Brooke cracks the door and Gigi’s disembodied hand holds out a navy-and-white-striped cotton boatneck sweater, which is, in fact, “smart.” Brooke pulls it over her head and fastens the skirt. When she pops out of the dressing room, Gigi beams and claps her hands. “Aren’t you a beauty! Oh, Brooke, yes, you were right. It suits you!”
Brooke is so happy, she nearly starts to cry. She’s glad the others aren’t around. Things always work out like they’re supposed to, she thinks; Brooke and Gigi were meant to have this time to bond.
Brooke decides to buy the sweater as well as the skirt. Maybe she’ll wear this outfit tomorrow night for the pizza party, ice cream truck, and fireworks. When the cashier folds the skirt, she says, “The color will fade with a few washings.”
“Oh, yes, I know,” Brooke says. She hands the cashier her Visa, praying that Charlie in his desperation hasn’t done anything rash like run up a huge gambling debt with the Barstool Sports book. But the charge goes through smoothly; the cashier hands Brooke her shopping bag and Brooke floats out of the store.
She’s in such high spirits that she doesn’t see Electra until it’s almost too late. But some instinct makes Brooke turn, or perhaps it’s the bumblebee yellow of Electra’s dress or the Clydesdale clomping sound of her platform wedges on the crosswalk that catches Brooke’s attention. Electra is heading straight for them.
“Where to next?” Gigi asks.
Brooke cannot risk a run-in with Electra, but how will she avoid it? She takes Gigi’s arm and turns the corner, even though the street is, very clearly, residential.
“This way,” Brooke says, pulling Gigi along. She hears Electra call out, “Brooke!” but Brooke pretends not to hear. She speed-walks forward. (Thank God for her Skechers.)
She needs an escape route! It might have been okay to bump into Electra if she were alone, but she can’t introduce Gigi because it will get back to Hollis. To the left, Brooke sees what she thinks is a driveway… until she notices one of the tasteful Nantucket street signs; it says STONE ALLEY.
“I want to check this out,” Brooke tells Gigi, and she basically races down the steep cobblestone path tucked between the backs of the Main Street businesses and the sides of private homes. Electra won’t be able to pursue them in those wedges she’s wearing without snapping an ankle.
“This is so whimsical!” Gigi cries. “Like something from a storybook.”
Is it whimsical that Brooke is so desperate to avoid Electra that she’s bolting down the cobblestones, shopping bags slapping against her legs? She could easily break a bone herself but she doesn’t care; she has to get away. If Hollis finds out that Brooke and Electra reconnected, Hollis will never forgive her. Why on earth had Brooke agreed to have drinks with the woman? Why had she not confronted Electra about all the harm she’d caused? Instead, Brooke had genuflected at Electra’s altar; she had put the date of rock and roll football in her phone’s calendar.
Brooke keeps going all the way down the hill, Gigi following along, until the path becomes a set of stone steps that deposit them on Union Street. Brooke is out of breath and more than a little mortified. Gigi is going to think she’s a head case. And isn’t she?
But when Gigi catches up with her, she seems exhilarated. “That was a snazzy detour,” she says. “As we were descending, I could just picture whaling captains using that path to visit their mistresses. And Quaker girls in their frilled caps meeting their beaux for stolen kisses.”
Brooke no longer questions why Hollis invited Gigi to the Five-Star Weekend. The woman is an absolute delight.
Gigi looks at her phone. “It says there’s a place on the next block called the Handlebar Café. Shall we go get a coffee?”
“Yes, let’s!” Brooke says, now affecting a slight English accent of her own. “That would be just gorgeous.”
22. Under the Influence I
Dru-Ann is sorry she isn’t a better “gal pal” or whatever is expected of her this weekend, but she likes to shop alone. She knows what looks good on her and what doesn’t, and she gets in and out of stores as expediently as possible. She’s also a snob, and the prospect of popping into a bunch of shops that sell Nantucket T-shirts, brass porthole mirrors, or watercolors of the harbor makes her itch. Brooke wanted to go to Murray’s, which is where the women who hand out programs at the Episcopal church shop. No offense, but Dru-Ann’s tastes are a little more urban.
Gypsy does not disappoint. It’s in one of the grand old homes on Federal Street; it has a pleasant outdoor garden where two young women are sitting on a comfy-looking sofa with shopping bags at their feet. One of the women is Black with close-cropped hair, wearing fire-engine-red lipstick and head-to-toe Gucci. The other is a porcelain-skinned blonde in one of those long, floral, puff-sleeved dresses that make Dru-Ann think of Little House on the Prairie. The Gucci woman is showing Laura Ingalls something on her phone; Dru-Ann hears her say, “This was from the shoot at Rashad’s apartment on Bleecker.” They both look up as Dru-Ann approaches, and she smiles if only to prove that, even as a native Chicagoan, she can be nice to people from New York.
When Dru-Ann steps inside Gypsy, she enters her own personal fashion nirvana. She’s been looking for a particular Dries Van Noten shirtdress in amethyst that the website says is sold out, and she immediately spies it across the room. A tall, slender, painfully chic salesperson takes in Dru-Ann’s look—her Mother jeans, Golden Goose sneakers, Rick Owens tee under a cream linen Veronica Beard blazer—and gives her a nearly imperceptible nod of approval. Dru-Ann isn’t a day-tripper who has wandered in looking for “something cute to wear out for lobsters.” Dru-Ann belongs here.
“Welcome to Gypsy,” the salesperson says. “My name is Joey. May I offer you a glass of champagne?”
Does Dru-Ann want champagne at ten thirty in the morning? Hell yes she does. “I’d love it, thanks. My name is Dru-Ann.”
In a tiny but beautifully appointed kitchenette behind the counter, Joey pops a bottle of Mo?t et Chandon that’s sitting in ice. Dru-Ann is pleasantly surprised; she’d been expecting lukewarm prosecco. She accepts the flute from Joey, moves her sunglasses to the top of her head, and whisks the amethyst shirtdress in size small off the hook.
“I’ll start you a room,” Joey says.
Dru-Ann glides around the store, touching sleeves, holding up sweaters. They have the Nili Lotan pants that are all over the internet. Dru-Ann likes them in the eggshell but are they too trendy now? Would they qualify as “coastal grandma,” a look Dru-Ann is desperate to avoid? She sees a Raquel Allegra dress she’ll try on just for fun and an ivory camisole top by Chloe. She tries to banish Nick from her mind, though she can’t help but replay a Saturday only two weeks earlier—before the Dow Invitational disaster—when she and Nick had mimosas at the Hoxton, shopped the boutiques in the West Loop, had a very late lunch at Beatrix, then went back to Dru-Ann’s town house and had the kind of sex you see in movies. It feels very weird that Nick doesn’t know she’s on Nantucket—she mentioned the weekend to him when Hollis first invited her, but she doubts he remembers—and that she has no idea where Nick is today. He owns a lakefront estate in Winnetka, where he lives with Polly; he’s waiting for her to “launch” before he sells the big house and buys the penthouse at no. 9 Walton.
Is he home in Winnetka, Dru-Ann wonders, or did he fly to Scotland?
If Nick flew to Scotland, can Dru-Ann ever forgive him? Would her forgiving him even matter since they’ve “hit the brakes”? Dru-Ann throws back her champagne and picks up a red leather Isabel Marant motorcycle jacket. She’s going to… what? Spend money until the pain goes away?
The best thing about the other four stars, even Tatum, is that they have distracted her from thinking about all of this.
The two young women from the garden enter the store. They must be influencers, Dru-Ann thinks. They carry themselves as though the world is watching. Dru-Ann considers befriending them and seeing if they want to go to a bar. She can tell them about the Five-Star Weekend and how one of the other women hid a rubber snake in her sheets to settle a twenty-five-year-old grievance. Joey refills Dru-Ann’s champagne and whisks the motorcycle jacket to the dressing room. Dru-Ann follows him before she decides to try on the entire store.
The amethyst dress is a yes (she knew it), the Raquel Allegra is a no (Joey is refreshingly direct: “That’s not flattering on you”). The ivory camisole top underneath the red leather jacket is such a big hit that the influencers gravitate over, and the one in Gucci whips out her phone to take a picture.
“Is that Isabel Marant?” she asks.
“It is,” Dru-Ann says. She poses with her champagne. “I think I’ll treat myself today.”
Laura Ingalls billows over to the rack to check the price tag on the jacket. “Twenty-six hundred bucks,” she says with a note of awe in her voice.
Dru-Ann winks at Joey. “I’ll take the purple dress and the camisole.”
“Outstanding,” Joey says.