“Yes?”
“How’d Shirley Temple turn out?”
“You know what? Better than expected. She grew up and was no longer the little girl she was known for being. She gave up acting pretty early on, and later in her life she became a diplomat. Like an actual international diplomat, not someone who has a gentle way of telling a friend they’ve chosen the wrong lipstick color for their skin tone.”
“Hmm,” says Sam. “A diplomat.”
“You see? There’s always an opportunity for another act.”
“There are some awful things about me online, Mom. I don’t want you to see them. I’m so—I’m so ashamed.”
“I won’t see them.”
“You might, accidentally.”
“I’ll never look for them, Sam. You know I know how to google, right?” She gives Sam a look and Sam concedes that, yes, her mother knows how to google. “If I’d wanted to find out anything about you I would have by now. If I wanted to know why you’d come home, I could have searched for the answer. But I figured you’d tell me when you wanted to tell me. So as far as I’m concerned, whatever anyone says about you or anyone else online doesn’t exist to me.” She snaps her fingers. “See? It’s all gone, just like that.”
Sam looks to the horizon. She imagines she can see the mainland, but of course all she can see is the endless, endless ocean, with the wind turbines rising out of the water. “It’s not that easy, Mom.”
“Isn’t it, though? Maybe it can be, if you let it. You should read Joan Didion on being young in New York. ‘Goodbye to All That.’”
“I’ve read it,” says Sam morosely. “We read it for narrative nonfiction, junior year. Ms. Coolidge.”
“Okay! So you know, then. Those early years, the age you are now, you can make mistakes and they don’t count against you. You get a lot of clean slates in the beginning.”
“Joan Didion didn’t have the Internet!” cries Sam. “I can ignore it for a while, I can swear off of it, but it’s all out there.”
“But you don’t have to look. You don’t ever have to look. And there’s so much noise online. Yours is already static in the background.”
“I don’t know,” says Sam. “I just don’t know about that.” Then she says, “Mom?”
“Yes?”
“Do you promise Henry isn’t normal?”
“I promise that there’s no such thing as normal,” says Amy. “Normal is a myth.” She screws the top back on the bottle of wine, and she puts the bottle in her bag, and she stands and holds a hand out to Sam. “I’d much rather talk to you longer. But I’m meeting Shelly Salazar about publicity, so I think we’d better start up those steps.”
“Ugh,” says Sam. All of her problems still exist in the same way they did when she and her mother walked down the steps, and though nothing has changed in a concrete way, everything feels just a little bit like it has.
Amy
After what Sam told her, Amy wants to shake her fist at the world; she wants to scream with rage. She wants to track down Evil Alice and poke out her eyeballs, or at least give her a very stern talking-to, and maybe ask to speak with her mother.
Young people have so much more to deal with now! When she was nineteen, home on Block Island from NYU for the summer, her biggest worry was finding out where the bonfire was that night—not, for heaven’s sake, wondering who’d captured anyone’s embarrassing or private moments with a camera and then set the images loose for all the world to peruse. It’s easy to forget sometimes, when you’re admiring the shininess of teenage girls’ hair, how effortlessly they wear crop tops, that their burdens, which may at first seem featherlight, can be heavy indeed.
But Amy doesn’t have time to track down Evil Alice or her mother. There are seven days to go until they open, and she has to keep her eyes on the prize. Thank goodness she chose Joy Bombs, not Poor People’s Pub, for the publicity update with Shelly. She needs to clear the wine from her brain and get some answers from Shelly, who’s lately been slippery as a greased-up eel. Ticket sales still aren’t anywhere close to where they should be, and it’s time to panic.
After she drops Sam home and heads back into town Amy hasa few minutes to spare, so once she’s parked she sits in the Wagoneer and calls Greg. He’s still working. He answers, but in hisI’m in the middle of somethingvoice. There’s a certain breathlessness to it.
“I know what happened in New York,” she says.
“Hang on,” he says. He says something unintelligible to someone in the background, something stern that sounds like a warning or admonition, then he comes back. “I’m so glad you know,” he says. “I’ve been waiting.”
“Waiting for what?”
“For you to google. So we could talk about it.”
“Gregory! Whatdid you just say?”
