Love Anthony (13 page)

She collects the heaps of torn paper, shreds of what was her happy family, and throws them into the wastebasket in her bedroom. She then returns to the hallway and looks at the wall, to witness what she’s done. There. Eight framed, matted pieces of cardboard. He’s gone. There’s no undoing it now. Like his infidelity. This is what is real.

She adjusts two of the frames so that they’re level, flicks off the hall light, and returns to her bedroom. She strips out of her Goldie Hawn dress and slides into her pink, flannel pajamas. She crawls into bed, forgetting the locket still around her neck, facing the side where Jimmy used to sleep with her, her feet restless and her eyes wide-open.

Awake all night.

CHAPTER 10

E
verything changed in June, and Olivia, naïve to this time of year on this tiny island, never saw it coming. It started with Memorial Day weekend, when the cocooned and quiet simplicity of her daily life became bombarded on all sides by the rapid and sure-footed influx of invaders. The summer people. It took her a couple of weeks not to feel like she needed to hide inside her home, not to feel threatened or violated by their presence, to regain her composure and reestablish a routine. But after a couple of weeks, she finally exhaled, thinking,
There, this isn’t so bad.

And then came July. June did so little to prepare her for July. June is a gently sloping hill in the Berkshires, and July is Mount Everest. The roads are now crammed with mopeds and Jeeps and monstrous SUVs, engine exhausts and radios spewing their pollution into the sweet summer air. The previously desolate, private-feeling beaches are now cluttered with families and their chairs and umbrellas and boogie boards and their picnic garbage and constant conversation, and every rental house is full, every bedroom and driveway, the occupants celebrating their week’s vacation with outdoor parties and cook-outs night after night.

These are the real summer people, and they came by the tens of thousands, quintupling the island’s population. They came by air, and they came by sea, and they came with their kids and their dogs and their nannies and their assistants and their personal chefs and their houseguests. And everyone (except the dogs) brought a cell phone. Olivia imagines the geological shelf that Nantucket sits on, fragile and precarious, and worries that it might actually crumble under the weight of all the tourists and their stuff, causing the island to sink to the bottom of the ocean. A modern Atlantis.

Even the sky is crowded. Commuter planes and private jets from Boston and New York roar overhead every few minutes. All day long.

If she adjusted in June, she’s merely coping in July. She feels a kinship with the other locals, easily identified and distinct from the summer people, like picking out wild horses from circus zebras, even though she knows that the feeling is one-sided. Although she’s earned some level of respect for having lived here through part of the winter and an entire spring, she hasn’t lived “on island” a full year yet. She’s not a real member of the herd. She hasn’t put in enough time. But even after a full year—in truth, even after fifty years—she’ll always be viewed as a wash-ashore, a transplant, never a true local, and absolutely never a native (a person has to be born here to own that title).

She’s made some adjustments already that have become her summer laws for living:

Never go to the beach between the hours of ten and three. That’s when they all go.

Avoid Town at all costs. If you must go, do not drive downtown at lunchtime or anytime after 6:00 p.m. There will be no parking anywhere.

Never go to Stop & Shop anytime Friday through Sunday.

Allow an extra thirty minutes for everything.

She’s written these rules out on a piece of paper and taped
it to the wall by her front door, a cute but serious reminder in case she should grow forgetful or cocky. Which is why she’s cursing herself right now, as she stands at the edge of the pasta aisle in front of Newman’s Own marinara sauce near the end of a discouragingly long checkout line in Stop & Shop on a Saturday afternoon.

She needed more coffee and eggs and thought it would be nice to have a salad for dinner without thinking about the calendar or her summer laws. She didn’t realize what day it was until she pulled into the crowded parking lot and knew immediately. She hesitated, thinking she should forget about the salad and go home, but then the woman in the Land Rover behind her honked, urging Olivia to move along, and so she did, thinking,
How bad can it be?

That was over an hour ago. She counts the items in her basket. Fourteen. If she reshelves the loaf of bread and the toilet paper (she can get by on what she has until Monday), then she can move over to the express line, but that line is even longer and appears to carry more hostility in its ranks.

“This is taking forever,” mutters the woman in line behind Olivia. “I’m definitely going to be late.”

Olivia’s grateful that she’s at least not in a hurry. She has no beach-portrait session tonight. The family she had scheduled for this evening canceled this morning.

Becoming a professional beach-portrait photographer ended up being far easier than she imagined it would be. First, she did some research by calling around to the other portrait photographers on the island, inquiring about their rates. Then she did the math and figured out that if she could do four sessions a week from June to Labor Day, she’d make enough money to live the whole year. More than enough.

But then she had the problem of how to get
any
customers, never mind four a week, to hire her, an unknown with no professional training or experience, just a good eye and a natural
facility with a camera. To address this rather big problem, she did two small things. First, she printed flyers and posted them all over town—the Visitors Center, Young’s Bicycle Shop, The Bean, the library, the Chamber of Commerce, the Hy-Line and Steamship Authority docks, even here at Stop & Shop. And second, she made sure to set her price at $200 cheaper than the “cheapest” going rate.

The calls and e-mails started coming in, and she’s booked more sessions than she thought possible, four to six times a week, often twice in the same evening. She’s already scheduled one family for Labor Day weekend. The prints are all ordered online through a separate company, so all she has to do is shoot with her digital camera, edit with Photoshop on her computer, and upload the images to the ordering website. Payment is online, by credit card. There are no paper invoices to send, no waiting to receive checks in the mail. She has no overhead other than Internet service. It’s clean and simple.

The women in front of her have calmly been chatting the whole time, seemingly unfazed by the long lines and the increasingly impatient mood surrounding them. One, the natural-looking blonde, is wearing a black cotton tank with no logo, no embellishments, a plain white cotton skirt, and flip-flops, and the other is wearing yoga clothes. No flashy jewelry, no designer labels, their fingernails aren’t manicured, and their purses look like they cost less than $50. Locals.

“Is it weird that I don’t want to hire Roger?”

“No, of course not.”

“He’s done all the others and has always done a great job. I don’t know, I feel like I’m being disloyal, but it’d just be too weird showing up without Jimmy.”

“I get it.”

“He’d be like, ‘Where’s Jimmy?’ And then I’d have to admit that he’s not coming, and that would be weird.”

“So don’t hire Roger. He won’t even know.”

“Everybody knows everything here.”

“True. So then he probably already knows about you and Jimmy.”

“I guess, maybe.”

“And you know, he wouldn’t even care. These things happen. I think he just got divorced, didn’t he?”

“I don’t think so.”

“He did. His wife left the island, moved to Texas.”

“Oh, yeah, that’s right. So who would you hire?”

“I don’t know, you should ask Jill. They used someone last summer.”

“They used Roger.”

“Oh.”

“I know I shouldn’t spend the money, but I need the pictures. They’re going to be a visual reminder that my life is fine without him, that I still have my beautiful girls, and I don’t need him to be happy.”

“Visualization is good.”

“This is my first step in really moving on.”

“You manifest what you envision.”

“Yeah. And I need to do it soon. Those empty frames in my hallway look depressing.”

“Why don’t you have Gracie draw some cute pictures, put those in the frames for now?”

“I asked, she wouldn’t. None of them would. They’re all mad at me for ripping up our family photos. I don’t blame them. Such a stupid thing to do.”

“Jimmy cheating on you was a stupid thing to do. You get a free pass.”

“Shhh.”

“What?”

“We’re in Stop & Shop, someone will hear you.”

“Oh, for God’s sakes. Kevin Bacon knows Jimmy cheated on you.”

“You’re right, I know.”

Olivia touches her purse, knowing she has a beach-portrait flyer inside. She should tap this blond woman on the shoulder and offer her the flyer, but as she imagines doing this, it feels too aggressive. And she doesn’t want to interrupt or admit to listening to their personal conversation. She decides to keep to herself and hopes that the blond woman will notice her flyer pinned to the bulletin board on the way out.

Their line is finally out from the pasta aisle, and Olivia can now see every checkout line in the store. To her left, she notices a woman and her son. He’s about six or seven, and he’s sitting in the toddler seat of the grocery cart. His long, tan legs dangle down, almost reaching the floor. He’s spinning a pinwheel, which he has pressed up against his nose. Autism.

He’s so completely pulled inside a spinning world of blurred metallic color that he doesn’t seem at all affected by the long line, the crowds of irritated people around him, the harsh lights, or Michael Bublé singing Tony Bennett over the speakers. Then something changes. Maybe he realizes he’s hungry, or he’s bored, or he hates Michael Bublé, or the tag on the back of his shirt is itching him at last more than he can stand. Who knows why? He throws the pinwheel to the ground, and he starts screaming, thumbs in his ears, his eyes squeezed shut.

His mother retrieves the pinwheel and spins it, holding it up to his face, trying to lure him back into its magic spell, but he won’t open his eyes. She tries to soothe him with her voice, straining to remain calm, reassuring him that they’ll be home soon, but his thumb-stoppered ears are unavailable to logic or lies. She doesn’t attempt to touch him. Olivia knows this would probably make everything worse. A lot worse.

Then it appears as though she’s doing nothing. She’s ignoring him.

Olivia sees the looks and hears the murmured judgments being passed around like mints among people in line.

He’s too old to be acting like that.

My children would never be allowed to behave that way.

Spoiled.

What kind of mother?

They don’t get it. Olivia does. Shy of picking him up and carrying him out of here, that mother is doing what any mother of a child with autism and a cart full of groceries would do. She’s breathing, holding on white-knuckle tight to her cart and her courage, and praying to God.

God, please help him calm down.

God, please, before I lose it, too, get us out of here.

God, please.

“I don’t blame him,” says the woman in the yoga clothes. “If this line doesn’t start to move a little faster, I’m going to start screaming, too.”

“Not very Yogi of you,” says her blond friend, the one who needs the pictures.

“True. But it sure would release all the negative energy I’ve been absorbing in this place. Stop & Shop is totally clogging up my fourth chakra.”

The blonde laughs. Olivia smiles. The blonde stares at the boy and his mother while they wait in line. The expression on the blonde’s face as she watches them doesn’t seem to carry a trace of judgment, but rather an intense interest, even wonder. Olivia would love to know what she’s thinking but says nothing.

At long last, Olivia reaches the checkout. She greets the cashier with a friendly hello, bags her own groceries, carries her canvas tote to her Jeep, and drives home.

Thirty minutes later, she is there.

AT HOME, OLIVIA
boils two eggs. She slices the tomatoes, cucumbers, and a red pepper. She shreds the lettuce and tosses
it all into a large bowl. She adds olives, Vidalia onions, Parmesan cheese, croutons, and, when they’re done, the eggs. She drizzles on a touch of olive oil and red-wine vinegar, a pinch of salt and pepper. A glass of cold sauvignon blanc, a slice from the ciabatta loaf, and she’s done.

She carries her dinner, a citronella candle, and one of her journals out onto her backyard deck. She sits with her well-earned feast, opens her journal, and begins to read where she last left off.

July 5, 2003

My life right now is all about communication, or rather, the lack of it. I spend all my waking hours demanding communication from Anthony. Anthony, say JUICE. JUICE. JUUUUICE. Say the word. Tell me what you want. Say I WANT JUICE. Say SWING. Say I WANT TO GO OUTSIDE AND SWING ON THE SWING. Please. Look at me, Anthony, and tell me what you want. Tell me what you’re feeling. Tell me why you’re screaming. I can usually tell if it’s happy-excited screaming or frustrated-panicked screaming, but right now, I’m too tired, and I can’t figure it out. Why are you screaming? How can I help you if you won’t tell me what you want?