Chapter 5
Chapter Five
There are eleven women on Peggy Erickson's terrace and every one of them has already decided what I am.
I'm four steps through the gate and I can feel it land. The small recalibration, the half-turn of shoulders, the conversation that keeps going while everybody makes room in it for me.
Julia says I imagine this. She’s wrong. Julia has never once had to walk into a room she wasn't sure of.
I know what I am to them. The second wife. The one who doesn't work, doesn't drive, doesn't swim, and turns up to a summer party looking like she's just woken from a nap.
I’m the wrong pick.
Somewhere in a studio in Bellevue, there's a woman in Lululemon who teaches yoga at six in the morning. She laughs easily and has never made a room go quiet by walking into it. One day David is going to wake up and understand he could have had her instead.
I glance down, one last check.
I wore the green dress. Wear something colorful, Peggy said, so I stood in my closet for twenty minutes hating myself for obeying her.
"Mallory! You came." Peggy comes down the terrace steps with both hands out. She takes mine and holds them, and she looks me over like a house she has no intention of buying. She’s forty-eight, blonde to the root, in white linen that hasn't creased once all evening.
She has the best view on the point and she has arranged every chair to remind you of it.
Behind her, the lake lies calm and copper in the last of the sun.
Heat still rises from the flagstones. I feel it through my shoes.
"Wouldn't miss it for the world." I want to gag. "Thank you for having me."
"Don't be silly." She squeezes. "We were beginning to think you'd gone into hiding."
"Just working."
Her eyebrows do something small and interested. "You're working again? How wonderful."
“Not working, working. Just keeping busy. Reading, mostly. It’s nothing that would—” But she's already got me by the elbow and is steering me up onto the terrace like a lost child being walked to the lost-child desk.
She isn't listening to a word of it. She never was.
Her question was the point. The answer was never going to matter.
Brant Erickson is at the far end with a drink in hand.
Three men in half-zip sweaters crowd around him while he tells a story with his arms. How he ever ended up with Peggy is a mystery.
He's fifty-two and made his money in biotech. He’s loud and good-humored, with the easy confidence of someone who has never had to wonder if he’s welcome.
He lifts his glass to me without breaking his sentence.
Whatever else is wrong with this house, Brant has never once made me feel small.
The same can’t be said for others.
My eyes move past Brant and land on the Echo Twins.
They aren't twins. They aren't even the same decade. People call them the Echo Twins because wherever Peggy goes, they follow, repeating her opinions half a beat after she has them.
Lil Crawford is fifty-four, all sharp bones and expensive restraint.
Her sunglasses are pushed up into her hair though the sun is nearly gone.
She has a handbag looped over her forearm like something precious.
Yvette Marin is younger, prettier. Her phone is already up, catching the terrace, the lake, me, another candid for the hundreds she takes and never posts.
"Green," Lil says, looking me over. "That's brave."
"It's just a dress, Lil."
"That's what I mean." She sips her wine. "Brave."
Yvette lowers the phone and smiles at me with enormous warmth. "I've been telling everyone you used to write about true crime."
"I still do."
It's out before I can stop it.
"Oh? Since when?" Her eyes come back to me, interested for the first time.
The only honest answer is inside the envelope taped shut by my front door, and I am not about to give her that. So I smile and wait until she loses interest and looks away.
She doesn’t really want the truth. None of them do. It's the past tense they like, the little flag that says I've come and gone, that whatever I was, I'm not anymore.
The food is small and beautiful and comes on white platters that circulate without anyone appearing to carry them. Mediterranean, Peggy announced twice. Something light.
God forbid anyone eats a cheeseburger.
There’s a woman by the pool who tells me at length about her son’s rowing. Then a man from Yarrow Point asks what David does and spends six minutes telling me about his recent knee replacement.
When we moved here I read up on the point, because that's what I did instead of making friends.
The women of Hunts Point built the clubhouse in 1913, where the point narrows toward the water.
They put up tennis courts. They held dances and dinners every Saturday night. When the mortgage came due, they staged a fair and cheerfully robbed each other blind with lotteries, sideshows, and rigged games. The people who lost the most money apparently had the best time.
They even wheeled the babies out with tin cups strapped to the carriages, collecting coins from anyone who came near.
That same year, the women started a mission to bring fruit and flowers to Eastside families who had none. It grew into something larger, and a version of it is still feeding people more than a century later.
That was the club. Women who wanted something to do and did something worth doing.
The charity the club was built to support still gets its moment, near the end of the night, between the wine and the goodbyes. Someone says its name. Everyone claps. A photo is taken for the newsletter, and then the evening goes back to being about the view and the wine.
Of course, I don't say any of this out loud. There's no kind way to tell Peggy she has turned a century-old club into a photo opportunity. Saying it would only prove I read up on this place instead of belonging to it.
I hold a glass of white wine I'm not drinking. I do the thing I always do at these, which is stand against a wall and watch the exits. Two gates. The side path down to the dock. Whoever built this terrace built it to be seen from the water.
Which is how I come to see Peggy go down that path.
She goes at the exact moment a platter comes out of the kitchen and every head on the terrace turns toward it.
She doesn't hurry. She doesn't look back.
Ten seconds later a man follows her. Young, no older than forty, in a linen jacket, one of the men who was standing at Brant's elbow twenty minutes ago.
He goes down the same path with his drink still in his hand.
I count. It’s a habit I can’t switch off. They’re gone six minutes.
Peggy comes back up alone, unhurried, white linen uncreased. She stops at the top of the steps to fix a chair that doesn't need fixing, then rejoins the party. The man comes up two minutes behind her by the other gate, smoothing the front of his shirt. Nobody watches either of them but me.
At the far end of the terrace, Brant is telling the same story to a new man, laughing at his punchline before he reaches it. He's happy. That's what stays with me. So plainly, uncomplicatedly happy in his house.
I say nothing. I file it away, because apparently that’s easier than having a life.
Julia finds me at the rail after twenty minutes, in a navy silk dress, looking effortlessly radiant.
"You look like a hostage," she says.
"I look like I'm being interviewed for a job I don't want."
"That's the same face." She takes the wine out of my hand, drinks some, and gives it back. "Did she tell you about the name?"
"What name?"
“Peggy wants the members to have a name. For the newsletter, apparently. There's a newsletter now." Julia's face is perfectly grave. "The Huntresses."
"She did not."
"She floated it at the spring meeting. Lil loved it. Yvette loved it. And then Barbara Ellery, who is eighty-four and whose grandmother was on the original committee, said, and I want you to hear this exactly as she said it, ‘We already have a name, dear. It’s on the clubhouse.’" Julia grins. "Peggy hasn't mentioned it since."
I laugh for the first time all evening.
“So, um, Chris isn’t coming,” Julia adds. “Before you ask.”
"I wasn't going to ask."
“You were going to be relieved, which is worse.” She says it lightly and looks at the water.
I let it go. There’s a whole conversation under that one, and this isn’t the terrace to have it on.
Behind us, somebody says my name.
"Mallory, come and adjudicate." Peggy has assembled four women in a semicircle near the outdoor fire, and she calls to me like she's summoning a dog she doesn't own. I go, because the alternative is not going, and I've learned which of those costs more.
"We were discussing the weather," Yvette says.
"No, we were discussing that it isn't weather," Peggy says. "They've had that warning up for three days. It's August. They call every breeze a warning now."
"My phone made a noise like a submarine," Lil says.
"Because the whole thing is theater. They tell you a storm is coming so that when it doesn't come you're grateful to them." Peggy turns to me with her head tilted. "You'd know about that. You people invented that, didn't you? Frighten them, then sell them the calm."
You people. There it is, the little velvet knife, the reminder that whatever I am, I'm not one of them.
"I wrote about crime, Peggy. Not weather."
"Same instinct." She smiles. It's a very good smile. It has been on the front of three charity brochures. "Anyway. Somebody's birthday is coming."
Julia has arrived at my shoulder and I feel her go still.
“You’re about to turn forty," Peggy says warmly, to the semicircle, on my behalf. "Isn't that right?"
"Thirty-nine," Julia says.
“Thirty-nine!” Peggy presses her hand to her chest. “Well. Enjoy it.” She looks at me for a beat longer than she needs to, and her eyes go, without hurry, to the corners of my eyes. “You know, I’ve had the loveliest results from my surgeon in Bellevue. Nothing dramatic. He calls it maintenance.”
She leaves just enough space before adding, “But you have a surgeon at home, don’t you? He can look after all that.”
David operates on people's insides, not their faces, and Peggy knows it. That isn't the point.
Lil laughs before she can stop herself. Yvette lifts her phone.
There was a time I would have known exactly what to say to a woman like Peggy.
I could have taken her apart in front of everyone in about nine seconds.
I know how to hear the weakness in a sentence and press on it.
I’ve done it to men who spent good money on lawyers, and Peggy Erickson has given me plenty to work with in the last few minutes.
I open my mouth, but the noise wins.
It happens in loud rooms. On terraces with fire and water and eleven overlapping conversations. Anywhere my one good ear has too much to sort through.
The voices smear into each other. The semicircle keeps moving, keeps laughing, and the thread of what I was about to say is gone.
I stand there with my glass and my green dress and say nothing.
"Anyway," Peggy says, releasing me. She turns her body a quarter turn, which is how you're dismissed here. "Do try the octopus."
Julia takes my elbow and steers me away toward the rail. She's furious, which is comforting, because I'm not sure I'm anything.
"She's a snake," Julia whispers. "Say the word and I'll ruin her evening."
"Don't."
"I'd enjoy it."
"I know you would. But let it go.”
"I’d like to let her go, off the edge of a cliff,” Julia says.
We both chuckle.
I drink the wine now. The lake has gone from copper to gunmetal, and the first bats are out over the water. The heat still hasn't broken. Out past the Ericksons' dock, the sky in the west has a hard bruised line along the bottom. Nobody else is looking at it.
Julia is talking. I catch about half of what she says.
Then I get that feeling on the back of my neck, the one I stopped trusting two years ago, the one I have been told is my body doing its best.
I turn around.
He’s standing on the upper terrace by the doors, apart from the others, watching me.
A man I’ve never seen before, in a dark shirt with the sleeves rolled, holding a glass he isn’t drinking from.
He’s not doing anything a man shouldn’t do at a party.
But when I catch him, he doesn’t look away, and something about that turns my stomach over.
Then he smiles, unhurried, as if we’ve known each other for years.
And he lifts his glass to me.