I used to believe a season began on a specific day. Or maybe it started with weather, a change in the light, the blooming of flowers, the falling of leaves. Maybe with a holiday, as it did in Rehoboth, where summer began on Memorial Day weekend and ended on Labor Day, when the tourists left and the town became ours again. Now I understand seasons are like heartbeats, slowing some days so that afternoons stretch into long purple shadows, speeding up other times so that months spin by in an hour, years disappear in a night.
Perhaps if our last summer had ended differently, I would believe it had started, as it seemed to, on Memorial Day weekend. But everything that happened that summer happened because of what began back in March, when the advisory board at Ten Chimneys sent that letter to Kelly Jarrell. Afterward, our lives shifted in ways none of us apprehended until it was too late.
Annabelle’s deck was ablaze with candles and pots of yellow hibiscus; white lights were strung along the railing and draped in the branches of the birch trees. I spun to look at her. “This is stunning!” It was like a stage set, shimmering against the deepening twilight and velvety green of the newly mown lawn.
“It turned out, didn’t it?” She was beaming. “Scott did the picnic table.”
He’d painted it a glossy periwinkle that caught the reflection of the fat candles lined up down the center. It was already set with delicate flower-patterned china plates, cloth napkins, and real silver, all of it gleaming in the flickering light. “It’s beautiful,” I said again, and felt a jolt of happiness leap up in me. Erik and Gabe were already manning the grill and smoking cigars, Scott was mixing martinis, and Spencer was on the trampoline, jumping straight up and down like an exclamation point.
“Hey, that’s not fair!” Eva’s high voice lifted across the backyard, where she was playing croquet with the girls. She was wearing a full-skirted yellow dress that caught the sunlight like a candle flame. She was barefoot, her high-heeled sandals lying in the grass. We’d all gotten dressed up at Annabelle’s request.
“It’s a barbecue,” Erik protested when I handed him a dress shirt to wear with his Bermuda shorts.
“Well, she wants it to be special.”
Compared to Annabelle and Eva, I was underdressed: black linen pants, wedge-heeled espadrilles, a sleeveless white sweater—but I’d felt excited and hopeful ever since she issued the invite. Kelly and I had always regarded Memorial Day weekend as a new start. We’d drop ten pounds, lose our virginity, save money to travel to Europe, fall in love. It never mattered how many summers didn’t live up to our dreams, how many summers we didn’t live up. Memorial Day weekend rolled around and once again, we’d imagine all the ways we would reinvent our lives.
I felt that again at Annabelle’s, the sense of things starting anew. I was determined to stop being so afraid, to trust more, to eventually find the courage to tell Annabelle about Lucy. I wanted to let go, have fun, stop hiding so much; I wanted to dress up! I glanced at Eva in her poufy yellow dress and wished I’d worn something more festive, wished I were the kind of woman who owned festive clothes. But I could be, I thought. Why not?
It was a pretty night, the dusky sky with its quarter-moon floating over the trees, shadows stretching across the lawn. And we were all together, they knew about Kelly, and the world hadn’t stopped spinning. In the falling light, swifts swooped and dove, and a cloud of white smoke drifted up from the grill. Gabe and Erik were arguing good-naturedly: How many millions of dollars on a capital campaign? Kids coming to school without breakfast…Annabelle flicked her eyes at them in mock annoyance, and I smiled. Gabe had joined the board of the Milwaukee Boys and Girls Club and was constantly needling Erik about Ten Chimneys: How could he justify all that spending on the arts, those fucking fellowships, thirty-five-dollar tours of the estate—when children fifteen miles away didn’t have winter coats?
“You do realize your wife was awarded one of those fucking fellowships, right?” Erik said.
“And no one’s happier for her. But this lavish spending to recapture the heyday of some privileged white actors most people never heard of. How do you sleep at night?”
“Asks the man driving a Prius,” Erik laughed. “Wow. You’re not just saving kids but the environment too. I’m amazed you haven’t wrenched your shoulder patting yourself on the back.”
Gabe’s retort.
Then Erik’s.
More laughter.
Verbal jousting, Erik called it, one or the other conceding a point by pretending to be mortally wounded, staggering backward, clutching his heart. Erik insisted the “debates” were fun, that he and Gabe had been doing this from the moment they met, which Annabelle and Eva affirmed, ignoring them when they started up. Mostly, I did too. But every now and then I sensed how close to the edge of real anger they had stepped. And it had nothing to do with Ten Chimneys or impoverished kids or whatever else the argument du jour was.
It was about Gabe’s betrayal.
Erik forgave it, but he still couldn’t fathom it—ethically, morally, even practically. “Jesus! What the hell did he think would happen when we all had Thanksgiving together?” And though I’m sure Gabe was grateful for Erik’s silence, being grateful was exhausting too. Listening to them that night, though—elitist view…sanctimonious horseshit!—I felt the opposite of my usual worry. This is what friends do, I thought. Yes, you might hurt one another, maybe even badly, but you don’t just throw away the friendship. There was a generosity in Gabe’s and Erik’s willingness to disagree, something immutable and solid about the friendship itself. I wanted that with Annabelle and Eva.
The sky was charcoal-colored now, the lawn nearly black but for Eva’s dress and the white croquet wickets, the darting shapes of the girls.
“What are you thinking?” Annabelle said.
“I’m thinking how perfect this is. Like something from a magazine.”
“That’s exactly what I wanted.” She went to grab the sliding door for Scott, who was balancing a tray of martinis. “All right, you guys,” she called, taking a glass, then twirling to face us. She looked gorgeous, her hair loose, tumbling over an emerald-green sweater and sassy white skirt that flounced around her thin legs every time she moved. She was barefoot, toenails painted green to match her sweater, that tiny tattoo just above her ankle. Stasia. “Eva, get over here!” she called. “It’s time to celebrate.” Gold bangles shimmied down her arm as she lifted her glass.
Of course Eva had gotten the fellowship. She’d phoned the minute she heard. “I don’t need to accept,” she said. “If my working with Kelly is an issue for you.”
“Oh, Eva, no. The stuff with me and Kelly, it’s…it’s so long ago.”
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely,” I told her, though I wasn’t at all.
After we hung up, I wandered into the living room, where I’d sat the day before with Annabelle, the Kleenex box still on the floor by the couch, and I stood at the window, a pressure in my throat that made it hurt to swallow.
The next night, Annabelle phoned to tell us Scott’s band would be opening for the Spin Doctors at the Wisconsin State Fair in August. “I’m going to have to weigh him down with bricks if he doesn’t return to earth soon,” she said. “So anyway, we’re having a barbecue on Saturday to celebrate: your show, Eva’s fellowship, Scott’s gig. And I want us to dress up, okay?”
Eva lifted her cosmo, and we leaned forward to clink glasses. The lights strung through the trees reflected off our arms and faces. “To our hostess,” she said. A breeze rustled the leaves of the birch trees, and the wind chimes jangled softly from the corner of the deck.
“And to our chefs.” I lifted my glass toward Gabe and Erik.
“Whoa. What about the bartender?” Scott asked.
“To our bartender!” someone—was it Annabelle?—said.
We laughed more, the sound of our voices crisp against the purple-black sky and the outline of the trees. Another candle sputtered out in its pool of wax. “I want to toast too!” Phoebe said.
“Sure you do, lovey.” Annabelle turned to her daughter. “What do you want to toast?”
“Croquet!”
And so we toasted croquet. And then Hazel wanted to toast strawberry ice cream, so we toasted that.
“You want to make a toast, Spencer?” Erik asked.
“Why is it called toast?”
“That’s a good question, lad. How about we look it up after dinner?”
He nodded solemnly. “Can I toast toasts?”
“A toast to toasts!” Scott called, and we lifted our glasses again.
The whole night was like that. We toasted Ten Chimneys, Alfred and Lynn, the beautiful weather. We talked about the fellowship, then speculated about what play—it had to be one the Lunts had done—Kelly would choose for the fellows to perform. Briefly, we talked about Kelly: “So what’s your plan for when she’s here?” Gabe asked. “Jackie O. glasses? A wig? A burka?”
“I was thinking all three,” I laughed.
“She’s gotta know you’re here,” Scott said. “It’s too fucking weird if she doesn’t.”
“That’s what my mom says.”
“Yeah, but…” Gabe shrugged. “Coincidences happen all the time.”
And then we were talking about coincidences. The time Gabe and Eva were in Debrecen, Hungary, and ran into their neighbors, or the time Annabelle found on the beach at Lake Michigan a ring she’d lost there the year before.
We toasted coincidences and finding lost things.
By then, the kids were flitting about with glow sticks in the black pool of the lawn, their voices echoey and sharp. Erik reached for my hand, his fingers warm. The candles had burned down to flattened discs, their minimal light low and unsteady.
At some point—was it then?—I remember watching Eva and Gabe and thinking they didn’t just love each other, they liked each other. I watched him give a tug on her ponytail and how she swiveled to meet his eyes; I thought of how they’d slapped five at dinner and said in unison, “Go team Burns!” whenever one of them said something witty.
Go team Burns!
A year later, and the phrase echoes; it makes me ache.
Across from me, Gabe leaned back and stared up at the sky, which was glimmering with stars. Did he really hate his job? I wondered, then pushed the thought away. The night was too perfect. I didn’t want anything to ruin it. I think we all felt that way. Maybe it was the fact that the deck really did feel like a stage set, the sky a velvet curtain; maybe we were all playacting a little, wanting to always be the people we were that night—generous, elegant, carefree—without secrets or damage. Maybe that was why, when Annabelle raised her martini glass yet again and said, “Here’s to a season of perfect happiness!,” no one made fun of the sentiment or pretended to gag because it was so sweet. We lifted our glasses.
By the time we left, we had the summer planned: We’d have picnics at the lake, go to Chicago for my show. We’d see Scott at Hattie’s on Fridays when we could get a sitter—that was a given—but Saturdays…Saturdays would be ours. We’d take turns hosting barbecues, dress up, make the nights elegant the way we imagined Alfred and Lynn would have. Heels and pearls, candles and croquet, cigars and old-fashioned drinks: gin rickeys, Rob Roys. “What the hell is a gin rickey?” someone laughed. “I guess we’ll find out,” someone else said.
I’ve thought a lot about that night. I suppose we all have. “Give me a break,” Erik said not long ago. “Declaring a season of perfect happiness? Come on!”
“Season of perfect happiness, my ass,” Gabe will scoff. “Kind of like calling the Titanic unsinkable right before it hit the iceberg.”
I hate hindsight. I always have. Probably because I spent so many years living with the litany of everything I should have done and should have known and should have felt—and to what end? There’s something smug about hindsight, something cheap.
The Lunts gave their lives to performances, made their home an elaborate stage set because they believed their lives should be a performance—something created with practice and care and attention to every detail. It’s easy to call it false, and people did, but I think of how we arrange flowers and dinner parties and the furniture in our houses, and no one says our homes are superficial or fake for our having done this. No one pities us for trying so hard to create an ideal. What they think, instead, is that our homes matter deeply to us.
Why shouldn’t it be this way with our lives?
This isn’t to say that behind the scenes, things weren’t fragile and messy that summer. We were fragile and messy. And yet, we loved each other and fought for each other, and I will never accept, as people want to insist, that we were better off after our lives unraveled because at least everything was out in the open then, at least everything was honest.
I might have believed that once.
Sure, maybe the truth set us free. But it also broke us.
I love that Annabelle worked so hard to create that night—that magical candlelit deck and the sky ricocheting with stars and our laughter sailing out across the darkness. Even now, especially now, I love her determination to hold us all together despite the secrets and the betrayals. I love that she wanted so badly to salvage the best of us, to focus on what was good in our friendships. And if there was something sad in this, then it was sad in the way the string ensemble aboard the Titanic, who played their instruments as the ship was sliding beneath the ocean, was sad.
It was also brave.
And beautiful.
Sometimes I think our summer of perfect happiness was also a kind of requiem, and we played for as long as we could.