The Charm Bracelet(40)
Arden looked at her mom, shocked, and then shook her head. “She doesn’t need to know all that.”
Lolly smiled sweetly and folded the cherry apron into a neat square before tying the crisp apron dotted with bright strawberries, trimmed with a white border, around her neck and waist. She watched her granddaughter spray her body with suntan lotion before flipping over.
“She doesn’t?” Lolly finally said, turning to look at her daughter.
“Why would you bring that up, Mom?” Arden asked.
“I just want the same things for you both. I’m getting older, and I want you both to be happy.”
Lolly stopped and looked back out at Lauren. “I’ve been thinking about what Lauren said, about how she switched majors. She needs to know you’re human, you’ve made mistakes, and that it’s okay for her to make some, too. She’s trying so hard to be perfect, and she’s not happy, my dear.”
Arden’s head whirled.
Is she right? Has my carefully crafted life been built on a cracked foundation? Arden thought. And now Lauren is crumbling, too?
Arden stared at her mother, seeing her differently for the first time in a long time: Solid. Strong. Sage.
Lolly nodded at her daughter and then pinned a large plastic nametag onto her apron featuring the logo of the sweet shop and the name “DOLLY!” in a capitalized script, the exclamation point in the shape of an ice cream cone.
“See you at seven,” she said, ambling off the screened porch with a large bag stuffed with Dolly’s costume, and blowing Lauren a kiss. She stopped on the stoop and turned back around. “And try to look … well … a bit less serious for dinner.”
“You don’t like my wardrobe, Mother?” Arden asked.
“Why not let your daughter help you get dressed tonight,” Lolly sang, walking away from the cabin. “Just for fun.”
Fun, Arden thought, suddenly picturing herself in her office at Paparazzi, images of the magazine’s most beautiful women—Kerry Washington, Angelina Jolie, and Princess Kate—whirling through her head.
Out of the blue, Arden chuckled, watching her mother walk away: In a surreal, alternative universe sort of way, all of this made sense. One of the most bookish women in the world—bespectacled, bobbed, little makeup, drab clothes, no jewelry—working at one of the glitziest consumer magazines in the world, and the daughter of a true character.
As Arden’s mind continued to whir, her life quickly became Photoshop clear: I am the Spanx underneath the glitz, the unseen glue that holds it all together.
As soon as Arden heard the soft crush of gravel of her mother’s Woodie pulling away, she bolted upstairs, changed into running shorts and sneakers, and zipped past Lauren without saying a word.
“Hi to you, too, Mom!” Lauren said, but Arden didn’t hear her.
Arden jogged around the edge of the lake, hoping she might be able to outrun the ghosts from her childhood.
Have I always been this lost?
Then she saw it: That tiny opening within the large stand of white birch. She tried to resist, but it called to her, and Arden found herself running directly into it.
Here was the secret jogging trail that skirted Lost Land. It meandered through the woods and hopscotched around summer cottages. The path had been formed when Arden was young, when wealthy Chicagoans had seen On Golden Pond and flocked to Scoops for a taste of the simple life, snatching up cottages as quickly as fudge. Thin white women with severe bobs introduced running to the resort area along with Pottery Barn and Martha Stewart, and their lithe bodies and Nike-clad feet eventually cleared a trail along the memorable little lake.
As Arden ran, she recalled how fascinated she had been with this influx of status into the long-overlooked lake that sat miles from the money of downtown and the Lake Michigan coast.
Arden remembered watching from her bedroom window during high school as construction workers descended onto Lost Land—earthmovers replacing herons—and transformed tiny log cabins on the opposite side of the lake into Ralph Lauren–chic estates. The wives followed, decorating and running, running and decorating. They would meet in their yards, which fronted the lake, stretching, doing this thing called “yoga,” before dashing off—Zoom!—an angry army of hornets in pink.
Arden had followed. She not only began to run, she began to want clothes and shoes that Lolly and Les just couldn’t afford. Arden began to yearn for a life in the city she had never known.
“They aren’t real. You can’t live your life wanting to be a projection of someone else,” Lolly would repeatedly say to her shy daughter. “You have to be you, Arden. And they wear tennis bracelets, not charm bracelets. They don’t know who they are or where they came from anymore.”
Lolly had fought to preserve the original seven cabins along Lost Lake and had come out victorious. She knew these women didn’t like her, but she hadn’t expected her daughter to envy them.
“They aren’t happy, Arden,” Lolly told her daughter. “They are never content enough to enjoy their lives.”
Arden picked up her pace, trying to outrun her thoughts, and sprinted along the trail, shadowed and cool under a canopy of birch and sugar maples. She breathed deeply as she ran, her lungs filling with an ease she rarely experienced in the city.
Arden approached a tiny stream—a “crick” as her mother called it—that ran into Lost Land, and decided to jump it like a show horse. She picked up steam and …