7. Willow
— ? —
Willow
Archie went down at five, and I do not mean tired.
It started as a shoe. It stopped being about the shoe almost immediately, and then it was about the shoe again, and then it was about a door being open that he wanted closed but had somehow also wanted open. The logic of a two-year-old in freefall.
“Baby. Baby, look at me.”
“NO.”
“I’m not doing anything to you.”
“NO SHOE.”
“Nobody’s putting a shoe on you. The shoe is over there. Can you see it? It’s gone. The shoe has left the building.”
“SHOE,” said Archie, with his whole body, and threw himself backwards into my hands.
I sat down on the floor with him and got my back against the bed and held him across the chest the way you hold a person who has stopped being able to want anything sensibly.
He fought it for a while. He shouted at the ceiling.
Then he went from shouting to crying and from crying to that other thing, the shuddering one, where the storm has passed but the body hasn’t got the message yet.
He turned around and got both fists into my dress and put his wet face flat against my shoulder.
“There we are.”
“Shoe.”
“I know. It was a lot.”
“Mama.”
“I’m here. I’m not going anywhere. You can hold on for as long as you want.”
He held on. That is the job, and it is the only job I have ever been unambiguously good at. Everything else I do has a question mark after it. This doesn’t.
Pia put her head around the door.
“Do you want me to say you’re not coming?”
“I’m coming.”
“Willow, you’ve got a child fused to you. You’re a two-headed creature now. It’s your life.”
“He’ll go down in a bit. I’ll come after.”
“Your hair’s had it.”
“I’m aware.”
“I’m just describing the scene,” Pia said. “You don’t have to enjoy it.”
“Is she going?”
“Is who going.”
“Pia.”
“She’s going,” Pia said, leaning against the doorframe with her arms crossed. “She’s been at the house all afternoon borrowing a hairdryer.”
***
I arrived at the tent late, with my hair off on one side and a patch on my shoulder the silk was never going to forgive.
The Squam Club does this benefit every year, and the tent goes up on the lawn, and everybody who has ever bought a house on that island stands in it and talks about the water like they invented it. The lights were on in the rigging. The whole thing smelled of money pretending to be casual.
Levi found me first, because Levi always finds people first. It is his only useful skill at parties.
“You look like you’ve been in a fight.”
“I have.”
“Who won?”
“He did. Comfortably. I never stood a chance.”
“Good lad.” He handed me his own drink, which he does instead of getting you one. “Michael’s over there getting talked at by Pell.”
“Who’s Pell?”
“Nobody. He’s a nobody who owns a marina and thinks that makes him interesting.” Levi looked across the tent. “He’s told me twice tonight that the dredging is political.”
“Is it political?”
“Everything on that side of the island is political. It’s a hobby for people who don’t sail.”
“Is he all right, Pell?”
“He’s not a violent man and he’s not a clever one. He’s the third kind.” Levi finished his own sentence somewhere in his throat. “Don’t stand near him after nine.”
“Is that advice?”
“Kind of.” And he went off, because Levi ends conversations mid-thought, without warning.
Michael saw me from across the tent and his whole face did the thing, and he came over through people and laid his hand flat between my shoulder blades.
“You made it.”
“He went down at five.”
“Bad?”
“Historic. One for the books. We’ll be telling this one at his wedding.”
“I’d have come back.”
“You were already here.”
“I’d have come back, Willow.”
And he would have. He would have got in a car. He would have left the tent and driven back and sat on the floor with me. That part of him has never gone anywhere. The problem is all the other parts, the ones that forget to come back until there’s a crisis.
“Stay next to me,” I said.
“I’m next to you.”
“I mean it. Not as a thing you say. Actually stay. The whole night.”
“I’m actually staying.”
Then Krystal came into the tent in white.
There is nothing wrong with white. It was not a wedding. It was a benefit, in a tent, on a lawn, and other people were in pale colors.
But the tent noticed, and it noticed as a group. Heads turned. Conversations paused. She moved through it like she’d been doing this her whole life, which she hadn’t, which is the thing that makes it remarkable.
She came straight over.
“Willow. You look done in.”
“I’ve been assaulted by a two-year-old.”
“He got you on the shoulder.”
“He got me everywhere. That’s just the visible part. The rest is psychological.”
“Do you want to swap? I’ll take him tomorrow and you can go and stand in a corner and drink something with ice in it.” She said it warmly. She means things. That’s what makes her impossible to fight.
“You’d last four minutes.”
“I’d last two and I’d come back a better person.”
“He bites now.”
“So did you,” Krystal said. “Your mother told me. She said it in front of the whole kitchen and you went the color of a beet and wouldn’t come out of the bathroom for an hour.”
And I laughed, because it was true, and because for one second we were two girls in my mother’s kitchen with sand on our feet. She hands you a memory like a gift and you forget, just for a moment, that you’re supposed to be keeping track.
Michael said, “Krystal, did the Hamburg thing land?”
“It landed. They pushed back on the timeline but-”
“Not tonight,” I said.
They both looked at me.
“Sorry,” Krystal said. “You’re right. Off. Completely off. I’m a menace at parties, I don’t know how to turn it off.” She put her hand on Michael’s arm. “Put your phone in your pocket and go and be a husband. That’s an order.”
He laughed. He put his phone in his pocket. He was a husband for a while, and it was lovely, and then a man from Boston wanted to talk about a berth, and Krystal was already halfway into that conversation, and my husband stepped into it.
He looked back at me once and held up one finger. One minute.
I have a whole collection of that finger.
Kristina appeared beside me with a glass.
“You’re standing on your own.”
“I’m aware.”
“Then move. You look like you’re just put down somewhere.”
“Kristina.”
“I’m not being unkind. I’ve been at these since before you were born and I’m telling you what the room reads.”
“And what does the room read when a woman’s husband walks off mid-sentence to talk about shipping?”
She looked at the tent for a while.
“It reads the same thing,” she said, and went to find somebody else.
***
I went to the bar because standing alone in a tent is easier if you are holding a thing.
Pell was already there and had reached the stage of an evening where a man starts talking to whoever is nearest, whether they want it or not.
“You’re with the Folgers.”
“I am.”
“Which one are you? There’s a lot of them and I can never keep track.”
“Michael’s wife.”
He looked at me. He did the whole thing, top to bottom, in no hurry at all, with a glass in his hand, taking inventory.
“Are you?” he said. “Which one’s the wife, then. Because there was a girl in white on his arm all evening and I’d have put money on her.”
“That’s his chief of staff.”
“Is it?” Pell smiled at the barman as though the barman were in on the joke. “Well. You’ve got a look about you. I’d have said the help.”
The barman went completely still with a bottle in his hand.
I have been ready for that sentence my whole life. I have practiced answers to it in cars, in bathrooms, in the shower at three in the morning. I have run this conversation a hundred times and never once got to have it out loud.
“My mother cleaned houses on this island,” I said. “She cleaned two on Cliff Road, and I know which two, and I know what they were like inside. So if you’re trying to place me, I’ll save you the trouble.”
“Two on Cliff Road,” Pell said.
“Two on Cliff Road.”
“Which two?”
“You’ll want to ask your friends that. I know which two. I’ve been in both kitchens and I could tell you what’s under the sink.”
Somebody down the bar laughed, and it was a laugh on my side, and for one second I had it. The whole thing, the room, the moment.
Then Krystal came across the tent.
She came fast, with her face set, and I thought, here she comes, and I felt relief.
Because there was one person in that tent who had eaten off my mother’s table.
One person who knew the house I grew up in, who had sat in that kitchen, who could place me in a way that had nothing to do with Michael.
All she had to say was that we grew up on the same street.
“Oh God,” she said. “Charlie, stop. Leave her alone.”
“I’m having a conversation.”
“You’re having an incident.” She put her hand on my arm. Then she tipped her head to one side and said, to him, in the voice you use to explain a difficult friend, “Ignore him. Poor Willow’s never quite got the hang of being married to someone successful. It’s a lot to adjust to.”
And she squeezed my arm.
Pell laughed. The two men beside him laughed. A woman further down the bar laughed and then covered it, which was worse, because covering it meant she had understood it.
It was not a lot of people. It was enough.
“Krystal,” I said.
“What? I’m defending you.”
“Say the other thing.”
“What other thing?”
“Say we grew up on the same street. That’s all. That’s the whole sentence.”
Krystal looked at me with her head still on one side, and I will never know what was behind her face, because she has always been better at this than me. She has always known how to keep the inside and outside separate.
“He knows where I’m from,” she said. Lightly. As though it answered something.
And she was right, he did know. She had come over to defend me, and the defense was that I am out of my depth in my own marriage, and she handed it to a man who owns a marina, on an island where my mother scrubbed floors. She knew what she was doing. She had to know.
I turned around.
Michael was standing the length of a table away with a drink in his hand.
He had heard it. I know he had heard it, because his face had gone still, and he had already started to move toward us, and then he stopped moving.
He opened his mouth.
Nothing came out of it.
Krystal said, “Michael, tell him about Hamburg,” and my husband looked at me, and looked at Pell, and looked at the floor, and said, “Charlie. Behave.”
Then he went into Hamburg.
***
I walked out of the tent.
The lawn goes down to a path and the path is crushed shells, and I was in heels I could not run in, so I could not even leave properly. I had to pick my way out of my own humiliation at the pace of a woman inspecting a garden.
I got to the cars and stood there.
The quartet started again. Somebody at the tent flap laughed at another thing entirely, because it had already stopped being an event in there, because that is what those things are. It happened, and it was absorbed, and the tent went on. The world closed over the top of it like water.
The barman came out for a cigarette and saw me and stopped.
“Do you want me to get someone?”
“No.”
“Mrs. Folger.”
“Honestly. No. I’m fine.”
He stood there a bit longer.
“You know,” he said, “I’ve been on that bar four seasons and I’ve never heard anyone answer him like that.”
“Did it help?”
“It helped me,” he said, and went back in.
I stood by the cars and waited for the noise to change. I waited for the flap to move. I waited for footsteps on the shell path, for someone to come after me, for my husband to appear in the dark and say something, anything that meant he had chosen me.
Nobody came out.