We were at the part where the boy gathers the tree’s apples to sell when I sensed that Ella had fallen asleep —both of us were leaning against the headboard of her bed—and after a few more pages, I shifted so I could look down at her eyes. They were indeed closed. I ought to have shut the book and turned out the light then, but I kept reading; I read until I’d reached the end.
IT WAS, I
saw on the digital clock on my nightstand, after one when Charlie climbed into bed beside me. Groggily, I mumbled, “Did you have a flat tire?”
“Shh,” he whispered. “Go back to sleep.”
But as we lay there in the dark, instead of drifting off again, I became more alert. My mind pulled itself into focus, and I thought,
Surely this had been the longest day of my life.
When I spoke, it was in a normal volume. I said, “You need to tell me now.”
Immediately, he rolled over and placed his arms around me, and when he spoke, his breath was warm against my face. I could tell he was excited. He said, “No, no, everything’s good. Everything’s
” His happiness filled our darkened bedroom. He said, “I’m buying the Brewers.”
THE COUNTRY CLUB
pool opened that Saturday—it was Memorial Day weekend—and Ella insisted that we arrive right at nine o’clock. First, though, we picked up Jadey and Winnie. As they emerged from their house, a mammoth Tudor, I saw that Winnie was wearing a red bikini, the cups of it flat against her twelve-year-old chest, and Ella said to me from the backseat, “You said bikinis are inappropriate before you’re sixteen!”
“Every family has its own rules.”
“But Winnie is
family!”
“We’ll talk about this later,” I said, because Jadey and Winnie were almost to our car. Jadey, for all her talk about needing to lose weight, was wearing a bikini, too
I thought—which I could see under her sheer white linen cover-up. She also had sunglasses set on her head, pushing back her blond hair, and over one shoulder she carried a huge canvas bag with navy straps and a navy monogram. When they opened the car doors, I noticed that she and Winnie wore matching red toenail polish.
The girls immediately started talking in the back (Winnie was very sweet with Ella, very inclusive, which was part of how I knew Jadey and Arthur were good parents) and next to me, Jadey said, “How was the funeral? As funerals go, I mean.”
“Not bad.”
“Your grandma seems like she must have been such a cool lady.” Jadey pulled a can of Diet Coke from her bag and popped it open. “I wish I’d gotten to know her better.” As I turned out of their driveway onto Maronee Drive, Jadey rolled down the window on her side, then faced the backseat. “Ella, I hear you’re joining the swim team this year. You will
Coach Missy. You girls are gonna have the best summer ever.” Although we’d be spending July and part of August in Halcyon, missing half the swim season was considered acceptable because so many families who belonged to the country club also went away to vacation homes.
We weren’t the only ones who’d come right on time for the pool’s opening, and the lower parking lot was a chaos of children, mothers, a few fathers, and teenagers. The Maronee Country Club, really, was its own small nation, one of those tiny, slightly absurd kingdoms—Liechtenstein, perhaps. It took up sixty acres, most of this land occupied by the eighteen-hole golf course. The clubhouse was an extremely long rectangle of white stucco—it always reminded me of a wedding cake—with a front porch full of oversize white rocking chairs and an American flag flying from the cupola. A valet took your car, though I always felt a little silly and would just as soon have parked myself. The main dining room was on the first floor, and this was where wedding receptions and debutante parties were held and where the tables and chairs were cleared out on alternating Fridays in the fall and winter for dancing school, which was open to children in sixth and seventh grade. On the lower level was a casual dining area known as the sports room, where, before my parents-in-law had moved east, Harold and Ella and I had met sometimes for a Saturday lunch of BLTs or Monte Cristos. In a building adjacent to the clubhouse were the weight room, squash courts, locker rooms, and lounge, and in the lounge, you were as likely to see a foursome of seventy- year-old matrons playing bridge as you were to see two male college students at the bar, outfitted in white, sweaty from a squash match (in the nation of the Maronee Country Club, a drinking age did not exist). The tennis courts sat between the clubhouse and the road, more than a dozen courts with a tennis shop in the middle where the pro had a desk and where one could get a cup of water, have one’s racquet restrung, buy apparel, or argue about whether or not Bjorn Borg was the greatest player of all time (a comparable golf house existed, and there was a special section of the parking lot reserved for the fleet of golf carts). The tennis courts formed a barrier between the road and the clubhouse; the sandy green courts were enclosed by twenty-five-foot-high chain-link fences, and as you approached, you’d hear the hollow rubbery thwack of balls being hit.
Of course, the main attraction that morning was the pool—the enormous, majestic, glittery blue-tinted pool, which, between Memorial Day weekend and Labor Day weekend, exerted a magical pull not just for the children but for the adults as well. It was located behind the clubhouse, and six years earlier, at the wedding reception of Polly Blackwell (Polly was Charlie’s first cousin), at dusk on a June evening, I’d looked out the window of the dining room, and it had been like gazing upon a lake in a fairy tale. The pool was Olympic-sized, with dark blue floating lane dividers, a deep end at the northwest corner, and a shallow end at the southeast (the shallow end was not the same as the baby pool, which was its own entity; predictably, its relative warmth was a source of endless jokes). One entered the pool area through a black-painted iron gate at the southeast tip; on the north side was a lawn of
