All the Summer Girls Read online

“You’re a good mom,” her husband says.

  “Thanks.” She slides out from under his hand and begins to rinse Lucy’s dinner dishes. What to do with a half-eaten bowl of buttered penne with peas? Toss, she decides, and scrapes the final bites down the drain. Some decisions are that easy.

  “I wish I didn’t have to go to this dinner,” Drew says. She can feel his eyes on her as she loads the dishwasher. She’s wearing her Mom Uniform: pencil-leg jeans and a black tank top, a brightly patterned Missoni headscarf her only remaining attempt at personal style. She used to wear black because it made her feel chic; now she wears it because it’s slimming and hides stains. “We never finished our conversation last night,” Drew says, wrapping his arms around her waist from behind and kissing her neck.

  Vanessa had barely slid her feet under the covers the night before when Drew had asked if she was ready to have another baby. It wasn’t the first time they’d discussed the subject, but it was the first time he’d brought it up since he’d confessed, months earlier, what had happened with Lenora Haysbach. She had the sense that he expected they’d start trying right then. He had that look in his eye. She evaded the question by mentioning her best friend Kate’s upcoming bachelorette party—it would be her first girls’ trip in years. Nobody in her right mind goes to Vegas pregnant, she told him, and a certain amount of alcohol was required when facing the volatile, thorny mess that was her current relationship with Dani. Then she said she needed a glass of water and swung her legs back out of bed.

  It was the only time she had ever appreciated that her desk was in the kitchen. Up until then, the sight of her desk—built into the kitchen countertop, a constant reminder that her work was now officially of the domestic nature—had always made her feel a slight tick of annoyance. Before her good sense could steer her down a more constructive path, she sat in front of her computer, logged in to Facebook, and, finally, allowed herself to look up Jeremy Caldwell. And there he was: so easy to find. The hint of an early summer tan. Light brown hair; dark, narrow eyes; and a clean-shaven jawline that would make a J. Crew model question his job security. She couldn’t access any information about him—Was he married? Did he still live in Philadelphia?—without requesting to be his “Friend,” and she wasn’t ready to take that step.

  She had sat at her desk for several long moments, looking at Jeremy’s photo and listening for Drew’s footsteps in the hall. Had the situation been reversed and Drew were considering reaching out to an ex-girlfriend, she would kill him. Even before what happened with Lenora, she would have at least threatened to kill him.

  She studied Jeremy’s profile picture. He looked so unchanged that she wondered if the photograph had been taken the summer eight years earlier when they’d dated. Was it possible she herself had taken it? Was he sending her some sort of sign? She peered closer. His lips were pressed together, just managing to suppress the smile that shined, redirected, from his eyes. He’d always done that—smiled with his eyes, like a child. Like Lucy. At this gut-wrenching turn of thoughts, Vanessa quickly logged out of her Facebook account and shut the laptop. By the time she’d slipped back into bed, Drew was asleep.

  “You’re sure I can’t convince you to come tonight?” Drew asks now. His wineglass has left a red ring on the counter. These little messes are invisible to him; he simply does not see them. “Maybe Gina can babysit.”

  “She’s in the Hamptons,” Vanessa says, though she’s not actually sure whether or not their downstairs neighbor has already left for her beach house. Drew’s work dinners are inadvertently humiliating. None of the people he works with have the slightest idea what to talk about with someone who spends her days raising a child. Anyway, Drew had already, by telling her it was “just the guys,” indirectly assured her that she did not have to worry, Lenora would not be at the dinner.

  “We’ll finish the conversation eventually,” Vanessa says, using the measured tone that has become her default. She wipes away the ring of wine he left on the counter.

  “Okay,” he says. She can tell he’s already moved on. He’s incredibly skilled at not obsessing over things. She suspects this is a guy thing—she doesn’t know a single woman who could so easily place something she wants on the back burner.

  Vanessa first met her husband at an opening at Nocelli, the contemporary gallery in Chelsea where she worked in the years after she graduated from New York University. Drew Warren was tall with a strong nose and thick brown hair that curled against his forehead—a walking David in a bespoke white shirt, open at the collar. Vanessa felt the eyes of the other women in the room swivel in their direction as they talked. Drew described himself as an aspiring art collector and the executive producer of Estelle, the new talk show of a feisty octogenarian comedian who had starred in a much-adored eighties sitcom. Vanessa admitted she had not seen the talk show but lied and said she wanted to. Drew admitted he didn’t know much about art but said he was fascinated by it and eager to learn more. Vanessa had obliged by telling him about the paintings, a series of vibrant, slyly funny domestic scenes by a figurist named Francine Martin. Vanessa could see that the paintings did not appeal to Drew, but he had tilted his head and listened with what appeared to be genuine interest as she spoke, at one point putting his hand on the small of her back to move her out of the way of a passing waiter. When she Googled his name in her apartment later that night, she was astounded—and a little thrilled—to learn he was the son of Thomas Warren, the famous evening news anchor.

  Their first date was spent wandering the new galleries popping up on the Lower East Side; afterward, they ate grilled corn wrapped in tinfoil outside Café Habana and laughed when they caught each other surreptitiously pulling corn shreds from their teeth. Drew took her to parties filled with famous, creative people. When she mentioned she had always wanted to visit London, he whisked her away for a long weekend spent trolling the Tate and the Saatchi Gallery and Portobello Road. When she met his beautiful, articulate mother for the first time, she was so nervous that she momentarily forgot how to hold a spoon. On their drive back from Connecticut, Drew had thrown his arm out protectively in front of Vanessa at the very moment he stopped short to avoid hitting an aggressive driver who had cut into their lane. Later, as the city came into view, he admitted that he feared that his father, known for his insightful commentary on the events of the day, was not proud of him; as the producer of a talk show, Drew could not help but feel his contributions to the world paled in comparison.

  In response, Vanessa found herself telling Drew that her fascination with the business side of the art world, the fact that she loved the excitement of a big sale as much as the art itself, made her community-organizing, ozone layer–obsessed parents uneasy. She had so little in common with them, a fact that seemed to get more pronounced with each passing year. She didn’t even share their skin color—hers wasn’t creamy pink like her mother’s or dark brown like her father’s but somewhere in the middle. Her skin made her experience of the world different from either of theirs; her job made them worry about her moral compass. Vanessa hadn’t expected to open up so much to Drew, but she realized that when she looked at him, she saw a kindred spirit.

  At twenty-six, Vanessa was the first of both her high school and college friends to get married. At twenty-seven, she was the first to have a baby. Her decision to quit working when she had Lucy made Drew uneasy—not because they couldn’t afford it, but because he knew how much Vanessa wanted to run her own gallery someday. So, really, he’d foreseen all of this. This discontent. But when the doctor had placed Lucy on her chest, Vanessa had felt a series of fireworks explode inside her, and her very first thought was Oh, fuck. Because she knew what this crazy new kind of love meant. If it wasn’t a financial necessity, how could she possibly return to work and leave Lucy in someone else’s care? How could any work accomplishment ever compete with how she felt when her daughter gazed, mesmerized, into her eyes and smiled? No, Vanessa wanted to be the one who cared for Lucy on a daily basis. But she a
lso wanted—and this feeling has grown stronger lately—to hold on to the dreams she had before Lucy was born.

  She can’t win.

  Once Drew has left for dinner, the noise of the city seems more muffled than usual and the condo throbs with quiet. Vanessa pushes open the window above the sink and inhales the unusually hot June air. Five stories down, an ambulance passes, its urgent siren filling the kitchen for a moment before fading. She makes herself a bowl of cereal—a favorite dinner from her single-girl-in-the-city days. Leaning against the counter, she closes her eyes and feels the city breathe against her bare neck. Echoing heels against pavement. Laughter. Fragments of conversation. “She only calls when she needs something,” one woman says. “If he doesn’t pay by the thirtieth, I’m kicking him out,” says another. For long minutes there is silence, and then a set of passing cars sounds so much like the inexorable roar of the ocean that Vanessa feels herself being pulled back through time. Her eyes flip open, and she yanks the window shut.

  After attending a Quaker school for thirteen years, Vanessa is used to being alone with her thoughts. Friends schools, as they’re called, are a dime a dozen in Philadelphia and are populated by kids of every religious background, with practicing Quakers being in the small minority. Vanessa Dale was the only one in her Philadelphia Friends School class who went to Friends Meeting on Sundays with her family in addition to the school’s Wednesday morning Meeting; her parents are agnostics who like the idea of being members of a peaceful urban community. So Vanessa had twice as much time with her own thoughts as her classmates did. Or with God, as her teachers would have said; Quakers believe that we carry God within ourselves, making an intermediary like an ordained minister unnecessary. Want a tête-à-tête with God? Just hunker down with your own thoughts for an hour and let the light within shine.

  “I spoke with God already,” Vanessa’s best friend Dani said one morning as they filed into the auditorium for Friends Meeting during their senior year of high school. Even back then, Dani wore all black, already trying to prove that under her conventional cuteness—her shaggy, pin-straight blond hair, her perky nose, her big, brown eyes—lived an edgy artiste-in-training. “When my alarm went off. She was pissed. Turns out she’s not a morning person.”

  “Maybe she just couldn’t deal with your dragon breath,” Vanessa replied. Kate, the third point of their best-friend triangle, looked back from her spot in line and laughed.

  “Wait,” Dani said. Her loud voice carried over the line of seniors shuffling as slowly as humanly possible into the auditorium. “I think God is my dragon breath. Right?”

  Dani and Kate looked at Vanessa expectantly, as though her double dose of weekly Friends Meeting made her an expert on All Things Quaker. All it really made her, she thought, was an expert at gnawing her fingernails into perfect crescents. She shrugged. “Hell if I know.”

  “I don’t think so,” Kate said, tucking her hair behind her pale ears. “I think that’s Native American—you know, a higher spirit in everything. Quakers just think he’s in people. Or maybe not. Maybe all living things? Like, animals too? I don’t think God is in your bad breath though. Or even your good breath. I think once you breathe out, God is probably . . .”

  Vanessa tuned out. Kate got herself particularly wound up on Wednesday mornings, perhaps worrying about the blow an hour of silent Friends Meeting would deliver to her daily word quota. Vanessa let her gaze wander over her classmates, finally landing on Kate’s twin brother, Colin. He stood in a cluster of his lacrosse teammates, staring into the middle distance as his friends jostled one another. He might, Vanessa realized, have been high. Lately he moved within a pot-scented haze that reminded Vanessa of the cloud of dust that surrounded Pig-Pen in Charlie Brown’s Christmas special. Hardly a month went by that she didn’t run into Mrs. Harrington in the school’s halls, coming or going from another teacher conference about The Problem of Colin.

  Kate and her brother shared the same Irish coloring—brown hair verging on auburn, pale skin with a dusting of tiny freckles across the bridges of their noses that darkened and spread in summer—but otherwise you’d never have guessed they were twins. Kate was fastidious and thin, an overachiever; her cheerful chatter was motored by sharp intelligence. Colin—who had an athletic build, deep blue eyes, and unruly hair that seemed perpetually overdue for a cut—only appeared focused when he held a lacrosse stick in his hand.

  Colin blinked and caught Vanessa’s gaze. A smile flickered across his face, as though there were some joke between them. She looked down and felt a flush warm her cheeks. Since he was a good athlete and had clear skin and a sweet smile, it did not matter that Colin was introverted, moving quietly within the pack of puffed-up, wisecracking jocks at the school: most of the girls at PFS had crushes on him. But he was Vanessa’s best friend’s brother, and therefore off-limits to her. When she looked up again, she found Dani looking at her.

  What? she mouthed. She steeled herself for one of Dani’s searing pronouncements, which could cut to the quick if you didn’t prepare yourself. But Dani just shrugged.

  “All right, girls. You know the drill,” Mr. Camden said as they neared the entrance to the auditorium. “Time to make like bananas—”

  “And split!” Kate finished. Mr. Camden, who coached the debate team and wore his shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows, was Kate’s favorite teacher.

  “We know, we know,” Dani said, her words overlapping with Kate’s.

  The girls hadn’t been allowed to sit next to each other in Friends Meeting since the incident that fall when Dani—spelling out her jokes letter by letter on her thigh—had made Kate laugh so hard that she choked on her own spit and sprinted from the auditorium in a burst of coughing and squeaking sneakers and slamming doors, causing a ripple of laughter to swell and break over the entire student body. Even using all the arsenal at their disposal—hisses and flashing eyes and pointed fingers—the teachers hadn’t been able to entirely snuff out the laughter for the remaining twenty minutes of Meeting; in the very moment it would seem to at last peter out, a tremor would strike a far corner of the room and suddenly the entire auditorium would again become a churning sea of hands clamping over mouths, crinkling eyes, and shaking shoulders.

  Now, they filed into separate rows in the auditorium. Vanessa sat near the door and had a view of her classmates’ backs. Kate was four rows straight ahead, and Vanessa could see the line of Dani’s blond hair falling over the back of a bench two rows up and to the right. She searched the room until she spotted Colin at the far end of her own bench, his eyes already closed. She considered sending a poke down the row of classmates toward him to keep him from nodding off to sleep but decided against it.

  Though she never told them, checking the room for the whereabouts of Dani, Kate, and Colin was something Vanessa always did. She would have felt silly admitting the ritual. Looking for Dani and Kate made sense—the three of them had been best friends since the first day of kindergarten at PFS when they all showed up wearing the same purple-striped Gap shirt and had spent two cherished weeks together every July at Dani’s father’s beach house in Avalon, a tiny town on a seven-mile-long barrier island off the coast of southern New Jersey—but why Colin? Vanessa told herself it was because he was always around, always barging into Kate’s room to see if he could copy one of their homework assignments or to reclaim the laptop he shared with his sister or—in earlier years—to peg one of them with a water balloon.

  One recent afternoon he had wandered into Kate’s room, sat down heavily beside Vanessa on the bed, and stroked her hair three times before Dani’s scoffing laugh made his hand drop to his lap.

  “Stop pawing her,” Dani ordered. Dani and Kate exchanged a meaningful glance, and a lump formed in Vanessa’s throat. These little shifts in dynamic were common, but knowing how quickly things could change didn’t make it any easier when you were the odd girl out.

  “Woof,” Colin said, jutting his chin up to flick the hair from his eyes. When he loo
ked over at Vanessa, she saw that his eyes were glazed over. After a few minutes, he stood and walked back toward the door.

  “He’s drunk,” Dani announced after he left the room.

  “Maybe,” Kate said. “Who knows?” There was a note of warning in her tone that Vanessa felt she, in particular, was meant to hear. What would it be like to have a twin brother? Vanessa had two younger sisters who, at twelve and ten, seemed like babies to her.

  “Should we see if he can spare any?” Dani asked.

  “Dani!” Vanessa and Kate said together. They looked at each other and laughed and just like that the lump in Vanessa’s throat evaporated.

  “We have to finish this calculus set,” Kate said.

  Dani groaned. “Who cares? We’re seniors. We got into college already.” She had a point. Thanks to her writing portfolio and 800 SAT verbal score, Dani was headed to Brown that fall. Kate was going to Penn, and Vanessa to NYU. Vanessa couldn’t wait to get to New York, where she suspected her real life would begin.

  “But it’s only four o’clock,” Kate said, looking even paler than usual. “And we have school tomorrow.” She’d recently admitted to them that the thought of college sometimes made her throw up. Even then, Kate was not a fan of change. Penn was a whole three miles from the town house in Society Hill where Kate had grown up, Vanessa and Dani had laughed to each other on the phone later that night. She acted as if she were moving to the moon.

  Dani stared at Kate, shaking her head as she clapped her binder shut. “Live a little,” she said. “I guarantee you’ll thank me for this later.”

  Vanessa is on her third glass of wine, regretting it even as she drinks it. She misses the days when she could have more than one cocktail without immediately foreseeing the headache she would have to contend with while serving her exuberant daughter breakfast at six thirty the next morning. Drew could stumble onto the bus and sleep through the workday with his eyes open, but Vanessa would be on her feet from morning to night, making peanut butter sandwiches and negotiating the stroller through subway turnstiles and cursing the person who invented tambourines during a relentless hour of music class. Of course, she and Lucy could just stay home. She could put on Sesame Street and let her daughter zone out for an hour or two while she sneaked a nap on the couch. But if that’s the kind of mother she is going to be, then what was the point of giving up her career?