Big Day
Saturday morning, Labor Day weekend. The sun was just coming up.
I stayed in bed longer than usual. I was thinking about my first-ever tennis tournament—psyching myself up, but more so, I was thinking about this being my last weekend at Wonderland.
My father was driving up from New Jersey that night.
We’d have dinner with the family on Sunday. Monday morning he’d bring me home.
Forrest’s affair with Brenda was over. Knowing this gave me a certain sense of relief. But I also knew that everything was different now too. The girl I was ninety-one days earlier, when I climbed up the stairs to my little room at Wonderland that first night, no longer existed.
That morning I lay in my little bed, memorizing every single thing about my room, starting with the sheets, which were nothing like the sheets I slept on back home.
“There’s something called a thread count, Frances,” Regina had explained to me.
“The first thing you need to do when you buy bedding is check the number. Eight hundred, minimum. Preferably a thousand.”
I took in everything that morning: the floor where I did my nightly one hundred sit-ups, the robin’s-egg-blue desk where I’d written in my journal every night—until the story got ruined; I hardly ever wrote anything anymore—the mirror where I studied my reflection, checking for some sign of womanhood that never showed up.
And more: The hooked rug next to my bed with a border of bluebirds around the edge.
The milkmaid wallpaper and the lace curtains with a pattern woven into the lace (also birds), and the way they fluttered over my bed when the wind came up over the lake.
The sound of the loons calling out to each other at night, and sometimes in the morning too.
The chest of drawers that now held—alongside the unopened box of tampons—the stash of back-to-school clothes Regina had bought for me, which I didn’t want to look at because what they signaled was the end of summer and my return to the Hubbard apartment, a place I would be sharing with only my mother now.
I thought about my journal, lying directly under my mattress, and the row of BBs still untouched, which assured me the words I’d written on those cream-colored pages would remain secret. I couldn’t even bear reading them myself anymore.
As awful as it had been seeing my parents go at it with each other (that, or go silent), I also knew that when I was back home, I would miss the sound of my father’s fingers on the typewriter keys.
I would miss the sound of the scratched-up John Coltrane record he played, late in the night, when he’d finished his last bottle.
I’d miss the hope I kept holding out all those years that things might still get better.
One thing about my parents splitting up: Now it was clear, this wasn’t going to happen, ever.
I looked up at the skylight over my bed. On clear nights—lying here with my book, or just lying here—I could see the stars. No stars in New Jersey, that was for sure, not that you could see, and anyway my dark little bedroom back home had no window.
This was what I thought about as I lay in bed at Wonderland for the last weekend of the summer. It felt, that morning, as if everything I loved most was about to disappear.
There was a brunch scheduled at the club, to be followed by some kind of cooking contest for the younger kids. Jilly was set to compete in that.
No brunch for me. Jonathan had told me that it was better to eat light on the day of a match—and anyway, on the few times I’d attended events at the club, the members largely ignored me, so why attend? I could hear my mother’s voice in my ear, offering commentary.
Those people all have their thumbs up their ass, she would have said. For people like them, the definition of a hard day is running out of shrimp cocktail.
After the brunch came the triathlon. I didn’t even care anymore, as I would have once, about how Forrest would do.
I had no need to be there at the water’s edge as he came in from the swim—an event he’d probably practiced for a lot less than he’d said he did.
There was a time when I would have been out there cheering him on, but that time had passed.
For me, the big event of the day would come afterward.