Keep Your Mouth Shut and Wear Beige (27 page)

I went to all the parties, all the banquets. I sat through the performances, watched the slide shows, listened to the speeches, and felt less a part of this school community than I ever had, less connected to the other mothers.

Give me another chance . . .
I wanted to beg them. I could be your friend. I could stand around and talk in the parking lot. I would learn to trust you; you would learn to trust me.

But this was the last week of Zack’s senior year. There were no more chances. I had failed.

The kids had come to graduation with their cars crammed full
of beach chairs and portable beer-pong tables. They grabbed a piece of cake at the reception, handed their diplomas to their parents, and departed for Beach Week.

Mike found me at the reception and invited me to go out to dinner with Claudia and him. I should have gone—that would have been the right thing to do—but I couldn’t face how awkward and stilted the evening would have been. It seemed easier to go home alone.

I was surprised at how long the week felt without Zack at home. When people had asked me about being an empty nester, I’d laughed. “I never see him anyway. What difference will it make?”

But it did make a difference. A big one.

My shifts started on Wednesday of that week. One of my patients was a man, a husband, a dad, a failed suicide. He’d lost his job and then made some wild investments, leaving his family in terrible financial trouble. He couldn’t face the consequences of what he had done. His suicide attempt had made an even bigger mess because now he was in an ICU bed that cost about a million dollars a minute, and he had stopped paying his health insurance, something his wife had first learned in the emergency room.

Usually I ignore anything I disapprove of in a patient’s life . . . if I even know about it in the first place. As unfeeling as this might sound, I can even ignore the fact that he or she is a human being. When someone’s heart stops, I don’t think of him as a person, a person who is loved and treasured, whose death will devastate his family. I don’t even think of his heart. I focus on the monitors. I’m not trying to make this person live so that he can go home to the people who love him. I’m working with everyone else in the room to get that monitor started. It’s us and the machine. It wants to stop, and we want it to start. I fight this battle as fiercely as I would if it were Jeremy or Zack in the bed. I have to think of the
machine and only the machine because sometimes the machine wins and we lose. Someone’s Jeremy or Zack dies, and I can’t bear to think about that.

But this man, this suicide, this coward . . . I was angry with him. That was wrong; it could have compromised the care I provided. I had to ask another nurse to change patients with me. I’d never done anything like that before.

The Director of Nursing called me in, asking me if I was all right. “I don’t know,” I said honestly.

She was a good person, and she cared about me. But she needed me to be okay, she couldn’t afford to lose one of her best nurses. So pretty soon I heard myself telling her what she wanted to hear and what I wanted to believe: that this was just situational stress; it would pass.

I could have talked to my father. He would understand, but he would worry. He was still enough of a dad that he would try to fix it. He would offer to pay my tuition if I wanted to go back to school. He would encourage me to go to Africa for a year and help with the AIDS babies. But I didn’t want to go to Africa. I needed to fix this in my own way.

I felt as if I were losing everything I cared about. Of course, I’d known that my boys would grow up, but I hadn’t expected it to be like this. What if I also lost my job? What if I couldn’t be an ICU nurse anymore?

I needed someone to talk to.

I needed Rose.

Obviously I had been wrong about her having ADD. I was
surprised, but as a nurse, nothing annoys me as much as a doctor who clings to his first diagnosis even when all the evidence says he is wrong. Apparently Annie had simply been underperforming, and once she set her mind to it, she was able to motivate herself.

Good for you,
I thought.
And thank you for doing it now. Your mother needed you to be doing well. It was the best Mother’s Day gift you could have given her.

This was the third time that I’d gone to the Hamptons— although I now knew that if I lived in New York and had any degree of understated cool, I would never say that I was going “to the Hamptons.” I would be going “out east.”

My other trips had been in November and December, and it was now June. Everything was lush and green. The trees were thick with leaves, and the hydrangea bushes were promising their heavy blossoms. The farm stands were open. Quart baskets of ripe strawberries were arrayed in crimson lines on the weathered plank tables. Bits of dirt clung to the roots of the feathery lettuce while the round heads of cabbage were piled in bushel baskets under the tables. Some stands already had peas and broccoli. I would love to be here in July when the corn and tomatoes would come in, the blueberries and the melons, followed by the fruits of August, the peaches, pears, and plums.

There had to be people who did this right, who didn’t come “out east” for status, who weren’t burdened by twelve-bedroom faux chateaus filled with professional associates for guests. I could tell by the number of older homes, by the people on the sidewalks with strollers. They came to the Hamptons for the beauty and the peace. They came to be with their families and closest friends. The true heart of these villages was not the glittering fund-raisers that
the rest of us read about in the society pages, but what happened inside the houses, behind the hedges.

What had gone wrong for the Zander-Browns? They were good people. Their values were solid; their hearts were in the right place. They had faced Finney’s challenges with courage and flexibility.

Was it just the house? Had they simply bought the wrong house in the wrong place? People came to Mecox Road with different expectations than they would have had if they were visiting a rambling cottage in the Adirondacks. In the Adirondacks, you wouldn’t have been surprised if someone handed you a wrench and asked you to see if you could get the hot-water heater working. In the Hamptons, people seemed to expect that someone else would have gotten up early, squeezed the orange juice, and gone out for fresh bagels.

But you couldn’t blame a house.

The problem was with them as a family. They’d been so open and welcoming to outsiders that there was no longer an inside, a core. Guy kept inviting people to Mecox Road. He should have painted the master bedroom instead.

This wasn’t The Brand. Her white clothes had always been creamy or pearly, not as crisp and bright as this shirt. And these navy accents? Hadn’t she told Annie at Thanksgiving that she never wore navy?

Why was she dressing differently? Was she becoming flexible; was she recognizing the difference between a public and a private
self? Or was she identity-hopping?
I’m now playing golf and visiting the Hamptons with “Michael,” so I’m going to dress that part.

She reached to help me with my luggage, and I handed her the buff-colored Neiman’s garment bag.

“Oh, is this your dress?” she asked. “Can I look at it?” Without waiting for an answer, she lifted the bag higher and unzipped it. “Oh, Darcy, this is perfect. It’s absolutely perfect.”

She sounded surprised.

“I’m not a total moron, you know,” I said. “I can follow directions.”

She wasn’t used to people speaking so directly. “I thought . . . since you don’t like to shop . . .”

“I don’t care about the things you care about, but I can respect it when something matters to someone else. I try to cooperate. It’s part of playing well with others.”

“I didn’t mean to—”

I waved my hand, stopping her apology. “It’s okay. Is Rose here?”

“No. She sends her apologies. She took Finney to get his hair cut. She said to tell you that you’re in the front corner room on the third floor.”

I reclaimed the garment bag and carried my suitcase up to one of the nannies’ rooms. My dress for the Friday-night rehearsal dinner was already hanging in the closet. It was lavender, pretty much the color of the dress that Grandma Bowersett had worn to my wedding. The back neckline was low and quite complicated with multiple diagonal straps. From the front, Grandma Bowersett’s dress had been more interesting.

I went downstairs. Guy had finally persuaded Rose that, at least during the week of the wedding, she had to have some staff in the house. So, from seven in the morning to ten each night, at least one of Mariposa’s two nieces would be with us, keeping on
top of the dirty coffee cups and empty toilet-paper holders. A private chef was coming in every afternoon to make dinner and to leave something for the following day’s lunch.

Both nieces were now in the kitchen, leaning against the counter, talking softly to each other in Spanish. As soon as they saw me, they straightened and stopped talking. I introduced myself. They answered politely, and we stood there looking at one another awkwardly until I moved out of the kitchen and they resumed their quiet conversation.

They’d been working hard. The kitchen gleamed, and in the family room the morning newspapers were neatly folded. A coffee service had been set up on the sofa table; the cream was covered with Saran wrap and nestled in a little bed of ice.

There were no dirty cups for me to load into the dishwasher, no wadded-up kitchen towels to take downstairs to the laundry. As Rose had said, she could pay people to do the things that I did. I guess I wasn’t much use to people who have a staff.

I went outside. What the landscaper had called the “permanent installations” were finished. Flagstone walks now carved lawn into interesting shapes. Low walls and elevated terraces were screened with weathered, white trellises. Moss grew around the stones, and vines climbed up the terraces and spilled over the walls. A cluster of lilac bushes flowered in the sunniest part of the yard, and masses of ferns grew in the shade. Everything looked as if it had been there forever.

The swimming pool was uncovered and filled with water. It was rectangular, but boulders and masses of plantings had been brought in to soften its harsh shape. A massive yew shrub, its thick, twisted branches the result of years and years of unplanned pruning, had been transplanted to balance the borders, and an arching wooden bridge had been built across the pool.

Cami and Annie were standing on the bridge, watching the
workmen unload the tents. “This is amazing,” I called out as I went to join them. It was the first time I ever remember seeing the two of them standing together.

“Mom said to apologize,” Cami said immediately, “about not being here, but she thought Finney needed to get away from the chaos.”

“Although we were just saying,” Annie added, “that it wasn’t only Finney who needed to get away.”

“But don’t tell her that we said that,” Cami added quickly. “She’s hoping that we haven’t noticed how stressed out she is.”

I didn’t make any promises. “How are the two of you doing?”

“Fine,” Cami said. “I should be writing thank-you notes, but I’m fine.”

“Actually,” Annie said, “we were wondering if everything doesn’t look a little fake. If it’s just too perfect somehow. Too much like a stage set.”

A bird bath, its stone nicked and weathered, was surrounded by silvery-green lamb’s ear. Beyond it were raised beds designed to look like a cutting garden with daisies, sweet peas, gladioli, and cornflowers. The feathery white of the Queen Anne’s lace was a background to the colors . . . but the Queen Anne’s lace plants were going to be dug up two days after the wedding. Otherwise they would take over, ruining both the local ecology and any chance Rose had of joining a garden club.

I could see Annie’s point about everything being too perfect. It was a fantasy of an English cottage garden, purchased and transplanted into the backyard of a multimillion-dollar faux chateau.

“That’s not the sort of thing I have a good feel for,” I said. “What does Claudia think?” Claudia was now on the other side of the yard, talking to the landscaper.