RUTHIE AND JEM unpacked the car, shouldering the totes, cases, boxes, and suitcases into the playhouse, colliding in doorways, calling out from different rooms (“This room is a shriek of pink!” Jem shrieked, when she saw her room. “It’s an intestine!”), bouncing on beds, turning on faucets, and exulting in a well-stocked open kitchen. Outside they dipped their feet into the pool and examined the pool house.
“Stacks and stacks of towels,” Jem said. “And really good shampoo. My hair is going to smell like a meadow.”
“It’s a compound,” Ruthie said as they surveyed the view. “We have secured the compound, Captain. And we have a vista.” She swung her arms wide. “Ich bein ein Berlinger!”
“Mom, please. You are so beyond me-hearties right now.”
Ruthie knew she was pumping up enthusiasm when the truth was she just felt beleaguered by the day. She’d met a goddess and been ignored by her stepson. Trouble at work that had seemed manageable now loomed, serious. Mike had leaned against the door and suggested a dinner “to talk.” He’d told Penny and Elena that he was trapped in a life that wasn’t his life. She’d been called presentable and dependable.
Maybe Carole was right. Had the disappointments of middle age, the sorrow of a failed marriage, drained something out of her, what her father used to call her pep? Had she lost so much vitality that a young man could see right through her?
She’d once been blessed with cherubic cheeks and good skin. Her thirties had been almost indistinguishable from her radiant twenties. Although slightly drier. Not beautiful but pretty, she knew how to talk to men, how to flirt and keep them abuzz. Of course now she knew that her currency had been mostly youth, because now nobody was looking. She saved the sass and crackle for her girlfriends.
She’d shut all that off because men had shut it off. On the north side of forty, they weren’t leaning closer, weren’t watching her mouth or her ass. They didn’t give a shit if she tossed her hair or cocked an eyebrow. If she was witty they no longer wondered how she’d be in bed, they merely laughed. And it would be a surprised laugh, as though it was impossible for her, at this age, to give them even momentary pleasure.
Post-divorce you had to buy a good bra and inject things into your laugh lines, and she wasn’t in the mood. Who was she going to flirt with, Lloyd Handleman, the local realtor who kept suggesting they have a martini so she could “take the edge off”?
Now she was rounding the corner toward fifty. She thought of Adeline Clay, her face taut, her skin glowing, her waist like a twenty-year-old’s (no butter!), her body as supple as if she’d just stepped off the shiatsu table.
If Ruthie was going to carve a new person out of the old one, she needed more than drugstore moisturizer and outlet shopping.
She needed Carole’s size eight fat pants.
“Come on,” she said to Jem. “Let’s invade the big house. I’ll get the key.”
“THERE ARE EIGHT pairs of Wellington boots,” Jem said. “I counted. And two dishwashers.”
“I know.”
“There’s a climbing wall in the boy’s room.”
“Really?”
“Are you sure we’re allowed to be here?”
“Carole said it was fine.” Ruthie regarded herself in the full-length mirror. She looked drawn. Was the mirror too used to reflecting the better-looking?
“Plus this dressing room is the size of my bedroom.” Jem touched a drawer and it slid open silently, revealing triangularly folded silk panties in an array of colors, a line of matching bras in a column next to them.
“Whoa,” Jem said.
“Honey, please don’t ogle Carole’s underwear, I feel spooky enough as it is.”
“Rich people match,” Jem said. “I bet if they lose a sock, they just throw the other sucker out. They don’t even wait for a couple of laundry cycles to be sure.”
They stared down at the drawer for a moment. Was this the secret that rich people knew? The things most people bought in batches, hurriedly, shaking them out of Gap and Target bags—T-shirts, underwear, socks—were, for the rich, silky secret fabrics that lay against their skin like talismans, reminding them that they did not have to worry about the costs of the ordinary: dry cleaning, orthodontics, lunch. They had the worries of a pleasant life with equally pleasant choices—London for theater this winter, or Turks and Caicos?—so maybe their base level of dopamine was higher than everyone else’s.
Ruthie closed the drawer.
“How come I can’t raid Verity’s closet?” Jem asked.
“Because she’s six.”
“Oh. The other one.”
“Arden. Because you weren’t invited. Besides, she’s twelve.”
Jem sighed. “I bet she has better clothes than I do already.”
“Are you okay?” Ruthie asked. “You seem off. Crabby.”
“I’ve got finals and stuff. And the playhouse…”
“You don’t like it? How can you not like it? You saw the kitchen!”
“Everything is so…I don’t know…done.”
“Are you kidding me? For years you’ve been complaining about sofa beds and now you’ve got a European mattress and it’s too done?”
“I know,” Jem said. “I’m reverse spoiled.”
“Nah. You’re just spoiled. My fault. I only want you to be happy, and it’s exhausting.”
Jem leaned against Ruthie. Ruthie slipped an arm around her. She breathed her daughter in, feeling the humidity-swollen texture of her hair against her cheek. Jem stirred and she hugged her tighter. “Just another second. One day you’ll love me again. But by then osteoporosis will have set in and I won’t be able to hug you without fracturing a bone.”
“You are a serious weirdo,” Jem said, but she smiled as she pushed her away.
“So what is it?” Ruthie asked. “This is our best summer squat ever. Why the gloom?”
“I hate leaving my house. I’m going to spend an entire summer afraid I’ll spill something.”
“We need the money.”
“Maybe if all those years you didn’t buy me organic milk and stuff, you would have been able to save money and we’d still have the house in the summers.”
Ruthie started to laugh, but then got momentarily lost in speculating if all those things they had always spent money on to protect Jem—from growth hormones in cows, from pesticides, from trans fats, from PCBs in plastic (all those expensive wooden toys!)—would add up to enough extra cash to give Jem exactly what she wanted, could keep her in Apple products and purses and vacations for years.
“Remember when we used to talk about fun things, like Death Eaters?”
“Mom!”
“I’m sorry about the pedicure, you can save up for one this summer.”
“It’s not the pedicure. Sometimes it just seems like…like everybody has money but us.” Jem’s finger trailed along a row of folded sweaters.
“Well, lots of people do. And lots of people are suffering.”
“If you mention refugees I’m walking.”
“That’s exactly what they have to do, walk away from a life—”
Jem took a step and Ruthie pulled her back. She stroked her hair. Lightly. Held her like a moth, felt her fluttering wings. “Look, aside from cashmere throw envy, we have it pretty good,” she said. “We’re going to have a great summer. Speaking of which, I bumped into Meret’s mom today. Doe’s been doing this teen outreach thing, and Mrs. Bell is bringing Meret and a whole gang to Spork. So you can hang with friends instead of working the kids’ table, okay?”
“I don’t know if I can come. I’m working tomorrow.”
“Only until three. You can come after work, with Daddy.”
Jem set her jaw. “I can choose what I want to do with my time.”
“Well, sure.” Ruthie peered into her face. “Did something happen at school? Or with Meret?”
“Why did something have to happen at school?” Jem flung herself away. “I have to pee.”
“Check out the toilet! It’s Japanese!”
Ruthie found the pink shirt and white pants. She tossed aside her T-shirt and slipped on the shirt. Silk slipped over her arms and floated around her waist and fit her shoulders and cast a light on her skin as though she was carrying around Carole Lombard’s cinematographer.
She never wore pink. But this pink was luscious. Inside it she would feel as though she’d burrowed into the heart of a rose.
She pulled on the white pants, satiny cotton sliding across her skin. She twisted in the mirror. Was that an actual ass?
“Whoa, Mom.” Jem walked back in. “You look like a whole different person.”
Ruthie slipped into her flats. “That’s the idea.”
“Okay, no.” Jem perused the shoes and came up with MANOLO MULE KITTEN HEEL. “Here.”
Ruthie slipped into the shoes. “Better,” Jem said.
It was like resolving a painting. If you change a corner, the composition is thrown off. Couture had thrown the rest of her middle-aged self into relief. The bracelet she’d had since college, a plain silver band she’d bought at a flea market in NoHo. And her hair! Carole was right. Everything was wrong.
“My hair,” she said.
“You just need product,” Jem said. “And maybe a necklace or a bracelet?”
“I can’t borrow Carole’s jewelry. Wait, hold on.”
She dashed to Verity’s bedroom. She found the dress-up trunk and pawed through it, looking for that pretty silver necklace. The trunk was heaped with sequined tutus and costume jewelry, most of it too glittery for a Memorial Day picnic. Feathers flew as she tossed boas and hats aside. Something caught her eye, the dull shine of metal against all that sparkle. She pulled out a man’s watch with a nickel case, one of those knockoffs that looked real if you didn’t look twice. She wound it, and the second hand ticked forward crisply.
It was a little clunky and she liked the weight of it. She went back to the full-length mirror and posed. The tailored pants said Jackie O on a Greek island, the pink said summer fun. The heels winked flirty. Yet the man’s watch made her look like a kickass Amelia Earhart—grounded, maybe doomed—but with an action plan.
“Nailed it,” said Jem, and they were friends again.
From: Ruth Beamish
To: Michael Dutton
Jem said you boned with Adeline
From: Michael Dutton
To: Ruth Beamish
WHAT?
From: Ruthie
To: Mike
I meant bonded! BONDED
…
oops! Ha ha. Anyway do you think if you r still fixing step etc you could encourage her to come to Spork? I need her. Will tell you why. Fire up that Dutton charm offensive.
From: Mike
To: Ruthie
The Dutton charm is tattered at the edges these days, but ok.