Spoiled Page 4

  “Mama, can we go in the water now?” Sensing her mother’s mood, Annie was polite, judicious, fastening on her arm floaties.

  “I don’t need those!” Elspeth heard Julia saying. “I know how to swim already.”

  “You want me to take them in?” Elspeth was surprised to hear herself volunteer.

  Louise gave a shrug: Do what you like. Without the girls to perform for, her face had gone flat with disdain.

  “What’s your name again?” asked Julia, shielding her eyes to look up at Elspeth, as Elspeth dropped the sarong Louise had produced to replace the ratty cotton shorts she had arrived with. Wots your nime. “You can call me Elspeth.”

  “Yay, Auntie Elspeth!”

  “She’s not your aunt,” Annie said.

  “It’s fine, Annie!” Elspeth half-shouted, making Annie look at her curiously, for she, too, had bristled at the word on the girl’s lips.

  She took each of them by the hand and brought them down to the water. Though it was ideal for swimming here—shallow, with friendly waves breaking near the girls’ chins, Elspeth’s waist—the Italians never seemed to go in, standing instead in unambitious clusters on the sand like congregating birds, clucking and gossiping among themselves. There seemed to be seven or eight grandparents for every child, giving their own party, Elspeth thought, an impermanent aspect—making them seem “fringe.”

  Elspeth meant to take them in for ten minutes and then plead changing-of-the-guard, but each time she inched closer to the sand Julia said, “No! Turn around! Turn around at once, do you hear me?” and, taken aback, Elspeth obeyed. After half an hour Annie got bored and went to play with her sand toys at the water’s edge.

  Louise’s conscience must have pricked her, for she stood up and called to Elspeth and Julia, “There’s a little baby here, girls—come see! A little bambolattina!”

  “No!” Julia protested. “I want to play the turtle game again.” She clung to Elspeth’s arm, pulling her back toward the water. “You and I can play all day if we want! There’s no one to stop us.”

  “I think I’d rather say hi to the baby. You should come, too,” Elspeth suggested weakly, reasoning, like a fool, with the child instead of simply telling her what to do.

  “Oh, babies!” Julia made a face. “They’re incredibly tedious and all they do is cry and shit all over the place. It’s hardly worth the bother.”

  “I’m getting out now,” Elspeth said. She was appalled by the desperation in her voice. “You really should come, too, Julia. We’ve been in a long time!”

  On shore, she shook out a towel and lay down on the sand a few yards from Louise’s chair. Julia danced around in the water, pretending for a couple of minutes to continue the game alone. She got out, presently, and came up the beach toward Elspeth.

  “I think I’ll take a nap,” the little girl said. Purposefully, Elspeth did not look up from her book. Julia got a towel out of the beach bag and spread it out right next to Elspeth’s. Out of the corner of her eye, Elspeth could see her pinching the two towel edges together to make sure no sand stuck through in between. “Auntie Elspeth? Could you put sun cream on my back, please? I wouldn’t want to get a burn.”

  “Oh, all right. Fine.” Elspeth opened the cream, but then she said, handing it back to Julia, “You know what, Julia? I’m reading now. Why don’t you ask Louise?”

  “But she’s reading, too!” protested the girl—logically enough.

  “Louise? This is your fault, after all!” Elspeth called, her voice cracking with frustration.

  Louise didn’t so much as nod. “Okay, Louise is going to do it,” Elspeth said loudly and went back to her book.

  “What are you reading?”

  “It’s—nothing.”

  “Is it a grown-up book?”

  “Yes!”

  “Are you a grown-up?”

  “Yes, Julia. I’m a grown-up.”

  “Do you have a husband?”

  “No,” Elspeth said.

  “Are you divorced?”

  “Could you just leave me alone, Julia? I’m really trying to read.”

  “Did you never have somebody fall in love with you and want to share your bed and go snog-snog-snog-snog-snoggy with you?”

  “For Christ’s sake!” Elspeth sat up. “Louise?”

  “It’s your fault.” Louise laughed meanly and turned a page. “You shouldn’t have played with them. Raises their expectations.”

  Annie, sensing drama in the air, abandoned her bucket and shovel and drew close to the chairs.

  “You shouldn’t say ‘Christ,’ you know,” Julia said. “Are you trying to attract attention?”

  “Yes!” Elspeth cried. “As a matter of fact, I am! Louise, can you just—?”

  Louise put down her magazine and fixed Elspeth with a belittling stare. “What? What’s your problem now?”

  Trembling, Elspeth hesitated. “Never mind.” She picked up her book and towel and had toiled halfway up the beach before she turned around and shouted, “Next time you make us all eat lunch with some guy you think is in love with you, you might at least find out if he has a girlfriend!”

  By the time she got up to the house she had a splitting headache. She drank several glasses of water and a glass of blood-orange juice and stretched out on the sofa, her forearms covering her face.

  She tried to summon her indignation, but as soon as she felt better physically, her foul mood subsided, as well. Lying there in the impersonal house, with its furnishings familiar to beach houses the world over (the dumpy sofa that the owners always felt compelled to protect with a tapestry; the driftwood-framed flower and sailboat pictures), and with the ceiling fan whirring overhead, and snippets of a mama’s litany of complaint floating over from the house next door (Basta, Paolo, basta!), she felt surprisingly content—humbled, as always, before Louise, who had given her the real Europe, which the Melissas of the world would never see. She picked up her towel again and went out, heading back down the path to the beach. She met them coming up—Annie leading the way, with solemn, measured giant steps, Louise carrying Julia in her arms. Julia was whimpering.

  “Spee!” Annie broke out when she saw Elspeth.

  “Too much sun?”

  “She cut her foot,” said Louise.

  “Cut it very badly,” the little girl said, and lifted the appendage in question to show a blood-soaked T-shirt tied around it, tourniquet-style—Louise’s white one from the Prada outlet, Elspeth noted with mild titillation.

  “I tied the bandage!” Annie announced.

  “God.”

  “There was a broken bottle in the sand. They ran right over it.”

  “God,” said Elspeth again. “So, are we … ?”

  “Yes, we are!” Louise raised her eyebrows, imputing some significance. “We’re running up to call Papa right away.”

  “Oh, right. Of course.”

  “No! No! I don’t want to call my papa!” Julia struggled, kicking in Louise’s arms. “I don’t want to go home!”

  “I know you’re disappointed, Julia. But you actually have a very serious injury and we don’t want it to get worse.” Louise looked at Elspeth. “She’s going to have to go to the emergency room.”

  “It does look pretty bad,” Elspeth said seriously. It came easily to her to sound—even to be—concerned. In Louise’s eyes, too, she read joy behind the solemnity: They were going to be rid of the girl after all.

  Elspeth offered to go down and collect the things that were left on the beach. “Annie, why don’t you come and help me, so Mommy can tend to our patient.”

  “Hey! I’m the patient!” Julia said. “You’re talking about me!”

  ON THE BEACH, aunt and niece were gay, Annie seeming to have caught something of the relief that was in the air. Elspeth let the little girl prolong the packing up of the toys, let her put one last, two last, three last toes in the water. It had long been assumed—acquaintances had often remarked—that because Annie was an only child, and because her
parents were divorced, she must have a particular desire, more acute than most children’s, for friends her own age. But seeing her with the various playmates that had been inserted randomly over the years Elspeth got the sense that Annie saw them as supernumeraries. She seemed to feel pressure to act more like a child with them than she would naturally; her giggle, in play, sounded self-conscious. Once they left for the day, she would relax, and as she was now, would act more like a kid.

  Elspeth let Annie drag her heels up the path, even encouraging a forbidden detour that skirted the neighbors’ yard: If they took long enough, there was the faintest chance they might miss Werner Stechel altogether, find he had already come and gone by the time they came in.

  Outside the door of the house, she and Annie slid off their flip-flops. They tapped the sand off and lined them up neatly along the doormat as Louise required. “Did you get in touch with Werner?” she couldn’t stop herself from calling from the door. She couldn’t hear what Louise said. “What?”

  Inside Julia was lying on the sofa watching television—a dubbed action movie was on; Schwarzenegger, in a jungle.

  “Hey!” Elspeth heard Annie observe, as she joined Louise in the kitchen. “You’re still here!”

  “So, did you call him?” Elspeth murmured.

  “Yup.” Louise seemed to be concentrating very hard on counting out the forks and knives. “He’s not coming.”

  “What do you mean he’s not coming?” It had crossed Elspeth’s mind that even if he left right away, Werner might be tied up in traffic for a quarter of an hour—it was peak season on the Maremma, after all.

  Starting on the spoons, Louise said, “He says she’ll be all right.” She took a tray from a low cabinet and piled the silverware on it. “He’ll be over ’round nine or ten, as planned.”

  Annie came into the kitchen, scuffing her feet. “Can I have some Coke?”

  “‘Could I please have some Coke, Mama,’ and no, not before dinner, Annie, you know that. Can you help me by carrying this tray out to the table? Careful, Annie—don’t drop it.”

  “I don’t even know where the pronto soccorso is near here,” Louise said when Annie left. Elspeth watched her sister take the supper things out of the fridge and cupboard. Her efficiency, hard-won, in the kitchen was soothing.

  “There must be something, though,” Elspeth said finally. “People are always hurting themselves on the beach.”

  “Yeah …” Louise began to chop onions, irritated. She wiped her forehead with the back of her wrist. “Can you take her up and put a proper bandage on her? There’s Bacitracin in the medicine cabinet. It’s the white tube with the brown stripe.”

  “Careful!” Julia cautioned as Elspeth labored, with the girl in her arms, up the tortuous spiral staircase to the second floor. “You’ve got to be careful, you see, because I’m hurt rather badly.”

  Elspeth ran a bath and made Julia sit on the side of the tub and soak the injured foot. She ran some water in the sink as well, to soak Louise’s T-shirt, though there was hardly any chance the stain would come out. Through the open door she could see into the bedroom the two of them were sharing, as they had shared a room growing up. In the corner, near the cheap French doors that opened onto a little Juliet balcony, stood the ironing board, hungrily poised for its daily supply of wrinkled cottons, seaside vacation notwithstanding. Elspeth had made fun of Louise for it—had commented condescendingly on the first night, “Still ironing the underwear, I see.” Louise’s twenty-year habit of when-in-Romeing had long been an easy target: the joint-and-two-veg she had learned to put in the Aga on Sundays when married to Robert; the sudden penchant for “football,” and the out-of-character repudiation of shaving that had appeared with Jean-Marc. Now she felt a taste of remorse—for despite being ridiculed, Louise had done Elspeth’s skirts and shirts as well. And it was nice to have one’s clothes ironed.

  As Elspeth was running the tap over Louise’s shirt, turning the water up high so it would pulse out the blood, she remembered something else Louise had once done for her: She had washed out her underwear for her. When they were eight and seven, Elspeth kept wetting her pants because she couldn’t get to the toilet on time. It must have been summer because she could picture Louise wringing out her underpants and spreading them to dry on their mother’s old Chevrolet. She could almost see the unappetizing cans collected for the Goodwill food drive filling up the backseat, the recycled plastic toys for the Cleary’s Corner children, the brooms the blind had made … “We can wash them in the sink and dry them out here and she’ll never know,” Louise had said, as if even then they had both instinctively wanted to protect any part of their private lives they could—even a private sickness—from their mother’s metastasizing woundedness. How long had they kept it up? Two weeks? Three? Eventually the mother of a friend, a neighbor of theirs, had noticed Elspeth running for the toilet and called Noel. She had been taken to the hospital; an advanced-stage urinary tract infection; an outpatient operation; a course of antibiotics—and everything was fine.

  And for Louise, too, there had been the interventions of friends’ mothers—a string of friends’ mothers, then boyfriends’ mothers—most notably one Mrs. Janocek, who had pointed out how good Louise was at languages; suggested looking into a job as an au pair one summer; going abroad.

  She had no idea what Louise had done in situations that would have required her to wash out her underwear, though. Elspeth turned off the tap, screwed it tight so the faucet wouldn’t drip. Louise had picked out her clothes every day, told her how to wear her hair—figured out French braiding, when that was the style. But Elspeth had no idea whether anyone had told Louise, even offhandedly, as Louise had mentioned the fact to her, when they were driving somewhere in high school together—now at fifteen and sixteen—that just because someone wanted to have sex with you didn’t necessarily mean he wanted to date you. “You should be careful about that,” she had said simply, not elaborating, Elspeth not asking her to.

  Louise never complained. It wasn’t her style. And when she alluded to it, the allusions were oblique, couched in signature Louise-style bravado. She would say, “You know, I was showing Giacomo some pictures of me when I was little, and you know what he said? He said (here Louise would slip ruthlessly into Giacomo’s accent), ‘Your part is not straight. Your part is never straight. And why do you wear such mismatched clothes? Your mother had you! (Had would come out ed.) Couldn’t she take care of you, too?’”

  WHEN JULIA’S FOOT was dressed and bandaged, Elspeth carried her back downstairs. She sat her on the sofa beside Annie and propped her leg up on pillows—two little girls watching Arnold.

  In the kitchen, the sisters conferred. “I found out there’s a pronto soccorso in Grosseto.”

  “How far’s that?”

  “In the car? Twenty minutes …” Louise gave the broth on the stove a stir. “It’s so annoying, I just put the rice on … I wonder if we really need to take her.”

  They looked at each other impassively. Then Louise gave a big angry sigh and turned off the flame under the saucepan. “So much for that.”

  “You want to get them ready? I’ll get the car.”

  Elspeth walked along the service road till she saw the first of the two purple Multiplas. She was glad she was alone, wrenching the car out of the tight spot. Louise would have teased her about her driving. “While we’re young, Els, while we’re young,” she would have said. “Can’t find ’em, grind ’em.” When she got out of the spot she drove carefully along the service road until she saw them, standing at the foot of the path to the beach house, Louise propping Julia up, with Annie beside them, the latter holding Louise’s oversized straw bag.

  Louise’s whole life, people had been telling her how beautiful she was, had stood in awe of her talent, her phenomenal taste. There had been the expectation, in the family and beyond (old teachers, old neighbors), that one day it would all come to brilliant fruition. Running Sotheby’s. Or married, at least, to some count w
ith a crumbling castle. “Three kids by thirty”—that, Elspeth recalled suddenly, had been Louise’s own, more modest plan. She hadn’t counted on divorce. Seeing her sister with the two girls now, Elspeth had a glimpse of how things might have gone, if she hadn’t married Robert at twenty-five—if she hadn’t married someone to stay away from home. The fantasy held her for a moment—Louise as the head of a growing brood, married, stateside, to some big investment banker, moving out to Larchmont when number three came along … Something struck her about the threesome just before she pulled up. Whether it was Annie’s studied look of solemnity or Louise’s chilly, un-American poise or even Julia’s Oscarworthy impersonation of an invalid, she didn’t know, but it was as if they had each had to become slightly more professional than their real-life counterparts would have, as if in fact, Elspeth were seeing three people who had been hired to play a mom and two kids. Then Elspeth was upon them: her sister, her sister’s daughter, and Julia Stechel.

  “All right, guys, into the car we go,” Louise was saying.

  Elspeth put the car into neutral and cranked on the emergency brake, feeling underneath her for the lever to slide the seat back. Louise drove like a teenage boy, with the seat so far back she could barely reach the clutch. And although Elspeth had now had her driver’s license for fourteen years, there was never any question as to who would drive.

  The Secret Vote

  ONE EVENING NOT too many years into this century, at a closing dinner for an IPO she’d worked on, Alice was seated next to one of the bankers on the deal. Alice made a mistake early on—mechanically using the phrase “your wife”—and had to spend the first half of the evening coming up with remarks that showed she understood the man was gay

  To her left sat the biotech start-up’s CFO, soft-spoken and seemingly diffident. Alice had thought she had better draw him out, with the result that “Don” was now mortally preoccupied with making sure she realized that, despite his divorce, he was dating someone seriously (“Sarah,” whom he had re-met at a business school reunion). Implied reproach on either side of her made for static exchanges over the salad. It wasn’t until the pasta arrived that the conversation cracked open. Alice refused wine. “Really?” The banker hesitated politely with the bottle over her glass, his lips pursed with concern. “Not even a drop of red?”