The Summer Bed

by Ann Brashares

“Let me see,” Mattie called, getting up. “Wow.”

  Sasha came over too.

  “Why would you do that, Quinn?” her father demanded. “You know how I feel about piercing. If you take the thing out, will it close over?” His voice went unusually high and turned brittle.

  “I think it’s cool,” Mattie pronounced. “When did Quinn ever try to be cool before?”

  “Most Indian women pierce their noses when they come of age,” Quinn said.

  “You are not an Indian woman,” he shot back.

  Quinn was sorry now. She was sorry that her father was troubled by it. She was sorry that Sasha had to see her get scolded, because she knew Sasha minded it and was her staunchest defender.

  “By blood I am partly a Bengali woman,” she said carefully. She felt Sasha’s warmth and distress at her elbow.

  Evie came over, knowing she couldn’t hold the table or the evening together at this point. She put a hand on Quinn’s shoulder. “Promise your father you won’t get anything else pierced,” she said lightly, champion of neatening.

  Quinn turned to him. “I promise,” she said solemnly. “Not even my ears.”

  “Your ears would be fine,” he muttered.

  —

  Quinn’s mother arrived at changeover on Sunday, but it was half a day before Lila stopped Quinn in the kitchen. “Hey, wait. Stop. Something’s different.”

  Quinn nodded.

  Lila held Quinn’s face between her two hands.

  Quinn pointed to her nose.

  Her mother squinted at it, dotted it lightly with the tip of her finger. “It looks nice. I like it.”

  Little Ray,

  Did Quinn ever tell you stories about the Indians of Eel Cove? I had a dream about them last night.

  Big Sasha

  BS,

  Oh my God, yes. I loved the mother/chief/witch doctor with the sea-glass beads. I still think about her potions. (To forget your name, to share your mind, to hear things people say on the other side of the world.) Do you remember how the kids in the white family would go to the regular doctor and they’d just get more twisted up and needy, and then one of them would sneak off to the chief for a real cure?

  LR

  LR,

  That was when Quinn was sick. I never put it together back then. We were only six or seven, I guess. I remember visiting her in the hospital. I remember the night she got home, she got out of bed and walked into the pond in her pajamas.

  My memory of her in the hospital is so dark and strange I wasn’t sure it actually happened. But if you remember it too, I guess it did. I snuck into her bed with her. She said, “I’ve got to get out of here, because there’s no way to get better in this place.”

  BS

  “Just tell me he didn’t go to Princeton.”

  “He went to Princeton,” Emma said flatly.

  A trip to the farmers’ market on her morning off had sounded like a good idea when her mom suggested it. Now Emma was trailing her mother with a net shopping bag full of weird root vegetables and wanting to cry. One minute her mother was examining heirloom tomatoes and the next she turned on her.

  “I just don’t understand what the rush is. Why barrel into this? You’re twenty-two years old! You just met him.”

  “You got married at twenty-two.”

  “Exactly, and look what that got me!”

  Emma shook her head in disbelief. “Thanks a lot, Mom. It got you me and Quinn and Mattie.”

  Lila dropped the tomatoes into the bin and put her arm around Emma. She kissed the side of Emma’s head. “Darling, of course. I would never ever change that. But you know what I mean.”

  Emma pushed her fingers against the spiny husk of a pineapple. What kind of farmers’ market sold pineapples? “I seriously doubt any farmer around here grew this.”

  “And this party Mattie and Quinn keep talking about,” Lila muttered. “My God! This August? Is that really necessary?”

  “I think it’s sweet,” Emma said tersely.

  Lila huffed out a breath and turned to a bin of tangled string beans. “The thing I don’t understand is, what do you gain by getting married? You can do all the things you want without getting married.”

  “You got married. Twice.”

  “Because I had children. Don’t tell me you’re ready to have children.”

  Perversely, Emma wished she could produce a few children right then and there. “I want to get married because I love him. We want to live together.”

  “Emma, you have your whole life for that. Now is when you’re free. You can travel. You can experience how you feel with lots of different people.”

  “I don’t want to experience lots of different people. I like how I feel with him.”

  Her mother put down her bag. “Now you do. But how do you know what you’ll want in five years? Or ten? Or twenty?”

  Emma didn’t like where they were and she didn’t like where they were going. She didn’t like the dark judgment stirring in her chest. “Well, maybe the idea is that you commit to somebody you love and you stick with them, regardless of what happens in five or ten or twenty or a hundred years, because they’re your family and that’s what marriage is and because you made a vow.”

  Lila turned away. She picked up her shopping bag and moved along to the berries. They paid for their groceries in silence and walked to the car in silence.

  Emma hated the way her mother’s car smelled after baking on the hot street. She hated how much crap there always was in it: the pottery wheel and bags of clay—or whatever other crafty thing she was into at the moment—weird health bars half unwrapped in the door pocket or stuck to the bottom of your shoe. Midwifery paraphernalia so puzzling and gross you did not even want to ask. Jackets, shoes, old junk mail. You always had to move stuff to sit down.

  Lila waited until they pulled into their driveway to break the silence. “Just don’t tell me you’re going to change your name.”

  Emma got out of the car and shut the door hard behind her. If she hadn’t wanted to change her name before, she sure did now.

  —

  Of all the lies he’d ever told, the one Ray probably regretted most was the one about losing his virginity. It wasn’t necessarily the worst one. It didn’t really do anyone harm. But unlike most lies that slipped into the past and let you forget about them, this one kept coming back.

  For example, every time he considered that he hadn’t actually lost his virginity, the lie tapped on his shoulder. Every time he considered how he might actually lose his virginity, it sort of coughed skeptically. This amounted to a lot of times.

  Like now, for instance, as he lay in this bed under the moon and burrowed into the sheets slept on by Sasha the very night before and tried to ignore his nose, his nerve endings, his brain, and also his entire body, so as not to think too much about her.

  Stupidly, he’d told the lie to Parker, who didn’t care that much either way. Parker continued to be a good and true friend, so the lie came annoyingly along with the friendship.

  Why had he done that? Sometimes it seemed like the person who gave in to these stupid impulses and the person who suffered over the consequences of them were two separate people. Parker didn’t particularly judge him or care. Parker had never even told him his own status, so what had been the need?

  Partly it was because he had the juvenile idea that he could casually get rid of it whenever he wanted to. Violet had already done it in ninth grade, she’d informed him. He figured he could just do it with her and not have to make a big deal of it. Since the option was at hand like that, it was practically the same as already having done it.

  He’d vowed late in the spring that he’d do it before the end of the summer, before starting his senior year. He’d just get it over with.

  But now, for other reasons, becaus
e of pushing out the boundaries of his former idea of love, he knew he probably couldn’t just get it over with Violet. He’d have to hang on to it even longer, because he had the idea it could be something important.

  Anyway, he had said this. A person had to live with his lies. That was what they cost.

  —

  Mattie didn’t want to look at herself in the mirror anymore. She first realized it yesterday, slipping through the front hall of the Wainscott house with her head turned. She’d always loved the front-hall mirror. She liked herself better in that mirror than in any of the others, but she couldn’t look right now. She snuck right in past it, a girl with a fear and a secret.

  Since the time she’d discovered she was notably pretty in fifth or sixth grade, Mattie had spent an embarrassing number of hours bobbing her face into the wide mirror that sat over the bureau in her bedroom. She had celebrated versions of herself in it from her bed: Mattie reading a book; Mattie talking on the phone, giggling pleasingly at a joke; Mattie doing her homework, a serious expression on her face. Today she skirted her reflection when she got home from work, sat restlessly at her desk, pulled curtains and turned off lights before she flopped into bed and stared at her phone.

  Tonight she was supposed to be going to the new taco place in East Hampton with Megan Vise and two of her friends from UCLA who were in town, but she couldn’t stand her face in her makeup mirror. She couldn’t pick a dress to wear. She called Megan and told her she wasn’t feeling well.

  The very qualities she usually appreciated in herself spooked her now. Her fine yellow hair and round violet-blue eyes. Quinn had the dark, otherworldly eyes; Emma was an exotic head-turner with thick black hair down to her belly button; and Sasha, the most Indian in looks, was quietly the prettiest of all of them; but her dad was a well-known sucker for a blonde. He’d been raised by a blonde. He’d married two of them for better or for worse. Her father marveled at her. It made Mattie special to him, special to herself.

  I kind of got all of it had been her smug sense for so long. She’d won the genetic jackpot. She’d inherited her dad’s smarts and grit, his merit as an outsider, his righteousness as a self-maker, his check mark in the diversity box. And all this she had in Disney Princess colors. It sickened her to frame the thought right now. Like pushing hard on a bruise.

  And his love. Most important of all, she got to have her father’s love, and the natural confidence that came with being his girl.

  Suddenly there were so many things she was scared of in that mirror: Who she’d see, who else she’d see, who she wouldn’t see. What she’d lose, what she’d realize she never had. For the first time she hated her differences and she hated her smugness even more.

  Who was Jonathan Dawes? What did he expect? Had he thought all these years that he had a daughter out there? Had he known where she was all this time? Had he thought about her and wondered what kind of girl she was?

  It scared her to think of herself in relation to him, to what he might have thought or hoped for. What kind of daughter did he require? To him she was not one of many daughters, as she always thought of herself, but one strange figure in his life. Was she somehow responsible to him?

  She thought of covering the mirror the way they had at her friend Ellie’s house when they sat shiva for her mother. But she couldn’t exactly cover all the mirrors in the house—and over the years she’d had relationships with all of them. The one in the front hall, reflecting her long-term favorite Mattie, the coming-and-going Mattie. The Mattie above the fireplace in the living room, with whom she’d only become acquainted once she was tall enough to see her. And the oval one in the den caught the Mattie who watched TV if you bent your neck a little. There was the well-lit Mattie in the sunroom mirror, who plucked her eyebrows because the light was good. There were even the framed family prints in the stairwell, where she found her face in the glass. She always saw a mobile version reflected back from the dark judicial robe of Great-Uncle Henry Harrison.

  She got up. She couldn’t stand to be alone with her thoughts in the dark. She couldn’t stand to be with her reflection in the light.

  She hated her smugness, and along those lines she hated her supposed crusade for justice. There she was, Miss Junior Detective, discovering family truth, catching her mother in a lie, and grandly preparing to extend forgiveness after the appropriate confessing and suffering. By bringing the darkness into light, she’d help them all find closure and a family rebirth, preferably in time for a really great party.

  The only person she’d caught was herself. The suffering would be hers, and the forgiveness would come from no one.

  She went downstairs to the den and turned on the TV. She hunched into the sofa and flicked through stupid shows to the even stupider ones. She settled on a terrible rip-off of a terrible show involving a tanning bed and a lot of plastic surgery. It fit her need: she could watch people other than herself with loathing and bewilderment.

  She heard a rattling in the kitchen. The suck of the refrigerator door. Soft steps through the living room and up three stairs. She hadn’t realized Quinn was home. Quinn, who’d told her to be careful, who’d all but warned her she’d wreck her own happiness if she kept prying.

  Quinn appeared in the doorway of the den, bathed in TV light. Mattie kept her head down, but Quinn read her mood in less than a second.

  “What is it?”

  Mattie shook her head. She always told Quinn things. It was impossible not to; most of the time, Quinn knew before you told her anyway. It usually felt so good to hand over problems to Quinn, who took them and carried them uncomplainingly.

  Mattie pressed her mind to think if there was any part of it she could unburden. But she couldn’t this time. It was too uncertain, too unsettled. She didn’t really have anything, just a feeling of sick suspicion and the shame of having petulantly demanded information she wasn’t ready to hear. It wasn’t just admitting to Quinn she’d been right again. It went without saying that Quinn was right. To share it would make it more real than she could tolerate yet.

  Quinn’s large, lovely eyes filled with concern.

  Mattie hunkered deeper, trying to evade those supernatural sister eyes. She kept her mouth small. If she tried to say something she would cry.

  Quinn stood thoughtfully. Mattie knew Quinn had the ballpark of the problem and a name to put to it, but she didn’t push. It was just another way she did not resemble her horrible sister Mattie. Instead she went around to the back of the sofa. She started French braiding Mattie’s hair the way she used to do.

  Mattie felt a shiver at her sister’s touch and then let her shoulders and neck settle.

  “Two braids or one?” Quinn asked.

  Big tears were already falling. Mattie wondered if Quinn knew that, understanding she needed to cry without explanation. Mattie held up two fingers.

  Quinn’s competent fingers divided and wove, divided and wove. Mattie cried silently. Quinn braided and made it seem like she couldn’t tell. Neither of them said anything else, but the comfort was more than words.

  Hey, Little Ray,

  Can I tell you something weird? (Something else weird.)

  I think of myself in relation to your dad a lot. Even when I was really small I had this idea that because he was my sisters’ father, he was sort of mine, too. I don’t know the guy. I imagine he has an opinion of me, even though I know he doesn’t. Because my sisters always told stories about him, I figured he was how a father should be and I didn’t want to disappoint him. How crazy is that?

  Big Sasha

  BS,

  It amazes me, it makes me laugh, and sometimes it actually scares me how parallel our lives run. Yes, I get what you say about my dad. Yes, I’ve had all those same thoughts, exact thoughts, about your mother. And to take it a step worse, I’ve wished Lila were my mom, thrown my own mother under the bus (figuratively) in my desire to be th
e same as our sisters—to be one of them and not half-a-one. I think of Lila as the “real” mom, the serious, strong-willed one who could stand up to my dad. I think of my own mom as some kind of understudy imposter. How horrible is that? (I can’t believe I just wrote that.)

  I should probably mention that though Robert is a character and a half, he’s no picnic.

  LR

  LR,

  Parallel is right, sadly. Lines that go along forever together and never meet.

  On the understudy imposter front, Adam lost his teaching job at the end of last semester and doesn’t own either of the houses we live in. He left two kids in California to marry my mom and he barely knows them anymore. When I was a little kid I spent too much time thinking about those kids, technically my half brother and sister, a whole country away: Is a dad allowed to just do that? How strong are these bonds, anyway?

  I love my dad. I respect him in a lot of ways, but I don’t want to be like him.

  BS

  “Can you just stay for a minute?”

  Mattie’s mother had the same furtive look she’d been wearing for the last few weeks as she fled the Wainscott kitchen with her cup of tea seconds behind Adam.

  “Please?” Mattie stood up quickly from the table. She didn’t try to keep her voice level.

  Her mom stopped. She heard the need, at least. She hadn’t given up her mom job altogether. “Is everything okay?”

  “Well.” Mattie considered. She had her mother, a little of her, for a few seconds, at least. She didn’t want to scare her into the living room. “Sort of.” It shouldn’t have surprised her much that she started to cry.

  Her mom cast a look after Adam, who was most of the way to the den. She ventured toward Mattie. “Honey, what?”

  Mattie perched on the table, half sitting. Hot rays of late-morning sun pitched through the sliding-glass doors of the kitchen. It revealed the soft skin starting to bag on her mother’s neck, the faint brown spots along her cheekbone.

  Mattie took a breath and it started coming out. She couldn’t turn back anymore. She went forward. “I don’t even know who I am right now.”