I check my phone. 12:47. Yvette said to arrive at 12:30 on the nose, which was anal and unlike her, but I figured it was because she wanted me to get there before Jen. She’s been out here two days already, trying to enjoy the peace and quiet before the weekend’s open house. I wait until my phone says 12:48 to knock again. Still nothing.
I cup my hands around my eyes and press my nose to the panel of windows shouldering the front door. Jesus. The house is now a Tibetan fur fever dream: shag white carpet, shag white side chairs, shag white throw pillows on the blessedly un-shaggy white linen couch. All this distinctively fuzzy décor paired with cold white stone floors. Limestone is what Jen went with, I recall Yvette telling me. It’s slippery when wet—which makes perfect sense for a beach house with a pool. I’m afraid someone’s going to crack their head open, Yvette confided in me.
My sigh fogs the window, and I wipe it clean with my shoulder, searching in my bag for my phone.
“Hello,” Yvette says, on the third ring. Her hello is always the same, a velvety hell-low-ah, managing to be both unrecognizing and deeply intimate at the same time.
“Hiya,” I say. “It’s Brett.”
There is a pause. “Honey,” she says, “everything okay?”
“Ah, yeah.” I laugh. “Where are you?”
There is another pause. “What do you mean?”
“I mean.” I slap away a mosquito on my thigh. I wonder if Stephanie will be avoiding the Hamptons this summer on account of Zika. Seems unlikely. “You told me to come at twelve-thirty.” I wait for her to remember but she doesn’t. “So . . . I’m here.”
“Where?”
“Yvette!” I cry, exasperated. “The house in Amagansett!”
Yvette mumbles something to herself I can’t make out. “I thought we said Sunday,” she says. I can picture her squinting at the Imagined Desks of Historical Women calendar I gave her last Christmas, Mary Shelley with a glass of white wine next to her pen. “Is it Sunday?”
I suffer a spike of fear as I realize this isn’t Yvette being flaky, this is Yvette being in her late sixties and having trouble with her memory. “No, it’s Friday,” I say, gently. “We said Friday.”
“Honey, I am getting so old!” Yvette chuckles. “I come out tomorrow. Jen was coming this afternoon to show the house to a listing agent. I must have gotten my days screwed up.”
I squeeze my eyes shut and exhale hard. I’m stranded in the Hamptons with only the Green Menace to take me in.
“I feel horrible,” Yvette says, though she doesn’t sound horrible. She sounds like she’s in the middle of plucking her eyebrows or some other banal but satisfying activity, like I’ve interrupted her pleasantly productive afternoon. “Jen should be there soon. Why don’t you just wait for her?”
A smattering of raindrops cool my scalp. “It’s about to pour.”
“I don’t mean outside. The key is under the rock in the second planter around back. Let yourself in. Make some lunch. Jen had scheduled a FreshDirect delivery for twelve-thirty.” In an offhand manner that seems anything but offhand, she asks, “Is it there?”
FreshDirect. I wouldn’t take Jen to be so provincial. I scan the front patio, spotting faster with raindrops by the second, but I don’t see a delivery. “Nothing. No. It’s really starting to come down again.”
“Hmmm.” Yvette sounds concerned. “They might have dropped it off by the back door. Would you check?”
“Yvette, I’m sorry, but I’m not staying. I don’t feel comfortable being here without you.”
“Would you at least bring the food inside so it doesn’t spoil?”
I drop my arm by my side, shutting my eyes and taking a deep, calming breath. I return the phone to my ear and force a smile so that it sounds in my voice. “Sure.”
I unlatch the gate and walk parallel to the house. I can see the new pool, its tarp littered with leaves and dead bugs and one lone Solo cup.
“The delivery’s back here,” I tell her, as I round the corner and spot the cardboard FreshDirect boxes, soggy from the rain, piled two deep next to the double patio doors that have replaced the sliding door with the screen that used to always jump the track. The rain has almost washed away the ink on the note taped to the top box: two attempts to contact, left unattended per directions.
“Oh, good!” Yvette says. “Well, help yourself to anything you want—”
“I’ll just grab something at Mary’s Marvelous on my way out—”
“It’s fifteen dollars for a salad there!”
“Good thing I don’t eat salad then.” I locate the key and fit it into the lock. “I’m going now. I need both hands for this.”
“You are a lifesaver!” Yvette says. “Thank you. I am so sorry about today. But you won’t regret this.”
“Thanks, Yvette,” I say, hanging up and puzzling briefly over her last statement. What won’t I regret, exactly?
I hear a car chewing up the pebbled drive and I brace myself, thinking it’s Jen, but it continues down the road. Every crevice of my body is wet with sweat and the rest of me is catching up in the rain. I decide that’s the only scare I need—I cannot be here when Jen arrives. We might both die of discomfort.
I squat and hoist a box into the crooks of my elbows. I’ve not taken one step when the waterlogged bottom gives out, like one of those commercials showing what happens to bargain paper towels when tested with too much blue detergent. Jen’s groceries spray everywhere: on my shoes and bare legs and the fresh whitewashed oak porch. Mother. Fucker.
I step onto the lawn, wiping my feet on the wet grass like a dog, leaving behind what looks like yellow spittle. Egg, I realize, gross. It takes me a moment to connect the dots, because unlike Jen, I am not a masochist in a voluntary state of sustained primal hunger to meet the patriarchal-mandated beauty ideal. I eat eggs for breakfast and put cream in my coffee and cheese on my sandwiches and oh my God, bacon. That is a package of uncured bacon, seeping its pink bacony juice onto the new porch. It’s like a puzzle overturned on the table: Only when everything is laid out in front of you can you really start putting all the pieces together. Jen’s healthy, long hair. Her four-pound weight gain.
I hear another car approach, and I wait, unmoving, as its old engine fusses nearer. There is one short burst of hard rain, like someone has taken a cloud and wrung it out over my head, but I do not seek cover. The car door slams shut and Jen calls out, nervously, hopelessly, “Yvette?” My heart is banging like a gavel; hers must be too. She knows that’s my car in the driveway.
I listen to the gate open, to Jen’s careful footsteps on the slippery deck. I have to look away when she sees me. I can’t bear to see her so vulnerable and exposed. I have earned each and every unkind feeling I have toward Jen after the way she’s spoken about me to America. I get to feel vindicated by the discovery that the nation’s most sanctimonious vegan has been skulking around ordering bacon off the Internet like contraband. It’s turkey bacon. But still. She has no right to make that tragic face and make me feel bad, nearly empathetic, for her.
I make an intense project out of cleaning my shoes in the grass and speak casually. “I think it was from the rain. The boxes just fell apart when I picked them up.” I’m quick to add, “Yvette told me to bring them inside.”
I only look up when I hear Jen fit her key into the lock. She disappears inside, the door latching shut slowly but firmly behind her. For a moment, I think that’s it. Jen is just going to stay inside until I leave, maybe even for the rest of her life, so that she never has to deal with the fallout from this. It’s not the worst strategy.
But after a few moments, Jen reappears with a beach towel slung over her shoulder and some green plastic trash bags. She offers me the beach towel and shakes open a garbage bag. She picks up each grocery item and examines it for damage, setting it aside or throwing it out, depending. I don’t know what else to do other than help.