Keep Your Mouth Shut and Wear Beige (13 page)

I’d never registered with the site. Registering would have given me the right to purchase her patterns or post comments, neither of which I wanted to do. Registering would have also given whoever administered the site access to my name. I wondered if Claudia could find out who the nonregistered “guests” were. My user name was nursemom23. The boys had picked it; the 23 meant nothing except that twenty-two other women wanted the world of cyberspace to know them as “nursemom.” At least I assumed they were all women.

If Claudia did have a list of her lurkers and stalkers, would she know that nursemom23 was me? That would stink.

She laughed. “Guy grew up on food like that. He’ll love it.”

Then, a week later, she e-mailed me, saying that Claudia was going to bring the pies.

Claudia was bringing the pies? She hadn’t mentioned that on her blog.

I make a fabulous pie. Even Mike’s mother says that no one makes a piecrust like I do. People are always asking me for my recipe, and of course I give it to them, but the secret isn’t in the ingredients. It’s the technique as well as understanding and respecting the molecular structure of different fats. I cut the shortening into a finer crumb than the butter. Once I add the water, I hardly even breathe on the dough. I’m not vain about much, but I am about my pies.

This was far too important an issue for e-mail. I called Rose. “Are you sure Claudia understands about Finney’s allergies? Don’t you remember what happened at the engagement party?”

“I don’t think she’s the sort of person who makes the same mistake twice. She’s already talked to the pastry chef.”

The pastry chef? She was going to
buy
these pies? We were
going to have store-bought pies on Thanksgiving? Don’t they take your citizenship away for that? “But you’ve said yourself how easy it is to forget. Some people automatically dust their bottom crust with cornstarch.” I did that when a fruit filling looked particularly runny. “They may do it without thinking. They may not believe her. They may not take her seriously.”

Who was sounding like the food-allergy mom now?

“I suspect,” Rose said carefully, “that Claudia is very capable of making people take her seriously.”

Of course she was.

“Is there something you aren’t telling me?” Rose asked.

“No, no. I just like making pies, that’s all.”

What a liar I was. This was about more than pies or even Finney’s health. It was about my role as the Pie-bringer Queen. Claudia was trying to dethrone me. First she had left me off the guest list and then had put me at the losers’ table. Now she was bringing the pies. Why hadn’t the divorce agreement covered things like this?

Everything I had read about the Hamptons commented on the light, how clear and crisp it was supposed to be. This light had lured artists to come out from the city and to turn garages and sheds into studios. But I, good midwesterner that I am, noticed how fertile the soil was. The crowns of trees were broad and spreading. On either side of the highway were the cultivated fields, now fallow for the winter. Many of the farms had roadside market stands. Most were boarded up with sheets of plywood, but some were still
open, selling decorative gourds and the peach jams and strawberry preserves made from the summer’s harvest.

Guy’s assistant, Mary Beth, had sent me directions that were easy to follow. I took the Montauk Highway, then turned left on Mecox Road just past the watermill. I passed the inn where Claudia and Mike were staying. It looked quaint and historic. Then the road bent to the left, then to the right. Some of the houses were also quaint, charming places with shingles and porches, nicely sized for second homes. But many of the houses were new, and their massive roofs loomed over the ten-foot privet hedges. I passed a house under construction; its yard was rutted with tire tracks and its walls were wrapped with Tyvek, the white protective material emblazoned with blue lettering. Immediately beyond it was the Zander-Browns’ place. I slowed, found the break in the privet hedge, and then turned up a long gravel drive.

Because Cami and Annie had talked with such enthusiasm about their grandparents’ rustic cottage in the Adirondacks, I was unconsciously expecting this house to have that kind of charm, despite its twelve bedrooms. But I was wrong. This house was very big, very formal, and very, very new.

Built from pale stone and cream siding, it was laid out in an L. My house was an L too, but other than that, my little Virginia farmhouse had nothing in common with this chateauesque creation. It had three visible stories, and the interior of the L formed a gravel-covered parking court. Two sides of the court were enclosed by the wings of the house. The remaining two were fortressed by low stone walls. Big stone planters—dish-shaped instead of the conventional urns—sat on top of the wall at careful intervals, and there were two similar planters on either side of the front door. The planters held several varieties of ivy, but, this being November, they looked a little sparse.

A two-seater metallic-blue BMW with a couple of big dents
in the fenders was carelessly parked in the courtyard, managing to block any car that might be parked in the three-car garage. I pulled in close to one of the stone walls, hoping to stay out of the BMW’s line of fire. I felt sure that it wasn’t Rose’s car. It was much too small to hold her share of the Oregon Trail load of food.

There was a small door near the garage. It was recessed and half hidden beneath an eave. I suspected that it led to the kitchen. I am a kitchen-door person, but since I didn’t know who had driven the BMW, I went to the main door. It was ornate, with leaded side windows and a fan light. The doorbell appeared to be part of a correspondingly elaborate intercom system. I pressed the buzzer, and as I waited for a response, I peered through the window, seeing a wide front hall tiled in an icy marble. The walls had little niches for sculptures. All of them were empty.

A clicking emitted from the intercom. I pressed down on the little switch marked Speak, said my name, but got no reply. I tried the door even though the clicking didn’t sound as if it had unlocked the door. And it hadn’t. The door was locked. I spoke into the intercom again and got some more clicking. Clearly, the person inside didn’t know how to work the intercom. I buzzed once more and went back to the side panel to continue my peering.

The stairs were wide and curved elegantly. My guess was that the main part of the house was laid out like a center-hall colonial with the living room on one side of the hall, the dining room on the other, and the kitchen and family room running along the back. Finally I saw the hem of a skirt descending the stairs. I stepped back so as not to be caught peering through the glass. A minute later, a woman opened the door. It was Jill Allyn Stanley, the novelist, the donor of the oversized espresso machine.

She looked older and more tense than in her photos. Thanks to some more Internet snooping, I now had a sense of her career— lots of early promise that had plateaued into a steady “good
enough” kind of success. Wonen’s book clubs read her, but she didn’t get movie deals or big foreign sales.

“Are you Mariposa?” she asked me.

“Uh, no.” She certainly wasn’t guilty of ethnic stereotyping. No one had ever before wondered if I was named Mariposa. “I’m Darcy, Jeremy’s mother.”

“Oh, dear.” She seemed to pay no attention to my introduction of myself. She looked even more tense. “Mariposa came two days ago, but I was working and I just couldn’t have people cleaning, so I told her to come back today.”

“Mariposa is the cleaning lady?”

“Yes. I had forgotten that she always came on Mondays. You don’t think she will mind coming back a different day?”

How on earth was I supposed to know that? But it was hard to imagine that in an affluent area like this, the cleaning ladies had lots of free time right before a holiday weekend.

“I really need her to come back because I can’t figure out the dishwasher. But maybe she’ll come later on.” Jill Allyn obviously decided to pursue hope as a strategy. She put her hand on the banister, ready to go back upstairs. “But if you don’t have anything else to do right now, could you look at the dishwasher, see if you can get it to work?”

“Is it broken? Do you know where they keep the tools?” Give me a pair of needle-nose pliers and I’ll try to fix anything. I frequently can’t, but I enjoy trying.

“Tools? Oh, no, no, no. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it. I just don’t know how to work it. And Rose gets her knickers in a twist about people leaving their dishes all over.” And with that, she went back upstairs, leaving me standing in the hall by myself.

I had been right about the layout of the house. On my left was what had been intended as a formal living room. It was furnished
in more pale colors; it looked like a model home, although it lacked the accessories and the little unifying pots of ivy that had turned my house into such a showplace. The dining room, to my right, had—I counted—twelve chairs around the table and another six against the wall.

Behind the living room was a library with floor-to-ceiling shelves on three walls. Only one bank of shelves was full of books; the rest were empty, but there were still boxes and boxes obviously waiting to be unpacked.

Then, as I had suspected, the back of the house was open. The kitchen was at one end and informal eating space was in the middle; at the far end, a U-shaped arrangement of three pale leather sofas faced a huge flat-panel TV that hung over the fireplace like a painting. The whole space felt vast and impersonal.

There were several sets of double glass doors along the back wall. I opened one and went outside. A swimming pool was covered with a carefully fitted tarp. An elaborate outdoor grill had been built into a stone enclosure. A broad lawn extended to a marshy swath of reeds. Beyond those reeds was the ocean. I couldn’t see it, but I could hear the steady murmur of wind and waves.

I went back inside, closing out the sound of the ocean. This was a beach house? To me, a summer home ought to be a glorious jumble, candy dishes full of unknown keys and paper clips, garages stuffed with croquet sets and kids’ bikes, cabinets full of old board games, their boxes bleached and flattened. There should be a leaking shed with a wooden canoe, a stack of bushel baskets, and a rotary lawn mower. In that mess would be a sense of possibilities, ways to have fun, suggested by generations of other people having fun.

This house did not look as if anyone had ever had fun in it.

I found a very elegant half bath underneath the stairs. It was
immaculate, but the roll was out of toilet paper. There wasn’t even the empty cardboard tube. Apparently someone—Jill Allyn, no doubt—had taken the whole roll, not caring about the fate of others. Fortunately I had a little packet of Kleenex in my pocket. I washed my hands, dried them on my jeans—there was no towel— and then went into the kitchen to address the dishwasher issue.

Most people, when they can’t figure out the controls on a dishwasher panel, discover that after they have loaded the dishes and wrestled with the soap dispenser. Jill Allyn Stanley had apparently had a defeatist attitude from the get-go. She hadn’t put a single dish into the dishwasher. The counter was covered with teacups and crumb-studded plates. There were crumbs by the toaster, streaks of dried tomato sauce on the counter near the microwave, and little rectangular tea-colored stains all over. Apparently Jill Allyn drank a lot of tea and always put her used tea bags on the counter before throwing them in the trash . . . although she didn’t always put them in the trash. A few sat on the counter, dried and slumped over, looking like desiccated mice.

Although the dishwasher had a variety of options for how and when to wash dishes, it was otherwise perfectly straightforward. I loaded it quickly, found detergent under the sink, and started it. I wiped the counters and closed the cabinet doors.

Although it was a million times bigger, this kitchen reminded me of the various time-share condominiums that Mike and I used to rent for family vacations. Everything was immaculate and impersonal. The dishes were white with a ribbed rim. The water and juice glasses had a similar ribbed design. The pots and pans were all from one manufacturer; they were still shiny, looking as if they had hardly been used. There were no coffee mugs printed with corporate logos, no fiesta-striped pitcher purchased for a margarita party, no stray serving dish left behind after a neighborhood pot luck.

I had always enjoyed cooking on our family vacations. All four of us would go to the grocery store together. With everyone piling things into the cart, we would have way too much food; at the end of the week, we would line up the uneaten apples and unopened boxes of crackers in hopes that the maids would take them.