The Whole Thing Together

  He smiled. He leaned against the old fire door. His heart was full. He proceeded to spend the next hour stacking miniature tomato paste cans into the Great Sphinx.

  No, she wouldn’t get bored easily. And he had a flaw of character.

  Question of the day for Little Ray:

  Did Quinn ever take you to see the narwhals at the Coney Island aquarium?

  Big Sasha

  BS,

  Yes! She loved that place and she hated it. She cried over the ancient walrus. “He can see the open ocean from his tank!” So I cried too, naturally.

  Did she used to take you under the blue whale at the Natural History museum?

  LR

  LR,

  Many times. She had stories for each one of the scary undersea dioramas.

  She was the only one in the family who took me anywhere. If not for Quinn, I would have turned out like Cameron Reese.

  BS

  Please.

  —

  “Do you think it’s possible that Mom had an affair when she was married to Dad?” Mattie chose a moment when Quinn was wrestling the deep-rooted weeds in a patch of summer squash.

  Mattie decided to burden Quinn with this in its totality. She knew Quinn would take most or all of the weight, and it was just as well. She was tired of carrying it alone.

  Quinn stood up. “Why do you ask?” She looked neither surprised nor hungry for information, as other people might.

  “Because I keep thinking about it. That guy in the Black Horse I told you about?”

  “Uh-huh.” She was back to the weeds.

  “I asked Mom about him and she shut down completely. She hasn’t looked me in the eye since.”

  “What did she say?”

  “Nothing remarkable. She said he was a surfer. He taught her and us for a bit. I knew all that. It was how she looked and acted.”

  “Right.”

  Mattie took a breath. “And then I asked Dad.” Mattie picked at her fingernails violently. “He was so weird, Quinn. He hardly said anything. Silent but cold. I’ve never seen him act like that.”

  Quinn nodded, but her face, even from the side, was pained.

  “It was Sunday afternoon and he was in his study. After I asked him he told me to close the door and right after that I heard something crash on the ground.” She felt shaky as she told it. “What does that mean, do you think?”

  “Something fell.”

  Mattie let out her breath. “Quinn.”

  “Do you want to know what it means?”

  “I don’t know if I do, but I keep pushing, and I can’t seem to let it go.” She cracked all her knuckles. She closed her eyes. “None of us knows what happened. Don’t you kind of want to know?”

  “They don’t want us to know.”

  “Obviously they don’t. Why not? What happened?” Mattie felt itchy and reckless, and even though her recklessness always seemed to cause Quinn the most trouble, it didn’t stop her. “Are you not curious?”

  Quinn wiped the dirt off on her pants. “I don’t think there’s any piece of information that would change the things we know are true,” she said slowly.

  Mattie was barely listening. She opened her hands. “Other people divorce amicably. They stay friends. They have dinner together. They share holidays, go on vacations. I know plenty of people like that. Our parents haven’t stood within a hundred feet of each other in almost twenty years. What happened to them? And why can’t they tell us?”

  “They want to protect us.”

  “From what? Maybe they want to protect themselves. Maybe it’s the one thing they’ve agreed on in all this time.”

  “Maybe even that amount of agreement is good.”

  “When we were little kids maybe. But at a certain point, they don’t get to decide anymore.”

  At last Quinn’s large eyes turned on her with all their force. “Please be careful, Matt.”

  No, that was not what she would be doing. She would trample, lurch, and careen. “Maybe I get to decide. Maybe even Jonathan fucking Dawes gets a chance to decide.”

  Sasha spent two days trying to think of what she could write to Ray about, and then she saw the sphinx behind the back shelves in the storeroom of the market alongside her pyramids and she almost cried.

  She almost cried with appreciation of it. In her heart surged a tidal wave that started to trickle out of her eyeballs. That was weird.

  But it brought such a rush of the old feelings. The Lego feelings and To Kill a Mockingbird feelings and the little plastic animal feelings. It was nostalgia, but something new and momentous, too: the synthesis of her old Ray and the bewildering stranger Ray she’d met outside Samantha Rubin’s apartment building. Here was a beautiful rendition of nearly the whole of Giza made of cans and boxes stretching across the poorly lit aisle behind the last wall of shelves that led to the defunct fire door.

  It brought back an old version of herself that she’d missed, hadn’t really known was gone.

  And then Francis came around in back of the shelves and found her.

  “What the hell is this?”

  She let out her breath. Shit. With her eyes she memorized the last moments of box-and-can Giza.

  “Are those pyramids?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you make this?” She couldn’t quite read his voice. If Francis was even a little impressed she wanted to include Ray, but if he was purely annoyed she didn’t.

  “Um.”

  “Have I been paying you to make a play world out of dry goods?”

  She tried to look contrite and not just put out. “I’m sorry. I had a bit of extra time after I finished with the morning shipments and restocking. I thought maybe we could use the images on social media.”

  That was complete bullshit, but Francis talked about the value of social media almost as much as he talked about his MBA.

  She could see the wheels turning. “You mean, we could post it on Facebook.”

  “Sure. Maybe create an Instagram account.”

  “Okay.” He nodded, eyebrows raised. “That’s good thinking. You know, that’s why I like to hire you kids.”

  “Ray did it too. He really deserves credit.” She smiled. She couldn’t help feeling proud.

  “You’re Ray.”

  “I mean the other Ray.” Now she knew exactly what she would write to Ray as soon as she got off work. Her heart began thumping irrationally. Her fingers tingled with anticipation.

  “He did?”

  “Yeah.”

  He laughed. “Here I was imagining Ray was an adult. I mean, you’ve seen that gorgeous girlfriend who picks him up after his shift every day.”

  Sasha swallowed hard. Her heart kept up, but its rhythm changed. Her smile dangled uncertainly on her face, then fell off.

  Gone was her triumph. She could barely speak. She felt a little dizzy. She wouldn’t have thought Francis had the power to injure her, but there were so many things to feel bad about in that one sentence of his she couldn’t sort through them.

  Ray was an adult. She was a child. Ray had a girlfriend. His girlfriend was gorgeous. His girlfriend was devoted. Sasha had in fact not seen the gorgeous girlfriend. Not at all. Sasha had not even fathomed her. Sasha had no person, gorgeous or otherwise, picking her up after her shift. Not every day. Not any day.

  Now she looked at the dumb can pyramids and just felt stupid. Was Ray making fun of her when he added the sphinx?

  Francis turned to go. “It’s cute.” He gestured to the spread. “Really. Did you get pictures already?”

  She felt stricken. She tried not to. “No. I will.”

  “Good. And then take the whole thing down and put all that stuff back where it goes.”

  She nodded, miserable.

  “Tonight.”

  —

  “I think we should call before we go to Lexi’s,” Jamie suggested.

  Now that Jamie’s parents had agreed to fly east for the engagement party, he and Emma had decided it would be
good to call them and stage a preliminary introduction before the hubbub in August.

  Emma pushed her phone against her ear so she could hear better. “Can you get out of work early?”

  “I’ll try. I’ll go back to the office after the dinner if I have to.”

  His voice sounded tight. She wished she could see him so she could read his mood.

  “Let’s meet at my place at six.”

  “That early?” She’d never known him to leave the office before eight on a weeknight.

  “Yeah. I think so.”

  She arrived in front of his apartment building in Long Island City just as he did. He kissed her like he meant it, but his face was anxious. His feet were tip-tapping the whole ride up in the elevator.

  “It’s just a phone call,” she said. “Your folks are the easy ones, right?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. Whose parents are easy?”

  She was trying to understand. He didn’t talk about his family much. His parents were married. He had one sister who was fifteen and prematurely capable. His dad worked in sales for a chemical company. They lived in a nice airy house in a nice subdivision with a carport.

  Was it her he was worried about? She had thought of this before. “They won’t be able to tell I’m Indian over the phone,” she said as he let them into his tiny apartment.

  He looked aghast. “What do you mean?”

  “I was just worrying that when they meet me, they might be surprised I’m not a bit…whiter.”

  He grabbed her and hugged her hard. “Oh, Em, you are so perfectly perfect. I hate that you’re worried about that.” He let her go. “Anyway, I told them all about you—I think I used your description: half-Bengali, half-hippie. They met your dad once for about a tenth of a second when they came to see the office last year.”

  So that wasn’t it.

  “I’m calling,” he said.

  They caught all three Hurns at home. Everyone was warm, polite, full of congratulations, a little awkward. Jamie’s mother effused about the case of champagne Robert had sent.

  “I am touched that you are all coming here for the engagement party,” Emma said at the end. “I can’t wait to meet you.”

  “See, that wasn’t so bad,” she said after they’d all chimed in about how much they were looking forward to it and hung up.

  Jamie nodded.

  “They all sound great, in fact.”

  Jamie’s eyes looked more guarded than she’d seen them. “My mom is easier sometimes than others,” he said.

  “Well, she sounded like a picnic compared to mine.”

  —

  Mattie was the only one around, so Mattie was the one Sasha had to ask. Not ideal, but it had to be done.

  “Who is the gorgeous girl who picks Ray up from his shift every day?” It was none of Sasha’s business, and not objectively relevant to any aspect of her life, but there it was.

  Mattie was painting her toenails on a lounge chair by the pool. Mattie was so distracted these days, Sasha hoped she could excise the information she wanted, like a surgeon in a hurry, without a lot of curiosity or haranguing in return. “You mean Violet?”

  Shit. She had to have a cool name like Violet. “I don’t know. Do I?” Were there a lot of these girls?

  “I guess you must mean Violet. She’s always turning up. I don’t know about gorgeous.” Mattie considered. “Yeah, maybe she is. Do you know her or something?”

  “Manager Francis told me about her.”

  Mattie rolled her eyes. “Francis is lascivious. What is he, thirty? Violet is in high school.”

  Sasha really did have to wonder about herself. Why was she surprised there was a Violet? Of course there was a Violet. Why did she feel betrayed? Was she completely bananas? What kinds of ideas was she harboring? And yet, her mouth opened again. “Are they serious?”

  Mattie was occupied with fixing up a botched toenail and didn’t appear to judge her for asking. That, at least, was nice. “Serious? They’re kids,” Mattie said, as though she herself were a senior citizen. “It’s hard to use ‘serious’ and ‘Violet’ in the same sentence.”

  Meanly, Sasha was happy to hear this. “Is that right?” She craved more.

  “Violet’s been hanging around Ray since they were in middle school. She goes to Nightingale, I think, where no boy has ever stepped, so Ray’s like the white rhino. You know how that is. She’s your classic bratty East Hampton kid who hangs around Main Street wearing a lot of makeup and trying to spot celebrities.” Mattie raised an eyebrow like she was a justice of the Supreme Court or something.

  The pleasure of that damnation was short-lived. Now Sasha was on to the next worry. Was Ray like that? Was that really the kind of girl he went for? That didn’t square with what she imagined. But then again, when it came to Ray, imagination was mostly all she had. “And Ray is into that?” She didn’t even try to stop herself from asking.

  Mattie waved the bottle of nail polish around. “I don’t know how much of it is Ray being into her and how much is Ray putting up with her.”

  That didn’t sound very romantic, did it?

  “Emma calls her ‘Just Violet.’ ”

  “Why?” Sasha asked, perhaps a little too eagerly.

  “Because whenever she turns up at the house, we all go, ‘Oh, it’s just Violet.’ ”

  Sasha laughed. She wondered if it sounded as diabolical outside her brain as it did inside.

  Mattie finished the second and final coat on her second and final pinky toe and finally came out with the inevitable. “Anyway, what does it matter to you?”

  I still surf every Saturday out at Ditch Plains.

  Had he somehow known Mattie would come to this?

  At the time it had struck her as a laughably extraneous piece of information. And yet she’d remembered it. And here she was driving Adam’s crummy Honda out to Ditch Plains early on a Saturday morning.

  Mattie’s mother did not want to talk. Her father most certainly did not want to talk, but she somehow got the sense that Jonathan Dawes did.

  The towel and the book felt like props to her as she picked along the sand. This beach was only a few miles down from Georgica but belonged to a wilder world. The break was long and rugged and already dotted with surfers. The height of the cliffs and the speed of the wind gave it an edge-of-the earth quality. Jonathan Dawes must have come over to their world, to the flat water of Georgica Pond, when he balanced little girls on the water.

  Mattie felt self-conscious as she made her way toward the water. This beach was run by notoriously cranky locals. If you hadn’t surfed here for a decade or two, if you couldn’t acquit yourself on a board, you were not welcome. And yet she noticed more nods than scowls. Maybe blond girls in bikinis got a pass here, just as they did in most circumstances.

  She recognized him from the back a couple hundred yards down the beach. He was wearing wetsuit pants so supremely faded they might have been the same ones from the picture seventeen years ago. His hair had a strawlike texture from years of salt and sun. He was holding a respectably beat-up longboard, standing with two other surfers. He was one of the locals, not cranky, maybe; if anything, he was the kind of institution the cranky ones were protecting.

  She was moved by him, in a strange way. How well he belonged, how relaxed his body looked. How much he was part of this exact place. And how he was still part of that old time, when nothing else from then felt the same.

  It seemed a credit to her that her life might overlap with his. This was an intoxicating thought and a treasonous one.

  She was frozen there, clutching her book and towel, when he turned and saw her. He cocked his head, and then smiled and came toward her.

  She was almost surprised that he registered her. She forgot she was visible and part of this scene. She had lulled herself into the idea that she was watching him as though on a screen, a pair of abstract eyes gazing at him in his natural environment. She’d forgotten she’d come here to interact. She wasn’t sure
she wanted to anymore.

  There was something momentous about his walking toward her. Because of the raking sunlight and shadows and his look of question and expectation. Now she knew she was choosing something.

  Had she meant to?

  She must have meant to. She didn’t get here by accident.

  He got close and put his arms out to give her a hug. She was awkward, clutching her things. He was not awkward, sort of hugging around them.

  “Nice to see you, Mattie. I was hoping you would come.”

  That spooked her. Her mind ran back over the things he’d said, the things she’d said. She was another stupid Hamptons kid at the Black Horse. What was he hoping for?

  I look like my mom. That was why he was looking at her like that. By this she reoriented herself.

  “I wanted to ask you something,” she said boldly.

  He nodded as though this, too, was what he expected.

  Now that she was here she wasn’t sure how to put it.

  Was she mad at her mom? Did she want to catch her? Prove something? What good would that do?

  No good. And yet she wouldn’t let it go.

  “Did you…” She trailed off.

  He didn’t prompt her or seem to want to rush her.

  “Were you and my mom…”

  He cocked his head again. He didn’t seem nervous at all. Not in the way she was nervous.

  “…involved with each other?”

  He didn’t look surprised or mad. He didn’t say anything.

  But already she was wanting to retreat. “I know it’s not my business to ask personal questions. You don’t know me.”

  At this he laughed.

  “What?” she said, self-conscious, embarrassed.

  “You’re right. I don’t know you.” She could tell he wanted to put her at ease. He laughed again, less joyful this time. “I almost feel like I do.” He caught her eye for less than a second. Was it she who looked away or was it him?

  “Because I look like my mom.”

  He shrugged. “You do.”

  “Everyone says that.”

  He nodded. “Right. I can imagine.”