The Jetsetters

by Amanda Eyre Ward

She yearned to make things okay in her family: to fix her father’s “fog,” to keep her siblings from making Winston yell, to tell her mother she was beautiful and could stop fishing for compliments.

Charlotte knew he saw her as elderly, an elderly lady in the rain. She wanted him to know she’d been a stunning beauty once—that inside, she was still that graceful young bohème. But strangers seeing you as someone you couldn’t bear to be was simply one of the indignities of age. You could accept it, rail against it, or just pretend it wasn’t happening.

Any sign of weakness in her mother made Lee feel completely unmoored.

“I am not,” she said, sounding in her own ears like a petulant teenager. How she missed being a petulant teenager! Adulthood was the worst.

The attention of men: Lee knew it was a makeshift and ultimately useless ice pack held to the burning fact that her life was a mess, but comfort was comfort, no matter how fleeting.

The truth was that Charlotte envied her own daughter. Dismissing Regan allowed Charlotte not to examine her own shame, guilt, and jealousy.

Cord swallowed, wanting to ignore the call he’d just received from his sister’s best friend, Zoë. How could he tell his baby sister her husband was a monster?

Focusing on her breath rather than her brain’s messy and subjective thoughts seemed to be the key. Lee learned to pretend she was swimming even when she was on land. She’d slow her brain down, look around, stop time. This bled into feeling thankful, and gratitude helped ease the sadness she’d been born

her racing brain and sense of hopelessness were symptoms of depression, probably manic depression. But who wouldn’t be depressed in her position? Jason bought her books, told her about podcasts, and ordered nutritional supplements to treat her brain. But magnesium drinks weren’t going to get her a job. Saint-John’s-wort pills weren’t going to change her dawning knowledge that nothing—not even fame—would bring her peace.

the cheap-red-wine world he was a part of: angry, attractive people who stayed up late and seemed to disdain her parents’ bourgeois lifestyle. What a thrill it was to trade her desperation for disdain!

(how she missed her clouds of Aqua Net, but one had to do what was right for the planet, not to mention those poor Australian children with a hole in their ozone layer)

Why hadn’t she stayed? It had seemed improper, or slovenly, or something. Weak. She’d been taught to remain solitary. Charlotte was proud of her ability to ignore and rise above her desires. Louisa had never stayed in Charlotte’s bed, and that was for sure! But maybe, if she’d snuggled underneath Cord’s navy comforter, Charlotte might have found a way back to the deep sleep she’d once had next to her nanny, Aimée. But she thought she was supposed to sleep in her own bed. Charlotte wasn’t one to be needy, to burrow next to a child for comfort.

being with him reminded Lee of a time she wanted to forget. Cord and Regan didn’t even know about Winston’s suicide. Charlotte had told them their father died from a heart attack.

Charlotte had once been someone who tried to get to the bottom of things. Winston, for example. She had continually tried to figure out what was wrong with him, attempting to anticipate what he might need or want so that she could keep him from sadness and, later, scotch.

sex. It was messy and real. You couldn’t be naked with another person and remain perfectly put together. Sure, your lover might leave you, might think you were ugly and wrinkled. But maybe that was the risk you had to take to connect to another.

How lonely it was to have no witness to her life. No one to guard her passage into slumber, no one to know that she had made it through the night.

He wanted to be connected to her—he always had. But why? Why did he feel so responsible for her? (“Because you’re codependent,” he heard Handy say in his mind. “Accept the things you cannot change, brother.”)

It never occurred to me to wonder what I thought about it all.