“Where are you then?” Marguerite asked. In his annual Christmas letter, Dan had written about Renata’s infatuation with her literature classes, her work-study job in the admissions office, and her roommate, but he had hinted nothing about her summer plans.
“I’m here on Nantucket,” Renata said. “I’m at 21 Federal.”
Marguerite suddenly felt very warm; sweat broke out on her forehead and under her arms. And menopause for her had ended sometime during the first Clinton administration.
“You’re here?” Marguerite said.
“For the weekend. Until Sunday. I’m here with my fiancé.”
“Your what?”
“His name is Cade,” Renata said. “His family has a house on Hulbert Avenue.”
Marguerite stroked the fraying satin edge of her summer blanket. Fiancé at age nineteen? And Dan had allowed it? The boy must be rich, Marguerite thought sardonically. Hulbert Avenue. But even she had a hard time believing that Dan would give Renata away while she was still a teenager. People didn’t change that fundamentally. Daniel Knox would always be the father holding possessively on to his little girl. He had never liked to share her.
Marguerite realized Renata was waiting for an answer. “I see.”
“His parents know all about you,” Renata said. “They used to eat at the restaurant. They said it was the best place. They said they miss it.”
“That’s very nice,” Marguerite said. She wondered who Cade’s parents were. Had they been regulars or once-a-summer people? Would Marguerite recognize their names, their faces? Had they said anything else to Renata about what they knew, or thought they knew?
“I’m dying to come see you,” Renata said. “Cade wants to meet you, too, but I told him I want to come by myself.”
“Of course, dear,” Marguerite said. She straightened in bed so that her posture was as perfect as it had been nearly sixty years ago, ballet class, Madame Verge asking her students to pretend there was a wire that ran from the tops of their heads to the ceiling. Chins up, mes choux! Marguerite was so happy she thought she might levitate. Her heart was buoyant. Renata was here on Nantucket; she wanted to see Marguerite. “Come tomorrow night. For dinner. Can you?”
“Of course!” Renata said. “What time would you like me?”
“Seven thirty,” Marguerite said. At Les Parapluies, the bar had opened each night at six thirty and dinner was served at seven thirty. Marguerite had run the restaurant on that strict timetable for years without many exceptions, or much of an eye toward profitability.
“I’ll be there,” Renata said.
“Five Quince Street,” Marguerite said. “You’ll be able to find it?”
“Yes,” said Renata. In the background there was a burst of laughter. “So I’ll see you tomorrow night, Aunt Daisy, okay?”
“Okay,” Marguerite said. “Good night, dear.”
With that, Marguerite had replaced the heavy black receiver in its cradle and thought, Only for her.
Marguerite had not cooked a meal in fourteen years.
8:00 A.M.
Marguerite left her house infrequently. Once every two weeks to the A &P for groceries, once a month to the bank and to the post office for stamps. Once each season to stock up at both bookstores. Once a year to the doctor for a checkup and to Don Allen Ford to get her Jeep inspected. When she was out, she always bumped into people she knew, though they were never the people she wished to see, and thus she stuck to a smile, a hello. Let them think what they want. And Marguerite, both amused and alarmed by her own indifferences, cackled under her breath like a crazy witch.
But when Marguerite stepped out of her house this morning-she had been ready for over an hour, pacing near the door like a thoroughbred bucking at the gate, waiting for the little monkey inside her clock to announce that it was a suitable hour to venture forth-everything seemed transformed. The morning sparkled. Renata was coming. They were to have dinner. A dinner party.
Armed with her list and her pocketbook, Marguerite strolled down Quince Street, inhaling its beauty. The houses were all antiques, with friendship stairs and transom windows, pocket gardens and picket fences. It was, in Marguerite’s mind, the loveliest street on the island, although she didn’t allow herself to enjoy it often, rarely in summer and certainly never at this hour. She sometimes strolled it on a winter night; she sometimes peered in the windows of the homes that had been deserted for fairer climates. The police once stopped her; a lone policeman, not much more than a teenager himself, started spinning his lights and came poking through the dark with his flashlight just as Marguerite was gazing in the front window of a house down the street. It was a house Marguerite had always loved from the outside; it was very old, with white clapboard and wavy leaded glass, and the people who owned it, Marguerite learned from nosing around, had fine taste in French antiques. The policeman thought she was trying to rob it maybe, though he had seemed nervous to confront her. He’d asked her what she was doing, and she had said, Just looking. This answer hadn’t satisfied the officer much. Do you have a home? he’d asked. And Marguerite had laughed and pointed. Number Five, she’d said. I live at Number Five. He’d suggested she “get on home,” because it was cold; it was, in fact, Christmas. Christmas night, and Marguerite had been wandering her own street, like a transient, like a ghost looking for a place to haunt.
Marguerite reached Centre Street, took a left, then a quick right, and headed down Broad Street, past the bookstore, past the French bistro that had absorbed all of Marguerite’s old customers. She was aimed for Dusty Tyler’s fish shop. Marguerite’s former restaurant, Les Parapluies, had been open for dinner seven nights a week from May through October, and every night but Monday Marguerite had served seafood from Dusty Tyler’s shop. Dusty was Marguerite’s age, which was to say, not so young anymore. They’d had a close professional relationship, and on top of it they had been friends. Dusty came into the bar nearly every night the year his wife left him, and sometimes he brought his ten-year-old son in for dinner. Dusty had gotten very drunk one night, starting at six thirty with vodka gimlets served up by Lance, Marguerite’s moody bartender. He then ordered two bottles of Mersault and drank all but one glass, which he sent to Marguerite back in the kitchen. By the time dinner service was over, the waitresses were complaining about Dusty-he was out-of-bounds, obnoxious, bordering on criminal. Get him out of here, Margo, the headwaiter, Francesca, had said. It was a Sunday night, and the fish shop was closed on Mondays. Marguerite overruled the pleas of her staff, which was rare, and allowed Dusty to stay. He stayed long after everyone else went home, sitting at the zinc bar with Marguerite, sipping daintily from a glass of Chartreuse, which he had insisted he wanted. He was so drunk that he’d stopped making any kind of sense. He was babbling, then crying. There had been spittle in his beard, but he’d smelled salty and sweet, like an oyster. Marguerite had thought they would sleep together. She was more than ten years into her relationship with Porter at that point, though Porter spent nine months of the year in Manhattan and-it was well known to everyone-dated other women. It wasn’t frustration with Porter, however, that led Marguerite to think of sex with Dusty. Rather, it was a sense of inevitability. They worked together every day; she was his first client every morning; they stood side by side, many times their hips touching as they lifted a bluefin tuna out of crushed ice, as they pried open sea scallops and cherrystones, as they chopped the heads off shrimp. Dusty was destroyed by the departure of his wife, and Marguerite, with Porter off living his own life in the city, was lonely. It was late on a Sunday night; they were alone in the restaurant; Dusty was drunk. Sex was like a blinking neon sign hanging over the bar.