Chapter Two Bailey #3
The truth was that Bailey came from a deeply cheesy family.
Her father, Jay, was a beer distributor for Anheuser-Busch who drove up and down the state selling spirits to package stores and restaurants.
In 1975 he met her mother at a party on Prides Beach and fell crazily in love.
Clara was magnetic and beautiful, and Jay was a man on the rise, promoted to sales manager and leasing a shiny new Saab convertible.
They married in a blowout ceremony at the Myopia Hunt Club, a cake the size of a Great Dane, hockey-puck steaks, and scalloped potatoes for two hundred.
He bought an old church on Heartbreak Road and converted it into a house.
Until elementary school Bailey and her two sisters shared a room, but as Jay became more and more successful, promoted to a management position on the Budweiser account, then even higher up at Michelob, traveling three days a week to St. Louis, he poured his money into renovations.
He built out a new kitchen with glossy marble countertops.
He had a reflecting pool put in the center of the house beneath a skylight with a spiral staircase at the end.
He and his architect designed an entire new wing, doubling the size of the place, princess bedrooms for each girl, a primary suite, and a playroom full of Barbies and dress-ups.
Clara loved the house and obsessed over shelter magazines, training herself in the art of home decorating, hiring a glassblower to make them a custom chandelier for the foyer, scouring the shops in Boston for art and artifacts.
Clara planted a garden and filled it with roses, all pink and white.
They dug a pond back behind the house and made an island in the middle and bought two large mute swans that glided around their domain with an air of snooty serenity.
Jay put in a hot tub on the deck, and a trampoline in the yard, and fenced it in with netting so Bailey and her sisters could jump and flip with abandon and never worry about concussing themselves off the side.
Their house was the one all the little girls flocked to, eager for playdates and sleepovers, and long afternoons in the massive playroom where the Barbies enacted grand soap operas with lots of fighting and sex.
For Bailey’s tenth birthday her mother, now pronouncing her name “C-LAR-uh” like a Spaniard, invited every girl in her class to ride in a pair of rented limos to the movie theater, where she gave them each a crisp twenty to buy whatever candy they wished, then whisked them back to the house for ice-cream sundaes under fairy lights in the garden.
In high school, through her newly sophisticated teenage lens, Bailey saw how her family was over the top and tacky.
She named her house “Budweiser Manor” and rolled her eyes at the fifteen-foot Christmas tree decorated entirely with glass angels, the massive sexed-out bathroom with two showerheads, the fussy gauze canopies over each four-poster bed.
She cringed at her sisters’ matching BMW SUVs, her mother’s weekly manicure appointment, her father’s “CEO glow” maintained year-round with trips to the tanning salon.
Her family was nouveau riche, tacky as hell, the human equivalent of Diet Coke served in Waterford crystal.
Two years ago, Bailey’s parents had moved out of Budweiser Manor and into a retirement community.
Her father wasn’t even retired, but when the golf club at Turner Hill built up their McMansions the developer struck a deal with the town to make it a community for residents over fifty, and Jay jumped at the chance to walk out his front door and onto the back nine.
Bailey’s parents wanted to bring their swans to Turner Hill, but the bylaws of the community prohibited it.
Their new house even had a little water feature, but the community board had said no.
Canada geese and ducks splashed in the pond all day, but still swans remained banned.
“They let in all sorts of other waterfowl but not swans? That’s bird racist, that’s what it is,” Clara complained.
“You probably shouldn’t go around saying that to people,” Bailey had cautioned.
But until Jay and Clara figured out how to get the swans into Turner Hill, Bailey had agreed to live in her childhood home with the swans.
She gave up the lease on her little house on the river and returned to Heartbreak Road, the reluctant grand dame of Budweiser Manor.
Supportive as they were about the pregnancy, whenever Bailey talked to her parents about the baby’s name her mom became completely unhinged.
“I don’t understand why you won’t just give the baby Vanny’s last name,” her mother protested.
“Because it’s my baby, Mom,” Bailey explained for the millionth time.
“Honey, we just think that if you don’t give the baby Vanny’s last name he’s going to start to think you don’t want to get married,” her father tried.
“That is correct. I don’t want to get married.” Bailey really wasn’t sure how else to say it.
“You don’t know that, honey,” her mother pushed. “A lot can change when the baby arrives.”
They had this conversation about three times a week, everyone ignoring the fact that Van had a girlfriend, and they always reached an impasse. Of course, a lot would change when the baby arrived, and Bailey couldn’t pretend otherwise.
As best as she could guess, Bailey had gotten pregnant sometime after the holidays when instead of doing dry January, they all leaned in extra hard on chasing away the winter doldrums. They played Quarters and Flip Cup, Beirut and President.
They woke up hungover and drank Bloody Marys, the vodka joining the alcohol already coursing through their systems. One night they made Mexican Manhattans and Fran fell asleep with her clothes on.
The kids were off with their grandparents, so Bailey and Vanny had sex in London’s bed, a twin with Buzz Lightyear sheets, and Bailey felt appropriately guilty about it after.
(She didn’t tell Fran, but she threw the sheets in the washing machine before she left.)
Then, in February, Bailey was half asleep when she felt a sharp pinch.
She assumed it was cramps, that she was getting her period early.
The next day she had a spot in her underwear, but that was it, just a spot.
A few weeks later, no real period in sight, Bailey called up Van with a problem.
The swans who lived in her pond wouldn’t eat and Bailey was worried.
She would normally call her parents, but Jay and Clara were in Florida playing golf, so Van came over on his way to work.