Still Summer

  “Well, thanks for that much. I asked her because it wasn’t just like she was her ordinary bitchy self. She had a reason.”

  Holly shrugged and said, “She seems to have gotten over it. She was chatty Cathy on the plane. ‘Aunt Holly, I got the cutest this. . . . Aunt Holly, do you think Dave would whiten my teeth for cheap?’ And I have to say, I thought some of it was funny, Trace. ‘Why do engineers have to take English? It’s bullshit. Why do I have to read Eugene O’Neill? No wonder he was a drunk. If I was this boring, I’d want to be drunk, too. And oh boy, Virginia Woolf is next. I have it with me. They should call this course People So Boring They Committed Suicide as Public Service.’ What I can’t figure is that guy dumping Cammie. For who? Lindsay Lohan? Even my boys think Cammie’s hotter than a movie star; and they don’t have hormones. You should hear them tell their friends, ‘You should see our cousin . . . though she’s not . . . really. . . .’”

  “But as good as cousins. You know, Hols, guys must have changed since we were young, because if a girl looked like Cammie when we were kids, she could write her own ticket. Didn’t have to have two brain cells to rub together. I thought it was weird, too, but apparently this was a Pater-and-Mater-wanted-a-royal-marriage thing. Not that this kid is an Astor or anything, but Kenilworth . . .”

  “Versus the near west side . . .”

  “Exactly, and I had been so furious with her an hour before, because she was on my case about wanting to go backpacking around the world instead of going back to college. . . . It boils down to . . . she can’t stand me.”

  “Trace, she’s crazy about you. Otherwise, why would she bother to torment you so creatively?” Holly scoffed, and then pointed out, “This alleged breakfast is mythological. It said it was by the pool. There is no pool.”

  “She told me yesterday she thinks I’ve never felt passion. Can you imagine telling Heidi that you thought she’d never felt passion?” Heidi was Holly’s mother, dead now for two years.

  “Not if I wanted to stay conscious until the end of the sentence. My mother called me a potty mouth for telling her I had a bladder infection. And I was married!”

  “I don’t expect Cam to be perfect, Hols. And I know it has something to do with that she was . . .”

  “That she’s adopted.”

  “That she was adopted, Holly. How many times have I told you that I don’t think of adoption as a condition?”

  “Well, I don’t think of Cammie as being adopted. . . .”

  “There you go! That’s like saying, Oh, I never notice that she limps!”

  “Tracy, you know what I mean.”

  “I do, and I don’t like it much.”

  “You know I don’t mean any harm.”

  “Of course I do. I’m being a bitch. But we were so close. All the way through high school. Cam was a renegade, but, geez, she loved me and Jim and Ted. Now she loves Jim. Period.”

  “Ted’s out?”

  “Ted’s definitely out. Ted is the enemy because he likes me.”

  “Ted isn’t . . . wasn’t adopted.”

  “Like that’s my fault? God, when my period stopped, I thought I had cancer! I never thought we’d have another kid.”

  “Maybe she just needs some time. Would it help her to . . . know?”

  “Do you think so?”

  “It’s a tough call, Trace. It could make her better or . . . worse. I mean, keeping something like that from her for so long. . . .”

  “I didn’t really have a choice. That was the condition. That I not tell her.”

  “Well, I don’t want to hear any more about Cammie. She’ll grow up and we won’t even remember anything but the bikinis she bought on this trip. She was in a great mood this morning,” Holly said. Cammie and Livy went for a run and breakfast. After that, Holly said, Olivia wanted to buy a few opals.

  “Buy a few opals?” Tracy gasped.

  “That’s what your daughter said. Livy saw a woman wearing a diamond bracelet last night that she liked, too.”

  Tracy marveled, “I was so staggered last night, I wouldn’t have noticed someone who wasn’t wearing anything but a diamond bracelet! You aren’t even supposed to bring earrings. The pamphlet says everything gets all tossed around. You’re supposed to bring minimal cosmetics, no jewelry, not even rings. I was going to get Ted a necklace, you know, a chain; but I’m waiting until we get to Grenada. I wouldn’t want to buy it and lose it.”

  “Well, I brought maximal cosmetics,” Holly continued. “I don’t go to SuperSaver without mascara.”

  “But you’d let your boobs hang out at breakfast.”

  “I’ll never see these people again. That cabdriver last night must have had jugs that weighed ten pounds each, and she was letting ’em rip.”

  “Why wouldn’t they just eat the breakfast here?”

  “Breakfast here wouldn’t be good enough for Olivia. Not served to her.” The hotel was as deserted and silent as if a neutron bomb had exploded during the night. Holly wondered how they’d find a way to pay their bill.

  “Oh, Holly. Don’t start. You just don’t like Livy, do you,” Tracy said. “There’s the golden iguana,” she went on, pointing at a surprisingly large lizard on the wall above her head. It blinked its gemmy eyes at them and skittered away, not quite quickly enough for Tracy. “Can’t they keep them outside?”

  “I don’t think they get to decide,” said Holly. “Lizards have their own rules.” Her blond hair was standing straight up, in a halo.

  Tracy smiled. Holly was a comfort in any situation—the only woman Tracy knew who never stressed a holiday, who could always stretch dinner to accommodate five more boys, simply someone, except for her anxieties as a mom, who knew how to live. Today, she resembled Ian, who had so many cowlicks that he could never get his hair to lie flat even when he smeared it with gel until it was as stiff as the old-fashioned bathing caps Sister Boniface once made them wear into the pool.

  “You don’t want me to tell you what I think about Olivia, Tracy,” Holly said now. “That’s why you always change the subject, even when you’re the one who brings it up. Wait! I smell coffee. There it is, an oasis!”

  Around a sharp turn, and overlooking a beautiful pool made entirely of natural rock, was a glassed-in sunroom. A breakfast bar fragrant with croissants, jam, fruit, and carafes of hot coffee, apparently placed there by elves, was daintily displayed. Tracy gratefully spread jam on a croissant and offered the plate to Holly.

  Holly ate half of her pastry before she said, “Trace, when we picked Olivia up the other day, I realized that what really bothers me is that Olivia hasn’t changed and we have.” She held up a hand to forestall Tracy’s objection. “No. I don’t mean that she can afford a boob lift—and yes, Trace, I’m a nurse and she has had one—and we can’t. Or even that we wouldn’t if we could—though that is a lie, I would. She never grew up. She never had to. That bugs the crap out of me. I can’t hide it. You’re right. I don’t like Livy. But I love Livy. I just don’t romanticize her. The little girl from Westbrook who ended up the Countess . . . whatever. She was even a bitch at her own wedding,” Holly said. “Remember? You have to sit here. You have to sit there! I ended up eating next to a guy who didn’t speak a word of English and kept sticking his hand up my dress. Forget it, Trace. . . . This is a good pastry, nice and flaky and fresh.” She patted her pouch of a belly, visible to anyone else only when she wore the tightest waists; visible, in Holly’s imagination, from passenger aircraft flying at thirty thousand feet. “Are you finished, Trace?”

  Tracy had fallen quiet.

  She was thinking of Anna Maria Seno, Olivia’s mother. She was thinking of an ordinary afternoon, when Anna Maria told Olivia frankly, and in front of Tracy, that Joey was wanted but that she, Olivia, born ten years later, had been an accident. Not content to stop there, she went on to explain that women in their thirties didn’t have babies then. She, Anna Maria, worried Olivia would come out with two heads and have to spend her whole life in an adult-size cri
b with the sisters at Mount Carmel. She thought of the stifling small rooms in the Seno house, four rooms crammed with plastic trees in tubs and plastic philodendrons on wood-grained plastic stands, with chairs and ottomans wrapped in plastic like oversize sandwiches, from the lampshades to the golden tufted love seats. (“She could probably hose down the whole house,” Olivia once told Tracy. “If she could only figure out a way to get plastic on the walls.”) The religious icons in every room. The Sacred Heart. The sere knots from previous Palm Sundays tacked above the beds. The Virgin in her grotto lighted with a blue bulb, her staring ovoid face with its follow-you eyes terrifying Tracy every time she stayed over and had to use the bathroom.

  They’d made over a closet for Olivia.

  It was a big, deep closet, and Sal, Olivia’s father, was a carpenter. He made her a built-in bed, and the built-in drawers and shelves above it were so clever, it was as though he were a New Yorker who’d had access to all the space-saving tricks of an Ikea store. Livy had bins for her books, her own Princess phone, and even high racks for her winter coats. But it was still a closet. Joey had bunk beds, a stereo, red shag carpeting, shelves of Pony League trophies and photos, walls for posters, a big bureau with an ornate cross on the wall above it, heavy silver that could have come from the Vatican. Nothing was too good for Joey.

  Tracy remembered the afternoon that Olivia came home to learn that her father and mother had decided that Olivia’s dog, Pickles, had dug around the peonies once too often. Sal had taken her to the vet to be put to sleep during lunch hour. When Olivia screamed, Anna Maria slapped her. She closed the windows and made lemonade from lemons, telling Olivia to shut up, the whole neighborhood would hear, that Pickles was dirty and shed and probably gave Olivia allergies. But Olivia continued to scream until she threw up.

  Anna Maria and Sal, Tracy thought, who closed their bedroom door after dinner and watched television alone, while Joey and his friends combed their hair in front of the bathroom mirror or, later, teased Olivia and, Tracy suspected, worse. Joey could do no wrong.

  All Olivia had to do to get her share of attention was become royalty.

  Holly didn’t get it. No one but Tracy did.

  Tracy remembered helping Anna Maria out of the train at Montespertoli for the wedding, Anna Maria rubbing her legs and saying that Olivia had her nerve wearing white.

  “You don’t know her like I do,” Tracy said suddenly. There was no need to give “her” a name.

  “Obviously,” Holly conceded.

  “I don’t mean that. She didn’t always have it easy.”

  “None of us did, Trace. But we didn’t turn out like ‘Mirror, mirror on the wall . . .’”

  “You’re jealous.”

  “No doubt,” Holly said. “Or maybe not. Whatever I think, it’s between us. I’m not going to wreck the trip. I am grateful to her for it.”

  Tracy looked at her waterproof watch, with its double dials. She would always know what time it was at home. “The van comes in forty-five minutes. Do you think they’re back?”

  Tracy and Holly made their way back to their room to gather up their toothbrushes and pajamas. “Before they come, Tracy,” Holly said suddenly, laying a hand on her friend’s arm. “Don’t think anything I said about Olivia has to do with Cammie.”

  “Look!” Cammie cried just then, darting into the room. “Look what Aunt Olivia bought me! And don’t start up about it! I have reasons why this is important. . . .” Tracy and Olivia exchanged glances over Cammie’s head. Then Tracy exclaimed over the bracelet, dainty as a double thickness of wire but set with a row of deep indigo sapphires, each bezeled, each slightly different from the others, submerged lights lambent within each stone.

  Tracy couldn’t imagine what it had cost.

  It had never bothered her, over the years, when Olivia sent Camille vast boxes of Italian cashmere and lace-trimmed underwear. It was sweet; it was extravagant; it was at a distance. Looking at them together there, their dark heads bent acquisitively over the bracelet Cammie was displaying, she felt an old spike stir in her heart, searching for a place to let blood. Olivia had outshone her. Olivia always shined the brightest.

  “Get a few opals there, Liv?” Holly asked.

  Livy nodded. “Wait until you see.”

  Unable to restrain themselves, Tracy and Holly leaned in as Livy slowly opened a folded velvet case. The stones, large and small, ranged from rusty to fiery peach and green within, oval and square cut. They gleamed like small planets against the black pile of the material.

  “What in the world are you going to do with them?” Tracy asked. “You already have more jewelry than the Queen Mother.”

  “Earrings, a pendant, maybe. A really big brooch. I’ll need to send them somewhere. I wouldn’t trust anyone in Chicago. I know a man in Montespertoli. The Virgin Islands are renowned for opals,” said Olivia. “You don’t pass up what’s there. It’s like not bringing home wine from Italy.”

  They all fell silent out of respect. Franco Montefalco had bottled spectacular wines and olive oil on their Umbrian estate. But Olivia seemed cheerful chatting about her former life. If she was in mourning, it was a mourning of her own variety. She had wrapped herself in a black-on-black sarong, but the skin that showed through the panel carved out of her maillot was flawless, taut, not the sickly white of winter-hidden skin, but a kind of exquisite beige, like fine antique ivory.

  “I know a beautiful goldsmith on Rush Street,” said Tracy.

  “Really?”

  “Yes. He made me a ring for our twentieth anniversary, from a drawing Jim did. You could look him up.”

  “Maybe I will, Trace. I’m an American again now,” said Olivia. “Thanks. I don’t mean to sound like a snob.”

  “Even though you are,” Holly said. She wrinkled her nose at Tracy and laughed.

  “Admitted,” said Olivia.

  “Well, looks like you’ve got yourself a find there, missy,” Tracy said, turning to Camille.

  “A woman should have a few pieces of really good jewelry, Mom,” Cammie said. “It’s timeless.”

  “Did you just make that up?” Tracy teased.

  “Tracy, I haven’t seen my godchild in eight years,” Olivia said, genuinely beseeching. “Naturally I’m going to want to spoil her.”

  “She’s my goddaughter, too, and I saw her yesterday,” said Holly. “She was bitching because her mother drove too slow. I didn’t have the same impulse.” Cammie arranged her face in a mock glare of rage at Holly. “Well, admit it, Cam. You sometimes treat your mother like a queen would treat her subject. A mean queen.” Cammie stuck out her tongue.

  “Admitted,” she said. “But Aunt Holly,” she added, tickling Holly under the ribs until Holly slapped her hand away, “you made me a cashmere sweater for Christmas. I practically didn’t have to wear a coat all year, it’s so warm and beautiful. That’s as expensive as a bracelet if you count the time.”

  Holly softened, leaning over to pull Cammie’s baseball cap over her eyes.

  “Well, you can’t bring this stuff with us,” Tracy said nervously. “We’re going to have to ask this fellow . . . here, wherever he is, to FedEx it home.”

  “No way! I’m never taking it off!” Cammie said.

  “I wouldn’t trust anything this costly with any delivery service,” Olivia said. “Please, Tracy, let her wear it. We shouldn’t put beautiful things away, out of sight. They need to be seen, the way pearls need to breathe. Look at it against her arm. It’s marvelous, and with her new swimsuit and her hair . . .” The swimsuit had been Olivia’s gift also, a full ounce of azure material that mercifully covered critical clefts and hillocks. Between Janis’s and Olivia’s gifts, Camille would be nude by the end of next semester.

  Tracy made a ritual protest. “Olivia! If you’re going to give her something like that . . .”

  “I never gave her a birthday present when she turned nineteen—”

  “You gave her a check for a thousand dollars! And that was a month
ago!”

  “For college, Mom!” Cammie protested.

  “And that wasn’t a gift! A gift is a tribute to beauty! Franco used to say that,” Olivia chimed in. “And I’m taking mine, too. Who knows how honest this innkeeper is?”

  They heard the van bleat in the lot.

  “I haven’t even brushed my hair or showered!” Camille wailed.

  “You’re just going to get dirty anyway,” Tracy said. “It’s . . . a boat. And anyway, if we don’t go right now, we’ll miss it. Aren’t you going to put on clothes, Liv?” she asked, grabbing her luggage.

  Olivia smiled lazily and asked, “Why?”

  They went to a brothel. They had done this the other time. It was a place Ernesto liked to go, the young man guessed, whenever they had these jobs. He bragged that he took at least two girls each time. It was hard to miss the word for “two.” Carlo had a wife, but he went also.

  A meager place, fouled by years of debauchery, the building was no more than a shack made of planks like broken teeth, the roof tar paper covered with cheap, irregular shingles. The dirt floor looked as though it were raked occasionally. But it had a superb zinc bar and buttery leather bar stools. Drinks were glasses of unnamed clear spirits with no mixer or, curiously, a root beer the owner made.

  Some of the girls were so young that they got sick if they drank booze, so they were given root beer before they were led upstairs.

  None of them was old enough for this life, the young man thought. No one could ever be old enough for it. It could only make people old.

  They were all stolen girls, of many races. He had no idea how they came to be here, on this island, the name of which he didn’t even know. There seemed to be houses, with lights strung on poles, Christmas lights of some sort, back among the trees; but he and Ernesto and Carlo did not go farther back, only to this place, on the lip of the harbor. The young man sat there for hours with a book and waited.

  One of the girls, a blond child, had come three times to the young American and pleaded urgently in a language he assumed was Dutch. The time before, he had paid to sit alone with her in her four-by-six room and given her a pencil, trying to urge her to draw him a map. She was so frightened and, he suspected, already infected with something that she could do nothing but weep and cling to him, repeating something that sounded like “Mutti? . . . Mutti?” which the young man assumed meant the same thing in any language. He stroked her hair and wished he knew how to buy her and send her home. Perhaps he could find a translator somewhere, at a resort, perhaps. But the owner had come then, before the time he had paid for was up, and with his pistola ordered the girl downstairs.