"Swell."
"You look familiar. Did you ever wait tables at Bradey's? Lemon or lime?"
"Yes lime. No Bradey's."
"Were you the receptionist in Dr. Crane's office?"
"No, sorry."
I was not in the mood to play Where Do I Know You From. I took my drink and scanned the nearby conversation circles, looking for Hunter, looking for the plume of cigarette smoke that was always rising from him. I didn't know anyone else here, but what I understood, as I crossed the beach with my club soda, weaving through the clusters of beautiful people and their beautiful children, was that none of them would be at a clambake among strangers the night after a father or a spouse died, the way Ginny and I were. These people did not have to reinvent their lives every day. All they had to do was show up for the ones they'd been born into or signed onto. And when one of them died, an elaborate protocol system fell into place and operated with a balletic grace and precision of the sort used to get children into the best schools and then the best law firms. Though all these people had servants and secretaries, the calls around death, even to the florist, were made by principals, by Mr. or Mrs. And there were always two or three in a circle who knew exactly whom to call about obits in the Times, the Globe, the Washington Post.
"Could that be Sophy Chase?"
It was Betsy Schmidt, who, with her flirtatious husband, Terry, owned the only bookstore on the island, in a refurbished old barn out by the airport, with its own café and art gallery to lure people out there. She was conspicuous in this Town and Country crowd, her dyed, rust-colored hair, her permanent winter pallor, the cigarette always at her side, springing up to her mouth between conversations so that she wouldn't blow smoke in anyone's face. What was she doing here? Of course. Sue Winston had her Louisa May Alcott book coming out and wanted to ingratiate herself with Betsy and Terry in the hope that they would bestow on her the honor of a reading at their store.
"I didn't know jo‹ knew the Winstons," Betsy said.
"I didn't know you knew them either." I was surprised by her invitation to do the island minuet: jockeying for position. It hadn't gone out of fashion in my absence.
"Any interesting plans for the summer?"
"I don't live here anymore. I'm back briefly under difficult circumstances. My husband-we just separated-he died."
"Oh," she said brightly. "Is that good news or bad news?"
The statement hung in the air, and hangs still in my memory, like an enormous red flag. It stunned me. It stung me. It provoked me. Then it enraged me. It revisited the accumulated shocks and humiliations of the previous twenty-four hours and added another, the suggestion that I might be having a good time. I can articulate this now, but in that moment I was so rattled that this woman's pitiful attempt at levity, or sisterhood or whatever it was, shot through me like a seismic tremor, the earth violently rearranging itself, and all I could do was gape at her and try to remain standing. I lost the capacity to speak. And the will to speak. And the energy to say one more civilized thing to one more person who saw me as a bystander at the scene of my husband's death. I had not uttered a syllable, but the venom in my gaze had penetrated Betsy's skin, and it was she who spoke, or tried to, next.
"I just meant…" she sputtered. "You know, in terms of resolving the separation, because sometimes the friction in a marriage carries over into a divorce, and you get so angry you think it would be easier-"
"You must know a lot about that."
"We do have books on divorce in the store."
"And you've read those, have you?"
"Not all of them, but maybe more than your average-"
I interrupted. "Your average happily married woman? And what about love? Do you read books about that too?" I stared at her until she raised her cigarette and took a deep drag. She forced herself to nod, like a child who has misbehaved; smoke poured from between her lips. "It's one of my favorite subjects. Maybe next time I'm in the store you can point out the ones you like best."
I saw confusion and a touch of fear in her eyes. She had no idea how to get away from me or how far my hostility might go. I had no idea myself. I could imagine her wishing that I had just told her to fuck off, instead of being so perverse and unrelenting.
"I'd be happy to, next time you're in the store," she lied, and turned stiffly in the sand, like a penguin, and waddled off toward the cooking pit, to join the huddle of spectators upwind of it, waiting for the canvas to be ceremonially lifted and the steaming feast uncovered, disrobed. I continued to stare, but instead of seeing what was there, a bunch of summer vacationers about to clap for a pile of steaming lobsters and clams, I saw this semicircle of people gaping at the pit, the way I was gaping at them, as spectators in an old operating theater, and the Bake Master, in his butcher's apron, as the surgeon about to saw off someone's limb without anesthesia. I remembered the play Will and I had seen the year before at Island Rep about the history of medicine. In a scene nearly impossible to watch, the writer Fanny Burney had her cancerous breast cut off and described it in a famous missive of 1812. The actress recited bits while the staged operation took place, and I found the text later in a collection of famous letters: When the dreadful steel was plunged into the breast-cutting through veins-arteries-flesh-nerves-I needed no injunctions not to restrain my cries. I began a scream that lasted unintermittingly during the whole time of the incision- & I almost marvel that it rings not in my Ears still, so excruciating was the agony.
I drank down the club soda in my plastic cup and went again-did I march, did I saunter? I don't know, I found myself there, that's all-to the drinks table. "What kind of beer do you have in a can?"
He listed a few names. I chose Heineken. I said, "Why don't you give me two of them?" I could feel the tempo of everything speed up and the notes shorten. Like marimba music but sinister. I had lost my balance. I was losing my way.
He bent over a trash basket filled with crushed ice and drinks in cans. The amount of alcohol in twelve ounces of beer is the same as in a shot of whiskey. Two cans, two shots. I shook with fury. I wanted the alcohol to take the edge off my rage and my rage to fill the well of my grief, and my life-which seemed a distant foreign country-to return to the messy, tattered, serio-comic routine it had been the day before.
"I know who you are. You're Sophy," the bartender said, and held out two icy, dripping cans of beer.
"Yeah, that's me." I wiped them on my sleeve and slipped them into my shoulder bag. I was about to say thank you and walk away-I did not want to know he remembered me from the vet's office or the post office or a clambake I'd never been to; all I wanted was to get away from there and drink-when he said something that caused me to shudder.
"I used to see you at meetings." This was not chipper bartender banter. It was pointed, it had a lot of subtext, we both knew exactly how much. "But I haven't seen you for a while."
"I don't live here anymore. I'm visiting." I did not say why. I did not want to admit that I was doing the pitifully predictable thing: succumbing to drink in a crisis. They call it "picking up," and if I had not been half mad with Betsy Schmidt and grief, I would have said to myself, "Don't pick up," and would have listened. Instead, I did what lie had just done to me: put him on the spot, called him on his behavior. "I thought it was kind of a no-no for people like us to work as bartenders. All that temptation."
"I don't usually. I'm helping out a friend who had to go to Boston."
"You really ought to be careful," I said. "Ciao."
As I turned, he said the one thing I dreaded he would say-the slogan offered to someone who's recalcitrant or slipping ping or doesn't quite get how the whole thing works: Keep coming back. It means, come to enough meetings, and you'll like your sobriety. You'll find God in the morning sun and in your breakfast cereal. You'll deal with crisis by reaching for a meeting instead of a drink. You'll mutter slogans to yourself without irony, without cynicism, without muttering.