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Karolina Waclawiak: The Invaders

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Karolina Waclawiak The Invaders

The Invaders: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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Over the course of a summer in a wealthy Connecticut community, a forty-something woman and her college-age stepson’s lives fall apart in a series of violent shocks. Cheryl has never been the right kind of country-club wife. She's always felt like an outsider, and now, in her mid-forties — facing the harsh realities of aging while her marriage disintegrates and her troubled stepson, Teddy, is kicked out of college — she feels cast adrift by the sparkling seaside community of Little Neck Cove, Connecticut. So when Teddy shows up at home just as a storm brewing off the coast threatens to destroy the precarious safe haven of the cove, she joins him in an epic downward spiral. The Invaders

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As I hurried down the path, away from the legs, I kept turning around to make sure he wasn’t following me. Who was it? A teenager? Someone’s husband who liked to get off on the rocks? Finally something had happened to wake up my summer.

I looked at my watch and realized I wouldn’t be able to go home and change before the club’s summer fashion show. As I ran down the trail, fluffing my hair and hoping the bags under my eyes weren’t too drawn, I stopped once more to see if the legs were still splayed out in the sand and rocks. They were gone. As I saw wide bird wings fill the sky, I knew the man under the boardwalk was coming. He was somewhere I couldn’t see, so I ran.

• • •

At the club, I eyed the women. Could it have been one of their husbands under the bridge? Hadn’t he been worried a kayaker might paddle by? I looked around, wondering what everyone’s secret could be. I knew it hadn’t been Jeffrey; the ankles hadn’t been delicate like his. I looked at the ladies and they were all in some form of undress. We were all exposing ourselves to one another as we got ready for the runway, some more shy about it than others. Jeffrey and I hadn’t had sex in two hundred and twenty-five days, but I wasn’t sure if that was a lot to anyone else because it wasn’t something any of us talked about. We said things like “Oh, we don’t do that anymore, ha ha.” But then you looked around at one another suspiciously to see who had the downcast eyes, the ones who also didn’t do it anymore. At all. I wanted to know which of these women were still having sex with their husbands. I wanted to know if I was pathetic or if this was just how it turned out for everybody.

When I was a teenager, my mother used to say, “Men only love you when you’re fertile, even if they don’t want you to have their child.” She’d looked at me, sixteen and glowing, and said, “They only want you. They want to suck out your youth. I don’t have any more to give.” I’d told her that it wasn’t true, that men came around for her all the time, but she’d just said, “That isn’t love.” I’d had no view of the future, no idea she was wise.

I really shouldn’t be the one with the downcast eyes. In this club, I was young. At forty-four, I had floated through the young-mother years without cesarean scars or crumpled, crepe-paper-belly skin. I had retained my figure and it had to count for something. I was the new guard. It didn’t matter that Jeffrey was part of the old guard. His first wife had had to deal with key parties and rushing Teddy to bed before starting the arguments about strands of hair in the bed sheets that did not match her shade of dye. I was lucky to have missed all that. It must have troubled her, seeing Jeffrey saunter off with Johnson Picard’s wife from down the block, if the rumors were true. It’s one thing to hear about it and another to see it with your own eyes and not be able to do anything because you had agreed to it ahead of time. The women waddling around drinking Chardonnay with ice cubes, women with deep creases in the vees of their cleavage — he had slept with them first. In their white sneakers and print shirts and those… cotton short pants.

We were now transitioning between desirable and undesirable — that sad moment when a woman realizes that absolutely no man is looking at her, not even a passing glance. It made us all paralyzed with fear.

We battled the decline with bright, exotic colors and bold prints — anything to draw that attention back to the curves of our bodies. Even if various parts had begun to hang or droop, at least men were still looking. Men were easy after all, weren’t they? Quick glances at erect nipples under the smooth cotton of a pale pink golf shirt or at the hem of a too-short pleated tennis skirt that seemed to elongate even the stubbiest of lady legs. It had to cause some kind of stirring in them. We all hoped, at least. The Shop Till You Drop fashion show had been organized by Mary Ann to highlight the fashions from the Main Street shops. Bring the fashion to us, we begged. And they did. Sales reps from each boutique sat in the back row and were set to take note on who leaned in when.

There were women of all ages going through the racks of clothes, looking for their names, and changing into the first string of outfits for the runway. Mary Ann had picked the models from dozens of members. Young or old, it didn’t matter; they just had to be pretty and slim, their beauty something to aspire to. I looked at the daughters of friends shimmying out of short shorts and then at the older women who were watching them, forlorn, and I realized we weren’t ever going to be the ones men were looking at again. They were looking at the daughters, the ones with taut upper arms, smooth legs, and tiny bikini bodies who flipped from stomach to back on pool loungers all day long. I stared at them and craved their youth and their bodies. Their youth! I would never be that young again. It was too painful to linger on and it wasn’t something we could say out loud to one another. I wanted to go up to each young thing and tell her, This isn’t infinite for you. Women have an expiration date. But those things hadn’t registered to my youth-dumb ears, so why should it for them? I wondered who we were allowed to steal our youth from.

I felt a tap on my shoulder as I moved through the bodies looking for my name and turned around to see a smiling Mary Ann.

“Oh, Cheryl, there’s been a mistake.”

“Did my clothes get lost?” I asked, laughing.

“Well, it’s just that we don’t need you. We have enough people,” she said.

“Oh.”

“I overbooked, thinking some people would say no. Stage fright or vacations. I guess this year everyone wants to play Victoria’s Secret angel,” Mary Ann said.

“Mary Ann, it’s fine. I hadn’t prepared my signature move anyway,” I said. I wondered if she ever felt left out. If anyone ever made her feel like deadweight. Perhaps being on top for so long made her forget that it felt terrible. I smiled through it, though. If I told anyone, it would just get back to her and I’d fall even further down her golden list. I wondered if Mary Ann had the same hierarchy for her friends who wintered in retirement homes in Florida or if it was a free-for-all. We had never been invited, but I knew they all bought near one another. I shuddered at the thought of spending a retired eternity with them, but Jeffrey jokingly referred to his retirement as his “me” time and made no mention of a second home.

“I’m doing you a favor. Do you really want to be up there and judged?” she said, smiling.

I leaned in conspiratorially and said, “These ladies are vicious, aren’t they?”

Mary Ann was taken aback and I knew I had said the wrong thing. “No, of course not, they’re good friends,” she said.

I slid behind the curtain and saw a few open spots at the round tables. Everyone looked sharp and I felt terribly underdressed in my walking clothes. I took a seat next to Christine to wait for the show to start. Christine had chopped off her sandy blond hair a few years ago. The bowl cut was favored by the older women, but she wasn’t one of them yet, so it just made her look unfeminine. She really had been beautiful once, but after child number three her waist disappeared. A waiter brought me a mimosa and I asked him to stay close. The waiters were clearing plates when I realized I was starving.

“You got the boot, huh?” Christine asked.

“Oh no, they had too many girls this year.”

“Sometimes I think they just do that to put people in their place. Give them hope and take it away.” She motioned with her hands, nearly spilling her sweating white wineglass on me.

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