“So not right away?”
“No,” admits Jordan. “Not right away.”
“Well, I didn’t delete yours. I’ll text you, okay? Hang on, I’m doing it right now.”
Simone’s contact arrives on Jordan’s phone with a buzz, they say goodbye, and Simone turns and goes back the way she came.
Natalie is wearing a giant sun hat and her new bikini, and she’s thinking about corralling her children back to the house so she doesn’t miss the window for Caspian’s two o’clock nap. Miss the window, and therest of the day goes south fast. She doesn’t look too bad, maybe even pretty good,Baywatchmeets MILF, and in the old days (last week) she would absolutely be making a post or a TikTok or both. Her followers go crazy when the Hanson family leaves the farm and ventures into the wild.Watch us go apple picking! See us at the airport, on our way to Montana to visit the grandparents! Here we are visiting a museum in New York City, swimming in a lake, playing miniature golf.
She understands,obviously,that the internet is addictive, capricious, potentially damaging to the psyche. She has prior experience with that damage herself. The previous fall, scrolling Instagram, Natalie saw a photo of four of the Wesleyan girls together on a getaway to Napa—everyone but her and Leah. Two-thirds of the Sisterhood. Immediately hot tears had pricked her eyes.
Leah had gone to law school and now works for a big firm in Manhattan; she and her husband, an oncologist, live in Connecticut, in commuting distance of the city. Two kids, two jobs, three rotating nannies. She and her husband never see each other. The kids hardly see them together. Every day, Leah once told Natalie, with an air of grievance but also a sort of pride in all she was managing, was a jigsaw puzzle into which they needed to slot one hundred and fifty pieces. Every. Single. Day. “No rest for the weary!” She laughed. It didn’t seem so funny to Natalie.
“Why are you doing it?” Natalie asked her once, and then, into the silence, “No, really, Leah, I’m serious.”
“Because how else am I going to do it? I went to law school! I’m not going tonotpractice law. Chris went to medical school! He’s not going to not treat cancer so he can drive to soccer practice! Look, sorry if I don’t make all of my salad dressings from scratch—” She broke off her sentence, and Natalie was silent. “Sorry, Nat, I didn’t mean...”
The previous fall, Natalie captured a screenshot of the girls in Napa and texted it to Leah.WTF?she said.
Oh yeah, Leah texted back.Bummed we couldn’t make it.
Couldn’t make it? She hadn’t been asked! She imagined the side text blowing up now as Leah realized her mistake. She hearted the photo anyway. It would have gone against her brand to make a big deal over something so trivial. But she understood that this was the cost of her new life. The Sisterhood no longer thought they had anything in common with her.
Now Scarlett and Evangeline are working on a massive sandcastle, using the buckets that Natalie unearthed from the garage storeroom. After she’d plucked them from an enormous pile of who knows what, she’d closed the door. Their father had given them only one job, but it’s a doozy.
Caspian is walking around his sisters like a bull about to enter the ring, 100 percent unharnessed energy. It’s clear from his expression that he wants to help but that he also wants to knock the whole thing down just to see what will happen. He looks so much like his father, with his strong legs (who knew a toddler could have visible quad muscles?) and the shape of his eyes—both Austin’s and Caspian’s are round as buttons and fringed with thick lashes. The male energy, always threatening to erupt. Caspian and Austin look most like each other when neither gets their way, which happens often enough with Caspian and really hardly ever with Austin.
Natalie observes as a little girl about Scarlett’s age approaches her daughters. Long-sleeved rash guard, hat, zinc on her nose. When Natalie and her sisters were this age they ran around on this beach in almost nothing, which explains why Natalie has three moles on her upper back that the dermatologist is “watching.” And who is she to judge? Her own kids are covered up too.
The girl clearly wants to join in but isn’t sure how to approach, so instead she takes a swaybacked stance and watches from a careful distance, the knuckles of her right hand in her mouth. Evangeline and Scarlett pass a look between them, seeming to come to an agreement, and then Evangeline wordlessly hands the girl the small yellow shovel and the second-best bucket.
Who says homeschooled kids have no social skills?
A woman who is probably the girl’s mom flops down next to Natalie, uninvited, and says, “My kid’s so shy. She always waits to be included, you know?”
Natalie refrains from saying that this doesn’t seem to be a genetic trait, and instead she smiles and says, “I get it.”
“Ohmygod, Natalie, it’s me! Rebecca Martin! From the Beach Club!”
Natalie looks and the face resolves into someone recognizable from her youth. The Shipmans belonged to the Beach Club because Theresa belonged, and Theresa belonged because her parents joined when they first built the house. The second a member turns twenty-five—actually, the secondbeforethey turn twenty-five—they have the option to get an adult membership, as Natalie chose to do. If you turn that down, as Jordan (“I’ll never use it”) and Mae (“Are you kidding? I can’t afford that!”) did, you can still visit the club with your family members who belong, but your only option to become a true member in the future is to join the decades-long wait list.
The question of what she will do with her membership is one Natalie hasn’t been able to bring herself to ask yet. Will she retain it, without a house to use it from? Or will she let it go? The Shipman girls have the best memories of the Beach Club, with its swim team and white wooden lockers, its famous Third of July party, thecomforting strictness of its rules. You can’t set up for dinner before 5 p.m.! No entering the upper deck if you’re under sixteen!
She does not, however, have fond memories of Rebecca. Rebecca was a boyfriend stealer and a snitch.
“Oh my god,Rebecca!” she says. “It’s so good to see you!”
“If she knocks over that sandcastle I’ll Venmo you fifty bucks. I’m kidding!” Natalie’s annoyance radar is going off in a big way. (Obviously Natalie knew Rebecca was kidding.) She begins packing some of their things into her beach bag to indicate that Rebecca shouldn’t make herself comfortable, and she’s about to give a five-minute warning to her kids, when Rebecca says, “My friends and I all follow Hillside Maven. For, like, a lark, you know? We’re, like, this is so nineteen fifties but we can’t get enough of it!”
Natalie freezes.
“Thanks for following,” she says carefully, even amiably. She’s not feeling amiable, but she really cannot afford to alienate anyone else right now,even Rebecca Martin.She calls out the five-minute warning.
“The homeschooling stuff is really a hoot. I mean, just the fact that you have the time!”
A hoot? A hoot is not how Natalie would describe all the hours she puts into planning lessons for Scarlett and Evangeline. They can both already read! She’ll have Evangeline at a sophomore-year French level by next year! It is the furthest thing from a hoot: it’s honest work, and it’s sacrifice, and it’s for the good of her family.
(And her followers.)
