Summertime Guests - Wendy Francis Page 0,22
symbol, which Claire guesses means serenity or balance or another one of those new-agey mantras. Her boyfriend (they’re holding hands, so it seems a safe assumption) is dressed in baggy khaki shorts and a Bruins T-shirt. There’s a grungy, drummer aura about him. When the bell dings for the elevator, though, he surprises her by holding the door and saying, “After you.”
“Thank you,” Claire says, pleasantly surprised. In general, she finds the next generation to be appallingly lacking in good manners. She’s noticed this around the office, especially among the young interns, who show up to work with an automatic sense of entitlement. As if they’re too smart to work the copy machine, too important to skip lunch even while the senior staff races around to meet a deadline. Somewhere along the line, Claire thinks to herself, the Golden Rule has gotten lost, replaced with a cool indifference. Being nice has fallen out of fashion. Which is unfortunate because she’d much prefer to live in a world where strangers remember to stop and hold the door. Where people make an effort to say please and thank you every now and then and ask How can I help? instead of Can I have that?
Walt and she used to discuss this very thing. “What’s so old-fashioned about kindness?” she would demand after some particular affront by a stranger.
“Nothing,” Walt would say. “We used to call it common courtesy.” Walt, she thinks, would have liked this young man on the elevator.
“Enjoy your match,” she tells the young couple when they all step off the elevator, and they say thanks, wave goodbye.
Claire heads straight for the pool, where the dozen or so umbrellas scattered around the perimeter bring to mind a field of brightly colored poppies. A cabana boy materializes by her side and offers to fetch a chaise lounge for her, and Claire thinks Oh, yes, please. How wonderful! After lugging the chair over, he asks if she’ll be needing another, if she’s expecting company, to which she curtly replies “No, thank you,” before slipping him a modest tip.
She shakes the hotel’s red-and-white-striped beach towel out over the chair and sets her bag down on a side table. It’s funny, she reflects, how it was almost easier traveling with Walt. Simply because then she was part of a couple, and most people, she has discovered, are more comfortable when they can slot a person into a particular category. With Walt, she’d been a wife, part of a pair, in a twosome, a Biblical Noah’s ark duo. Easy to explain and file away. But After Walt (the time which she now thinks of as AW), it has become apparent that some people don’t know how to handle her solitude, whether they should acknowledge it or avoid it like a pesky pothole.
It’s as if she, a slightly older woman flying solo, suddenly presents a conundrum to the rest of the world. Is she divorced? Widowed? Or, even worse, single? She watches while strangers’ minds whirl through the possibilities, trying to place her. And though her wedding band, a tiny diamond on a thin silver ring, now dangles from a small chain necklace around her throat, she’ll occasionally slide it back onto her ring finger to let strangers know that yes, indeed, she was married once. Please don’t pity me! is what she really wants to say. The constant urge to explain her oneness to others—still a surprise to herself some days—can grow tiresome. She’s joked with Ben and Amber that maybe she’ll start wearing a name tag, like the ones she used to at journalism conferences, that identifies her as Claire O’Dell, widowed at 61. Still happy!
She plunks down on the chair and takes a moment to rearrange her swimsuit cover-up, a pretty white eyelet that could double as a dress. She’d found it on the sales rack at Macy’s along with some other vacation wear, as Amber called it. From her bag she pulls out a magazine, her eye snagging on an article entitled, “How to Spice Up Your Marriage When He’s All Vanilla.” She grunts to herself. Do people actually read this drivel? Before she’s a sentence in, though, a young mother trying to coax her daughter to jump into the shallow end interrupts Claire’s concentration. She watches while the little girl, probably three, tiptoes over to the pool’s edge and bends her knees. Her face scrunches up in willful determination—or maybe it’s fear (it’s hard to tell)—before she chickens out and races