The Smart One (8 page)

It was harder once they came out, harder with each year that went by. Weezy wanted her children to have everything they needed and more. But it was hard to figure out just what that was. Sometimes she got fixated on things that she wanted the kids to have. She was determined to get bunk beds for Claire and Martha, something she’d always wanted so badly when she was younger. She used to picture herself and Maureen building forts, and talking to each other in their bunks, late into the night. What little kids wouldn’t want that?

Her girls hadn’t seemed as interested, but Weezy pushed for it. “You’ll love them,” she kept saying. It turned out that they were both too frightened to sleep on the top bunk. Martha cried the whole first week she was up there, so Claire agreed to switch, but ended up falling out of it a few days later and spraining her wrist. Weezy tried to remain hopeful that they’d end up falling in love with the bunk beds, but after waking up to find them both squished into the bottom bunk for almost a month straight, she gave in and had Will take the bunk beds down.

So maybe Weezy hadn’t always been right about what would make the children happy. But that didn’t mean she was going to stop trying or step back and let them search all by themselves. They didn’t know what they wanted. She was their mother, and she couldn’t help it. She was involved.

That was why she was hell-bent on getting them all to the shore. They didn’t know how important this time would be to them later. Maureen seemed to have given up on her kids’ coming to the shore. “They’re busy,” she said. Maureen’s daughter, Cathy, was living in Ohio with her partner, Ruth, and her son, Drew, was all the way in California, and
somehow this didn’t seem to bother her. It seemed absurd to Weezy—they’d all gone to the shore together when the kids were little; it had been a tradition. Maureen should have encouraged her kids to keep coming. Didn’t she want them to be able to look back on the family vacations and appreciate all the time they’d had together?

“They’re adults now,” Will said, when she complained about getting the kids to clear their schedules for the shore. But they didn’t really seem like adults to Weezy—Claire didn’t even do her own laundry. She had it sent out to the cleaners around the block. Martha was still living at home. And Max was practically a child, still in college, likely to eat cereal for dinner if no one was there to cook for him. They weren’t adult enough to know what was good for them, that was for sure. So she was going to get them to the shore, come hell or high water.

Weezy and her family had been going to Ventnor City since she was a little girl. Her father’s family had acquired the house, and every summer her father and his brothers used to pack up their families for the summer and head out there. The husbands went back to the city during the week and returned each weekend to the shore, where the children greeted them like long-lost explorers, running out to meet them at the car, jumping on them like monkeys, wrapping their sunburned arms around their necks and saying, “Daddy, we’re so glad you’re back.”

There were four bedrooms in the house where the adults stayed. Weezy and Maureen and their cousins were crowded on cots on the sleeping porch, lined up like little soldiers, waiting for a breeze to cool them down. From there, they would listen to the sounds of their parents outside on the front porch, getting drunk with the other neighbors, laughing and singing, smoking cigars, and saying, “This is the life.”

Those were the best summers of Weezy’s life. She firmly believed that. She was shocked when her own mother, Bets, had told Weezy that she’d always hated going to the shore. “It was so crowded, and no one had any privacy. Your aunts weren’t the best company, and anyway we had to cook and clean and what kind of a vacation is that?” After Weezy’s father died, Bets never went back to the shore house.

But Weezy didn’t care what Bets thought. She wanted her kids to
have the same summers that she did, full of hot dogs, taffy, and sea salt. Of course, it was different now. The house was split between Weezy, Maureen, and nine other cousins, and no one (including Weezy) wanted to double or triple up on families and be squished the way they once were. She and Maureen always went together with their families, which was plenty. And for the past few years, Maureen’s kids hadn’t come, so it was just one extra person.

Weezy had claimed the last two weeks in August early on, and thankfully no one had challenged her on it. She and Maureen had brought their families there every summer for the past thirty years. Weezy was afraid to miss even one year, worried that if she did, one of the other cousins would take her time slot. Even the year that Will’s mother died in August, they packed up the week after the funeral and went. It was good therapy to be by the ocean, Weezy thought, and what good would it do to sit at home?

The end of August was Weezy’s favorite time, right before the end of summer, when fall and responsibility and schedules were so close that you could smell them in the changing air, and everyone rushed around to get as much sun and ocean as they could before they had to return home. That was all she wanted for her children, who were no longer children—to smell like sunscreen and play mini-golf and shuffleboard, and jump in the waves. If she could give them this one thing to carry with them, then maybe it would make everything else okay. And so she forced this gift on them, summer after summer, whether they wanted it or not.

WEEZY WAS IN THE TV ROOM
sorting through the beach towels and her summer clothes. She had them all spread out on the couch, trying to decide which things to give away and which things she could keep. She needed to make a list of things to get for the shore and start shopping, because really she was already behind.

She held a black one-piece bathing suit in her hand, debating whether or not to just pitch it. She hadn’t bought a new bathing suit in years, and she knew it was time, but the thought of standing in a dressing room to find a new suit that would (to be honest) just stay hidden
underneath her cover-up seemed like a waste of time. Not to mention an unpleasant errand, to say the least.

She was still holding the suit when the door slammed, making her jump. Then she heard Martha clomp to the kitchen and open the refrigerator.

“Martha? Is that you?”

Martha came around the corner with a glass of Diet Coke in her hand. “Mom,” she said, “that bathing suit is like a million years old.”

“I know, I’m tossing it.” Weezy put it down on the couch. “How was your afternoon?”

“Fine,” Martha said. She sounded down and Weezy felt her heart drop. She was used to Martha’s moods, but she’d hoped for a good one today. Now dinner would be strained and silent. Maybe they would eat in front of the TV.

“Is everything okay?” Weezy asked. She tried to make it sound like a light question, so Martha wouldn’t think she was prying.

Martha sipped the fizz off the top of the glass and sighed. “It’s fine. Just a bad day at work.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Yeah.” Martha sighed again. “I’m just kind of over it. J.Crew, I mean. I’m thinking about looking for some other jobs. Maybe even think about going back to nursing.”

Weezy stayed silent, not wanting to say anything that would make Martha change her mind. She had wanted Martha to do something else for so long, but she hadn’t wanted to push it. It had driven her crazy to watch Martha rot away at that store. It was a waste of talent. But she hadn’t been able to say so. She’d remained quiet and patient, at least in front of Martha. At night to Will, she would whisper, “What is she going to do? Work there for the rest of her life?”

“Really?” Weezy finally said. “That’s interesting.”

“Whatever. It’s just something that I’m thinking about. I don’t even know if I’ll go through with it.” Martha took her Diet Coke upstairs, leaving Weezy to worry in the TV room.

Will teased her that she spent twenty-three hours a day worrying about the kids. But what did he expect?
Of course she worried about
them. That was what mothers did, wasn’t it? Will had the luxury of knowing that she was taking care of the worrying and so he didn’t have to. He could rest his head on the pillow at night and sleep well.

When the kids were little, she’d worried about their getting hit by a car. She was a firm believer in hand-holding. Max and Martha had been like obedient little suction cups when they reached the street, holding their hands up to her, clinging to her with trust. Claire was the first one to pull away, to hold her arm stiffly by her side, glaring up at Weezy, wanting her independence.

When they were in high school, Weezy worried that they’d get in a car with someone who’d been drinking. When they were in college, she worried that the girls would be raped, that Max would be mugged, that they’d fall down the stairs at a wild party and break their necks, that they’d try drugs, drink too much, or vanish. The list went on and on. She kept most of her worries to herself, knowing that if she shared them with Will, he’d just think she was overreacting.

And then she worried that all of her worrying had made Martha the way she was. Maybe as a child Martha sensed Weezy’s fear of the world, absorbed it as a little person, and let it overtake her. Or maybe it had been passed down in her genes, a worrying gene that mutated and grew in Martha.

She wondered if having the girls so close together hadn’t given her enough time with either of them. They were less than a year apart and so different in every way. Had she made them the way they were? She would never know.

And so she continued to go through her clothes and worry. She worried that Claire was unhappy, that Max would get hurt by Cleo, that Martha wasn’t going to be able to get back to nursing. There was always something. That’s what Will never got. You could worry from morning until night, and even then, there’d be something more, something else that you needed to add to the list.

CHAPTER
4

Right from the start, Cleo knew she wanted to go to a college with a campus. She wanted green lawns and trees. She wanted a quad with brick buildings and college kids reading books on the grass. Basically, she wanted to go to college in a picture.

“Why?” her mom kept asking. “Why narrow it down before you even start looking?”

“Because,” Cleo said. She left it at that. Cleo had grown up in New York, lived on the Upper West Side her entire life surrounded by buildings and people, and she was ready for something different. There was no explaining to Elizabeth why she wanted—no,
needed
—a campus. She couldn’t say that she was craving greenery, that she imagined herself walking across grass, wearing a backpack, while leaves fell in front of her. She couldn’t say that she wanted to go to a school that had a campus because that was how she’d dreamt it would be. Elizabeth was not a dreaming woman, and would never understand.

Cleo also couldn’t say that she wanted to go somewhere different, somewhere no one else from her high school had even considered going. She’d listened as the guidance counselor had listed all the usual colleges, and she’d pressed the woman for more options until she’d come up with some.

When she stepped onto Bucknell’s campus, she knew it was the place for her. Their tour guide was a cute girl named Marnie, with a brown ponytail and a raspy voice. She was the kind of girl that looked like she always had a party to go to. Marnie laughed as she pointed to all the brick buildings, told them that she was a philosophy major (which made Elizabeth snort), that she was from Quakertown, Pennsylvania,
and that her boyfriend was on the baseball team. “He’s the pitcher,” she said proudly, like they should all be jealous. Cleo found that she was.

After the tour, she and Elizabeth went to have lunch in Lewisburg, at a little place called Maya’s Café. Cleo tried to contain herself as they walked down Market Street, even though she wanted to point at the old-fashioned movie theater and squeal. Elizabeth didn’t like squealing and wouldn’t be amused.

They each ordered a BLT and as they waited, Elizabeth pointed to the glossy brochure and then ran her finger down it, like she was trying to read it a different way. “I’ve never even heard of this school,” she finally said. “You should keep exploring other options.”

“Okay,” Cleo said. She took a sip of her Diet Coke and slid the brochure back across the table toward her. She didn’t want Elizabeth touching it.

“I mean, my God, it’s small. What did they say? Nine hundred people in the freshman class.” Elizabeth shuddered, like this was unthinkable.

There was no point in arguing. Cleo knew she’d end up at Bucknell, but she also knew it wouldn’t happen by pitching a fit. She was only a junior. She would go on other college visits, she’d pretend to consider them. And when it came time, she’d make her choice and Elizabeth would let her go.

CLEO’S DAD WAS “NEVER IN THE PICTURE,”
which was a phrase she heard her mom use once, so she stole it and used it whenever anyone asked questions. She found that it shut them up right away. There was something final and not quite nice about it. He was “never in the picture,” as if to say, don’t ask anything more.

Even if people had asked questions, Cleo wouldn’t have been able to answer them. Her mother told her that her father had been someone she worked with in Chicago at the Board of Trade, when she was “right out of college and dumb.” Once, when Cleo pressed for more information, her mom said, “He had a wife and a family and he wasn’t interested in a new one.” Cleo never shared that information. Even if her own mother wasn’t ashamed that she’d had an affair, Cleo found
the whole thing humiliating. She was constantly afraid that her classmates would find out, that she would let it slip one day that her mom was a homewrecker.

After Elizabeth got pregnant, she moved to New York and got a job at a consulting firm, where she worked long hours and loved every minute of it. When Cleo was younger, she’d hated to listen to Elizabeth on work calls—she was always pushing people to do what she wanted, always sounded so angry and annoyed. Cleo knew why everyone caved around her, why Elizabeth just kept rising at the company. A coworker of Elizabeth’s once told Cleo, “Your mother is a force to be reckoned with,” as if Cleo didn’t know that already, as if that wasn’t the most obvious thing in the whole world.