“Hey!” she said, and she kissed me on the mouth. “Did you see the show? Wasn’t it amazing?”
“It was amazing,” I agreed. “The best they’ve ever played.” How I found it within myself to be so generous, I had no idea. Because my anger at Nick was bowling me over like a mighty wind. This, I suspected, had been all his doing. He had started dating, not just any girl—not the girl who worked at the New York Public Library where he liked to write his lyrics, and not the Thai girl who worked the Tom Yum cart on Saint Mark’s Place—but my friend Rhonda. My closest friend.
Nick looked at me, and it was the same look that reached right inside me and turned my heart like a knob, but it was different, too. He was angry, angrier than I was. He was saying,
Now you know how it feels. You’re sleeping with my brother, who has always gotten the best of everything. You are practically living with him. So now there’s Rhonda. We’re even.
I had to leave the greenroom. There was talk of the four of us going to the Spotted Pig for drinks after the show, and I smiled and said, “Yep, that sounds great!” Nick was staring at me. He said, “Do you feel okay, Chess? You look kind of sick.” I wanted to sock him. I excused myself for the ladies’ room. I stood in front of the mirror until another girl jostled me with her oversize Tory Burch bag. Instead of going back to the greenroom, I rejoined the throngs of people on the dance floor. The Strokes were playing “Last Nite,” which was my favorite of their songs. I was lost in a tangle of strangers, a mob of unfamiliar bodies. Rhonda. It had been a stroke of genius on his part. When the song was over and everyone around me was cheering and screaming for another song, I headed for the Exit sign and I was dumped out onto the cool street. Ha! I had been part of a couple for so long, I never acted with a solo conscience. I thought of Michael, who by now would be hovering by the ladies’ room door, enlisting Rhonda to go in and collect me. He would be worried. I didn’t want
him
to worry, I wanted Nick to worry. I hailed a taxi and headed home. My phone was ringing—three times it was Michael and three times I didn’t answer, even though I knew this was cruel. The fourth time my phone rang I was going to answer it, but it was Nick calling, and I didn’t pick up. Nick knew why I’d left.
When I reached my apartment, I dead-bolted my door and sent Michael a text that said:
Got home safely. Good night.
He wrote back, saying:
WTF?
And then the phone in my apartment rang and it was Michael. He was ranting. “How could you just leave? What the hell were you thinking? I thought something had happened to you! This is New York, babe. Men are out there with date-rape drugs. I thought someone had hurt you! It was so unlike you, leaving like that—you are not that thoughtless, just walking out, leaving me there. What the hell were you thinking, Chess?”
Tell him? I couldn’t tell him. And I couldn’t ask: Was Nick worried? Did he care?
I said, “I wasn’t thinking, Michael. I’m sorry.”
Michael said, “What the hell, Chess?” His voice was sad and defeated, as though I were always letting him down like this, which was unfair because I had never disappointed him before. I had been a good girl, a good girlfriend. But Michael was no dummy; he dealt in human resources. Maybe he had guessed. There had been isolated moments when he would look deeply into my eyes, brush a hair off my face, kiss the back of my neck, or make some other intimate gesture, and I would flinch. Swat him away.
“What?” he’d say. “What?”
And I would think,
I don’t love you enough. I don’t love you
that way.
Something had to give, I thought.
She would never have admitted it to anyone, she wouldn’t even write the words down in her journal, but she was anxious for Tate to get home.
It didn’t help that it was raining. Rain in the Tuckernuck house was never good. It started out as a novel and quasi-exciting development.
It’s raining! Quick—put the top up on the Scout, close the windows, hunker down!
These were the traditional steps, and woe to the person who was outside in a downpour grappling with the Scout. This morning, because she decided that her mother and aunt should be spared the indignity, that person was Chess.
She ran back into the house, soaking wet. Her mother had breakfast going—bacon and scrambled eggs and the sticky buns that she’d been saving for a special occasion. (The rain qualified.) She was making a second pot of coffee and had gone to the trouble of heating up milk on the stovetop. India, meanwhile, was stuffing newspaper, kindling, and sticks into the woodstove.
“She was a Girl Scout,” Birdie said.
“Who are we kidding?” India said. “Birdie was the Girl Scout.”
Chess shivered. She accepted a hot, milky mug of coffee from her mother and she bundled up in the scratchy afghan in the traditional starburst pattern that her grandmother had knitted. India got the woodstove raging and the three of them huddled around it with their breakfasts while the rain came down.
“Do you think Barrett will bring Tate home in this weather?” Birdie said.
“Never,” India said. “He’ll hold on to her.”
Chess felt jealous—not because Tate was with Barrett, but rather because Barrett was with Tate. Tate had been gone for fourteen hours and Chess wanted her back. They had lived together on Tuckernuck for more than a week, and Chess had grown used to Tate’s indefatigable optimism; she took a dose of it every day like a vitamin.
She could see from here how the rest of the day would go: Birdie and India would resort to all of the usual rainy-day amusements—cards, books, Monopoly—and they would smoke and try to guess when the rain would stop. Birdie would make too much food and they would start drinking at noon. All of this would be done without Tate, and so no matter how much fun was to be had (drunk Monopoly?), the day would wobble like a three-legged table. The numbers would be uneven; Chess would be the odd man out. They would all resort to wondering aloud about Tate: Was she having fun? What were she and Barrett doing together? Would this become a bona fide romance? What kind of future did it have? And this would make Chess feel Tate’s absence more keenly. She hated missing people. It was like a disease.
Chess drank her coffee, ate one-quarter of a sticky bun to appease her mother, and retreated to the attic to work on her confession. The rain clattered against the roof. Chess could hear the waves pounding against their little beach. If Tate hadn’t come to Tuckernuck, Chess realized, every hour of every day would be like this.
It was ten o’clock, eleven o’clock. Chess wondered if Barrett and Tate were having sex. Chess’s own sexual desire had wilted like an unwatered flower. She was too depressed to touch herself.
Tate and Barrett. Barrett Lee: one more person for Chess to feel bad about.
Everyone knew about Chess’s ill-fated date with Barrett Lee the summer after Chess’s freshman year of college—Barrett took Chess on a picnic, Chess puked off the back of the boat. Everyone thought that was it. The end. Chess’s feelings for Barrett Lee hadn’t been clear that summer. If pressed, she would have said she felt nothing for him; she could see he was attractive, certainly, but he wasn’t headed to college, and that turned her off immediately. He would become a fisherman or a carpenter and live on Nantucket his whole life, never leaving except to go to Hyannis to Christmas shop and to Aruba for a week in February. He was his father in the making. Chuck Lee was a lovely man, but he was an old salt, and Barrett Lee was an old salt in training. Chess wanted nothing to do with him.
When Barrett asked her out that summer, however, for a picnic, she said yes without hesitating. Her main impetus, she had to admit, was that Tate so ardently loved Barrett. It was irresistible, at nineteen, to go on a date just to upset Tate. And, too, Chess was bored. There was nothing to do on Tuckernuck but read and play backgammon with her parents. Going on a picnic with Barrett was, at least, something different.
She drank too much; this was accidental. It was hot out on the water, Chess was thirsty, the beer was icy cold, and one beer begat the desire for another beer. The sickness caught her off-guard. It rolled over her like a wave. The ham sandwich Barrett had offered her had tasted funny, but she had eaten it to be polite. The spoiled sandwich and the diesel fumes and the motion of the boat and the beer had a cumulative effect: the nausea slapped her and she puked off the back of the boat. Barrett gave her a bottle of water to rinse her mouth and offered her a Life Saver. He initially seemed grossed out, though he quickly recovered and said something to the effect of, “Happens to the best of us.” But this didn’t help. Chess was ashamed. She had put on a mortifying show when all along she had considered herself superior to Barrett Lee. It was awful. She wanted off that boat.
Chess and her family departed from Tuckernuck when their two weeks were up, and at the end of August, Chess returned to Colchester. She would never forget the day that Barrett showed up out of the blue: October 18. It was the Platonic ideal of a Saturday in October in the state of Vermont. The sun was out, and the sky was a clear, piercing blue. It was sweater and apple-cider weather. Chess and her sorority sisters were selling beers and brats at the Colchester versus Colgate football tailgate. The tailgate was held on the field outside the stadium, which was ringed by maples and oaks that were ablaze with color. The field was swarming with drunk alumni and students from both universities, and young families from Burlington with their golden retrievers and towheaded toddlers.
Chad Miner, a minor god in SigEp, was the first one to tell Chess. “Somebody’s looking for you,” he said. “Some dude.”
“Really?” Chess said. She wanted Chad Miner to be the one looking for her. “Who is it?”
“Don’t know him,” Chad said. “He doesn’t go here.”
Next was Marcy Mills, from Chess’s expository writing class. She bought a sausage from Chess, then said, “Oh, by the way, there’s a guy wandering around here looking for you.”
“Who?” Chess said.
Marcy shrugged and zigzagged her brat with bright yellow mustard. “I didn’t know him. But I heard him asking someone else if he knew Chess Cousins. So I told him I knew you, and he asked if I knew where you were, and I said no. Because look at all these people!”
“Yeah,” Chess said. She moved the sausages perfunctorily along the grill, making sure they were browned. “What did he look like?”
“Blond,” Marcy said. “Cute.”
“Send him my way!” said Alison Bellafaqua, who was standing next to Chess at the keg, filling plastic cups with foamy Budweiser.
Chess still didn’t think that much about it. If she was thinking at all, it was of Luke Arvey, a guy she’d gone to high school with who now went to Colgate—but Luke was neither blond nor cute. Chess also had a second cousin on her father’s side—a Cousins cousin—who went to Colgate, but she hadn’t seen him since a family reunion the summer she was nine years old. She wouldn’t be able to pick him out of a crowd of two.
Then Ellie Grumbel and Veronica Upton approached Chess—they were both drunk already—and they said, in singsongy chorus, “Someone is
looking
for you!”
Now Chess was annoyed. “Who is it? Did he tell you his name?”
Alison Bellafaqua said, “Pull those babies off.” Meaning the brats. “The game starts in ten minutes and we have to get the cash box back…”
Her voice was drowned out by the marching band passing through the middle of the field, on its way to the stadium. The students from both schools were meant to follow it into the stands. Although it was hokey, Chess loved following the band into the game. She, like her mother, was a helpless rah-rah and a sucker for any kind of tradition. But she couldn’t follow the band today because of her beer-and-brat duties. Alison was right: They needed to shut the stand down and take the cash box back to the sorority house. They needed to
hurry
or they were going to miss kickoff.
Ellie Grumbel, Chess realized, was still standing there, swaying, threatening to fall over. She said, “I think he said his name was Bennett.”
Chess looked up in alarm. She got a bad feeling.
“He said he was from Nantucket,” Veronica said. “A friend of yours from Nantucket?”
“Is it Barrett?” Chess said. “Barrett Lee?”
She didn’t have to wait for a response because at the instant Chess said his name, she saw him through an opening in the crowd. Barrett Lee. Chess’s heart plummeted. He was wearing a navy turtleneck and a striped cotton sweater and jeans—it was weird, she thought, to see him in real clothes instead of a bathing suit and a T-shirt. He was alone as far as Chess could tell. He was scanning the crowd—for her—and what struck Chess was how utterly out of place he looked, despite his attempt at preppy college attire. What struck Chess was how pathetic it was that he had shown up—here, at her college!—without warning. She wanted to hide. She felt threatened. Not physically threatened, certainly; it was her way of life that seemed to be in danger. She wanted to watch the game; she wanted to participate in some postgame tailgating and catch up on the fun she had missed while stuck at the sorority sausage station. She wanted to change into her new jeans and her new top from J.Crew (purchased with a surprise hundred-dollar check from her father) and try again with Chad Miner at the twelve-keg SigEp party later. And she had a shitload of studying to do the next day and a paper to write, not to mention her standing Sunday night pizza date with her best friends, the two Kathleens. That was her weekend; it was perfect in its symmetry and balance between the social and the studious. She didn’t want—indeed, couldn’t handle—a disruption by the surprise appearance of Barrett Lee from Nantucket.
Her mother would be horrified; Chess knew this even as she was acting, and she prayed (a) for forgiveness and (b) that the heinous act she was about to commit would never be discovered.
She grabbed the cash box. “I’ll take this back to the house,” she told Alison.