Interstitial #6
“My parents told me about your mom,” says Simone, and instantly Jordan’s throat closes and she feels like she can’t breathe.
The grief is always right there on the edges, ready to pounce. “I’m so sorry, Jordan. Your mom was amazing.”
“Thanks,” she manages to croak. “Yeah, she was. I miss her. We all miss her.” The word miss feels so inadequate; it seems like the loss of Theresa should have its own special word.
“We used to talk about books, your mom and me, that summer. Sitting out on your patio.”
“Yeah,” says Jordan, squinting toward the horizon. “I remember that. You were both reading Water for Elephants.”
“We were! You’re right. I can picture my paperback.
I got it wet and it was so soggy and swollen.
Your mom’s was pristine.” They start to walk, and Jordan can feel Simone looking at her, but she keeps her eyes straight ahead.
“I wanted to reach out to you, but we weren’t in touch so I didn’t know if I could .
. .” Her voice falters, then trails off altogether.
“Sure,” says Jordan. “I get it.” She hadn’t really left an opening for Simone to get in touch with her. If she’s remembering
correctly, she’d said some irrevocable things. Can she revoke them now?
“I have been following your sister, though, I admit.” Simone laughs. Her laugh sounds the same, like it’s moving up and down
a musical scale. “Well, I was. Until I couldn’t take it anymore.”
“What couldn’t you take?”
Simone bends to examine a clamshell. “Empty,” she says. “Nobody to rescue.” She straightens again. “What I couldn’t take was
all of that heteronormative perfection. It’s too much. It’s unreal. I mean, I know that’s an expression, but it literally
seems like it can’t be real.”
“Yeah,” says Jordan, feeling disloyal to Natalie but also agreeing. “I get it,” she says again.
“Okay, so,” says Simone. “Catch me up on your life in thirty seconds or less.” They pass a man walking a German shepherd on
a leash, and Jordan clocks Simone’s double take. The man is very good-looking.
“Only thirty seconds?”
“You can have a little longer if you need it.”
“Okay.” Jordan takes a deep breath. “I live in Manhattan. I work for a high-end crisis communications firm, which means when
people do something wrong that goes public—or even if they don’t do something wrong, but the public perceives that they have—we
manage the response.”
“You’re a fixer!” cries Simone.
“Not exactly. Sort of. More of a—buffer. A context builder. A hand-holder, sometimes. Does this count as part of my thirty
seconds?”
“I forgot to look at my watch. Take as long as you need.”
“Okay. Two years and two months ago, my mom died. Five months ago, my dad married her hospice nurse, who’s twenty-nine years younger.
My sisters and I boycotted the wedding. My dad is putting our house on the market.
My sisters are up in arms about it, but I actually think it makes sense.
Natalie has three kids, you’ve seen them online, I’m sure, and Mae lives in Boulder. ”
“Relationship?”
“Me or Mae?”
“You.”
“I—no. Not currently. I was living with someone. Audrey. She moved out three years ago.”
“Why?” Don’t be so shy about getting right in there, thinks Jordan.
“She thought I was too focused on my work and that she’d never be the center of my attention.”
“Was she right?”
Jordan chews her lip. “Maybe. I’m not sure.” (She was right. And Jordan still misses her every day.)
“I can’t believe your dad is selling the house! I can’t believe you have an evil stepmother!”
“I do,” says Jordan, even though she knows that’s not true or fair. “It’s very Disney-esque. She makes us sweep a lot.” Simone
snorts. “That was definitely more than thirty seconds. Now, you go.”
“Okay. My parents are going to sell. They bought property on Kiawah, where the water is warmer. They stopped coming here regularly
a few years ago.”
Good luck with that coastal flooding, Jordan thinks, offended on behalf of Rye. Kiawah! It’s not supposed to be easy to get
in the water; you have to earn it.
“Really, I think they realized they were never going to get into the Beach Club. They would never say it, but they were so jealous of your parents.” The Beach Club wait list is famously long, decades long, and money can’t move you up.
“My partner and I just broke up. We were living in Santa Cruz. There was cheating.” Jordan tracks the passive voice.
“It got ugly. I’m living in my parents’ house while I get my yoga-and-smoothie place off the ground.
It’s something I’ve wanted to do forever, so—I’m doing it.
I found a little space in Portsmouth. I plan to open in September. ”
Jordan should say that’s amazing! She should say I love yoga and smoothies and Portsmouth! But a wire trips in her brain and instead she asks, “Was the partner male or female?”
They’re walking side by side, but at this Simone stops, so Jordan stops too, and Simone gives her a long, long look. “Female,”
she says finally.
For some reason that frees Jordan up to say, “That’s amazing. I love yoga and smoothies and Portsmouth.” Simone smiles.
They walk in silence the rest of the way, and then, when they are adjacent to Jordan’s house, Simone says, “That was the best
summer of my life, when we were seventeen.”
“I was eighteen,” says Jordan. “Spring birthday.”
“I’m lamenting my lost youth. Are you?”
“No,” Jordan says. “I don’t lament.” She doesn’t like when people talk about their lost youth. It’s not lost, it’s simply
in the past. That’s fine, that’s the normal way of things, the only constant is change, etc., etc. “I like adulthood.” She
likes having money and a nice apartment and being the master of her own universe. She likes buying good bourbon and monochromatic
Pilates sets and being a generous tipper and saying, “I’ll have the Seven Stones Cabernet.” She loves her job. She’s good
at it!
(She used to love her job.)
(She does love her job. Just not her boss.)
“But I will say,” she adds wistfully, “life was uncomplicated then.” Before she lost Theresa and gained Bernadette; before
she even knew Audrey. When she had Simone. She hadn’t lost anything yet.
“Oh, Jordan.” Simone’s smiling, but she sounds a little sad.
“What?”
“You think that, but you always made things complicated, even then.” She squeezes Jordan’s arm and Jordan’s heart skips a
beat. “It’s like you’re in a permanent defensive crouch.” She laughs like this is some sort of compliment.
“No, I’m not,” says Jordan defensively.
“It’s okay. You are who you are, right?”
Jordan is stymied. She’s not sure what to say, and she can feel herself starting to bristle, so she says, “I should get back
to my sisters.”
“Oh my god, your sisters,” says Simone. “You have the best sisters. I was always so jealous of the three of you. I would have given anything for sisters!
To be a Shipman girl!”
“Yeah,” says Jordan.
“Text me, okay? I have the same number.”
“I deleted it,” says Jordan. “In 2008, I deleted it.”
The skin around Simone’s sea-glass eyes crinkles when she smiles. She never wore enough sunscreen, Jordan remembers. She always
wanted to be so tan.
“So not right away?”
“No,” admits Jordan. “Not right away.”
“Well, I didn’t delete yours. I’ll text you, okay? Hang on, I’m doing it right now.”
Simone’s contact arrives on Jordan’s phone with a buzz, they say goodbye, and Simone turns and goes back the way she came.
Natalie is wearing a giant sun hat and her new bikini, and she’s thinking about corralling her children back to the house so she doesn’t miss the window for Caspian’s two o’clock nap.
Miss the window, and the rest of the day goes south fast. She doesn’t look too bad, maybe even pretty good, Baywatch meets MILF, and in the old days (last week) she would absolutely be making a post or a TikTok or both. Her followers go crazy
when the Hanson family leaves the farm and ventures into the wild. Watch us go apple picking! See us at the airport, on our way to Montana to visit the grandparents! Here we are visiting a
museum in New York City, swimming in a lake, playing miniature golf.
She understands, obviously, that the internet is addictive, capricious, potentially damaging to the psyche. She has prior experience with that damage
herself. The previous fall, scrolling Instagram, Natalie saw a photo of four of the Wesleyan girls together on a getaway to
Napa—everyone but her and Leah. Two-thirds of the Sisterhood. Immediately hot tears had pricked her eyes.
Leah had gone to law school and now works for a big firm in Manhattan; she and her husband, an oncologist, live in Connecticut,
in commuting distance of the city. Two kids, two jobs, three rotating nannies. She and her husband never see each other. The
kids hardly see them together. Every day, Leah once told Natalie, with an air of grievance but also a sort of pride in all
she was managing, was a jigsaw puzzle into which they needed to slot one hundred and fifty pieces. Every. Single. Day. “No
rest for the weary!” She laughed. It didn’t seem so funny to Natalie.
“Why are you doing it?” Natalie asked her once, and then, into the silence, “No, really, Leah, I’m serious.”
“Because how else am I going to do it? I went to law school! I’m not going to not practice law. Chris went to medical school! He’s not going to not treat cancer so he can drive to soccer practice! Look,
sorry if I don’t make all of my salad dressings from scratch—” She broke off her sentence, and Natalie was silent. “Sorry,
Nat, I didn’t mean . . .”
The previous fall, Natalie captured a screenshot of the girls in Napa and texted it to Leah. WTF? she said.
Oh yeah, Leah texted back. Bummed we couldn’t make it.
Couldn’t make it? She hadn’t been asked! She imagined the side text blowing up now as Leah realized her mistake. She hearted
the photo anyway. It would have gone against her brand to make a big deal over something so trivial. But she understood that