As the afternoon sun began to lower itself in the sky, Patty chopped vegetables rapidly at the kitchen’s center island. Her posture was impeccable thanks to years of yoga and practiced poise in the public spotlight. Ever the senator’s wife. Ex-senator now.
“Mary-Beth, would you pull out the carrots from the fridge,” she said.
It was just the two of them now, Patty and her daughter-in-law, Mary-Beth. The three Bright brothers were out sailing with their father. Ian was reading in his room. The twins were kicking a soccer ball around outside. And Chelsea was scrolling through her phone on the back deck.
Mary-Beth didn’t know where Farah-the-documentarian was, which made Mary-Beth a little nervous. Ever since she saw the camera mounted outside, she’d been feeling jumpy. She wondered how many cameras were hidden, and where—if anywhere—she was safe from them. It made her feel dizzy to think about, but not in an entirely unpleasant way.
“You’ll find the carrots in the bottom drawer.”
“Carrots, right.” Mary-Beth opened the massive refrigerator door and searched.
“And if you see any bell peppers in there, grab those, as well,” Patty said.
“Okay.”
Mary-Beth was happy to have something to do with her hands, other than sipping wine and readjusting her clothes, which suddenly felt like they didn’t quite fit. She loved Patty and these trips, but it was unmooring to be a guest in another woman’s kitchen, with no real purpose of her own. She’d never been the sort of person who enjoyed being waited on, but the real source of discomfort was the power imbalance inherent in this situation.
The thing they both understood was that, in this home, there was only really room for one chef, one comforter, one master of ceremonies, one keeper of secrets. There was room for only one mother in a house. All the other mothers were ancillary. So although Mary-Beth was grateful to Patty, she’d prefer to be head mother.
“Let’s see...” Patty set a timer on the stove. “John and the boys should be back in fifteen minutes or so from their sail, so let’s plan on dinner at seven.”
“That works for me.” Not that anyone had asked her.
Mary-Beth watched her children through the kitchen window as she sliced the carrots. Lucas dribbled a soccer ball around Cam’s feet, and they argued about the rules of their scrimmage. In the distance, she could see the two Sunfish sailboats that the Bright men were steering.
Patty shook her head at the window. “Look at those boys.”
It always took a moment for Mary-Beth to remember that when Patty said “those boys,” she was referring not to Mary-Beth’s teenage sons but to her husband, JJ, and his brothers, Patty’s grown children. “The boys” would always be Patty’s own sons. At the lake house, all the men were boys, but the women were only ever women.
None of this was JJ’s fault. If anything, Mary-Beth felt a little bad for her husband. With his parents’ adoration came an impossible standard. Particularly for JJ, the expectation that he would follow his father was strong, if unspoken. John Bright had been a lawyer, a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, a US senator and a published author. He was more accomplished, more famous and wealthier than JJ would likely ever be. These were not the sorts of things that Brights articulated, but they were the things they measured their lives by. It seemed to Mary-Beth that the more things mattered to the Brights, the less they spoke of them.
There was a thud from the waterfront, and then a round of laughter.
Patty smiled to herself. “They’re back.”
Moments later, JJ, John, Spencer and Charlie burst into the kitchen, all dripping wet and laughing.
“Ah!” Patty yelled. “Get out, get out. We just had this floor mopped!”
“What happened?” Mary-Beth laughed.
“Your brother-in-law tipped us!” JJ yelled, pointing at Charlie.
Charlie put his hands up innocently. “It’s your fault for forgetting what a lousy sailor I am.” He laughed and retrieved a six-pack of beer from the fridge.
Then the men walked their dripping bodies back outside to the deck. Before leaving, JJ leaned in for a kiss from his wife.
Mary-Beth pressed her lips into his forehead and drank him in. Lake water dripped from his hair to her shirt as the smell of movement and sunshine emanated from his skin. He was happy. This is why we’re here, she thought. We are here for this feeling.
John Senior slapped JJ playfully on his back as they left. The electricity of this family was something to Mary-Beth. Even years later, it continued to amaze her.
JJ looked more like his father than any of the Bright sons, which seemed to afford him a certain intimacy with John Senior, flattery being a powerful drug for the Brights. It wasn’t only that they were both broad former football players, with big, toothy smiles and emerald eyes. JJ also worked hardest to cultivate similarity with his father. They wore expensive—but not overly fashionable—oxford shirts on weekdays, and golf shirts on the weekends. They kept the Wall Street Journal conspicuously tucked into their black leather briefcases and offered people good Scotch when there was something to toast.
Mary-Beth knew they weren’t cool men. She’d never cared for cool. No, they were something better: they were impressive men. JJ and his father were the men who ran the world. They were the men fluent in everything Mary-Beth’s father aspired to understand, but never achieved: politics, the stock market, global affairs and fine art. They were comfortable in every room, even the ones they didn’t belong in.
Mary-Beth was smart enough to know that JJ and his father didn’t really run the world. They weren’t the most brilliant men she’d ever encountered, and they certainly weren’t of the right pedigree or wealth to really count themselves among America’s elite ruling class. But they passed and blended fairly well among that ruling class, which was important to them. And it was that fact—the fact of their vulnerability—that made JJ so wonderful to her. JJ needed Mary-Beth. He needed someone to reflect back at him all the greatness that he wanted to believe he was projecting out into the world. He really was great; that wasn’t a lie. But Mary-Beth was sure that no one saw all his greatness as she saw it, and no one could make him feel as great as she could. Maybe wives aren’t supposed to derive any happiness from such things anymore, but she did. She wasn’t bothered by it.
It seemed to Mary-Beth that the best marriages are based on unspoken agreements to maintain wonderful myths about each other. Beauty, brains, power—whatever one needed to believe to get out of bed in the morning—a good partner could do that. She and JJ did that for each other. Without ever voicing this arrangement, they agreed to hold flattering mirrors up and offer beautiful reflections for each other. It was a lie only if one didn’t believe that one’s partner deserved to be flattered. But Mary-Beth was sure that JJ deserved it. She did, too.
“Okay, salad’s done, and the chickens are in the oven.” Patty looked at the clock. “Let’s sit outside with the boys while things cook.”
“Hey, Mom,” Charlie called from the deck. “Can you make some of your famous guacamole?”
Patty dried her hands on a dish towel and, smiling to herself, began searching for the basket of avocados. “You go ahead, Mary-Beth. I’ll get this,” she said cheerfully.
Mary-Beth went out to join the guys, because, really, it wasn’t her problem that Patty wanted to wait on them hand and foot. If her mother-in-law insisted on doing every damn thing for these grown men, well, what else was there to do?
Outside, the men were laughing and baking in the early-evening sun. JJ put an arm out along an open deck chair for Mary-Beth, which she gladly took.
Spencer was telling a long story about a bad student. Ian was smiling beside him, despite the fact that he’d obviously heard the same story at least once before. Chelsea sat right in Charlie’s still-damp lap, raising the libidinous temperature around the two of them by a thousand degrees. The evening sun pointed at their tanned faces from across the shimmering lake like a spotlight. In their bodies and in the world, the Brights possessed a laconic sort of belonging.
Mary-Beth wanted to match their contentment. But instead, she felt a familiar tugging inside her that came sometimes at the lake house. Sometimes it seemed to Mary-Beth that she was the only one among them who truly appreciated the value of these riches. Not just the house and all the stuff, but the great big, happy family—it was the thing she’d spent her whole life wanting. To the Brights, it was a mere birthright. They didn’t appreciate it properly or ever bother to thank God for their good luck. She wasn’t even a real Bright, and yet she often felt like she deserved Bright-ness more than any of them, because she’d been deprived of this and she knew what a gift it was to have.
Mary-Beth had grown up an only child, in a different time, to an Irish Catholic family that didn’t believe in only children. As early as she could remember, people would ask her parents, “Is she your only child?” And this question had several other questions hidden inside it, questions like, “Are you selfish people?” and “Is it a medical problem?” Mary-Beth spent her whole life fantasizing about what her parents could have said in response to those questions. They could have said, “We got everything when we got our Mary-Beth,” or “She’s all we ever wanted.” They never said those things. When Mary-Beth’s parents were asked about why she had no siblings, they always said the same thing: “God only blessed us with one.” It was a strange answer in that it confirmed both the idea of her miraculousness and the tragedy of their small family. She was a gift, but her aloneness was a punishment. She was something, and nothing at all. It wasn’t the only sorrow of her childhood, but it embodied everything.
Mary-Beth spent her whole life dreading those questions and her parents’ tortured, tired answer. And she vowed to never again find herself in a small, wanting family. As a child, she pined for a family that demanded no explanation at all. Mary-Beth was always sure that it was the numbers alone that cursed her, not her family’s inadequacy at appreciating small numbers. It wasn’t a philosophical problem but a mathematical one. She wanted big numbers after that—and she got it with the Brights. She got a husband, two kids, three brothers and a set of famous in-laws. She got more bigness than she’d ever imagined.
And so it was with some repressed sadness that Mary-Beth had to acknowledge her status as an extra in this great big family. She’d been married to JJ for eighteen years. They had two perfect children together. And yet there was no denying that she wasn’t a real Bright. (And she was a Bright! That had been her legal name for eighteen years!) But she couldn’t stroll along for their long trips down memory lane. She never knew Gran and Pops, or the Labrador that died when JJ was ten, or the hilarious thing that Spencer said on Christmas morning in 1986. She knew the stories better than any of them by now, but they still weren’t hers.
JJ squeezed his arm around her shoulders, and Mary-Beth came back to the beautiful, bountiful present. Spencer was still telling his story to a mostly rapt crowd while Ian looked at the water.
A car honked from the other side of the house, and Spencer stopped talking. There was a pause in conversation, then John Senior clapped his hands together and stood up. “That must be Philip!”