Chapter Fourteen Augusta
Fourteen
Augusta
The Last Straight Generation
When Augusta was in the seventh grade there was a school camping trip to Sandwich, south of Boston.
They spent the night in a row of orange canvas tents, walked ten minutes down the path to a bathhouse with gross toilets and showers, and passed a long and boring afternoon identifying trees and drawing pencil illustrations of leaves in their marble notebooks.
Augusta was assigned a tent with three other girls she only socialized with peripherally, two who were in band and one who had hair down to her bum that she wore in braids that looked slightly Amish.
Augusta had thought they were nice enough, had figured they liked her okay, but one evening, coming back from the bathhouse with her toothbrush, Augusta walked up to the tent and heard her name through the thin canvas.
“Did you see the way Augusta was kissing up to Mr. Killbourne? She’s such a suck-up.”
“She’s like ‘Mr. K., did you see my drawing? Aren’t I perfect?’ ”
“She’s high on herself because she has horses. She thinks everyone wants to come over to her house to ride them, but I don’t. I think horses smell disgusting.”
“ ‘Oh, Mr. K., let’s have an affair like my daddy.’ ”
“ ‘Oh, Mr. K., come over to my horse farm so we can have sex.’ ”
The tent dissolved into giggles and Augusta stood in the dark, holding her small, quilted toiletry kit, frozen with surprise.
Is that what everyone thought? Did they all say it when she wasn’t around?
She waited ten minutes and then crawled into the tent and pretended to fall asleep, eventually drifting off hours later, heartbroken to know that the only thing unusual about that night was that she had happened to overhear it, that there would always be gossip, there would always be people who didn’t like her, that other girls weren’t trustworthy creatures.
There was nothing she could do but ignore it and swallow the hurt.
Augusta heard about Caroline Lash’s story in The New Yorker before she realized how much it would change everything.
One of the mothers at school pickup, a woman named Christy who had only moved to Greenhead that year, was holding a copy of the magazine and reading it on the bench.
“Did you hear there’s a piece about Greenhead in here?
” she asked. “It’s about how all the couples in town are doing drugs and sleeping with each other. ”
“What?” Augusta scoffed. “Why would someone write that? And why would it be in The New Yorker?”
“Probably because the girl who wrote it is Gwendolyn Lash’s daughter,” Christy said knowingly.
“Caroline?”
Christy flipped back a page. “Yeah, I wonder who it’s about. Apparently, she changed the names and says it’s ‘fiction’ but it’s not.”
Augusta felt her mouth go dry. Would Caroline have written about Bailey and Van? Or Fran and RJ? “Can I have it after you’re done?”
“Sure, or it’s online. Just search her name and Greenhead or Palmer Preston.”
The door to the school opened before Augusta could find it on her phone, and Charlie came running out, backpack thumping, holding a painted cardboard egg carton covered in dental floss. “Mom! I made an aquarium!”
As Augusta drove home, her phone dinged with text after text, the group chat with class parents, someone sharing the link, someone sending a popcorn emoji, someone asking how to get around the paywall, and someone else explaining it.
At home Augusta handed the kids cheese sticks and pouches of dried fruit before clicking on the link to read for herself.
As she skimmed the short story it was like looking at familiar photos through an Instagram filter, everything strange and distorted.
There was Bailey, renamed but recognizable, living in her parents’ renovated church-mansion with a tacky reflecting pool in the middle.
There were Fran and RJ, high on gummies at a kids’ soccer game.
Augusta was there too, daughter of an old Boston family, raised with horses and married to her brother’s best friend.
But there was so much that was wrong, reworked to make a point or to become tawdry.
The Bailey character was cartoonishly cheap, all gel manicures and chunky highlights, manipulative and oversexed.
Caroline had made Fran out to be some kind of victim, held hostage by the financial ruin of her family, tragically tied to a man whose drinking threatened to topple it all like a house of cards.
Most absurd of all was the story of her own character, funhouse Augusta.
Caroline had woven a love triangle between Augusta’s husband and her brother, a gay romance that the Augusta character had obliviously broken up, a delusional housewife so bent on keeping up appearances that she couldn’t even see what she had done.
It was insane. It was salacious, it was gossipy, it was wrong, but it was just close enough to the truth that everyone would eat it up like candy.
She texted the link to Bailey and Fran. Have you seen this insanity?
Fran texted back first WTF???
Caroline Lash is a horrible person, Bailey responded.
It’s full of lies, Augusta typed.
She makes me sound like an unfit mother, Fran replied.
She makes me sound like a hooker, texted Bailey.
Um, you guys, she makes Colin sound GAY, Augusta texted, and nobody replied.
Augusta’s father called five minutes later. “You and Colin need to get a lawyer right now. It’s libelous. They have printed that Colin is gay. This could ruin his career.”
“Really?” Augusta was confused. “I don’t know if—”
“Libel, Augusta. You can’t falsely accuse someone of being gay.”
After they hung up, Augusta googled the issue, and quickly turned up a series of headlines about how saying someone was gay—correct or not—was no longer considered defamation. Augusta had to assume that the most famous magazine in the world had some experience with legal precedent.
She texted Colin the story and asked him to call, but he was at work.
She texted Eben as well, but he didn’t respond.
The school text chain had gone quiet, and while Augusta wanted to believe it was because they had all gotten bored and moved on, she had a sinking feeling they had just started a private chat.
Suddenly, with The New Yorker story, Augusta was thirteen again, standing outside the tent, gossip raging within.
She read the story again, slower this time. The “Augusta” character Caroline had drawn was an idiot, someone who had willfully snubbed her gay brother in exchange for their rich father’s approval. That wasn’t Augusta at all. Eben had been the one to freeze her out.
Admittedly, her father hadn’t made an effort to get to know Max, but it wasn’t malicious, Augusta didn’t think.
It was nothing compared to the way various friends’ and acquaintances’ families had responded to them coming out over the years.
A girl from her American history class had told her family she was gay freshman year and her parents had driven up from Florida to bring her home.
The girl never came back. A guy from Greenhead, someone she knew from the newspaper club, had moved to California after school and lived with a man, someone his parents would only ever acknowledge as “a roommate.” Looking back to Augusta’s childhood in the nineties and aughts there had been an entire generation of “roommates” and “friends,” shadow partners never truly acknowledged by families.
A wealthy older uncle on her father’s side had someone they all called his “companion,” casting the relationship into a gray area that let people assume he was an elder caregiver.
It was only at his funeral that she realized they had been a couple.
Augusta had never asked about it and had sensed on some level that his wealth prevented her father from saying anything truly rude.
But her father had never actually said anything negative about Eben’s sexual orientation.
He just didn’t engage with it. Maybe, now that Augusta looked at it in the cold light of day, that was just as bad.
At six o’clock Augusta heard a car in the driveway, but when she opened the door it was Zoey, not Colin. She had forgotten that she and Colin had dinner plans, that she’d hired Zoey to babysit. She texted Colin again. Did you miss your train? What’s your ETA?
As she waited for a reply, she dressed carefully in a long skirt and blue sweater, smoothing her hair into a bun and putting in the gold and diamond earrings Colin had given her on her birthday.
Once she was ready, she joined Zoey downstairs, pouring herself a glass of wine and perching on a barstool while Zoey helped Jane and Charlie finish their dinner.
“Zoey, when did you decide you were gay?” Augusta took a big sip of the sauvignon blanc. She could feel the wine calming her down, smoothing out the edges of her anxious afternoon.
“Um, well, I didn’t ‘decide I was gay,’ ” Zoey corrected. The girl was wearing no makeup, her hair purposefully messy, her jeans frayed at the ankles.
“No, no, of course. I mean, when did you realize you were gay.” Augusta shook her head, as though shaking off a bad idea.
“I guess I had my first crush when I was five or six?” Zoey squinted thoughtfully. “But obviously I wasn’t examining my identity at that point.”
“Five or six? That seems so young.” Augusta glanced at Charlie.
He had spent the past several months talking obsessively about a kid in his class named Nash.
He said Nash wanted to marry him. Augusta had written it off as just little kid sweetness, but what if she was wrong?
Was Charlie gay? Could he already know that? No. That was ridiculous.
“When did you realize you were straight?” Zoey asked, spearing a green bean and passing the fork to Charlie.
“Realize I was straight?” Augusta barked out a laugh. “I don’t think that’s a moment.”
“Okay.” Zoey grinned. “You know you millennials are the last straight generation, right?”