After supper, Tipper and Luda set out Midsummer Ice Cream on the porch—five kinds of homemade ice cream, custards made ahead all week and churned in the big machine. They’ve made peanut-brittle, pale green fresh-mint, vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry. Tipper serves hot fudge, butterscotch sauce, whipped cream, and walnuts in ceramic dishes. The music is old barbershop quartets, and the tablecloths are striped red and white like peppermint sticks.
We each make our own, layering whipped cream and nuts with ice cream and sauce, holding our curved glass parfait dishes and dipping into them with long silver spoons.
When the guests are all served and my parents are gently drunk, I walk to the far end of the porch and sit in the hammock with a dish of fresh-mint and hot fudge.
My mother laughs at someone’s joke. Bess shouts as she helps the youngest Hadley with his croquet mallet. The children have all spilled off the porch onto the lawn. Some of them are spinning in the tire swing. The women sit on the steps, watching the kids; the men have gone down to the bottom of the yard, where they can look out at the sea and smoke cigars.
I spoon ice cream into my mouth and close my eyes.
I want
to escape the tyranny of this family’s expectations and make instead some new life, some city life.
I want
to stop carrying obsessive thoughts of stories I hear on the news and instead to reach out, understand, see with my own eyes.
But even more, I want
to be in this family, messed up as it is.
I want
to be my father’s daughter,
to solve my sisters’ problems,
to be the one who receives my mother’s black pearls, to be Rosemary’s favorite.
To be a Sinclair, and to have the security and good standing that all our hard work and
dirty money and
unearned privilege and
intelligence has bought us.
I see that now.
It may be my greatest weakness, this family. But I will not leave.
Penny comes and sits next to me. She has filled her parfait dish with only hot fudge. It is just the two of us, here on the hammock side of the porch. We are practically alone.
“Having fun?” I ask her.
She spoons fudge into her mouth. I wait for her to swallow.
“Did you ever find out about that picture?” she says, instead of answering me.
“What picture?” I ask—though I know what picture.
“The one you thought was Uncle Chris or whatever,” she says. “With the face scratched out. That I said was Daddy.”
I turn to look directly at her. I cannot read her expression. “Why?”
“I’m asking,” says Penny. “I kinda couldn’t stop thinking about it. That secret photo of Tipper’s. And I thought—it could be Buddy Kopelnick. The guy who wanted to take you camping and gave you all the jelly beans. Don’t you think?”
I look at her again.
She leans over and kisses my cheek, her lips warm from the fudge. “I didn’t tell Bess,” she says.
PART EIGHT
After
81.
SUMMER AFTER SUMMER, though I get older, Rosemary is always ten years old.
I ask her if she is lonely during the winters, when the island is empty.
“I’m just asleep or something, Carrie,” she tells me. “It’s fine. I’m cozy. Then I wake up.”
She visits me the summer I am eighteen, when I have graduated from North Forest and am headed to Vassar College. I chose Vassar because it’s only ninety minutes from New York City, the closest I could get. That year I am taking both codeine and sleeping pills during the day. I spend much of my summer asleep or stupidly numb.
She visits the summer I am nineteen, too, after my first year of college, when Penny and I both have boyfriends visiting. Penny is forcing herself into the shape my parents wish for her. A straight girl, a Sinclair, the stiff upper lip, a daughter to be proud of. She is headed to Bryn Mawr, though. An all-women’s college.
That summer Penny and I drink and forget, reveling in sex and loud music and excursions to the bars in Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard, where no one ever asks for ID. We ignore Bess, who responds by insinuating herself with our parents, being the hard worker with the bright smile, the noncomplainer, the athlete, the well-read dinner-table conversationalist. Rosemary sees me only now and then, that year, bribing me to read to her with potato chips she’s stolen from the Clairmont pantry.
She visits the summer after my second year of college, when at twenty years old I have left Vassar for a rehab center. My time at the center involves weeks of withdrawal and therapy and hope and support—but when I get to the island, I slip back into old habits and take any pills I can lay my hands on.