Anna Pitoniak - Necessary People

The first time Stella had invited me to her house, Thanksgiving of freshman year, I was convinced I’d never fit in. Pop culture had taught me how easily the poor girl embarrasses herself in the company of the wealthy. But this, it turned out, was a myth propagated by the wealthy themselves. Rich people love their shibboleths. They love to act like their language is impossible to learn. The truth was that anyone with halfway decent powers of observation could pick it up in five minutes.

This was how I purchased my way into Stella’s family: with good manners. To keep a toehold in this world required careful behavior. The worst thing I could do was to flout the rules. Old money hates, hates the nouveau riche because the nouveau riche haven’t bothered learning the rules. They’re having too much fun getting drunk and riding Jet Skis. They’ve got their money, which is more important than social acceptance. Anyway, if you give it a few generations, their money will look like anyone else’s.

It wasn’t so bad, really. The Bradleys were boring and uptight, attached to ritual and manner, but at least they were predictable. Not like my own parents, with their constant eruptions of anger. Here, as long as you followed the rules, you were okay. As long as the conversation was polite, it didn’t matter what was being said. Of course, this led to a lot of boring conversation, a lot of dull iterations of the name game. You know how old houses always look good? Whether mansion or tenement or saltbox, if it was built more than a century ago, it has a certain air of elegance. But when you think about the small rooms, the outdated layouts, the bad electrical wiring, you realize you’d never actually want to live there.

That was like the world of the rich. From far away, it looks enchanting. Up close, you realize the elegance is just a product of stasis. It’s easy to be tricked into thinking something is beautiful.

Toward the end of that week, Stella and Oliver and I took the boat out after lunch. It was a perfect day: the sky bright blue, the air hot, the sea glassy and calm. Hundreds of yards offshore, Stella cut the engine. We bobbed in silence for a while. I closed my eyes. This sense of peace, this calm solitude amid pristine wilderness—I’d admit, the wealthy did this well.

I heard Stella laugh. “What?” I said, opening my eyes.

“This freak,” she said, pointing at Oliver, who had just taken off his T-shirt. “Jesus, Oliver, do you ever go outside?”

“You are pretty pale,” I said. His bright white skin made him look like some nineteenth-century German aristocrat down from his schloss. Possibly tubercular, probably just delicate.

“You’re supposed to be the nice one, Violet,” Oliver said. He placed his sunglasses atop his carefully folded T-shirt. “Anyone else coming in?”

“I just ate,” Stella said. She lay on the bow of the boat in her bikini, her stomach taut and hip bones protruding, her slender legs crossed like drinking straws.

Oliver climbed onto the edge of the boat. “Violet?”

“Sure,” I said. When I jumped in, the water was so cold that it made my breath catch.

Oliver lay on his back, moving his hands just enough to stay afloat. “My grandmother taught me to swim. In the summers, when I was little,” he said.

“Don’t bore our guest,” Stella called from the boat.

“Don’t eavesdrop,” Oliver called back. He flipped over and faced me. We were both treading water, eggbeater-style. “She taught me and Stella. She drilled us when we got older. She’d ride next to us in the boat and time us on a stopwatch.”

“I can picture it,” I said.

“Nana doesn’t fuck around.” Oliver smiled. He took a precise satisfaction in swearing. Then his smile disappeared. “Actually, it’s a sad story.”

“What happened?”

“When she was a little girl, her older brother drowned. He took the boat out, the weather turned, and he capsized. He wasn’t very far offshore when it happened. If he’d been a stronger swimmer, he might have made it back. His body washed up the next day. She was five years old, I think. It’s one of her first memories.”

“That’s awful.”

“Sad, isn’t it? That’s been her obsession ever since.”

Oliver flipped onto his back. I joined him, spreading my limbs like a starfish. With my ears filled with water and my eyes looking only at the sky, I felt hyperaware of how far out we were, how deep the water was beneath me. Hundreds of cubic meters of water separated me from the ocean floor, but if I went motionless, the water meant nothing. Dead weight, sinking right to the bottom.

When we climbed back aboard, Stella was lying on her stomach, paging through a gossip magazine. “Why are you reading that trash?” Oliver asked as he toweled off.

“I don’t know if you’ve heard, Oliver, but I’m a journalist. I need to keep up.”

He rolled his eyes. “Violet, I thought you’d be a better influence on her.”

“Get fucked, Ollie,” Stella said lightly, using the nickname he hated.

“Don’t worry,” Oliver said to me. “This is just her thing. Whenever she fought with our mother, she’d go out in this boat and sulk for hours. Bobbing around and stewing.”

“I can hear you,” Stella said.

“It’s Pavlovian. This boat brings out the bratty teenager.”

“Or maybe it’s because you won’t stop giving her a hard time,” I said.

Oliver looked surprised. I shrugged. “It’s vacation. You’re being kind of harsh.”

Stella clambered over the windshield onto the deck of the boat. She smacked her brother on the arm. “ Yeah, ” she said. “That’s for being a paternalistic asshole.”

“Ow,” Oliver said whiningly.

“You should listen to Violet,” Stella said. “She’s smart. If she says there’s something wrong with you, there’s something wrong with you.”

“There’s nothing wrong with me,” Oliver muttered, pulling his T-shirt back on.

Later, as the sun was sinking and the air was growing cooler, Stella drove us back in. She’d had her boating license since she was little, and she handled the boat deftly, much better than she did the car. She steered with one hand, her blond hair streaming in the wind. Oliver and I were sitting on the bench seat in the back.

“I’m sorry about earlier,” he said. “I didn’t mean to start a fight.”

“It’s okay,” I said.

“No, it was rude. You shouldn’t have to sit through our bickering. But I guess we both revert to childhood when we’re together. I guess it’s inevitable.”

“I’m an only child.” I shrugged. “What do I know?”

“I worry that you have this distorted view of me. Stella probably says otherwise, but I’m actually a nice guy.”

Oliver looked genuinely distressed, and I felt bad. He was oddly old-fashioned, but he also had an endearing sincerity—the opposite of Stella’s cool sophistication.

“I know that!” I said, touching his hand. “Of course I know that.”

The waves had picked up, and occasionally Stella hit them at the wrong angle, bouncing the boat violently. She whooped with delight.

“Slow down!” Oliver shouted at her. “This is way too fast.”

“Can’t hear you!” Stella shouted back.

Oliver edged forward to where Stella held the wheel. He said something inaudible, and she rolled her eyes, but the boat slowed down slightly. As Oliver made his way back to the bench seat, Stella shouted, “Sorry my brother’s such a pussy, Violet.”

“She’s insane,” he said. “I have to remind her that not all of us have a death wish.”

“She’s too confident for her own good.” I thought of the smoldering joint the other night. “Maybe you should let it happen. One bad accident and she’ll be scared straight.”