Stay The Way You Are (A Nice, Reliable, Settled, Comfortable Woman) - Part One
Helena
Helena had brought up Christina's idea for a pool party over dinner, and Nate, always indulgent when it came to Christina's whims, reacted no differently to this one, not only agreeing to it but also suggesting that they have the pool cleaned in preparation for it. She wanted to tell him then as she had a million times before that as hard as he worked to make Christina like him, the more Christina disliked him. Helena thought the dislike unfounded and based mainly on her daughter's resentment that it was Nate and not Gigi to whom she was engaged, but she had been unsuccessful in making Christina acknowledge that Nate had any good qualities other than an "awesome pool," and when Helena had pointed out to her that a pool was a possession and not a quality, Christina had imperturbably replied, "That was the only one I could think of, so now he's down to zero good qualities," and put back in the one earbud she had removed to listen to her mother.
She pushed at the halibut on her plate, imagining Myka with those damnably attractive Clark Kent glasses crying out at the further despoliation of Atlantic Ocean fisheries. Nate, with a native Midwesterner's suspicion of any finned creature that wasn't a lake-bred fish, was finishing his steak. "You're indulging her," she murmured.
"It's not like I'm going to be there to use it. I have that trip to Brazil next week," he said, popping the last bite of steak into his mouth. "You said you were thinking of coming with me."
"I have clients I've been neglecting, and now that the pool party is on my list of things to do, I should get the house as well as the pool ready."
"That's what I have a cleaning staff for. You can fly out with me on Tuesday and come back on Friday night."
She shook her head, but he didn't try to press her further, only shrugging and taking a sip of his wine, nodding at other diners he knew as he let his eyes rove the room. She and Christina had more or less moved into his place at the beginning of June when school had ended, and in the two months since then, she had seen him barely a quarter of the time. She had had hopes that their moving in with him and Adelaide might move along their wedding plans, which were only vaguely coalescing around a spring wedding "next year." It wasn't that she couldn't wait to become Mrs. Nate Robinson, but she and Nate had been engaged for six months and in a relationship for over a year. It was time. She hadn't expected to be sitting across from this man in a New York restaurant which had a waiting list that extended months for ordinary mortals and wearing his ring - she had had far different expectations three years ago when she had managed to wear Charles down into accepting her idea that a Future Image office in the larger Midwest that existed outside Chicago made sense - but it was where she had ended up. There were certainly worse fates and worse men, regardless of what Christina thought.
She had possibly filed down the rough edges a bit when she had described to Myka how she and Nate had met, laughingly characterizing their first meeting as a collision between a "hard-headed businessman and a woman who represented what was 'mere puffery' to him, only sparks could fly from that." No sparks had flown on either side, and it had hardly been a collision either. In fact, their first meeting had been very much a business meeting, and some 13 months later, Helena couldn't entirely shake the feeling that their relationship was, to some extent, an extended business meeting, with benefits. But even those were somewhat lacking . . . .
"There's Bill McDermott, hon, smile and give him a wave," Nate encouraged her, smiling and waving at a portly man leaving the restaurant with a woman 25 years younger. Stretching her lips into a smile that matched Nate's, Helena waved and, taking a closer look at the woman, added ten years to her age. Watching them disappear toward the entrance, Nate said softly, "Rumor has it that he's looking to sell his shipping firm."
"I thought you wanted to concentrate on your core business," Helena said wryly, allowing the waiter who discreetly approached their table to take her plate.
"My core business is making money," he joked, "and if I can cut out the middleman and ship my fertilizer and ethanol myself . . . that's a cost savings." With an inquiring look at Helena, who gave him another a shake of her head, he told their waiter, "No dessert, just the check, please."
They would be going back to their hotel. Nate hadn't gotten out of his last meeting until after 7:00, and they would be meeting another couple, the husband the manager of a hedge fund in which Nate was an investor and the wife an attorney for a law firm that Nate kept on retainer, for brunch and a round of golf tomorrow morning. So much for a romantic weekend getaway. To be fair to Nate, he hadn't pitched it to her that way, he had explained that most of the time he would be involved in meetings or attending dinners or other social events that were, essentially, offsite business meetings, but she had wanted the two of them to carve out a little time for themselves, never more so than after her museum "date" with Myka and Maddie.
The deliberate recollection of Myka in her in teal polo shirt and forest green twill skirt, finished off with Neanderthal-era footwear (those sandals made anyone's feet, even Myka's, look as wide and flat as the Flintstones') did little to offset her memory of those eyes with their strangely charming combination of uncertainty and amusement. Clark Kent always had Lois Lane's number, even at his most bumbling. When she wasn't remembering how Myka looked or moved or sounded, she was imagining how Myka might look, might move in a swimsuit. Granted, Myka was almost 20 years older than when Helena had first seen her . . . unencumbered . . . of most of her clothing, but she still looked fit, fitter now perhaps than back then when they were stuffing themselves with midnight deliveries of pizza and wings or Sunday brunch cinnamon rolls. Myka had protested at the excess frosting on the rolls, but she had come up with a more satisfactory disposal method, scooping it up with her finger and then holding her finger a millimeter from –
Helena choked on the wine she was trying to swallow and tested the temperature of the bath, batting away bubbles until she could dabble her fingertips in the water. She might prefer to be dabbling them in icing given the choice, but though she had tried to coax Nate into taking a bubble bath with her or doing something, anything other than opening his laptop and reading the email that had piled up in his inbox during dinner, he had regretfully but firmly declined. She could read her email too; in fact, she probably should. There was a reality TV star whose recently posted rap sheet was thwarting his attempts to translate his smirking appearance on a dating show into an acting career, and he had been pleading with her daily to "MAKE THIS GO AWAY." But this was their time together, her and Nate's, not her and Myka's rewarmed and revisited, and certainly not her and Aaron Bradley's, he with his disdainful pout, which, while it might drive mere girls into raptures - and had during the most recent season of Put a Ring on It - left her feeling both impatient and not a little old.
With more dejection than the moment really merited, she took off her robe and slid into the bathtub, leaving her wine glass within easy reach. A few minutes later, or maybe it was closer to 20, she wasn't sure, except that the level of wine in her glass had been substantially reduced, there was a soft knock on the door. Nate sheepishly, apologetically entered. "I'm a class A idiot. I have a beautiful fiancée who wants to enjoy a romantic bubble bath with me, and I say, 'No thanks, honey, I'd rather read a bunch of reports that can wait until tomorrow.' Still willing to share those bubbles with me?"
Her night got much better after that, but not so good that it completely drove from her mind the image of green eyes behind Clark Kent glasses.
Christina
If Gigi were a color, she would be silver. Not because she was old (although Christina had heard Uncle Charles murmur to her mother more than once, "She's like Melisandre. When she thinks she's alone, off comes the jewelry and she ages a hundred years") and not because she was hard or cold like metal (Gigi was super nice, at least to her) but because silver reflected everything and showed nothing of itself. If you were wearing a red shirt and blue pants and standing next to a silvery piece of metal, that's what you would see - red and blue. Gigi kind of operated like that. Whenever her mom had her stay with Gigi, she was always "What do you want to do, Christina?" And they would do it - the art museum, movies, parks, the mall, whatever. It was kind of mean, Christina admitted to herself, but just to test her, she had asked Gigi one time if they could go horseback riding. She had no interest in horses, and she guessed that Gigi, who liked her comforts and wasn't afraid to say so, had no interest in sitting in a saddle and jouncing around either, but after a long pause, Gigi took in a breath and said, "Sure we can. I'll check into some riding stables."
So they had gone and all she had gotten from it was a sore butt from the jouncing around, but Gigi had gotten two dates, one with their instructor, who wore a cowboy hat and bragged to Gigi about the rodeos he had been in, and one with a woman who didn't like horses but was there because someone had given her the lesson as a birthday present. Christina had found her as annoying as the instructor because she kept referring to Gigi as "your mother" although they looked nothing alike. Gigi didn't want either date particularly, but that sort of thing tended to happen to her. But dates you didn't want were better than a sore butt, and Gigi didn't even have that. The next day she could barely walk while Gigi was running around everywhere.
It was hard to put your finger on Gigi because she was never under it when you looked. She was always somewhere else. Gigi was . . . elusive. It was a good word. (Maddie would tell her to use it three times right away so she would remember it, but it was her philosophy that if she needed to use the word again, it would be there.) Elusive silver. She liked the way it sounded; it could be the title of a picture. Actually, Gigi looked silvery. Her hair was a silvery blond where it wasn't streaked darker blond or even brown; "frosted blond" was how Gigi described it. "You've changed hair color so many times, it's frozen in indecision," Christina had heard her mother say. Gigi had laughed, firing back, "At least my hair isn't Maleficent black." Gigi's eyes were light, too, her irises such a pale blue that they seemed transparent. "The color of London rain," Gigi had said, and her mom had dryly countered with "More like acid rain."
Gigi was in "image consulting," too, although she had only one client, the mayor. Not long after they had moved to the Midwest from New York, her mom had met Gigi "while trying to steal the mayor." That's what Gigi had called it. "I offered him the resources and expertise of a firm known in the field." That's what her mom had called it. Gigi was the mayor's spokesperson, but whenever she was called that, on TV or in the newspapers, her mom would roll her eyes and mutter "Just like Rasputin was only the Romanovs' spiritual advisor." Christina didn't have to know who Rasputin or the Romanovs were to know her mom wasn't being complimentary, and yet, weirdly, she was. "Nothing clings to him," her mother had groused admiringly one morning when they were eating breakfast. She flipped the newspaper over but not before Christina had glimpsed the mayor's picture and partial headline . . . "Charges Dropped."
Gigi made other people elusive. Gigi was . . . stealthy. That was another good word Christina had learned a long time ago. She looked up from her sketch pad. All she could see of Gigi was two feet with impeccably painted toenails crossed on a sofa arm. The rest of her was lost somewhere among the biggest, deepest, plushest cushions Christina had ever seen. The only evidence of Gigi for the past half-hour or so had been her feet and her voice, which, like the rest of her, was silvery, too. Laughing and fleeting and bright. She was talking to the mayor or one of the mayor's team. Christina could tell the difference because Gigi's voice became very smooth, like silver syrup or silver butter, when she talked to the mayor. Her voice would carry away anything that might cling to him. It wasn't butter or syrup now. It sounded sort of clipped, like she was annoyed.
The call ended and then Gigi was up, passing the table and ruffling Christina's hair as she entered the kitchen. She opened a cabinet and pulled out a box of microwave popcorn. "I need a break. How about you?"
They needed an ally, she and Maddie. They needed someone stealthy, someone who could make them elusive, because while she was no slouch when it came to . . . arranging . . . things, they were up against her mom. "Gigi, I need your help."
At first, it hadn't been very promising. When she had asked Gigi if she could keep a secret, Gigi had gotten a "mom" face and said, "Not if it's something your mother needs to know." Then when she had said that it was Nate and not wanting to live with him in that . . . mausoleum (she wasn't quite sure what it meant but she knew it wasn't good) . . . Gigi's eyes had gotten wide and alarmed, and she had had to reassure her that Nate wasn't a perv just boring (and not worthy of her mom, but Christina wasn't going to get into that). It had gotten a little better when she got to the camp part and meeting Maddie, but Gigi still hadn't looked very enthusiastic. It wasn't until she tried to explain her mom and Myka's history and the magic words had popped out -
"Maddie says our moms were, like, crazy about each other, 'gooey-eyed,' she said, and –"
"'Gooey-eyed?' Helena Wells?'" Gigi exclaimed. Christina had the bag of popcorn; Gigi had ten kernels at most in a tiny little bowl, carefully chewing one kernel at a time. "I'm not promising anything," she said finally, "but I want to hear more about this woman who left your mother gooey-eyed. Myka? Is that her name?"
Helena
It was 11:00 on a Saturday morning, and normally she would be at work in Future Image's suite in one of the newer business towers downtown. Nate would be out of the country or unresistingly hemmed in by monitors and stacks of documents in his home office, and as inaccessible in his office as if he were out of the country. Her daughter would be on her phone texting with friends or sketching in a quiet corner, or, more rarely now that she was older and uninterested in accompanying her mother anywhere, pretending to be Future Image's nonexistent receptionist in the suite's waiting area, which had exactly one chair, one accent table, and a coat tree. (Making a client wait might make him question just how important he was to the company, and Helena didn't want her clients to think for a minute that they were any less important to her than they were to themselves - even if it were true.)
But this was not a normal Saturday, this was the Saturday of the pool party, and in two hours Nate's patio and pool would be filled with Christina's friends and many of their parents. Although both the patio and pool were oversized, just like the house, they weren't large enough, Helena feared, to accommodate everyone who was coming. The chaperones would likely outnumber the children, and all but two of them were probably coming to gawk at what they assumed would be a palace. Nate Robinson might be a native son, but he had long ago left the cornfields and one-stoplight towns. He was as stateless as any movie star or pro athlete; his friends were businessmen from all over the world, and he vacationed as easily and effortlessly in Italy or Fiji as he did "up north" at his lake home. Or so the parents of Christina's friends would think, who, while not titans of industry necessarily, were above the median in whatever economic index one might choose. The two who wouldn't be interested, or primarily interested, in the lifestyle of the CEO of an agribusiness giant - one of them was standing next to her, surveying, as she was, the rented patio tables and umbrellas and the two banquet tables, already set up on the patio, that would be bowing under the weight of the catered finger food due to arrive shortly before the first of the awestruck. The parents would park their cars on the square of lawn willingly sacrificed by Nate for the purpose and tilt their heads back like the tops of so many Pez dispensers or ceaselessly move them from side to side like bobbleheads -
"What are you serving them?"
It would have been an unremarkable question coming from someone who actually ate. But Helena knew this woman, she had spent the night with her, several nights, in fact; more importantly she had eaten breakfast with this woman after having spent the night with her. She knew that Gigi considered it a big breakfast if she had yogurt (always plain) and a hard-boiled egg. Gigi maintained that at "their" age oxygen counted as a carbohydrate, and she chose breathing over eating. While Helena always countered that they shared an age only if one considered an age to span decades, à la the Victorian Age, she couldn't deny that Gigi, whatever her birth date, was an exceptionally lovely woman. Though Myka's charm, a strangely heady mix of keen intelligence and social awkwardness, elevated her into a class by herself, Helena would readily admit that it was just her personal opinion; others with more objective points of view would probably hold that Myka was perfectly lovely as normal human beings went and certainly a cut above the ordinary run of university administrators but that Gigi was a former model no matter what she claimed was her occupation. The plain yogurt and coffee breakfast, the ten kernels of popcorn (Helena had seen her count them out), it was unclear how Gigi survived on them, but her figure was still a figure, with all the curves that the common understanding of the word implied. It was magnificently set off this morning by a navy blue bikini, which was barely hidden by the caftan she wore over it, its filminess more an act of provocation than modesty.
Helena thought that she would never be entirely inured to Gigi's appearance, but since she would have to be dead to achieve that blessed state, she allowed herself a tiny, virtually noiseless sigh of regret every time she saw Gigi in a bikini or an evening gown or a . . . gunnysack. The sigh completed, she then responded to her as she would any friend or, in Gigi's case, any former lover from whom she had parted on amicable terms. Lovers, friends, they were often one before they became the other, and, thus, her desire to transition from one phase of their relationship to another with no fuss, no tears. The anomaly, the outlier, her signal failure in that regard had been Myka. "Mini-meatballs, mini-cheeseburgers, mini-corn dogs, wings, onion rings, brownies," Helena began to recite, distracted more by how sharp that failure with Myka could still feel than by her first sight of Gigi in her bikini.
"Everything that kids will love and their parents will hate."
"Breezily spoken by someone who's never known what it's like to coax or scam her child into eating her vegetables," Helena said dryly.
"There's time yet for me to learn," Gigi said.
Her ovaries had to be shrinking in fright at the possibility, unless she was intending to delegate conception. From the top of her head to the tips of her pedicured toes, there was nothing about Gigi that cried out for motherhood. Instead, everything about her cried out that her mornings were meant to be devoted to putting her look together for the day, not making sure that her child got to school on time. Her hair had been gathered into an intricate up-do - she had a stylist on call, she had joked more than once, but Helena was confident that it was true - and her make-up was both perfectly chosen (for a day spent outside and within splashing distance of water) and, as always, perfectly applied. Christina could more or less feed herself now, as long as there was someone to remove the silverware before she turned on the microwave, and, if one considered vegetarian pizza a vegetable, she could even be said to eat from all five food groups on occasion. But there had been times . . . Christina's high chair, the walls, the table, her face, her hair, and her own face and hair, Helena remembered, covered in milk or tomato sauce or both. "You do know that children are not as easily or as quickly housebroken as puppies, don't you?"
Gigi stuck out her tongue. Helena ignored the challenge. In times past, she would have responded differently, and she issued another tiny, noiseless sigh of regret before returning to her survey of the terrace. Soon one half of the banquet tables would be covered by chafing dishes, and the other half would be covered by equally kid-friendly beverages: Gatorade, soda, juice, flavored water. There would be "virgin" mimosas and margaritas, among other nonalcoholic drinks for the adults. The former would be carbonated orange juice and the latter Slurpees in various fruit flavors, but it all sounded better with "virgin" in front of it. It wasn't a matter of changing or denying reality - that was beyond her powers, anyway - it was more often a matter of dressing it up a bit. As she often told her clients, "We're not gilding the lily, darling, we're just spraying some body glitter on it."
"Christina told me about her friend from camp. She said that you know Maddie's mother from college?"
Gigi hadn't bothered to frame it as an innocent question. All the archness that a mayor's spokesperson could muster, which was a considerable amount, was in that upward twist of her lips.
"Quit smirking," Helena said. "If you must know, Myka and I had a brief relationship in college." A part of her knew she should stop there, but another part urged her on, the part that couldn't stand to be smirked at. "It was very sweet, and intense, but over long ago." If anything, the sardonic curl of Gigi's lips grew deeper. "For heaven's sake, if I had to spend precious time remembering everyone I slept with during my inordinately long collegiate career . . . . There is not a server farm anywhere big enough to hold that information." She actually put the back of her hand to her forehead in irritation, Helena realized, like a heroine in a '40s era melodrama, as though putting her relationship with Myka in its proper place - in a box stuck in a far corner of a guest room closet - was a crushing effort that only several glasses of champagne or the compliments of a suave leading man could relieve.
"It's clear to me you've never thought about her." Gigi's laughter was more good-humored than needling, but Helena felt a rare blush burn her cheeks.
"I'll remember to show you the same sympathy the next time the press asks you about the mayor's two-week 'business trip' to Belize or the late night 'speechwriting sessions' the two of you are said to have."
It wasn't just good-humored this time, Gigi's laughter, it delighted in what she saw as utter absurdity. "The taxpayer was never on the hook for the mayor's trip to Belize, and it was a business trip; he was working on the next election at a supporter's vacation home. And I would happily write his speeches without his assistance, but he insists on adding his personal touch."
"Yes, and I'm sure it's only your speeches that receive his 'personal touch,'" Helena said acidly.
"So much vituperation for a little teasing about a passing affair," Gigi clucked and wagged her finger in reproof. "I'm only the more set on meeting her now, you know, the mysterious Myka."
She's not the least bit mysterious, and that's part of her charm. Helena was smart enough not to say it aloud, but she felt her blush intensify. If she were a client, she would have fired her for such a poor choice of tactics.
A bout of nerves, an unaccustomed bout of nerves, Helena told herself with emphasis, that was what had been responsible for her maladroit handling of Gigi's curiosity about Myka. It hardly mattered now that the pool party was in full swing and, more importantly, that Gigi had been forced to sequester herself in a guest bedroom to deal with a mayoral emergency. Myka and Maddie had arrived and blended into the crowd without Gigi being any the wiser. And crowd it was. Christina had forgotten the number of friends she had invited, seven the same as 15 in her mind, apparently. Fifteen multiplied by not two but sometimes three or four, because not only were there parents for a number of children but their parents' spouses or significant others as well. Plus, although Adelaide had vowed that would avoid the "infestation of tweens" by staying with her mother over the weekend, she had nonetheless arrived in an aging Pathfinder filled to circus-clown-bursting level with friends. Who had nothing better to do than eat their body weight in wings and mini-cheeseburgers and profanely evaluate the respective merits of Kendrick Lamar, Drake, Adele, and Rihanna from a far corner of the patio. Boisterous, obnoxious teens - that she could manage. They were hardly different from many of her clients, only somewhat less rich. After reminding them so casually that they might have made the mistake of thinking she was merely suggesting that they should keep their swearing G-rated and their hands out of the chafing dishes, she pulled Adelaide aside and said, "If you want me to keep inventing reasons for why you don't have to attend your father's dinners and charity events as his pride and joy, you need to take your friends into the house or off the premises."
Adelaide was rather a pretty girl, her father's oversized features made proportional for a pleasantly round face, but she had all of his practicality. Her attitude toward Helena and Christina was that they were simply the newest and most significant targets of her father's acquisitive impulses, and Helena and Christina accepted her as the oldest and most cherished of Nate's possessions. It was an eminently reasonable arrangement that worked for everyone, especially Nate, as there were very few teenaged screams of "She's not my mother!" and stepmother-to-be demands that "She's your daughter, you deal with her." Understanding that she had no leverage, hating to be introduced as "my little girl" by her father to his business associates and wasting prime evening hours that she could be with her friends in the dining room of her father's house or various "event centers" instead, she shrugged in assent. Out of the corner of her eye, Helena watched her begin herding her friends into the house and, more than likely, down into the cavernous basement level which had game rooms, a gym, a movie theatre, and a large sitting area whose dominant feature was a freestanding double fireplace. They probably would encounter a few of the parents who had disappeared into the house to use the bathrooms but had yet to emerge. At least Nate's office and their bedroom were locked. Any self-guided tours conducted to uncover anything revealing his net worth or his sexual predilections were going to be frustrated.
The one parent who had shown little interest in the house and who was acting like the chaperone she had promised to be was Myka. She wasn't pacing the length of the pool, whistle at the ready. Her surveillance was slightly more disguised; she was attempting to referee the melee that had erupted in the pool into some semblance of a game. While she allowed a certain amount of horsing around, dunking heads under water and yanking down trunks or swimsuit straps weren't allowed. With a surprisingly piercing whistle between her thumb and forefinger, she would order the offending parties out of the pool and allow each team a free shot at the goal set up at the end of the pool. Direct throws into the goal earned a point; wild, caroming shots that hit a table or an umbrella and then ricocheted off the goal into the pool earned no points but an "Awesome effort!" Maddie, stretched out on a lounge chair next to the one occupied by her friend, whose name Helena had forgotten, did her best to ignore her mother's presence.
Helena, not usually in the position of envying an 11-year-old's sang-froid, wished she could be as oblivious as Maddie seemed to be to her mother's laughing, splashing, goal-announcing activity. Had Myka shown up in a poolside outfit that was the equivalent of the "urban hiking" ensemble that she had chosen for their outing to the art museum, Helena might have succeeded. Instead Myka was wearing a conservative one-piece in a medium blue, which, through understatement, accomplished what a more provocatively cut swimsuit would have failed to do, emphasized the toned length of leg, the well-defined arms (a testament to 10 lb. weights and repeated sets of raises and curls), and an admirably flat abdomen as teasers for what wasn't revealed. The 21-year-old Myka who had complained that she was a "stick" had needed the more discerning eye of a Helena Wells, who, though only slightly older in years was centuries advanced in experience, and thus could point out and then, after a mere matter of days (which had still been too long for her), demonstrate by running her hands over them, curves that would eviscerate anyone's opinion, including Myka's own, that she was a stick. "Stick in the mud, maybe," Myka had said after one particularly active session of having her negative body image revealed for the nonsense it was. Lying next to her, Helena stared at Myka's dorm room ceiling in dazed exhaustion. "Not where it counts, darling."
It was precisely because looking at Myka in that swimsuit, her hair throwing off coppery sparks in the sunlight, had her mind darting off in completely inappropriate tangents that Helena had been avoiding the pool. She played the gracious hostess by visiting each of her rented tables, taking refuge from the sun by positioning her chair under the umbrella so that it had its back to the pool. Her polite inquiries about her guests' comfort and enjoyment were battered by their effusions about the house, the grounds, and the loveliness of their setting: "It's woodsy but inviting, not in that North Woods' lyme-disease-waiting-to-happen way," "It must be like living in a resort 24/7," "Would you consider allowing us to buy in as a time-share?" If by resort, her guests meant the anonymity of its decor and furnishings; the army of support staff that kept Nate's home cleaned, trimmed, stocked with food, and ready to host an event at any time; and the loneliness that attested to how infrequently it was visited by the one who owned it, then, yes, she lived in a resort.
Christina
Like her mother, Christina was making the rounds, but, unlike her mother, she wasn't trying to play the gracious host; she had forgotten how many people she had invited. (Gigi didn't count, 'cause Gigi invited herself after they had talked about the "plan.") There were the ones she had invited because she had been invited to their birthday parties and sleepovers; the ones she had invited because when she bragged about Nate's pool, they had made fun of her - and the pool; the one or two she had invited because they desperately wanted to be her friend and she needed to get a passing grade in math; the ones she had invited because she like the sound of their names (Sharif, Ursula) or because she liked the cut of their profiles against a classroom window; and the one she called the "wrong Jennifer" because, well, she had invited the wrong Jennifer.
Some she liked better than others; some she liked one day and not the next; some, like the wrong Jennifer, she didn't really know at all. But whether she liked them or how much wasn't important. It was about reciprocity, utility (her mom said "cultivation" was nicer), and competitive advantage. There were people who did you favors and expected favors in return; there were people who had something you needed; there were people who, if you let them show you up once, thought they owned you (and that would never do); and then there were people whose names when you said them aloud sounded really cool. The whimsy was her own touch.
She glanced at the lounge chairs that Maddie and Sophie had been occupying since before the party started, and they were still talking. How could you talk to one person for so long? How could you talk so long, period? All the same, it would be nice to have someone you could tell about the weird itchy, prickly feeling you had been having all afternoon, like you were getting a rash except that you knew you hadn't eaten anything with strawberries in it. You couldn't say to the people you traded favors with that you felt like you did when you had a nasty rash; you couldn't say to the geeky kid who worshipped you (and whose math homework you hoped to copy) that you were about to break out in hives; you couldn't ever mention the word "rash" to the kid who sneered "Pool? You mean wading pool, right?"; and you'd rather die than have to say "rash" and "Sharif" or "Ursula" in the same breath.
She cautiously touched the back of her neck. Her skin didn't feel warmer (or rougher) than normal. Her mom was sitting at a table with Kirsten's mom and Perry's dads. She couldn't be more out of the view of the pool if she tried. They had chatted a bit, her mom and Myka, when Myka, Maddie, and Sophie had first arrived, but that had been hours ago. Myka had stayed close to the pool, and sometime in it, chaperoning, while her mom had been doing this, talking with parents. Or checking on the food and drinks. Or ducking into the house, probably to make sure that people weren't putting their feet up on Nate's furniture or busting into his office. She had seen more than one of the parents snap a picture of the pool or the grounds; if she went out on Facebook, she would probably see, like, five of them out there on their accounts, with silly captions that were supposed to be funny, like "This is where I'm going to live when I grow up." No one but an adult would want to live out in the middle of nowhere like this. Even Adelaide complained about how far away it was; she lived with her mom in the city most of the time.
None of this was working out as it was supposed to. She didn't want so many bodies in her pool. The boys were probably doing gross boy things in it, blowing their noses between their fingers and washing the snot off in the water. And then her mom and Myka weren't even together. Myka was helping a littler kid, a baby brother of one of the invitees, paddle around in the shallow end, while her mom was 12 million miles away from the pool. She couldn't grumble to Gigi about how badly her and Maddie's plan was going because Gigi had been stuck in the house making phone calls for most of the day, "saving the world from democracy and preserving it for the mayor" her mom had joked. To top it off, Jordan, who could multiply large numbers in his head as fast as a calculator and, rumor had it, was teaching himself algebra and geometry, had been trailing her around all afternoon.
The itchy feeling intensified and Christina remembered how, when the dragons were let loose in Game of Thrones (she wasn't supposed to watch it and she didn't . . . much . . . except that she did like catching the dragons in action), they would cast shadows on the ground as they glided above the cities they were about to burn to a crisp. She wasn't sure why it came to mind. Sure, she was cranky, but she didn't want to see everyone incinerated. Not even Jordan. Nothing had happened; everything was the same as it had been a moment ago. Except that Gigi, finally, had left the house to come out onto the patio, and she looked especially silvery in the sun.
Helena
Just because she appreciated perfection, made a living, in fact, from creating the illusion of it, didn't mean that she wanted to be surrounded by it every bloody minute. She wasn't sure she could politely accept another bloody compliment on the order of "It's so perfect here." She found it more provoking than comments that she must love living in a resort because those, at least, she could always wring a joke from. "Except that if I leave the towels on the bathroom floor, there's no one to pick them up." Unfortunately her last reply to the comment had been on the snappish side, "Yes, but eventually you want to go home."
There were times, even recently, when she had been known to slop around in yoga pants with her hair in a ponytail and wearing no make-up, baring her imperfections. It didn't matter that the imperfections - the lines beginning to proliferate around her mouth, the suspect softness to her triceps, the bloodlessness of her lips in their natural state - were bared only to Christina (who was entering the years when mothers were hideous from head to toe), Nate, and whoever among the hired help were there that day. It mattered that she didn't feel she had to lock herself in the bathroom until she had exchanged the yoga pants for pants more form-fitting, applied foundation and lip gloss, and hidden her suspect triceps (which were regularly exercised, thank you very much) in something with sleeves.
Certainly her condo, where she and Christina had lived before moving in with Nate and Adelaide, was far from immaculate. The clutter and disorder that she ruthlessly banished from Future Image's office was on full display in their old home. Newspapers and magazines had littered tables, chair arms, and sofa cushions. Clothes hadn't always been put away, and Christina's room, frankly, had been more lair or burrow than room. Disorder, not perfection, was her natural state; Myka could attest to that. But she had lived in chaos long before she had arrived at the latest in a long line of sleepy liberal art colleges at which she had been trying, with a notable lack of effort, to finish her degree. She and Charles had been shuttled between sets of grandparents and other relatives during their parents' frequent, tempestuous separations only to be returned home upon their equally passionate reconciliations. Every reconciliation was a fresh start, which demanded a new home, and she and Charles would have to make new friends and learn new routes to their new schools. They would have just begun settling into their new life as a happy family when one or both of their parents would declare, with a fervor equal to that which had attended their earlier declarations of eternal love, that this was it, the end, she/he/they couldn't stand it any longer and "until things are sorted out, you'll be staying with your granddad." Or your Aunt Emily. Or your school friend, what's her name, Kathleen and her family.
Helena knew better than anyone that perfection was an illusion, but chaos was intolerable, especially when you were raising a child. In moving to this city, she had hoped to give her daughter something she had never experienced herself, and although what she had hoped for and what she had received were two very different things, she wasn't about to relinquish this, with Nate, for Myka Bering or, more accurately, what she had once represented, a very, very long time ago.
Feeling a sprinkler-like burst of perspiration on the back of her neck, Helena fluffed out her hair, trying to move the damp strands away from her skin. Yet no one else at the table seemed to be reacting to the sudden increase in humidity. The forecast hadn't called for rain, but everything stilled and grew eerily quiet, as though the birds, the flies swooping around the recycling bins and trash receptacles (also rented), even the blades of grass, were listening for the rumble of thunder. A storm was coming, wasn't it? Christina's friends and their parents sensed it, didn't they? Then, in that space between heartbeats, between her loud and uneven heartbeats, before the laughter and the splashing erupted once more, Helena identified the storm front, although there literally wasn't a cloud in the sky. Gigi had emerged from squelching the latest scandal threatening to reintroduce probity, transparency, and accountability in city politics, and, given the intentness with which she was staring, the work had made her hungry. But she wasn't looking at the food, no, not Gigi, she was looking at Myka.
