But for all the challenges of raising a young family, Iris had muddled forward each year. Strode, even. Sure, there were days when Paul arrived home to find her weeping quietly at the kitchen table, face in her hands as the kids crawled through the spilled contents of the pantry that sprinkled the floor, tiny floury-white handprints inviting him into the living room; smashed chocolate chips that caulked the cracks of the antique wooden floors rather nicely.
“What on earth?” he’d asked, mouth agape in the doorway.
To which she’d wiped her eyes and replied evenly, “They wanted to bake.”
That was the rarity. Most days Paul had arrived home, his own hair askew, flinging his briefcase onto the table with barely a hello to Iris, sinking into the toy-filled recesses of the couch as the kids clambered across him.
But in the end, Iris figured they’d made it. Just look at what they’d accomplished! The kids were healthy. They did the ski trips to Utah, and they joined the tennis club. The house was finally renovated. For her fortieth birthday Paul had shocked her with a Range Rover, a car she was embarrassed to drive, but secretly loved. He was a partner now, he reminded her. By both of their definitions, they’d made it.
Which is why she was so shocked when Paul came to her late that night two weeks ago with his decision, after she’d tucked the last child into bed. Laid out. Bowled over. This was their family. It was not perfect, but it was the way they’d done it for so long, in such silent seeming agreement, that she’d never seen it coming.
“There’s someone else, isn’t there?” she’d howled. It was the only answer that made sense.
Paul had denied it, and in a way that made her feel small. “Come on, Iris. Don’t be so cliché.”
Now, waiting in the long drop-off line at the school entrance, Iris watched her children hurry through the school doors, her heart in her chest. The driver behind her laid on the horn, jolting her.
She needed a plan. A lawyer. Something. Back at the empty house, Iris tossed her keys on the antique table by the door and took the stairs two at a time. She contemplated Paul’s golf shorts on the bedroom rug. Out of habit, she bent to retrieve them, along with a dirty pair of balled-up socks, but then changed her mind and kicked them across the wood floor. Let him wash his own damn clothes. What she needed was a shower. Had she even had one yesterday?
At the sink Iris caught her reflection in the mirror. The creased eyes, the pallid complexion. Paul had spent two weeks sleeping on the couch, while she stared numbly at the bedroom ceiling overhead, willing him back upstairs. She teetered unnervingly between the urge to either throttle him or pull him under the covers and press herself against him. But he never came. Each morning the blankets would be folded neatly in the hall closet, the throw pillows politely replaced on the sofa. She knew it was to protect the kids, but the practiced ease with which he went about this new ritual stunned her and infuriated her, too. And now, after keeping a silent front for the last two weeks, she wasn’t sure if it was him or herself that she was more disgusted with.
Despite the steady stream of the shower, Iris walked past it fully clothed. As the windows of the bathroom filled with steam, she climbed into the claw-foot tub in the corner, sank into its cold embrace, and wept.
Two
To Iris’s dismay, Ainsley Perry was manning the soccer team’s refreshment table. Patrolling would be more accurate. As parents approached, Ainsley lurched from behind her post, arms outstretched, not so much to accept their offering but to deflect the parents themselves. With a fixed smile, she steered them away from her potluck domain and redirected them to distant lands: the bleachers, perhaps, or the sidelines to cheer on the team. But Iris knew better. Backdrop to the congregants at this Saturday-morning ritual, the soccer field symbolized a sort of suburban pilgrimage: cramming the parking lot with their Volvo wagons and hybrid SUVs (a glaring oxymoron, in Iris’s opinion), families paid weekly homage to gawk, gossip, and draw comparisons between their unwitting children’s skills and, more often, each other. Pious attendance was casually noted, but lack of was nothing short of sacrilege. Iris knew: she had made that shameful mistake already this season. And so today, while stacks of unrevised manuscripts lay neglected on her office desk, Iris emerged from her car and began her maiden trek to the refreshment table, closing the perilous chasm between working mother and penitence. But she was not unarmed.
She had risen early, rolling out small circles of homemade dough for the occasion. Discarding the ones that landed on the floor, pulling stray dog hairs from the ones that did not. She’d pinched and shaped and sprinkled powdered sugar, traces of which still coated her furrowed brow. Because beneath the twinkling tinfoil on her antique ironware platter radiated the promise of deliverance in the form of two dozen almond crescents. Hastily, she tucked a stray hair behind her ear (oh no, was that her old scrunchie securing her ponytail?) and forced a smile. Today Iris would attempt to fit in, like the other moms who regularly graced the playground, hovered in the cafeteria, and clogged the school driveway at dismissal, while Iris’s own offspring suffered the snail-trail route of the school bus. These mothers were everywhere.
It was in that same spirit that Ainsley Perry committed herself to her role as refreshment manager.
Ahead, a group of mothers hovered around her table, sleek heads bowed, inspecting the goods. Iris would do this to win over Sadie, whose adolescent good graces she had inexplicably fallen away from since the first day of middle school. For Jack, whose easygoing personality made him grateful for any cookie, period. And for Lily, still her baby, who’d throw her arms around her mother in that blessed unself-conscious way of the preadolescent. And lastly, for Paul, to prove to him that she could juggle it all, that there was a place for her at the refreshment table, should she wish to claim it. If only she’d remembered to change out her filthy running shoes for a cute pair of ballet flats! No matter.
“Well, Iris Standish, I haven’t seen you in ages!” Ainsley said, but somehow her mouth remained conspicuously pursed. Collagen.
Iris tried not to stare at Ainsley’s lips. “Good morning. I brought treats.”
Ainsley peered beneath the foil, a look of alarm coming over her. “Are those cookies?”
Iris smiled. “Almond crescents. Homemade this morning.”
“Well.” Ainsley’s smile shrank. She turned to a brunette woman Iris did not recognize, who blinked several times. The two immediately launched into some eye-fluttering dialect that Iris could not interpret.
“Gluten free?” Ainsley asked finally.
Iris shook her head.
“Non-GMO?” the other pressed hopefully.
Iris shrugged. “Um, I’m not sure.”
“Huh. How about I put these over here,” the other woman replied, relieving Ainsley of the platter and turning to a second table that Iris noted was void of all refreshments.
Ainsley’s brow unfurrowed. “Perfect.”
Iris was confused. Her eyes moved over the plates before her, each carefully unwrapped and uncovered for easy access: carrot sticks, kale chips, hummus, orange wedges, edamame. Were those grapes peeled? Then at her own platter, alone on the other table, whose foil remained sealed, obscuring the loveliness that was her batch of crescent cookies.
“Why don’t I help?” she asked, peeling back the foil.
Ainsley and the other woman bumped against each other as they lurched in choreographed unison. “No!” the brunette cried, her smile faltering. “No, thank you, we’ve got it.” Her fingers danced across the foil, curling it back over the cookies, covering them in darkness once more.
Ainsley nodded vigorously, playing with the top button on her cashmere cardigan. Iris made note of her manicured nails, a tasteful shade of colorless pink.
Iris swiped at her frayed ponytail. “Well, it’s just that these are Sadie’s favorites. And some of her friends’, too,” she added hastily, though truthfully
Iris had no idea if any of Sadie’s friends liked almond crescents.
“I’m sure they are,” Ainsley said. “But this is the healthy food table. That one’s for . . . others.”
Iris looked again at the table before her, mountainous in its elevations of varied nutritional terrain. As if these mothers sliced their snack profiles right out of the government’s Recommended Dietary Allowances poster, with one of those handy little Williams-Sonoma vegetable clippers.
And then she glanced at the other table. The table where her contribution lay. It was empty, an open plain of Formica surface, save for a lone keg of illicit Kool-Aid that some other unenlightened mother erringly brought. Poor soul.
It was more than Iris could stand. Suddenly the predawn hours she’d spent in her ratty bathrobe bent over the kitchen island surged up in her throat: the whirring of the beaters, the powdering of the crescents. How her back ached bending over each tray as she formed individual half-moons, imagining the cheerful squeal the kids would emit upon seeing the cookies.
Behind her the air horn blew. Now she’d missed the damn game.
“Well, since it’s the only dessert on the dessert table, let’s unwrap it.” Hastily, Iris removed the foil again. She could hear the kids thundering toward the table.
“Really, you needn’t trouble yourself.” The brunette covered the cookies once more, with a flourish.
“No trouble at all,” Iris said flatly. She reached for the tray, this time whisking the foil right off the platter and crumpling it quickly into a tiny, silver ball, which she clenched triumphantly in her closed fist. “Ta-da!”
The two women regarded her with a look of cool contempt, just as the players rose up around them like a uniformed tide.
“Children, children!” Ainsley Perry cried, trying to gain control. “Fruits and veggies, over here!”
Obediently, the children lined up. Quickly the mothers went to work, doling out carrot sticks like Civil War nurses tending to battlefield soldiers.
But Iris was not to be excluded. “Cookies! Who wants COOKIES?” Yes, she was sabotaging Ainsley’s order. But she could not help it.
“Cookies?”
“Come and get them!” Iris was yelling now. But it felt great. The children surrounded her like a mob, and she whisked the cookies off the tray. Onto plates, into the hands of those with no plates. One right into a little boy’s mouth. She looked up, unable to contain her laughter. Now, where was Sadie?
A small hand tugged her shirt.
“Jack! Want a cookie?”
Jack’s brow furrowed. “Coach says no sweets at games.”
And then reality hit. Beyond the crowd of cheering children, there was another. A stunned group. Parents with arms crossed. A coach blowing his whistle in an attempt to restore order. And one distressed face in particular: Sadie’s.
Sadie was in the fruit-and-vegetable line. Not in Iris’s.
“I made your favorite!” Iris sputtered, holding the tray overhead as she waded toward Sadie.
When had it gotten so quiet?
“Want one?”
Sadie glared at the smashed crumbs scattering the platter. Then at her mother. “What are you doing?”
And before Iris could respond, she was gone.
Paul appeared at Iris’s elbow. “What’s gotten into you?” At least he whispered it, relieving her of her tray, guiding her away from the table and the wondrous expressions of those surrounding it.
Lily and Jack followed behind them, all the way to the car. Iris did not resist.
It was only after Paul had closed her driver door, leaving her alone in the Rover, that Iris realized what a scene she’d made. “Meet you at home,” he’d mumbled, before stalking off.
The kids had gone with their father, of course. The sensible one.
Iris gripped the steering wheel and rested her head on its cool surface. What was happening to her?
There was a gentle tap on the window. Lily. Chewing one of her forsaken cookies.
Iris unrolled it.
“Don’t worry, Mom. These are really good.”
• • •
The orange postcard came in the mail that morning. Iris hadn’t noticed it at first, tucked as it was amid the bills. She separated them from the newspaper, which she tossed directly into the recycling: there was enough sadness in her house at the moment—she hadn’t any room left for wars or failing economies. Iris was halfway through making the kids lunch when she saw the glimmer of orange from behind the electric bill on the counter. She plucked it out. Immediately she recognized the scene.
Hampstead, New Hampshire. A red canoe tethered to a dock. It was one of the old lake postcards that Hawley’s Market used to sell when they were kids. She and Leah liked to collect them and hide them for each other under rocks or on the back porch, like secret messages. She hadn’t seen one like this in years. Where had Millie found it? Iris flipped the card over. But right away, she saw it was not Millie’s handwriting. The loose cursive was as dreamy and breathless as Leah’s voice.
“Please Come.”
No signature, no date. Iris shook her head, reading the two words over and over. Come where? she wondered impatiently. Leah was all the way out in Seattle, where she had recently moved with her new fiancé, and the last Iris had heard, she wasn’t scheduled to fly in until just before her wedding. The same wedding she hadn’t even bothered to call her sister about, after not bothering to inform her that she’d become engaged to a man Iris had never even met. Maybe the postcard was an overdue attempt to reach out, an apology of sorts. It wasn’t as if the postcard was the wedding invitation itself. Iris had already received that lavish statement, an ecru (whatever that meant) card embossed with hand-gilded gold. She couldn’t help but wonder at the cost. Her parents had money, yes, but they were conservative. Modest. This invitation was all about excess.
Iris tossed the postcard back on the pile of bills. How like Leah to pen something cryptic and leave her struggling to decipher it. As though she had nothing better to do. Iris wasn’t having it. If anyone should be sending off warning flares or writing messages in the sand, it was her. She called the kids inside for lunch. She cleared the dishes when they were done, took Samson for a long walk, and drove Lily across town to a playdate. But as with everything Leah touched, the orange postcard demanded attention, nagging at Iris’s thoughts throughout the day, and when she came home later that afternoon she sheepishly retrieved it from the mail pile and tucked it in her jeans pocket. As much as it annoyed her, the postcard represented something beyond Leah’s furtive message. It was a sort of final push. One that Iris accepted with both dread and relief.
Three
Ernesto! Ernesto, is that you?” Her mother’s voice was distant, muffled, followed by a clunk and sharp barking. “Hello? Are you there?”
Iris sighed. “Mom. It’s me.”
“Oh, hello, dear. I thought you were Ernesto. I sent him to the nursery and I can’t imagine what is keeping him.”
Iris pictured Millie standing amid the well-tended plants in her vegetable garden, a cultivated wake of lettuce leaf and tomato vine trailing behind her. No doubt she was clad in her collared linen shirt and khaki shorts, a wide-brimmed hat set elegantly on her gray hair, as one of her rat terriers raced around the garden borders, in its usual crazed orbit.
“What’s wrong, Mom?”
Her mother’s pinched expression was vivid, through her voice alone. “Blight!”
“You got a bite?”
“No, Iris. Blight! The tomatoes have blight. I’ll have to tear out the whole lot!” Her voice was shrill now, and Iris imagined the blighty vines cowering in the shadow of her mother’s Wellington boots.
Millie Standish was not an avid gardener. She was a champion, a commanding presence in her local garden club and a force to be reckoned with in her own backyard. Throughout her county,
Millie gave seasonal lectures about preparing spring beds, cultivating summer soil, and putting perennials to sleep for the hard New England winter. Practices that gave the cozy, if false, impression that she was a nurturing woman. Her expertise in all things growing was well known and respected in the community, though Iris could hardly call her ministrations tender. Millie Standish did not coax flowers into bloom so much as she forced them. Her lush lakeside property may have evoked English countryside images of tea among the roses to the unknowing visitor. Big mistake. Millie Standish was an evolutionist, hard bent toward survival of the fittest. There was no pity for the delicate. She plucked and pruned with a vengeance, armed with various primitive tools to clip, hedge, and deadhead. What did not thrive was ripped from its roots and discarded without thought. Iris always pitied the seasonal work staff Millie hired. Like the meeker species in the garden, most didn’t survive the summer. Except for Ernesto, who for some reason returned year after year, as robust as the hedges that swelled around the family house’s foundation.
“Mom, can we talk?”
There was a pause, followed by another thud. Iris imagined the tomatoes screaming. “Isn’t that what we’re doing?”
Iris did not bother rolling her eyes. She was used to her mother’s impatient efficiency. “Well, yes. I suppose. Anyway, I was thinking the kids and I would come up there. For a couple of weeks.”
“Of course you’re coming. The wedding’s the first week of August. If we all survive until then.”
Iris ignored her mother’s invitation to indulge her complaints. She had bigger problems than bridal favors. “Actually, Mom, I was thinking sooner. And that we might stay a bit longer. If that’s okay with you and Dad.”
“Sooner? Longer?” Millie did not sound pleased by the idea. But then, she did not like surprises, even when they involved grandchildren. “What’s going on?” Millie Standish’s nose was sharper than her rat terriers’. She was onto Iris.
The Lake Season Page 2
