Mating Rituals of the North American WASP

by Lauren Lipton

  He sat next to her. Even outdoors, she recognized his aftershave, a blend of key lime and cedar she was sure was from Gaia Apothecary. He said, “Twice in forever I’m north of Fourteenth Street and I see you both times. That’s worth dinner, don’t you think?”

  Nobody had asked her out in seven years. She was saved from having to say no by an insistent cell phone. She waited for Jeremy to slip on his earpiece again and answer, but he pointed toward her purse: It was her phone, not his.

  It was probably Bex, wondering what had happened to her. “I should answer that.” Peggy caught the phone on the second to last note of its generic, musical ring.

  “Have you seen Field of Dreams?” Luke asked on the phone.

  Jeremy removed his gadget from its clip on his belt and consulted it. Peggy slipped off the bench and stepped a few yards down the path. “Pardon me?”

  “Have you ever seen Field of Dreams?” Luke repeated.

  Was he calling to apologize, at last? If so, this was a strange way of doing it. “I’m not sure what you mean,” she said.

  “Field of Dreams. A guy builds a baseball diamond in a cornfield—”

  “I’ve seen Field of Dreams.” Thanks to Brock, Peggy was reluctantly familiar with every sports movie ever made—Rocky, Raging Bull, North Dallas Forty. It might well be his only lasting legacy. She was pretty sure she was getting over Brock. It made her question why she’d stayed with him so long in the first place. The first two weeks had been rough, but this week she’d had the urge to cry only once. Her tears had been cursory, lasting less than a minute.

  “Did you cry?” Luke asked in her ear.

  She was baffled; it was as if Luke were reading her thoughts. On the bench where she’d left him, Jeremy was chattering away again into his reattached earpiece. “Did I cry about what? Why are you calling?”

  “Did you cry at Field of Dreams?”

  “Everybody cries at that movie.” She was losing patience.

  What did this have to do with his behavior at their wedding reception? “Of course I cried.”

  “I thought as much. Good.” He hung up without saying good-bye.

  By seven, Peggy had her new-old room in reasonable order, and she and Bex sat in the living room, toasting to roommates and fertility and success at the store. “And to your new single life. And the death of Josh’s couch.” Bex clicked her sparkling cider against Peggy’s champagne. “Can you believe it’s gone from the sidewalk already? Who would take that hideous thing?”

  “Careful. I’m grieving. And Peggy isn’t exactly single.” Josh, just home from the office, set down his briefcase on one of Peggy’s packing boxes. He kissed Bex and pecked Peggy on the cheek, then rummaged through a drawer in the kitchen. “So I thought of names for the baby.” He emerged with a fistful of takeout menus and plopped down next to Bex. “I’m thinking Shlomo if it’s a boy, Tzeitel if it’s a girl.” He squeezed Bex so hard, Peggy could have sworn Bex’s eyes bulged out.

  “Oh, nice. ” Bex smiled at him. “What if we have two boys?”

  “Shlomo and Yehuda.”

  Bex laughed. “Or two girls? Or triplets?”

  “I haven’t gotten that far.”

  Bex ruffled his hair.

  They had the exact relationship Peggy had always wished for. As she had so many times in the past, she forced herself not to be jealous. “Were you two always this cutesy-poo?”

  “Always were, always will be, and now that you’re living with us, you’re going to be subject to shows of cuteness that will amaze and astound you.” Josh gave his wife a second, flamboyant kiss on the lips, then leafed through the menus. “Who’s hungry for Szechuan Palace?”

  “I have a date,” Peggy blurted.

  The two stared at her. “When?” Josh asked, at the same time Bex was asking:

  “With whom?”

  “Next week.” Peggy shuffled menus aimlessly while she recapped her afternoon. She left out Luke’s phone call and didn’t mention the only reason she’d agreed to go out with Jeremy was that when he’d again asked her to dinner, an image of Luke sharing a glass of wine with the redheaded woman in the photograph had flashed into her mind.

  When she was finished, Bex proposed a toast: “To new beginnings.”

  “New beginnings.” Peggy inclined her glass in Bex’s direction. What did Luke matter, anyway?

  “But you’re married,” Josh said.

  Bex sighed. “I believe Peggy knows that, sweetie.”

  NINE

  The apple harvest had ended last week, yet, with classic city-folk enthusiasm—born of the distinctly urban assumption that one’s every whim could be satisfied, no matter the time of day or the season, at some nearby shop or club or restaurant—Peggy and Tiffany Ver Planck had insisted on going apple picking anyway. Luke waited as the two tried to persuade the proprietor of Bethlehem Farms, who was selling cider and doughnuts behind the counter at his farm market, to give them a basket and picking pole. The old-timer had already warned there wouldn’t be any fruit left, at least none worth eating. But he gave them what they’d asked for, and Peggy and Tiffany hauled themselves up into Ver Planck’s gargantuan black Escalade, on either side of the Ver Plancks’ sleeping toddler, with Luke in the front seat and Ver Planck driving the two hundred feet to the apple orchard. The two women disappeared over a ridge into the misty Saturday afternoon.

  Luke and Ver Planck walked the circumference of the orchard parking area, a dirt lot rutted with tire prints, one car door open in case Milo woke up. “Pick your own apples—it’s genius,” Ver Planck said. “Plant trees, and people pay for the privilege of playing migrant farmworker. Low overhead, low labor costs.”

  Luke squelched through a muddy patch. “Low profit margin.”

  “True.” Ver Planck stopped to survey the haze-shrouded farm, rows of fruit trees undulating with the curves of the hills; sun yellow scarecrow globes painted with menacing eyes keeping guard from wires strung over the spent cornfields. He framed his fingers into a rectangle and looked through them as if through a viewfinder. “Better to raze and subdivide.”

  Luke detected no irony in his friend’s comment. He walked ahead to the top of the ridge. Below him in the orchard, the doll-size figures of Tiffany and Peggy flitted from tree to tree like butterflies. Far beyond them, to the north and east, were Hartford and Providence and Plymouth Rock and Province-town, and the Atlantic Ocean and ultimately England, where the bones of Silas Sedgwick’s fathers slept.

  Ver Planck caught up. “You own the land, don’t you, next to that Pilgrim Plaza on Route 202? It’s part of the holdings you manage, right? You can do with it as you wish?”

  Luke nodded. The land to which Ver Planck referred was the last piece of Sedgwick property the family still possessed—twenty acres of fallow pasture bordered by a crumbling stone wall. A vocal group of preservationists, organized by Annette and Angelo Fiorentino, had picketed there during the construction of Pilgrim Plaza on the adjacent woods that had, until half a century ago, also belonged to the Sedgwicks.

  “Ever thought of developing it?” Ver Planck asked. “I played Sebonack last month with Grant Atherton. You know him.”

  “The name sounds familiar.” A crow landed a couple of feet from Luke and hopped a few steps on the deserted field. The only moving thing / Was the eye of the blackbird, Luke thought: Wallace Stevens.

  “Atherton was a few years behind you at Andover. He’s head of new-store development at Budget Club. I told him he ought to talk to you. They’re looking to put a store in this area.”

  “You think there should be a discount superstore on my family’s land?”

  “Why not? The property’s just sitting there, going to waste. You give Budget Club a ninety-nine-year lease, and you can still call the land yours. That strip mall next door is already pulling in customers, there’s a new traffic light—just the infrastructure a retailer like Budget Club is looking for.” He clapped Luke on the shoulder. “Think about it.”

  Luke thoug
ht about it. For half a second. “No thanks,” he said. The crow cawed as if laughing at them both.

  The farmer hadn’t lied: There was nothing left on the trees. Peggy wound through the orchard, eyeing the crooked, barren branches. There had to be one good apple left. She wanted only one.

  She’d been delighted that morning when the Sedgwicks’ telephone had rung and Miss Abigail had come to get her in the dining room, where she’d been writing a thank-you to a Mrs. Digby Twombly for a set of seasonally themed tea towels. “Tom Ver Planck’s wife, for you, dear,” Miss Abigail had announced. It was Peggy’s first call at the house. She’d followed Miss Abigail to the den, where the phone, black with a rotary dial and a bell, squatted on a cluttered end table, its heavy receiver balanced on a stack of yellowing telephone books.

  “Tom wants to visit with Luke, and Milo is obsessed with going to a farm,” Tiffany said. “Why don’t we make an afternoon of it?”

  Now Peggy appraised the orchard systematically. “Maybe we should go farther down the hill. There might be a tree no one else noticed.”

  Tiffany took the picking pole, a strange tool that resembled a broom handle with a small net attached to a metal ring at the top. They walked together, the flat tracks of Tiffany’s pink rubber Wellingtons next to the deep holes left by Peggy’s impractical boot heels, until Tiffany stopped. “Do you hear crying?”

  Peggy listened. “I think it’s a crow cawing.”

  “Oh.” Tiffany exhaled. “You’re right.” They started walking again through the damp air. “Poor little Milo. He was the one who wanted to come to a farm, and now he’s going to nap through the whole thing.”

  Peggy was quiet, thinking of Bex. This morning she’d had the transfer procedure. All three embryos were now inside her. It would take about a week before Bex would know if any were growing, and the news could easily be bad—the embryos had failed to divide; Bex wasn’t pregnant; all the money and time and hope had been for nothing, and she and Josh would have to start the process all over again. How many tries could their emotions and bank account take?

  “There’s one!” Tiffany pointed up into a tree. “Wait, it’s all pecked at.”

  Peggy drew her leather jacket tighter around her and looked back up toward the ridge. On top, she could make out Luke and Tom, pacing back and forth. It was the most animated she’d seen Luke all day. He’d returned to his tight-lipped self, without so much as a mention of his phone call last week. On the ride over to the farm to meet the Ver Plancks, he’d spoken twice: to ask if she had closed the car door all the way, and to offer an insightful remark about the weather. Now there he was, waving his hands, pontificating.

  “What do you suppose they’re talking about?” Peggy wondered aloud.

  Tiffany’s laugh had a tiny, adorable snort at the end. “Business. Always. I always say, unless my husband is asleep, he’s putting together a deal, and if he could figure out how, he’d make deals in his sleep, too. Last night he dreamed he bought the Brooklyn Bridge.”

  “What does he do, exactly?”

  “He manages the family investments, just like Luke.”

  “Like Luke?” As soon as she asked, Peggy wanted to kick herself—if she were really Luke’s wife, wouldn’t she know this already?

  But Tiffany just regarded her with a quizzical expression. “Well, you know, they all call it something different. Tom has his hedge fund, and Luke has his investment portfolio, Kyle has the Hubbard Family Foundation, but really each of them is just playing around with the inheritance.”

  Tiffany couldn’t be right, not about Luke. People with inheritances to play around with didn’t live in mansions that were falling to pieces. Peggy wished she could ask Tiffany all sorts of questions about Luke, about how he’d come to be living with his ninety-one-year-old great-aunt, about his poetry, about the sexy redhead in the photograph on his desk who was so obviously the subject of his poems. “Why is everyone so surprised Luke got married?” she blurted. “All people keep saying is, ‘I can’t believe he settled down!’ ”

  Tiffany was gazing up through the mist into a tree. “I’ve known Luke ten years, and he never talks about it, but my sense always was he had no interest in carrying on the Sedgwick name, or living in the Sedgwick House, or anything else associated with people like him.”

  “You mean, like you—and me,” Peggy corrected herself quickly. She too was supposed to belong to this group.

  “Oh, yes, ‘people like us.’” Tiffany laughed. “I’m not ‘people like us’; I’m from Queens. Anyway, I always told Luke as soon as he met the woman of his dreams, he’d marry her in thirty seconds. And, voilà, I was right!”

  More right than you know. It had taken a little longer than thirty seconds for Peggy and Luke to get married, but Tiffany wasn’t far off, even if, really, what had done it for Luke wasn’t meeting his ideal woman, but being rip-roaring drunk. But wait a minute. “I thought you grew up in Westport.”

  “I did. From age two to age eight, until my dad ran out on my mom and me, and poof—we were back in Flushing, living with my nana.”

  Peggy smiled. It was a good joke.

  “I’m not kidding. Does this help? ‘My muthah bought me a sweatah,’ ” Tiffany said in a nasal accent, giggled, and went to search more trees.

  Peggy laughed, still not sure she believed Tiffany, and mechanically scanned the next apple tree in the row. Its bowed branches arched darkly against the sky and brought to mind a familiar shape she couldn’t quite put her finger on, the Gothic windows of a cathedral in Italy, or the base of the Eiffel Tower, or…

  “Last night he dreamed he bought the Brooklyn Bridge,” Tiffany had said.

  The Brooklyn Bridge.

  Peggy was walking across it, an otherworldly midnight stroll, the air balmy on her skin, the bridge’s double arches framing cables strung with white bulbs, like Christmas lights. And—she closed her eyes and concentrated—she was hand in hand with somebody very special, asking him a question. And the first real details of her night in Las Vegas surfaced like a long forgotten dream.

  She and Luke had run out of cash, left the roulette table at New York New York, and ridden the hotel’s roller coaster outside, across the desert sky. They’d wandered onto the Brooklyn Bridge—not the true bridge, a scaled-down reproduction leading nowhere, a platform running along Las Vegas Boulevard.

  “I don’t like bridges,” Peggy had admitted, and Luke had asked her why. She’d looked out across the traffic-snarled Strip, where engines idled to the tuneless bass throbbing of car stereos. And she’d told Luke about the time she’d walked across the real Brooklyn Bridge; and about how, when she’d reached dead center, at what had felt like a mile above the East River, it had struck her that there was nothing underneath her but air. She didn’t tell Luke she’d been with Brock at the time.

  Luke had taken her hand. “And yet you’re not afraid of a roller coaster.”

  “My mind is a roller coaster,” she’d said—melodramatic but true. Precarious pitches and unexpected curves felt ordinary to her.

  “You don’t have to be afraid on this bridge.” Luke had put his hand on her waist. The night had been warm, windy, lush with possibility. “I’m going to give it to you as a gift. You’ll own it, and then you won’t be scared of it.”

  “That’s so generous.” Peggy had thought this the most romantic, the most madly improbable moment of her life. “But why?”

  “For knowing Shakespeare. For blowing all my money on roulette. For making me ride the roller coaster.”

  “You could have done that without me.”

  “No,” Luke had said. “I couldn’t have.”

  And then, because there couldn’t be another scene as romantic as this, there was no other appropriate step but to ask the question every hopeful romantic longed one day to ask. And who could resist saying yes on this stage set, in this unreal, idealized place where the Brooklyn Bridge was only a few feet off the ground and strung with Christmas lights; where it, and love, and ma
rriage, were better and cleaner and simpler than the real thing?

  Even if it was the woman asking the question?

  Peggy couldn’t breathe. Seriously—there was no air coming into her lungs. Her throat was closing, and her hands felt disconnected from her body. She was going to suffocate here in this spent orchard, and Tiffany, who was deep into another row of trees, wouldn’t return until it was too late. She attempted a small, shallow breath and then a larger, deeper one.

  She had proposed to Luke on the fake bridge. She’d held both his hands and looked up into his eyes, her face a moving image reflected in his glasses. “Will you marry me?” It had slipped from her mouth, but once the question was out, she knew she’d meant it. And when he had answered instantly, she’d known he’d meant it, too. For one instant of absolute clarity, they’d seen the future in each other’s eyes.

  Peggy braced one hand against the cool, rough bark of the apple tree and smiled in spite of herself. No chain of events could be less suited to people like her and Luke.

  Damn. Those had been strong martinis.

  She was about to call to Tiffany, suggesting they give up, when she looked into the tree one last time. There it was. She circled the tree; the apple was perfect from every angle.

  “I found one!” Peggy shouted, abandoning her thoughts of Luke. Tiffany came running with the pole and demonstrated how to position it under the apple and squeeze the handle so the metal rim closed around the fruit and captured it in the net.

  Luke watched them come marching up over the ridge, the upright pole between them, a small object swinging at the top.

  For a good ten minutes, Ver Planck had been following Milo as the child zigzagged back and forth across the parking area. Ver Planck’s eyes lit up with relief. “Look who’s back, sport.”

  “Hi, peanut!” Tiffany waved.

  “Mummy!” The child took off at a stiff-legged run, stepped into a tire rut, and fell, sprawled on his stomach, a few yards from Luke. Luke stood still. He looked back at Ver Planck and then at Milo getting himself to his feet and staring wonderingly at the mud on his pudgy, starfish hands.