He drove to the little seaside market for coffee. A beautiful woman in line behind him said, “You look like someone who would appreciate a party.” She was wearing cut-off jean shorts and white go-go boots. Her hair was uncombed and sandy and long and her wet bikini marked her shirt. She was his age or older, he thought, but she seemed sixteen.
“Not me. I’m not that kind of birthday boy,” he said.
“Is it your birthday?”
“Thirty-two,” he said.
“I know how it hurts you boys to grow up. It’s not so bad, you’ll see.” She borrowed a pen from the cashier and wrote down an address. “A friend of mine is hosting. Nine o’clock tonight,” she said. “It’ll be fun, no assholes.”
—
All afternoon Fern thought about the magic key they still held: Edgar could leave their Cambridge life, go back and take over the family steel company in Chicago, his birthright as the only child, and fortune would follow him. It was the very last thing he wanted to do. He would not be able to publish the novel he had spent ten years writing because it was about the son of a steel baron who walks away from his father’s money. But here were these three children and herself with all their various needs and desires, and she had not made this family alone. She looked out the kitchen window at the blue, green and blue again. This was an expensive ocean to love. While the children played cards, Fern went into the bedroom and, shaking, put her finger in the rotary phone’s different circles, calling Edgar’s mother.
That afternoon Fern and the children baked a chocolate cake that looked more homemade than they would have liked. The frosting melted and pooled on the plate. They boiled lobsters and clams and laid a whole bowl of drawn butter at each place setting. The table was clothed and decorated and everyone took showers. Edgar had been out on the water and when he came back his cheeks and eyes were red. Fern wanted to take him into the dark and say something that would make their good life continue.
Mid-meal, the phone rang again. “Fern, sweetheart,” her father-in-law said. “I hear there is something to celebrate. Are you having a party?”
She tried for cheer. “Lobster and steamers and chocolate cake.”
“Good girl. Mary’s on too. Say hi, Mary.”
“Hi, darling,” Fern’s mother-in-law said.
“Can you put Edgar on the extension? So we can all be here together?” Hugh asked.
When their voices were all joined by wires, Edgar’s parents sang to him.
His father said, “Edgar, I want you to know how welcome you are here at Keating Steel. In every way.”
His mother let out a little chuff, the sound of someone who always knew she would win. “You’ll see,” she said. “You’ll see how rich we will make you.”
“Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad,” Fern said, almost too softly to be heard.
Edgar could not see his wife but he could hear her unsteady breath. He understood: she was trying to sell him. He had known her for eleven years and had never hated her, but here was a flare. He squeezed his fists until his nails nearly cut. Fern was ready to transform him into the kind of man who stayed up late in the night working to make the margins between cost and profit wider. So that she could continue to live in a house much bigger than anyone needed, he would have to spend his weekends playing the more dignified seasonal sports with men who ran other companies and they would talk about bottom lines and taxes and subsidies and overseas manufacturing and their tennis games. Fern would turn as vapid as the other wives, all manicure and hairdo and crisp pleats. They would host and attend, host and attend in a spiral of meaningless parties. Their children would go on to do the same thing, and their children after, the whole ancestry one long string of spent and earned, appearance maintained, standards adhered to and passed on and one never asking what any of it meant, whether any good had ever once been done.
Fern wanted to see Edgar’s eyes. She wanted to yell and apologize and hide.
It snuck up on Fern, how hard and fast she began to cry.
“My,” said Mary. “Fern, what bad hay fever you have.”
The children insisted on singing “Happy Birthday” as soon as their parents were off the phone. “Make a wish,” Cricket said, and Edgar blew out thirty-two tiny flames, plus one to grow on.
Edgar looked at Fern. They both had red eyes. He said, “What about my book?”
“You made two thousand dollars on it. I don’t know what else to do,” she said.
“I’m going out,” he said. “I’ll be back in a few hours.”
—
Edgar went down the grassy path to his dark green coupe and drove away from Fern. The night was warm and the air half salt. Fern was left with chocolate cake on plates and three children who had been waiting all day to celebrate. He was left with the feeling that his life was being carved out, that his expected contribution was a shell, not substance. Both Fern and Edgar remembered the same thing: seven months earlier and after almost ten years of work on his novel, Edgar had sent it off to an agent. Two weeks after that, with shaving cream still on half his face, he had come running down the stairs, beating Fern and Cricket to the phone. Edgar had said, “Hello?” and then, “Uh-huh yes okay wow thank you,” like it was a single word.
“He has an offer,” he had said to Fern and Cricket. “He has an offer for my novel.” Cricket had been the one to cry first. Fern and Edgar had both knelt so that the three of them were the same height and they had put their heads together and wrapped their arms around each other. The twins had jumped aboard the huddle.
“It’s not a ton of money,” he said.
“Who cares about money,” Fern had said. “Who fucking cares about money.” The twins had looked at their mother in shock. “Sorry,” she had said. “I’m just excited.” Cricket had been more proud of both of her parents in that moment than any in her life: her mother knew how to swear and her father had written a book.
“Who fucking cares about money,” Cricket had echoed, sensing that in this happy moment nothing she could do would get her in trouble.
—
On this night, the woman from the store looked happy — she had little cheeses on a plate, she had a double-tall glass of gin. She had on white bell-bottom jeans and a white tank top with thin straps and no bra and high platform shoes, which she should have, as a feminist, disagreed with, but there she was, inches above the heads of the men in the room. She looked superior. She was superior. She popped a cheese in her mouth. It was cheap and that did not seem to bother her. The room was full of grass smoke and cigarette smoke and fat with bodies and they were all wearing very little clothing because it was the season for it, and hot outside, hot inside and all the drinks would have been better with mint, if they had had any. In a few hours everyone would strip and run down the path to the beach, throw their naked bodies into the slosh of the Atlantic Ocean.
For Glory, this party was like all the other summer parties that had ever been, except that Edgar showed up.
“You came,” she said.
“Listen. I’m married.”
“Obviously. Everyone is married by now.” Glory was tall and had the ragged lips of someone who’d been kissing all night in a cold car, in winter.
They talked in the drone of the party. They did not mention jobs. Money was another thing they did not talk about.
A leather-vested man with sideburns to his jawbone and rose-colored sunglasses, booze-breathed and too close to Glory, said, “You look hip. I’ve got a stash in my van.”