Summerland: A Novel (20 page)

“That’s Jordan Randolph,” the woman said. “The publisher of the newspaper.”

Ahhhh, Zoe thought.
That’s
Jordan Randolph. She had heard his name, of course. Mr. Allencast liked to complain about Jordan Randolph’s liberal politics, which had endeared Zoe to the mysterious Mr. Randolph before she ever saw him. She had been intrigued, even back then.

She didn’t actually meet Jordan until she enrolled the twins in preschool. The Children’s House was the only Montessori on the island, and it was difficult to get into. Rumor had it that people called the school from the delivery room of Nantucket Cottage Hospital and asked to have their newborns put on the waiting list. At first the twins weren’t admitted. Zoe was certain this was because she was a transplant and a single working mother, and because placing
two
children in the school was five times as hard as placing one. She was secretly crushed, but she resigned herself to keeping the twins in day care. They would survive. However, when Mrs. Allencast discovered that the twins hadn’t been admitted, she made a call—she and Mr. Allencast donated to the school
annually—and sure enough, an invitation to enroll them soon followed.

At the Children’s House, the level of parent involvement was high. There were meetings and fund raisers and potluck dinners and slide shows and student presentations. There were five precious minutes every weekday morning when Zoe stood in the cramped coatroom while Penny and Hobby changed out of their street shoes and into slippers, then solemnly kissed her good-bye and disappeared down the stairs for songs and story time.

Zoe first saw Lynne Castle in that coatroom. Lynne was instantly friendly, offering her hand, introducing herself. She was the mother of Demeter, who was the same age as the twins, though Lynne was quick to add that she also had two older boys who had gone through the school a few years earlier, making her something of a fixture there. In fact, she was president of the Board of Directors, but she said she was always thrilled to meet young, new parents who might, somewhere down the line, take over leadership roles, because really, she confided, she was getting too old for this.

Zoe had laughed. Lynne was charming. She was a little older than Zoe herself, maybe as many as ten years older, with a stolid, matronly look about her. She had graying hair that she wore pushed behind her ears, carried about thirty unneeded pounds, and boasted a wardrobe straight out of the Orvis catalog, circa 1978. Zoe wondered what
she
had looked like to Lynne, with her zippy haircut, the ends newly dyed red, and her dramatic makeup and her houndstooth pants and her chef’s clogs. In hindsight, she supposed that she must have resembled a cross between Cyndi Lauper and Julia Child. But Lynne Castle seemed to like her anyway.

Zoe met Al Castle and Jordan Randolph the following February, when the school held what was known as Fathers’ Night. The twins had been talking about this occasion for weeks, and it bound Zoe’s stomach up in knots. She had hoped to give it a miss
altogether, but the twins told her about the pictures they had drawn and the preparations they had made, and Zoe thought, All right, fine, I’ll go. She wasn’t sure the teachers would even let her through the door, though they knew her situation. There wasn’t one suitable man in Zoe’s life who could fill in. She thought briefly of asking Mr. Allencast to go, but the twins were terrified of him, and Zoe wasn’t all that sure that her employer, at age sixty-eight, would want to accompany her three-year-olds to this lofty event.

And so Zoe attended Fathers’ Night on her own. Her presence was alternately ignored and lauded. It made certain fathers uncomfortable, and to those men she wanted to say, “Listen, my husband is dead.” One father, a man Zoe now knew to be Lars Peashway, Anders’s father, had clapped her on the shoulder and said, “You’re very brave.” And Zoe thought, Brave? I’m not brave, mister. I’m just doing what has to be done.

The only fathers who didn’t treat Zoe like an oddity or a martyr were Al Castle and Jordan Randolph. Right off the bat, they included her. They told her that their kids, Demeter and Jake, talked incessantly about her twins.

“I think Jake is especially fond of Penny,” Jordan said.

“I think Demeter is especially fond of Hobby,” Al said.

The two men gave each other the wink-wink, and all three of them laughed. Zoe knew that Jordan was Jordan because she had attended Town Meeting, but she let him introduce himself.

“I’m Jordan Randolph.” He was wearing a sapphire-blue sweater and jeans and sneakers. The beautiful watch with the leather band. The rimless glasses. There was no reason, now, for Zoe to be anything but truthful about it: she had fallen in love with him way back then.

“You may know my wife?” he said. “Ava? She has the long braid? She’s Australian?”

“Yes, yes,” Zoe said. Of course, the most beautiful and best-
dressed mother in the coatroom, the one with the cool accent whom Zoe had overheard talking about going to the U2 concert at Boston Garden—that was Jordan Randolph’s wife.

“Jake is our only child,” Jordan said. “But we’re hoping for another.”

“Well,” Zoe said, thinking, Dammit! “Good luck with that.”

Willing herself not to moon any further over Jordan, Zoe then turned her attention to Al Castle, who introduced himself and said, “You must know my wife, Lynne?”

“Ah, yes,” Zoe said. Al and Lynne were a perfect match in their upstanding, verging-on-middle-aged ordinariness. “I like Lynne very much.” This was true. Lynne was the only mother who consistently said hello to her and stopped to chat with her in the parking lot. Lynne knew that Zoe was a private chef for the Allencasts, and Zoe knew that Lynne was starting up a permitting business at home now that Demeter was in school all day.

“She says you drive a Karmann Ghia,” Al said. “Is that true?”

“Guilty as charged,” Zoe said.

“What year?” Al asked.

“Nineteen sixty-nine.”

“The best,” Al said. “I own the car dealership on Polpis Road. If you ever decide to trade that baby in, I’ll give you an unbeatable price.”

“I can’t believe you’re talking business to the woman,” Jordan said. He stared at Zoe for a second, enough time for her to register: blue sweater, blue eyes. Then he smiled. “I’m off to do puzzles,” he said. “Wanna come?”

What had followed was no less profound than an adoption. Gradually, over the years, Zoe had been taken in by the Randolphs and the Castles. They became family. Lynne Castle was officially Zoe’s closest friend, though the person Zoe spent the most time courting
was Ava Randolph. She wanted Ava to like her. Ava reminded her of a smoothly polished stone, with her long, honey-blond hair, her perfect skin, green eyes, and rarely seen dimples. But like a stone, she was cool, and not just with Zoe but with everyone. She disliked Nantucket and fancied herself a sort of captive there; she was always talking about how she was about to go off to, or had just come back from, Australia. Her own sun-drenched country, that place where she’d rather be. It was Ava’s aloofness that captured Zoe’s imagination. She played hard-to-get, and Zoe wanted to win her over. She wanted to win!

For years Zoe tried. For years she beat herself up over it, thinking, Ava doesn’t like me. She thinks I’m loud and obvious and American. She thinks I’m a terrible mother because I work. Ava didn’t have a job outside of her home; she devoted all her time and energy to parenting Jake. She didn’t have to find a babysitter or, like Zoe, occasionally leave the children at home by themselves because she had to cater a dinner party on a Saturday night. She didn’t leave permission slips unsigned or forget sneakers for the kids’ phys. ed. days, or space out on getting cards for the class on Valentine’s Day. These misdemeanors were Zoe’s and Zoe’s alone, and she couldn’t help feeling that Ava Randolph might just be writing them all down on a list somewhere, a list that she secretly showed to Jordan every night before dinner.

Had it always ultimately been about Jordan? Zoe wondered. She’d been trying to woo the wife, but was it really the husband she wanted? Even back when Zoe first knew them, Ava and Jordan had openly bickered and argued. Zoe had always taken Ava’s side, even when she thought Jordan was right. Eventually Zoe became the person Ava complained to about her husband: Jordan’s breath stank in the morning; he had never once emptied the dishwasher; he refused to travel back with her to Australia no matter how she begged and pleaded, so that she and Jake always
had to go alone; he was
obsessed
with the newspaper. Ava had never known a man who was so absorbed in his work; in Australia, she said, even bank presidents stopped to have a coffee in the afternoon. Even the mining magnates and the real estate moguls took Sundays off and pushed their children in their prams and sat down to leisurely lunches. But on Sundays Jordan wouldn’t leave his house until he had devoured every inch of the Sunday
New York Times;
Ava wasn’t allowed to speak to him if he had a section of the newspaper in his hands. “He doesn’t get it,” Ava said. “He doesn’t get
me!
We want two different things!” All Jordan wanted was to work; all Ava wanted was another baby. Zoe would listen to her alternately yearning and complaining. She prayed every night for another baby, a brother or a sister for Jake. Ava told Zoe that a baby was the only thing that would make her life bearable if she had to stay in this country. This left Zoe feeling embarrassed about her own matched set of children. She assured Ava, “It’s going to happen for you, I can feel it. You will get your baby.”

There had been nights when Zoe truly believed that all she wanted was for Ava to become pregnant, even when the dinner party was over and the Castles and the Randolphs all walked out the door together, arm in arm and laughing, on their way to their cars, leaving Zoe standing in the doorway all alone.

She had been hiding among them. She was the lonely, swaying sapling amid the tall, rooted redwoods that were those other couples, her friends.

When Jake and the twins were in sixth grade, Ava finally did get pregnant. Zoe had to admit she’d been shocked by the news. Ava had been trying to conceive for so long that Zoe had given up hope on her behalf. She had become, in Zoe’s mind, a tragic figure, a woman who was never going to get the one thing she most wanted.

But then it seemed that she
was
.

And after all those years of hoping and wishing for her friend,
Zoe was even more taken aback to find herself overcome by jealousy. It was as undeniable as a stain across her face and neck. Could anyone else see it?

But with the pregnancy, Zoe and Ava grew even closer. Ava literally let her hair down—took it out of its tight braid, let it flow down her back. She was exhausted and nauseated, but she had moments of playfulness. She made fun of herself—her flatulence, her constant need to pee. She leaned on Zoe, asking if Jake could spend the night at Zoe’s house so that she, Ava, could sleep in. Jake had never been allowed to sleep over before, presumably because Zoe let the twins watch R-rated movies and gave them Laurie Colwin’s slumped brownies within an hour of bedtime. Ava started confiding in Zoe about how much she missed her mother and sisters back home in Australia. She couldn’t believe she was going to give birth to
another American,
she said.

And then the baby was born, and there was a celebration!

Lynne called Zoe at work to tell her that Ava’s water had broken and she was in labor, seven centimeters dilated. There would quite possibly be a baby by lunchtime. Zoe got off work at two o’clock and raced home to pick up the wrapped box containing a tiny pink layette (Ava was convinced the baby was a girl). She then waited for the twins to be disgorged from the door of Cyrus Peirce Middle School. They were as excited as Zoe was; Jake had been plucked out of the middle of social studies by his father.

Zoe’s first instinct was to drive right to the hospital to wait for the baby to be born. But once the twins were ensconced in the Karmann Ghia, she had second thoughts. They had not technically been
invited
to wait at the hospital. They were close friends of the Randolphs’, but they weren’t family. But then again, Ava had no other family on the island, and Jordan was an only child.
Should Zoe drive to the hospital? She was paralyzed by indecision, feeling suddenly insecure about her status in the Randolphs’ life. She decided to just drive home and wait for the call.

At that moment her cell phone rang. It was Jordan.

“It’s a boy!” he said. “Eight pounds four ounces, ten fingers, ten toes. Mother and child are both doing fine.”

“A boy!” Zoe cried out.

“A boy!” Penny and Hobby shouted.

“Ernest Price Randolph,” Jordan said. “Baby Ernie.”

“Oh,” Zoe said. “Congratulations!”

“Come!” Jordan said. “Come see him!”

Zoe had to admit, it was one of the most joyful moments she had ever experienced on Nantucket. Ava lay in bed, looking as if she had been through a war: she was pale, and there were bruised circles under her eyes, and her hair was matted to her head like a wet mop. But she was triumphant, she was almost forty years old and she had fucking done it, delivered a baby whole and healthy. The baby was asleep in Jake’s arms, and Penny and Hobby started arguing about who would hold him next. Zoe kissed Ava’s clammy forehead, and tears filled her eyes. She didn’t have words; the moment was simply too big. She handed Ava her present, and Ava unwrapped the sweet pink outfit and they both burst out laughing, and the tears found their release. Then Jordan walked in carrying a bottle of champagne. A moment later Al, Lynne, and Demeter Castle arrived, and Ava showed them the pink outfit, and there was more laughter. Penny scooted down the hall with a handful of dollar bills to get sodas from the vending machine, and Jordan popped the champagne, and Zoe snapped pictures of Hobby, who at age thirteen was already six foot one, holding tiny baby Ernie. Lynne Castle hugged Ava, and Al handed Jordan a Cuban cigar that he’d gotten on his last business trip to Quebec.
Ted Field poked his head in to shake hands with Jordan, then Al, and to make sure Ava was feeling okay. Jordan handed Zoe a paper cup of champagne, and Zoe toasted him and looked into his blue eyes, and she felt a moment of pure happiness for these people who had gotten their heart’s desire.