Chapter 11
LATE MAY’S HOT sun and cold ocean made a formidable combination.
The pool they had started last fall was almost done, but not quite, thanks to a battle with a local contractor, so Anna had joined a gym in Peabody with the hopes of becoming a more fit version of herself.
Truth was, at Life Time, the ten-thousand-square-foot complex with its smoothie bar and saunas and cold-plunge pools and spa, everyone joined to use the sprawling outdoor pool and waterslides.
In summer, the pool was the central gathering space of half of Hamilton, Boxford, Topsfield, and Middleton.
“For just five hundred dollars a month, you, too, can parade around in a bikini among Hamilton’s finest dad bods,” Di said to her to try to get her to join.
“Is this supposed to be a selling point?” Anna asked.
“It’s not not a selling point.”
Earlier that day, Di had sent her a screenshot from PTO darling Karen Pistoulia’s Instagram account.
Ever since Anna had deleted her social media, Di had been doing this—sending along good material, the kind that she knew would make Anna laugh.
The image in question was a selfie, which magnified Karen’s moon face.
Next to her was a skeletal Tom Brady, New England’s most famous sports personality. The caption just read: GOAT.
See what you’re missing, not being on the Internet, Di had written, as if not seeing the Hamilton Mommies flaunt their celebutante connections was going to leave some wide and gaping void in Anna’s life.
Di hadn’t approved of Anna’s decision to abandon Instagram and Facebook, and her screenshots were gentle reminders that there was a whole world out there.
I’ll survive, Anna wrote back. Anyway, her promise to Di had been to meet somewhere in the middle. No social media to track the inane social climbing of her “friends” and neighbors, so Life Time would have to do. Why not meet the hornets in their nest?
Di didn’t have a pool of her own, and she rarely drove up to Newburyport or out to Ipswich or Gloucester for the beach anymore.
“Too much work, too much sand,” she said.
She had become persnickety in her old age—old age being her forties.
Instead, Di, along with all of the other wealthy moms from the middle North Shore, preferred to pull up a lounge chair at Life Time, where, for a hefty fee, you could order a cocktail, a plate of chips and guac, and Pirate’s Booty for the kiddos, all charged to your account, thankyouverymuch.
Country club life without the astronomical $10,000 club fees of the Ipswich club, which, sure, some people did join, but that was a different stratum altogether.
Anyway, she had ended up joining, mostly because she did love the water, and she wanted the kids to have a summer, and because the beach .
. . well, it was beautiful, but cold, New England being what it was.
Getting used to being a member of Life Time was like getting used to being a different person.
Every day, Anna looked through her clothes and asked herself: Is this okay?
Was the cover-up from Target enough? Did she need something more .
. . Tory Burch? More . . . Prada? To live up to the expectations of the women she saw parading around the gym—and it really was a gym—could set her bank account on fire.
And yet she still felt compelled, in some magnetic way that made no sense, to normalize herself, to fit in.
Ever since the emails and the police report, Anna had done her best to become invisible.
Despite Di’s bid to convince her, no, she didn’t think the PTO was behind it.
But maybe it was better to take a break for now, to fade into the tapestry of summer.
There had been that look in Harper Mar’s face, that sneer, that permission granted by Mimi, and it had all burrowed quite deeply into Anna, even before all the calls, even before the dance.
All of it felt deeply connected, even though she hadn’t talked it through with anyone, not even Di.
Anna wanted things to be easy, at least for now.
She wanted things to be seamless. She wanted to soften the edges of Hamilton.
To disappear at drop-off and pickup. To send Denny to birthday parties.
To beg off commitments. She was busy! So busy!
If Di had noticed, she said nothing. And she was pretty sure Denny hadn’t noticed, which was useful in keeping up her charade.
She had been the perfect exterior parent, planning everything, executing plans and attending almost none of them, a background actor, an extra, tiptoeing around the perimeters of her own life.
But now it was the Friday of Memorial Day weekend, and her kids had the day off, for some obnoxious reason, and there was a heat wave, and she’d have to be seen in public eventually anyway.
She had made a good effort not to run into any of the PTO moms, but she couldn’t avoid it forever, and every time she stepped into Life Time, she knew she was stepping into the hornet’s nest.
Di had already gotten seats when Anna arrived late in the morning. Life Time was mostly full, swarming with moms and kids. Some days were like this, though Anna didn’t mind it. The chaos almost made it easier not to see anyone she knew.
“What a day to be alive,” Di said. She was wearing a long-torso single-shoulder swimsuit in black, with rouching and white piping along the seam, along with a wide-brimmed seagrass hat that made her look straight out of a 1960s movie.
Every once in a while, Anna wondered if her friend was real.
How could someone look so effortless all the time?
How could she go from an old sweatshirt with holes in it to this look—whatever this was—without missing a beat?
From a canvas bag monogrammed with her initials, DEM, she produced a full bottle of rosé, a wine opener, and two insulated pink travel cups.
“A little early, isn’t it, Di?”
“No way. It’s rosé.” Di winked. One of her boys, Brian, was in the pool with another local Hamilton kid, Anna could see, searching for batons with a pair of goggles, his navy blue and white swim shorts emblazoned with the high school’s logo: the Hamilton-Wenham Generals.
“Where’s Henry?” Di’s youngest, Henry, was a few months older than Ben, five.
“Upstairs. He didn’t feel like swimming today.
” Upstairs meant daycare, and a hands-off morning for Di.
Rosé indeed, Anna thought, though she wasn’t interested in a midday buzz herself.
Leave that to the moms of Hamilton, to escape the pretty prison that they had all created for themselves, even Di, even her perfect and wonderful friend Di.
“Is he okay?” Anna asked. “He hasn’t been over much lately.
It’s almost like he has a whole new group of friends.
” She had noticed that Henry had been around Ben less and less this summer, and that his interest in sports had suddenly exploded.
Henry was young, true, but he had always presented as bookish, which had concerned Anna’s naturally athletic friend, who had hoped that both of her boys would naturally gravitate toward fields and teams.
“Actually, he’s reignited a passion for soccer,” Di said.
“I thought the coach had suggested T-ball as an alternative,” Anna said with a quick snort.
Di gave her a look. The look said: You must have been mistaken. “The coach says he’s unbelievably gifted. They’re looking to bump him up to first-grade level. They think he could play a goalie position. Go for captain, too.”
I guess things can change, Anna thought.
For all she knew, Henry had latent skills buried deep inside that had never been extracted.
And now, what more could her friend have asked for, after all, than two sons with advanced athletic skills, besides a pile of money, a day in the sun, a large and fancy pool, and all the chips and guac she could reasonably charge to her account?
And they had that, too. Not a bad day after all, if you could stand it.
“Hurry up, come get sunscreen on,” Anna called to Ben and Louisa, then pushed them toward the shallow section of the pool where the guards were.
For her own part, she had selected a conservative one-piece, not at all Hamilton Mom of her, no one-shoulder business, more like Marshalls chic if anything.
“I see you haven’t updated your bathing suits this year,” Di said.
“Very funny.”
“Don’t look now, but the enemy’s here.”
Anna did look now, actually, and when she snapped her head up—purely by instinct—there were three women walking her way, a trio, like Mean Girls, but in real life, and not in pink.
This year, everyone only ever wore black, just in case she hadn’t gotten the memo.
Mimi Mar, hair pulled up into a petite banana clip, was in front.
Two-piece, of course, so that no one missed out on the hard work that went into the body.
A slip of a cover-up, just enough to go below the waist. To her left: Karen Pistoulia.
A little pink-looking, Karen, with a hint of sunburn and a scoop-neck suit and a long, flowing sleeved cover-up that trailed behind her like some kind of weird veil.
And Ellen Wilson. Did Anna even know they were friends?
Poor Ellen looked a little like an ugly duckling, scurrying behind these two, a little overweight, stuffed into a suit that was probably the wrong size, black with a ruffle around the collar, pretty if outdated.
They were looking right at Anna, three sets of bug-eyed black sunglasses, or they were looking right through her. Hard to tell.