27 Blood in the Water (2 page)

She went through the big double doors into the dining room proper and looked around. Little Susan Carstairs was sitting at one of the tables near the big wall of windows looking out on the terrace. Susan was a mouse. It made Caroline crazy. It didn’t matter who had done what or when or why, Susan apologized.

“Well, that’s it,” Caroline said. “Not a sign of anybody. And I’ll bet there won’t be a sign of anybody. They all say they want to be on committees. They all say they want to be part of things. Then when it comes time to do the work—well.”

Susan sniffled. “Well,” she said. “Maybe it really is the time, Caroline. Maybe we should hold meetings in the evenings.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Caroline said. She went up to the big wall of windows and looked out. The swimming pool was blocked off by what looked like crime scene tape. It was just a yellow caution bar, because there were repairs going on in the cabana and the pool house. Repairs were supposed to be going on, but they weren’t. Nobody was there working on anything. Nobody would be there working on anything today. The job would wait and wait and wait, just as it had waited and waited and waited since Labor Day. Then they’d bring somebody in at the last minute in the middle of the winter, and everything would cost more than twenty times what it would have if they’d managed to get it all done at the right time.

“Honestly,” Caroline said.

Susan made a strangled little noise.

Caroline ignored her. “Can you imagine,” Caroline said, “what our mothers would have thought of this place if they’d ever seen it? Do you remember what it was like, growing up on the Main Line when we did? Waldorf Pines. My God. It sounds like the kind of thing some backstreet hooker would make up for the name of her fantasy estate. It’s a cotillion committee, for God’s sake. It’s not rocket science. They all want cotillions and they want their daughters to ‘come out’ and get their names in the newspapers, even if it isn’t in the right part of the newspapers, except they don’t know that, either. They don’t know anything. It’s enough to make you scream.”

“I think they just want things to be nice,” Susan said. “I know it isn’t like what we had when we grew up—”

“I came out at the Assemblies. You did, too. You know what a cotillion is supposed to be about.”

“Yes,” Susan said. “Yes, I know, but—”

“There aren’t any buts,” Caroline said. “There are ways you do things and ways you don’t. These people get jobs in brokerage firms and they think they’ve—oh, I don’t know what they think they’ve done. A gated community. Can you honestly believe that? My mother would have died of embarrassment.”

“It’s good for privacy,” Susan said.

Caroline shot her a look, but it was useless. Susan was looking at her hands. They had made a promise, when they first moved out here, that they would never even hint at any of the things that had made them decide to make the move, but Susan wasn’t good at it. Susan thought about it all the time. Caroline could tell.

She moved away from the windows and sat down at the other side of Susan’s table. “The Platte boy isn’t on duty, either,” she said. “He’s supposed to be over there at six, making sure nothing gets messed about, but there’s no sign of him. People have no sense of responsibility these days. Do you know that? They’ve got no sense of responsibility. Maybe these people never had. God only knows where they started out from.”

“I do think they mean well,” Susan said.

Caroline shrugged. There would be coffee in the kitchen. She could go out to find it and pour herself a cup. The dining room wasn’t open at this time of the morning on a Friday. They only opened it for breakfast on weekends. She was enormously tired, and she was absolutely sure that she had made a mistake. She shouldn’t have volunteered for this committee. She shouldn’t have volunteered for any committee. She didn’t belong here, and pretending to care if stockbrokers’ daughters made fake debuts in overdesigned ball gowns did not change a thing about her life.

“You know what’s really odd?” she said. “Even that awful woman didn’t show up. She always shows up.”

“Martha Heydreich,” Susan said.

“Oh, I remember the name,” Caroline said. “I could hardly forget the name, could I? She’s the absolute symbol of what’s wrong with this place and everything in it. That pink car. And that hair. And let’s don’t forget the makeup. You’d think she had stock in Max Factor.”

“Maybe she does,” Susan said, “except I think she wears Clinique. Something like that. She does have beautiful hands. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such delicate hands.”

“Well, yes, but she makes sure you notice them, doesn’t she? That ring of hers is ridiculous, and she’s always holding it out so that you see it. And the nails.”

“She gets them done,” Susan said. “But I wish I had hands like that. They’re so long—do you remember what our mothers used to say about hands? You could always tell a lady by her hands. She’s got a lady’s hands.”

“She’s got a stevedore’s backside.”

Susan sniffed. “She’s a very hard worker,” she said.

“Yes, and very reliable most of the time. Wouldn’t she be, though? I mean, the one person you don’t want to see show up, and there she is, looking like a circus clown and acting like—I don’t know what. Even the nitwits who live in this place know there’s something completely awful about her. That trilling voice. Those enormous bags. And the jewelry. Oh, never mind. I shouldn’t go on like this. But it’s indicative, don’t you see? It’s indicative of everything that goes on in this place.”

“Of course I see,” Susan said.

Caroline gave her a look. Susan did not see. Susan never could see. She sighed and got up. She might as well go get that coffee. At least that way the morning wouldn’t be completely wasted. She wasted far too many mornings these days.

“I miss it,” she said suddenly. “I know I’m breaking our rule, but I miss it.”

“I miss it, too,” Susan said.

“It’s funny how things work out. If you’d told me just three years ago that I’d be living at a place called Waldorf Pines and refusing to watch the evening news in case—well, in case. I wouldn’t have believed it. I really wouldn’t have believed it.”

“I know,” Susan said.

“And then there are the boys,” Caroline said.

She stood still where she was, contemplating her two sons. They were in New York now, she was pretty sure. She hadn’t talked to either one of them in three years, and when she had talked to them she’d still been living in the Bryn Mawr house. She’d loved the Bryn Mawr house. There had been a topiary maze in the back garden, and the kind of staff it took to keep it all up. There had been committees that knew how to run like committees, where everybody showed up on time.

“Never have children,” Caroline told Susan. “They’ll just turn on you.”

Susan looked at her hands again. She was fifty-nine years old, just two years younger than Caroline herself. Neither one of them was going to have any more children.

Caroline walked back to the wall of windows and looked out again. The yellow caution tape was blowing in the wind. The trees were all bright with color. The fairways were not quite green enough. It wouldn’t be a bad landscape if it hadn’t been so pretentious, so self-conscious, so uncomfortable. There was mock Tudor everywhere, and odd Gothic arches where they didn’t belong. The whole place look like an Olde Tea Shoppe set up by somebody with no taste, no knowledge of history, and far too much money.

She wondered where Michael Platte was this morning, and then she wondered why she bothered to wonder. They were all off in the same places, these people. They were shopping, endlessly. Or they were at expensive restaurants where the food tasted like sawdust. Or they were at “charity” events where no charity was ever done but everybody got their pictures in the paper the next morning. They probably got their pictures on the Internet instantaneously. Waldorf Pines had a Facebook page these days. It was as if they thought nothing was really real unless people they didn’t know could witness it.

“They don’t even do affairs right,” Caroline said.

Susan made another little squeak. “I never believed that,” she said. “Did you? Did you believe it?”

“That Martha Heydreich was having an affair with Michael Platte? Is having, I suppose. I don’t know. Everybody says so.”

“But people say things,” Susan said. “You know that.”

“I do know that,” Caroline said. “I’ll admit, it seems completely impossible. The woman is—well. ‘Sexy’ isn’t the word for it, anyway. Not that men won’t have sex with women who aren’t sexy. It’s always astounded me what men will have sex with. At least she doesn’t seem to be ruining her marriage over it, if it’s true.”

“Oh, no,” Susan agreed. “He’s very fond of her. It’s nice, isn’t it, to see a couple devoted to each other that way? That’s not usual. Especially around here.”

“That’s not usual anywhere,” Caroline said. “Oh, well. I still think it’s peculiar. And you’re right. Maybe it’s all just something people made up. But they do spend a lot of time together. You see them everywhere around here. And you can’t miss them. Not with that car of hers.”

“Maybe we should give them a few more minutes,” Susan said. “You know how it is early in the morning. People have a hard time getting started.”

“They don’t have a hard time getting started when they’re doing something they really want to do,” Caroline said—and then she just gave it up.

It was a nice day. She could think of things to do. She could work out the invitation design and settle on a list of possible favors by herself. Then she could call a meeting for something on a Saturday and they’d all be more than willing to troop in and okay her decisions. They were always willing to okay her decisions. They only wanted to be named as members of the committee and have their pictures taken when the time came.

She’d once thought that all that mattered to them was money, but this wasn’t true. All that mattered to them was to be seen by other people to have money. They had not learned—if they were lucky they would never learn—that money is never enough if that is all you have.

Caroline went out the side door and down the narrow hallway to the kitchen. The smell of coffee was strong and insistent. They did do very good coffee in this dining room, although you could opt for the designer variety if you wanted to. Designer coffee. Designer tea at three hundred dollars a cup. Back in the Bryn Mawr house, she’d had Red Rose every morning and loved it. She had Red Rose every morning now.

She wondered what the boys were doing, out there somewhere, having jobs, loving women, maybe even getting married.

She wondered if they thought about the day she told them she would never see or speak to them again.

3

If there was one thing LizaAnne Marsh knew was absolutely pie-assed
retarded
—just first rate crapuscular
gay
—it had to be this thing about school starting at eight fifteen in the morning. Eight fifteen. Really. Even people who had to go to work to get money didn’t have to be there at eight fifteen. Not unless they had a really crappy job that was just mopping up after people or working at McDonald’s or doing something lame like being a cop. And that hardly counted. Real people didn’t have jobs like that. Real people had careers.

LizaAnne put her tray of eye shadows back on her vanity table and looked at her lashes in the mirror. LizaAnne liked to wear really thick eye shadow and then a line of black right under her lashes, but that was something else that was wrong with eight fifteen in the morning. You couldn’t get yourself up like that at eight fifteen in the morning without looking like somebody really stupid, like Martha Heydreich, and then people started making fun of you in the halls and in the gym and then … well, then. LizaAnne had never been on the wrong side of that “then,” and she didn’t intend to start now.

She got up from the vanity and went to the big bow windows that overlooked the golf course. This was only the second-best bedroom in the house, but LizaAnne knew a lot of houses where the first-best bedroom wouldn’t be as good. It was all so stupid, it really was. Even her father, who would give her anything she wanted, she only had to pout a little—God, how he hated to see her pout, and he knew she was kidding, it was really amazing—but even her father went on and on and on about being a good community citizen and not kicking people when they were down and all the rest of that nonsense. It was like one of those stupid mantras people said when they did yoga or whatever it was. LizaAnne didn’t know why anybody bothered.

Now she looked up and down the golf course, to the club building, to the pool house. There were two cars parked at the club building. That would belong to Mrs. Stanford-Pyrie and Mrs. Carstairs. It just went to show that LizaAnne’s mother was always right. A man would take anything if he couldn’t get laid. Those two must have met a couple of desperate losers to be Mrs. anybody at all. Mrs. Carstairs was a mouse. Mrs. Stanford-Pyrie looked like a horse. LizaAnne was more than half convinced that the two of them screwed each other when nobody else was looking.

Ewww.

LizaAnne had no problem with gay guys. She couldn’t really imagine what they did to have sex with each other anyway. Gay women were something else. She could imagine that. It was disgusting. It was worse than disgusting. It was retarded.

LizaAnne looked back at the pool house. The yellow tape was still up. Michael was probably inside somewhere, walking around the pool, making sure everything was safe. Sarah Lefton’s mother said that he hadn’t just dropped out of Penn State, he’d been kicked out, right on his ass, for running around naked on the tennis courts. LizaAnne didn’t know if she believed that. Running around naked on some tennis courts didn’t sound like such a bad thing, not even if they were outdoor tennis courts. Stewie Edland had been caught actually burning down the teeter-totters at the municipal park last spring, setting them on fire with a pipe he was doing some drugs with, and all that had happened to him was rehab and five hundred hours of community service. People got too worked up about things. They really did. Nobody cared about kids fooling around, as long as that was all they were. Nobody cared about anything.