Ada and I both turned to look at the mother, father, and two children. The father sat in a chair under the umbrella, a newspaper in front of his face, while the mother fed the children sandwiches. As we watched, the little girl dropped her meal in the sand and began to cry. The mother picked her up to comfort her but shot an annoyed glance at her husband, who had not budged.
“Right there—depending on the moment you capture, it tells a different story. You could show a lovely vacation. Or an unhappy marriage. Or something straight out of Norman Rockwell.”
“Close your mouth, darling,” Ada said to me, tapping me on the chin. I hadn’t realized it was open, and I shut it with a snap. Dan was right. That was exactly what I did. Just with the proverbial thousand words instead of a single picture.
“Meanwhile,” Ada continued, “I set that couple up six years ago now. So you’d best not tell the story of an unhappy marriage with that picture or that novel.”
Dan and I both laughed, and he reached for my hand under the table, squeezing it gently.
When lunch was over, Ada drove home, but Dan and I walked back toward the Princeton. “I’m glad you came,” I said.
He pulled me in and kissed me lightly. “I am too.”
“Will you come visit again? We don’t go back to Philadelphia until Labor Day.”
“I would love to. But what happens after Labor Day?”
I bit my bottom lip. “I don’t know,” I confessed. “I guess I’m supposed to go back to college if my father agrees.”
“Would it help or hurt if he knew we were . . . well, whatever we are?”
I thought for a moment. It would help, of course. The prestige of the rabbi’s son would overshadow how we found each other. But then I would have to go back to New York and the rules and expectations that went with being there. And Daddy expected me to get married. But even if I fell madly in love with Dan, I didn’t see a scenario where I didn’t wind up reading a book at the kitchen stove with children screaming in the background.
“I don’t know.”
He put a hand on my cheek, turning my face to his. “Hey—I’m not going to ask you to do anything you don’t want to do. If college—and New York—aren’t where you want to wind up, that’s fine by me.”
“Can we just take it one step at a time? I don’t know what I’m going to do in the fall. I don’t know if Ada will let me stay. I don’t know if I want to go back. And I don’t know if I have a choice.”
He pulled me toward him in a hug. “You have a choice, Marilyn. I meant what I said last night. I can pick up extra jobs and do whatever it takes. If you don’t want to go back and Ada turns you out, you still have a choice.” He leaned back so I would look at him. “And when you become a world-famous author, we’ll switch and you can support me.”
I laughed. “How about another date before we make that decision?”
“That sounds perfect. Next weekend?” I nodded, and he kissed me again. “Come on. I’ll drive you home first.”
I climbed into the front seat of his car. “Do you know, I never learned how to drive?”
“You didn’t?”
“Why would I in the city?”
He considered this for a moment, the different worlds that we lived in just based on the bodies we were born into and the roles our families expected us to play in them. “Do you want to learn?”
“I think I do, actually.”
Dan smiled. “Sounds like a date. Next weekend.”
“Next weekend,” I repeated.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Ada cleared her schedule the day before Lillian was due to arrive and threw herself into a tizzy making sure the house was perfect.
“I don’t understand,” I said to Frannie as I helped her put fresh linens on Lillian’s bed for the second time that week. “We just changed the sheets. No one has slept on them. And why does she care so much? Doesn’t Lillian work for her?”
“I just do what I’m told,” Frannie said with a shrug. “They’re very fond of each other, and Miss Ada likes to make sure everything is perfect for her guests.”
“Did she go to this much trouble for me?”
Frannie suppressed a smile.
“What?”
“No. But you’re family.”
I thought about that for a moment. I was blood, yes. And I supposed I had heard of Ada in my childhood from time to time, but I didn’t know her before being sent to Philadelphia. She felt like family now. But there was more to being family than shared ancestors. I looked at Frannie, who was making sure the bed had perfect hospital corners.
“Frannie, how long have you worked for Ada?”
She straightened up, putting a hand to her lower back, and thought for a moment. “Going on twenty-five years now. I was nineteen when she hired me.”
Before I was even born. And now she had a house here for her family to vacation. “And you have kids?”
Frannie nodded. “They’re grown now. But they come down for the weekends over the summer.”
I tried to picture giving our maid, Grace, a house for the summer. We didn’t have the kind of money that Ada did, and we still paid her for the summer when we spent it at the Catskills so she wouldn’t take another job. But it wasn’t that kind of a relationship either.
“Frannie!” Ada called from downstairs. “When you’re finished, I need help with the flowers—you’re better at the arrangements.”
“Coming, Miss Ada!” She turned to me as I was about to sit on the bed. “Don’t you sit on that bed that I just made now, or I’ll have to make it again.”
I looked at the pale blue quilt, wondering what kind of tyrant I was about to meet if the house had to be so perfect that a wrinkle in a blanket would require a whole bed being remade. The summer had just taken on a rose-colored hue with the reintroduction of Dan, and I was loath to let that go. I went to leave but turned a glass perfume bottle on the dresser a quarter inch first, just for the satisfaction of making something not perfect for this stranger who was coming to spoil my summer.
Ada left the following morning to pick Lillian up from the train station in Atlantic City. I offered to go with her, but Ada pointed a finger at me. “You stay here and make sure this house is spotless,” she said.
I pouted a little. I didn’t like Lillian. She was already intruding on my time with Ada. She didn’t need a paid companion anymore. She had me. And especially with Dan’s confidence that we would figure something out even if I didn’t go back to New York, I was leaning more and more toward staying. Perhaps I would feel differently once we were back in Philadelphia, but absence had made the heart grow fonder there. It didn’t have to be New York. It had its own charms.
I went up to my room and tried to do some writing, but I was too moody and the words weren’t coming. I felt like I was being replaced. Which was ridiculous, because I had come in and supplanted Lillian, not the other way around.
I wandered into Lillian’s room. The perfume bottle had been returned to its proper position. I moved it again with the listlessness of a cat that knocks everything to the ground.