Chapter Twenty-Five Lily #3
“Oh, thank you! I thought you’d like it. It’s in my purse, here.” Rose tosses over her straw clutch.
“Thank you!” I say, applying it. “What’s it called?”
Rose rises and walks to the sink to wash her hands, grabbing for the purple bar of hand soap. “I think it’s called Berry Crush or something,” she says, checking her own lipstick.
“Love it.”
“Right?”
We are getting ready to leave when Rose spins around again. “I’m serious, though, Lily. Please try to be nice. For me? I like him.”
I think of Thomas. Before last night, maybe I would fight this harder, persuade her to ditch William. But I was wrong about him. I was wrong about Henry, too, and who knows what else.
I look at the soft crinkles around the corners of her eyes, too few laugh lines, and I see another version of her face, a younger one that never knew grief. I know I will do my best to be good. I cannot compromise my mom’s happiness, not again. Never again.
The rest of the night passes quickly. I’m on my best behavior for Rose.
Nonetheless, in the privacy of my own thoughts, I officially decide I do not like William.
He proves every negative stereotype about summer people right.
I’m grateful Theo is here to break the tension.
His practice at the club has made him an expert at people-pleasing.
He’s like a chameleon, blending into his surroundings.
William has insisted on ordering for the table, and I watch Theo’s face tighten as he places order after order.
The menu is prix fixe and includes an appetizer and entrée, but William decides that is simply not enough.
He orders the most expensive items on the menu in addition: jumbo lump crab cake, miso-butter-poached lobster, grilled octopus.
“For the table,” he says. “To share.”
I try to do the mental math of the increasing check, but after a certain point, the numbers make my head spin and my stomach drop out. I lose count.
Something I’ve observed about the rich is that they seem to order food compulsively, only to have a few bites of each dish and say they’re “stuffed.” It seems to be a status symbol to spend money without enjoying it.
“I’m surprised you two met in person,” William says after ordering three more desserts, which he also does not touch. “Doesn’t everyone in your generation resort to meeting online these days because they’re too scared to have real-life conversations?”
Theo has taken on the responsibility of making sure there is no food left on the table. He must be about to keel over, but he dutifully tears into the tiramisu as well. His mouth is too full to respond.
“Do you have kids?” I ask in lieu of answering.
“No, why do you ask?”
“Hmm, wonder why,” I say.
“Lily,” Rose warns.
“I think,” Theo starts, swallowing another bite. “It’s nice to meet someone in person, but it’s also nice to meet someone online. It all comes down to dumb luck in the end.”
I turn to look at him, surprised. There’s a smudge of chocolate on his upper lip, and I resist the urge to wipe it off by sitting on my hands.
“What do you mean about ‘dumb luck’?” Rose asks.
“Well.” He wipes his mouth with the tip of a white napkin. “Let’s do a little live social experiment. It’ll be good for my teaching practice.” He winks at William.
“Let’s say the average beautiful girl like Lily has at least three hundred matches on a dating app,” Theo starts, and I blush.
“The average date time is around ninety minutes. If Lily were to go on a date with even half of the profiles she matched with this week, it would take approximately thirteen thousand, five hundred minutes. Even if she booked two dates a day, it would still take seventy-five days to go through her matches, and that is if she were to pause her profile today and only sort through the responses she already has, excluding all other potential connections, online and in person, forever.”
Everyone is quiet as we take this in. I’m simultaneously dumbfounded and impressed by his quick math skills.
“I think it’s the opportunity cost that paralyzes us.
So hear me out. In microeconomic theory, the opportunity cost of an activity or decision is essentially the loss of whatever value you might have derived from the option you didn’t choose, right?
So, let’s say you buy a slice of pizza, the opportunity cost is the hot dog you could’ve purchased with the same money.
When faced with too many choices, we either become paralyzed by indecision or we end up less satisfied with the choices we do make,” he concludes, his words ringing in the silence.
“Interesting,” Rose says first. She leans across the table, a wry smile on her face. “But unromantic.”
“Not necessarily,” says Theo. He’s leaning on the table, too, subconsciously mimicking her posture.
“I think that part of the reason why ideas of fate or serendipity or ‘the one’ are so pervasive in our society is because of this decision fatigue. If we torture ourselves with opportunity cost, if we spend too much time pondering the flavor we didn’t choose, we’ll be malcontent forever.
We have to believe, at least on some unconscious level, that there is a higher power at play in the universe: that the person we do meet is somehow meant to be, predestined. ”
“And you’re saying that’s bullshit?” I ask, curious.
“No, I’m just saying that people like being told what to do, who to be.
It’s why we fall for astrology and personality tests and psychics…
At a certain point, all this free will gets to be exhausting.
We have to package life into smaller and smaller boxes, categorize and organize it until it becomes manageable.
We survive by making sense of the senselessness, by assigning meaning to the random. ”
“So,” I reiterate. “To put it simply, it all comes down to dumb luck. But dumb luck isn’t inherently unromantic. Dumb luck can actually be incredibly romantic, in my opinion.”
“I agree,” says Theo. “That’s why every time I used to pass this one bodega in the East Village called Heavenly Market, I’d buy a lottery ticket.”
Rose laughs. “You would? That seems unlike you.”
“I believe in investing in luck.”
The sky behind us has darkened, replacing the sunset with a blanket of cool, indifferent stars. The wind has picked up, and I’m thankful I packed a sweater.
“Ah,” says William, folding his napkin in his lap. “This academic banter reminds me of my time as a boy at Avon Old Farms School.”
“ ‘O Captain! My captain!’ ” I mock.
“What?” William looks around, disoriented. “Captain? What captain?”
“Never mind,” I sigh, but Theo is laughing, and I realize I love his laugh, how unselfconscious and contagious it is. Even Rose lets out a quick snicker, but she quickly covers it up by bringing a napkin to her face.
After dinner, we part ways. Rose and William go to his yacht, and Theo and I decide to take a walk downtown to grab ice cream.
We stroll through the docks with the boats lit up like Christmas lights, past the weathered brick sidewalks and cobblestone streets, peering into different storefronts.
We trade stories about our time on the island—Theo’s impression of Nantucket during his first summer here versus my perspective as someone who calls the island home.
“It’s beautiful,” Theo says as we walk past a line of teens waiting for their ice cream cones.
I choose a flavor called Cobblestones, vanilla ice cream with chocolate-covered cranberries and pretzel pieces. Theo buys a chocolate Oreo cone and then decides he is too full from dinner. “A first for me,” he says before offering some to me and dumping the rest into a trash can.
He continues. “It’s beautiful but it doesn’t seem real. It’s too idyllic, like a street in Disneyland. The proportions are all off.” He pushes against the clapboard face of a real estate office. “Like, I wouldn’t be surprised if this was all cardboard. Movie magic.”
I shake my head. “You have to come back in the winter. It feels more real when all of the vacationers are gone and the weather gets cold again. It still looks like a Hallmark movie, but less like you’re on a movie set and more like you’re traveling back in time.”
I consider William’s insistence that my mom should move. Would she miss this place? Or is it too isolated in the winters? Would she be happier elsewhere? Am I selfish for hoping she stays?
It’s like Theo can hear my thoughts. “Would you be sad if your mom left the island?”
“I want her to be happy, but I also really don’t believe William is the person for her.”
I tell him about Thomas, how I planned to set them up, the disastrous wedding, and how I saw him with Josie the other night.
“You have to tell her,” says Theo when I’m done. “She deserves to know.”
We walk away from the town, toward the lighthouse.
I’ve memorized these roads, the stop signs, the curves in each bend like the lines of a favorite poem.
It doesn’t hurt that Nantucket is actively preserved, quite literally frozen in time.
The entire island is considered a National Historic Landmark District, making it by acre the largest historic district in the United States.
Replacing Jeeps with horses and buggies, downtown looks almost exactly as it did in the 1800s, when it was still a small fishermen’s village: brick and clapboard storefronts, cedar-shingled sea captain houses, and stately white church steeples.
“You know,” I say to Theo, changing the subject.
“The funny thing about Nantucket is that it wasn’t originally preserved out of some sort of preemptive nostalgia or foresight about its future aesthetic value.
Although now it certainly is. Originally, it was left alone simply because it was forgotten.
Shifting sand bars made it difficult for larger ships to dock in the harbor.
For years, no one bothered to change it.
Now that neglect is exactly what gives it charm. ”