It Happens in the Hamptons

by Holly Peterson

  Two hours later, Katie parked the old pale green Porter family Volvo in the public beach lot. She watched throngs of women arriving at camp pickup, frazzled on a lovely weekend day. They were yelling at kids to rush to their next lesson, throwing them into cars, legs flailing, only half changed out of wetsuits before the cars tore away.

  If Katie could manage to handle that difficult tutor session this morning, why were the mothers around her so strained by simply getting their children at camp? This was, after all, a low-key water sports camp pickup moment, not a Best Buy television department on Black Friday of Thanksgiving week.

  A brunette in the spot to her right, wearing a shimmering bathing suit cover-up more appropriate for Kim Kardashian on her St. Tropez mega-yacht than a mom in a parking lot, darted out of her cherry-red Porsche 911 to fetch her child, a dash of madness in her eyes.

  Katie heard the distant sound of the fire station’s nasal honk reverberating through the salty breeze. It went off every day at noon to test the system of the mostly volunteer force. She wondered if today the noon signal meant something serious, given the frenetic activity.

  “Is everything okay?” Katie asked another mother dressed in black Stella McCartney workout gear. “I’m sorry to bother you, but I mean there’s so much honking in the lot, the parents are kind of sprinting around, I heard the sound of the fire siren, and I was wondering . . .”

  The woman flapped her hand back at Katie, implying that a plain mother in cutoffs and a baseball hat (an outfit telegraphing not from here) couldn’t be expected to comprehend the stress this woman was under handling three vacation homes (Southampton, Casa de Campo, and Aspen). Not to mention all the effort she expended to make sure the staff performed crucial functions like folding origami fish on the end of the toilet paper rolls for easy pulling.

  Even those staff people on this otherwise lovely Saturday morning were racing around, sweating in their ubiquitous uniforms of tan pants, white polo shirts (some with the name of the house like a yacht crew), and sensible white soft professional shoes. Katie watched a nanny make a child simultaneously rush to the car and hold his arms in the air so she could put his white tennis shirt on while hopping out of his thick, wet, sticky wetsuit. “Sorry, Jacob can’t do playdate,” the nanny yelled at Katie. “He has a lesson now . . .”

  Katie hadn’t even asked for a playdate.

  Through the sea of lunacy around her, Katie found her son, Huck, sitting on Luke’s shoulders. Another child hung onto Luke’s right arm and both boys laughed as Luke tickled them.

  “Hey, honey, how was it?” she asked Huck, pulling him off Luke’s tall shoulders. Katie tried to act official and polite as she turned to Luke and said, “Is everyone okay? The people here seem kind of in a hurry.”

  “All good,” he replied. “This is what they do. They act like the town is being invaded by the enemy.”

  “But it’s Saturday . . .” Katie’s voice creaked, a grown woman of twenty-nine once again succumbing to middle-school nerves. She stood up straight and resolved to speak more firmly as she listened to his answer.

  “I can only give this possible explanation,” Luke responded. “They’re like hamsters in a spinning wheel back in Manhattan, and they don’t hop off when they get here.”

  “Okay . . . I guess that makes sense.” Her voice sounded more normal now.

  “You’ll see, they’re not all like this. Some of the moms are fine. Some . . . not so much.” He smiled, staring into her eyes until the silence was palpable. “But . . . these kids had a great day, right, guys?” He blew out a breath loudly.

  “I don’t know how you can count them all and keep them safe,” Katie answered. “I’m sure you do and you have systems, but I’m just grateful seeing Huck’s smile when he’s near the water. It’s so . . . empowering for him.” Empowering? She had never once used that word. Katie hated that word.

  Now her eyes lingered on his too long. She forced herself to study the cracks in the pavement by her toes. She felt like a seventh grader with her first girl crush on a friend’s older brother. Or, far worse, like the neglected housewives around her. Speaking of, out of her sight, a wife in a Beyoncé caftan walked through head-high sea grass with Kona to his lair. The two of them resembled lions disappearing into the dense savannas of the Southern Sahara.

  Huck tugged at her leg. “Mom, can I go home with Richie? He said he’s always allowed to have a playdate and he doesn’t have to check.”

  Julia Chase strolled up to Luke, a bit more casually than the other moms and certainly with more of a friendly expression on her pretty, tanned face. She held out her hand to Katie. “Hi, I’m Julia, known around here as Richie’s mom. I see our kids have found the nicest guy in camp.” She pulled her Richie off Luke’s limbs. Her blond curls gracefully framed her face in the noontime sunlight.

  “Can Huck come over?” Richie asked his mother as she looked everywhere for Kona. “His mom said okay I think.” Both boys, wide-eyed, placed their hands in prayer under their chins. “Is it okay, please?”

  “Yeah, please, Mom, okay?” asked Huck.

  “You want to go to his house now?” Katie had had her own hands in prayer mode for weeks before they arrived, hoping Huck would make friends in the far-off Hamptons. And here, on his second try at a camp, he’d already found one. “Well, I guess, sure, if his mom, Mrs. . . .”

  “Oh, please, call me Julia,” she said. “Your son can certainly come over. Do you summer out here regularly?” Katie shook her head, noting the use of “summer” as a verb. Julia pushed her luscious blond curls off her face. “I know we just met, but I’m heading to a great exhale Core Fusion class, just five minutes away. While the boys play, we can go if you like?”

  “What is . . .” Katie prepared herself to feel deeply out of it, one of those things that’s not like the others.

  “Core Fusion? You don’t know it? Fred and Elisabeth? All the celebrities go. It’s an amazing workout.”

  “I was kind of hoping to join a gym today,” Katie said. “I do have my exercise gear in my car. But I have to be back close to here, for a job thing I have, by two-thirty.”

  “Just come.” Julia smiled warmly. “It’s only an hour and close by. You look like you’re in great shape. They won’t bring you out on a stretcher, I promise. We could let the nanny take the kids home with the driver and you and I can go. It’s challenging, but fun. They just announced a twelve-thirty barre class with Fred so I thought I’d rush to it now after checking in that Richie was okay. Next to your son, he appears to be better than fine.”

  Katie liked something about this woman, despite her cosmetically engineered figure, her hair bleached several shades too light, and her Technicolor exercise outfit—basically, the kind of woman she’d never thought she’d relate to. And though she felt silly jumping into a stranger’s plan, she did need a workout. The boys would be occupied, supervised, and Luke Forrester knew Julia as a regular, so . . .

  “Why not go?” Luke added. “Core Fusion classes are part of the mom routine. Give it a try?” He smiled.

  “We sign up online on the first Sunday night in April at midnight for the entire season,” Julia explained. “And by the following Monday afternoon, the good summer classes are full. They just announced a midday class, and I got two spots just for the hell of it. You know, I could probably sell them for three-hundred dollars each.”

  “Julia will take good care of you,” Luke reassured her, amused that Katie was jumping into the Hamptons housewives loony bin. “You couldn’t have a better guide.”

  “Can you give me clear directions? I don’t want to be late or lose you in all the weekend traffic.”

  Julia put her hand on Katie’s. “Stop. Please. Let me take you in my car and we’ll have our own playdate.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Wacky Workout

  Next thing Katie knew, she was flying down Route 27—the road that served as the central vein of the Hamptons—in Julia Chase’s second sports car, a navy
blue Maserati GranTurismo Convertible MC that purred like a snoring grizzly bear. As they careened down the highway, Katie tightened her seat belt and gripped the sides of her plush leather seat. The pavement, so close to the bottom of the car, seemed like mere inches beneath her feet. To her right lay the ocean and enormous estates, and to her left, the smaller, less desirable parcels of real estate dotting the potato field horizon.

  As they turned onto the back wooded lanes, the expensive grip of the tires felt like the centrifugal force of a roller coaster. Katie thought about how the very rich must experience everything differently, even a simple curve in a road.

  “So I don’t see a ring. Are you dating anyone?” Julia yelled, the convertible top down and her lemon-yellow hair flying all around her head like a 1950s movie star on the mountainous roads of Cannes.

  “Well, yeah . . .”

  “That sounds noncommittal.”

  “Well, it’s more than that, but just starting, I guess.”

  “You don’t have to explain; I know so many men who are always looking, so I thought I’d ask.”

  “I came here counting on seeing a man named George. I don’t need a setup for sure.” And after a brief pause, Katie added, “We’re just kind of trying it out, so I should give it a chance.”

  “And you came from out West, Luke mentioned. It’s Portland? Seattle? It’s all the same to us New Yorkers. Sounds horrible, but that’s the goddamn truth. We voyage all over the world, but we can be the most provincial people, just sticking to our little insular zip codes—10021 in the city, 11968 here. Terrible, really, but it’s paradise. So what am I going to do?” She turned and smiled at Katie.

  “Yeah, well, it is beautiful. But I have to say, not quite as gorgeous as Hood River, where I’m from. It’s at the base of Mount Hood and in the Columbia Gorge, and surrounded by orchards and vineyards. You can view Mount St. Helens in the distance and even Rainier on clear days. There are wildflower fields as far as you can see, and great hiking.”

  “I might mountain bike, but you’re not getting me in hiking boots.”

  “Call me crazy,” answered Katie, now wiping her fingers along the smooth mahogany dashboard of the Maserati. “But I figured that out.”

  “And you left family, or you were single or . . .”

  “Definitely was single, or well, not married.” Katie held her hand on her head, so her baseball cap didn’t fly off.

  “And his dad, is he active with the child and okay with you all being out here?”

  “He isn’t in the picture at all.”

  “Never mind. I’m sorry.” Julia turned to Katie at a stop sign and patted her hand. “Really I am. Don’t mean to push you. New Yorkers can fire questions at people. It’s not that we are super nosy. I guess we are, but it’s more we are just direct. We love to know people well. I certainly like a good relationship with my girlfriends. So I ask, but it’s fine if you don’t want to answer.”

  “No, it’s fine.” Katie missed having Ashley close by and wasn’t all that different in her desire to get to know people quickly. She and her friends out West certainly gabbed all day and night when they could. “It’s just, his father never was in the picture. He sends money almost never, he sends cards at Christmas. Huck sees him twice a year.

  “We fell for each other after meeting in a gallery show of his artwork and I got pregnant in a short four-month period. His name is Liam, he’s Swedish. That’s where my kid gets his hair; it’s almost white by August. Huck’s dad is an artist and a dreamer, and once he had to settle down and face reality, he freaked out and pretty much disappeared on us. He thinks it’s better for Huck if he isn’t around, if he isn’t planning on being really around.”

  “Do you agree? Are you angry at that?”

  Katie shook her head. “I don’t really disagree with Liam. He’s a sweet guy with his head in the clouds and I’m not sure showing up and then not showing is good for any kid. So, now that Huck is eight, and my mother, who kind of half raised him, is gone, it’s all really on me to turn him into a good man.”

  “I’m sorry about that.”

  “Yeah.” Katie looked out the window at the cornstalks now halfway grown up with teeny ears just budding out a third of the way through summer. She wiped her eyes a little with the tips of her pinkies, feeling stinging in them, but grateful the wind from the racing convertible dried them out quickly.

  After a few minutes of silence, Katie filled the void. “After a full four weeks here, my kid seems happy. We’re recently trying out this new Tide Runners Camp. I like it, he likes it, but are you sure they are safe? I met Luke Forrester and kind of grilled him New Yorker style on all the chaos and waves and boats. But I liked him.” Katie wanted more Luke data if she could discreetly pull it out of this nice woman.

  “Luke is a plain old great guy. Straight arrow. In fact, most of the guys in that camp are the absolute best. They always have an eagle eye on the kids to make sure they’re happy and safe and never hesitate to tell the campers how to behave and what’s expected of them. And the kids respect them, especially Luke. They roll down the beach in circles around him like he’s the Pied Piper.” She smiled and studied Katie at a red light. Katie instinctively neatened her T-shirt.

  “You’ll see,” Julia carried on. “Luke will be your son’s first true love, or at least purest form of worship he’ll ever experience. I don’t know much about him personally except that he used to have a girlfriend. I think she kind of tortured him, or at least that’s what the guys always said. She looks like a real-life centerfold.”

  Great, thought Katie, even though she was giving George the fair and focused trial.

  “Of course, then there’s Kona, who’s just trouble.”

  “Trouble? Like drugs?”

  “God, no, they are pretty clean, those guys, just he goes after women like a shark.”

  “Married women?” Katie couldn’t resist.

  “Married. Single. Anyone. I like to screw with him. Give him a glimmer of hope, then crush him. It’s good for him,” Julia answered. “He deserves a little of his own medicine as they say.”

  “It’s good for him?” Katie wondered if it wasn’t good for Julia.

  “Oh, yeah. He’s from Hawaii, or I guess he moved there where his mother’s family is. That’s why he has that face, that caramel skin.” She sighed a little. “Oh, I don’t know, just all island-y, kind of a worldly adventurer. He shimmies up trees and picks coconuts, or works on sailboats and climbs up the masts to unfurl sails flapping in winds. Gives him confidence to go after pretty much every woman. Kind of a wild dude, must have gotten it from his native roots, but we’ll leave it at that.”

  Katie wanted nothing more than to not leave it at that, relishing some much-needed girl talk and, perchance, even a little gossip, but they had entered a small, sandy driveway off a back road and slowly edged up to the top of the hill where a large barn structure housed the exhale Core Fusion studio. When they rolled up to a dusty lot, toned women were jumping in and out of luxury sedans and sports cars, not one weighing in at more than 125 pounds. Suddenly, Katie realized the frenetic, honking scene in the beach lot was like a calm Buddhist colony compared to this one.

  “This sucks, word got out,” Julia lamented, watching the exiting and entering cars in virtual gridlock, inching in and out of cramped spots and up and down the tight sandy lane.

  “The other class is ending now and the new class always arrives right as they are leaving, which is what causes this mess,” explained Julia. “I thought that for this extra class midday, during lunch, things would be calmer. But this is going to get ugly.”

  “Why?”

  “Because there are twenty-five spots in the class. This extra class is like a bag of bread rolls thrown on top of a starving refugee camp. People are desperate to get it, grabbing, pushing, fighting, you’ll see.”

  “Well, it does seem like some of these mothers have really bad manners,” Katie offered. “Before at pickup, and at some stores in to
wn, I saw them acting insanely.”

  “Bad manners? Try ruthless psychopaths.” Julia pulled her $161,070 convertible an inch closer to the center of the lot, where other cars were trying to exit, driven by mothers rushing to a golf, tennis, or a lunch emergency.

  “That’s my spot!” a woman in a robin’s egg-blue convertible MINI Cooper yelled at Julia. “I call it! That one!”

  “You call parking spots like that?” asked Katie.

  “You don’t get it yet,” Julia said, laughing. “The possibility of missing a chance to work four grams of fat off their inner thighs is like missing a chance to secure their kids a spot at Harvard. Watch, she’s going to accelerate and kill someone trying to get the spot before me.”

  The women maneuvered their masterpiece vehicles like fourteen-year-old girls in their first parking lesson with Daddy. It didn’t take an engineering major to divine that the woman in the MINI Cooper would have to physically bend the metal on her car in half to move it into the spot she’d “called.” But then, Julia wasn’t much better off either: she was trying to enter a too-tight spot, at a ninety-degree angle with a two-inch cushion of space. So far she’d spent about six minutes going an inch forward and then back, clearly not understanding her Maserati would never make it into the spot if she were going to tack it in by inches. Katie thought it rude to ask Julia if these people paid people to take their driving tests.

  “Don’t take this the wrong way,” Katie said. “But let me park the car or you’re going to smash it up. You gotta start again, roll back like ten feet, and do a wider turn to get in there. You go in, and sign us up. I’ll be there in three minutes and change and meet you.”

  “You can do it? I’m so sorry; you must think I’m an idiot. I’ve never been a good parker.” She smirked a little. “Truth be told, I get driven more than I drive and I’m out of practice.”