Chapter 19
“That’s why we’re so evenly matched,” Mary said, right from the start.
Which was true. They did feel evenly matched.
Anna felt bad that she preferred Mary sometimes even to Di, but Di was busy anyway, with Life Time and the Hamilton gossip, and so she and Mary made plans to meet at Veterans or to take their kids for an early al fresco dinner of wood-fired pizza at Appleton Farms or to take them to Crane’s early in the day before it got too hot and then to Russell Orchards after for cider pops. The party had been Mary’s idea.
“You are never going to become president of the PTO without some ridiculous meet-and-greet. You know this, right?” They had driven over to Richardson’s, in Middleton, and the kids were stalking the parking lot for yellow jackets, slapping them with flip-flops the way Denny had once taught her to do.
“This is exactly what I do not want to do,” Anna said. “An afternoon communing with the women of Hamilton is my precise and sweat-soaked nightmare.”
“Well, how else do you intend to get them to vote for you? The people you need to win over—I hate to say this—are the ones on the inside. It’s all well and good that I like you, and I can tell all of my friends to have your back, but the voting majority are the people on the PTO.”
Of course Anna knew this, but she had been putting off the abject reality of it, because she knew that the hardest part of becoming part of the PTO would be getting the existing PTO to like her enough to make her one of them.
It was also the existentially challenging part, the part that required stepping into a different pair of shoes.
Anna Plummer was, after all, the kind of person who wasn’t good at pretending, and she was particularly bad at disguising her own sense of distaste, and she had a sour spot—that kind of turned-up-mouth feeling—for the women who disregarded the parts of Hamilton that needed work.
The parts of her that needed work, if she really thought about it.
“This part is the impossible part,” she confessed to her new friend.
“We literally had entire human beings come out of our bodies. I wish people would stop saying that anything was impossible,” Mary said. She lifted a chocolate ice cream cone to her face and sank into it, covering her entire nose. It looked ridiculous. And fun.
“I hate that what you say makes so much sense to me,” Anna said. She drew the line at sticking her face in ice cream.
Mary had plenty of other ideas, of course.
It should be, she felt, an afternoon party.
Garden-themed. Upscale, but not too upscale.
Anna had to distinguish herself as a woman of the people who still had impeccable taste.
She needed to come with ideas, but those ideas should be tempered. She should be tempered.
“Let them get to know you first, then hit them with your platitudes about how the world is unjust,” Mary said. “Or at least let them get a little drunk before you start talking about that god-awful Ziti Dance.”
It made sense. Anna needed this kind of consultation, a second set of eyes to help her see the nuance that she couldn’t.
Much as she loved Denny, he was too kind for any of this, too forgiving.
He would have told her to show up, act the part of Hamilton doyenne, and never mention a word about any of the underpinnings of the PTO.
But it went against everything she believed in, to just let the core rot under her eye.
There was a way to get at it, and she hadn’t seen it before, and now she did, and to reclaim the town was to find a way in and to change the atmosphere and the culture, to force out its terribleness by forcing in goodness.
And although she remained unconvinced by her friend’s ebullience—that anything could be solved as sunnily and easily as just sticking one’s face into a scoop of round, smooth ice cream—she had come to believe, in just a few short weeks, that maybe her hard-and-fast outlook on the world was a little too rigid.
Mary’s house, they both agreed, was more neutral. Mary, after all, had grown up in South Hamilton, knew more people, and could draw a bigger crowd, even though her house was smaller and much farther away from, say, Nancy’s Corner.
“We aren’t multimillionaires, okay?” Mary said.
Her house was lovely enough, with a well-tended garden that reminded Anna of her mother’s.
A charming sunroom, laden with antiques, was the kind of room that Anna could imagine spending a family Christmas in as the snow fell in the backyard.
She coveted the blue Murano glass paperweight, the rolltop desk with its inkwell and stained-tip pens, and even the old wingback chair, the leather of which had split in the center.
In the backyard, a lattice archway was thick with tea rose vines, now crossing into their third bloom of the season, tiny white flowers, honeybees buzzing around them.
The last week of August, they agreed, would be perfect, right before the school year started, in the late afternoon, after the heat of the day had died down.
They could serve cucumber sandwiches and iced tea and lemonade, put the girls in pretty floral dresses and set out tiny crystal bud vases with roses and pansies and other cuttings from the garden and string Edison bulbs along the white picket fence for when the sun sank a little low in the sky and maybe the Hamilton mommies would find themselves temporarily enchanted by a garden full of gnomes and flowers and pixie elementary schoolers, with their pigtails and wide-eyed dreams, and maybe they could all agree that all kids should have that same ability: to dream about a world where they could do anything anywhere, boundless, up to the sky, out to the fuzzy edges of the earth, limited by no person, by no president of the PTO, appointed either by God or by man.
Even though Anna wanted a low-key event, once she got wind of the party, Di insisted on calling her very favorite planner over at Special Events of New England for help with high-tops, linens, and glassware. Anna drew the line at a tent, which was not to say that Di hadn’t tried.
“They do have these beautiful sail tents, rescued from old ships that are no longer in use,” Di pleaded.
“There’s not room, and this isn’t a wedding,” she told Di.
“Everyone wants a tent when it’s hot,” Di told her. “Half the PTO’s going to be marching around fanning their precious, sweaty faces. Just watch. And anyway, isn’t it pretty to stand under a tent in the afternoon?”
“They can drink lemonade, just like everyone else.”
And they left it at that.
Anna had to admit, though, that her two friends did make a fiery and commendable team.
Mary’s house was modest, but in August its garden was bountiful, pulsing with black-eyed Susan, purple ironweed, panicled hydrangea, bee balm, Russian sage, and phlox.
It had been weeded and tended to, but it lacked the particular manicured look of the estates along the winding roads of Hamilton.
You could get lost in these flowers, and that was exactly the mood that Anna wanted to set.
With Di’s help, too, high-top tables had arrived, cloaked in a tidy gingham print, a pale light blue to match the coneflowers and globe thistles.
“Alice’s Tea Party, but for adults,” Anna said, standing back to admire the work, her friends by her side.
It was the hottest part of the day, but she could feel the sun fading.
Soon the women would arrive, and Denny would be there to drop off Louisa, for whom she had selected an eyelet sundress and leather sandals.
“Calling some of these women adults may be taking things a little far,” Di quipped.
She hooked her arm into Anna’s and, on the other side, Mary did the same, and the unlikely trio stood looking at the tables, now topped with their little bud vases and mason jars filled with rental silverware.
Looking around the garden, Anna felt a surge of optimism, that she could do this, that this party was going to create the kind of forward momentum that she needed.
“Okay,” she said, inhaling the August air, the flowers, the heat, the slow smoke coming from some neighbor’s grill. “Into the lion’s den we go, though this time I suppose the den is ours.”
The women of Hamilton always arrived fashionably late. Mary’s friends came first, their joyous kids crashing into the lawn with glee.
“Away from the tables!” Mary shouted, as little girls rolled and bounced underfoot, threatening to tip over the very bud vases they had spent so many hours artfully arranging.
Eventually, a group of girls found their way to a small hollow in the back of the yard, where a tree that bent down toward the earth created a natural nook, perfect for shade and for secrets.
Anna stood near the front gate holding a glass of tea and wearing a long, sweeping skirt, hoping to make small talk with the new arrivals.
Mary had been generous in introducing her friends, but she had gone off to tend to the rest of the party, so Anna now stood on her own, watching women she didn’t really know show up, some of them spectacularly coiffed: beaded sundresses, gladiator sandals that wove halfway up the calf, layers of chunky jewelry that made it look like they had casually run out of the house in a dash (Anna knew the truth).
The women who knew one another leaned in for reciprocal air-kisses and offered quick updates on their summer lives.
Anna, from her post of relative invisibility, could hear it all, the trips to Amalfi, the swim lessons from the handsome new guard at Life Time, the restaurant that had just opened in Rockport (divine, one woman declared).