and the status she thought it could buy.
This Christmas, here at the Nantucket house, Eleanor had given Alicia a check for a thousand dollars. Alicia had spotted the amount and her face fell with disappointment.
“Sweetie,” Eleanor had asked, “don’t you like your gift?”
Alicia was almost at the point of tears. “It’s nice, Mom. Thank you. It’s just…I was hoping for more so I could buy a Birkin.”
Ari spoke up, rolling her eyes. “Mom. You can get an Hermès Kelly online for a thousand dollars.”
“Yes, used. Or a knockoff,” Alicia shot back.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Eleanor had said. Her daughter made her feel weary.
Eleanor also worried about Cliff, amazingly handsome, brilliant, hardworking, and wealthy, just like Mortimer had been. Cliff was thirty-nine, and still not married. With his good looks, women had flocked to him in college, but no one stuck. He came to the island most weekends in the summer, but he never brought a woman with him.
“Cliff,” Eleanor had asked him one summer, “don’t you have a special someone in your life?”
“Yeah, Mom,” Cliff had answered. “You.” He hugged her as they both laughed.
“Cliff,” Eleanor had asked him this Christmas, “are you dating anyone special?”
Cliff grinned and shook his head. “So many women, so little time.”
When Cliff was younger, she’d taken him and his sister to all the best plays, musicals, and ballets in Boston and often in New York. After Mortimer died, Cliff invited Eleanor up to Boston, put her up at the Chilton Club, and took her to plays and operas and out to dinner at posh restaurants where he ordered expensive wines. When he began selling real estate, Cliff often emailed Eleanor photos and information about the gorgeous houses he was selling, and Eleanor responded, glad to have this connection with her son. It was fun to see the interiors of houses, even though she wouldn’t change a board in her own. Because of the weekends and emails, Eleanor felt much more attached to her son than she did to her daughter, who was, even in her forties, worried about her figure and whether or not to have her forehead Botoxed. It took Eleanor months to realize that the closeness she felt with Cliff was about his professional life, not his personal life. But she had tried to stay close. Weren’t men supposed to adore their mothers?
In her most bitter moods, Eleanor blamed her husband for their son’s and daughter’s obsession with money. But even then, she admitted to herself that she’d influenced them, too. In the early days, she’d left them with a nanny while she tried to be the perfect wife for Mortimer. She’d furnished their Ipswich house luxuriously and elegantly. She went to a gym to keep herself trim, had her nails and hair done weekly, held the requisite cocktail parties for his colleagues, attended other requisite parties. Because Mortimer expected it, she’d forced her children to attend the appropriate after-school activities: tennis, swimming, archery for Cliff. Tennis, swimming, and ballet for Alicia. She’d taught them manners, yes, and sent them off to boarding schools when they were fourteen, because they’d asked to go.
Still, when they were small, she had curled up with them at bedtime, reading to them from the classics. She had cuddled them, praised them, tended to their occasional cuts or bruises. And every summer she’d brought them here, to her family’s summer home on the east coast of Nantucket Island.
Here, on the island, Eleanor had let the kids run free. Mortimer disapproved of skateboards and especially of any sign of sexual awareness. So Eleanor hadn’t told him when she’d sat her embarrassed teenagers down and talked to them about sex. She allowed them to go to beach parties in trucks driven by older teenagers. She didn’t mention it when they came home smelling of weed, and she held Alicia’s hair the night she came home so drunk she was sick. She put Alka-Seltzer in the medicine cabinet. She didn’t mind when they blasted Guns N’ Roses or Aerosmith.
Her children had turned out just fine.
Regardless of her parenting, Alicia and Cliff were who they were; they were done, like baked gingerbread cookies. The only family member Eleanor had any chance of being close to was her granddaughter, Arianna. Arianna, who asked people to call her Ari, was graduating from Bucknell University in a week, and she planned to continue her education, starting a master’s in early childhood education at Boston University.
Where would Ari be