The Identicals(9)

There had been no point in responding. He didn’t get it. He would never get it, Tabitha realized. She gave him the “we want different things” talk, and two days later, he moved out.



The party isn’t bad. The host and hostess are from Tallahassee, so by nature they find New England brisk. Hence they’ve provided a pile of cashmere wraps in optimistic summertime hues—cantaloupe, fuchsia, aquamarine—for the female guests on the boat to borrow. There is an endless supply of very cold Laurent-Perrier rosé and a piped-in sound track of Sinatra and Dean Martin that Tabitha just loves. Because she had no youth, she has adopted the tastes of her mother, Eleanor. Eleanor is a woman of refinement by anyone’s standards, but she is seventy-one years old, and at times Tabitha fears that she has not only skipped her own youth but her middle age as well and landed squarely in the era of hip replacements and hearing aids.

While Ramsay was packing up his things to leave, he delivered a speech in which he enumerated every one of Tabitha’s flaws.

She is egregiously snobby. She is uptight. She panders to the whims and wishes of her mother; she has spent her entire adult life in the woman’s shadow. She has been a tireless handmaiden in service to Eleanor Roxie-Frost Designs, LLC, yet the boutique on Nantucket loses money every year! Tabitha has no business sense; she has run the store into the ground. Ramsay himself had lent her forty thousand dollars so that she might expand the store’s inventory beyond the ERF label. “And don’t forget, you still owe me that money,” Ramsay said.

“I know,” Tabitha responded, although she was pretty sure Ramsay understood that with a child to send to college, it would take her a very long time to pay him back.

As his parting shot, Ramsay had said, “It’s a good thing you don’t want any more children,” he said. “You’re a piss-poor mother, Tabitha.”

She knew he was angry and hurt and heartbroken, but the unbuffered cruelty of this statement forced her to respond, “How dare you?”

He said, “Maybe with me gone, you can get your daughter under control.”



The food on the boat is delicious—lamb lollipops, lobster-corn cakes, gougères, deviled eggs. Tabitha helps herself judiciously—Ramsay was kind enough not to mention the fifteen pounds she’s gained over the past three years—as she scans the crowd for eligible men to talk to. Ramsay wasn’t wrong about her lack of business sense. What she needs, more than anything, is to either hit the lottery or find a sugar daddy.

Pickings on the boat are slim. All the men are older and seem well off, but they’re also married—and most of them are from Tallahassee, which rules them out immediately.

Tabitha has the bartender fill her glass of champagne, then she heads out to the bow of the boat alone. They are just rounding Brant Point Light, coming upon a vista so magnificent it takes Tabitha’s breath away despite the hundreds of times she’s seen it. She leans her elbows on the railing and holds her champagne out with both hands. She closes her eyes.

She is not a piss-poor parent. Ainsley is merely at a trying age, and she is rebellious by nature. But if you were to strip Tabitha down to her starkest, most honest thoughts, the ones she would never dare share with another soul, she would admit that where Ainsley is concerned, she has created a monster. After Julian died, Tabitha poured all her energy into raising Ainsley. She was a helicopter parent—a second-generation helicopter parent—controlling Ainsley’s every move the way Eleanor had controlled hers. But when Ainsley grew up, she did it fast. Ainsley was a runaway mustang, and Tabitha felt the reins slipping through her hands. The way Tabitha chose to keep Ainsley close was to aid and abet her in her quest to be the most popular, most sophisticated child at Nantucket High School. Tabitha bought the makeup and the two-hundred-dollar jeans; Tabitha extended the curfew. The fact that Ainsley is now such a powder keg is nobody’s fault but Tabitha’s.

Being out on the ocean always brings up these thoughts. Tabitha should have stayed on land.

Suddenly there’s a man standing next to her. He’s wearing a uniform.

He offers his hand. “I’m Peter,” he says. “The captain.”

“Tabitha Frost,” she says. “If you’re the captain, then who’s driving the boat?”

Peter laughs. “My first mate. I asked him to take over for a second so I could come down here to chat with you. Would you like to help me steer this beauty?”



As they stand side by side at the ship’s wheel—any time a crew member happens to wander in, Peter sends him off to fetch Tabitha more champagne or another plate of hors d’oeuvres—he unreels his life story. Coast Guard at nineteen, married by twenty-two, two boys (named PJ and Kyle), divorced by age thirty, ex-wife number 1 lives in Houston.

Tabitha wonders how many ex-wives there are in total. The music, she can hear, has changed to Top 40—the stuff Ainsley listens to when she’s in a good mood—and Tabitha envisions the champagne going to everyone’s head and the Tallahasseeans contorting their bodies in awkward, embarrassing ways that approximate dancing.

“Go on,” she says to Captain Peter.

Married again at age thirty-two. The daughter from that marriage is a shooting star, nineteen years old and a sophomore at Northwestern; ex-wife number 2, the mother, runs a glamorous campground on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.