What are we talking about in 1995? The Oklahoma City bombing; Bosnia, Serbia; molten chocolate cake; the Macarena; Windows 95; Des’ree; the Unabomber; Yitzhak Rabin; Toy Story; Selena; Bye, Felicia; Steve Young; Eight-Minute Abs; Yahoo!; Jerry Garcia; Frasier, Niles, Lilith, Daphne, and Roz; The Bridges of Madison County; O. J. Simpson found innocent by a jury of his peers.
When we check in with our girl at the beginning of 1995, we are cheered to see how well things are going for her.
Mallory is now—after Mr. Falco’s retirement and four months of traveling to the Cape twice a week for her certification classes—a real teacher. She joined the union and attends faculty meetings; she overprepares the night before the principal, Dr. Major, comes to observe her class. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, she’s the cafeteria monitor, and she accepts bribes from the kids in the form of Cheetos and Hostess cupcakes. She stands over anyone with pizza and sings “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” until the student offers up the crispiest piece of pepperoni. At the end of each school day, Mallory swings by the guidance office to debrief with Apple; sometimes they gossip, sometimes they vent, sometimes they have constructive conversations about how to better reach the kids. On Friday afternoons, Mallory and Apple go to happy hour at the Pines. They order beers and mozzarella sticks and toast to another week survived as though they are living in a combat zone—life with 112 teenagers—and Apple will say, “Only twenty-seven [or “nineteen” or “twelve”] weeks until summer vacation.”
Mallory is almost embarrassed to admit it, but she doesn’t want the school year to end. She starts off each class by reading a poem and asking the kids to react to it. She chooses Nikki Giovanni, Gwendolyn Brooks, William Carlos Williams, Audre Lorde, Linda Pastan, Eldridge Cleaver, Robert Bly, and everyone’s absolute favorite, Langston Hughes. Mallory photocopies short stories by Joyce Carol Oates, Maxine Hong Kingston, John Updike. They discuss editorials in the New York Times. They read The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers, which only a few of the kids warm to, and then they read The Handmaid’s Tale, which is a crowd favorite. Dystopia, Mallory thinks. Teenagers love dystopia, the world as they know it falling apart at the seams. Her students keep journals in which they relate passages of what they’ve read to their own lives. They write short stories, sonnets, personal essays, persuasive essays, haiku (which they like because they’re short), and one research paper, mandated by the state, which makes the kids stressed and peevish, and the unit falls in the middle of March, when everyone on Nantucket hates everyone else anyway.
Mallory is popular because she’s young, because she’s “cool,” because she wears long blazers and leggings and friendship bracelets that the ninth-grade girls weave for her, because she’s friends with Apple (“Miss Davis”), who is also young and cool, because she talks to her students like they’re people, because she takes an interest in their lives. She knows who just started dating whom and who just broke up. She knows to pack an extra sandwich and invite Maggie Sohn, whose parents are divorcing, to spend lunch in her classroom so they can talk. She knows where the parties are, who goes, who doesn’t, who throws up, who hooks up. Some of this she gleans from reading the kids’ journals; some she overhears as they’re coming in and out of her classroom; some she hears from the kids who confide in her. Mallory locks it all in the vault, and opens the vault for Apple only—she never says a word to the principal, Dr. Major, to the parents, or even to JD.
And then, when it seems like things can’t get any better, they don’t. They get worse. Much worse.
Mallory was warned by Apple and the other teachers: Once the kids return from spring break, they’re impossible to control. And after the first seventy-degree day, forget about it.
Spring fever, Apple says. Everyone gets it.
Over April break, Mallory and JD go to Vieques, a tiny island off the coast of Puerto Rico. Mallory chooses it because it’s undiscovered, relatively undeveloped, and cheap. She books seven nights in a one-story beachfront motel in a tiny village called Esperanza. Their room is dim and the bedding iffy, but they aren’t picky. Mallory is cheered because the motel sits on a strip of white-sand beach on a turquoise bay. JD is cheered because the motel has a happening bar and restaurant out front.
On the first full day, JD plants himself on a barstool and starts drinking Modelos; after lunch, he switches to margaritas. Mallory is indulgent at first—she knows that JD is used to all-inclusive resorts where the point is to drink as much as possible in order to get your money’s worth, but after two days, she loses patience and begins to worry about their bill, which they’ve agreed to split. Mallory wants to explore the island. She wants to snorkel; she wants to tour Mosquito Bay and see the bioluminescence; she wants to visit the plaza in Isabel Segunda. There’s a nearby island called Culebra that has a famous Chinese restaurant. Mallory wants to hire someone to take them over by boat.
JD says, Sure, sure, whatever you want, baby. But getting him off his barstool is another matter. Mallory rents a mask and fins from the surf shop down the street and snorkels in the bay out front. She buys two tickets for the New Moon tour of Mosquito Bay, but JD is passed out cold at eight o’clock, so Mallory goes alone. It’s as she’s floating around and the water lights up around her—the dinoflagellates in the bay glow a brilliant blue when they come in contact with other creatures—that she finally acknowledges that she and JD just aren’t compatible.
They’ve been dating for eighteen months—though, as Mallory told Jake, it has been very casual. Or casual for Mallory, at least. JD is far more passionate about the relationship; he’s always asking for more. He likes Mallory to come watch him play darts at the Muse on Wednesday nights, which she does only when she doesn’t have too much grading. On Friday evenings after her standing happy-hour date with Apple, Mallory will join JD at the Anglers Club for their weekly appetizer party. This means clams casino and pigs in a blanket with a collection of longtime Nantucketers in the funky, weather-beaten clubhouse on Old South Wharf. JD invites Mallory to his parents’ house and introduces her as “my girl,” which makes her feel queasy. But it’s been nice, too, to have someone on the island day in and day out who cares about her. JD is in excellent physical condition but the sex is reminiscent of Mallory’s college years, with him humping and grunting in the dark; he’s intent on pleasing only himself. And JD is explosively jealous of every single man Mallory comes in contact with. He’s jealous of Dr. Major; he’s jealous of Mallory’s male students, especially the seniors.
Twice this past winter, JD mentioned moving in together, and the phrase nearly sent Mallory into shock. Moving in together can only mean JD moving into Mallory’s cottage—and no, sorry, that’s never going to happen. Mallory doesn’t even let JD do work around the cottage. Small jobs—fixing the bathroom fan, replacing the screen in the back door—Mallory has learned to do herself. Anything bigger—building the outdoor shower, having the cottage winterized, cleaning the chimney—she hires other people to do, and JD is jealous of all of them.
When Mallory gets back to the motel after the tour of Mosquito Bay and gazes upon JD snoring in bed, she decides to make a clean break once they’re back in Nantucket.
JD feels awful about missing the bioluminescence trip, so the next day, he arranges for a taxi to take them to Isabel Segunda. Once there, they wander the plaza holding hands and they stumble across a cute open-air bistro that is suffused with the heady scent of basil. Sure enough, the proprietress has just made pesto, which she tells them she’s going to drizzle over a tomato, peach, and fresh mozzarella salad. Yes, please, one for Mallory. JD orders the whole grilled fish. They sit at a table on the edge of a balcony overlooking the Caribbean. The proprietress fusses over them, calling them lovebirds, and two hours pass in such an enchanted way that Mallory wonders if she overreacted the night before.
JD pays for lunch and they wander out into the white-hot afternoon in a daze. They stroll a little more, poking into galleries and gift shops. JD wants to buy Mallory something, a souvenir that she can take home, and Mallory (tactlessly?) repeats her mother’s decree that anything one buys on vacation always looks like hell once you get it home. JD flinches. Has she ruined the mood? No, or at least not completely. He picks a red hibiscus blossom off a bush and tucks it behind Mallory’s ear. “Thank you for planning this trip,” he says. “I’m lucky to have you.”
They try to find a taxi back to Esperanza but have no luck. It’s hot, neither of them speaks much Spanish, and when they go back to the bistro to ask the proprietress for help, they find it shuttered, closed for the afternoon. JD starts to huff and puff. He prides himself on being a problem solver and doesn’t like feeling helpless. He flags down a white pickup and offers the driver twenty bucks to take them to Esperanza. The driver is a young, handsome Latino in a white polo. He smiles at Mallory—the flower in her hair—and accepts the money. Mallory and JD climb into the truck.
Problem solved! Mallory squeezes JD’s thigh. She leans back against the headrest and closes her eyes. The window is open but the air is hot and syrupy. She is bobbing along the edge of consciousness when suddenly she hears the driver speak.
“So, where are you guys from?”
Mallory opens her eyes. She is surprised by his perfect, unaccented English.
“Nantucket Island,” she says.
“Ever heard of it?” JD asks. “It’s an island in Massachusetts, off the coast of Cape Cod. South of Boston.”
“Yeah,” the driver says. “I spent a few summers on Nantucket growing up.”
JD laughs like the guy has told a joke. “Oh, really?” he says. “Were you a Fresh Air Fund kid?”
There is a moment of noxious silence during which Mallory wants to vaporize and float away through the open window.
“Sorry, man,” JD says. “I was only kidding.”
The driver reaches a stop sign and stomps on the brake harder than he needs to. “I can’t get you all the way to Esperanza. You’ll have to walk from here. Follow the road to the sea, then take a right.” He hands JD the twenty. “Here’s your money back.”
Later, nothing JD says will change Mallory’s mind. Their relationship is over, and all Mallory feels is an overwhelming sense of relief.
Mallory tries not to play favorites with her students but she has become very close with Maggie Sohn, who is struggling with her parents’ divorce, and she has a soft spot for one other student, Jeremiah Freehold. Jeremiah is a sweet, bright kid. His father is a scalloper, his mother a seamstress. They live in an antique home on lower Orange Street. Jeremiah is the oldest of five children. None of this is particularly remarkable. What is remarkable is that, at eighteen years old, Jeremiah has never been to the mainland. Mallory thinks of the Freehold family as a throwback to Nantucket in the 1800s. They’re Quaker; they live a quiet, sustainable island life. In his journal for class, Jeremiah keeps a list of things he’s never actually seen: a traffic light, a McDonald’s, an escalator, a shopping mall, a cineplex, an arcade, a river, a skyscraper, an amusement park.
Talk about sheltered, Mallory thinks. But his life has a purity that she can’t help admiring.
Back in the fall, Mallory asked Jeremiah what his plans were for college. He told her he wasn’t going to college; he would become a scalloper like his father. Mallory asked how he felt about this. He was bright, an enthusiastic reader; it seemed a shame for him not to continue his education.
“I’ll be continuing my education on the water,” he said. “And when I want books, I’ll borrow them from the Atheneum.”
Right after spring break, Jeremiah starts stopping by Mallory’s classroom after school. He asks her to read his poetry. He asks her to recommend books. Mallory is enthralled with Michael Ondaatje’s novel The English Patient, which Jake had sent her at Christmas. The inscription: Again, by a man. Again, good. XO, Jake. Mallory isn’t willing to lend Jeremiah her own personal copy—it’s too precious with Jake’s handwriting inside—but she makes a special trip to Mitchell’s Book Corner and buys a copy for Jeremiah.
He reads it in two days, then comes by to discuss it with Mallory. Jeremiah is a tall, lanky kid with a high forehead and a pronounced Adam’s apple; Mallory thinks he looks like a young Abe Lincoln. Most days, he wears a flannel shirt, jeans, and sturdy boots. However, today he’s wearing a new shirt, white linen, and there’s a brightness to his eyes, a flush to his cheeks. He speaks so quickly about how much he loved the book that he trips over his words: Hana, Caravaggio, the Bedouin with their tinkling bottles of ointment, Kip the sapper, the North African desert, the Italian villa with holes blown through the walls.
Jeremiah has a crush on her, she thinks. Or maybe she’s just flattering herself.
The next few days, she shoos Jeremiah away after school, claiming she has meetings, a dentist appointment, she’s taking the Blazer in for a tune-up—and this works. Jeremiah stops coming by.
A couple of weeks later, however, he reappears. He’s visibly upset, hot-cheeked, perspiring. All the seniors are going on the annual three-day senior-class trip to Boston (Apple is a chaperone every year, and she hates it—a Best Western in Braintree with forty horny teenagers who think it’s party time—but the honorarium is too attractive to turn down), and Jeremiah’s parents aren’t letting him go.
“We had a family meeting and discussed it,” Jeremiah says. “I made my points and they made theirs but it came down to this: I live under their roof so they are in charge of me until I move out. And they don’t want me to go.”
“Oh,” Mallory says. “Wow.” She’s at a loss. She, like just about everyone else she knows, had wished for different parents growing up. Kitty would cook elaborate family dinners every single weeknight, and it was Mallory’s responsibility to do the dishes. Mallory’s tendency—every teenager’s tendency?—was to try to find shortcuts, but it was as if Kitty had second sight.
“Properly,” Kitty would call from the other room if she heard the plates landing in the dishwasher at too brisk a pace for them to have been thoroughly rinsed. “Do them properly.”
Mallory had learned to tune out her mother; the endless stream of whatever was coming from Kitty’s mouth became an unintelligible Wah-wah-wah, like the teachers in the Peanuts TV specials.
Senior was a man of few words unless the topic was traffic on 83 or the Orioles. He was frugal—the heat in their house on Deepdene Road was turned on and set to sixty-seven degrees on December 15 and not a day before; it was turned off on March 15 and not a day later. “If you’re cold, put on a sweater,” he would say. And Senior’s political views were pulled right out of the Eisenhower administration—for starters, his attitude about his very own sister, Greta.
But as exasperating as Kitty and Senior could be, they fell within the parameters of “normal parents” for twentieth-century America. They would never have kept Mallory or Cooper from an experience that could expand their horizons. Mallory tries to understand why the elder Freeholds would not want Jeremiah to go to Boston on a supervised trip with his peers, children he has known his entire life.
“Is it a matter of money?” Mallory asks. The trip fee, she knows, is a hundred and ten dollars per student, but the kids have been selling candy bars all winter to fund-raise, and some of that money is earmarked for families in need. Mallory could put in a word with Dr. Major.
“No,” Jeremiah says. “It’s a matter of principle. They see the mainland as needlessly complicated.” He shakes his head. “I love this island. But as soon as I have enough money saved, I’m leaving. I’m going to North Africa.”
Mallory brings up Jeremiah the next day at the faculty meeting. She’s hoping someone—Apple or even Dr. Major—will offer to call the Freeholds and persuade them to let Jeremiah go on the trip. But Dr. Major, who is normally very progressive and involved, shuts Mallory down. “There is no persuasion powerful enough when it comes to that family,” he says. “Let it be.”
Apple follows up with her later, in the hallway. “And don’t you go knocking on their door, Mal, please. I know you—you feel for the kid, he’s a little different, he doesn’t have many friends, you want to save him, but do not get involved. He’ll be fine. You want to feel sympathy for someone, feel sympathy for me—I’ll be confiscating cigarettes and trying to prevent teenage pregnancy for seventy-two hours.”
The seniors leave early Monday morning and are due back on the late ferry Wednesday night. The school is eerily quiet without them. Mallory teaches two seniors-only classes, so her days are baggy with time. On Monday, she catches up on her end-of-the-year progress reports. Tuesday, it rains and she holes up in her room and reads the new Anne Tyler novel. Wednesday dawns sunny and warm. It’s a terrific day to play hooky. What’s to stop Mallory from calling in sick or taking a personal day and getting some sun on her front porch? A sense of responsibility, that’s what. When she gets to school, she realizes her sophomores have a field trip to Jetties Beach, leaving Mallory with even more free time.
Mallory walks past the library and sees Jeremiah sitting at a table alone, his journal open in front of him. Her heart lurches. She can’t let him just sit there.
“Want to go get some lunch?” she asks him. “My treat?”
“In the cafeteria?” he asks. Mallory notices his steel lunchbox with the domed lid, the kind construction workers used to carry. She knows that Mrs. Freehold packs Jeremiah a lunch each and every day; he doesn’t even buy milk.
“No, let’s go on an adventure,” Mallory says impulsively. Jeremiah is a senior and therefore has off-property lunch privileges, though she doubts he’s exercised them even once this year. Which is all the more reason for him to go today. The rest of his class is watching street theater outside Faneuil Hall or farting in the elevators on their way to the Top of the Hub in the Prudential Center, so what harm will it do if Jeremiah goes to the beach? Or…“Maybe you can show me someplace I’ve never been?” Mallory has lived on Nantucket just shy of two years and there are still whole swaths of the island she hasn’t explored.
Jeremiah cocks his head. She can tell he’s wondering if she’s serious.
“Come on,” she says. “My car is out front.”
Jeremiah says he wants to show her Gibbs Pond, which is in the middle of the island, because that’s where his father first taught him to fish. Mallory’s interest is piqued because she knows from reading the kids’ journals that Gibbs Pond is where most of the high-school parties are held.
“We have fifty minutes,” Mallory says. “Can we get there and back in fifty minutes?”
“Yes,” Jeremiah says. He grabs his journal, his books, and his lunch with purpose, and for a moment, Mallory feels like that teacher—the one who thinks outside the box, the one who goes the extra mile, the one who saves a kid’s life, at least figuratively.
They head out the Milestone Road in the Blazer. The top is on but it’s warm enough for them to open the windows and let the sweet spring air rush in. Mallory turns up the radio. It’s “Crazy” by Aerosmith, and Jeremiah throws his head back and campily sings along.
“So you have a radio at home, then?” Mallory asks.
“Yes,” Jeremiah says. “And a TV. Cable TV.” He grins.
Jeremiah directs Mallory to turn left down a dirt road, and they wind through thick, scrubby woods. It was a pretty tough winter, lots of snow, rain, and wind, and the road is in bad shape with dramatic whoop-de-dos and rogue branches sticking out that etch Nantucket pinstripes along the sides of the Blazer. Mallory begins to wonder about the wisdom of this adventure. The road is one-lane—three-quarters of a lane, really—so there’s no possibility of turning around until they get to a clearing. “You’re sure this is the right road?” she says.
“Yes,” Jeremiah says. He’s got one elbow hanging out his open window and he’s so tall, his head nearly grazes the roof. “Just keep going and we’ll drive right into it.”
Mallory tries to relax. The adventure is in the journey. And she’d rather be here than in the cafeteria eating chicken potpie, right?
The woods start to thin out and there’s light ahead as though they’re coming out of a tunnel. A moment later, the landscape opens up and a large silvery-blue pond lies before them. There’s a formation of ducks paddling their way across the surface.
“It’s…it’s…” Mallory lives on a pond, Miacomet Pond, but Gibbs is different. It’s surrounded by open space and yet it’s hidden from the main roads; it’s like it’s been dropped in here, a secret. Mallory can’t believe she has been living on Nantucket this whole time without knowing this spot existed.
“My dad has a canoe,” Jeremiah says. “The first time he brought me out here, I was six or seven and we caught a bunch of yellow perch that we took home for dinner. The pond is named for John Gibbs. He was this Native American preacher who got into trouble with his tribe and came here to hide from them. The white settlers liked Gibbs’s preaching so much that they paid the penalty he owed—eleven pounds. It’s weird, right? This happened hundreds of years ago…but the pond is still here.” Jeremiah swallows. “My parents believe that this is our island, we’re its stewards, and this is our time to care for it, so why would we go anywhere else?”
Mallory drives closer to the pond’s edge, wishing she’d brought her camera. She turns off the engine and opens her door. She wants to see the pond up close; they’ve come all the way out here, they might as well. No one will notice if they’re five or ten minutes late getting back. Mallory doesn’t have another class until eighth period and Jeremiah is in independent study all day.
When Mallory puts one foot out of the car, she steps in mud. She not only steps in mud, she sinks in mud, all the way to the top of her shoe. Then she sees her front tire is mired in mud as well. “Uh-oh,” she says. Jeremiah is already out of the car, standing a few feet away; his boots are caked with mud. “Jeremiah, get back in, please. I want to make sure we aren’t stuck.”
She pulls her foot back in, starts the Blazer, and gently shifts it into reverse. When she hits the gas, the front wheels spin. Mud sprays everywhere.
“No,” Mallory says. She is such an idiot! She puts the car into four-wheel drive. That will do it, she thinks. This is, after all, a Blazer, the toughest of all off-road vehicles, or so she likes to believe.
Again, the wheels spin. Mud sprays everywhere; flecks hit Mallory’s face through her open window.
Jeremiah says, “You’d better stop. You’re digging in deeper. I’ll get out and push.”
Mallory tries not to panic. Everything is going to be fine. They will get the car unstuck. They will drive back down the horrible dirt road over the whoop-de-dos, and then they will be back on familiar turf, Milestone Road. They’ll get to school by the start of seventh period, at the latest. Mallory will wash the car by hand this weekend. She’ll buff out the pinstripes. She has never felt protective about this car anyway. It’s a road warrior. It’s supposed to take a beating.
Jeremiah crouches in front of the car and pushes. The water is at his ankles; his boots must be flooded. Mallory can see the tendons in his neck strain; his cheeks turn red, the veins in his forehead pop. Mallory steps on the gas, praying, praying, Come on, baby, easy does it, here we go…
The wheels spin. They take a deeper bite of the muddy earth.
Mallory takes her foot off the gas.
Jeremiah says, “Do you have any boards we could put under the tires?”
She blinks. “Do I have any boards?”
It’s a Wednesday morning. There is no one else at Gibbs Pond—no cars, no people, nothing but birds and the cloudless sky above. They’ll have to go for help. What choice do they have? Mallory tries to decide if she should send Jeremiah out to find help or leave him here with the car. Well, it’s her car and he has longer legs. She sends him out to Milestone Road.
“Just flag down the first person you see and explain what happened,” she says. “We need someone to tow us out.”
Jeremiah heads out on his own while Mallory gets out of the car and assesses the situation. She’s stuck. Stuck! She sits on the hood with her face in her hands and tries not to cry. She only wanted to help—but what does Kitty always say? No good deed goes unpunished. Mallory hopes that Dr. Major will understand. He already knows that Mallory feels awful about Jeremiah being left behind, so naturally she would offer to do something nice for him. A little fresh air. It’s such a gorgeous day, and everyone gets spring fever. Even Mallory.
What our girl doesn’t predict (though the canny among us might) is that the person who drives Jeremiah back to the pond is none other than JD. He’s in the Nantucket Fire Department’s Suburban.
Mallory can’t believe this. This is…so awkward. Mallory wonders if maybe it’s no coincidence that JD was the first person Jeremiah was able to flag down. Mallory has noticed JD driving the Suburban on the roads between the school and her house pretty frequently since they broke up. She hadn’t considered that JD was following her or checking up on her…until now.
JD pulls up behind the Blazer and hops out. He’s in his black uniform. Mallory used to joke about how sexy he looked in that uniform, but now she finds him intimidating.
He inspects the front of the Blazer and lets out a low whistle. “You’re stuck, all right.”
Mallory yearns to keep things professional. “Do you have a tow rope?”
“I do,” JD says. “Mind telling me what you and young Mr. Freehold were doing out here at Gibbs by yourselves in the middle of the school day?”
Mallory stares at JD, her cheeks aflame. She will not let him poison this situation with his pathological jealousy.
But then again, how will she stop him?
“I told you, Miss Blessing and I were having an adventure,” Jeremiah says.
Mallory closes her eyes. She feels JD’s imagination moving as swiftly as a duck’s webbed feet beneath the calm surface of the pond.
“An adventure,” JD says. “How about that.”
When the seniors arrive back at school the next morning, Mallory learns that Christy Belk and, yes, Maggie Sohn sneaked out of their hotel room, crossed a highway to get to a liquor store, bought a bottle of Wild Turkey with Christy’s fake ID, smuggled it into the hotel, and shared it with their roommates, both of whom spent the early-morning hours puking their guts up.
This, however, is not the talk of the school. The talk of the school is Jeremiah Freehold and Miss Blessing caught alone out at Gibbs Pond.
Apple stops by to see Mallory between classes. “Please tell me it’s not true,” she says. “Please tell me you listened to my advice and left that boy alone.”
“How did you find out?” Mallory asks.
“How did I find out?” Apple says. “There’s been a lot of whispering, baby. A lot.”
Oh, for God’s sake! Mallory thinks. People can’t possibly believe that anything funny was going on, can they? Mallory is stung, and worried, and crestfallen—not only because she and Jeremiah have become an object of curiosity (best-case scenario) or potential lascivious rumors (worst-case) but because in every class, she notices that her students avoid eye contact with her while simultaneously watching her every move. One of the boys slaps Jeremiah on the back.
At the end of the school day, Mallory is called down to Dr. Major’s office. She’d expected this, even welcomed it, because she wanted a chance to explain herself. But now, after talking to Apple, she figures she’s about to get fired. She wonders if Mr. and Mrs. Freehold will be there to complain about Mallory Blessing corrupting their son.
As soon as Dr. Major closes the door to his office, Mallory says, “I exercised horrible judgment, sir. I thought it would be okay to go for a ride during lunch. I felt so sorry for him. But I know how it looks and I understand why you have to let me go.” Only in the last few hours has it occurred to her how bad the situation might appear to others. She and Jeremiah went to Gibbs Pond alone. A female teacher and a male student. He is eighteen—but still. What were Leland’s words back in New York? It’s unseemly. How about some self-respect? Has Mallory learned nothing in the past two years? Has she not grown up at all? That’s what it feels like. She’s back at square one.
“Let you go?” Dr. Major says. “I’m not giving up on my most promising teacher. Are you kidding me?”
Mallory keeps her job, but the incident with Jeremiah Freehold casts a pall over her summer. It feels like everywhere Mallory goes, people are avoiding her, whispering about her. She lives in mortal fear of bumping into Jeremiah or his parents; she wishes she knew what they drove so she could scan the parking lot at the Stop and Shop before venturing inside.
She decided earlier in the spring that she would not return to work at the Summer House pool; she wanted to enjoy a real teacher’s summer off. But a week into vacation, this feels like an unwise choice. Apple is away—she took a job as head counselor at a camp for disadvantaged girls in North Carolina—and without her friend, Mallory finds herself feeling lonely.
She wants to call Jake but she can’t. When they parted the last time, they agreed they would call for only four reasons: engagement, marriage, pregnancy, or death.
How will I know if you’re coming back next year? Mallory asked.
I’m coming back every year, Jake said. No matter what.
Mallory accepted that answer, but a year is a long time and a lot can happen. Last summer, Jake had the convenient excuse of Cooper to bring him back up to Nantucket. But what about this year? What is he going to tell Ursula?
Maybe he and Ursula broke up, she thinks. It’s not impossible.
Mallory is desperate for company. She calls Cooper and invites him to come for the weekend.
“The rest of my summer is booked,” Cooper says. “Alison and I are in Vegas this weekend, then we have tickets to see Mary Chapin Carpenter at Wolf Trap the next weekend with Jake and Ursula, then we’re going to Denver, then to Nashville.”
“Ah,” Mallory says. It feels like she’s been hit in the forehead with a poison dart. Jake and Ursula have not broken up. They’re a couple, doing couple things with other couples. “So, you and Alison…I guess it’s more than just a rebound?”
“Definitely more than a rebound, Mal,” Coop says in his overly patient old-soul voice. “Why would you even suggest that?”
Oh, I don’t know, Mallory thinks. Maybe because you started up with Alison less than a month after your wife left? “I’m happy for you,” Mallory says. “Have fun.”
She plays “Everybody Hurts” umpteen times in a row one night and drinks a bottle of wine by herself. This is a low point. The lowest, she hopes. The next day, she calls Leland, but the phone at Leland’s apartment has been disconnected. What? Has Leland moved? Tracking Leland down requires a phone call home to Kitty, who can get Leland’s new number from Geri Gladstone. A call with Kitty is never a simple thing; Mallory limits her communications with her parents to once every two weeks. It’s always the same; her mother talks about tennis, what’s happening at the country club, and her perennials bed, which is (apparently) the envy of Deepdene Road. Then she’ll ask about Mallory’s love life. Kitty didn’t approve of JD (no surprise there) and so she was relieved to hear about the breakup, but her pestering has grown tiresome. (“There are wealthy men on Nantucket, Mallory, out on those big yachts. You might meet one if you ever got out of your cutoffs and put on a dress.”) Kitty will then ask when Mallory plans to leave Nantucket and “rejoin civilization.”
On this call, as on every call, Mallory says, “I’m here for the foreseeable future, Mom.”
To which Kitty replies, “Oh, darling.” Heavy sigh. “Your father wants to say hello.”
“Leland’s number, Mom!” Mallory calls out as a reminder.
But it’s Senior who responds. “She’s already on her way over to Geri’s. She’ll be gone an hour, so thank you. The Orioles are playing.”
Turns out, Leland has moved from Eighty-Second Street to Greenwich Village.
“Apparently her block is quite gentrified,” Kitty says.
Mallory rolls her eyes. Kitty’s idea of New York City is frozen in 1978; she thinks everyone who lives in the Village looks like Sid and Nancy. “It’s all gentrified now, Mom.”
“Well,” Kitty says. “I’m surprised you didn’t know Leland moved.”
“I haven’t talked to Leland since the holidays,” Mallory confesses. The day after Christmas, Mallory and Leland had lunch in Baltimore at Louie’s Bookstore Café; Leland was leaving the next day to go back to New York. Their conversation was stilted because their lives were so different. Leland had been promoted to the features editor of Bard and Scribe. She boasted about her upcoming interview with Fiella Roget, the twenty-four-year-old Haitian woman whose novel Shimmy Shimmy was “all anyone in the city is talking about.” In turn, Mallory had bored Leland to tears by describing her life at the high school and how she hung out with JD while he played darts at the Muse.
Mallory feels guilty that she hasn’t called Leland before now, but the longer she waited, the more onerous catching up seemed. This will be good, though—calling for a concrete reason, to invite Leland for the weekend.
An unfamiliar female voice answers at Leland’s new number. “Allô?”
“Hello?” Mallory says. “I’m looking for Leland Gladstone?”
“One moment, plisss,” the voice says.
There’s whispering. Or maybe Mallory is imagining that? She’s lying on her porch in the sun because that’s where she feels the safest, gazing at the ocean in her front yard.
I am lucky, Mallory thinks. I am blessed.
I am so, so lonely, she thinks. She’s not sure what she’ll do if Leland turns her down.
“Hello?”
“Lee?” Mallory says.
“Mal?” Leland says. “Is that you?”
“Yes, hi, how are you? Kitty got your number from Geri, I didn’t realize you’d moved, and I was busy with the end of the school year, and anyway, I’d love for you to come visit this weekend, or next weekend…” Mallory is talking too fast. She’s nervous. She can’t imagine why—for years, she and Leland were as close as Siamese twins. But that’s the issue, she supposes. They were once so close that now it feels awkward to be not as close, though Mallory knows this is what happens when you grow up: paths diverge, people lose touch. Mallory didn’t know that Leland had moved. She doesn’t know who just answered the phone. Leland’s new roommate, presumably.
There’s a sigh from Leland—annoyed? regretful?
“I wish I could,” she says. “But I’m leaving tomorrow for Bread Loaf.”
“Bread Loaf,” Mallory says. It takes her a second to understand because at first she thinks Sugarloaf, which was where the Blessings and the Gladstones used to take their family ski trips. But Bread Loaf is something else, a writer thing.
“At Middlebury, in Vermont,” Leland says. “I’ll be there for three and a half weeks, so…”
“As a student?” Mallory asks. “Are you…writing a novel?”
“Me?” Leland says. “No!” She starts laughing and Mallory laughs right along with her, even though she feels miserable because Leland won’t be coming to Nantucket. Mallory wants to hang up but that, of course, would be rude and will make the chasm between them even wider and deeper. “I’m going with Fifi.”
“Fifi?” Mallory says.
“Fiella,” Leland says.
“Fiella Roget?” Mallory asks. Surely she’s missing something. Just last week, Fiella Roget appeared on the cover of the New York Times Magazine. She’s famous, a bona fide literary phenomenon.
“Yes, Fiella Roget,” Leland says, and in the background Mallory hears the same voice that answered the phone. Leland did the interview with Fiella and they became friends; is that it? They’re such good friends that she calls Fiella “Fifi”? They’re such good friends that Fifi answers Leland’s phone and has invited her to Bread Loaf for three weeks? “She agreed to teach last year, before the book came out and she became so in demand. She decided to honor the commitment.”
“Okay,” Mallory says. She wonders why she’s supposed to care about any of this. “And what will you do while she’s honoring the commitment?”
“Network, obviously,” Leland says, and Mallory relaxes because this, at least, is a Leland she recognizes. “The waiters and waitresses are the promising writers, you know, because they’re the ones on scholarship. Everyone else pays to go. So I thought I’d sit in on Fifi’s workshops, see if I can identify budding talent, and maybe get a scoop for the magazine.”
“I guess that makes sense,” Mallory says.
“Besides, I need to fend off her admirers,” Mallory says. “You do know they call it ‘Bed Loaf.’”
Fend off her admirers? Mallory thinks. An outrageous notion enters her mind. “So…you moved to the Village, right?”
“Charles and Bleecker,” Leland says. “Fifi has the greatest apartment, and things moved so fast that…yeah, she asked me to move in with her in March.”
Things moved so fast?
“Are you…” Mallory doesn’t even know how to ask the question. She’s afraid if she does, Leland will laugh or be angry. Leland is heterosexual—all those years with Fray, her hunt for the perfect square-jawed, lacrosse-playing Princeton-educated investment banker, Kip or whoever. “Are you dating Fiella Roget? Are you two together?”
“Dating, together, head over heels in love,” Leland says. “Can you believe it?”
Wow. No, really—wow!
That’s great, so happy for you, enjoy Bread Loaf, hopefully you and Fifi can come see me another time, Christmas Stroll or next summer! When Mallory hangs up, she thinks: I have to call someone! But who? Apple is away, Cooper is busy crisscrossing the country with Alison. Mallory could bike out to the Summer House and tell Isolde and Oliver, but they’ve never met Leland and they don’t read so they wouldn’t even know the name Fiella Roget. Mallory supposes she could call Kitty, but she’s not desperate enough for that. She wonders about the Gladstones. Do they know their daughter is now dating a successful female novelist? Do they find it as startling as Mallory does?
After a little while, the novelty of the news wears off, and by the time Mallory wakes up the next day, she feels only left out and lonely. Cooper has Alison, Leland has Fifi…and Jake has Ursula.
August drags on. Mallory’s days, which were so frenetic during the school year, gape with unfilled hours. She should go out to the bars at night—21 Federal, the Boarding House, the Club Car—and try to find someone of her own. But instead, she reads and writes lesson plans for the upcoming school year. She runs and lies in the sun. She buys Sarah Leah Chase’s Nantucket Open-House Cookbook and makes the baba ghanouj, roasting fresh eggplants from Bartlett’s Farm and fat cloves of garlic until they’re soft and golden brown. The result is so delicious, Mallory can’t scoop it into her mouth fast enough.
It’s a tiny victory.
Finally, the last week of August arrives. Mallory is both relieved and anxious. She has awakened at three a.m. the past five or six nights, imagining Jake arriving by pirate ship or hot-air balloon.
No matter what.
Does this mean the same thing to both of them: No. Matter. What?
Mallory waits for the phone to ring. She waits for a telegram. How are those delivered? By hand? She lives on a road with no name. She peers out the back windows, searching for a lost telegram-delivery guy.
No matter what.
It’s Monday; Labor Day is a week away.
It’s Tuesday.
On Wednesday, finally, she goes to the post office to check her box. Jake has her address; this is where he mailed her the book last Christmas. When Mallory finds only the usual assortment of bills and back-to-school catalogs, her eyes burn with tears. As if that isn’t bad enough, she bumps into two people coming into the post office as she’s leaving, physically bumps into them, because her sight is blurred.
“Mal. How’s it going?”
Mallory looks up, blinks. “JD,” she says.
JD is with a woman. She’s older, but attractive, with long copper-colored hair, hair that is so beautiful, it nearly demands a compliment. Mallory knows this woman. It’s…
“Miss Blessing, hi,” the woman says. “I’m Tonya Sohn, Maggie’s mother.”
JD is dating Tonya Sohn, Maggie’s newly divorced mother. Mallory sits behind the wheel of the Blazer for a second, wondering if she should scream or laugh.
Laugh, she decides. She wants JD to be happy so he’ll leave her alone.
Mallory tosses her mail onto the passenger seat, and a plain white postcard flutters out of one of the catalogs to the floor. Mallory sees her name printed on the front. She snaps it up, flips it over.
It says: I’m flying in on Friday the first at 4:45 p.m. If you’re not waiting at the airport, I’ll take a taxi to the cottage.
The postcard is unsigned, though obviously Mallory knows who it’s from.
She sits a second, wondering if she should cry or laugh from utter relief.
Laugh, she decides. She has so much to tell him!