1976

SUMMER FATTENED EVERYBODY UP. The family buttered without reserve; pie seemed to be everywhere. They awoke and slept and awoke in the summerhouse on the island, ate all their meals on the porch while the sun moved across their sky. They looked out at the saltwater cove and watched the sailboats skim and tack across the blue towards the windward beach, littered with the outgrown shells of horseshoe crabs.

Picture the five of them, looking like a family. Fern was happy because they were together all the time. She baked. Not well, but muffins were muffins and they never went uneaten. Edgar wore the clothes he kept at the Vineyard house, which were stiff with salt and faded from sun. At dawn and dusk and six times between he rolled his pants up and stood at the surfline, his feet sinking a little deeper with each wave. Fern wore a kerchief and dug in the garden, trying to make the cucumbers come up. Cricket was always in a sundress with a rainbow on it, the twins in shorts and sailor shirts embroidered with the name of their grandparents’ boat. Fern was a mother and a wife and herself all at once. Edgar rumpled his children’s hair, kissed his wife on the temple, mended the sails and painted the hulls, sailed out in the Sound and bobbed there, pretending the shoreline away.

—

Edgar loved the eelgrass and the cold water and the thunderstorms so much it was unsayable. He thought that if a poor person told you he loved the eelgrass you would believe him immediately, and how unfair that was if you happened to be rich. As if his feelings were purchased and therefore not true, not a strum he could hear in his ears when he dove from the wet deck of his boat into the Sound, which was the precise cold it had been every summer, and the moon jellies brushed against his legs when he kicked and he held his breath and stayed under as long as he could, submerged in that perfect brine, memorizing for the thousandth time this feeling. That he had a hand-built wooden sailboat made him only able to talk about his swim, his ferocious love for this water, with other people who also had wooden sailboats. Back home, taking his car in for an oil change, he would not be able to answer the question honestly: how was your summer? He would have to abridge, “Beautiful. Water and wind.” He knew that the summerhouse, the sea view, belonged to him because he paid for them, yet it felt like his bloodstream pumped with this place, like the rocks and waves and saltmuck were in him, that he was of them. But money, old money, got all the press.

—

The children were brown with white, white behinds and they wore anklets of poison ivy blisters. For them the whole point of life was to be wet and dry eight times a day and never clean. As the children understood it, there were places where it was summer all year and they could not believe that their parents had chosen this northerly, four-season land. The parents did not have a good explanation. Only that their kind of people did not live in warm places. They could visit—Edgar’s parents owned an island in the Caribbean—but then they had to go back to New England or Chicago or St. Louis or Kansas City, as if the particular ratio of city to country, winter to summer, brick to grass, was necessary for their species to survive.

In the evenings they rowed to a nearby beach for a supper picnic. Fern with a loaf of not very good homemade bread in a checkered cloth on her lap, the kids leaning over the lip of the rowboat hunting for jellyfish, and all of them in the music of Father’s oars dipping, rising, dripping.

There was always sand in the bed and none of them wanted it to end.

—

August arrived despite their prayers that it would not. Each swim and sail meant more. At the county fair Will entered a small schooner he had carved and won first place, but Cricket’s blueberry pie and James’s bouquet of flowers went ribbon-less. They rode the Ferris wheel and admired the blue-ribbon piglets and watched the ox-pull. They begged the days to pass more slowly.

On the morning of Edgar’s birthday, the phone rang. It was Fern’s family’s lawyer. She could picture him with his polished mustache and fat-collared jacket, his feet on the desk. She had talked to him once when her parents had died the winter before and he had told her that he was sorry for her loss and would call in some months when the affairs were in order. Now his voice was flatter. “Fern,” he said. “I don’t know how to tell you this.”

“I’m already an orphan,” she said, trying to make a joke. What other news was there?

“There’s no more money.”

There had been so much for so long, the kind of sums that seemed immune to depletion. “How can there be no more money?”

“It was spent. And your father seems to have made some very generous gifts in his last year.”

“Do you mean no money?”

“The eventual sale of the house will pay the taxes.”

Fern found Edgar on the beach scraping barnacles off an old mooring.

“There’s no more money,” she said to him through the wind. “The money is gone.” It was like announcing a death. The long-ago earning of that money—slaves, cotton, rum—and the spending of it, were done. The money had lived its own life, like a relative.

“What do you mean?” Edgar asked.

“Apparently some of my mother’s sculptures are worth something.”

Edgar put the scraper down in the sand, got up and walked towards the water, dove in. He stayed under long enough that Fern thought he might not come back up. She called his name. She dove in too, wearing her dress, which dragged her down. She called him and called him. She spun in circles trying to find the ripples or bubbles that signaled his body. A moment later, Edgar’s head appeared halfway across the cove. He ran his hands over his hair and eyes. He had swum the distance in one breath. Edgar turned and floated on his back, and Fern could hardly see him—his body was just a shadow between air and water.

—

Edgar remembered going in a limousine with his parents to a fancy holiday party at his father’s downtown Chicago office when he was six. To get there they had to drive through the poorest neighborhoods and he had looked out at those falling-down apartment buildings and the dim lights inside and the trash on the street and at the children and there was Edgar, little Edgar with his tiny tuxedo and his shiny shoes and the small pocketwatch his father had clipped to his belt loop. He was on the inside of the car and the other people were on the outside. Edgar had reached over and rolled the window down a crack and the air that rushed at him was cold and smoky. His father had smacked his hand and reinstated the barrier. He had checked to be sure that the doors were locked. Edgar had felt the wet wool of guilt fall over him. He had looked to his mother to explain fortune, but she had bowed her head and was staring hard at her feet.

Even now that he was grown he could smell the limousine and he could smell the city outside. His had been a wished-for life, something viewed by everyone else from a great distance, and to voice even one experience of difficulty, of loneliness, was not welcome. Being rich had felt to Edgar like treading alone for all of time in a beautiful, bottomless pool. So much, so blue, and nothing to push off from. No grit or sand, no sturdy earth, just his own constant movement to keep above the surface. It was easy to hate riches when they surrounded him, but Edgar did not know how to be any other kind of person. He did not know that in every life the work of want and survival was just as floorless, just as unstopping.

—

When he had come out of the water and dried off, Edgar kissed his wife who was sitting on the sand in her wet dress. He said, “We’ll figure something out.” Though he had no idea how to earn money, this almost felt like good news. His first novel would be out in a year and maybe he could make something of it. They would be just like everybody else. She tried to talk but he said, “Let’s not ruin my birthday. I’m going to get a Danish.”

He drove to the little seaside market for coffee. A beautiful woman in line behind him said, “You look like someone who would appreciate a party.” She was wearing cut-off jean shorts and white go-go boots. Her hair was uncombed and sandy and long and her wet bikini marked her shirt. She was his age or older, he thought, but she seemed sixteen.

“Not me. I’m not that kind of birthday boy,” he said.

“Is it your birthday?”

“Thirty-two,” he said.

“I know how it hurts you boys to grow up. It’s not so bad, you’ll see.” She borrowed a pen from the cashier and wrote down an address. “A friend of mine is hosting. Nine o’clock tonight,” she said. “It’ll be fun, no assholes.”

—

All afternoon Fern thought about the magic key they still held: Edgar could leave their Cambridge life, go back and take over the family steel company in Chicago, his birthright as the only child, and fortune would follow him. It was the very last thing he wanted to do. He would not be able to publish the novel he had spent ten years writing because it was about the son of a steel baron who walks away from his father’s money. But here were these three children and herself with all their various needs and desires, and she had not made this family alone. She looked out the kitchen window at the blue, green and blue again. This was an expensive ocean to love. While the children played cards, Fern went into the bedroom and, shaking, put her finger in the rotary phone’s different circles, calling Edgar’s mother.

That afternoon Fern and the children baked a chocolate cake that looked more homemade than they would have liked. The frosting melted and pooled on the plate. They boiled lobsters and clams and laid a whole bowl of drawn butter at each place setting. The table was clothed and decorated and everyone took showers. Edgar had been out on the water and when he came back his cheeks and eyes were red. Fern wanted to take him into the dark and say something that would make their good life continue.

Mid-meal, the phone rang again. “Fern, sweetheart,” her father-in-law said. “I hear there is something to celebrate. Are you having a party?”

She tried for cheer. “Lobster and steamers and chocolate cake.”

“Good girl. Mary’s on too. Say hi, Mary.”

“Hi, darling,” Fern’s mother-in-law said.

“Can you put Edgar on the extension? So we can all be here together?” Hugh asked.

When their voices were all joined by wires, Edgar’s parents sang to him.

His father said, “Edgar, I want you to know how welcome you are here at Keating Steel. In every way.”

His mother let out a little chuff, the sound of someone who always knew she would win. “You’ll see,” she said. “You’ll see how rich we will make you.”

“Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad,” Fern said, almost too softly to be heard.

Edgar could not see his wife but he could hear her unsteady breath. He understood: she was trying to sell him. He had known her for eleven years and had never hated her, but here was a flare. He squeezed his fists until his nails nearly cut. Fern was ready to transform him into the kind of man who stayed up late in the night working to make the margins between cost and profit wider. So that she could continue to live in a house much bigger than anyone needed, he would have to spend his weekends playing the more dignified seasonal sports with men who ran other companies and they would talk about bottom lines and taxes and subsidies and overseas manufacturing and their tennis games. Fern would turn as vapid as the other wives, all manicure and hairdo and crisp pleats. They would host and attend, host and attend in a spiral of meaningless parties. Their children would go on to do the same thing, and their children after, the whole ancestry one long string of spent and earned, appearance maintained, standards adhered to and passed on and one never asking what any of it meant, whether any good had ever once been done.

Fern wanted to see Edgar’s eyes. She wanted to yell and apologize and hide.

It snuck up on Fern, how hard and fast she began to cry.

“My,” said Mary. “Fern, what bad hay fever you have.”

The children insisted on singing “Happy Birthday” as soon as their parents were off the phone. “Make a wish,” Cricket said, and Edgar blew out thirty-two tiny flames, plus one to grow on.

Edgar looked at Fern. They both had red eyes. He said, “What about my book?”

“You made two thousand dollars on it. I don’t know what else to do,” she said.

“I’m going out,” he said. “I’ll be back in a few hours.”

—

Edgar went down the grassy path to his dark green coupe and drove away from Fern. The night was warm and the air half salt. Fern was left with chocolate cake on plates and three children who had been waiting all day to celebrate. He was left with the feeling that his life was being carved out, that his expected contribution was a shell, not substance. Both Fern and Edgar remembered the same thing: seven months earlier and after almost ten years of work on his novel, Edgar had sent it off to an agent. Two weeks after that, with shaving cream still on half his face, he had come running down the stairs, beating Fern and Cricket to the phone. Edgar had said, “Hello?” and then, “Uh-huh yes okay wow thank you,” like it was a single word.

“He has an offer,” he had said to Fern and Cricket. “He has an offer for my novel.” Cricket had been the one to cry first. Fern and Edgar had both knelt so that the three of them were the same height and they had put their heads together and wrapped their arms around each other. The twins had jumped aboard the huddle.

“It’s not a ton of money,” he said.

“Who cares about money,” Fern had said. “Who fucking cares about money.” The twins had looked at their mother in shock. “Sorry,” she had said. “I’m just excited.” Cricket had been more proud of both of her parents in that moment than any in her life: her mother knew how to swear and her father had written a book.

“Who fucking cares about money,” Cricket had echoed, sensing that in this happy moment nothing she could do would get her in trouble.

—

On this night, the woman from the store looked happy—she had little cheeses on a plate, she had a double-tall glass of gin. She had on white bell-bottom jeans and a white tank top with thin straps and no bra and high platform shoes, which she should have, as a feminist, disagreed with, but there she was, inches above the heads of the men in the room. She looked superior. She was superior. She popped a cheese in her mouth. It was cheap and that did not seem to bother her. The room was full of grass smoke and cigarette smoke and fat with bodies and they were all wearing very little clothing because it was the season for it, and hot outside, hot inside and all the drinks would have been better with mint, if they had had any. In a few hours everyone would strip and run down the path to the beach, throw their naked bodies into the slosh of the Atlantic Ocean.

For Glory, this party was like all the other summer parties that had ever been, except that Edgar showed up.

“You came,” she said.

“Listen. I’m married.”

“Obviously. Everyone is married by now.” Glory was tall and had the ragged lips of someone who’d been kissing all night in a cold car, in winter.

They talked in the drone of the party. They did not mention jobs. Money was another thing they did not talk about.

A leather-vested man with sideburns to his jawbone and rose-colored sunglasses, booze-breathed and too close to Glory, said, “You look hip. I’ve got a stash in my van.”

Glory sidestepped him and moved closer to Edgar. “I’ve got a stash in my bra. Oh, wait, no bra. Guess it must be somewhere else.” She winked.

“You shouldn’t drink. It’s bad for the soul,” the man said.

“Men could stand to be reinvented. Men are due for an update,” she said. “But you seem okay,” she told Edgar. “I like you.” She looked him over—he was all sinew and blue eyes, his day in the sun made obvious by the color in his cheeks.

“Thank you,” he said. She made him feel small in a way that he liked.

“Don’t worry. I’m married too.” Glory pointed out her husband who was sitting in the corner wearing a button-down shirt with a big collar, high-waist brown pants and loafers and smoking a long, thin cigarette. He looked like someone trying to sell something for less than it was worth. She half loved him for it. He was real, at least. Dumbish, and no way would he be there when a revolution swept them all away, but honest and fair. He was probably talking about human evolution, which was one of the topics Glory had approved for social situations. That and political corruption in southerly nations, or food. He was not allowed to discuss anything about Glory or her family, his family. Their wedding was unmentionable. Everyone knew that they were husband and wife and that this had been a decision made by other people and that Glory tolerated while John waited at the gates of her broad and lush paradise. It was obvious, to look at them.

At 11:00 p.m., drunk and stoned, Glory said, “Do you want to get some air?” and Edgar took Glory out to his sports car, which was either a brave or disgusting car for someone who had just claimed to believe in socialism. Glory admired the pale blond leather seats and the wooden gearshift.

“You’ve never had an affair, have you?” she said.

He said, “I’m sorry. I should go home.”

She leaned over and kissed him well, like it was enough, not a short and irritating detour on the way to the good part. Edgar had never kissed someone he did not love.

He pulled his head back and closed his eyes.

Glory looked out the window at the party. Everyone inside was enjoying the trap they had set for themselves. They were in the process of making the exact mistakes they had hoped for. Edgar saw John’s leg in the window, in the same chair he’d been in all night. There were people near him. Smoke swirled around him. “I worry about him like a mother,” Glory said. “I always hope he’s gotten enough to eat and made friends.”

“My wife—” Edgar started, but she interrupted him.

“I shouldn’t have brought up spouses again. Let’s not.” She reached out to his thigh. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to,” she said, teasing him.

“I’m feeling very confused right now.”

Then a knock, and Glory and Edgar looked out his side to see who it was. A woman with long pale hair that looked like it had been carefully matted and a headband. “Are you leaving? I can’t find a place to park.” It was too dark to see the woman’s face, but Glory knew the voice immediately because it was her mother’s. Her mother, double-parked in her comfortable luxury station wagon and clothes a few years out of date that even Glory was too old to wear. She looked like she was in a play. “Mother,” Glory said. “Mother, mother, mother? You can’t be here.” Glory’s mother edged away. The outfit was worse than Glory could have imagined: her midriff was exposed (and very perfect, which made it all the worse) and her skirt was a mere strip of denim. She had silver anklets and no shoes on, and hers were the scrubbed and painted feet of a princess.

Glory’s mother recognized her daughter at the same instant and, without trying to defend her right to stay or offer an excuse, she began to run. She passed her own car, the lights still on and the door open, and she ran. Glory ran after her and Edgar ran after Glory. They rounded a corner, sprinted the straightaway. Glory’s mother was surprisingly fast. She took another turn down a dirt road and Glory let her go. She watched her little mother whip away like a rabbit and Glory collapsed onto someone’s lawn and Edgar fell beside her. They panted. They started to laugh. They had each hated their parents but had forgotten the surprising pleasure of being embarrassed by them. It made Glory feel young. Like they were living on the inside and the grownups were on the outside, and she half wanted to thank her mother.

“This is already better than other affairs,” Glory said.

Edgar thought of Fern in their bed with their children nearby. She would be reading a book and checking her watch. She would be waiting to talk about a future that had been suddenly upended. Maybe she would tell him that she was willing to give it all up, the houses and the cars and the comfort. Or maybe she was waiting to thank him for being the man he had always tried to keep from becoming. He felt like an impossibility—how could he do what was needed and continue to exist as himself? To Fern, Edgar silently said, “I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m almost completely yours,” and he leaned over and kissed Glory. She kissed him back, reached up and tried to take his glasses off.

“No,” he said, grabbing them. “I’m too blind.”

“Four eyes,” she teased, but he did not give in. He only took his glasses off to sleep. He felt unmoored enough without being sightless too.

Eventually, they walked back. Edgar pulled his car out and Glory parked her mother’s and turned it off. She put the keys under the seat and left it unlocked and then she got into his passenger seat and said, “I’m taking you home. I’m taking you home and I might not ever let you leave.” Later, he would look back at the unraveling and see that this instant was the point of departure. Edgar decided: once. And just like that, he set his life aside. He set his husband-self, his father-self, his son-self, aside. He was all body, all sensation. His heart was a flapping wing. He was simultaneously jealous of himself for what he was about to do and scattershot with regret. They drove a mile to her house, grey shingles and a big porch, a thousand paperbacks on the shelves. The bedroom looked out at the windward side of the island where waves battered and crashed.

As Glory undressed him, Edgar felt like he had a new body. He appreciated her hip bones and shoulders because he was a man with good taste and these were beautiful prizes, but the stronger drug was the version of himself he was meeting. This woman had never in her whole life, in the history of everything she knew, run her hand up this chest. He was the entire westward migration, the whole untrodden prairie, the shaggy peaks, the snow, and the cold sloshing Pacific on the other end.

Glory knew what he was feeling because she had felt it before. She also knew it never lasted. Everyone became familiar. There was no time, pretty soon, to bother kissing the ankles, the knots of blooded veins underneath the wrist. It was neck, ears, lips. Even lovers got tired. They had families. They had nothing to wear for the big fundraiser. They had a million things to do before school started and husbands or wives to lie to and love, and the empty mouth of nighttime.

When they were done, Glory put two cigarettes in her mouth and lit them, handed one over. “Where do you live?” she asked.

“Cambridge.”

“No shit. Me too. Then we can do this again sometime.”

A beat of terror in Edgar’s pulse. This woman would not vanish into the summertime haze.

“How do you deal with the guilt?” Edgar asked. His heart was pumping it out all through his system. Fern, his heart seemed to say, Fern, Fern.

“Eh. I make it worth his while.”

John came home later and slept on the couch without bothering to knock on the bedroom door first.

Edgar drove back to his summer family in the dawn, the twin highs of sex and grass wearing off together. A doe leapt out of the blackberry brush and stood in the middle of the road, looking at Edgar. Still as a photograph. She watched him, her eyes reflecting the headlights. It was too late for Edgar to go unseen, to slide back in without a mark.

He told his drowsing wife he loved her and it was true. Things were blooming outside that had not been blooming a week ago and other things died on the branch that had been luscious. Edgar grabbed Fern hard around her waist. She was his wife; their pleasures, their troubles, belonged to both of them. Edgar wanted to implicate her.

Fern lost her nightgown easily. Edgar was a hot wind and everything loose was swept up. Fern bent. She felt as if she was just meeting this man, that she was in bed with a foreigner. She pulled her head up like a person coming out of the water. “Edgar?” she asked, looking for magnetic north.

“It’s me,” he said. “Who else?” He glanced around the bed, because he’d felt it too, a new presence.

“No,” she told him. “No one else. I got confused. Where were you all night?” she asked.

“Just a party.”

“What party? I’m sorry that I called your mother. I’m sorry we need money to survive.” But her eyes were not sorry. Her eyes said, Time to grow up now. Time to earn and support.

Edgar suddenly felt hungry, very hungry. “Do we have any blueberries? I could make pancakes.” Edgar was putting on his pants. He did not have time for a shirt. “Let’s squeeze orange juice,” he said. “I’m in the mood for fresh.” The sun came over the hill and sent a razor of light into the room.

“I don’t think we have oranges.”

“We don’t?” As if this made no sense.

“It’s not one of the things I buy.”

“The only thing you don’t buy,” he scoffed. All around them was the evidence of her material desire: the fat headboard of the bed, holding her up; the rug from a faraway, sandy nation carried by camel and freighter; the pale butter-colored sofa with thin, modern arms that Fern had had made for this particular spot, to fit the dimensions of the stained glass above it; the stained glass itself, three deer in tall green grass, their long necks bent towards sleep. The modern house, all glass and view, and outside, grass and water.

“Don’t pretend you don’t care about any of this,” she said.

Edgar ignored her and went into the kitchen and assembled the ingredients, began to measure and pour, a mess accumulating quickly around him.

The children woke up to the sound, stood in the doorframe, their father in a sunlit stream filled with flour dust and their mother watching him with narrow eyes, as if he had arrived without invitation. Edgar said, “Pancakes!” and the twins were gleeful, but Cricket saw how angry her parents were, felt the treacherous space between their two poles and refused to enter the room or eat the breakfast. She sensed that something big had been upset.

—

They packed up a day early and the children cried all the way home, flat furious to be taken away. The ferry ride back to the mainland was pain itself, their beings and their bodies pulled in opposite directions. “Promise that someday we’ll stay on the Vineyard all year,” the twins pleaded to their parents. “We’ll go to the one-room schoolhouse and we’ll swim even when it’s too cold to swim.” Why didn’t they? Fern wondered. There was no good reason not to, except that their house was made of wood and glass and they would have frozen by December. Edgar thought of the house, the sea, the island and the fact that he only got to love the place because he could afford to. If he became Keating Steel, they could come every summer of their lives and their children’s children would grow up with the same saltsmell in their rooms as they fell asleep, the same blackberry stains on their fingers, the same memorized feeling of utter peace after having jumped into the cove and stayed under as long as their lungs would allow. And if he did not become Keating Steel? Edgar could not imagine selling the house, not only because it would have been devastating (to think of telling the children made his throat cinch) but because it seemed impossible—the place was not real estate but body part, heart part, something beyond ownership.

“Someday,” Edgar said. How long before the magic of a quiet winter island in an uninsulated house wore off? The first snow? What absurd indulgence, he suddenly realized, to build a beautiful house that was only habitable half the year. If they walked away from the money, sold their Cambridge colonial and all their things and retreated to the island, this house would make them immensely happy from May to October and then spend six months trying to kill them. Love, Edgar thought, good old love.

“Someday,” Fern repeated. The same seagulls the children had fed from the ferry happily in June now seemed predatory. The children closed their cracker boxes tight. “Shoo!” they said, flinging their arms.