Girls of Summer
Nancy Thayer
one
Remember, Lisa’s mother had often said, it’s good to know where you want to be, but sometimes you have to go in the opposite direction to get there. Lisa knew her mother was right because her mother was, as was her father, a high school teacher full of knowledge and experience. She also knew that when they had married, her mother had wanted to have five children and her father had wanted to be a novelist. Instead, they taught in the Nantucket high school and had only one child, the fortunate Lisa, but they said they were extremely happy throughout their lives. So maybe they didn’t get where they intended to go, but they ended up where they were meant to be.
Lisa thought about her mother’s words a lot. Her teachers always told her that she could make something of herself. She could be an astronaut or a doctor or the governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts!
Lisa politely thanked them but secretly wondered why she should do anything other than what she loved doing most: swimming at Surfside Beach in the summer, biking around the island in the fall and spring, and creating entire wardrobes of clothes for her many dolls during the winter.
Actually, she knew why she should do something else: to please her parents. Even if it wasn’t her fault—how could it possibly be her fault?—that they had no other children, that her father never wrote a novel, even so, she felt a powerful obligation to her parents, these people who had given her life, and that life had given her so much good fortune. They never pushed her, but she knew they expected and hoped for a lot from her. They gave her violin and piano lessons. Ice skating and swimming lessons. She mastered them, but she didn’t excel at any of them. She never brought home a gold medal for her parents to put on their mantel.
Still, Lisa made mostly A’s in her high school courses, and she volunteered for various island causes. She helped her mother clean house. She helped her father mow the lawn and rake the leaves and shovel the snow. She had lots of good friends, and two best friends, and she was never bored. Like her mother, she carried a book with her everywhere, in case she got stuck in a waiting room for the dentist or had to take the ferry to the mainland.
In high school, she had friends who were boys, but she never had a real boyfriend, which secretly worried her. Was she such a loser? It was true that she worked hard on her grades and spent a lot of time reading and sewing. After she graduated from high school, she learned that guys didn’t ask her out because her parents, those brilliant high school teachers, terrified them.
When it came time to apply to college, Lisa wanted to attend the Fashion Institute of Technology, but her parents refused to send her there. So Lisa went to Middlebury College in Vermont to major in business administration and to learn how to ski, because who knew? Maybe she’d be a star at skiing.
In the summer, she returned to the island to work, because she needed the money but also because she loved working in retail, especially in the clothing shops. She helped hang, fold, smooth, and carry glamorous dresses for the posh summer women. She never wanted to be one of those posh women. She wanted to be the owner of the shop.
In college, she finally dated, although not very seriously. During her freshman year, the guys seemed all about partying. They got drunk, did stupid pranks, and laughed like donkeys. Over the next few years, it got a little better. The guys she went with tended to be on the jocky side, muscular, often incredibly handsome, always nice. But something was missing. They weren’t, somehow, enough.
In late October of her senior year, Lisa went to a gathering with her girlfriends. The northern Vermont air was crisp, the mountains were blazing with crimson and gold, and she felt she was perched at the very edge of a new and exhilarating life. The party was held in an old Victorian house. The doors and windows were open, there was a bar in every room, and after downing a couple of beers with her friends, Lisa realized she hadn’t eaten since breakfast and she was getting slightly dizzy.
She wandered into the long hall, squeezed between groups of people, and found herself in an extremely large, ancient kitchen with so many roosters on the tiles, plates, dishtowels, and implements that she wondered if she’d had more to drink than she’d thought.
“Hi,” a man said.
“Oh,” Lisa replied, and thought: Wow.
A British aristocrat stood before her, like a young Hugh Grant clone, complete with floppy hair, except this man’s was dark. He was wearing a collared shirt and a blue blazer, and she squinted at this.
“I had to go to dinner with my parents,” the man said, reading her mind.
“Oh, dinner,” Lisa moaned.
“Hungry? Come this way.”
He put an arm around her shoulders and gently guided her to a table piled high with cheeses, crackers, a gigantic sliced ham, and other mouthwatering goodies.
But now that she was near food, she couldn’t eat. She was more self-conscious than she’d ever been in her life, and that was really not the way she’d ever been. This man was daunting.
“Who are you?” she asked.
He grinned. “Erich Hawley. Senior, majoring in economics. And skiing.”
“I’m Lisa, a senior majoring in business administration.” She smiled, tilting her head so that her glossy brown hair fell over her shoulder and down over her breast. Oh, wow, she thought. It had happened. She was flirting! “And I’m learning to ski, but I’m not a natural at it. I’m better at swimming. I live on Nantucket.”