Chapter 20
The complete and unprecedented halt of all contact with Margaret changed my dynamic with Eleanor because Eleanor had been using Margaret and our shared forums of communication as a backdoor means of talking to me without actually having to talk to me.
Margaret, I realized, had known this, tolerated such a role all summer, and finally grown sick of it.
She canceled coming to Eleanor’s parents’ anniversary party by telling Eleanor only, forcing Eleanor to choose—reach out to me directly for the first time in nearly two months or allow me to show up at her house, find out Margaret wasn’t there, and plausibly interpret her lack of advance notice as a desire to be alone with me.
I realized this when Eleanor texted me at the last minute, the morning of the party, on the first Saturday of August. On her phone, I knew, would have been her single blue message on the right side of the screen facing a wall of gray text on the left from me, all the messages I’d sent and then deleted from my message history.
I didn’t even remember what I’d said exactly, which was both horrible and a gift.
I noted that Eleanor had chosen not to message me in the separate DM thread I’d opened by sending her my picture.
I wondered if she wondered if I’d cancel.
I wondered if she knew about what happened between me and Margaret.
I didn’t know what terms the two of them were on with each other by now.
I texted back a sad-face emoji in response to the news of Margaret’s absence.
If Eleanor didn’t want to be alone with me, she’d have to tell me not to come.
Later, I ran up the stairs to my mother’s bedroom.
All her windows were open. Still in her cotton nightgown, she was typing on her laptop, pieces of paper scattered across the rest of the bed.
A lawnmower buzzed at intervals of increasing and then decreasing volume as it moved back and forth across a lawn somewhere down the street.
“Are you going to tell me you need to tell Eleanor’s mom that we kissed before I’m allowed to sleep over at her house by myself?” I asked. I’d rather never have a sleepover again for the rest of my life than be the one responsible for Kim finding out that we kissed.
“It’s a problem,” my mom said, shifting the computer from her lap. She talked and moved so slowly. “I’m not going to tell Eleanor’s mom,” she eventually announced, “because it isn’t my business. But I need to ask you, do you want to sleep there? Not only because you’ve already said yes?”
“Yeah,” I said.
She pushed herself into a more upright seated position. “And you know that I would come and get you for any reason?”
“Yes.” The question was under what circumstances I’d be willing to call her.
“And if you want to, you can still change your mind and say that you’re not allowed to have sleepovers yet?”
“Okay, I know.”
Some bird on the tree nearest to the bedroom windows began to warble, then cry.
“You have to be responsible for your own good judgment,” my mom said, “but I do wish Kim had somewhat less confidence that everything always turns out for the best.”
I gave her a little hug and ran away.
—
Oscillating water sprinklers waved like enormous hands across the green expanse of Eleanor’s lawn.
My mom walked me up to the front of the house.
Moms always want to enter and exit through the official egress of a building.
Kim opened the door to greet us with her white blown-dry hair and bearing of official welcome.
Eleanor stood behind her mother. I stood behind mine.
While they went through their salutations, Eleanor and I examined each other.
She wore her hair in a high, tight ponytail, the bones of her face elfin, the rosacea on her cheeks pink, her feet bare.
She watched my eyes dip to the metal script of her necklace and then return to her face.
It was as much of an admission as I was able to make.
Yes, I was mad at Eleanor. I could have called her to account, but more than why she told Margaret about kissing me, I wanted to know what she said and how she said it.
I wished I could have seen her face when she used my name in a sentence about herself.
We didn’t have to break eye contact, because we weren’t alone, though it still took some courage to keep my gaze steady.
“Thank you for lending us Mina,” Kim said. Part of her charm lay in giving other people the opportunity to feel gracious.
“Oh, you’re welcome,” my mom answered, smiling but unable to leap into friendly banter without additional social runway.
My parents and Margaret’s mother had all been invited to this party but declined. My mom declined all invitations to parties at which she wouldn’t know a significant portion of the guest list, and Margaret’s mom said no because she hadn’t yet gotten used to attending events without a husband.
“Ellie enjoys occasions like this so much more with a friend,” Kim said. She talked with her hands, heavy gold and silver bracelets jumping up and down her wrists when she gestured. I winced before I could remember not to.
“Yes, thank you for lending us Mina,” Eleanor said, her tone the vocal equivalent of an eye roll.
She hated this form of her mother’s courtesy—the implication of a deficiency within the self for the sake of thanking someone else for filling it in.
She didn’t want to congratulate anyone for help she didn’t need.
She didn’t want to need anything from anybody at all.
As soon as the sentence had left her mouth, she felt embarrassed. I saw it on her face. Her sarcasm had been too sharp, too private, meant either for her mother or for me but not for the two of us together at the same time, and certainly not for my mother.
“Mina does that to me too,” my mom reassured Eleanor. What she lacked in ease, she made up for in alertness to the emotional environment and a resulting compassionate sincerity.
“Oh, teenagers are ruthless,” Kim replied, having raised five of them. “Ellie’s sisters used to steal my reading glasses and then wear them to tell me my behavior disappointed them terribly.”
She invited my mom in for a glass of iced tea in spite of the approaching deadline of the party.
She’d thrown too many of them to feel anxious.
Instead, she appeared energized by the prospect of the evening.
My mom politely declined entering the house, but before she left she had one last thing to say, and she gave me a quick look before she began speaking—a moment to prepare myself for embarrassment.
“The girls are sleeping here tonight,” she confirmed. “If there’s any change of plans, please call.”
“Of course,” Kim said with a smile. “No camping or decamping.” But when she saw that my mom couldn’t treat the events of that June with humor, she went on, “You have my number if there’s anything you need.”
Despite the ten-year age gap between them and the differences in approach with respect to me and Eleanor, I always thought our moms could have been friends.
Each in their own way, they took themselves and their daughters very seriously.
But Kim had already made friends with the mothers of her older children’s classmates, and my mom never initiated a new relationship without quite a lot of encouragement from the other side.
She left. We all waved to her from the front door. Then Kim turned to me and Eleanor.
“Ladies, we have three hours,” she said.
—
The pretense of the party freed me and Eleanor from having to make sense of each other right away.
Kim required our best and most helpful attitudes.
We ran up and down the slick wooden hallways of the first floor, giggling and sliding in our socks between the errands Kim assigned us, fetching drink dispensers from the basement, chopping up fruit for fruit salad, slicing cheese for cheese plates, and hurrying outside to arrange napkins and placemats on the long line of tables set up in the backyard and stab teak torches into the ground at even intervals in a rectangular perimeter to keep mosquitoes at bay.
The secret I’d thought I had with Eleanor turned out to be a secret Eleanor had with Margaret.
This gave me a kind of power. Having been wounded awards you the right to a concessionary gesture.
But acting wounded or requesting concession would have ruined all our running around and laughing, so I didn’t.
We scoured the garden with kitchen shears, cutting flowers for bouquets.
When I leaned over some waist-high foliage to reach the thin neck of a poppy, my hair slid over my shoulder onto the leaves.
Eleanor, quick and decisive, flashed out her scissors to snip the end from a curl.
The crisp sound of the metal slicing through my hair made me gasp.
My lock fell into the garden. I gave her a look.
“I live here now,” I said, and cut another flower.
When the catering staff arrived, we traipsed upstairs to get ready. The audible stacking of plates, jingling of silverware, voices, and footsteps that rose from the first floor and backyard of the house through her bedroom’s open windows helped soften the sensation of our being alone together.
“What are you wearing?” I asked.
If she were Margaret, I would have already known.
Discarded shirts, skirts, and tank tops lay on the floor, evidence of a decision-making process.
She held up a short black shift dress with puffed sleeves, a silky black bow for her ponytail.
I half-laughed when I pulled out my own clothing, a linen dress of the same length in white and a white headband.
We’d match, or rather we’d offset each other precisely.
It was like I almost knew what she wanted from me.
Kim knocked on the door and then stuck her head around to check on our progress. Her eyes immediately moved to the rumpled clothes on the carpet.