary says. “Please don’t say that. That’s truly all I ask.”
She nods. She won’t. “But I could have been—”
“No, you were great,” he says. “You were so…”
Gary thinks for a moment, not like he is hesitating, but like he is trying to find the most accurate word.
“So what?” she asks.
She is surprised that she genuinely wants to know. She has always been so afraid to know things about herself—so afraid of reading the truth in course evaluations, or seeing her large nose in a photograph, or listening to her therapist draw unbearably accurate conclusions about her. “Have you always been this critical of yourself?” he asked her. And yes. Yes. She has.
“I’m literally a critic,” she reminded her therapist, and he laughed. And where did she learn this? How did she become so good at identifying flaws? At seeing only the fungus on the trees?
“Alive,” Gary says. “You struck me as a person who was fully alive. It was inspiring, actually.”
Maybe it should be embarrassing to talk like this, to be so sincere in the middle of a hotel hallway at five in the evening, but Gary doesn’t seem embarrassed about it. Maybe one becomes comfortable with sincerity when they listen to people talk about their own shit with the utmost seriousness. He spends his days in a small room where people can only ever live or die. He is the one trusted with telling people the absolute truth about their assholes. Not to mention, their fates. Whereas Phoebe was trained in the depressive school of her father, and then the snark of graduate school, taught to poke holes in everyone’s arguments, to see the fatal flaws in papers, and it had been exciting for a short period of time. “For Matthews to claim that Jane Eyre is or is not a feminist text is to misunderstand what feminism is,” Phoebe wrote in her one published paper. She had been proud when it came out, but then for months after, she had a sour taste in her mouth, like she had put something rotten out into the world, and every time she worked on her book, she felt like she was just waiting for a critic to point out the ways it was spoiled. Who cares how many times Jane Eyre goes walking? How can Stone claim the natural world is both a domestic space and a public space at the same time? And how does the freedom Eyre experiences on those walks with Rochester not contradict Stone’s earlier claim that Jane is “trapped in the ‘unnatural’ world of a man’s making”? That’s usually when Phoebe stopped working on her book and picked up her cigarette.
Phoebe prefers this new way of talking. And maybe this is just one of the really nice things about getting older. Maybe this is the part of her life when she gets to start saying what she means, for better or worse. Because no amount of truth can be worse than the feeling she got after years of hiding from it.
“Thank you for saying that,” Phoebe says.
“Will we see you at the … reception then?” Gary says, so awkwardly that it feels like it’s the end of a date. And how easy it would all be if it were the end of a date. How nice it would feel to lean forward and kiss him.
But it’s not a date. Lila is coming down the hall. Lila belongs to Gary and Gary belongs to Lila, and Phoebe belongs to no one.
“No,” Phoebe says. “Like I said, I’m really not a part of the wedding.”
“Take care then,” Gary says. He gives her a long hard look, like he knows this will be the last time they ever see each other.
“Bye,” she says.
IN THE ROOM, Phoebe feels disappointed to return to the facts of her own life, to the night she will spend in the Roaring Twenties all alone. Not to mention, the life she will spend alone. And why does she do this? Why does she have a nice day with people, feel connected to them, and then, when alone, think only about the possible horrors of her isolation ahead?
“You catastrophize,” her therapist said to her once. “Depressive realism.”
She knows that. Yet her thoughts still have power over her anyway. They make her feel pinned to the checkered rug, to her solitary existence.
She thinks she should probably call a new therapist. But she still has this feeling that she is outside of time. She is supposed to be dead, and she’s not—it helps every time she remembers she’s living in some kind of bonus afterlife where she has a view of the ocean and a man named Carlson who shows up at sunset to “turn down” the room.
“Turn down?” Phoebe asks.
“Get you ready for the night,” Carlson says.
“That’s a service you provide here?”
Phoebe imagines Carlson pulling down her sheets, tucking her in like her father once had. Telling Phoebe sweet things about the universe like her husband used to. Petting her head as she drifts off into a sleep with no dreams.
“Yes,” Carlson says. “We are so sorry to have suspended it for the reception last night.”
Phoebe watches Carlson turn down the room. Lower the shades. Turn on the lights, fluff the coconut pillow. Pull the bedsheet down.
It is nice, this ritual. She likes that there is a specific phrase for it, this turning down of the room, this recognition that night is something we must prepare for. Because the night is hard.
Usually the worst time of day for Phoebe, when the depression surfaces like a cyst. Her therapist suggested that maybe it was body-related, maybe she just had a sugar deficiency, and maybe she would be happier if she ate six snacks a day. But she started to eat six snacks a day and the sun would begin to set and she would look at her husband’s shoes still by the door and she sobbed so loudly in the empty kitchen that it scared her. She would crawl into bed and think of all the different women she could have become. All the different ways better women end their days. How did Mia end her day?
She didn’t know why the end of each day always felt like such a test, but it did. It felt like a rehearsal for the end of life, which did not bode well for her, because Phoebe often did it with a drink in her hand, watching endless episodes of some period drama. Phoebe turned on all the lights at home and then her TV and lowered the woofer because the sounds of the British rifles were too realistic.
“Anything else you need?” Carlson asks.
It is nice the way everyone here keeps asking this, even if it’s just their job. Each time feels like another chance to practice asking for what she needs, something that used to be so difficult for Phoebe. I need to go on that vacation in March, she should have said. I need you to tell me that you love me more often right now, she should have said. But it had felt humiliating. Because her husband needed nothing—he was always so busy, so totally fine, always walking out the door with a million papers in his hand.
But Carlson waits, gives Phoebe time to think, looks at her as if he really wants to help, and maybe he does.
“I need a phone charger,” Phoebe says.
“Sure thing,” he says. “Anything else?”
“And a drain stopper for the tub.”
“Absolutely,” Carlson says. “I’ll be right back.”
“You’re not going to CVS, right?” she asks.
He laughs. “No. Just downstairs.”
She likes his Southern drawl and wonders if, like Pauline, he sounds nicer than he is. Though she suspects this is true of most people, especially herself. Because Phoebe was not nice. No—Phoebe was just trying very hard to be liked, even by Mia and her husband, even after the affair. She behaved like she was a very nice woman in an Ibsen play, waiting for the audience to clap or turn on her at any moment. To declare her a terrible woman or a great woman. But in her fantasies, she didn’t think nice things. She always wished bad things for them both.
“Here you go,” Carlson says when he returns, and presents the drain stopper and the phone charger on the brass platter. This time, she actually laughs.
“These brass platters are funny,” Phoebe says.
“We have to do it,” he says, and smiles.
“Where are you from?”
“Georgia, but I’m coming up from South Carolina,” he says. He works at their resort down there. He’s just here to offer some help as they get settled again after Covid. “We’re short-staffed.”
“Well, thank you for your service,” she says, and it’s so overly formal, it makes him laugh.
He does a grand bow. “You’re welcome, my dear. Now you enjoy your evening.”
HOW DOES ONE enjoy an evening?
She charges her phone. She puts on the fluffy robe. She fills the Victorian tub. She lets out her hair. Combs it with the softest brush she has ever felt as the sky turns pink.
She steps in the warm water one foot at a time. She opens Mrs. Dalloway. She makes it to Septimus’s suicide and then she reads on until the water gets cold. She turns on the hot water again and begins to wash. She picks up the shower head, and washing is less romantic than it appears
it would be in a tub with vintage brass hardware. She goes to wet her hair and sprays water all over the floor by accident.
“Shit,” she says.
Eventually she gives up trying to bathe beautifully in this tub. She gives up trying to feel like she’s in a painting. She doesn’t have to be beautiful in this moment. She doesn’t have to be anything, ever. Her husband is not watching. Her father is not watching. Nobody was ever really watching, except Phoebe. Phoebe was the only person waiting in the dark to condemn herself for every single thing when the day was over.
“Can you take a different approach?” her therapist asked her. “Can you sometimes just try to love what you hate about yourself?”
She didn’t understand this question at the time. She didn’t understand how she could love herself. She didn’t understand what people even meant when they said they loved themselves. She honestly didn’t believe them. How could you love yourself? How could you love yourself when you know every single horrible thing you’ve ever thought? When you end most nights fantasizing about your husband fucking his mistress against the wall? And sometimes, Phoebe is in the fantasy, too. Phoebe is there to watch, to tell her husband he must do it harder and harder and harder.
“It’s sick,” Phoebe told her therapist.
“Why does it have to be sick?” he asks. “Why can’t it just be you, wanting to be a part of it?”
“Okay, so it’s sick and pathetic,” Phoebe said.
“It’s not pathetic to want things, Phoebe,” he said. “It’s good.”
“It’s not good to want that.”
But now she can understand what he was trying to tell her. It is good to want things, even the humiliating things. Even the things you aren’t supposed to want, like Gary, the groom. Because every time she thinks of sitting in that hot tub with Gary, she feels so lucky to be alive. She can’t believe she almost missed the chance to meet him. She can’t believe she almost threw her body away. This beautiful body, she thinks, and runs her fingers over the soft fuzz of hair that has grown on her legs. The scar on her knee. Her breasts, sticking out of the water like two smooth and ancient rocks in the ocean. And it turns her on a little, just looking at her breasts, so
she starts to touch herself. She always thought it was a myth, all these water orgasms women were having in movies, but she can feel herself get close, feel her whole body begin to shake, when the door opens.
“Phoebe!” Lila shouts as she walks in.
“Jesus,” Phoebe says, sitting up so fast, water spills over the edges. She is flushed from the hot water, the heat of being caught. But Lila only notices the soaked phone on the ground.
“You can put that in dry rice and it’ll be fine,” Lila says. “I’m sure Pauline can get you some from the kitchen. Want me to call?”
“No,” Phoebe says.
Phoebe is not worried about the phone. Phoebe is more worried about how Lila got in here. But Lila just starts talking.
“God, I don’t know how Gary is related to Marla,” Lila says. “Could you believe Marla today? Honestly, the Vacation in a Cup thing. I don’t even know why I bother being so nice to her. And Juice, too. It’s like they hate me! They probably do hate me. And fine, I get it. I’m really fucking rich. I know it’s annoying. But I’m not rude to people. I’m not a bitch like Marla! And I know I’m not supposed to call another woman that, but what am I supposed to do if she’s just a bitch?”
Phoebe stares in disbelief as Lila sits down on the tiny black bathroom chair, which suddenly looks like it was put there just so Lila could sit on it and call people bitches.
“She was even worse at the cocktail party tonight,” Lila says. “I coughed, because I got some vodka down the wrong pipe, and Marla looked at me and was like, I’m sorry, but you just can’t cough like that in public anymore. And I said nothing, of course. Because she’s going to be my sister-in-law. I am going to have to spend the rest of the week with her. I mean, the rest of my life, technically. Though we don’t have to spend every holiday together. Like, we get Halloween to ourselves, right?”
The tub is cold again. Phoebe turns on the hot water, but it’s too hot and burns Phoebe’s fingers. This is how it happens. She just lets people around her do what they want. She doesn’t call them on their shit. She pretends like she has no needs, like it’s just fine to walk into her room when she was in the middle of trying to have an orgasm.
“How did you get in here?” Phoebe asks.
“I have a key,” Lila says.
“You have a key?”
“Yeah, I got a key when I booked the room for the week,” Lila says.
“Okay,” Phoebe says. “But that doesn’t mean you can just walk in on me while I’m in the middle of taking a bath.”
“Oh, I don’t mind you being naked,” Lila says, staring directly at Phoebe’s breasts. “I lived in a dorm room all my life. Seeing a naked woman is basically like seeing wallpaper.”
“That wasn’t my point, either,” Phoebe says.
“Then what’s the point?”
“The point is, I was about to have an orgasm!”
“In the water? That actually works?”
“Now we’ll never know, will we?”
“And my life is not perfect. Have you even been listening to a word I’ve been saying?”
“I have, yes,” Phoebe says. “You have a sister-in-law who doesn’t want to get Covid. A mother who is not dead and in attendance at your wedding. Not to mention a fiancé who is really wonderful.”
“Oh my God, not you, too,” Lila says. “You sound like Nat and Suz.”
“Nat and Suz are right,” Phoebe says. “He’s wonderful.”
“What do you think is so wonderful about him?”
“Don’t you already know what’s wonderful about him?”
“Of course I know. But it’s more interesting to hear what you think is wonderful.”
Lila waits.
“Please?”
“He’s sincere,” Phoebe says, because if Lila wants honesty, she will get honesty. “He seems to accept that people are, well, human.”
“Okay,” Lila says, clearly unsatisfied. “But what else?”
“He’s smart. But he’s curious, too. A lifelong learner type.”
“A lifelong learner?”
“He’s engaged with the world. Like he’s on a mission to know it better. And he’s funny, but not in-your-face funny. Just in that dry kind of way
that’s hard to notice at first, because he looks more friendly than funny, but once you do, you can’t stop seeing it.”
“But do you think he’s attractive?” Lila asks.
“You want to know if I think your fiancé is attractive?”
“I’m curious what you see.”
“Yes, I think he’s attractive,” Phoebe says, and it feels good to admit it out loud. Especially to Lila. “Very attractive, actually.”
This seems to please Lila, but then she looks momentarily doubtful. “Even with the beard?”
“The beard is maybe the best part.”
“But it’s gray.”
“A sexy kind of gray.”
“Gray is not sexy.”
“It’s like just a touch of gray,” Phoebe says. “Just enough to make him seem wizened.”
“That sounds way too close to wizard.”
“They’re actually not etymologically related.”
“Sometimes he does look like a wizard, though.”
“He does not look like a wizard,” Phoebe says. “He looks like a man with a beard.”
“Every man with a beard looks a little like a wizard.”
“Trust me, Gary seriously has the most ideal hair situation for a man his age.”
“That’s what I used to think,” Lila says. “But then he grew his beard and it came out all gray. I think if he just shaves the beard, it might be better.”
“I’m not sure it’s ever that simple.”
“That sounds cryptic.”
“Not cryptic.”
“Yes cryptic. Are you mad at me or something?”
“No, I’m not mad at you,” Phoebe says, but then remembers she is trying to be honest. “I’m annoyed.”
“With me? Why?”
“Because I was trying to take a bath!” Phoebe says. “And you just waltz in without even knocking, then sit down and bitch about your sister-in-law and your fiancé’s sexy gray beard and your million-dollar wedding to a naked and suicidal and divorced woman in a tub, and you think that’s really how I want to spend my bath? You think that’s fair to do to me?”
Lila looks hurt or confused or both. But Phoebe doesn’t care.
“And you do, I think!” Phoebe says. “You really think you can just walk around, spewing your inner monologue onto everything, but you can’t. You have to respect people. You have to knock on their doors before walking into their bedroom. Nobody cares that you’re the fucking bride. It doesn’t give you a license to just watch people bathe. You’re not God. You’re just another fucking woman, put here on earth like the rest of us.”
“But I did knock on your door,” Lila says. “You didn’t answer.”
“If a person doesn’t answer, that means you don’t come in.”
“Well, excuse me, but I was worried you might be dead!”
“Oh,” Phoebe says.
It honestly didn’t occur to Phoebe that Lila might still be worried about her, since Lila never seems particularly worried about anything but her wedding. Yet Phoebe is softened by the thought. Lila was worried she might be dead. Of course. That’s what happens when you tell people you’re suicidal. They worry about you. They worry about you so much, it makes them angry, too.
“You really want to talk about fair?” Lila asks. “You think it’s okay to tell someone that you want to die, then kick them out of the room, and then act like it’s not going to affect them in any way whatsoever? I’m not a monster, Phoebe. I would care if a woman died at my wedding. I have feelings. But everybody thinks that just because I’m like really fucking blond or something, I don’t have feelings, but you know what? My hair is not even blond!”
“It’s not?” Phoebe asks. “It’s impressively natural seeming.”
“Well, it’s brown, just like my father’s! And my grandfather’s! We’re Italian!”
“You are?”
“Like, a quarter! My dad’s dad was Italian,” she says. “My name is actually Lila Rossi-Winthrop, a hyphen that my parents fought over their entire lives. My father was so proud to be Italian, never really forgave my mother for not taking his name, even though he’s a total hypocrite. Because when I grew out my dark hair in college, do you know what my father said? He said, I liked you better as a blonde. And so now I am here, with super blond hair, because not even my own father likes my real hair. Which is really just his hair. The man gave it to me, then acts like it’s my fault for growing it!”
Lila stands up.
“Everybody in my life is always telling me I can be anyone I want, but then whenever I do one thing they don’t like, they act like I’ve ruined myself,” Lila says. “And so I come up here, because you’re the only person at this wedding who doesn’t seem to give a shit what I do.”
None of what Lila says is a surprise to Phoebe, yet it’s a surprise to hear Lila say it. Phoebe looks at Lila, a bride still in her white silk reception dress. It has cherries on the trim. It makes her look a few years younger than she is. It must have taken her hours to get ready for the reception, carefully considering each decision, and yet, she is not even at the reception. It makes Phoebe feel suddenly tender toward Lila, like Lila is the old Phoebe now. Lila is the one hiding in the library or in the dark of her room because she feels most comfortable there.
“That’s really why you’re here?” Phoebe asks.
“Yes,” she says. “And also because my maid of honor, Vivian, just called to say she’s not coming. I was upset.”
They laugh.
“Shit,” Phoebe says.
“Her son has Covid.”
“Double shit.”
“But does she need to really be there if he has Covid? Like, can’t Max take care of the kid for once?” Lila wonders. “Max is seriously the worst, by the way. I mean, he’s the best in the worst kind of way.”
“You lost me.”
“He researches endangered jaguars or something. They like, fell in love on some research trip trying to save the last living jaguar in South America. But now that they have a kid, she is always at home, while he’s traveling the world counting up all the jaguars, I guess. Needless to say it’s very … annoying. For Viv, I mean. Viv is always stuck taking care of the kid.”
“Maybe she’s not stuck. Maybe she likes it.”
“Nobody likes that.”
“Some people like it.”
“I try to like it,” Lila confesses. “But most nights, Gary doesn’t make it home in time from work and it’s always just me and Mel at dinner. Sometimes, it’s okay. Sometimes we just watch a movie or something. But sometimes, when I make her sit at the table, it’s excruciating.”
And she doesn’t know if this is Juice’s fault or her own.
“She hardly ever speaks to me,” Lila says. “And I never know what to say to her. I ask her about school, about her friends, about why she wants to be called Juice now. But she’s just like, It’s none of your business, which means that it has something to do with her mom, but she won’t say it. She’s just like, Because my name is Juice now, and so I’m supposed to just start calling her Juice?”
She sighs.
“I don’t know. Maybe I’m just not very good at being around children. My mother was right. I didn’t even know how to be a child when I was a child. And sometimes I wonder if the people who say they love being around children are lying. It’s like people who claim to like raisins. They just want to be people who like raisins.”
“I like raisins.”
“Well, of course you like raisins.”
“My hands are like raisins,” Phoebe says, holding up her pruned fingertips.
“You should probably get out of the tub,” Lila says.
“But I haven’t even washed my hair yet. To be honest, it’s actually really hard to bathe in this thing. I’ve decided it’s one of those things that looks more romantic than it is.”
“Like chocolate,” Lila says.
“And cross-country skiing in the forest.”
“And paddleboats. I loathe paddleboats.”
The thing she is starting to love about Lila is this: She begins to shampoo Phoebe’s hair without a word and continues her angry chatter in such fixed tones, it becomes soothing to Phoebe.
“Do you think it’s weird that you’re the only one I can tell all this stuff to?” Lila asks.
“I wouldn’t say weird,” Phoebe says. “But maybe it’s a little sad.”
“It is sad,” Lila admits. “It’s really sad. And how did that happen? How did I end up becoming a person who has nobody?”
“You have Gary.”
“But I can’t be honest with Gary,” she says. “I can’t tell him that I’m not sure I really like his daughter. That I pretty much hate his sister. That I’m sick and tired of hearing about his dead wife.”
“What about Nat and Suz? You could tell them.”
“Not really.”
Lila admits she does not do the best job of keeping in touch with her friends when they are no longer right in front of her face. She has no idea what’s going on in their lives, really. She knows that Viv is somewhat responsible for repopulating the Atlanta Zoo with the giant panda. She knows that Nat is married to the third violin in the Detroit Symphony. And she knows that Suz has a baby, and she thinks it’s weird how she calls the baby a little worm, but also maybe it’s cute. The point is—Lila doesn’t know. She wishes she could ask, but they don’t ask each other real things like that anymore.
“When my father died, none of them called,” Lila says.
They just sent texts. Heart emojis. They said, We’re here for you, Lila, and Suz sent a picture of the Little Worm like she was the moral support. And it weirdly made Lila feel like she couldn’t call them. All she wanted to do was sob in their arms like she had once in high school. But the time for that seemed to be over.
“Ever since I arrived here, I’ve had this feeling that we’re just pretending to still be friends. Reenacting the friendship the way it used to be, when we were actually close,” Lila says.
That was how Phoebe felt at the end of her marriage. They reenacted the beginning—went on date nights, invited each other to things. Matt was always saying, Sure, yes, come to happy hour. But she could feel how he didn’t really care if she came. Her presence had somehow become irrelevant to her own husband, and how are people supposed to tolerate that kind of pain? How are you supposed to go from being the center of someone’s world to being irrelevant? To sobbing in your best friend’s arms unthinkingly to being afraid to call them after your father dies? Phoebe doesn’t know. She, too, was caught unprepared by that kind of loss.
“That’s sort of how it is with everyone here,” Lila says. “Like I’m pretending. Acting out this idea of what we once were or what we could be.”
Phoebe wants to ask what she pretends to be with Gary. But it doesn’t seem right. She’s in a fragile state. It feels like one small pull of the thread, and Lila will unravel. And Lila surely has to go back out to her cocktail party. It’s only eight.
“When does the pretending stop?” Lila asks.
“I’d like to say whenever you want it to,” Phoebe says, but she knows this isn’t true. It’s harder than that. “But I think it stops when you get fed up.”
“Fed up with what?”
“Yourself,” Phoebe says.
“But how long does that take?” Lila asks, as if she’s at the doctor, writing down notes.
“It took me forty years.”
“Well, that’s not promising. Forty is so far away.”
“I mean, it doesn’t have to happen at exactly forty.”
But Lila puts her face in her hands. “Ugh. I can’t believe I have no maid of honor.”
“Maybe Pauline will do it.”
Lila doesn’t smile. She doesn’t seem to like the joke. “Will you do it?”
“I’m not in the wedding.”
“I’m the bride. I get to decide who’s in the wedding. It’s like being the president of your very own country. So ta-da, now you’re in the wedding.”
“But I don’t even know you,” Phoebe says, and as soon as she says it, Phoebe regrets saying it. She knows it’s no longer true.
“You already know me better than most people at this wedding,” Lila says. “Except for maybe my high school guidance counselor.”
“Why did you invite your high school guidance counselor, by the way?”
“Is that weird?”
“It’s a little weird.”
“Well, he’s local. And he was really very kind to me when I was a kid,” she says. “A better mother to me than my own mother. Even gave me his sweater once when I got my period on his office chair.”
“Even stranger.”
“You think so?”
“I think he probably got the invitation and was like, Wait, what? The girl who menstruated on my chair?”
Lila laughs loudly and looks truly happy for a second.
“He probably did,” she says. “Because actually it is a little weird. I finally had a chance to talk to him, and he was so familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, halfway through the convo, I was like, Wait, who are you? Why did I invite you?”
She laughs again and it’s good to hear Lila make fun of herself. But Phoebe is starting to understand that on some nights, Lila is probably the loneliest girl in the world, just like Phoebe. And maybe they are all lonely. Maybe this is just what it means to be a person. To constantly reckon with being a single being in one body. Maybe everybody sits up at night and creates arguments in their head for why they are the loneliest person in the world. Lila has no maid of honor and Phoebe has never been a maid of honor. It has always been a mark of shame for her, that no woman in this world was willing to claim her.
“Anyway. It’s not even like you have to do that much,” Lila says. “Viv already planned everything. You’ll see tomorrow, it’s all in the binder. You just kind of have to like, read the binder and then stand there and do what Viv would have done.”
“You do remember that I came to this hotel to kill myself,” Phoebe says.
Saying it aloud makes her feel very far away from that woman who put on her green dress and came here to die—to think of someone being in that much pain. To think of herself walking in here like she had no other option. Phoebe wants to hug that woman, not hurt her.
Her therapist was right. She won’t kill herself. She is not the type. She has always known this about herself but somehow forgot. Somehow, everything felt so dark back at home, and only now that she is here can Phoebe look back and see just how dark. At the time, the darkness felt like life. Phoebe was too familiar with it, the way she was too familiar with her own house. She could walk to the bathroom in the middle of the night, no problem—she knew the knobs on every door, could feel the walls of her house like they were the walls of her own body. To be stuck inside her house was to be stuck inside herself and all the choices she made over the years.
“I’ll do it,” Phoebe says. Saying it aloud feels like grabbing on to something.
“Yes!” Lila says. She claps her hands and Phoebe starts to feel a tiny bit excited. Phoebe does not have to go back—not yet. “Tomorrow morning, you can join us for the bridal brunch in the conservatory.”
A ridiculous sentence if Phoebe ever heard one. But she’s cheered by the thought.
“Only if you get this shampoo out of my hair,” Phoebe says.
Lila holds the shower head above Phoebe. The water is warm down her back. Phoebe sinks deeper into the tub.
“Have you tried the back scrubber?” Lila asks.
“There’s no back scrubber.”
“They didn’t give you a back scrubber?”
“I don’t need a back scrubber.”
“How else were you planning on scrubbing your back?”
“Do I need to scrub my back?”
“Have you never washed your back before?”
“Maybe not?”
The only time she ever washed her back was when she showered with her husband. At the start of their relationship. Their first trip to the Ozarks,
in the little B&B, how they would wash each other. She remembers the feeling of him spreading the soap over her back, his hands sliding down her spine.
“Head back,” the bride says.
Just submit, Phoebe thinks. Put your head back and close your eyes and let the water rush down your body. Let the bride wash the shampoo out of your hair if that’s what the bride wants to do. You’re the maid of honor now.
BY THE TIME Phoebe turns her phone on, it is dark outside. She sits on the balcony and listens to all the messages come in at once. A familiar ding, yet the phone feels foreign in her hand, like some object pulled from an archaeological dig, filled with messages that no longer have anything to do with her.
Bob asking why she took off in the middle of her Intro to Lit class.
Her student Sam who wants her to know that she didn’t come to class today because her grandmother had a bloody nose and her bloody nose got all over Leaves of Grass and she thinks it’s probably a biohazard to bring the book into a public space now, though she knows how Dr. Stone feels about students who do not bring their books, but the syllabus doesn’t mention what to do if the book is covered in actual human blood? This is what Sam needs to know. Thanks!, she wrote.
And then Bob again.
Are you okay? Bob wrote. Because Bob is not a total jerk. Bob is wondering where she is. Does she need a medical leave of absence? Does he need to get another adjunct to cover the semester for her? Will she be back?
And then there are the texts from her husband. They start on late Tuesday, just before midnight.
Phoebe, her husband texted. It might be weird to say this, but it felt equally weird not to have wished you a good start to the semester when I saw you today in the office. So, I guess what I am trying to say is, I hope your classes went well today.
But by this morning, he was concerned.
Hate to bug you again, but Bob emailed and is wondering where you are. I told him I don’t know. Are you okay?
And now he is very concerned.
Phoebe, I know I don’t have a right to ask, but if you could please let me know if you’re okay, I’d really appreciate that. I’m very worried about you.
Now he’s worried? She is stunned by his sudden concern. Because why wasn’t he worried two years ago when he left? Or on her birthday last May, when she woke up and the first sound out of her mouth was a sob that had sounded so much like an animal dying in the woods it spooked Phoebe into silence?
She doesn’t respond. Maybe I’ll never respond again, she thinks.
But she should write to Bob. She types and deletes a few responses.
I am going to be back in a week, after I finish taking care of my dying grandmother’s estate.
I am researching 19th-century estates on the East Coast for my book, which I am going to seek publication for in 2023. (Did you know Edith Wharton lived in Newport?) My research might take all semester.
But none of this is true. Writing these emails makes her feel like her students lying their way out of something. And she is lying—she has no idea what she will do after the wedding. She can’t imagine going back now. But she also can’t imagine not going back.
I will need someone to cover my classes this week, she writes to Bob. I am very sorry for taking off without any notice, and I’ll write as soon as I can when I have more information about what I am going to do regarding the rest of the semester. Thank you for understanding.
She uses the flashlight on her phone to finish Mrs. Dalloway. But when she’s done, she doesn’t go inside. She wants to stay and look up at the stars. At home, she would never sit out in the dark alone. But nighttime in a hotel is a different thing. At night, a hotel comes alive. The fairy lights in the garden start to sparkle. The experimental harpist and cellist begin to play. The wedding people sprawl out of the parlor and assemble on the patio. They are still partying. The wedding people are always partying. It feels like what they are sent here by God to do. To have loose ties around their
white collared shirts and to laugh very hard while slamming the tables with their palms.
She read something once about how the cello is soothing because it mirrors something about our physiology. Phoebe can’t remember what exactly. But it does soothe her. So do the sounds of doors closing, opening, closing, opening. The sink running next door. The roll of laughter so steady and constant, rising and falling like waves. The constant motion of the world. The whole place is designed to keep her from descending into despair. On every wall, there is evidence that somebody has thought about her stay here. The little candles on the tables below. The torches that come on automatically at dusk.
It is so easy to hate Mrs. Dalloway for worrying so much about her stupid party, the way it’s so easy to hate the bride, she thinks. But in the end, everybody goes to the party and that’s the point. It’s Mrs. Dalloway who brings them all together in a modern world full of railroads and wars and illnesses that are always tearing people apart. If the problem is loneliness, then in this way, and maybe in only this way, Mrs. Dalloway is the hero for giving everybody a place to be.