Where Happiness Comes From
Forty-nine days remained in my Wonderland summer.
Life went on just the way Regina told me it would, with little visible sign of change: just the usual round of tennis lessons, ice cream cones, playdates, sailing at the yacht club, takeout lobster rolls on the patio, riding bikes, boating, and trips to the supermarket, library, or Caboose.
Fried-chicken dinners. S’mores by the fire. Biking to the club. Tennis again.
The only part that changed was that Forrest seemed to have slipped out of view. He was still around—though not for our breakfasts together—but even when he was physically present, he seemed distracted all the time now.
This would have been unbearable if it hadn’t been for my time out on the tennis court. Jilly and Hayward seemed to regard their lessons as a chore undertaken to please their parents. For me, those fifty-five minutes on the court with Jonathan had become the high point of my day.
As for Regina, after that one afternoon in which it had occurred to me that she might need to go back to that hospital—and in spite of her apparent recognition that Forrest had now embarked on an affair with Brenda—she actually appeared a little brighter these days, a little less depressed.
She was taking fewer naps. She had started wearing makeup, more subtly applied than Brenda Barnett’s, and getting dressed in actual clothes, not just caftans.
Maybe, with a competitor on the scene, she was trying to up her game, though from the looks of Forrest’s many absences (“triathlon-training sessions,” he said, and there were more of these as the days passed), her efforts weren’t doing anything to keep her husband home with her.
To look at how the days went in Wonderland over those weeks—midsummer now—it all looked pretty good.
But I knew that, just as Regina had explained to me, a whole other set of events was taking place, everyone engaging in their own secret activities or just entertaining their own private thoughts that nobody would ever have guessed.
It was true for everyone probably. Maybe everyone who’d ever been born.
Who knew what went on in the life of Prudence, when she went home at the end of her long day of cooking?
Or my kind and handsome tennis teacher, Jonathan—home for the summer from college to give lessons, and, according to the gossip I overheard at the snack bar among the tennis girls, rumored to have a forty-year-old Argentinian boyfriend in town, even though mothers at the club kept trying to set him up with their daughters.
Imagine having a tennis pro in the family. Lessons whenever you wanted.
I thought about Pam Oliver, still holding out hope that Forrest might stop by for a replay of whatever activities the two of them may have engaged in the summer before.
The picture came to me of Olivia, the rich girl who huddled with her posse every morning at the club, all of them sipping their five-dollar virgin pina coladas.
They might only talk about their hair and some model they saw in Seventeen, but at the end of the day, Olivia lay alone in her bed too.
When she did, what thoughts entered her mind?
Hardest of all to imagine were the secret yearnings of Regina Emerson, but even Regina must have had hers.
Or maybe it was the disappearance of yearning, the absence of hunger for anything more, any more, that led a person to the place Regina seemed to occupy now—where it seemed she barely cared if she lived or died.
One thing had changed in my nighttime routine.
Where, until recently, I’d filled the pages of my journal every night with make-believe scenes I imagined taking place between Forrest and someone I pretended was me, the story had gone flat.
I could no longer write about any of that, or allow myself to concoct our fantasy encounters on the page.
Days went by now that I made no move to retrieve my journal from under the mattress to write a new entry. Brenda Barnett had ruined the thrill. When I pictured Forrest now, her face always appeared—her mean little eyes, and that red hair of hers. The stupid things she said.
I found excitement now when I stepped out on the court to hit the tennis balls Jonathan lobbed to me from across the net.
I was hitting them hard now.