The Whole Thing Together

  It seemed unfair that Evie had to play the overdog, when she took all the knocks of the underdog and got none of the sympathy. Evie was generous in hundreds of quiet ways. She never tried to take credit for having dinner on the table, food in the fridge, gas in the car. She never sat back in a chair but perched momentarily, like she’d taken a priority seat at the front of the bus and was waiting for a more deserving person to come along.

  Tonight Emma had allowed Evie to set out some cheese and crackers and grapes under her watchful eye. Now the assembled party sat around the coffee table stiffly eating, and Quinn had that butterfly feeling in her chest. Her spirit needed to visit each one of them. She couldn’t help it. The mix of hope and fear pulled her like pollen.

  Jamie had a benumbed look, and yet a great eagerness ran right under it. He was handsome and well-made, but with no sense of entitlement. It was no wonder her father looked so supremely happy sitting in his wing chair.

  “Now, Sasha, you are the youngest? Is that right?”

  “Right. Except for Ray. On the other side. He’s seventeen, too.” Quinn saw Sasha’s effort to sound casual.

  Jamie nodded. Did he know what “on the other side” meant? Quinn could see his gallantry in wanting to get everybody straight, not wanting to step into anything.

  “Ray is Lila and Adam’s son,” Evie filled in bright and quick, before Robert could get involved. Quinn saw the familiar look of all-purpose apology forming on Evie’s face. “We’re a complicated family, aren’t we?”

  “This is barely the half of it,” Mattie said wryly.

  Jamie looked highly unsure of what to say. Quinn could imagine the delicate calculus taking place, his wish to be kind to Evie undermined by Emma’s impatience toward her. “It looks like a great family to me,” he ventured, a little quietly.

  Quinn saw Emma’s fervor, her inchoate anxiety lighting on little things, like whether the sofa had spots on it and whether the crackers were stale. This was different for her from just parading around with the photogenic lacrosse guy. Did Emma even know how much more vulnerable she had suddenly become?

  And there was Sasha, trapped in the elbow of the sectional sofa, staring at the grapes, internally begging her mother not to say anything embarrassing. Quinn could practically see the old war-weary soldiers battling it out in Sasha’s brain. Sasha wanted to defend her mother and also be on the same team as Emma.

  Sasha, like Ray, was a dear and loyal person but had little reward for it. Her loyalty was rejected by Mattie and patronized by Emma. Ironically, of all the people in her two-part family, it was Ray, a world apart from Sasha, who could prize what she had to give.

  The only way Sasha found to please Mattie was failing to shine in any of the ways Mattie shone. Mattie was the baby; she was Daddy’s girl, the beauty, the head-turner, the flirt. Sasha gracefully ceded all these and more, chose other areas to make her case. Sasha got strong by giving things away, and Mattie got weak by indulgence.

  Sasha was born knowing she had to be careful because she had parents who loved each other. She had their father all the time. She was raised by a vigilant mother/stepmother but had no stepparents herself to resent or feel resented by.

  Dinner began, a torrent of clanging dishes and passing bowls and things tasting good enough to inspire wordy praise. Quinn observed Emma’s keen, flushed face, practically willing the deliciousness into the strip steaks.

  After dinner there was a lot of hectic cleanup on the part of Jamie and a good blueberry crumble. Then came a long walk on the beach for Emma and Jamie. And the rest of them standing around like five versions of the nurse in Romeo and Juliet.

  —

  Emma’s hopes were so visible, Quinn longed to fulfill them. She wanted the wind to blow the right amount, the moon to reveal itself from behind the clouds. She wished she could make it exactly right. But more than that, she wanted to protect her sister from the hopes themselves. Do you really want this? The drunk kind of love always wears off.

  Quinn challenged herself to embrace pain, but she realized she’d been less capable at embracing hope, the very mother of pain. Hope was the thing she was scared of.

  It was a familiar weakness, not wanting the people she loved to want things too badly. Her protection could only extend so far.

  “You think I’m hopeless,” Mattie told her once, and it stuck in her head.

  “I just don’t want you to hope too much,” Quinn had blurted out, and regretted it thousands of times.

  “I think she really likes him,” Evie said with a sigh.

  This was so unmistakably true, not even Mattie could find a way to argue with her.

  “I think she’s got good taste,” her dad said, smiling like a fool.

  Hope was tricky with the people you loved most. It was more dangerous than speeding cars and biting dogs. Quinn could see why parents around the world let their kids sit on soft surfaces and stare into screens all day.

  Dear Other Ray,

  So how fucking weird was that?

  Sorry if I was kind of speechless. I was…

  Ray sat at his keyboard staring at his screen for a long time. What? What was he?

  Surprised. And kind of disturbed because I didn’t realize you were you. And I thought…

  His fingers stopped again. He thought what?

  What if he was honest?

  you are really beautiful, which is why I wandered around for the whole party (loser/stalker) trying to see you again. I am guilty of looking at you in THAT WAY and thinking of you in THAT WAY, which seems pervy and inappropriate under the circumstances.

  And BTW, it was scientifically confirmed in the elevator that you smell better than anything in the world.

  How am I supposed to fall asleep in our bed now?

  He deleted the whole thing quickly so he wouldn’t do some moronic thing like send it.

  —

  Matthew was going around the farm with the dreaded clipboard.

  “I already logged in my hours this week,” Mattie said. She stretched her legs onto the overturned washbasin.

  “I know. I’m making the schedule for the rest of the summer. When do you need to go back to school?”

  She lifted her face to the sun, let out a long breath. “I don’t know. I don’t know if I’m going back.” She was in a reckless mood.

  “Why not?”

  She sat up. Usually she’d lost Matthew’s interest by this point in a conversation. No cleverness, mischief, or flirtation managed to hold it. For three years she’d tried.

  He was actually looking at her seriously.

  She might as well keep being honest. “I don’t know what I’m doing there. I don’t really care much about my classes….You know, my sister Emma is all high-achieving Princeton this and that. Now she’s got this boyfriend, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they got married. Quinn is, well…she’s Quinn.”

  Matthew smiled. She didn’t need to explain. He sat down on the chair across from her. She wasn’t sure she’d ever seen him sit down before.

  “I don’t know who I am or what I’m supposed to do with my life. Why waste everybody’s time and money on going back to college?” She was halfway stunned at herself. Everything she’d said was true, but she hadn’t quite known she felt that way.

  Matthew looked at her levelly. “Makes sense to me. I didn’t go to college. Not yet, anyway. Maybe I’ll find a reason to one day. But I don’t want to be one of those people who go to college because they can’t think of anything better to do. I always have plenty to do here.”

  Mattie almost looked around to see if somebody would pop out of the storeroom with a camera, pranking her. This was so unusual.

  She nodded sympathetically. “I don’t want to be one of those people either. And I’m worried I am. It’s not like anyone expects anything of me. My dad thinks Syracuse is for nitwits and party girls. I know he loves me, but he doesn’t take me seriously.”

  Matthew scuffed his work boot on the dusty floor. “That’s a sham
e. I mean, it’s a shame if you want him to take you seriously.” He looked at her straight on. “Do you?”

  Had someone put a truth serum in the cider today? She felt a little dizzy. She was as quick as anyone to lie, but she didn’t want to in this case. She considered the question honestly.

  “Do I want him to take me seriously?” She shook her head slowly. She sighed. “I don’t even know.”

  He shrugged, mildly self-conscious. “As my grandfather always says, you start with yourself.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It’s Howard’s favorite line. I make fun of him, but it’s true. If you want to be taken seriously, be serious. Take yourself seriously.”

  She stared at him, eyes large and slightly afraid. “Okay,” she said.

  He stood up. “Anyway, you can work here straight through October if you want. Apples, late corn, squash, pumpkins, cider keep us busy into fall, but then we shut down for the winter. I can’t offer you anything after that.”

  Riding her bike home an hour later, Mattie was still in a daze. She felt like she’d been given a gift, but she wasn’t quite sure of the nature of it.

  Heartthrob farmer Matthew Reese had uttered words so wise he’d punctured holes in her ordinary tricks and manners. She felt air blowing in where there wasn’t any before. Like somebody opened the windows in a musty, neglected house.

  Do I want to be taken seriously?

  Maybe she did.

  And all at once she understood precisely the nature of Matthew’s gift. He’d taken her seriously.

  —

  For Sasha it felt different to be in her Wainscott bedroom now. It felt different to sit, let alone lie down, on the bed. It felt different to brush her teeth. It felt embarrassingly different to take off her clothes.

  She couldn’t look at the bookshelves in the same way, couldn’t look out the window, couldn’t glance in the mirror. His bed, his books, his view, his face. For all the years they’d shared the room, she’d always felt him in it. But not like this.

  Ray. Actual Ray. Who was Ray, really? What was Ray? A flat, winged fish. A unit of sunlight or hope.

  He had always been her version of him. Suddenly he was his own version of him, and it was entirely different. He had taken himself back. It seemed kind of selfish of him to overwhelm her carefully nurtured version just like that, in just one meeting.

  Sasha remembered when they got the new house on Seventy-Fourth Street, Con Ed couldn’t get access to the electric meter, so for six months their bill had been based on estimated usage. The seventh bill was a lot higher, and when her dad asked why the difference, her mom said, “Well, Con Ed finally read the meter.”

  Now that Ray was actual, he was different to her and she was different to herself. She had a straining kind of feeling about him she’d never experienced before. She wanted to hold on to her estimate of him, but again and again she tried to summon him the way he was: shoulders, eyebrows, hair that curled a little behind his ears. She wished she could have imaginary Ray back. She wished she could breathe the real Ray in, feel his warmth again.

  I’m not sure I want to feel any of this.

  In eighth grade, they’d both been assigned To Kill a Mockingbird. She’d left her copy at home in Manhattan the weekend she had an essay to write, and she got into a panic over it. She’d already gotten an extension. She jawboned Emma into driving her to the library, which was closed, and the bookstore in East Hampton, which didn’t have it. You couldn’t get it on Kindle back then. By Sunday midday she was in tears and even suggested going back to the city early, which she never wanted to do.

  Then, as she lay in bed, a mirage floated before her on her very own nightstand. There it was, facedown, To Kill a Mockingbird. His copy, her salvation. She opened it gingerly, afraid the title and words would change if she tried to read any of them. On the inside cover, she saw Ray’s name in his writing. There were his underlines, his scrawly annotations, his notes inside the back cover.

  She found herself following his thoughts, nearly crawling into his brain.

  We live in the same place, but never together.

  By six p.m. the essay was done. She’d gotten so carried off, she’d added her own underlines, her own notes. She’d forgotten she probably shouldn’t do that in his book. But when she came back two weeks later, she saw he’d added more, words winding through her words, picking up on ideas she’d written.

  Now she fished the old copy from their common shelf. She remembered times when she’d separate their books, but they always ended up mixed together again. She stared at the old handwriting, his in blue ballpoint, hers in black, woven together.

  She got out a piece of blank paper and stared at it for a while.

  Nice to meet you, Ray, she finally wrote, folded it, and stuck it inside the front cover.

  —

  Ray lay on his bed. He missed her when he was in Brooklyn. How could he miss her? He did not know her. He’d seen her once.

  He did, though. He missed being in her bed. He missed the smell and the feeling of her. He remembered, with some chagrin, the blanket that was supposed to fend off nightmares. What if he brought her silky nightgown thing back here? He had to laugh at himself for the outrageousness of it. How pervy would that be?

  He had no hope of being with her in any bed, of course, but in Wainscott he felt like he could. He imagined he had. It wasn’t even sexual. Or not totally sexual. Okay, so there were aspects of it other than just sexual.

  There had been no contact, no email, between them in over a week. Not since the incident on Lexington Avenue. He missed that, too. Now that he’d seen her in person and smelled her in person, he wasn’t sure what to write to her anymore.

  He loved when he saw her name pop up when he checked his mail on his phone. He felt a little empty each time he opened it and didn’t see her name, which was pretty much every time.

  Did she think of him a millionth as much as he thought of her?

  Even one millionth would be encouraging.

  He needed to get back in contact with her in a way that wasn’t creepy or overwrought. They didn’t even need to talk about what happened. He picked up his phone. He poked his finger around until he came up with a short message:

  Dear Other Ray,

  Is Francis trying to get with Emma or what?

  Other Sasha

  He pressed send.

  He checked his mail plus or minus one thousand times over the next twenty minutes. And then he saw her name.

  Dear Other Sasha,

  100% he is.

  I’m hoping it’s your week when he finds out about Jamie.

  Other Ray

  And there was joy.

  How long did he have to wait to write her back so he didn’t seem creepy or overwrought?

  Emma looked around at the other tables. Was she dressed-up enough? Jamie hadn’t warned her he was taking her to the fanciest restaurant in Southampton. Suddenly she wished she’d done her hair better and worn mascara.

  “Is this a special occasion or something?” she asked him. “It can’t be our anniversary yet.”

  His fingers started going. “It is sort of. Three months.”

  The waiter delivered two glasses of champagne she didn’t remember ordering. “Wow, nice,” she said.

  Were they going to be one of those couples who celebrated a lot of extra milestones? Was Jamie secretly a half birthday kind of person? She wasn’t sure how she felt about that.

  “Did you get a raise?”

  He laughed, but his face looked slightly dyspeptic. “No.”

  His feet were getting tappy. Hmmm.

  Two bowls of light green soup appeared. “Sweet pea and mint,” the waiter announced.

  She looked at Jamie questioningly. Was he doing some kind of telepathic ordering? “I love sweet pea soup,” she said.

  “I know,” he said. “You always order it.”

  She dipped her spoon in and tasted it. “Delicious.”

  She at
e contentedly. He was oddly quiet.

  “So I saw the funniest thing on YouTube,” she said, not exactly sure why it popped into her mind. “This guy took his girlfriend out to a restaurant with a secret plan of proposing to her. He thought he was being super clever and romantic putting the ring in the bottom of her piece of cheesecake. So anyway the girl gets going on her cheesecake, and you can see she’s really psyched about it. She’s kind of a big girl actually and she’s plowing into it—who can blame her—and then all of a sudden she starts choking and—”

  Emma could not ignore the look of panic on Jamie’s face.

  “Jamie, what?”

  She’d never seen his face turn completely red before. This was new.

  “What?” Did he not like that story? Did he not like cheesecake? Did he know the person in the video?

  He stared with horror at her bowl.

  She looked down at her soup bowl. She held her spoon aloft. “Jamie?”

  He reached across and took her soup bowl from her.

  “Hey…Jamie?”

  He squeezed his eyes shut. He had both hands on her soup bowl like she was going to wrestle him for it.

  The wheels were turning slowly in her mind. “Jamie…You didn’t…”

  He kept his eyes shut. He nodded.

  “Not really?”

  He nodded again.

  “Seriously?”

  She started laughing. She couldn’t help it. She took the soup bowl back, though he tried to keep it.

  “No way, no way. Just no way.” She spooned around until she felt a little clink and an extra weight in her spoon. She brought it up to her mouth. “Yum.”