Girls of Summer(4)

It would be smart for Lisa to take part in some non-partisan organization, Celeste continued. Lisa could make friends that way, and she could also be a representative for the bank. It was a good idea, Lisa thought, a great idea, actually. Washington was so enormous and complicated it made her feel lost, and when she took refuge in her apartment she was troubled by loneliness.

The National Museum of Women in the Arts was looking for an intern in their library and research center. It was a nice fit for Lisa. She was young, energetic, and knowledgeable about the arts. Once she started working there, she began doing research at night into women artists of past decades and centuries, and she loved it. Soon the cocktail parties where she’d once stood tongue-tied became fascinating, especially when she told some diplomat or correspondent where she was working. As the months passed, she became not the quiet, small-town Lisa, but an accomplished researcher and a minor expert on women’s art.

   Erich was delighted with the new and improved Lisa. Over the next few years, they took their vacations in foreign cities with great art museums—Paris, Amsterdam, Florence, London. They were really working vacations for Erich, who sandwiched meetings with diplomats, bankers, and scholars of economics. Lisa didn’t mind going out alone; she preferred strolling through museums by herself, pausing when something caught her eye.

It was when she was twenty-eight, with the dreaded year thirty looming over her, that she realized she was tired of traveling. She wanted to make a real home.

She wanted to have a baby.

One evening as they returned from a cocktail party and were getting ready for bed, Lisa said casually, “I’ve stopped taking the pill.”

Erich sat in the overstuffed chair in their bedroom to take off his black patent leather shoes. “What pill?”

“My birth control pill.”

Erich peeled off his black silk socks. “Are you sure that’s wise?”

Lisa went to her husband and knelt before him, her hands on his knees, looking up into his face. “I want children with you, Erich.”

His reaction was odd. He frowned, as if she’d spoken in an alien language he had to interpret. Then he said calmly, “Of course. Children would be good.”



* * *



—

“I’ll help you find a nanny,” Celeste told Lisa the day Juliet was born.

Lisa looked at the sweet perfect face of her daughter, wrapped in a hospital blanket, wide eyes gazing at the bright new world. “I won’t need a nanny.”

   “But your work with the women’s museum!”

“I’ve resigned. I can always return to it. I don’t want to miss a moment of Juliet’s first few years.”

“I think you’ll find,” Celeste said dryly, “that there will be many moments during your daughter’s infancy that you’ll wish to miss, especially those in the middle of the night.”

“Oh, Celeste, you’re so funny,” Lisa said.



* * *



—

Erich was pleased to have a daughter, and he did share some of the work, walking a fretful baby in the middle of the night, carrying her in a backpack when they strolled along the Mall. Celeste and Erich’s father—Lisa had never been asked to call him by his first name, so she always thought of him as Mr. Hawley—were helpful in their own very generous and controlling way. Erich’s parents helped find a small house in Georgetown and, in celebration of Juliet’s birth, they paid the down payment. Lisa’s parents, thrilled at having a grandchild, came often to help Lisa with small, perfect, rosy-cheeked baby Juliet.

Erich rose quickly in the ranks of the Swiss bank. It helped that he was fluent in French, German, and Spanish. Lisa admired her husband, and understood completely all the time he spent traveling, especially because when he returned home, he was so happy to see her that she quickly got pregnant again.

When Theo was born, Lisa expected that her husband would spend more time at home, that he would be even more in love with her because she had given him a son, and yes, she knew that was an old-fashioned way to think, but she was quite sure that Erich and especially his parents thought that way. She was realizing, because of her babies, how she had coasted through her early adult years, letting life make her choices for her. Now the sweet, exhausting gifts life had given her—which she had chosen—forced her to pay attention to the choices she had to make to keep her children healthy and happy.

   And maybe she paid less attention to Erich when he was home.

In fact, Erich spent even more time away from home, renting an apartment in Zurich. In their small charming townhouse, Lisa missed him as she changed diapers and mashed bananas and read stories, trying to keep her little ones entertained during the dreary winter and relentless summer heat.

And then: “Why not come home for the summer?” her mother asked.

The new, clear-sighted Lisa thought it through. In the summer, it would be as easy for Erich to fly to Nantucket as to Washington. Her mother would help with the babies, and best of all, they would be on the island, near the ocean, surrounded by her friends.

She packed up plenty of baby clothes and child paraphernalia and went.



* * *



—

She’d not forgotten the magic of Nantucket; she’d only banished it away to a corner of her heart. At Children’s Beach, Theo shrieked with laughter as Lisa held him in the shallow waves. Juliet constructed sand castles and played on the jungle gym. They both were blissed out by the sight of the huge ferries coming and going, and they waved and jumped up and down, thrilled by the ship’s horn. On rainy days, Lisa took them to the Whaling Museum and the library. And when her children were irritable from teething or a bad night from wetting the bed, her mother took them to the beach and Lisa took a nap. When Juliet and Theo were in bed for the night, her parents babysat while Lisa went to a movie or out to dinner with her friends.