The Summer Place

by Jennifer Weiner

She’d only played for Owen once in their time together, that first night he’d come for dinner. She’d been reluctant. Part of her didn’t want him to think she was showing off, and another part couldn’t wait to dazzle him.

“The Cuckoo Sonata,” so-called because it imitated the call-and-repeat of a songbird. It was bright and playful, and had some showy moments where her left hand would cross over her right. Sarah had adjusted the bench, then her posture, then struck the first three chords. By the third or fourth measure, she’d closed her eyes, and by the time she reached the first repeat the room and her family and her boyfriend had all ceased to matter, the room had disappeared, and it was, as ever, just Sarah and the music, Sarah and the song.

hoping he didn’t look as startled as he felt by her appearance. He hadn’t seen his mother in person since his dad’s funeral, before COVID and the lockdowns, and in the intervening months she seemed to have sped through the remainder of late middle age and gone straight to old. Her skin had new wrinkles; her hair was as fine as dandelion fluff, and she moved with the slow, careful gait of an invalid.

She found herself wishing, pointlessly, that her mother had told her more: told her which path to follow when she couldn’t decide whether or not to pursue her music. Told her the truth about Owen. Told her that her own marriage hadn’t always been perfect, hadn’t always been easy. But that would have made Veronica Levy a different kind of person; certainly a different kind of mother. A mother who hovered and directed and micromanaged; a mother who cleared every obstacle out of the way before her child could come close to stumbling, who’d never let her kid struggle to figure it out for herself. A mother very much like Sarah herself.

Annette Morgan—once, briefly, Annette Danhauser—knew what the world thought of her. She had flouted a primal directive; broken a central rule. She had walked away from her child. Not to mention a man who loved her; a man who’d loved them both.

The world made space for men who left; who walked away from wives and children, sometimes more than once.

Annette wondered about that; about all those mothers, snapping and cracking, bending and breaking. Sometimes, she’d think that there had to be more women like her; that she couldn’t be the only one. She looked for them, the women who, like her, had held their babies in their arms and looked down at those dear, tiny faces, the womb-crumpled ears and off-kilter noses, and felt… nothing. No, worse than nothing: bone-deep terror, a certainty that they would make nothing but mistakes and cause nothing but pain, and an overwhelming desire to run. Other women who would sit at home with that new baby in their arms and watch the clock counting the hours until a boyfriend or husband or babysitter came to rescue them, because they could feel their very souls shriveling and dying as the minutes dragged by.

Women who always felt like imposters; women who never automatically looked up when a childish voice called, “Mom.” Surely, Annette would tell herself, there were more women like her out there. No matter how alone and isolated she felt, she couldn’t possibly be the only one.

she would scan the parks and the playgrounds, looking for kinship, for some other new mother with circles under her eyes collapsed on a bench, pushing a stroller back and forth with her foot and trying to finish reading a single page of a book or make a phone call or just drink her coffee in peace. She found other exhausted mothers, women who were overwhelmed and physically depleted. She found angry, frustrated mothers, upset by the lack of support from their spouses or their families. But, at some point in every conversation, each of those mothers would send a fond gaze toward the baby in the stroller, or curl her hand tenderly against the head of the baby strapped against her chest. But I wouldn’t have it any other way, the other woman would say, just look at her, and her voice would get softer;

Ruby lived in a beautiful home. She attended an excellent school. She had a father and a stepmother who loved her, two solid, stable adults to model solid, stable adult behavior. She had doting grandparents, a half-brother she adored, two tables full of giggling preteen friends from her school and her summer camp. And if she also had a crazy, selfish mother who’d cut and run, it could be worse. Like if she’d had an unhappy mother who’d stayed and made everyone miserable.

It might not be until Ruby was much, much older that she would be able to see her mother as anything but the villain of her story, and her father as the hero; when she’d be able to set aside her black-and-white thinking and appreciate the nuances and shades of gray.

Another runaway bride, she thought, and wondered if it was genetic; if all of the women in her family got itchy feet at the notion of being wives and mothers. Her own mother had done, at best, an indifferent job. Vivian Morgan had always been more interested in her tennis games and her clothes and the parties she threw and attended than in her three children. When, in the midst of an argument, Annette had flung the eternal teenage-girl accusation at Vivian—I don’t know why you even had kids!—her mother had rolled her eyes,

But Rosa knew that it wasn’t the money that mattered, it was what she’d done, how she’d taken a good man and pulled him down into the dirt. She’d taken a faithful man and made him a cheater; she’d taken an honest man and made him a liar. For six hundred dollars, she had found a good man and corrupted him… and she would have to carry that knowledge with her, about what she’d done and what kind of person that made her, for the rest of her life.

after a few months, every infatuation fades. The passion ramps down, the fairy dust evaporates, the pheromones calm, and, instead of two people who float on clouds of ecstasy, who think of one another endlessly when they’re apart and can’t stop touching when they’re together, you end up two people who have to decide, every day, whether or not you still want to be a couple; whether to stay or go.

He was a man, not a prince or a magical escape hatch, the living embodiment of a Plan B. He was just a man, with good parts and bad, like all men (and all women).

Marriages can survive a little resentment. Marriages can survive a lot of things.

She didn’t add that there weren’t any perfect solutions, that you always ended up regretting something. Pick a husband and children, maybe you never reach the summits of your profession. Pick your career, and maybe you end up alone, with a shelf lined with awards and a bank account full of cash and a bed that feels empty when you lay your head down at night. Maybe you couldn’t get the life you wanted, but you could have a life you wanted.

Maybe if she’d realized what her mother had sacrificed, maybe if she’d understood that her mother, too, had a road not taken, a version of herself that she hadn’t been, she would have seen the world differently.

Soon enough, life would teach Ruby those difficult lessons. Soon enough, she’d have to make hard choices. Sarah didn’t need to offer instruction when, right now, what Ruby needed was comfort.

preoccupied, his mind somewhere else. Now, at least, she knew where his mind had been, and what he’d been preoccupied with.

didn’t do a very good job of listening to Annette when we were together. I haven’t been listening to Ruby.” He made a face. “If I had been, maybe I would have figured out she didn’t want this wedding, and I could have helped her find a better exit strategy.” He looked into her eyes. “And the worst thing is that I haven’t been listening to you.”

That wasn’t the way Sarah remembered it… but if the last months of her mother’s life had taught her anything, it was that memory was subjective. Veronica remembered summers with her children, with occasional breaks to write or grade papers; Sarah remembered a mother constantly working, with occasional breaks to be with her children.

She hadn’t decided how it felt to have her life mined for fiction, and had been swinging between feeling deeply flattered and slightly exploited. She could hear her mother in her head: That’s what writers do. Maybe it explained why her mom hadn’t liked who she’d been while she was a published author. It certainly explained why Veronica hadn’t wanted these books read until she was gone. Sarah could be angry, but now there was no one to be angry at.

It felt—briefly—as if a return to something like normal was on the horizon, and all of us were waking from some strange, enchanted interlude, during which our lives had been reordered. Stuck at home, together, we saw the people with whom we were closest—our children, our spouses, our parents—out of context and in a new light.

knew that I also wanted to write about loss, and mothers and daughters and how the torch gets passed from one mother to the next.