Sara Benincasa - Great

I said hello to the driver and followed him out to the car that was, as usual, some kind of armored tank. He lifted my bags as if they were peanuts, popped them into the back of the car, and held the door open for me, and soon we were off and rolling. Only this time, instead of heading out toward Long Island, he started driving toward Manhattan.

“Um,” I said. “Um.” I’m not good at public speaking, even when the “public” consists of only one stranger. My mom could do it with two hands tied behind her back, blindfolded, and probably gagged, to boot, but not me.

“Um,” I tried again. “Isn’t—I mean—we usually go the other way. To East Hampton. When we drive there. I don’t mean you and me, because this is the first time I’ve met you. I just mean, you know, me and whoever is driving me. Which is usually someone I’ve never met before.” I shut up then, because I’d come down with what my friend Skags calls “a case of the Nervous Naomi Babbles.” Skags and I have been best friends since we were in kindergarten. She’s this boyish lesbian (she says she rocks the “boi” look, but that spelling annoys me), and she looks like a ten-year-old kid. She’s hilarious. My dad used to be kind of afraid that I was going to turn out gay, too, I think—he never said it, but I could tell. But he chilled out once he found me sobbing in my bedroom over yet another boy who didn’t want me. He softened toward Skags even more when she yelled at him from the bleachers to run some specific offensive play I don’t know the name of. I’m a coach’s kid, but I can’t tell you a damn thing about how the game is played. Maybe it was actually something about dribbling? I don’t know.

The driver said, “Oh, miss, we’re not going to the Hamptons. We’re going to the Downtown Manhattan heliport.”

“Why are we going there?” I asked, alarmed. Before he could answer, my cell phone rang. I checked the incoming number.

“Mom?” I nearly shouted into the phone. “Why am I going to the Downtown Manhattan heliport?”

“Hi, darling!” she trilled in the fake-happy voice she only uses when people she wants to impress are listening. Her vowels soften, her pronunciation becomes more clipped, and she sounds like she’s trying to fake a posh English accent. If you could hear Skags do an impression of it, you’d die laughing. It is seriously dead-on.

“Isn’t it a wonderful surprise, dear?” Mom continued, letting out a peal of fake laughter. “And I had absolutely nothing to do with it! You know Senator and Mrs. Fairweather—I’m sitting with Merilee right now at Baxley’s—have their own helicopter. Well, Delilah happens to be taking it from town to East Hampton today, and Merilee was kind enough to suggest that you take the trip with her! Isn’t that generous of her, darling?”

Okay, a few things: My mother had absolutely everything to do with me being offered a chance to catch a ride with a Republican senator’s ridiculously beautiful (but, I’ll admit, shockingly nice) fledgling model daughter. She’d been hammering away at Merilee Fairweather for years, trying to lock down something she could actually call a friendship, and it seemed she’d finally done it. The helicopter offer alone wasn’t evidence that Mrs. Fairweather had succumbed to my mother’s relentless hounding, but the “sitting with Merilee right now at Baxley’s” was.

Baxley’s Restaurant and Ocean Golf Club is this aggressively charming restaurant in a weather-beaten clapboard Victorian home right on its own private little stretch of beach in East Hampton, with a members-only golf course and palatial club next door. It’s kind of an East Hampton institution, and the fact that my mother had wrangled herself a seat at the Fairweathers’ reserved table was for her, I knew, a dream come true.

“Hey, Mom,” I said halfheartedly, because I felt like I should acknowledge her victory, “it’s really nice that you’re having lunch with Mrs. Fairweather.”

“I know,” she whispered. “She just got up to use the bathroom. I am just—delighted is not even the word, Naomi. Between this and getting ready for the IPO. . .” You’d think a self-made millionaire Food Network host/cookbook author/cupcake bakery owner about to launch her own branded line of kitchen supplies and food products—not to mention a magazine—wouldn’t need the approval of some anorexic socialite, but you don’t know my mom. Being accepted by Merilee Fairweather was way more important to her than Bake Like Anne Rye!, Inc.’s initial public offering of stock, an upcoming event that she’d been trumpeting all over the cable news networks in recent days.

Skags, who loves sports and financial news like she’s some old 1 percent-y rich dude instead of a middle-class teen with a lesbian faux-hawk, tried to explain to me what an IPO is when my mom texted me about it, but I didn’t care enough to listen too closely. The gist is that an initial public offering means you think your company is so badass that you’re willing to sell little tiny pieces of it off to the general public, and if the stock price goes up, everybody gets rich and happy.

“And,” Mom added, “the senator is apparently considering buying some stock when we go public at the end of the summer!” She tried to maintain a whisper, but her voice kind of squeaked with joy at the end.

“So I guess I can’t get out of this helicopter thing, can I?” I said, not in a mean way. I just sort of resigned myself to it at that point.

“Darling,” Mom said, sounding surprised. “Why would you want to?” I heard a rustling in the background, and my mother saying to Merilee Fairweather, “Naomi is so excited! This will be her first trip in a helicopter. And you know she adores Delilah.” That wasn’t strictly true—I adored Skags. I don’t know what the word was for how I regarded Delilah—admiration? Awe? We were definitely from different tribes that spoke different languages and had different customs, and I couldn’t imagine us ever being close in the way that Skags and I were. What would we ever talk about? She could tell me about Fashion Week, and I could, like, explain how I’d gotten an A+ in Honors US History II after collaborating with Skags on a comic book version of the first chapter of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (Skags did the pencils, I inked and colored, and we both worked on lettering).

In the background, I heard Mrs. Fairweather say, “Oh, well, Delilah thinks Naomi is just lovely.” Even though I knew she was pulling that one out of her ass, I actually blushed a tiny bit. Different tribe or not, Delilah Fairweather was exactly the sort of person you want to think you’re “just lovely”—not that I’d ever admit that to any of my friends back home, where we called the popular, beautiful girls the Beasts. Skags swore that one of the Beasts, Jenny Carpenter, was completely in love with her, but I was pretty sure that was a delusion.

“Mom,” I said, “helicopters kind of freak me out a little.” I did not add, “And so do you, and I wish I were back home drinking mint chocolate milk shakes with Skags and making fun of the Beasts and those giant summertime sunglasses that make them look like overgrown flies.” I don’t think she would’ve understood a single word I said.