crowded as it would be in July and August.
Perhaps by then she would have managed to lose enough weight so that her bust wouldn’t bulge out of her suit like too many pillows in a case.
Perhaps not.
Did she eat as sublimation for sex? She’d talked with friends about this enough. She hadn’t been a chubby teenager. Well, she hadn’t been thin, either. She’d just been nicely rounded. She’d been that way in college, too, and when she was working on her master’s.
Of course she’d dated. She’d even had flings. Kind of. In her deepest heart, she knew that for years, perhaps most of her twenties, she’d been obsessed with literature, poetry, and women writers. Her two best friends, both graduate students, got married; Meg was a bridesmaid for both of them. Kyla married another grad student who was working toward his PhD and expected Kyla to be his cook, housekeeper, and general gofer. Winnie married a studly mechanic who looked like sex in tight jeans and didn’t know who Edgar Allan Poe was. Winnie now had two adorable children, and her dreams of her own PhD and a career teaching English literature had evaporated.
Meg didn’t want either one of their lives. As Louisa May Alcott had said, “I’d rather be a free spinster and paddle my own canoe.”
But Meg wanted children. And she had to admit she wanted them with a husband, a man she admired and desired, who would cherish his children, and all she asked was that he be
intelligent
. Well,
kind
would also be a good quality.
Would she give up teaching to be a wife and mother? Why should she have to? If only she could meet an insurance agent, or the manager of a Home Depot, or a mailman. A good guy with asteady job and a steady, kind, reliable heart. Was that too much to ask?
It was some comfort that Arden and Jenny weren’t married or engaged, either. Back in the old, old days, when the three of them were on the island for that first summer after their father married Justine, it was already clear that Arden was the man magnet. Of course, she was fourteen, with boobs and curves, while Jenny was the stick she still remained and Meg had looked like a plump little kid.
Now that Meg allowed herself to sink back into the memory, she marveled at how much fun that long-ago summer had been.
After breakfast, the three girls would gather up their beach bags and hurry along the narrow lanes to Jetties Beach. They’d toss down their stuff—beach umbrella, sunblock, and cooler of cold drinks—and dash into the surf. They’d have swimming races, contests to see who could stay under the longest; they’d build extravagant sand castles; they’d beachcomb; they’d fall asleep on their towels, returning home red as lobsters. They were always giggling at something, anything, a woman’s jiggling bosom, a boy’s smile—everything seemed hysterically funny.
After lunch, they’d walk into town to check out books from the library or buy fashion magazines and ice cream. In the heat of the afternoon, they’d sprawl in the backyard, reading and snoozing, or if it was raining, they’d play games. Monopoly. Scrabble. Clue. In the evening, they might go back into town to see a movie or just to hang around Main Street, people watching, listening to the street musicians, giggling at how cute the guitarist was.
Meg didn’t remember them fighting, not that first year.
It was the next year, when Arden was fifteen and she and Jenny were twelve, that everything changed.
Arden had cut her long red ponytail into a short asymmetrical mess that fell in her eyes. She had three holes in her left ear, twoin her right. She wore heavy eye makeup, black fingernail polish, and slutty clothes. While Jenny and Meg were still singing songs from the Disney movie
Beauty and the Beast
, Arden was blasting the house with Nirvana and Pearl Jam.
The three girls had seen each other about once a month over the winter, when their father took them all out to dinner and a play or a movie, so Meg was
Perhaps by then she would have managed to lose enough weight so that her bust wouldn’t bulge out of her suit like too many pillows in a case.
Perhaps not.
Did she eat as sublimation for sex? She’d talked with friends about this enough. She hadn’t been a chubby teenager. Well, she hadn’t been thin, either. She’d just been nicely rounded. She’d been that way in college, too, and when she was working on her master’s.
Of course she’d dated. She’d even had flings. Kind of. In her deepest heart, she knew that for years, perhaps most of her twenties, she’d been obsessed with literature, poetry, and women writers. Her two best friends, both graduate students, got married; Meg was a bridesmaid for both of them. Kyla married another grad student who was working toward his PhD and expected Kyla to be his cook, housekeeper, and general gofer. Winnie married a studly mechanic who looked like sex in tight jeans and didn’t know who Edgar Allan Poe was. Winnie now had two adorable children, and her dreams of her own PhD and a career teaching English literature had evaporated.
Meg didn’t want either one of their lives. As Louisa May Alcott had said, “I’d rather be a free spinster and paddle my own canoe.”
But Meg wanted children. And she had to admit she wanted them with a husband, a man she admired and desired, who would cherish his children, and all she asked was that he be
intelligent
. Well,
kind
would also be a good quality.
Would she give up teaching to be a wife and mother? Why should she have to? If only she could meet an insurance agent, or the manager of a Home Depot, or a mailman. A good guy with asteady job and a steady, kind, reliable heart. Was that too much to ask?
It was some comfort that Arden and Jenny weren’t married or engaged, either. Back in the old, old days, when the three of them were on the island for that first summer after their father married Justine, it was already clear that Arden was the man magnet. Of course, she was fourteen, with boobs and curves, while Jenny was the stick she still remained and Meg had looked like a plump little kid.
Now that Meg allowed herself to sink back into the memory, she marveled at how much fun that long-ago summer had been.
After breakfast, the three girls would gather up their beach bags and hurry along the narrow lanes to Jetties Beach. They’d toss down their stuff—beach umbrella, sunblock, and cooler of cold drinks—and dash into the surf. They’d have swimming races, contests to see who could stay under the longest; they’d build extravagant sand castles; they’d beachcomb; they’d fall asleep on their towels, returning home red as lobsters. They were always giggling at something, anything, a woman’s jiggling bosom, a boy’s smile—everything seemed hysterically funny.
After lunch, they’d walk into town to check out books from the library or buy fashion magazines and ice cream. In the heat of the afternoon, they’d sprawl in the backyard, reading and snoozing, or if it was raining, they’d play games. Monopoly. Scrabble. Clue. In the evening, they might go back into town to see a movie or just to hang around Main Street, people watching, listening to the street musicians, giggling at how cute the guitarist was.
Meg didn’t remember them fighting, not that first year.
It was the next year, when Arden was fifteen and she and Jenny were twelve, that everything changed.
Arden had cut her long red ponytail into a short asymmetrical mess that fell in her eyes. She had three holes in her left ear, twoin her right. She wore heavy eye makeup, black fingernail polish, and slutty clothes. While Jenny and Meg were still singing songs from the Disney movie
Beauty and the Beast
, Arden was blasting the house with Nirvana and Pearl Jam.
The three girls had seen each other about once a month over the winter, when their father took them all out to dinner and a play or a movie, so Meg was
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