Golden Girl(60)

“We were spoiled with Willa,” JP says.

Yes, Willa was a perfect baby. She slept all the time, peacefully, faceup in her bassinet and then her crib. She comforted herself without a pacifier; she nursed beautifully but never minded a bottle.

Carson, however, has both colic and reflux. She eats, she spits up, she cries. Vivi has her on the breast, gives her breast milk from a bottle, gives her formula from a bottle—there’s no difference, no improvement. She’s happier sleeping on her stomach, but what kind of irresponsible parent puts a baby to sleep on her stomach?

There are days Vivi cries right along with Carson, but she lets herself do that only when Willa is napping.

She tries not to think of the girls as good kid/bad kid or even as easy kid/difficult kid because what if these labels follow them into adolescence and then adulthood?

“They’re just so different,” Vivi says. “How did this happen?”

“Happens all the time,” JP says like a man who is an expert on siblings, although he’s an only child just like Vivi.



On the night that Vivi thinks might be the worst night ever—Carson is screaming bloody murder and her face is as red as a Bartlett’s Farm tomato; Willa is doing this new low-key whimpering thing (which is even more grating on Vivi’s nerves than the baby’s crying); and JP is off-island taking the test for his real estate license, so Vivi has no backup—Vivi gets an idea for a novel about two sisters. It comes to her whole, like a neatly wrapped present. The Dune Daughters.

Charlotte and Evangeline. Their father is a scalloper; he raises them by himself in a dilapidated fishing shack out in the dunes by Long Pond. One sister marries a local boy and the other marries a rich summer kid. Who will be happier?

Willa and the baby don’t fall asleep until well past midnight, but Vivi, thinking about the novel’s plot, doesn’t care. When they’re finally quiet, she grabs a notebook and a pen and brews a cup of herbal tea (she wants coffee but there can be no caffeine while nursing). She inhales the silence and exhales words onto the page. It is just that easy, that natural; it feels like breathing. Two hours later, like clockwork, the baby cries and Vivi’s milk lets down, but she keeps writing. Miraculously, Carson stops crying on her own; the front of Vivi’s nightgown is soaked, but she doesn’t care. She keeps writing.



Eight months later, the first draft of The Dune Daughters is finished. Vivi wrote it during the girls’ naptime and late at night. She learned to live with less sleep the same way people learn to live with less food during wartime.

On the night she completes the novel, she wakes JP up by sitting on the edge of the bed and kissing the crook of his neck. JP has endured one hell of a summer. As low man at Island Fog Real Estate, he was assigned the least desirable rentals, which always seemed to attract the most demanding families. JP spent twelve consecutive summer weekends meeting people with keys, chasing down plumbers to fix leaky outdoor showers, running to Yates Gas because the propane tank on the grill was empty. JP likes his boss, Eddie Pancik—everyone on the island calls him Fast Eddie—but JP knows he would be happier if he started his own business and could be his own boss.

“Don’t quit,” Vivi told him all summer long. “We need the money.” They used the fund set up for JP by his grandparents to put a down payment on the house on Surfside and the rest went into a “contingency account,” which is almost depleted. Kids are expensive. Life is expensive.

“I finished the novel,” Vivi says once JP’s eyes open.

He props himself up on his elbows. “You did? Just now?”

“I can’t tell if it’s any good,” Vivi says. She has given the novel a dozen read-throughs and sometimes thinks it’s inspired and other times thinks it’s cheesy and clichéd, a vanity project by an overtired housewife. “I’m too close to it.”

JP pulls Vivi to him and kisses the part in her hair. “Of course it’s good,” he says. “You wrote it.”



When Vivi tells the women in her Mommy and Me group that she has finished writing a novel, half of them are skeptical about its prospects, the other half patronizing.

JP assures her those mothers are just envious because Vivi found the time to do something for herself.

That’s part of it, certainly, Vivi thinks. But it’s also silly to expect people to get excited about a book that isn’t published.



How will she ever get published?



Vivi has remained in touch all these years with Famous Author, the one who taught the workshop that Vivi attended in high school. In a letter, Vivi asks Famous Author what she should do with her manuscript.

He calls her, taking her completely by surprise (she included her phone number in the letter but never dreamed he’d use it).

He gives Vivi his own agent’s name and address. “Send it to Jodi with a big note on top that says I referred you. I want full credit for discovering you, hear me? You’re going to be successful, Vivian. I could tell that thirteen years ago. You’ve got something.”



A week after Vivi sends the manuscript, Jodi Partridge calls to say she would be honored to represent Vivi.

“This book is so…summery. It makes me want to move to Nantucket and live my best, beachiest life.”

Vivi eyes the inside of her house. There are doll clothes and Cheerios all over the floor and a juice box (not even organic) leaking onto the coffee table. Vivi had big plans of taking the girls on a walk through the moors—the foliage is changing colors and the October sun makes everything look like it’s been dipped in gold—but it’s two o’clock and Vivi is still in her yoga pants.