The Summer Everything Changed

by Holly Chamberlin

  Sex. Isobel wondered now if Jeff’s hurt feelings could be frustration in disguise. So far they had done no more than make out. But Jeff was definitely not a virgin. He had to want a lot more from her, though he hadn’t been pressuring her, not really.

  The weird thing was that even though she was seriously attracted to him—the very thought of him brought tingles to her stomach—Isobel just didn’t feel willing to take the next steps. It wasn’t that she was afraid of sex. It was just—well, she wasn’t quite sure what was holding her back from moving their relationship forward. But something was, some instinct maybe, and that was good enough reason for her. For now.

  Isobel left the gazebo and went inside.

  Isobel spent a good deal of the night pondering the notion of soul mates; of twinned and twined hearts; of infatuation and intense devotion and undying love. These were not topics meant to lull you into dreamland.

  Did everyone who was truly in love lose him- or herself in the other person, or maybe in the third entity, the relationship? Was it necessary to “lose yourself”? Traditional notions of romance would seem to say so. The woman, especially, was to become a part of the man, a piece of something larger, no longer “only” herself. Really, it was a bit offensive and seriously old-fashioned—and experience had pretty much shown that nine out of ten times it ended in disaster for the woman—but it also did sound kind of heroic in a weird way, sacrificing yourself for the greater good, which was LOVE in capital letters. Lovers were two halves of a whole . . .

  In the middle of the night, she had gotten out of bed to sit at her desk with her laptop. She thought it might be wise to see what great poets and novelists had to say about the matter. You could always rely on great poets or novelists to tell a truth in a way you would remember.

  Isobel chose a “famous quotes” site at random and selected “quotes about love.” There was something from Emily Brontë; Isobel thought it was probably taken from Wuthering Heights. It sounded like something Cathy would say about Heathcliff. But she hadn’t read the book in a while so she wasn’t really sure.

  “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”

  There was also a line from a work by Leo Tolstoy. She didn’t know what novel this might be from, or even if it was from one of his novels. She had yet to venture into the works of the famous Russian writers.

  “He felt now that he was not simply close to her, but that he did not know where he ended and she began.”

  And then, from Romeo and Juliet, there was a line the teenaged Juliet speaks to her teenaged lover:

  “The more I give to thee, the more I have, for both are infinite.”

  Her head spinning, Isobel had shut down the computer and crawled back into bed. Maybe love took more than she had in her to give. And maybe . . . Well, was she actually in love with Jeff? She thought that maybe she was. She got all tingly when he was next to her. Wasn’t that a sign of love? Or was that merely a sign of sexual attraction? She thought about him when he wasn’t with her. Then again, she thought about Gwen when Gwen wasn’t with her.

  Isobel shifted under the covers. She felt so awfully young and naïve. She so hoped she hadn’t permanently alienated Jeff with her immaturity. She had learned as a firsthand witness how delicate relationships could be, even those that were supposed to be—or that, at least, looked to be—strong, like her parents’ marriage. If that had failed after twenty-some odd years and an official and public vow of foreverness, how much more likely was it that her own fledgling relationship with Jeff would fail because of her inability to understand a simple need and request?

  Very early in the morning, Isobel fell into a deep sleep. But after only three hours, she was out of bed and back at work on the blog post. Finally, inspiration struck. At least, she was able to craft a few sentences she felt pretty sure Jeff would like.

  Jeff had said he would come by the inn at twelve o’clock. Isobel took her laptop down to the kitchen to wait for him. He was as good as his word, walking through the kitchen door at precisely noon. He didn’t apologize for having stormed off the day before, but Isobel didn’t expect him to. He had been upset, yes, but justifiably. She knew that now.

  “I have to show you something,” she said immediately.

  Jeff looked wary. But maybe that was her imagination.

  He sat at the table, Isobel standing at his side, and she showed him the new post. Isobel read the important part over his shoulder.

  “And here now is something I want very much to share with my Dear Readers—this lovely photograph of my lovely boyfriend, Jeff Otten. He’s a member of one of the very important and philanthropic local families and in my opinion (and in the opinion of everyone else here in Ogunquit!) a super nice and kind and smart person!”

  He finished reading in a few quick seconds. And then he frowned up at her.

  “You should have asked me if I was okay with this.”

  Isobel’s stomach dropped. She shook her head. “But you told me you wanted me to mention you . . .”

  “Did I give you permission to say anything you wanted about me?” Jeff snapped.

  The word permission struck Isobel like a slap. Were adults allowed to give each other or to withhold from each other permission? Other than bosses and army officers and priests and rabbis and other authority figures like that?

  “But it’s nothing bad . . .” she protested feebly.

  “And this picture. When did you take this picture of me?”

  “Well, actually, Gwen took it. It’s from when we were hanging around the other day.”

  Jeff jabbed the screen with his finger. “She had no right to take my picture. Who does she think she is? She invaded my privacy. I should—”

  “Wait, Jeff, I asked her to take it! It’s not her fault, really.”

  Jeff was silent for a moment. And then he said, “Can you take it down? The entire post?”

  “The whole thing? But I only mention you in a few lines.”

  “Isobel, I want you to take it down.”

  Isobel felt the tiniest thread of fear but brushed it aside. “Well, all right,” she said.

  “Now. Before I leave.”

  “I’m sorry, Jeff,” she said, hurrying to take a seat at the table. “I didn’t mean to—Did I offend you somehow? I don’t understand.”

  “You don’t need to understand. You just need to accept that I don’t want that post out there.”

  Without further protest, Isobel took down the post, Jeff now standing over her as if, she thought, to be sure she did what he had asked.

  “Now was that hard? Thank you.” Jeff bent and kissed her forehead. “I’ve got to go.”

  Isobel tried to smile. “Okay. Does your dad need you at the office?”

  “Yeah. I’ve been working on some important reports he wants right away.”

  “Okay. Oh, before I forget. Gwen’s parents got us free tickets to see The Pirates of Penzance at the Playhouse this Saturday night. They’re supposedly really good seats, too. And Gwen said they could probably get another two if you think your parents would want to come.”

  “This Saturday? No,” Jeff said, “we can’t go. I’m taking you to hear a band at the Dolphin Striker in Portsmouth. Besides, I’m not into musical theater.”

  Isobel hesitated. It was the first she had heard of plans to go to Portsmouth, and Gwen’s dads had gone to the trouble of getting tickets, but the last thing she wanted to do was upset Jeff again with another silly blunder. “Oh,” she said finally. “Okay. What about your parents, then?”

  Jeff laughed. “Izzy, really? My parents don’t bother with local theater. If they want to see a professional show, they go to Boston or New York.”

  “But the Ogunquit Playhouse gets some really big names, like—”

  “Izzy. I said no. Look, I really have to run. I’ll check in later.”

  He left through the kitchen door. Isobel still sat at the table, laptop closed in front of her. She looked down at the sparkly bracelet on
her wrist and frowned. Were all men so—so fickle and sensitive?

  Isobel rubbed her eyes. They felt tired. She felt tired.

  She wished she could talk to someone about what had just happened with Jeff. Her mom was beyond busy, and she had told Isobel that she hadn’t been sleeping well lately. She would try her best to concentrate on what Isobel was saying, she was always good that way, but to go to her mother about something so minor—and it was minor, after all, Jeff’s being sensitive (that was a more accurate word than fickle)—would be unfair.

  And she could forget about talking to Gwen. Gwen didn’t like Jeff, and Isobel was sure that Gwen wouldn’t give Jeff’s side of the misunderstanding—it hadn’t been a fight, really, not even an argument—proper consideration. “It’s all his fault,” she would say immediately. “He was being unreasonable. You did nothing wrong.” It was great to have someone unconditionally on your side, except when it wasn’t.

  Catherine, however, might be a good person to ask for advice. She was smart and sensible and in her own admission had “been around the block,” an old-fashioned expression Isobel found hilarious. But Catherine might feel weird about keeping their conversation from Louise, even though Isobel would assure her that she wasn’t trying to hide anything from her mother.

  No. She foresaw potential messiness if she involved Catherine.

  As for her friends back in Massachusetts . . . Though some of them kept in touch through CityMouse, the nature of her relationship with them had changed. What intimacy there had been was pretty much gone. That had probably been inevitable. Sometimes when you didn’t see a person on a daily basis, so much of what made the friendship real was lost. It wasn’t always that way; lots of people maintained long-distance friendships over a long period of time. But maybe the friendships she had made with those girls back in Massachusetts hadn’t been as strong as she thought they had been. Well, she had been a child then, really. And things always changed. The only thing in life you could count on was not being able to count on something or someone forever . . .

  Isobel got up from the table and took her laptop up to her bedroom. Once there, she locked the door behind her and lay down on the bed.

  She was determined to figure this out for herself. Adults didn’t go running to someone else for advice about every single little glitch in their daily lives. Adults looked their problems square in the eye and wrestled them to the ground. Like what her mother had done when her father had left them. She hadn’t sat around whining. She got on with her life. Like Isobel would get on with hers.

  Chapter 33

  “You might be interested in this.”

  “What?”

  Louise and Isobel were in the kitchen the following day. While her daughter grazed through a bag of SunChips (ah, youth, Louise thought enviously), Louise sorted through her collection of plastic food storage containers and lids. She didn’t know how it happened but at least once a week a lid went missing. It was very frustrating.

  “I bumped into the owner of that cute little boutique on Beach Street this morning.”

  “The woman with that adorable little white dog I want to eat with a spoon?” Isobel asked.

  “Yeah. Anyway, she told me she’d been chatting with Sally Otten at their church after services last Sunday and Mrs. Otten told her that Michael, her older son, the one who lives in Basel—”

  “Yeah, yeah, what about him?” Isobel demanded.

  “Patience. Well, word is that he was promoted to president of something or other at his company—sorry, Paula Murphy isn’t the most coherent of storytellers—and that he won an award from some prestigious council on ethics in the pharmaceutical industry. Again, the details were a bit fuzzy.”

  “Still,” Isobel said. “Wow.”

  “That’s what I said. I’m surprised Jeff didn’t mention Michael’s latest triumphs to you.”

  “I’m not. Jeff told me that he and his brother aren’t close.”

  Louise nodded. “I guess I can see that. They are seven years apart. That difference doesn’t matter much between adults, but growing up they must have lived in virtually different families.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And it can be more difficult to bridge that gap when both siblings are the same sex. There’s competition and all . . . Maybe Jeff and his brother will grow closer later on in life. Maybe once they get married and have kids.”

  “Yeah, who knows? Guys are hard to figure out sometimes.”

  Louise raised her eyebrows. “Tell me about it. Hey, is anything troubling you? Is everything okay with Jeff?”

  “Oh yeah, everything’s fine. It’s just—”

  “Where’s the manager!” It was a bellowing demand, not a question, and it had come from the front hall.

  Louise put her hand to her forehead and rubbed. “Oh crap, it’s Mr. MacCready again. Really, that man can’t go five minutes without a complaint. If it’s not the butter being too hard to spread without shredding his fresh-baked muffin, it’s the toilet paper being too harsh for his precious you-know-what.”

  “The toilet paper, huh?”

  Louise shrugged. “Slight exaggeration. Wait, you were about to say something. ‘It’s just’ what? Godzilla can wait for five minutes.”

  Isobel laughed. “If I was going to say something I totally forgot what! You’d better go tend to Godzilla, Mom. Creatures like that tend to make a big mess when they’re upset.”

  “You’re right. Once more into the breach . . .” She hurried off to deal with Mr. MacCready and his latest unreasonable demand.

  Later that day, after The MacCready had been pacified (the sprig of fresh lavender on his bed had irritated his sinuses and he wanted new sheets immediately) and the latest wedding crisis had been temporarily wrestled into order (no, it was unlikely that the inn would be able to hire a local lobsterman to display his boat in the backyard for the amusement of the guests), Louise found herself lounging on the front porch, enjoying a precious few moments of leisure. There was a slight breeze in the air, and Louise thought she could smell the salt of the ocean in it.

  She thought back to her interrupted conversation with Isobel earlier. She felt sure Isobel would talk to her if anything really important was troubling her. Since Isobel was old enough to understand, Louise had stressed the importance of communication without reservation or shame or the fear of punishment. Certainly, choosing not to tell a few relatively minor incidents to her mother (was the gift of an expensive bracelet an “incident”?) didn’t mean that Isobel would choose not to tell a big worry or a serious fear.

  Suddenly, Louise remembered being in the car that day with Isobel and pointing out Jeff at the garage. Isobel had responded as if she had never seen Jeff before, but she had, she had met him in town days before . . .

  Wait a minute, Louise thought. What had happened when? She had had so much on her mind in recent weeks, days tended to run into one another; just last Wednesday she had thought it was Thursday and had taken the garbage to the curb in anticipation of a pickup. She wasn’t at all sure she could she rely on her memory of the sequence of events involving Isobel and Jeff. She certainly hoped she was confusing the time line, because if she wasn’t, then she had caught Isobel (albeit after the fact) in an outright lie.

  Louise was distracted from this unpleasant thought by a guest pulling up to the inn and climbing out of her car. Ms. Jackson was a large woman in every sense—tall and broad and solidly built. Her smile and her good nature were as big as her physical self.

  Louise got up and opened the door of the inn for her. “Hello, Ms. Jackson,” she said. “How was your afternoon?”

  The woman beamed. “Wonderful. And there’s nothing like spending the day in the sun to whet one’s appetite. I’m absolutely famished!”

  Louise smiled and followed her inside. “Well, there are some cookies in the parlor . . .”

  “Excellent!” Ms. Jackson exclaimed, making a beeline for that room. “They should hold me over until dinner!”

&nbs
p; And a cookie wouldn’t kill me, either, Louise thought, her worries about Isobel flown.

  Chapter 34

  CITYMOUSE

  Hello, Everyone!

  Recently, I ran across a quote from Anjelica Huston (online, of course, where so many of us tend to live too much of our lives) about the inimitable Diana Vreeland. She said that Ms. Vreeland “. . . made it okay for women to be outlandish and extraordinary.”

  I don’t know enough about the social history of the last century to say if Diana Vreeland was the most important influence in encouraging women to be outlandish and extraordinary, but even if she was only one of many strong women who helped less-strong women be proud individuals, well, that’s a big feather in her cap!

  Again, I am reminded of the term jolie laide, used in reference to both Anjelica Huston and Diana Vreeland. How much better to be jolie laide in mind and spirit, too, than to have a cookie-cutter personality and character and mind-set!

  Now, here’s a photo Gwen took about a week back of a woman we spotted the last time we were down in Portsmouth. The woman—who was visiting the East Coast from southern California—was very amenable to our taking her picture. Her name was (is) Roberta Worthington and she told us that the lime-green-with-splashes-of-black-all-over-them skinny jeans she was wearing were actually a pair she had bought way back in the eighties (!) and pulled out once a summer every single year since. Fun tidbit: The first time she wore the jeans was to a Duran Duran concert!!! Can you imagine?? Her slouchy black blazer was a purchase from the early nineties and her bag—fantastique!—was “just a little Louis Vuitton thingie” she had picked up at a vintage shop about ten years ago. In short, nothing but her T-shirt and underwear (she told us this; we are not impolite enough to ask about someone’s undergarments!) were new! Even her slim-line loafers (no socks necessary) dated from 2005. Clearly, this woman takes very, very good care of her clothes and never gains or loses more than a pound or two.