Postcards From Last Summer (39 page)

Summer 2005

“M
irror hogs,” Tara said, peering over the heads of her friends clustered around the vanity, trying to check her reflection in the mirror. From her bell-shaped pearl gray gown to her beaded pumps, she was every inch a bride. Getting married. Today.

Somebody stop the earth from spinning so fast.

With the deadline of Steve's job in Tokyo, the wedding had needed to be planned at light speed, with decisions made daily and a few compromises made.

But the most important decision had been made, and somehow the others fell into place, bringing twenty-nine-year-old Tara here to Lindsay's lemon-painted attic room dressed in her Vera Wang gown and made up and almost ready to walk down the aisle an hour before they needed to leave for the church. It gave her more time to soak up the joy swirling among her friends, her future mother-in-law, and Maisy, the six-year-old flower girl who couldn't get over the fact that she'd be strewing real rose petals down the aisle of the church. It would all be perfect, if her mother weren't waiting downstairs, holding back from the fun because Serena Washington wasn't comfortable being in the same room with her daughter.

“Do I have to pick up all the flower petals after the ceremony?” Maisy asked. “I might need a broom. Just a little one.”

“Jumping the broom!” Tara blurted out, remembering the African American tradition at weddings. Her parents would be so disappointed that she forgot it . . .

“Got it covered,” Lindsay called from the vanity. “Your sister Denise is bringing one, all decorated.”

“But what about me and the flower petals?” Maisy persisted.

“You don't have to clean them up,” her mother answered. “Someone in the church will take care of it. We'll be moving on to the reception.” She searched for an outlet near the vanity, where Elle and Lindsay also vied for mirror space. “You know,” Darcy said, holding pins in her mouth, “we could have rented a hotel suite for this.”

“And what would be the fun in that?” Elle said as she dabbed sparkly red mousse into her hair. She was trying to blow-dry her usual ringlets into a softer, shaped cloud of hair that bobbed just above her shoulders.

“No fun, but plenty of electrical outlets and room service.” Darcy was pinning Lindsay's brown hair atop her head so tufts fell in gentle curls, crimped by Lindsay's curling iron.

“I think I should pick up petals.” Maisy's pale blue eyes went wide as she flopped onto the bed, the folds of her periwinkle satin skirt billowing around her thin legs. “We should save some. I need a wedding souvenir. Don't you, Aunt Tara?”

“Good point,” Tara said. “Maybe you should collect a few after the service.”

The service . . . the wedding. Tara never expected to have a day like this—a whopping celebration of her love and commitment to someone. She figured that if and when she got married, it would be a small ceremony that wouldn't stir up too much attention. After all, she and Steve had been living together in their Brooklyn brownstone for more than a year now. A month ago marriage was a distant probability. But first Steve got the job offer in Tokyo—a juicy package that would pay his and his wife's travel and living expenses—and then Mary Grace's latest prognosis turned shaky, and the timetable had been cranked up a notch. Fortunately, it all worked in well with Tara's career plans, as twenty months with the firm of Mengle, Kilroy, and Jameson was about twenty months too many. She had decided to drop out for a while and study to be a mediator—a negotiator of peaceful resolutions, she hoped—which she could do through online classes while in Japan.

“I still can't believe you guys talked me into having a big wedding,” Tara said, sitting momentarily beside Maisy to slip off her satin pumps adorned with tiny beads—“magic slippers” Maisy called them when Darcy suggested she borrow them for the wedding. Now Tara was trying to avoid sitting for long, worried about putting a crease in her high-waisted gown, an elegant Vera Wang that they'd been able to buy off the rack since Tara was a size 8. But if she was going to stand, she'd have to keep her shoes off for now. “Steve and I are so low key, I worried this would be weird, but I'm liking it. Even my shoes look royal. And my feet!” She laughed as she wiggled her pedicured toes, frosted white polish with white gems on the toes. “I've never felt like a princess before, and oddly enough, I love it!”

“No one deserves it more,” Mary Grace said. Lindsay's mother seemed frail, almost childlike in the overstuffed chair, a pillow behind her head so that she could save her energy for the ceremony and reception. “Besides, every girl should feel like a princess on her wedding day.”

“Pampered and lucky,” Tara said, lifting the skirt of her gown to flash Mary Grace a bit of leg adorned with a delicate blue lace garter her future mother-in-law had given her last week. Tara wasn't going to wear stockings or panty hose—too hot—but she wore the blue garter for good luck, part of the “Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue,” tradition. She had borrowed Darcy's shoes, her gown was new, and, as Mary Grace had said, “The garter is blue and it's certainly old—perhaps you can get a double whammy out of it.” Enclosed in a tiny panel of the garter was a shiny copper penny from 1955, the year Mary Grace wed Lindsay's father, “My Tom,” Mary Grace had said as Tara examined the penny. “Back then we always believed that it was good luck for a stranger to give you a penny on your wedding day. I got mine from a tourist lady visiting the Hamptons for the first time. She must have been quite amused by me and my friend Glenda, strolling into town in our house coats and rollers the day of the wedding. I didn't want to do it, but Glenda was convinced that we needed that penny, and I suspect she was right. It's brought me such luck over all these years, so many blessings. And I wish more of the same for you and Steven, Tara.” They'd hugged, and despite the stiffness and pain pervading Mary Grace's body, she gave Tara a mighty squeeze. “Wooh!” Tara gasped. “You still got it, Mrs. Mick.” And Steve's mother had laughed. “Oh, I don't know that I ever had it, dear.”

When Tara showed Steve the garter, he was highly amused. “I remember my sisters taking it out of the box in Mom's closet and fighting over who'd get to wear it first,” he said. “That thing was a valuable treasure in our house.”

“The real treasure is your mother,” Tara told him. “She makes me feel so special. Like she couldn't have dreamed up anyone better to be your wife.”

“Yeah, well, that's no stretch.” He slipped an arm around her waist and pulled her back against him. “Besides, Ma has always won my friends over. I'd be seeing someone in high school, a girl who was a little lukewarm about me, and I'd bring her around to the house and—bam!—Ma would win her over. Worked every time.”

Tara laughed. “And look at me, doubly motivated. All I have to do is marry you and I get Mary Grace for a mother and Lindsay for a sister. What's not to like?”

“It's all part of the deluxe package I'm pleased to offer,” he'd said, kissing her neck.

Looking from Mary Grace to her trio of friends primping in the mirror, Tara felt grateful that everything had come together so well, especially considering the lack of support from her own mother. Thank God for Lindsay, the wedding planner. Somehow she knew where to shop for gowns, flowers, caterers, and headpieces. Lindsay knew when to keep it simple and when to go for satin and beads. The woman had an instinct for weddings. “You are so good at this,” Tara kept telling her. “Maybe you're next.” To which Lindsay had winced. “Noah and I? I don't think so. Much as I love planning weddings, it's not in the cards for me.” When Tara asked her why not, Lindsay couldn't answer. “You know I love Noah, but can you picture him in a little house in the suburbs driving our kids to school? I don't think so.”

While Darcy searched her professional makeup kit for lip liner suitable for each woman's skin tone, Tara set Darcy's seed-pearled shoes on Lindsay's old desk, noticing the bulletin board still covered with postcards Lindsay had collected over the years.

“I can't believe you still have these up, Linds,” Tara said.

“I'll never part with my postcards,” Lindsay responded, as if horrified at the thought. There were nearly a dozen postcards chronicling Hamptons lifeguards starting in the 1980s and boasting
GREETINGS FROM SOUTHAMPTON.
Tara skimmed past the series, each featuring that year's fleet of muscled, tanned lifeguards, their buff torsos brimming over taut red swim trunks. Where were they now? Probably married with children. Writing software or selling cars. Everyone had to move on. Well, everyone except Serena Washington, who kept trying to recapture the days when she would snap and Tara would jump to follow her orders. Her mother refused to let go of her control over Tara, and as a result, Serena Washington now waited downstairs in the living room, one story apart from the loving atmosphere of wedding preparations, a world apart by choice.

“And you saved these postcards I sent from family vacations . . .” Those slow-paced beach weeks in Jamaica and Cancun. “Not to be outdone by postcards from Elle. There must be thirty of them. Sydney, London, Thailand, Rio . . .”

Elle and Maisy came over to check out the corkboard gallery.

“I've got everything,” Lindsay said. “The ones Darcy sent from Europe. I never throw them away.”

And there tucked between postcards from Jamaica and London was a photo of Tara, Lindsay, Steve, and his friend Skeeter, the four of them sitting around a Monopoly board, grinning as Skeeter tucked plastic red hotels into his nostrils. “Look at us . . . a bunch of goobers.”

“That's real attractive.” Elle pointed to Skeeter and shot a dubious look at Tara. “And you're marrying the guy fanning himself with Monopoly money? Of the two, I'd say he's the better choice.”

A
s Skeeter Fogarty toasted Tara and Steve, Darcy tried to keep her mind from wandering from the wedding festivities to the man seated across from her at the large round table for twelve.

Noah Storm. Dammit, everywhere she turned, he was there, like the ubiquitous, omnipresent facilitator of her artistic expression.

Not that she wasn't grateful for the huge boost he'd given her career. Critics had raved about Darcy's performance in
Life After iPod
, which had received an award at Sundance and was currently showing at the Tribeca Film Festival. They'd immediately shot a sequel with Bancroft, Alton, and Mouse. Noah had recently cast Darcy in an off-Broadway play that would begin rehearsing this month, and he'd hired Milo to do the set design—a huge opportunity for Milo, who'd been studying design at the New School for the past three years now. Noah Storm had been more than generous, and Darcy knew she had grown and prospered in the light of his capable talent. She hoped to continue working with him, learning from him.

Thanks to Noah, she'd also become something of a minor celebrity. Shots of Maisy and her walking the red carpet at premieres had appeared on all the TV mags, and Darcy had been fielding so many requests for interviews that she'd actually had to hire a publicist to manage them. The fact that she was a single mom pursuing an acting career alone seemed to endear her to the public, bringing interest from magazines as varied as
Ladies' Home Journal, People, Glamour, Rolling Stone,
and
Working Mother
. These days, whenever she and Maisy were waiting in line at the grocery store, her daughter would skip up to the checkout display to “find Mommy's cover,” and inevitably, she did. Her friends were highly amused when they went to lunch and ladies stopped by the table to have their playbills autographed by Darcy. Sometimes, people would stare at her while she was walking down city streets or riding the subway wearing big round sunglasses and a floppy hat, and every day when she picked up Maisy at school there was the cluster of giggling fan moms, who pumped her for information on her latest project, her crazy schedule, her take on Noah or Bancroft or Mouse.

She owed Noah a huge debt. However, as she lifted her champagne flute, she wished for the millionth time that she didn't have to see him socially, that he weren't dating her best friend, that he didn't attend every momentous social gathering in her family of friends. Toasting the happy couple, Darcy sent up a silent toast:
And here's to moving Noah Storm out of sight and out of mind.

Not that they'd had a disagreement or argument. On the contrary, they connected well artistically. Of all the directors Darcy had worked with, Noah was the best at communicating what he was looking for in a scene, the nuance of a scrap of dialogue or a single look. On set or in a rehearsal studio, they connected in a very personal, visceral way.

And that was the crux of the problem. Darcy's connection with him made it hard for her to retract, difficult to step back and remind herself that she was not entitled to a greater piece of Noah's life, that it would be wrong to reach for his hand or enjoy his embrace too much. Doubly wrong, because he was romantically involved with her best friend.

“Mommy, can we dance now?” Maisy held her hands high, ready for Darcy's embrace.

“Sure.” Seeing the chance to escape Noah's entourage, Darcy lifted the light of her life off her feet and swirled her away from the table, toward the dance floor. Maisy was her date for the wedding, which was fine by Darcy, who'd drifted away from her public relationship with Bancroft Hughes after they'd finished filming the
iPod
sequel. Ban moved on to a pretty aspiring redheaded pop singer/actress and Darcy devoted the extra time to Maisy, taking her for walks in the park, watching her do her homework, baking cookies together, and reading her stories. Although Elle kept reminding her that the “girls of Bikini Beach” were pushing thirty, Darcy didn't feel the need to have a man in her life now. Between her work, which brought her juicy camaraderie and laughter, and her daughter, whose demands and capacity for love seemed endless, her days and her heart were full. When Mary Grace was diagnosed in February, Darcy was relieved to be available to both her daughter and Mary Grace, whose back pain had been slowing her down significantly.

“You can put me down,” Maisy said, giggling. “Really, I'm not a baby anymore.”

But still so light, so fragile.
Darcy lowered Maisy to her feet and took her chubby hands. “Who gets to lead?”

“I do,” Maisy said imperiously. “And please, don't step on my toes. I want this pedicure to last.”

Darcy bit her lower lip. Like mother, like daughter.