She could hear the fragments of a cheer coming from First Field, where the game was in its third quarter. It was the same cheer she had learned when she had arrived at Sheffield as a prep, the school’s term for freshmen. The cheer was a paean to the school’s mascot, a gryphon. Hearing it, a stooped man with watery blue eyes looked toward the sound and valiantly waved a tiny Sheffield flag, as though he were expecting troops from that direction to liberate him.
The cool gray stone of the field house offered respite from all the sound, and Evelyn followed the familiar path to the girls’ bathroom, past the hockey rink on one side and the water-polo pool on the other. Inside, under the fluorescent lights, Evelyn leaned over the gray-concrete slabs of the sink, which stank of beer (that was the recent alumni; she’d barely seen a beer among the older alums all day) and was littered with red plastic cups. She reached into her bag, pulled out a sunglasses case, flipped it open, and extracted a flannel lens cloth. Leaning so close that she could see the thin film of grease forming on her nose, she carefully rubbed one pearl earring to a Vermeer-like shine. It was pockmarked, she admitted, but in her usual self-examination that she performed before seeing her mother, she hadn’t caught it.
She briefly made eye contact with herself. Precisely one time, when she was twelve, she was told by one of her father’s law partners that she’d be a heartbreaker someday, but it had yet to come true. At twenty-six, she felt like she still hadn’t grown into her features, and if she hadn’t by now, she probably never would. Her hair was mousy brown and hung limply past her shoulders, her face was too long, her nose too sharp, her blue eyes too small. The only body part she thought was really spectacular was her pointer finger. She’d resisted her mother’s suggestions—“suggestions” was putting it mildly—of highlights, lowlights, a makeup session at Nordstrom. “You’re telling everyone around you that you don’t care,” Barbara liked to say.
At least at Sheffield-Enfield this weekend, she and her mother had reached a tentative truce. Going to the school was one thing Evelyn had done right in her mother’s eyes, even if, as Barbara said, Evelyn had failed to build on it. Evelyn had made a promising start when she became friends with Preston Hacking, a Winthrop on his mother’s side (“Fine old Boston family,” Barbara said) and, obviously, a Hacking on his father’s. She’d remained close with Preston, but she had failed to parlay that into anything useful, Barbara believed. Evelyn’s other best friend from Sheffield was Charlotte Macmillan, who was the daughter of a Procter & Gamble executive and whom her mother still referred to as “that girl in the pigtails” after the hairdo Char had worn when she first met Barbara.
Evelyn rubbed at the other earring. Folding her upper body over the sink until she was an inch from the mirror, she rotated and polished the earring, then rotated and polished it again for good measure. Her mother couldn’t get her on that front.
As she heard people approaching, she jumped back from the mirror and turned the faucet on, so when alumnae with maroon S’s on their cheeks burst in, she had a plausible explanation of what she had been up to. “Good game,” she said brightly, pulling a paper towel from the dispenser.
With the mud trying to suck off her ballet flats, Evelyn resumed her post at the card table behind her mother’s car and spread olive paste in careful curves on one of the offending pepper crackers.
“Well, well, well. If it isn’t my cheerful little earful.”
Preston Hacking’s voice was reedy and nasal and familiar, and, hearing it and seeing the edge of his worn-down Top-Siders behind her, Evelyn let the guarded smile that had been fixed on her face since she’d left the field house balloon to a full grin. She spun on her toes and threw her arms around Preston, who picked her up with a yelp, then set her back down, out of breath from the exertion.
Preston looked exactly the same as he had at Sheffield, tall and thin, with thick, loosely curled blond hair, red glasses, and lips that were always in a half smile, the fine features of someone who had never gotten into a fight and instead had politely submitted to the hazing imposed on the well-bred boys as preps. Evelyn remembered hearing he’d been duct-taped to the statue of the Sheffield founder for several hours and, upon release, had offered his tormentors a cigar that he had in his sport-coat pocket; it was a Cuban. An ancient, scratchy-looking Sheffield sweater was hooked over his elbow—his grandfather’s, or his great-grandfather’s, Evelyn couldn’t remember.
“Pres! I thought you were leaving me with the geriatric society. What took you so long?”
“I had, and still have, a massive hangover, and felt I could not take the cheer and school spirit of people such as you. Good God, woman, what was in those martinis last night?”
“Maybe they roofied you.”