The Last Book Party(46)

“Your best stories?” Jeremy said. “And how many would that be?”

“Well, not many,” I said, suddenly feeling foolish. “Four?”

“Out of how many?”

“How many stories have I started? Not quite hundreds, but…”

We climbed up and crossed the path of the old railroad tracks, overgrown with wildflowers, and then walked down the other side and through the marsh toward the beach by the mouth of the harbor.

“No, how many stories have you finished?” Jeremy said.

When I didn’t answer, he said, “I’m guessing you’ve finished four—the ones that came easily.”

“Something like that,” I said.

“I rest my case. You need to stop the magical thinking. You have to push through, especially when it’s not easy.”

The ground was muddy as we crossed the marshy inlet between the tracks and the beach.

“Walk quickly and you’ll sink less,” I said, picking up my pace.

“Like run fast when it’s raining and you’ll stay dry?”

I laughed, happy to have the conversation move off the topic of writing.

We climbed through the bright green dune grass and over the hill and onto the beach. There was a light breeze off the bay. I stripped down to my bathing suit and ran in. Treading water, I watched Jeremy walk in slowly, holding his arms up when the water reached his waist.

“Slower is harder,” I said. “It’s not even cold!”

“You’re kidding, right?”

When the water was up to his chest, Jeremy dunked his head and swam underwater for a while, surprising me by surfacing much farther out. Wet and flattened, his hair nearly touched his shoulders. I swam toward him and then asked something that had been on my mind since the night before.

“Did your escape to Choate help your relationship with your parents at all?”

“It eased the tension, I guess. Made me less angry at them.”

“And what about your sister? Did she feel abandoned?”

“She did,” he said. “Terribly so.”

“Were your parents able to help her?”

“In a sense, yes. They got her to a doctor, and he helped. But it was an affront to them. Imagine, they nearly starved during the war, got painfully thin and lost most of their hair, and then they find themselves in a cushy suburb in America with a beautiful daughter who is mutilating herself so badly that she has no eyelashes or eyebrows. It was hard for them to understand.”

I thought of Danny, and how even parents who seem fully equipped to help a child can be at a loss. We swam to shallower water where we could stand.

“Do your parents ever talk about what happened to them during the war?”

Jeremy shook his head.

“You know those Holocaust survivors who seem to have turned suffering into immeasurable kindness? The ones that go speak to children at synagogues to show them the living embodiment of resilience and how love triumphs after all?”

“I do,” I said. “Those people are incredible.”

“Yeah, well, those people are not my parents.”

We walked out of the water and sat on the hot, dry sand. “And you’re not curious about what happened to them during the war? And before?” I scooped some sand and started digging a hole between us.

“Honestly? I’m not. I’d rather invent stories. Create people.”

Jeremy started digging a hole right next to mine.

“Like Sarita, in your novel?” I reached the moist sand and dug a little farther until my arm was in the sand up to my elbow.

“Yes, like Sarita. I’m glad you remember her name.”

“It’s easy to remember the name of someone you like.”

I pulled my arm out and watched Jeremy dig until he was scooping out wet sand and couldn’t dig any farther. We filled the holes in and then set out down the beach to the parking lot. We walked in silence to the dirt road back to Toms Hill and my house. At the top of the road, I stopped to look back toward the bay and the view of Long Point at the tip of Provincetown. Jeremy stopped beside me. The wind had already dried his hair and was lifting his curls. He looked at me and cocked his head as if to ask what I was thinking. And so I told him.

“You know, you’re not such an asshole.”

“Yeah.” He smiled. “I know.”





41





From my vantage point at the edge of the driveway, the kaleidoscope of costumes, bursts of color from feather plumes and scarves, wigs and hats of all kinds, sweeping capes and furry boas, made the crowd on Henry and Tillie’s lawn look like a single organism, breathing and preening on the grass. It was a frightening sight, this crowd creature, as if it were about to open its mouth and swallow me whole.

I didn’t recognize anyone until I saw a familiar-looking woman in a short calico dress and two long braids wired to stick straight out from her head. It was Alva, appearing as Pippi Longstocking, a playful choice that did not surprise me, as I’d often heard Alva rail against the assumption that librarians were stuffy. When she looked my way, I lifted my hands to applaud her outfit. She smiled and raised her glass, making it clear that she thought my costume was a success. Against the rules of the party, I had revealed my costume to Alva, although I had done so by telephone, fearing that an in-person meeting might lead her to suspect my affair with Henry. She had given me some good ideas for making my outfit look authentic although she had refused to divulge her own costume.