Ainsley did not deign to respond. Her mother could ground her, and her mother could drown her phone, but her mother could not make her speak.
Ainsley spent the majority of her time in lockdown worrying. Ainsley and Teddy had planned on going to dinner at the Jetties, where, it was rumored, G. Love was going to play a surprise set. They had heard this from Teddy’s uncle Graham, who would be shucking oysters and clams at the raw bar. With Ainsley grounded, Teddy might offer to take Emma to the Jetties instead. As Ainsley lay in bed watching reruns of Chopped on TV, Emma and Teddy might be drunk and swaying together in the crush of people energized by G. Love’s magical appearance. They might kiss. Emma is a thrill seeker without morals; she would think nothing of stealing Ainsley’s boyfriend. Ainsley wants to hate Emma, but she can’t, so Ainsley hates Tabitha.
Tabitha had started drinking wine at five o’clock—the expensive Nicolas-Jay Pinot Noir, from the Willamette Valley in Oregon, that she used to drink before Ramsay put her on rosé. Tabitha had then asked Ainsley if she wanted a glass.
Ainsley had thrown her mother a look of contempt. What mixed messages she was sending! The whole reason Ainsley was under house arrest was because she had been drinking (and smoking weed and turning the living room into a frat house), and what does Tabitha do? Offer Ainsley a glass of wine. Ainsley was so agitated about the Emma-Teddy scenario forming in her mind that she could have used a drink. But three years earlier, when Ainsley was first experimenting with alcohol, she had consumed a bottle and a half of the Nicolas-Jay Pinot Noir. It was delicious, she’d thought initially—like a rich, plummy juice. But shortly afterward, she’d started puking purple. She would never drink red wine again.
Tabitha passed out by nine, and Ainsley would have sneaked out at that point, except that Eleanor had been alerted to her granddaughter’s escapades, and an alarm had been activated that would sound if anyone broke the threshold of the driveway in either direction. There would be no coming or going that night.
Ainsley had ended up paging through the photo albums by herself, and she had to admit it was fascinating. There were clippings of Billy and Eleanor on the society pages of the Boston Globe—in every photo, Billy leaned in to kiss Eleanor’s cheek while she gave the camera a brilliant smile. They looked pretty much in love to Ainsley. There was another photo in the album that showed Eleanor, enormously pregnant—the size of a hippo, really—draped in a yellow dress that might also have been a pup tent. Billy wore square wire-framed glasses and white bell-bottoms and a white patent leather belt, and he held up two fingers over Eleanor’s shoulder. So… this was the day they found out they were having twins. The dates were stamped onto all the photos, and this one said: OCTOBER 10, 1977. Ainsley felt like she knew that Grammie didn’t discover she was having twins until very late in the pregnancy, and now she sees it was only six or eight weeks before the twins were born.
This is what baffles Ainsley about the olden days, before technology: people didn’t know anything. There were no ultrasounds to tell Grammie she was having two babies instead of one. There was no Internet. How did anyone know anything without the Internet? Really, Ainsley can’t figure that one out. And there were no cell phones. How did a person live without a cell phone? Ainsley was doing it right now, and it was very stressful. She might have logged on to her laptop and checked Facebook or Instagram to see if Emma had posted anything about going to the Jetties with Teddy, but Tabitha had changed the Wi-Fi password, just as she’d promised.
Most of the rest of the pictures were of her mother and Aunt Harper. They looked exactly alike: there was no possibility of telling them apart, and Ainsley wondered if when they were babies their identities had been switched, then switched again—maybe switched infinite times—until the day they were old enough to speak and say their names out loud. Then whoever they happened to be that day stuck. Eleanor always dressed them in matching outfits that she made herself, using her turquoise Singer sewing machine (which she still had and always claimed she was going to donate to the Smithsonian). There were green gingham jumpers with giraffes appliquéd on the front; there were pink party dresses with borders of purple sequins at the bottom; there were black velvet dresses at Christmas. Who put two-year-olds in black? Ainsley wondered.
Only Eleanor. It was well documented that Eleanor Roxie-Frost got her big break in fashion when Diana Vreeland happened across the twins wearing yellow linen shifts during a playground outing on Boston Common in 1980. Those dresses were miniature versions of what would become the Roxie. It had been in the era of women’s lib, and Eleanor Roxie-Frost became a textbook case. She went from being a stay-at-home mother of twins designing clothes for her daughters and herself to a fashion-design sensation featured in Vogue nearly every month. When the twins were in high school, Eleanor found retail space on Newbury Street and opened her flagship store there. The store had been a good thing and a bad thing, because Eleanor became so busy being a famous fashion designer that something in her life had to go. That something was Billy. Ainsley’s grandparents got divorced, a fact that Ainsley always found embarrassing. Around half of her friends’ parents were divorced, but grandparents were meant to stay together until they keeled over from being so old.
Even stranger and more unsettling was that, after the divorce, Aunt Harper had gone with Billy and Tabitha had stayed with Eleanor, a custody agreement that seemed to have been borrowed from The Parent Trap. The Frost family had split right down the middle, like one of these photographs torn in half—Billy holding one twin, Eleanor the other.