Interstitial #2
“but then Aunt Jordan and Aunt Mae and I need to finish sorting out the garage. The dumpster is coming tomorrow. Beach?”
“I’m tired of the beach.” Scarlett sighs.
“I think Evangeline and Caspian want to go to the beach.”
Agreeably, Caspian says, “Beach!” He clambers into Natalie’s lap and pushes his nose into her neck. It feels sort of nice.
Damp, but nice.
“They always get to pick,” says Scarlett. “I never do. It’s not fair.” She sits up and stomps her unshod foot for effect.
Natalie considers her middle child. She gets where Scarlett is coming from, this unarticulated rage, this sense of injustice.
Her sisters made fun of her for it, but it’s real.
“Thus it shall always be,” she tells her daughter.
Scarlett says, “Huh?” and knits her brows together.
“Nothing,” she says. “Never mind. I just mean, I get it. I get why it feels unfair. Look, I found a book for you.” She finds
Bunbun where she has set it on a shelf and brings it to Scarlett.
“That’s a baby book,” says Scarlett disdainfully.
“But it’s full of wisdom,” says Natalie.
Kara comes in then, holding a mug that says MY HUSBAND IS HOTTER THAN MY COFFEE. Natalie winces. Did Kara not read the mug? Did Kara not read the room? Then comes Jordan, who looks much better than someone who slept only half the night, and most of that in a lounge chair,
deserves to look. Her mug says BUT FIRST, COFFEE. Basic, but a classic.
Natalie begins reading Bunbun to Scarlett anyway, and Scarlett pretends not to listen while actually listening. Soon enough they’re interrupted by Calvin
and Mae, back with Mae’s car.
“I know!” says Natalie. “We can go to Strawbery Banke.” Strawbery Banke is a living history museum in Portsmouth made up of
a bunch of buildings that preserve the Puddle Dock neighborhood through its many iterations over the past three hundred and
fifty years, from the Abenaki people to the present day.
“I don’t want to go to the museum,” says Evangeline. “I want to go to the beach.”
Natalie is sure Caspian would also choose the beach over a museum, but she doesn’t want to disappoint Scarlett.
“Why don’t Kara and I take Caspian and Evangeline to the beach, and you and Scarlett go to the museum?” suggests Calvin.
“Really?” asks Natalie.
“Yesss!” says Scarlett. She’s picked up a miniature fist pump somewhere (Mae?) and she employs it now.
“Actually,” says Kara, “I’d love to go to the museum with Natalie and Scarlett.”
“You would?” says Natalie. She would?
“I would. I really would. I was reading up on the sights of Portsmouth. I want to see the role-players.” The role-players
portray people who lived in different historical periods related to the buildings. You can engage them in conversation, but
they can only answer in character. It’s fun to try to trip them up.
This conversation is presenting Natalie with a true conundrum. On one side is her natural instinct, which is to find a moderately
polite way to say absolutely not, no way to Kara. What right does Kara have to home in on Natalie’s special day with Scarlett? On the other side is the memory of her
father just two days ago at the optometrist. What had he said? I would appreciate it if, when she arrives, you’d make her feel welcome.
“The role-players are pretty great,” says Natalie finally. Kara smiles, and Calvin is positively beaming.
“I’d like to take them to the beach,” says Mae.
“You would?” Natalie is incredulous. Such a bounty of offers! “Are you sure? Caspian is a lot at the beach. You have to watch
him every second.”
“I know that,” says Mae. “I didn’t just meet him yesterday.”
Caspian wipes his nose on Natalie’s shoulder.
“What about you, Dad? Care for some role-play?” Natalie cringes, realizing that this came out wrong. “I mean, care to go to
a museum?”
“I have a few things I need to get done around the house—” he starts to say.
That’s when Jordan comes in and says, “I call Dad. I’m taking him to Petey’s for lunch today.”
If you’re a Rye resident in search of seafood, especially chowder, you are either a Petey’s person or a Ray’s person. The
Shipmans are Petey’s people, though they understand the value of being Ray’s people too. Riding past Rye Harbor, with her
father driving, Jordan feels special the way she used to as a kid when she went along on certain errands with Calvin that
the other girls were either too young for or not interested in. The hardware store was one of these. Jordan would always go
to the hardware store. There was something about the organized shelves, the knowledgeable salespeople (just try to stump them;
that’s right, you can’t), the wide assortment of unrelated items that made her feel happy and complete.
They snag the last spot in the parking lot, which is usually full ten minutes before the restaurant opens. Jordan has so many
happy memories of going to Petey’s, but most of them involve Theresa. She has to pause before getting out of the car, because
she’s picturing her mother ordering her favorite meal, whole fried clams, and suddenly she can’t breathe.
Calvin orders a cup of chowder and a lobster roll. Jordan studies the salad menu, then she chastises herself for being an
idiot and turns her attention to the fried portion of the menu (clam strips, oysters, lobster tails, crab cakes). She lands
exactly where her father landed.
Without conferring with Jordan, Calvin then orders two beers.
Okay! thinks Jordan. We’re doing this! He carries them to a picnic table and sets one in front of Jordan.
Jordan can’t remember the last time she had a beer.
But this beer in a plastic cup brought to her at a picnic table by her father, it tastes so good.
It tastes like college and that feeling where you don’t know what’s going to happen next but all possibilities are on the table.
It tastes like youth! They sip the beers while they wait for their number to be called.
“I know you’re upset with me, Jordan. For you it’s not so much about selling the house—”
“Make no mistake,” she says. “I’m upset about selling the house too. I just see where it makes sense.”
He nods, accepting this. “But what you’re really upset about is Kara.”
It’s been five months since Calvin married Kara, but they haven’t had this conversation yet. None of the Shipman sisters have
had this conversation with their father. Well, apparently Mae didn’t need to. But it’s been lurking for Jordan and Natalie, like a monster in the closet, like the stranger on the dark corner. The thing
you want to pretend isn’t there. “What I’m also upset about is Kara,” she corrects. “I mean—Dad!”
Calvin tents his fingers, holds them in front of his face, and looks at her over them.
It reminds Jordan of how he used to look at her or her sisters if they got in trouble.
Their parents were traditional in that the father did the disciplining.
The mother, when asked, listened to the complaining about the disciplining, or clattered pans loudly in the kitchen to pretend it wasn’t happening.
Calvin was the master of the stern silence, the disappointed gaze.
Natalie scraping up the side of the car pulling out of a parking spot where she’d parked too close to a cement wall.
Mae coming home drunk sophomore year of high school, which even Jordan thought was too young to come home drunk.
Jordan throwing the one rager of her life senior year and getting caught for it.
She waits for him to say something but he doesn’t, so she continues. “I mean, do you ever think about what Mom would say?”
Her voice gets smaller, more choked. “Do you ever think about Mom at all anymore?”
She watches her father’s face go through a series of emotions: sorrow, bewilderment, a hint of defensiveness. “Of course I
do. All the time. All the time, Jordan. Every single day. Before she died—”
Jordan cuts him off. “I swear to god, Dad. If you’re going to tell me that before she died Mom handpicked Kara to be her successor
and begged you to promise her that you wouldn’t be alone . . .”
“Then what?”
“Then I’m going to throw up. That stuff only happens in Hallmark movies.”
Good timing: their number is called. Calvin rises to get the food, and, though Jordan knows she should help him, she remains
where she is, stewing in her indignation. She wasn’t prepared for this conversation—she has come to Petey’s under false pretenses!
Then she feels bad so she keeps an eye on Calvin walking from the counter. If he’s struggling, she’ll get up and help. Okay,
fine, she’ll get the napkins and the spoons for the chowder.
When they have their chowder and their lobster rolls, and while they are busying themselves opening the little packets of
oyster crackers and scattering them across the creamy surface, Calvin continues as though there’s been no break in the conversation.
“I suppose that’s true. Although I’ve never seen a Hallmark movie.”
“Well, don’t,” says Jordan. “You’d hate them.” (She herself, in times of loneliness or heartbreak, especially during the holidays,
has been known to quite enjoy them.)
“Anyway, that’s not what I was going to say.
Your mother never decreed any such thing to me.
Whether she thought it or not, I don’t know.
But she didn’t say it. What I was going to say was, before your mom died, I never, ever, ever thought I’d want to be with someone else.
Never in a hundred years would I have imagined it.
” This, from her father, is an extreme amount of hyperbole, even though most people would have said never in a million years.
“So what happened?” She can hear it in her voice, the way she’s challenging him. She should be giving her father the gift
of curiosity, but she can’t.
There’s a really long pause next, long enough that Jordan isn’t sure if he’s going to answer or not. She blows on her chowder
to cool it and takes a bite of her lobster roll.