Tonight the Streets Are Ours

The problem for my brother, though, is that he is everything my dad wants in a son: respectable and honest and business-minded. Which means he doesn’t get ignored and condescended; he gets all the attention, all that suffocating attention, because he should know better and should do better. I don’t know how he stands it, but maybe he doesn’t know how I stand it, either.

Anyway. Whine, whine, whine, it’s all beside the point, because this weekend didn’t feel like that, for once. This weekend was good. Mom was gone, Dad was grilling meat, everyone else was there eating it. And I do mean everyone. Even though obviously the Hamptons house is there year-round and we could go any time, the truth is that Hamptons season ends at Labor Day weekend. Coffee shops with a half-hour-long line today will have a handful of customers this time next week. So last night we were closing out the season, if not the house itself, in force.

Julio kept cannonballing into the pool, and Uncle Todd was there being Uncle Todd, and Trotsky had invited over some heiress he met on the beach on Friday, and there were, like, five dogs running around and playing catch and I don’t know who any of them belonged to. It was chaos and I loved it and I just hope that none of the photos we were taking get seen by my mother, ever. The moment when one of the dogs stole a steak off the grill and then dropped it in the pool was priceless, and it would give my mother a heart attack, for no good reason, since nobody was hurt, except for the cow who gave its life, I guess.

Leo had brought Bianca, which is how you know things are getting serious between them, because I have never known him to invite a girl out to the Hamptons for the weekend. It made me feel sick to see them together, and to know what that signified about their relationship. He goes to college next week, and obviously she’ll still be in the city, and I wonder if I’ll see her more now that he’s going to be physically out of the picture, or less, now that the official glue to bind us together will be out of town. Or maybe the distance will tear them apart anyway. Maybe he’ll fall for some college girl and Bianca will be just a distant memory for him. That would be nice.

Not that he’s going so far away. And he’s arranged his schedule so all his classes are just Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. He kept chattering about how excited he was about that. So he could come back to see Bianca any time.

If I only had to go to class three days a week, I could write a novel with all my time off. I could write freaking Don Quixote if I had as much time as Leo has. After he bragged about it for the third time, I asked what exactly he was planning to produce with all his spare time. He told me to shut up.

It was late, late, late by the time everyone went home or just crashed at our place. It’s a big house, lots of beds, so no big deal, and some of those people were wasted. Probably everyone in the Hamptons was wasted last night, though. It would have been competitive for anyone to get a taxi home.

It was a beautiful night and I didn’t feel like going inside, not least because the last time I checked, Julio and some famous painter’s daughter were making out in my bed. I just lay out in one of the deck chairs, staring up at the stars, until the fire in the grill had been put out and the dogs had been kenneled and the beer had been finished and everyone had gone to wherever everyone goes. I think they all forgot about me. I think I fell asleep.

I woke up to the very quiet sound of waves. Our house is beachfront property, so you can always hear the ocean waves, but this was different. Quiet and different.

I opened my eyes and saw someone swimming laps through the pool. It was pretty dark, so I just saw the shape of a person moving smoothly and rhythmically through the water.

Maybe she sensed me watching her, because after she finished her next lap, she hoisted herself up the ladder and out of the pool, walking over to stand in front of me, her wet feet a quiet slap slap slap on the pavement.

“Bianca,” I said. “What are you doing up?” She looked black and white in the moonlight, like an old photograph of someone you’ll never really meet.