The Summertime Girls

by Laura Hankin

  “Beth and her grandma are expecting me to stick around.”

  “But—” The resentment in Marsha’s voice took on a new breathiness. “We have news we want to tell you. In person.”

  “What?” Ally said.

  “In person! I’m not going to tell you over the phone!”

  “What? Did you guys get engaged or something?”

  On Marsha’s end of the line, silence. Ally took a deep breath, orienting herself to a new world. “Holy shit,” she said. “You guys got engaged.” Her mother, who had sworn after the dissolution of her union with Ally’s father that marriage was for suckers, that monogamy was completely impractical and contrary to how human beings had been designed, was getting married to a man Ally had never met. Glen had started popping up in phone conversations about six months ago, but like all of the boyfriends that floated in and out of her mother’s life, Ally chose to largely ignore him, assuming that he’d be gone before she had a chance to get attached.

  “Well, I wanted to tell you in person. But yes! We’re so happy.”

  “Congratulations,” Ally said, mustering up some cheer in her voice.

  “So, you see, you have to come back, so we can have a proper celebration. Glen wants to hear you sing. I told him all about how musical you are! Maybe we could go to one of those piano bar places and you could sing us an engagement song. Glen loves ‘Til There Was You.’”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Or maybe you could write us a song and sing it at the wedding! You could call it something like ‘A Love for All Seasons.’”

  “I don’t really do that anymore.”

  “Ooh, how about a lyric like, Meant to be, Together we’re free, Sea to shining sea—”

  “Mom! I don’t want to sing you guys a song. I told you I don’t perform anymore.” Ally sometimes worried that her throat had rusted over in the last month. Even when she tried to sing in the shower, her voice sounded hollow to her, tinny and empty despite the acoustics of her bathroom. Noises came out of her mouth, but they didn’t feel connected to anything, so she stopped making them and washed her hair in silence.

  “Well, anyway, we just want to see you. I’m sure Beth will understand. Just tell her about the engagement. I’m getting married—I can be selfish!”

  Ally didn’t say what she wanted to say, that her mother was always selfish, even when she wasn’t getting married. Instead, she said, “I’ll try.”

  Maybe, she thought when she hung up, she did want to try. To get to eat at Jean-Georges, without spending any of her own money! She’d probably be able to order an appetizer and a dessert. Or did they do prix fixes there? With wine pairings! She swallowed the excess saliva that rose into her mouth at the thought.

  More important, if she went back to New York early to see her mom, she and Tom could get their coffee sooner. And if coffee were to turn into more-than-coffee, they’d have more time for all of that.

  That reminded her. Tom. Her heart booming a serious bass line, she checked the rest of her phone.

  She had one text message, sent at 1:30 A.M. from a contact labeled Alex From Bar, reading, Hey u out? She ignored it.

  An e-mail from Gabby, in response to the e-mail from Tom that Ally had forwarded along:

  WHAT???????

  1] What is this complete inability to stay in one place? He isn’t Jesus. There’s no need to be so fucking peripatetic.

  2] Is “getting coffee” code for the two of you boning and . . .

  3] If so, do you want to go with me to get waxed beforehand because it is a full-on jungle down there but you know I hate going to Bella Wax by myself.

  Ally could write a War and Peace–length tome about Gabby’s eating, drinking, and personal grooming habits. If asked to write about Beth’s recent doings, she would have trouble filling up a haiku.

  Beth went to Haiti.

  She wants to be a doctor?

  Five more syllables.

  Finally, yes, there it was. An e-mail from Tom. It was disappointing in its brevity: Awesome, talk soon!

  She stared at it for a second, trying and failing to figure out some nondesperate way of extending the conversation. Then she put her phone on the wicker bedside table next to her and attempted to think about the day ahead, about how she should move forward with her Britton Hills documentary idea, about whether she should go back to New York. Basically, she tried to think about anything that would prevent her from obsessing about Tom. But of course it didn’t work. Dwelling on him was the one constant in her life right now.

  • • •

  THE night that Ally met Tom had already been going pretty damn perfectly.

  It was her junior year in college, and she’d made a name for herself. She was the singer-songwriter girl on campus now. People she knew only vaguely would stop her sometimes as she walked through the quad in the brisk Massachusetts air and say that they’d loved her last show. “That song,” they’d enthuse, “you know, the ‘Joys of Being Alone’ one, has been stuck in my head all week!”

  On this particular night, she’d played a show at Roasters, the coffee shop just a couple blocks off campus. Her hair, steering clear of frizziness, had fallen in perfect waves without her having to do anything special to it. Her voice had come out clear and strong, even more effortlessly than normal. Roasters was full, packed with her friends as well as townies and students she didn’t know, who’d been studying or hanging out and seemed (mostly) delighted by the unexpected music. Outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, fat snowflakes made their way lazily down to the ground. When she played her last song, her friends sang along with the chorus.

  “Thanks so much, everyone!” she said as her final guitar strum reverberated and faded away, replaced by clapping and cheers. Then, high on the adrenaline cloud that always enveloped her postperformance, she went to stuff her guitar into its case.

  As she zipped the case closed, she felt a hand touching her shoulder.

  “Hey, great show,” the hand’s owner said. Just the sound of the voice, its particular tenor, something about where it existed on the scale, was enough to slow time. She turned around. This guy she’d never seen before stood there, grinning at her. For what seemed an eternity, as she struggled to resume the lung processes she normally didn’t have to think about, she let her eyes comb over him. She immediately wanted to run her fingers through the dark brown hair messily topping his head. She looked up at his eyes, a startling shade of blue in his olive-skinned face, and marveled at their force, even behind the shield of dark-rimmed glasses.

  “I’m Tom,” he said, extending his hand. “And I want to thank you for giving me a distraction from my computer science study group.” He jerked his head toward a table in the corner, crowded with three pale guys and one girl, all on their laptops, sneaking peeks in Ally’s direction. The girl shot her a malevolent glare, her bushy eyebrows furrowing.

  “I’m very happy I could help,” Ally said.

  “But you’ve created a big problem for me.” She thought she detected in his voice the slightest hint of a twang, like he was desperately trying to leave someplace like Texas behind.

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  He leaned toward her, his face serious. “Well, before I heard your music, coding was boring. Now, after I’ve heard it, coding will be excruciating.”

  “Wow. I am so sorry,” she said. Behind Tom, Gabby and her burly boyfriend, Jeff, walked by, trying to be stealthy, giving her two big thumbs-up. “There seems to be only one solution here.” Tom was still leaning toward her so she moved forward too and lowered her voice. “You should blow it off and walk me home.”

  They walked back to her dorm through the falling snow. The flakes had started to pile up, covering the dead grass and the concrete walkways. Lampposts glowed, turning into little halos of light. She felt like they were walking through Narnia.

 
Tom offered to carry her guitar for her. “So music’s your thing, huh?” he asked, as he took her case.

  “Yeah, it is,” she said, loving the certainty with which she was able to answer. “What’s yours? Programming the shit out of computers?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, laughing. “Comp sci’s okay, but it’s not exciting, at least not for me. I think I might currently be thingless. The fact that you know what excites you, though, that’s really, really awesome.”

  They slowed in front of a stone building. “This is me,” she said. She turned to face him. Above their heads, party sounds escaped from dorm room windows. Someone yelled something about shots. A Katy Perry song thumped into the night. She looked down at her brown leather boots, and then back up at Tom.

  “Want to keep walking?” he asked.

  So she ran inside to drop off her guitar. Then they roamed the campus for hours, until the snow piled up into foot-high drifts.

  On the eastern side of the athletic field, where bleachers gave way to trees, they made snow angels, rubbing their arms and legs into the coldness. Tom stood up, caked in snow, and drew a thought bubble coming from the head of his snow angel. He snapped a twig off a tree, and with it, he traced letters within the thought bubble. She held her breath as the sentence emerged. Ally is beautiful.

  “I think my snow angel likes you,” he said.

  “I think I like your snow angel.”

  She stood up onto her tiptoes, shivering, and brushed the powder out of his hair. He looked into her eyes until all the snow was gone, and then he wrapped his arms around her and kissed her.

  In the weeks that followed, being with Tom made her tick off every cliché she’d ever heard that accompanied falling in love. Her heart actually raced when she was with him. She could feel the Indy 500 zooming around in her chest. Her face got red. She felt herself floating up above the rest of the people on Earth. It was just the two of them, hanging out together fifteen feet off the ground, in their own private patch of air.

  She was so crazy about him she even gave up Britton Hills that summer, dizzily agreeing to spend her vacation between school and internship with his family. (Just outside Austin! She’d picked up on his hidden Texas accent just as, she thought, she was able to identify beautiful things in him that the rest of the world couldn’t.) His parents had cooed over her, had made sure to buy multiple boxes of her favorite breakfast cereal, and each night after everyone else was asleep, Tom would creep into the guest room where she lay, her whole body alert and impatient for him. He’d get into bed with her, and they’d try so hard to be quiet. “Shh,” he would whisper right before he bit down on her ear. He’d set an alarm for six A.M. and they’d fall asleep, exhausted in the best possible way. In the morning, he’d run back to his childhood bedroom before his parents, who probably knew exactly what was going on, woke up.

  Except for one brief, weird month in high school where she’d lulled herself to sleep at night designing white dresses in her head, she’d never thought much about weddings. She’d always assumed that a husband and kids would happen someday, far off in the future, and never bothered to think any more about it. But with Tom, she couldn’t stop herself from spinning out fantasies.

  Some of the details were fuzzy—in the wedding fantasy, she couldn’t figure out what she’d look like, how she’d do her hair, or what she’d be wearing. She had no idea how they’d combine their last names. (Could she really hyphenate Morris with his already-hyphenated Mejia-Robertson?) But she knew, in the sharpest relief, how Tom’s face would light up when she walked down the aisle. It would be the look of surprise and delight that overtook him sometimes, when she played him a new song he loved or when she wore his favorite dress, the bright blue one that dipped down low in the front and spun out around her legs (and slipped off easily). That look seemed to say, without agenda, I am the luckiest guy in the world.

  She knew she wore a similar look when she was with him. She felt like the luckiest girl in the world all the way up until the day he broke her heart.

  • • •

  WHEN Ally walked into the kitchen, Grandma Stella was leaning against the counter. She had the cordless phone to her ear—a bulky, tan relic. “No, but I just don’t think—” she was saying into it, her voice tight with frustration, when she saw Ally. “Hold on a jiff, Timmy,” she said, and covered the phone with her hand. “Morning, dear. Scrambled egg?”

  “Oh, amazing, yes. Thank you,” Ally replied, and settled herself at the table.

  “Let me just finish this,” Grandma Stella said, wiggling the phone, “and then we can chat.” She took her hand off the receiver and cradled it between her ear and her shoulder, speaking into it once again. “Sorry, darling, I’m back.” She opened the refrigerator and took out a blue foam egg carton. “Yes, yes, I know, but you don’t understand that I’ll need it.”

  As Grandma Stella cracked two eggs and began to beat them a bit too vigorously in a ceramic bowl, Ally looked down at the newspaper on the table in front of her. The Bugle was open to that ridiculous advice column, Dear Valerie. Ally winced at how amateur the whole thing looked, with its gigantic print and clip art. Valerie’s face, in a misguided glamour shot, peered up from next to her byline. Ally skimmed a letter about strained in-law relations and lingered on Valerie’s horrendous response. Apparently, Britton Hills’ resident advice columnist was a fan of big romantic gestures and terrible puns.

  Then she realized that Grandma Stella had finished her phone call and was standing with her fingers pressed to her temples.

  “You all right?” Ally asked.

  “Of course,” Grandma Stella replied, snapping into brightness. “So. How did you sleep?” She transferred the steaming eggs from the stovetop to a plate with a practiced ease and began to walk them over to the table.

  “Really well,” Ally said. “You forget, living in New York, what it’s like to sleep in total quiet—” A clatter interrupted her.

  “Shoot.” Grandma Stella said, a mess of eggs and broken plate at her feet. “Shoot.”

  Ally jumped up. In three long steps she crossed over to where Grandma Stella stood, staring fixedly at the ground. “I’ve got it,” she said. Grandma Stella attempted to bend down. “No, don’t!” Ally said. “I’ll clean it.”

  “My hands were slippery, from the butter,” Grandma Stella said. She grabbed some paper towels.

  “Sit down,” Ally said, taking the paper towels from her and crouching, picking up pieces of jagged yellow crockery.

  “Oh, please don’t cut yourself.” Grandma Stella hovered. In her right hand, she held the string of her bathrobe uselessly.

  “I’ll be fine!” Ally said. “Don’t worry. Please, sit.”

  Slowly, Grandma Stella did. “I’m so sorry, dear. Your eggs . . .”

  “Oh, I’ll just have a piece of the bread instead,” Ally said. “Are you okay? Do you want a glass of water?”

  “No, no.” Grandma Stella waved her hand in the air. “I was just distracted. From the phone call.”

  “What was it about?”

  Grandma Stella sighed. “Oh, Timothy—Beth’s father. He’s got this crazy idea that I shouldn’t be driving anymore. Apparently the world will fall apart if I bring the car to Sunny Acres.”

  “Do you need the car there?” Ally asked. She dumped the bits of broken plate in the trash. There, they crushed the eggshells that Stella had tossed in so casually minutes earlier. Ally bent back down to pick up the eggs, fluffy and buttery and all over the floor.

  “Well if I don’t have the car, how am I supposed to ever go anywhere else? If I don’t have the car, I’m trapped. I can’t go visit anyone, I just have to wait for them to come visit me, and how often will that happen?”

  “I’ll come visit you,” Ally said.

  “I know, dear. Thank you. I’m so sorry to go on like this, but Timothy is driving me up the wall. An
d Mary—you’d never know she was just my daughter-in-law, the way she feels entitled to tell me what to do. I’ve already let them sell the house. They could at least let me keep the car. But no, they’ve put up some advertisement on the Internet. Like I want to let some stranger from the Internet come stand in my driveway.”

  Ally thought she could understand Grandma Stella’s annoyance. Beth’s mom and dad, a therapist and a high school principal respectively, were wonderful, a deeply-in-love unit. However, they suffered from a bad case of thinking they always knew best.

  Grandma Stella gave Ally a halfhearted smile. “It’s one of life’s cruel tricks,” she said, “that your children grow up and treat you like a baby.”

  “I’m really sorry,” Ally said. She finished wiping off the floor and sat down next to Grandma Stella at the table.

  “You have nothing to be sorry about, dear. I’m so thankful you’re here,” Stella said. She leaned forward and rested her forehead on Ally’s. Ally could feel her soft skin, the powdered makeup she religiously applied.

  Sometimes, Ally caught herself believing that she was Stella’s real granddaughter, not Beth. She and Grandma Stella shared a certain vivacious smallness that united them. In their midst, long-limbed Beth was an elegant giraffe among cute little prairie dogs. Once, when Grandma Stella had come to visit Wilmington, she’d taken the girls to the movies. Beth had gone to the bathroom, and Ally and Grandma Stella had bought an extra-large popcorn for the three of them to share.

  “You and your granddaughter enjoy the film now,” the lady behind the counter had said, and Grandma Stella had put her arm around Ally’s shoulders.

  “We will,” she’d replied.

  “Will you . . .” Grandma Stella started to ask now, and then hesitated. “Please don’t mention all this to Beth. Mary said she was very unhappy in Haiti—well, I’m sure you know all about that.”