Beach Week: A Novel

PART ONE

The

Meetings

1

When Leah reminded her husband at breakfast that they were hosting a meeting that evening to discuss the logistics of the forthcoming annual high school graduation celebration known as Beach Week, he kept his eyes locked on the sports section of the newspaper and made a plaintive choking noise that sounded like the bleat of a sheep. A few drops of coffee sprayed from his mouth, landing on his pressed white shirt.

Charles had reacted in a similar, if less theatrical, fashion when she initially informed him of this meeting a few days earlier. Still, she had hoped for something else, some sudden change of heart that might have made him warm to the idea of welcoming into their home this group of parents whom they barely knew, to discuss a subject that had, admittedly, caused him to bristle even when it first crossed their radar as a mere abstraction on a local NBC News segment entitled Mayhem at Beach Week more than a year earlier, before their daughter had begun her senior year. After viewing footage of underage drinking and lewd sexual behavior, Charles had quipped that the idea of packing one’s child off for a week of presumed debauchery was akin to negligent parenting.

It was unlike Leah to act unilaterally in a matter concerning their daughter, and for a brief moment she felt a twinge of guilt disproportionate to having merely volunteered to invite a few people over to their home for a brief discussion involving child rearing. She could only regard this as a sad indication of how constricted her life had become since they moved to the suburbs of Washington, D.C., almost two years earlier. She had given up her job as a teacher back in Omaha and had since failed to find—or to seriously look for—another. Once, an act of daring on her part might have involved challenging a contentious school board on a ninth-grade reading curriculum; now she felt like a renegade for simply inviting the parents of her daughter’s friends to their home and preparing to set out plates of cheese cubes and bowls of salted nuts without first consulting her husband.

Of course it was true that Charles might have other cause for annoyance; for one thing, it probably appeared that Leah was disregarding their plan to have a meaningful, considered conversation specific to the potentially loaded question of whether their daughter would even be allowed to attend Beach Week. But Leah wasn’t disregarding it. They would have plenty of time to discuss this later. Tonight’s meeting was purely informational, intended only to find facts, to meet their fellow parents and hear them out.

Leah might have tried to explain this now, but she felt suddenly afraid of what she’d done to disturb their increasingly delicate marital balance, and her instinct was to retreat. She walked over to the sink and wet a paper towel, which she pressed to the specks of coffee that were starting to merge above Charles’s left breast pocket into an amorphous brown cloud. She regarded with some tenderness his hairline, which was receding incrementally each day. Charles was a gentle, easygoing man who only ever raised his voice to yell at professional athletes on television, but lately he’d become somewhat mercurial. Although there were outside forces that had altered the family dynamic, Leah knew that she was not without blame when it came to the matter of his changeable moods, particularly on this occasion.

This was one of my best shirts, he said.

I’m so, so sorry, she said, and she was. It’s no big deal. I can definitely bleach it out.

This was not quite true; she didn’t have the talent to remove this spot. She was the sort of laundress who turned whites pink and inexplicably lost socks. Why now, even in assertions to do with laundry, she wondered, was she behaving with duplicity?

It wasn’t as if Leah had invented the idea of Beach Week. Kids from this community had been flocking to the same stretch of the Delaware shore to commemorate their high school graduations for as long as anyone could remember, and although there were occasional minor incidents involving citations for possession of alcohol or cases of sun poisoning, nothing truly awful had ever happened. She had done a little poking around online to assuage herself with the knowledge that this sort of thing wasn’t unique to the affluent suburb where they now lived. At high schools all over the country, graduation was marked by one sort of celebration or another. Some communities called it Senior Week, and activities ranged from barbecues to trips to amusement parks to presumably more raucous expeditions to such notorious party spots as Cancɐn. Sharing a house with a nice group of girls from good, solid families at a beach only a few hours from home—Leah could easily imagine worse ways for Jordan to cap her high school experience.

Besides, it was Jordan herself who had proposed the idea. Their seventeen-year-old daughter had come into their bedroom late one night the previous week to say that she and her friends had found the perfect rental for this coming summer, but they had to act quickly to secure the lease. Leah and Charles had at least been on the same page in groggily suggesting the need for a proper conversation about this at a more reasonable hour. That was the extent of their discussion to date, so it was not as if Charles had expressly said no to Jordan’s participation, and it was not as if Leah had put forth her own completely out of character yes-leaning view.

After a difficult transition following a move halfway across the country the summer preceding Jordan’s junior year of high school, compounded by a terrifying, high-impact collision on the soccer field that had left her sidelined with a concussion and its lingering—albeit mercifully dwindling—side effects, Leah wanted, above all, to have her daughter be a happy, healthy teen. That she set this goal intellectually didn’t stop her from trying to protect Jordan at every turn. Since that disorienting moment when Leah had glimpsed her daughter unconscious on the 18-yard line, the blood from her nose brilliant in the afternoon sunlight as it trickled down her white jersey, she had become a bit overzealous in her mothering, and she knew that she needed to let go.

By all indications, they were over the hump: Jordan’s post-concussive migraines had largely subsided, her concentration had returned, the bursts of vertigo were now rare. She did remain a bit moody and aloof, but Leah understood that these hardly qualified as signs that something might be wrong in a teenage girl. Given the scale of disasters that might befall a family, this was clearly minor; nevertheless, Jordan, Charles, and Leah herself had all lost equilibrium, recalibrating emotions in private, and not always linear, ways. Leah had started to have bouts of What Might Have Been, with the insidious sidebar crazy mothering issue of What She Might Do to Prevent This from Ever Happening Again. If only the dangers in this world could be confined to the soccer field! Leah now had a heightened awareness of the catastrophes that loomed at every turn. There were crooked bolts of summer lightning shooting randomly from the sky and distracted Beltway drivers swerving out of lanes, cell phones pressed to their ears. She had even just seen a newspaper photograph of a bear roaming their pristine subdivision, on one occasion walking right onto someone’s deck and swiping the bag of hot-dog buns that had been left beside the grill. And the environment! There were toxins galore—in food, in plastics, in underarm deodorants, microscopic carcinogens in the water and the air. From what she’d read, it was possible that some of these might even be triggering Jordan’s headaches.

Allowing Jordan to go to Beach Week was of course hugely inconsistent with Leah’s recent neurotic style of parenting, but she thought it a good sign that their daughter wanted to go, that she was seeking to engage with her new Verona friends, about whom she at times seemed ambivalent. Leah wasn’t completely naȹve; she had some insight into teenage behavior, having been a high school English teacher for nearly two decades, but she trusted Jordan and had come to the conclusion that certain kids were going to misbehave no matter where they were, whether under twenty-four-hour guard or on their own at the beach. She’d seen bed-hopping by members of the wind ensemble she chaperoned at a school-sponsored band trip, had spied a National Merit finalist snorting coke in the bathroom at the local Dunkin舗 Donuts late one night, and had once walked in on two male students having sex after debate team practice—and this was in the supposedly more conservative, bucolic Midwest. If kids were going to get into trouble, they would, regardless of whether their parents kept them on a short leash. Leah understood as well that Beach Week was an important rite of passage, a dry run for the more wrenching letting-go that would by necessity take place when Jordan left for college in the fall.

Admittedly, there was something else to this whole Beach Week thing. Leah would say it was subliminal, except that she had easy access to the thought. She wanted to go to Beach Week herself. Not actually, physically go to Beach Week at the age of forty-two, of course, but symbolically, in an if-she-could-only-go-back-in-time kind of way. Having grown up in a small town, Leah had always wished for a richer teenage experience, which in her mind would have involved going to a large, coed, racially diverse public school that was the stuff of television dramas—the kind of school her daughter now attended, minus the diversity part. In addition, Leah had grown up dreaming, quite literally, of the beach itself. She wanted crashing waves, funnel cakes, boardwalks with video arcades and Skee-Ball. She wanted to build sand castles and collect shells and look for jellyfish and sit at restaurants that served crabs with Old Bay seasoning. She was twenty-three before she’d stuck a toe into the ocean, and that was on her honeymoon. What could be better for her daughter, more healthy and natural, than relaxing at the beach with friends, breathing in the fresh sea air?

Would Leah dare say that in some private corner of her mind she longed for the bad stuff that Beach Week was known for, too? Although she and Charles weren’t physically estranged, a thick layer of resentment hung over them in bed like plane-grounding fog. Marital tension might have made for better sex in theory—the release of pent-up anger and whatnot—but in their case it did not. That might have been because there was nothing very arousing about the other source of anxiety in their lives, which was money. She wondered if it might have given her a charge to contemplate problems of infidelity: Charles having an affair with his severe, pretty department head with whom he played tennis twice a week, for example. More likely, not: the thought only made Leah want to impale him with the racquet—and maybe impale her, too. But that wasn’t the point. The point was that they were still fielding hospital bills from increasingly arcane subspecialists whom they could barely recall encountering after Jordan’s injury. Their insurance company had yet to pay a claim without rejecting it first, requiring countless hours of aggravating, haranguing phone calls. On top of this, they had given up trying to sell their house back in Omaha, which had languished on the market for months before they decided to take it off and rent. Now their mortgage’s balloon payment was coming due. They had also brought Charles’s mother, Florence, with them and installed her in a nearby overpriced nursing home. But the mother of all money tension had to do with Charles’s new job, the very thing that had brought them to the East Coast. A large bonus that constituted the bulk of his compensation was tied to the commencement of a project that now seemed hopelessly stalled.

After the coffee had been blotted as best it could, Leah imagined that Charles would check his Blackberry and discover some work conflict that would preclude his participation this evening, but before he had the opportunity, Jordan appeared in the kitchen.

Oh my God, I had no idea how late it was, she said. Even though she was in an apparent rush, she didn’t seem especially panicked as she moved through the room gathering her belongings. It took her a moment to locate her wallet, which Leah finally spotted on the counter by the telephone. Her keys proved more elusive, but they found them on the seat of one of the kitchen chairs that had been pushed into the table, making them hard to spot. Jordan with great deliberation studied the selection of bananas ripening in the fruit bowl and finally ripped one free from the middle of the cluster.

I stayed up way too late working on my history paper, and I guess I overslept, she said.

She dropped into a chair and pulled on her boots, then bunched her hair into a sloppy ponytail—a wild, thick mass of dark ringlets, as hopeful and unruly as a shaggy lawn in spring. Leah could soak in the sight of her daughter, her only child, for hours, and delight, and draw inferences from details as slight as the hungry, aggressive way she peeled the skin from the fruit and took a bite. Her appetite was good! Leah was further encouraged by the sight of her daughter’s rosy cheeks, which seemed to be a sign of health, although it was equally possible that her color merely reflected the thermostat, which Leah had begun to tune low in attempts to be both energy- and cost-efficient.

Dad, can you give me a ride to school on your way to work?

Charles looked up from the paper and mustered a smile for his daughter. Sure. Can you wait a sec?

Not really, Dad. School starts in … She pulled her cell phone from her pocket to check the time, even though the clock above the stove was clearly visible. Seven minutes.

He put down his paper and grabbed his coat, and they were on their way. He forgot to give Leah a kiss, but she felt a swell of warmth all the same at the sight of her family heading off for another productive day. Or maybe what she felt was just relief that she had managed to pull this off, although why she wanted to host a Beach Week meeting was a question she had difficulty answering, even to herself.

Once the parents began to arrive that evening, Leah realized that their house was not spacious enough to accommodate this group comfortably. She had given no thought to where she would put their winter coats, which she began to heap on the bed in the spare room upstairs. She had also failed to consider that those who had come straight from work would be hungry, determined to cobble together a meal from the simple and not very elegant spread of light hors d’oeuvres set out on a couple of side tables. She had worried she was overdoing it on the hospitality front, given that this was meant to be a brief meeting of the sort that she was pretty sure didn’t call for food at all. Now she wished she had ordered some platters from Whole Foods, even chilled a few bottles of wine.

Leah felt like she could never quite get it right in Verona. Distance-wise it was a relatively straight line, a thousand measly miles from Nebraska to Maryland. The language was the same, the local customs no different, people looked and dressed in a mostly similar fashion, and yet. And yet … what, was what she was still struggling to figure out. Omaha was a cosmopolitan city, and she and Charles were hardly hicks. Not to put too fine a point on it, especially since Leah considered herself an antisnob, but they were cultured, educated people. They listened to NPR and saw foreign films, and Leah had belonged, simultaneously, to two different book groups back home and had immediately upon arriving joined one here. She and Charles went to the occasional opera and enjoyed the theater, too. So why was it she felt she didn’t belong in this town? Was it simply that everyone was almost absurdly accomplished? Leah was too intimidated to mention to the neighbor next door that his teenage son frequently blocked access to the Adler driveway with his haphazard parking after she discovered that the man had recently won a Nobel Prize for pioneering research in enzymes—or something. Another neighbor had just returned from a stint as ambassador to Norway, and the woman directly behind them was a senior State Department official. Leah never knew for sure who anyone was, which could be downright mortifying. At a recent dinner party hosted by Charles’s former college roommate, who lived nearby, she had asked a world-famous author what he did, and then, moments later, asked a two-term U.S. senator where he was from.

Perhaps she was overstating this, and was merely feeling displaced. Moving was right up there on the list of major life stressors, alongside death and divorce, after all. On top of this, she was unemployed for the first time in her adult life, and now an empty nest loomed. And she and Charles, once the best of friends, had drifted into some distant, difficult-to-define space. She was in a fragile place emotionally, probably just getting her signals crossed—surely that’s all that was going on. It was almost certainly the case that she had only imagined a snicker, for example, when she casually inquired of another mother on the soccer field where the nearest Walmart was, and there was surely no subtext when the woman replied that while she didn’t know the answer, it was probably in another state.

Janet Glover, the mother who was organizing this event, walked through the door carrying a heavy stack of folders. She had prepared a PowerPoint presentation, she explained to Leah, but just that morning her computer had crashed, so she’d spent much of the afternoon, with the help of her assistant, xeroxing and assembling these materials to hand out to the parents. Janet had photocopied a meeting agenda onto sheets of fluorescent yellow and affixed these with a single staple to the front of each folder, which made for the soothing sound of papers rustling in the wake of the ceiling fan Leah had just switched on in an effort to ventilate her living room, which got stuffy even in winter, with all the piped-in, stale heat. One of the folders blew open; the contents scattered on the floor. Leah turned the fan to a lower speed and gathered the strewn papers, finding among them a map of Chelsea Beach, a Chelsea Beach area information and transportation guide, a statement from Corporal Winston White of the Chelsea Beach Police Department, a list of frequently asked questions, and two pages of helpful tips compiled by parents who had started a blog called Beach Week Survivors. Leah set the folder back in the pile wearily, with a sudden sense of foreboding. Maybe Charles had been right and she had been too quick to agree to even considering this idea. She was apparently not alone in this sentiment.

I think this entire idea is a travesty, said Alice Long, who was next to arrive. What kind of irresponsible parents would allow a bunch of young girls to go to the beach for a week, unsupervised?

This was an unfortunate way to begin the evening. Alice was widely regarded as difficult, but more to the point, she was the mother of Cherie Long, who had been charging toward the arcing soccer ball when she butted heads with Jordan. One girl walked away unscathed; the other wound up in the hospital and was still on the mend almost a year later. Who could explain these things? Assigning blame was useless; no one had been at fault, unless you were petty enough to point out that Cherie Long had been out of position and was generally considered a ball hog. These things happened in competitive sports, yet a word of apology or even of genuine concern from Alice Long, either at the time of the accident or in its aftermath, might have gone a long way to appease Leah.

Alice was arguably Verona’s most famous citizen, if you took out of the equation the many politicians and journalists who lived there. The source of Alice’s fame was at least amusing: she was a former television actress, best known for her long-running title role in The Winged Wife, a shamefully derivative drama about a crime-fighting suburbanite whose flying superpowers kicked in when she tapped her toe to the ground as certain serendipitous meteorological conditions collided (there seemed to be an unusual amount of hail and gale force wind in the fictitious California suburb where the show was set). A self-righteous style of parenting combined with her former acting gig had earned her the derisive nickname the Flying Nun.

Now she was better known as a helicopter mother extraordinaire, the sort that teachers feared: her daughter, Cherie, was Ivy League-bound, she told them in late-night calls to their homes to complain about grades or a too-heavy course load, and nothing was going to come between her and a 4.79 weighted GPA.

Her stunning daughter was a nearly exact replica of Alice, and side by side they looked like they belonged in tweed ensembles in a New York Times fall fashion spread, leaning against a split-rail fence. In addition to her physical elegance, Alice put herself together well, creatively accessorizing, as evidenced by the lovely strand of coral around her neck that contrasted nicely with the long blond hair, which appeared, against all odds, to be natural, even as her peers mostly slogged, with varying degrees of grace and coherence and semipermanent color, through middle age. (Leah had stopped highlighting her hair, having read something, somewhere, about cancer-causing dye, and had since become acutely aware not only of the little strands of gray creeping into her increasingly dull shade of brown, but of the coloring, bleaching, and frosting habits of others.)

Leah wondered why Alice had bothered to come to the meeting if this was her view. Also, didn’t Leah deserve some sort of hello, or perhaps even a thank-you, for opening up her home? On top of which, wasn’t the very fact that these ten sets of parents were assembling some five months prior to the event to discuss logistics an answer to the question itself? These were concerned parents, not irresponsible parents. But she didn’t say as much.

Fortunately, she was alone with Alice Long only for a moment, as the others arrived behind her in one parental clot that had trouble squeezing through the narrow entryway. Leah recognized most, but surprisingly not all, of these people, even though she had diligently turned up at every school event this past year. One of the fathers looked familiar. He had thick, curly dark hair, and he wore a pink cable-knit sweater that looked fresh from the Brooks Brothers box, with no fabric pilling in sight. He had the aura of someone famous, and Leah wondered for a moment if he was that political commentator on cable television, the guy who had been somehow involved in the Clinton administration. His foreign policy adviser? Or maybe not—maybe he was that local insurance agent whose face was plastered on the backs of grocery carts and buses. Behind him was a couple Leah recognized as the parents of one of Jordan’s friends, but which one?

Leah had always been acutely aware of the passage of time, but now that she was facing the prospect of Jordan’s leaving home, she was becoming a sentimental basket case. Interactions with her daughter lately seemed fleeting and precarious, set against the backdrop of the fraught emo music so frequently emitting from Jordan’s room. Leah had once taken pride in having struck a good balance between teaching and mothering that, although perhaps not ideal, had felt right at the time, but now she found herself dwelling on every missed opportunity. If she could rewrite the past, she would have worked less, as if more time spent with Jordan in the formative years might have prevented her from having that concussion.

Now she wished she had signed up to supervise every field trip, had managed sports teams, had indulged her daughter’s request at birthdays and holidays to decorously wrap every gift and adorn it with colorful bows and yards of ribbons that they would fray and curl, no matter how long it took or how late the hour. If she could only have a do-over, they would make cookies from scratch at least once a week and frost and sprinkle them with every sugary accoutrement on offer in the grocery store cooking aisle. And she’d be more indulgent: she wouldn’t have tossed the American Girl catalog in the trash before Jordan got home from school in an effort to discourage materialism. In fact, given a second chance at mothering, maybe she’d even go back in time and splurge on a hair appointment and a set of skis for Jordan’s one and only Molly doll that time they’d visited the flagship store in Chicago. Then Jordan might have turned out to be the sort of kid who told her mother who her friends were.

There were only about twelve people at first, but it still felt crowded in Leah’s living room, and there were more on the way. A few stray spouses, including her own, were going to arrive a little late, she was informed, and the Linds had sent their regrets as they were currently in Canada scouting a hot goalie prospect to possibly sign to the hockey team they owned. It was one thing to have this many people for a cocktail party—not that she and Charles ever had cocktail parties—but in order to hold a meeting, presumably everyone needed to sit, yet one more item to add to the punch list of things she should have thought about earlier. Fortunately, no one seemed to notice, since the atmosphere had in fact begun to feel like a happy hour, albeit one with only soft drinks and lemon Perrier and her mediocre spread of