The Whole Thing Together

by Ann Brashares

  Emma had worried about Lila’s stubbornness out loud to Jamie, and he’d said, “Well, my mom’s still chattering about the champagne.”

  But that was the thing. The contrast was the problem. People with married parents tended to have the reflexive idea that parents reinforced each other, contributed to some grand parental whole. Hers did the opposite. Robert’s gestures always made him the hero, but as Emma got older she understood a less heroic underside to them: he always put Lila in the shade.

  On Friday night:

  “Is Jamie coming out?”

  “Not tonight, Dad. He’s working late. Tomorrow, I hope. He’s going to try to make an early jitney.”

  “Well, we’ll be glad to see him whenever he gets here.”

  Next morning: “We going to see Jamie tonight?”

  “As soon as he gets out of the office.”

  “He works hard, doesn’t he?”

  And then at the actual dinner that night, revered Jamie in attendance, her dad continued to drive her bananas.

  “Marriage is the most wonderful thing in the world.” He put his arm around Evie, who had finally sat down after all the cooking and serving.

  Emma wanted to keep her mouth shut, but she also wanted to throw up. She was in a strange mood, stirred up and raw. The constant challenge by Lila set against the smug complacency of her father, now parading the glory of his marriage to a woman who wasn’t her mother. Neither of her parents seemed to see her at all.

  “Dad, what are you talking about? Isn’t that kind of an oversimplification? You and Mom despise each other.”

  Her dad withdrew his arm and sat up. He looked as surprised as if the fern on the table had stuck out a frond and pinched him. “And that’s why your mother and I are not married,” he replied stiffly.

  “But you were. Obviously. Some marriages are wonderful. Some are clearly not.”

  Jamie looked desperately uncomfortable.

  Her dad was not in the mood for a challenge or even a real conversation. It was the end of the week, his stomach was full, he’d had a couple of glasses of wine. He was in one of his affirmation moods. “Yours and Jamie’s will be wonderful,” he said conclusively, almost like it was an edict.

  God, with her parents it was always a two-front war. “Yeah. If we try hard to make it be,” she said.

  —

  Later that night Emma and Jamie sat at the edge of the patio, outside the circle of light.

  “Why are they doing this?” Emma wasn’t overly suspicious or particularly intuitive, but she had a deep, emerging sadness that she and Jamie were sheltering something special and unusual, a tender sapling trying to get rooted with the promise of digging far and reaching up. And the poison in her past, still regularly mixed and batched by her parents, would kill it. All that promise would just be a thing she and Jamie imagined together once.

  Jamie scooted behind her. He put his hands on her shoulders, kneading the strips and tangles, and she began to melt. “I think it’s supposed to make us happy,” he said.

  “Happy in what way?” she asked. She dropped her chin to her chest. She breathed in the thick scent of cut grass, chlorine, and sunshine fading off the paving stones. She relished the warmth of his body around hers.

  “Celebrating us, us getting married. Taking us seriously, in spite of the fact that we are young and we met in April and nobody actually does.”

  “We do.”

  “We do.”

  “That’s what matters.”

  “That’s all that does.”

  “So why do we have to do this party?”

  He worked his thumbs down her spine. She couldn’t keep up arguing with him much longer. “Maybe we don’t.”

  “We don’t?”

  “Do we?”

  She considered. Mattie wanted to. Quinn wanted to. Why did they want to? Mattie could want it for selfish reasons. To try out some new canapés, get a sexy dress, have some wine, stir up some drama. But not Quinn. Emma trusted Quinn in ways she wouldn’t necessarily concede out loud. For Quinn, who hated parties, never got dressed up, and absorbed everybody’s strife, it was a sacrifice, a slow-motion torture. So why did she want it?

  “Maybe it’s a trial,” Emma said into her chest.

  “That doesn’t sound like much fun.”

  “Maybe it’s the day where everybody is tried. If we get through it, we’re strong.”

  “Strong enough for the wedding?”

  “Strong enough for the marriage. And the wedding too. But I have a feeling if we get this out of the way, the wedding will be all right. You figure you have to be strong to make a marriage work in this place.”

  “In any place.”

  “More so in this one.”

  “You and I will make it through,” he said boldly. “I’m not scared.”

  She flopped face-forward onto the grass. “You probably should be,” she said, muffled.

  —

  Sasha needed to get something out of the way:

  Are you bringing your girlfriend to the party?

  My girlfriend?? You mean Violet?

  Yeah. Francis is a big fan.

  Ah, Francis. I should maybe be annoyed or surprised by that, but I’m not. Mainly, I am not having a boyfriend-like response because she is not my girlfriend. And no, she’s not coming to the party.

  Suddenly he had a more terrible thought.

  Are you?

  Bringing a girlfriend? No. Boyfriend either.

  God, Ray was relieved. It hadn’t occurred to him that she had a boyfriend or would bring a boyfriend, and when it suddenly did, it consumed him with misery and agitation. He was glad he only had to be consumed with misery and agitation for around twelve minutes.

  —

  Quinn saw her mother in the paper goods aisle of the Stop & Shop on Newtown Lane before her mother saw her. It allowed her an unclaimed moment, outside the circulation of their relationship, both of them strangers in a strange place.

  In the space of a moment a story could pass. In front of the paper plates and napkins a world could reveal itself. It happened in her transformation from stranger to daughter in her mother’s eyes.

  Quinn looked wrong here; she didn’t fit. She was a don’t-want-to-believe-your-eyes kind of wrong, like a living whale exposed and drying on open sand, immobile on its side, taking in fate through one large, sentient eye. Or maybe that was just how she felt.

  Lila didn’t want an ordinary kid. That was the thing. She professed disbelief at captain-of-every-team Emma, organizing her books by color. “She’s my rebel,” Lila liked to say of Emma whenever anybody asked where she was going to college. Lila rolled her eyes at Mattie’s fortune in hair products, pink feathered flip-flops, eye-popping micro outfits. Quinn was her hope in this way.

  “What are you doing here?” Lila’s pupils seemed to dilate.

  “Shopping.”

  “I can see that. Why?”

  Lila would have celebrated a vegan, a dreadlocked, faux-leather-wearing, weed-smoking, folk-festival-attending socialist. A girl you could comfortably deploy in the war against your ex-husband. Quinn knew and felt these things. There were times when she wanted to be these things. But Quinn wasn’t that girl. She didn’t fit into Lila’s version of original. She didn’t fit into anyone’s. Her friends were plants and old people; her strongest connections she made with strangers; her arc was noncontinuous. She didn’t belong in a school or an office building and certainly not in the Stop & Shop. Quinn was confounding to her father, probably embarrassing to her sisters. Even Lila, conflicted as she was, couldn’t help that native mother-desire to have her kid fit into something.

  “For the party,” Quinn explained.

  “The thing for Emma and Jamie?” Lila didn’t need to say: You? In this place? For that?

  Quinn stared down at the two columns of plastic cups rolling around her basket. “Yes.” That was the story she’d seen for a moment in Lila’s eyes, the fear of real difference, the genuine article, slouching
toward Bethlehem.

  “Quinn, why in the world have you gotten yourself mixed up in this mess?” She dropped her empty basket with a clatter.

  “It’s not a mess, it’s a party.”

  “Okay, it’s a party. Since when do you like parties? You hate parties. I can’t imagine you turning up at this thing, let alone wanting to throw it.”

  Quinn stopped on the word, eerily apt. She did want to throw it. She wanted to throw it against the wall, hard, if necessary, and watch it break open. Let it go to pieces if it had to. She couldn’t shy away anymore.

  Maybe it would be a mess.

  And maybe after that they could clean it up.

  —

  Sasha didn’t know how to worry about all the things there were to worry about, so she decided to worry about a dress.

  In a strange burst of serendipity, Emma and Mattie were both home and wanted to go shopping with her. If they had tried to plan it, even weeks in advance, it never would have happened.

  “You already have a dress, Em,” Mattie pointed out as they got into Emma’s car.

  “I know. But I can still help Sasha.” Emma gave Mattie a look. “And you.”

  “You think you can tame the skank sister for introduction to Jamie’s parents,” Mattie suggested.

  Emma laughed, but not that hard.

  Walking along Main Street, East Hampton, amid the Lamborghinis and the balding men with supermodel girlfriends, between two of her three big sisters, Sasha felt her old uncertainties step right along with her.

  Emma and Mattie were tall and she was not. They strode on long legs and she stumbled along with her awkward gait, painfully aware of her wrongness, the turn of her foot. The more she thought about it, the more exaggerated it felt, until she was surprised she could walk at all.

  Emma was always “tall for her age,” until she was just plain tall. Mattie was the same. Even Quinn, built like a twelve-year-old boy, had at least two inches on her. Sasha remembered saying mournfully to Evie once, “I think I might not be tall for my age.”

  Her sisters endlessly ran, raced, and jumped; kicked things, threw things, and rode things. Sasha waited for her foot to go straight, which it eventually sort of did. Except on days like today, when it seemed to curl right back in.

  Sasha wondered, not for the first time, did her sisters ever tease her about it? Not to her face, which was fair game and expected, but behind her back? Did they tell Ray how graceless she was? The old fear meant a new thing to her now.

  They turned onto Newtown Lane and tried the trendy stores first, so brightly lit and brightly colored and brightly perfumed Sasha’s whole head hurt.

  “No,” Emma said to the mini–halter dress Mattie pulled out.

  “No,” she said to the skintight dress, the alligator-print dress.

  After a while Mattie and Sasha were just pulling out the most outrageous ones they could find for the fun of it.

  “No hot pink, no spandex, no feathers, no chains,” Emma stated.

  “I think we have to shop at Talbots,” Mattie complained.

  Sasha laughed. “I could just wear my school uniform.”

  Emma was becoming less amused. “I have to be at work by one,” she said. She steered them down the sidewalk and upstairs to an upscale secondhand place. “Less expensive and less slutty options,” she declared.

  Emma pulled a bunch of things and brought them to the dressing room. Sasha took a navy-blue-and-white-striped maxidress to humor her.

  “Does it come with a burqa?” Mattie asked through the curtain.

  Emma and Mattie were both waiting for her to come out. Sasha felt sweaty and mottled as she tried it on, in that particular fitting-room way. She felt like all the parts of her body were sticking out too far, trying too hard.

  “Well, look at you.” Emma studied her cleavage admiringly, resettled the waist of the dress on her. “Out of four we got one proper girl.”

  Mattie nodded. “Our own fertility goddess. It will be C-sections for the rest of us.”

  “I think you’re calling me fat,” Sasha said.

  “I’m calling you gorgeous,” Mattie said sincerely. Sometimes Mattie made her feel bad for the extra flesh, but today she was in a more generous mood.

  “Try the black one,” Mattie said.

  “Why aren’t you trying on any? Why is it just me?”

  “None are slutty enough,” Mattie said, giving Emma a sideways smile.

  Sasha dutifully tried the black one and came out, sweatily, for inspection.

  Emma turned her around by her shoulders. “Look at your tiny waist. I would show this off if I had it.”

  “Me too,” Mattie said.

  “If Mattie had your body she would never wear another stitch of clothing,” Emma proclaimed.

  “Just if it was cold,” Mattie agreed.

  The three of them gazed at her in the mirror. Sasha fidgeted with discomfort.

  It was hard to do this in front of them. For once, she really did care. August 9 was possibly the only day in her foreseeable life when she would see Ray face to face, in the flesh, and he would see her.

  She wanted to look pretty. She wanted him to think she was pretty. Would he? Would he ever think of her like that? Would he be astounded, horrified to know she thought of him like that? Because she suspected she did. In the midst of everything else, she was almost sure she did.

  She wanted it to be sexy, but not too sexy. She wanted attention, but only some attention and not from just anyone. She wanted a dog whistle of a dress, a frequency heard only by him. An inside joke, intimate but not funny.

  “Who are you dressing up for?” Emma asked.

  Sasha stopped breathing. She felt her face heat up in mortification. In the mirror she watched the redness crawl up her neck. “What?” Could Emma possibly know?

  “I always ask myself that,” Emma continued philosophically. “It was actually Myrna Chapman who brought it up once. She said, ‘When you really dress up, you’re almost always dressing up for someone in particular.’ ”

  Mattie was clowning around with a turquoise feather boa, but Emma had clearly tuned in to something. She arranged the hem of the black dress. “See, in my case I’m obviously dressing up for Jamie, but also for his mom, who I don’t even know. When I was picking out the dress, I realized I was really thinking about her.”

  Sasha swallowed. “What about you, Matt?”

  Mattie looked up. “Matt,” she answered.

  “Yourself?”

  “No, the other one. Matt Reese.”

  Emma let out a huff of breath. “Aren’t we all,” she said.

  “Seriously. I dress or fail to dress for him every day, but he doesn’t seem to notice.”

  Emma rolled her eyes. “How could he not notice? I’m sure he notices.”

  Mattie considered. “Then maybe it would be more accurate to say he doesn’t enjoy or appreciate my efforts.”

  “Then he might be the only one,” Sasha pointed out. “Cameron sure enjoys them.”

  Mattie made a face of disgust.

  Emma turned back to Sasha. “You still didn’t answer.”

  Sasha devoted her attention to a rack of clothing on wheels at the front of the dressing area. She seized on a beautiful color—something between celery and mint—and pulled it from the rack. She held it up. It was a slip dress in raw silk, three-quarter length and cut on the bias. It was ethereal but totally simple.

  She went back into the fitting room and pulled it over her head.

  She loved the feeling of it falling over her body, skimming her outlines but not pulling or sticking anywhere. Sheepishly she opened the curtain. She pushed her hot, heavy hair off her neck.

  Her two sisters stared.

  “I gawk,” Mattie said.

  “Wow, Sasha,” Emma said. “That’s the one.”

  Sasha turned, her skin prickling with the excitement of it. “Not too low-cut?”

  “No, just right,” Mattie said. “You’ve got to lose the bra,
though.”

  They stared for another moment.

  “Sash, it is not lost on me that you refuse to tell us who you are dressing up for. But whoever it is,” Emma proclaimed, “will absolutely fall in love.”

  “So I hope it’s not Jamie’s mother,” Mattie added.

  As far as Mattie was concerned, it was not a good time for Jonathan Dawes to pull into the dusty parking lot of Reeses’ Farm Stand.

  Maybe it was a good time.

  The engagement party, the great convergence of their lives, was less than forty-eight hours in the future, and what Mattie hoped would be an ennobling event turned out was not.

  At the house the lawn was unkempt and overgrown. When her dad got to the house on Sunday his hair would fly off his head. And Mattie could not sweet-talk or even bribe any of the local lawn service companies to come fix it. They’d all been burned in the battle of her parents at one time or another. Same story with the swimming pool company. And again with the outfit that was supposed to remove the tree that had fallen into the driveway. Most times Mattie didn’t particularly care about these things. But for this one day, she did.

  “We like getting paid. We don’t like affidavits,” said Mike of Hamptons Hedges.

  Fair enough.

  Not even the valet parker wanted to do business with them. “We’ve heard stories,” the guy said. “A house owned by enemies.”

  When Jonathan Dawes drove in, Mattie was sitting with her phone on her lap behind the counter under the shade of the oaks bunching cilantro, trying to locate the place where her father had rented a mower.

  She hadn’t really known she was mad at him until Jonathan Dawes swung shut the door of his rhubarb-red Prius and strode toward the farm stand. If he wasn’t surprised to see her, he was a pretty good actor.

  “Mattie,” he said, half like a question, his eyebrows elevating.

  She stood as he approached. She was glad there was a counter separating the space between them. She was relieved nobody else was around—no other customers or any Reeses for the moment. She didn’t reach out to hug him. She lifted her arms and hugged herself.

  “You work here?” he asked.