“I’m going to the beach,” Sarah says. “I’ll see you there.” She leaves via the room’s private terrace. Lauren lies on the bed for twenty minutes, staring at the ceiling, before joining the rest of the party in the cabana they’ve reserved until noon. The car will take them to the airport at one thirty.
She will shower, one final, hot shower in this glorious bathroom, though her hair will still feel salty, her feet still sandy. She will put on the jeans and the shirt and the cardigan, though it’s too hot for a cardigan, because it will be cold on the plane, she knows. She will leave behind the three issues of The New Yorker that she’d brought with her, having read them entirely, except for one article about baseball. She will leave behind twenty dollars on the nightstand, for the housekeeper. She will scurry through the lobby and into the car quickly, but she won’t see the waiter, so it’s fine. She won’t watch while Sarah signs the bill, which she’s already told them all repeatedly she’s going to do and therefore none of them will put up any kind of fuss about it. She will be quiet on the car ride to the airport, they will all be quiet on the car ride to the airport, studying their phones, already thinking about work, and boyfriends and husbands or lack of boyfriends and husbands, about winter coats and the way the city smells when it’s cold outside. The sky will grow dark as the plane continues north, and the city will come into focus as light, a glorious array of lights, as the plane dips below the clouds and the pilot gives his well-rehearsed speech about not moving about the cabin and so on. And she will know that when the pilot says the words Flight attendants, prepare for arrival, that will mean arrival is truly imminent, because the approach to the city is a long one, the lights misleading; you will think you’re there but you’re still a ways off, and then there it is, nearer, nearer, so near it seems you’ll plunge into the sea, it seems the plane’s wheels will skim the roofs of the cars on the highways, but none of that will happen, all will be well.
Chapter 13
The people on the street—the disappointed-looking businessman with snow on the cuffs of his pants, the Chinese grandmother moving very slowly, umbrella doing little to protect her, the postman in his cloudy blue fatigues—seem defeated. A sadness more persistent than the snow seems to settle on the city. We think of January as winter’s heart, but in truth, it’s only its beginning. There is much yet to get through.
Sarah doesn’t succumb to this sadness. She feels liberated. Christmas had been so much distraction. One of Huck’s timeworn jokes: Their religion is gift giving. For Christmas, you didn’t ask for humble, stupid things, common, cheap things, because those you’d get anyway: stockings stuffed full of card games and candies, tiny, plastic things meant for Barbie; later, earrings and bracelets and rolled-up pairs of tights; later still, gift cards and jewelry with a more adult seriousness, no charms in the shapes of cats. At ten: a horse, a beautiful young thing, called Bellatrix. She boarded in the Bronx, and Sarah’s mother drove her up twice a week to ride. That had been her year of the horse. Her clothes were equestrian, the books she read heroic narratives about girls riding through danger or somehow, with the intercession of their fearless steeds, saving the family farm. Her allowance was saved for a dreamt-of new saddle, so expensive that it would have taken her literal years to accrue enough, but somehow that never occurred to her, as a child.
She lost interest, of course. Kids lose interest, and Bellatrix was sold three years later. Later, at fifteen, she’d realize how weirdly sexual it is, this thing with girls and horses, and she’d feel strange. That year: Cartier watch. Again, much desired; she wears it even now. She had wept viciously the day she’d misplaced it in the locker room before swim class, but one of the custodians had seen it on the bench, taken it to the main office for safekeeping, and her anguish had lasted only an hour or so. Then at seventeen: the car, the compact BMW she’d wanted, but in blue, which Huck had deemed more sensible than red, and not a convertible, because Lulu was convinced that in an accident you’d be decapitated.