I could hear Prudence upstairs, reminding the children to get dressed for the club and explaining to Jilly why she couldn’t bring her American Girl dolls to the celebration. Regina needed to change too. But it felt as though she wasn’t finished talking to me.
“I don’t want to shock you, but there was a time not so long ago when I thought maybe I should just do myself in,” she said. “I figured it would make everyone’s life so much easier. But you know what? Forrest would miss me. The children might not care much, but my husband would.
“I’d miss them too,” she said. “You might not believe this, but I love them all. In my way.”
Upstairs, back in my room, I got dressed for the Bastille Day celebration, to which I would wear my same blue dress—the second party in two weeks. The five of us piled into the Wagoneer and headed to the club.
The thought came to me, sitting in the back seat, between Jilly and Hayward, as I looked out the window, that for all the discussion Regina and I had that day—about Brenda, about Forrest, about herself, about sex—one character in the family drama she’d never mentioned was me. Maybe because I was never really all that important to anyone here after all.
34
Regina, but Not
They served pâté at the party—a food I’d never tasted before that night—and it didn’t agree with me. I must have looked pretty bad, because even Regina noticed and suggested I go home to lie down. Under normal circumstances—how things had been up until recently, anyway—this would have been a moment Forrest would have volunteered to drive me, but as it was, Regina corralled Jonathan, who’d been standing alongside the punch bowl, looking almost as out of place as I was, to bring me home. I couldn’t say much on the ride back to the house, but he made a point of telling me, again, how impressed he was with the progress I was making with tennis.
Back at the house, I threw up. That left me feeling better. With the house empty, I took the opportunity to scope things out again. This time, instead of checking out Regina’s room, I stepped into the one occupied by Forrest.
Not much to uncover there: a collection of Red Sox caps, a running treadmill, a plastic bin containing a few dozen identical pairs of neatly balled-up white tube socks, and beside those a stack of identical white T-shirts. There was a framed picture of the Buddha on one wall, next to some kind of certificate, also framed. On closer examination, this turned out to be Forrest’s high school diploma.
I opened the top bureau drawer. More tube socks, plus underwear, a jockstrap, bike shorts, and a pair of bicycle gloves. The next drawer held a pile of some kind of item I couldn’t identify at first, though after studying the writing on the packets, I understood. This was the first time I’d ever actually seen what a condom looked like.
At the very bottom of the drawer—with a dollar bill folded around it, held by a paper clip—there was a photograph. The girl in the picture looked a lot like Regina. This must be Regina, of course, but in a certain way she didn’t resemble Regina at all. She was smiling broadly, for one thing. She was tossing her head as if she’d just finished laughing. I studied this picture for a long time, wondering what could have happened to Regina to make her change so much.
Next to the photograph—less well hidden, in fact—was a card, the kind a person would purchase at a Hallmark store, with a rose on the front. The printed message read simply,Thinking of you and our special moments together.Below that, someone wearing bright orange lipstick had evidently pressed her mouth against the card, leaving a lip-shaped impression, and below this, a single letter, with a heart around it:B.
I felt like throwing up again, though this time it had nothing to do with the pâté.
35
Where Happiness Comes From
Forty-nine days remained in my Wonderland summer. Life went on just the way Regina told me it would, with little visible sign of change: just the usual round of tennis lessons, ice cream cones, playdates, sailing at the yacht club, takeout lobster rolls on the patio, riding bikes, boating, and trips to the supermarket, library, or Caboose. Fried-chicken dinners. S’mores by the fire. Biking to the club. Tennis again.
The only part that changed was that Forrest seemed to have slipped out of view. He was still around—though not for our breakfasts together—but even when he was physically present, he seemed distracted all the time now.
This would have been unbearable if it hadn’t been for my time out on the tennis court. Jilly and Hayward seemed to regard their lessons as a chore undertaken to please their parents. For me, those fifty-five minutes on the court with Jonathan had become the high point of my day.
As for Regina, after that one afternoon in which it had occurred to me that she might need to go back to that hospital—and in spite of her apparent recognition that Forrest had now embarked on an affair with Brenda—she actually appeared a little brighter these days, a little less depressed. She was taking fewer naps. She had started wearing makeup, more subtly applied than Brenda Barnett’s, and getting dressed in actualclothes, not just caftans. Maybe, with a competitor on the scene, she was trying to up her game, though from the looks of Forrest’s many absences (“triathlon-training sessions,” he said, and there were more of these as the days passed), her efforts weren’t doing anything to keep her husband home with her.
To look at how the days went in Wonderland over those weeks—midsummer now—it all looked pretty good. But I knew that, just as Regina had explained to me, a whole other set of events was taking place, everyone engaging in their own secret activities or just entertaining their own private thoughts that nobody would ever have guessed.
It was true for everyone probably. Maybe everyone who’d ever been born. Who knew what went on in the life of Prudence, when she went home at the end of her long day of cooking? Or my kind and handsome tennis teacher, Jonathan—home for the summer from college to give lessons, and, according to the gossip I overheard at the snack bar among the tennis girls, rumored to have a forty-year-old Argentinian boyfriend in town, even though mothers at the club kept trying to set him up with their daughters.Imagine having a tennis pro in the family. Lessons whenever you wanted.
I thought about Pam Oliver, still holding out hope that Forrest might stop by for a replay of whatever activities the two of them may have engaged in the summer before. The picture came to me of Olivia, the rich girl who huddled with her posse every morning at the club, all of them sipping their five-dollar virgin piña coladas. They might only talk about their hair and some model they saw inSeventeen, but at the end of the day, Olivia lay alone in her bed too. When she did, what thoughts entered her mind?
Hardest of all to imagine were the secret yearnings of Regina Emerson, but even Regina must have had hers. Or maybe it was the disappearance of yearning, the absence of hunger for anything more,any more, that led a person to the place Regina seemed to occupy now—where it seemed she barely cared if she lived or died.
One thing had changed in my nighttime routine. Where, until recently, I’d filled the pages of my journal every night with make-believe scenes I imagined taking place between Forrest and someone I pretended was me, the story had gone flat. I could no longer write about any of that, or allow myself to concoct our fantasy encounters on the page.
Days went by now that I made no move to retrieve my journal from under the mattress to write a new entry. Brenda Barnett had ruined the thrill. When I pictured Forrest now, her face always appeared—her mean little eyes, and that red hair of hers. The stupid things she said.
I found excitement now when I stepped out on the court to hit the tennis balls Jonathan lobbed to me from across the net.
I was hitting them hard now.
36
A Doll Bill Cosby Might Get for His Daughter
