Chapter 2 Lee
Lee
Lee Perkins adjusted her oversized Gucci sunglasses and raised her drink for another sip, but there was nothing in her cup.
Oh, she remembered the days when the gentleman who served Perrier-Jouet to the Beverly Hills Hotel pool cabanas would fill her champagne flute without Lee even noticing it was drained!
“Do you want another chardonnay, dear?”
Reluctantly, Lee lowered her gaze to her mother, Charlotte, who sat next to her at the Palmetto Club, a community pool located just a quick golf cart ride from Charlotte’s house.
Charlotte wore a zebra-striped bathing suit; a matching zebra-striped visor; and Candy Yum Yum–colored lipstick she’d “borrowed” from her daughter and never returned.
“Yes,” said Lee.
“Hurry up, then, and get me one too,” said Charlotte. “Drinks are half-price ’til six! Wine Down Wednesday, you know.”
Lee rose from a luxuriant slouch, wincing at the Savannah sunlight cutting through her faded umbrella.
She was not surrounded by movie producers, A-list stars, and Hollywood influencers.
No: Lee was forty-three years old, formerly famous, and living in her mother’s guest room, sleeping underneath a hideous painting of bulldogs on a sailboat.
Her napkin read: Truth versus Chardonnay.
Lee and her mother chose chardonnay. Every time.
After a few, Lee could pretend she was back in golden California. She could return to the time when her bank accounts were flush and her family wasn’t scattered across the world, each one rapidly disappearing into their own private catastrophes.
As Lee strolled toward the snack bar, retirees pretended not to stare at Charlotte Perkins’s “troubled” daughter, the reality TV star and mental patient about whom they said, not so sotto voce, Lee Perkins is a complete disaster but wow, isn’t she gorgeous?
Lee felt as if she were disappearing, her career stalled and her manic depression muffled—but not eradicated—by medications that narrowed her range of emotions and made her hands shake.
Honestly, thought Lee, everyone in her family seemed to be adrift.
Charlotte rarely drove her car outside Palmetto Shores, her gated community.
Lee’s brother, Cord, was drowning in booze and work.
Regan, Lee’s baby sister, had moved all the way to Greece where she lived with her teenaged daughters, Isabelle and Flora, on the glittering Mediterranean Sea.
Lee had once underlined sentences in a novel that described her family: When you are small, if you reach out, and nobody takes your hand, you stop reaching out, and reach inside, instead. That’s just the way it was.
Lee and her siblings had been raised in the late 1980s, a time of big hair and enough Aqua Net to hold it in place.
A time (especially in the American South) of preppy vibes and straight teeth; cold smiles that betrayed nothing, L.L.Bean totes, and living by the credo—later cemented in the movie The Wolf of Wall Street—“Act as if!”
What happened to adults who knew only how to act as if they were a family?
Over the next few weeks, in New York and Savannah and Athens, Greece, the furiously flailing Perkins family would sink, one by one.
And in their last breaths, could they, could Lee—lovely, sad Lee—see that what would save them was quiet, unsexy, and hidden in plain sight?
A simple truth, yet hard to understand: If you didn’t reach out, you would never know you weren’t alone in the water.