Bittersweet

‘Inspection?’

‘Of the cottage.’

‘Who’s inspecting it?’

I could tell from the way she blinked straight ahead that my questions were an annoyance. ‘Daddy, of course.’

I tried to make my voice as benign as possible. ‘You sound concerned.’

‘Well of course I’m concerned,’ she said with a pout, ‘because if we don’t get that little hovel shipshape in less than a week, I won’t inherit it. And then you’ll go home and I’ll have to live under the same roof as my mother.’

Her mouth was set to snarl at whatever I said next, so instead of voicing all the questions flooding my mind – ‘You mean I might still have to go home? You mean you, of all people, have to clean your own house?’ – I looked across the tracks to a tangle of chickadees leapfrogging from one branch to the next, and sucked in the fresh northern air.

An invitation marks the beginning of something, but it’s more of a gesture than an actual beginning. It’s as if a door swings open and sits there gaping, right in front of you, but you don’t get to walk through it yet. I know this now, but back then, I thought that everything had begun, and, by everything, I mean the friendship that quickly burned hot between me and Ev, catching fire the night she told me of Jackson’s death and blazing through the spring, as Ev taught me how to dance, who to talk to, and what to wear, while I tutored her in chemistry and convinced her that, if she’d only apply herself, she’d stop getting Ds. ‘She’s the brainiac,’ she’d started to brag warmly, and I liked the statement mostly because it meant she saw us as a pair, strolling across the quad arm in arm, drinking vodka tonics at off-campus parties, blowing off her druggie friends for a Bogart movie marathon. From the vantage point of June, I could see my belonging sprouting from that day in February, when Ev had uttered those three dulcet words: ‘You should come.’

Over the course of the spring, in each note scribbled on the back of a discarded dry-cleaning receipt, in each secretive call to my dorm room, my mother had intimated I should be wary of life’s newfound generosity. As usual, I’d found her warnings (as I did nearly everything that flowed from her) Depressing, Insulting, and Predictable – in her way, she assumed Ev was just using me (‘For what?’ I asked her incredulously. ‘What on earth could someone like Ev possibly use me for?’). But I also assumed, once my father reluctantly agreed to the summer’s arrangement, that she would lay off, if only because, by mid-May, Ev had peeled her Winloch photograph off the wall, I’d put the bulk of my belongings into a wooden crate in the dorm’s fifth-floor attic, and my summer plans – as far as I saw them – were set in stone.

So the particular call that rang through Ev’s Upper East Side apartment, the one that came the June night before Ev and I were to get on that northbound train, was surprising. Ev and I were chopsticking Thai out of take-out containers, sprawled across the antique four-poster bed in her bedroom, where I’d been sleeping for two blissful weeks, the insulated windowpanes and mauve curtains blocking out any inconvenient sound blasting up from Seventy-Third Street (a blessed contrast to Aunt Jeanne’s wretched spinster cave, where I’d spent the last two weeks of May, counting down the days to Manhattan). My suitcase lay splayed at my feet. The Oriental rug was scattered with sturdy bags: Prada, Burberry, Chanel. We’d already put in our half-hour jog on side-by-side treadmills in her mother’s suite and were discussing which movie we’d watch in the screening room. Tonight, especially, we were worn out from rushing to the Met before it closed so Ev could show me her family’s donations, as she’d promised her father she would. I’d stood in front of two swarthily paired Gauguins, and all I could think to say was ‘But I thought you had three brothers.’

Ev had laughed and wagged her finger. ‘You’re right, but the third’s an asshole who auctioned his off and donated the proceeds to Amnesty International. Mum and Daddy nearly threw him off the roof deck.’ Said roof deck lay atop the building’s eighth floor, which was taken up entirely by the Winslows’ four-thousand-square-foot apartment. Even though I was naïve about the Winslows’ money, I already understood that what summed up their status resided not in their mahogany furnishings or priceless art but, rather, in the Central Park vistas offered from nearly every one of the apartment’s windows: a pastoral view in the middle of an overpopulated city, something seemingly impossible and yet effortlessly achieved.

I could only imagine how luxurious their summer estate would be.

At the phone’s second bleating, Ev answered in a voice like polished glass, ‘Winslow residence,’ looked confused for an instant, then regained her composure. ‘Mrs Dagmar,’ she enthused in her voice reserved for adults. ‘How wonderful to hear from you.’ She held the phone to me, then flopped onto the bed, burying herself in the latest Vanity Fair.

‘Mom?’ I lifted the receiver to my ear.

‘Honey-bell.’

Instantly, I could smell my mother’s pistachio breath, but any longing was pushed down by the memory of how these phone calls usually ended.

‘Your father says tomorrow’s the big day.’

‘Yup.’

‘Honey-bell,’ she repeated. ‘Your father’s set the whole thing up with Mr Winslow, and I don’t need to remind you that they’re being very generous.’

‘Yup,’ I replied, feeling myself bristle. Who knew what Birch had finally said to get my reluctant, sullen father to agree to let me miss three months of punishing labor, but whatever it was, it had worked, and thank god for it. Still, I found it borderline insulting to suggest my father had had anything to do with ‘setting the whole thing up’ when he’d barely tolerated it, and was reminded of how my mother always sided with him, even when (especially when) her face held the pink imprint of his hand. My eyes scanned the intricate pattern of Ev’s rug.

‘Do you have a hostess gift? Candles maybe? Soap?’

‘Mom.’

Ev glanced up at the sharpness in my voice. She smiled and shook her head before drifting back into the magazine.

‘Mr Winslow told your father they don’t have service up there.’

‘Service?’

‘You know, cell phone, Internet.’ My mother sounded flustered. ‘It’s one of the family rules.’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Look, I’ve got to—’

‘So we’ll write then.’

‘Great. Bye, Mom.’

‘Wait.’ Her voice became bold. ‘There’s something else I have to tell you.’

I absentmindedly eyed a long, thick bolt on the inside of Ev’s bedroom door. In the two weeks I’d slept in that room, I’d never given it much thought, but now, examining how sturdy it looked, I was struck with wondering: why on earth would a girl like Ev want to lock out any part of her perfect life? ‘Yes?’

‘It’s not too late.’

‘For what?’

‘To change your mind. We’d love to have you home. You know that, don’t you?’

I almost burst out laughing. But then I thought of her burned meat loaf, sitting, lonely, in the middle of the table, with just my father to share it. Microwaved green beans, limp, in their brown juices. Rum and Cokes. No point in rubbing my freedom in. ‘I need to go.’

‘Just one more thing.’

It was all I could do not to slam the receiver down. I’d been perfectly warm, hadn’t I? And listened plenty? How could I ever make her understand that this very conversation with her, laden with everything I was trying to escape, made Winloch, with no cell phones or Internet, sound like heaven?

I could feel her trying to figure out how to put it, her exhalations flushing into the receiver as she formulated the words. ‘Be sweet,’ she said finally.

‘Sweet?’ I felt a lump rise in my throat. I turned from Ev.

‘Be yourself, I mean. You’re so sweet, Honey-bell. That’s what Mr Winslow told your dad. You’re a “gem,” he said. And, well’ – she paused, and, despite myself, I hung on her words – ‘I just want you to know I think so too.’

How could she still make me hate myself so readily? Remind me that I could never undo what I had done? The lump in my throat threatened to well into something more. ‘I’ve got to go.’ I hung up before she had the chance to protest.

But I hadn’t caught my tears in time. They flowed, hot and angry, down my cheeks against my will.

‘Mothers are such lunatic bitches,’ Ev quipped after a moment.

I kept my back to her and tried to gather my strength.

‘Are you crying?’ She sounded shocked.

I shook my head, but she could see that was exactly what I was doing.

‘You poor kitten,’ she soothed, her voice turning velvety, and, before I knew it, she was wrapping me in a tight embrace. ‘It’ll be all right. Whatever she said – it doesn’t matter.’

I had never let Ev see me walloped, had felt sure that, if she did, she would be fruitless in her comforting. But she held me firmly and uttered calm and soothing words until my tears weren’t so urgent.

‘She’s just – she’s not – she’s everything I’m afraid of becoming,’ I said finally, trying to explain something I’d never said out loud.

‘And that may be the only way that your mother and my mother are exactly the same.’ Ev laughed, offering me a tissue, and then a sweater from a bag on the floor, azure and soft, adding, ‘Put it on, you pretty thing. Cashmere makes everything better.’