Elin Hilderbrand - The Island

Tate tried the red dress on. It was a stunner. She tried on the killer heels. They were red suede peep toes with red snakeskin uppers. Tate felt like a woman, perhaps for the first time ever. What did that say about her? She didn’t want to think about it. She just wanted to stay in this dress forever, despite the fact that it had a backstory even more lurid than the orange polka-dot dress. “This is it,” Tate said. “This is the one.”

“That’s it,” Chess agreed. “Your lucky dress. Your break-somebody’s-heart dress.”

Tate had the dress and the shoes, and she had her tan. She worked on the rest, but it was tricky. She filed and polished her nails-perfect except for the sand scattered across the polish. She washed and conditioned her hair in the bracing shower, then brushed it out. A hair dryer would have been nice; as it was, she had to hope for the best. She allowed India to apply makeup to her eyes and lips. Tate never wore anything more than Chap Stick, but India insisted on mascara, eyeliner, a little lip gloss. Birdie lent Tate a silver clutch that she claimed had belonged to Tate’s great-grandmother in the 1930s and was a denizen of the top drawer of the dresser in Birdie’s room. (Was she making this up?) India lent her a gold wrap (pedigree: Wanamaker’s, 1994). Why India had brought a gold wrap to Tuckernuck was beyond Tate, but she didn’t question. She was Cinderella today; it was okay if things just appeared.

“How do I look?” Tate asked. There wasn’t a mirror in the house where she could get a fair read. She was worried about her hair.

“Oh, honey,” Birdie said, “you look just beautiful.”

“I’m going to take your picture,” India said. She had brought one of those disposable cameras that came in a cardboard box. This was, to Tate’s knowledge, the first time she’d used it. It had been an uneventful trip.

Tate was embarrassed as she mugged for the camera. She felt guilty getting all dressed up and going out for a dinner party on the big island-the real world, with electricity and hot water and other people engaging her in conversation. Shouldn’t she stay home and eat corn on the cob and blueberry pie and play solitaire while everyone else read or needlepointed or sunk deeper into their interior lives? No, that was silly. She was going.

This was, in so many ways, all she’d ever wanted.

She was standing on the beach in her red silk dress with India’s wrap and her great-grandmother’s clutch purse and Chess’s shoes in her hand when Barrett pulled the boat in at six o’clock. There was also a backpack at her feet, containing a nightgown (borrowed from Chess), her toothbrush, and her running clothes. Up on the bluff, Tate had kissed and hugged everyone good-bye as though she were leaving on a long journey.

“I’ll be back in the morning,” she said. It was funny how Tuckernuck, one of the most remote places on the eastern seaboard, now felt like the center of the universe.

Barrett cut the engine. He was staring at her in a way that Tate had been waiting for all her life. Staring! He said, “Man, do you look good.”

Tate bowed her head so he wouldn’t see the stupid expression on her face. The dress had worked. And the makeup. And whatever else he was reacting to. Barrett hopped out of the boat and dragged it to shore, just as he always did. But this time was so different: He was wearing a white oxford shirt, a kelly green tie printed with sailboats, a navy blazer, and khaki shorts. He approached Tate and said, “I’m going to get this out of the way.” And he kissed her. He tasted like beer. His mouth was warm and soft, and Tate felt a jolt, blood flowing to all the right places. Her stomach dropped, her eyelids fluttered. Ka-bam!

Oh, God, she thought. Kiss me again.

He kissed her again. It was like a scene straight from her seventeen-year-old fantasies. Then she heard a noise, a wolf whistle, and cheering, and when she glanced up at the bluff, she saw Aunt India and Birdie watching. Barrett laughed, and in one smooth movement, he scooped Tate up and deposited her gently in the boat named Girlfriend. Tate accepted her accoutrements and her backpack. Barrett hopped in and pulled the anchor, and they were off. Tate waved good-bye.

It was, Tate knew, a very big night for Barrett. The people who were having the party, the Fullins, were his most important caretaking clients. By “most important,” Barrett meant that they were high maintenance; Anita Fullin was the woman who had called Barrett in from fishing because her pipes were making noise. Anita Fullin needed him to do everything for her, he said, right down to replacing the paper towels in the kitchen.

“You’re kidding about that, right?” Tate said.

“Right,” he said.

The Fullins had money to burn, and they paid premium rates; the boat, Girlfriend, had been their boat. They had given it to Barrett as a bonus at the end of last summer. He had to take good care of these people; they were his patrons.

The Fullins threw this party each year, inviting everyone they knew on the island-which meant friends from Manhattan who were renting on the Cliff, as well as Barrett, Mrs. Fullin’s masseuse, the manager of their beach club, Mr. Fullin’s favorite golf caddy, the maître d’ from LoLa 41. It was a nice mix of summer people and locals, Barrett said. It was a nice party, though he’d missed it the past two years because-well, he said, because of Stephanie.

“This is the first time I’ve been out,” he said. “Like this, you know, since she died.”

Tate nodded. She wanted to know everything. And in addition to knowing everything, she wanted to kiss Barrett some more, loosen that tie, unbutton that shirt… she was a racehorse bucking at the gate. But this had always been her problem with men, right? She came on too strong, too soon. She had dry spells that lasted years (the last man she’d slept with had been Andre Clairfield, who was on the practice squad for the Carolina Panthers, but that had been a drunk, late-night sex thing and should probably not be counted), and then when she found someone she really liked, she was out of practice with ladylike restraint. She was too hungry, too eager, and she frightened men away.

She would not frighten Barrett away. He was, she realized, a man of few words. (Had this always been the case, she wondered, or was it a result of losing his wife?) He was trying hard now, she could tell, to talk about the evening ahead so she would be prepared.

“Where are your kids?” she said.

“With my parents,” Barrett said. “And they’re spending the night.”

Tate had wondered if she would wake up in the morning to find two little boys staring at her as though she were a visitor from another planet, the way it always seemed to happen in the movies. Tate, naked or nearly so, in their father’s bed. The older one proclaiming, “You’re not my mommy.”

“Okay,” Tate said. They were now in Barrett’s car-a black Toyota pickup-barreling down Madaket Road. After a week on a deserted island, with its rutted dirt paths, the sensation of driving this fast seemed foreign. They passed the dump, which smelled like a rotten-egg omelet, but Tate pretended not to notice. Barrett hummed along with the radio, Fleetwood Mac singing “You Make Loving Fun.” Then the DJ came on with the weather report: clouds overnight, rain tomorrow, wind from the southwest at fifteen to twenty knots.

They drove into town. When Tate was young, her father would bring her and Chess over for one day trip per summer. He would use the phone at his insurance agent, Congdon and Coleman, to call his office while she and Chess were set free in town with spending money. They went to the pharmacy lunch counter for peppermint-stick ice cream at 10 A.M. They browsed Mitchell’s Book Corner (though this was mostly Chess; what Tate remembered about the bookstore was begging Chess to leave). They went to the Hub to ogle Seventeen magazine and buy candy. Then they reunited with their father for lunch at the Brotherhood of Thieves; in the dark, subterranean dining room, they ate chowder and thick burgers and curly fries. Tate remembered using the hot water tap in the bathroom, letting it run over her hands; she remembered looking in the clear silver of the mirror. Everything was a novelty after being on Tuckernuck; the soap dispenser hanging from the wall was a novelty. In the afternoon, their father took them to the Whaling Museum or to the Jetties to play tennis. Or they rented bikes and rode out to Sconset to see the Sankaty Lighthouse and get yet another ice cream from the Sconset Market. The Nantucket days had always been fun, and before they left they always paid homage to the yellow clapboard house with the wraparound porch on Gay Street that had, decades earlier, belonged to their great-grandparents, Arthur and Emilie Tate. Nantucket had never been home for Tate, however. It had never been more than a gateway to Tuckernuck. Tuckernuck was the real thing. It was an island for purists.