All through the barre class, Sherri chewed the inside of her cheek to keep herself from screaming. It. Was. So. Hard. And it was the strangest kind of hard. Sometimes you scarcely moved at all, you did strange swingy things with your hips, you picked up teeny tiny weights. But by the time they’d done their damage, you felt like you were holding two four-ton concrete pilings in each hand.
In the first section (“arms”), she thought she was going to throw up. In the second (“quads”), pass out. By the time they got through glutes and abs to the stretching, at the end, she didn’t even have the energy to lie down flat on the mat, the way all the other women were doing. “Savasana,” apparently. She just slunk out the door and made her way on quivering muscles to her car.
It was difficult to explain the sensation that had come over Sherri during the barre class—it was a feeling of helplessness, of haplessness, such as she hadn’t experienced in a very long time, not since she’d been forced to play volleyball in high school gym class. (“Look where you want the ball to go, Sherri!” the gym teacher had cried again and again. “Not where you’re afraid it’s going!”) Sherri had never, ever gotten the hang of volleyball. Nor badminton. Really, anything with a net. And now, apparently, anything with a barre as well. In her old life, of course, she’d been curvier. And if she got too curvy, there was good old-fashioned dieting. A home gym, although Bobby used that more than Sherri.
It was some time later that she fully felt the sting of her failure and her exclusion. She had stopped in to pick up Katie’s summer reading book at the lovely little bookstore on State Street. She peeked in the window of the coffee shop next door and saw the whole group, bent over their lattes and cappuccinos, talking earnestly. Her cheeks burned, and she ducked her head, turning away from the window.
She thought she’d navigated the most difficult experiences of her life already, before she and Katie had arrived here. Now, with her legs about to give out on her, looking at these women whose daughters controlled the incoming sixth grade, she wondered if her biggest challenges might still be coming.
There had been talk of a lunch table. Katie had to get a seat at that lunch table.
She turned around and almost ran into another woman, the woman who had been kind to her at the restaurant. She combed her mind for the name.
“Rebecca,” said the woman. “Morgan’s mom? We met briefly at the beach, and then at dinner.” Rebecca’s eyes flicked toward the coffee shop and back to Sherri. Instantly Sherri understood. Either by her own choice or the choice of others, she hadn’t been included either.
“Hey, Morgan and I are planning on going to the beach today. Are you free? You and your daughter should come.”
Rebecca offered to pick up Sherri and Katie, explaining that she already had a parking pass to get onto the reservation and it would be silly for Sherri to pay the parking fee. Sherri didn’t know what “the reservation” was until they arrived; apparently it was a state-owned beach with a campground and miles of parking for which you could use the special pass. Nothing to do with Indians, as Sherri had initially thought. Oh, she had so much to learn.
Sherri found out a few things about Rebecca right off the bat, after they settled themselves into their beach chairs (Rebecca had brought one for Sherri) and watched the girls run off with boogie boards. Rebecca worked in a nearby town as a second-grade teacher. Her older daughter, Alexa, was almost eighteen, headed to Colby in the fall.
In Sherri’s old life her best friends had been the wives of the guys Bobby worked with; they’d been tossed together by circumstance more than temperament or choice. Jennifer with the stables. Lauren with the acrylic nails. Amber with the indoor swimming pool. She’d sometimes wondered what it would have been like to choose her own friends, women she’d met at work (difficult, since Sherri didn’t have a job) or in a book club (impossible; Sherri had never been in a book club). She hadn’t made a friend from scratch in a very long time—since high school, really, and she’d lost touch with most of those friends when she’d started up with Bobby. None of her friends had liked Bobby.
Rebecca reached into her cooler (it had the word yeti printed across the center, just like all of those coolers lined up at the surf-camp beach) and pulled out two cans of something. “Black cherry or ruby grapefruit?” she asked. Seltzer! Just the thing on a hot day. Sherri had brought only water to drink.
“Either,” said Sherri. “Thank you. Unless you’re saving one for Morgan.”
Rebecca let out a friendly sounding snort and handed Rebecca a can. “Uh, I don’t think so,” she said. “Morgan’s not exactly drinking age.”
Sherri took a closer look at the can. White Claw Hard Seltzer. Five percent alcohol. One hundred calories. Sherri thought of Brooke and her rosé by the pool. Did these women drink all day, every day? Well, all right. Sherri could hold her own. She opened her can and took a long sip of the seltzer. She didn’t taste rum, or tequila. Maybe it was vodka? She took another sip, then another. The sun was so lovely. She could almost feel the vitamin D seeping into her bones. She was filled with a sensation of peace and tranquility such as she hadn’t felt since . . . well, in a very long time.
And then her eyes flew open. From out of nowhere she had that panicky feeling again. Where were the girls? Oh, there they were, not on their boogie boards anymore. They were playing around with their phones, taking beach selfies. No self-consciousness about bathing suits when you were eleven years old, all knees and elbows and vertebrae. Not like now, when there were so many different body parts to worry about, things hanging and wobbling. Maybe Sherri should have gotten the breast implants when Bobby offered all those years ago. Lots of the women did. (Implants, and then some. New lips. Bigger eyes. Bigger cheekbones.) But Sherri had always liked her breasts. They were big enough to be serviceable, even attention-seeking, without getting in the way. Now she kept them covered, like she kept so much else covered.
A klatch of teenage girls caught her eye. They were lying on their stomachs in a semicircle, laughing at something on a phone one of them was holding. The seltzer must have gone to her head, because all of the girls looked like Madison Miller, even though Madison Miller had ginger hair and none of these girls did. But they were about Madison Miller’s age, fifteen, sixteen, with bodies that were sleek and brown and hair that sat in tight buns on the tops of their heads. Be careful! Sherri wanted to call to them. Be careful, because you never, ever know.
“Are you okay?” Rebecca had pushed her sunglasses to the top of her head and was peering at Sherri. “You look like you just saw a ghost.”
I did, thought Sherri. There’s a ghost over here, and a ghost over there. This beach is full of ghosts. What she said was, “I think the seltzer might have gone to my head, that’s all.”
“It’s hot,” conceded Rebecca. “And that seltzer is strong.” She reached back into the Yeti and produced two wraps. She took one herself and handed Sherri the other. “Eat,” she commanded.
Sherri did as she was told. Hummus and vegetable. She was ravenous. “Did you make this? This is delicious. This might be the best wrap I’ve ever eaten.” Since she and Katie had become a family of two their meals had been scattershot, made quickly out of boxes and cans. She hadn’t felt settled enough to cook properly, the way she had back in their old house, and often she skipped meals altogether.
“No, I got them at the Natural Grocer,” said Rebecca. “I didn’t know if you or Katie were, you know, vegetarian or vegan or anything so I kept it simple just in case.”
Sherri briefly relived the shame of the surf and turf at Plum Island Grille. “No,” she said. “We’re none of those things. We eat everything. Thank you. This is so—” She felt her voice catch, and she told herself to pull it together. “This is so nice of you.” She tucked her T-shirt closer around her bathing suit. Rebecca had disrobed immediately upon arrival at the beach, showing a body that was nicely toned. She’d bet Rebecca could get through the “glutes” at barre class without feeling like somebody was cutting up her muscles with a Swiss Army knife.
Rebecca’s eyes were on Morgan and Katie. “Did you ever want to have more than one child? Sometimes I feel like Morgan is an only child, she and my older daughter are at such different stages.”
“I definitely wanted more than one,” said Sherri. She had wanted four children, but Bobby said only one. Too much noise made him twitchy; chaos threw him off. He liked everything just so in the house, and even Katie’s possessions, her shoes tossed here and there, sometimes put him over the edge. For a criminal, he was very fastidious. Or maybe all criminals were fastidious. Sherri had never surveyed the other wives about that in particular. Though some of them volunteered marital secrets without being asked for them, so Sherri knew more than she wanted to know about, for example, Tony Cancio and the toe fetish. She wished she could un-know that one.
Maybe it was the alcoholic seltzer talking, or maybe it was the beauty of the summer day, lulling her into an unwarranted state of complacency. Sherri felt, almost, like Rebecca was someone she could confide in. That was a dangerous feeling, and it had to be stopped at all costs. There was no person anywhere Sherri could confide in. She cast about for a change in subject, and her eyes caught on Rebecca’s wedding ring. “What did you say your husband does?” asked Sherri.
“He’s gone,” said Rebecca. She twisted her wedding ring.
“Like, for good?” Sherri asked. Absconded? A deserter?
“He died,” said Rebecca. “Eighteen months ago.”