The Summer Place

by Jennifer Weiner

Sarah pressed her lips together, not wanting to dwell on how often she found herself doubting her choices and thinking about the life she hadn’t pursued.

Men are vain about their hair, her mom had told her. Even though it’s not as big a deal for them, they don’t like getting older any more than we do.

You think you know someone, then you’re locked in a house together for over a year, and it turns out, you never knew him at all.

He had played at being a free spirit, a modern-day hippie, rootless and untethered, and he’d enjoyed that life, knowing it wasn’t permanent, knowing that, deep down, he’d always wanted conventionality; a life like his own parents had, only, of course, not miserable.

Once, the belt hadn’t had quite so far to travel, and her legs hadn’t been quite so jiggly, or her skin so fine and slack. Once, she’d been deliciously curvy, even though she’d wasted years despairing of her body, trying to wish and diet and Jazzercise the weight away; starving off the same ten or fifteen pounds that always came back, usually with friends. She’d been pretty back then, her skin smooth, hair shiny, eyes bright. These days, everything was dulled and faded, and every part of her body from her breasts on down had developed an unseemly droop. In clothes, or even in a swimsuit, she could still look not-terrible. Out of clothes… well, out of clothes she just tried not to look.

she remembered being an attentive, hands-on, present mother who’d taught her kids to swim and ride their bikes and then gave them the gift of empty hours to fill, with books or swims or walks or Frisbee games with friends. And was telling a kid to amuse herself in a beautiful house right on the ocean really so awful? Poor you, Veronica would think, but never say, when Sarah got going on her lonely childhood and her neglectful mom.

From the minute she’d held her son, tracing his full cheeks, the snub of his nose, his bowed lips, touching the dark curls covering his head, she’d felt something inside of her shift. It was what you felt, she thought later, when you gave your heart away, the click you experienced when your focus changed completely.

They’d all found their place; they all had their thing. His father had known, since reading To Kill a Mockingbird in sixth grade, that he’d wanted to be a lawyer; his mom had known, even sooner than that, that her life would involve reading and writing. Sarah,

filling bento boxes with radish rosebuds and edamame and neatly portioned servings of grilled chicken and rice. He would make Connor’s bed, after a few bad run-ins with Legos taught him to wear shoes before entering the boy’s bedroom,

She missed it. She missed him. She missed having a partner, someone intimately familiar with the details of the life they’d built together.

And Eli was completely oblivious, physically present, emotionally gone.

For the years they’d been married, Sarah had done her best to ignore Eli’s annoying habits: the volume at which he chewed; the way he’d leave his sweaty workout clothes in a sodden pile on the bathroom floor,

she could make peace with his minor acts of slovenliness. Sarah went for the second option.

Staying married, she’d decided, was a choice; one that had less to do with love and more with forbearance. You recommitted yourself to your spouse every time you overlooked a pair of sweat-soaked boxer shorts in the corner of the bathroom; every time you swept, without comment, toenail clippings from the bedroom floor; every time you’d pick a different coffee shop after finding yourself buoyant and flushed and a little too eager to see that one barista with tattoo sleeves and the large, capable-looking hands. Every day, at least once, Sarah would find herself looking around her beautiful kitchen, with the skylight she’d added, or at Ruby as she came bounding through the door, and she would think, I made the right choice. I did the right thing.

Zoom, Sarah found that whatever tolerance she’d cultivated over the years had frayed to the point of nonexistence, and whatever reserves of goodwill she’d stored up had been drained.

“Just so I understand: you’re terrified that he’s cheating, and you also want him dead?”

She’d had her solitude: the hour in the morning after Eli had left for work and the kids had left for school, when she could sit with her second cup of coffee and do the crossword puzzle, or fold a load of laundry, or straighten up the kitchen, or read a chapter of a book, or just enjoy the quiet. She’d loved the weekend afternoons when the kids would be at sports practices or playdates and Eli would be out with his buddies, riding his bike or playing pickup basketball with the other dads.

At night, she’d savor a quiet hour alone in the kitchen, after everyone had gone to sleep, prepping the next night’s dinner or paging through cookbooks while she sipped a cup of tea.

Eli knew how much her alone time meant to her, and all through their marriage, he’d done what he could to preserve

Sarah would help them pack. She’d carry bags to the car. She’d stand on the steps, cheerfully waving goodbye, and then, once they were gone, she’d do an exultant jump in the air, thrilled at the thought of three entire nights where she would have the house all to herself.

The pandemic had stolen those precious days and hours. Even when everyone was tucked away in their bedrooms, Sarah could feel them, as if their presence had a physical weight, or a sound. It was the constancy of it, the unending-ness. She felt crowded and edgy and half-crazy; every time she turned around there was someone standing too close to her, speaking too loudly, needing something.

Every request, no matter how polite, clawed at her with sharp nails. Every breath of air in the house felt stale and flat, like it had already been in and out of someone else’s lungs; every surface she touched felt sticky. And she knew, from her friends, that she wasn’t the only woman feeling that way. They were all trying to do too much, for too many people, in too little space, trying to manage their jobs and their kids’ schooling, the meals and the housework and their working-from-home partners or spouses while they clung to sanity with their fingernails. As the months went by, Sarah thought that, if there wasn’t a true end coming soon, there’d be a wave of women leaving their marriages, just as there’d already been a wave of women leaving the workforce. They’d log on to Expedia en masse; they’d buy themselves one-way tickets to the most deserted parts of the world with no plans to ever come home.

She didn’t understand what had happened, or why Eli not only no longer saw their belongings, but no longer saw her, either—who she was, what she liked and used, what was meaningful and what was not.

But, in the midst of a pandemic, in a house with hardwood floors, the sound of Eli slap-slapping his way through his days had become maddening,

But nothing had changed. Eli was still distracted and distant. He barely listened when she spoke. When they gathered in the family room to play board games or watch TV, he’d have to be reminded when it was his turn, or he’d get up after twenty minutes and go drifting through their house like a ghost.

“I just—” Sarah had closed her eyes, knowing if she answered, if she said the words out loud, it would all become real. “I just need a little time by myself,” she had said, her voice almost a whisper. Maybe if I go away, I’ll remember why I loved him, she thought.

She wasn’t going to tell her mother how she felt like she was living with a ghost and not a partner, not a husband or a father, and certainly not a lover,

He used to listen to me and notice how I was feeling. He used to pay attention. He used to care.

Except how could you tell your husband that every single thing about him was annoying you, that his indifference was making you feel like you didn’t matter, and that you couldn’t remember why you’d wanted to be with him in the first place?

His feet were bare, shoulders were slumped, his posture defeated, and on his face was a look of such aching despair that Sarah’s first impulse was to go to him, wrap her arms around him, to hold him and tell him that whatever was wrong would be okay, that they’d figure it out together.

“I read here,” said Ronnie. “In the mornings, and then when the sun goes down.” That was one of her favorite places, but she also loved the little desk in the pantry, where, beneath a shelf full of cookbooks, she played solitaire on her laptop and paid her bills. She loved her bed; the way she could lie there and hear the ocean through the windows, and the outdoor shower, with the cutouts in its door that let her stand under the spray and catch glimpses of the sea.

“Why’d you stop writing?” he asked. Ronnie gave what she hoped looked like an indifferent shrug and kept her tone light. “Ran out of stories.” That wasn’t the truth, and she hadn’t ever stopped writing. Just publishing. And she’d never told another living soul why.

She understood, from a very early age, that suburban respectability was attainable and desirable. Fame was not.

She would publish short stories in literary quarterlies, and maybe even The New Yorker. She’d also get her PhD so she’d be able to support herself as a professor. Combined, these two pursuits would guarantee her a quiet, contemplative, academic life; a life spent in the company of stories and storytellers, in the land of language and words. It was all she wanted; all she’d wanted since her fifth-grade teacher had read her class “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost, and every word, every pause, every image, had echoed through her and made her heart feel like a struck gong.

By the time she was twenty-five and had completed her master’s, Ronnie had been rejected by the editors of every prestigious publication still in existence. A few of them took the time to include encouraging notes along with the “Sorry, but this isn’t right for us” form letters, and it was enough to keep her going.

Ronnie had never set out to write that kind of book, even though she’d happily read dozens of them, along with horror and romance and mysteries and every other kind of fiction. She’d simply failed at writing the kind of book she thought she’d wanted to write, the kind the critics would appreciate and future English majors would someday study.

Instead of trying to turn herself into the kind of writer she would never be, she had decided to write in her own voice and tell the story that kept talking to her, urging her on; the one that made her both a writer and a reader, eager to see what would happen next.

Whenever she was in New York, she could feel her Boston life, her real life, the life she wanted—at least with most of her heart, most of the time—beckoning, waiting to consume her. She knew that, at the very least, she should feel guilty about what she was doing.

I was a good mother, Ronnie told herself. She’d stopped smiling, the memory giving her an unpleasant twinge. She didn’t like the idea that all that Sarah remembered was a parent too busy or distracted to notice her.

“The whole time we were dating, he made me feel like I was the most important person in the world. And now it’s like he can’t even see me. If I walk into a room, he walks out of it. If I cook dinner, he chews it like it’s cardboard. I can’t remember the last time he gave me a compliment, or looked at me like I mattered to him.”

“He barely talks to me. He looks right through me, and he won’t tell me what’s going on, or why he’s acting this way, and I have no idea how to help him,

“I don’t want the boys thinking that this is what marriage is supposed to be. Or Ruby, either, for that matter. I don’t want any of them believing that a husband, or a wife, can just check out emotionally, and the other person just endures it.”

Sarah couldn’t recall the last time Eli had paid her a compliment, which was, somehow, even sadder.

That summer, Sarah, at her mother’s insistence, got a job as a maid in a hotel in Provincetown, down the street from the shop where Sam sold penny candy to tourists. (Her mother was a great believer in the value of working in the service industry. “You’ll learn how to deal with customers, and with a boss, and you’ll give waitresses good tips for the rest of your life.”)

“An identified patient,” he began, in a lecturing tone, “is a dysfunctional family’s scapegoat. The other family members project their issues onto that person, and he or she gets blamed for everything.

Which means that the other members of the family never have to face their own issues, or deal with their own shit. And,” he concluded, “the identified patient is never allowed to get better. Because if that person did get mentally healthy and stopped being the scapegoat, it would expose the real problems. The stuff the rest of the family doesn’t want to talk about, or face up to, or fix.”

Eli, she knew, had shot up six inches between junior high and high school. He walked with a permanent stoop, the result of the years he’d spent bumping his head on doorframes and ceilings that weren’t sized for a man of his height. Eli was still sometimes oblivious to the way his body occupied space.

There was nothing as pure or as passionate as that kind of first love. And, she thought, nothing as devastating as that first breakup.

“In my family, lying was a way of life. I was just keeping up the family tradition.”

close, she could see faint wrinkles around his eyes, a few strands of gray in his eyebrows, but his eyes were still that brilliant, aching blue of a perfect summer day.