17. Fake It to Make It
Caroline pans around the dinner table. For Hollis’s fans, this is the money shot.
Hollis is serving her cilantro-and-lime-marinated swordfish with avocado sauce, a summer squash tart with goat cheese and mint, a large green salad, and homemade baguettes with black pepper butter that, yes, her mother churned herself like a pioneer woman. This will be followed by peach cobbler with a hot sugar crust topped with fresh whipped cream, and tiny squares of Japanese chocolate.
Tatum smears a hunk of baguette with the peppery butter. The swordfish is so perfectly cooked and seasoned that it doesn’t even need the avocado sauce. She thinks, If I don’t have cancer, I’m going to learn to cook like this.
I’m going to take classes at the culinary center, I’m going to buy a freaking butter churn. She isn’t going to worry about the money; she’s just going to do it. Do I have cancer? She watches Brooke pile salad on her plate and thinks, If I can count to five without Brooke speaking to fill the silence, that means the tumor is benign. She gets to four, then Brooke takes a breath… but Brooke stops herself and stuffs her piehole with salad. Tatum exhales. She should have called the doctor back right away; this is making her crazy.
Brooke was about to ask how everyone could eat and drink so much without worrying about gaining a hundred pounds. She starts out with only salad and a small piece of fish (no sauce). But the tart is a work of art—the discs of bright yellow squash have been snugged into the tart crust, dolloped with goat cheese, and sprinkled with fresh mint. She’ll have a small piece; it would be rude not to. But she won’t have bread. But then Gigi, who is sitting next to Brooke, hands her the ramekin of butter and says, “This is witchcraft.
Let me get you the bread.”
Brooke accepts the butter, thinking, A piece of bread will help soak up the alcohol. Brooke has had a lot to drink. There were the two glasses of rosé with Electra (although Brooke would like to discount these, since she’s trying
to pretend she never went for drinks with Electra) and almost an entire bottle of rosé tonight. Gigi is watching her with a kind smile, waiting for her to butter her bread, and what can Brooke do? Does anyone even count calories anymore? There are more fashionable ways to lose weight, like intermittent fasting or going keto, where you eat only steak, eggs, and broccoli rabe.
Younger people have stopped caring about weight altogether because to care about being thin is to threaten body positivity. Does Brooke want to threaten body positivity? Well, no, but neither does she love her muffin top. She weighs the decision for a moment, then butters the baguette and pops it in her mouth. It’s so delicious that she doesn’t care if they have to roll her off the island in a wheelbarrow.
Hollis can’t stop staring at Gigi Ling. She’s every bit as lovely as Hollis imagined. I chose well, Hollis thinks. Gigi Ling is better than normal—she’s exceptional. Her accent is like music; Hollis would be happy listening to her read the phone book.
“Tell us about yourself!” Hollis says. She’s had so much to drink that she nearly adds, I know next to nothing about you!
“I’m an Aquarius and I like long walks on the beach,” Gigi says.
Gigi is funny! Hollis thinks.
“I know you’re from Atlanta,” Hollis says. “But where did you get the accent?”
“I was born and raised in Singapore,” Gigi says. “My father is Chinese, my mother was a country girl from Pine Mountain, Georgia. They met because my mother was a flight attendant on the Concorde and my father used to travel back and forth between New York and Paris for business.”
This is a cooler answer than Hollis could have imagined, but something is off… “I thought your mother was Chinese? Didn’t you say something about her Cantonese recipes?”
Gigi’s mind stalls for a second. Shoot, yes. On the Corkboard, she’d written, My own mum passed away before she could teach me her favorite Cantonese dishes. That was back when Gigi was trying to get Hollis’s attention. She never dreamed she’d someday be sitting in Hollis’s kitchen relaying her origin story.
“I did!” Gigi says. How does she explain her mother’s “Cantonese dishes” when her mother grew up “a country girl” in western Georgia? It’s not impossible that her mother was Chinese American and learned the Cantonese dishes from her own mother or grandmother. Would that be believable? “My mother learned to cook once she moved to Singapore. My father used to say she made the best zongzi in the nation, even better than the private chefs, and there were a lot of those.” Gigi laughs, mostly at the absurdity of this answer.
Gigi’s mother not only didn’t cook, she didn’t eat; she subsisted on Tab and cigarettes and was dead of emphysema at forty. But Hollis laughs along, and is anyone else even paying attention? Gigi moves to more solid ground: She attended the Singapore American School, then her parents split; her mother died, and, to honor her, Gigi attended her alma mater, the University of Georgia, for two years. Gigi then got it in her mind that she wanted to fly planes for a living, so she transferred to Embry-Riddle. She’s forty-three years old and has been a pilot with Delta for eighteen years. She most often flies internationally; she keeps her mouth shut about Rome and Madrid, but she mentions that, thanks to her travels, she’s become fluent in Italian and Spanish.
“That’s”—Hollis has a hard time coming up with the right word—“so interesting!” She looks around the table at her other friends’ faces, which are glowing in the candlelight. “Isn’t it?”
Tatum discreetly rubs under her arms. Is it her imagination or does that area feel tender and swollen? Lymph nodes, she thinks.
Dru-Ann is gazing at her bag on the blue silk chaise. What is happening on her phone? Has Nick called? By now he must be regretting what he said about hitting the brakes. He probably stopped by Dru-Ann’s house, and when he realized she wasn’t home, he might have gone to look for her at the Aviary. When she wasn’t there, would he have started to worry?
Brooke thinks, Hollis seems pretty obsessed—and for good reason. Gigi is fabulous!
It doesn’t take long before someone—the woman with the curly hair; Brooke?—asks the question Gigi is dreading.
“So, is there a Mr. Ling?”
“Only my father,” Gigi says.
“Do you have a boyfriend?” Brooke asks. “Or… a partner?” She pauses.
“I’m sorry, is that too personal?”
Yes, it’s too personal, Gigi thinks. “I was in a relationship,” Gigi says.
“But it ended.”
Hollis is glad that Brooke asked. Hollis wanted to know if Gigi was with someone, but she’d never been brave enough to bring the topic up via text.
Gigi laughs. “So now I’m doing that hot-girl thing of ‘decentralizing men’ from my life.”
Is that a hot-girl thing? Dru-Ann wonders. If so, Posey Wofford doesn’t know it.
Tatum has been married to Kyle for thirty-one years. She has always had the goal of making it to sixty years, and she’s only halfway. She knows it’s not a “hot-girl thing” to be so in love with her husband, but she is. Please God, she thinks. Give me more time with Kyle.
“I’d like to decentralize Charlie from my life,” Brooke says.
“Is there something you want to share with the group?” Dru-Ann says.
She’s kidding—the last thing any of them wants is to hear some deep, dark confession about the state of Brooke’s marriage. Right? Dru-Ann looks around. Gigi, Tatum, and Hollis are all gazing at Brooke with interest.
“No,” Brooke says. “Maybe later this weekend, but not right now.”
Gigi relaxes a bit; this kind of chat is unusual for her. She has never had close girlfriends. At SAS, Gigi occasionally befriended a girl whose parents had been relocated by a bank or corporation, but the stint in Singapore was always temporary—the parents got transferred or the family couldn’t adjust to the oppressive heat or the strict laws and they left after a year or two.
Gigi’s classmates at Embry-Riddle were nearly all men, and this carried through to her life as a pilot. On the rare occasions that the female flight attendants Gigi works with invite her out for drinks, she says yes—and after a few cosmos or negronis, the talk always turns to sex. Always.
Gigi takes a sip of wine. “Let’s change the subject,” she says. “How do you all feel about faking your orgasms?”
The table sits in stunned silence.
Oops, Gigi thinks.
Caroline is so glad she has the camera rolling. This woman is awesome.
Tatum takes a swallow of pinot grigio, which goes down like water— headache tomorrow for sure—and says, “I’ve never faked an orgasm in my
life.”
“Liar,” Dru-Ann says. “Everyone fakes. It’s the reason men are so insecure. They can never be sure if it’s real or if we’re pulling a Meg Ryan.”
Who is Meg Ryan? Caroline wonders.
“I. Have. Never. Faked. An. Orgasm,” Tatum says. “Kyle knows how to make me scream. He stands behind me…” She stops. “Do you want to hear
this?”
“Uh, no,” Dru-Ann says. “We’re eating.”
“I want to hear,” Brooke says.
“I have to admit, I’m intrigued,” Gigi says.
“He lifts me off the ground with one arm and rubs me with two fingers of his other hand.” Tatum shrugs. “Sometimes we do that in front of a mirror.
Very hot. That always works, but he has other tricks. I taught him what I liked back when we were both young, and he knows I haven’t been with anyone else, so there’s no one he needs to compare himself to. But I never fake. Why would I?”
“Damn,” Dru-Ann says. “I fake to, you know, move things along.”
“Because you have a chicken in the oven,” Hollis says. “Or you just want to go to sleep.”
Ew, Caroline thinks. She’d hoped Hollis would recuse herself from this part of the conversation.
“I’ve never had an orgasm with Charlie,” Brooke says.
Again, the table goes silent. From outside, they can hear the waves breaking, then the suck of water back to the sea.
This, Caroline thinks, is what’s known as a mic drop.
Finally Dru-Ann clears her throat. “Now I understand why you want to decentralize him from your life.” She pauses. “Never?”
“Never with Charlie or any other guy, actually,” Brooke says. “Only with myself.”
“Does Charlie know this?” Hollis asks. She can hear her voice becoming high-pitched and she’s probably one sip of wine away from slurring. She should switch to water, but she doesn’t want to. This is the kind of frank, intimate talk that should be happening this weekend. Gigi Ling understood the assignment.
“He has no idea,” Brooke says. “He thinks he’s a porn star.”
“You poor child,” Dru-Ann says. She’s developing an actual fondness for
Brooke. The woman is such a basket case, it’s endearing. “We need shots.
Now.” She goes to the kitchen for shot glasses—Hollis has two dozen on display; she must use them to serve gazpacho or some nonsense—and grabs the bottle of Casa Dragones and the bowl of cut limes. Back at the table, she pours five shots and passes four around: Brooke, Tatum, Hollis, and Gigi.
Dru-Ann hoists her shot glass. “To satisfaction.” She winks at Brooke.
“We’re gonna get you some, girlfriend.”
They all throw back the shots. Hollis winces, Brooke winces, Tatum winces; Gigi squeezes a lime into her tequila, and her gold bangle chimes against her watch as she throws the shot back with undeniable elegance.
Where did Hollis find this woman? Caroline wonders. She’s a queen.
Hollis is a little unsteady as she stands to get dessert, the peach cobbler with a hot sugar crust, which has been warming in the oven. She brings the cobbler out and sets it on a trivet, then scoots back to the kitchen to whip the cream.
For a few moments she stares into the bowl as the whisk beats around and around. She hears laughter in the other room over the strains of Bon Jovi and she thinks, This is working. Just as surely as the cream turns from liquid to solid, her friends are coming together. This metaphor might not apply, but there is no denying that things on the deck are going much better than they were earlier. Gigi’s appearance has done wonders. Everyone is on her best behavior.
Hollis suspects that Gigi is fibbing about her mother’s Cantonese cooking, but she thinks it’s endearing. Hollis has lied about her own mother in the past —oh, has she. She and Gigi are so… simpatico.
For an instant, Hollis feels pleased with herself. She brought these amazing women together, and she has curated the perfect Nantucket weekend.
But as she’s walking toward the open slider, she overhears the conversation on the deck.
Brooke says, “That cobbler could be on the cover of a magazine!”
And Caroline says, “My mother’s life always looks good from the outside.
It’s the only thing that matters to her.”
The table goes quiet. Hollis wants to reverse her steps, go back to the kitchen, go even farther back, to two weeks ago before she sent the invitations, before she thought this weekend would save her.
But then Tatum catches her eye. “Hey, sis,” she says.
Hollis holds the frosted bowl aloft. “Whipped cream,” she says feebly.
Tatum leaves the table, and after a beat, Dru-Ann stands up and follows her down the hall. Tatum disappears into the powder room. Dru-Ann hears the hum of the fan, the roll of the toilet paper, then the toilet flushing and water running in the sink.
The door opens. When Tatum sees Dru-Ann, she rears back. Then she sets her mouth in a grim line and tries to breeze right past her but Dru-Ann grabs her arm. “Do we have a problem?”
“Let go of me, please,” Tatum says. “Everything’s fine.” As long as you stay out of my face, she thinks.
“I can’t believe you’re still bent about a joke I made a million years ago,”
Dru-Ann says.
“The thing is,” Tatum says, “it wasn’t a joke.” She sees Gigi coming down the hall toward them and clamps her mouth shut.
“Are you two all right?” Gigi asks.
No, Tatum thinks.
No, Dru-Ann thinks. But she’s not dragging a stranger into this. She cocks an eyebrow at Gigi. “I notice you didn’t answer your own question. Do you fake your orgasms?”
“Well,” Gigi says. She pauses dramatically. “I’d rather be a Tatum than a Brooke.”
Both Tatum and Dru-Ann laugh. Tatum forgets she’s angry for a second; Dru-Ann thinks, All right, score one for Gigi. (Though Dru-Ann notices she didn’t actually answer the question.) Caroline is a few yards away, filming. That’s a moment, she thinks.
Hollis’s fans are in for way more than they can imagine.
Hollis is, somehow, left at the table with only Brooke. Where did everyone else go? Hollis is tempted to start clearing. Would that be rude? Would Brooke feel slighted, feel as though her company wasn’t enough? (Yes.) Brooke realizes she has Hollis all to herself. Now is the time to tell her that she had drinks with Electra. Because what if Hollis finds out another way? Hollis won’t find out, how would she—and isn’t it a free country?
Can’t Brooke have drinks with whoever she wants?
Brooke won’t mention it. Uttering Electra’s name at all would be dropping a stink bomb on an otherwise flawless evening.
But she can’t just sit in silence. It’s too awkward.
She says, “I’m sure wherever Matthew is, he misses your cooking. He was so proud of you.” Immediately, Brooke chastises herself: What a moronic thing to say. Wherever Matthew is, what does that mean? Heaven? Hell? The ether? Buried in the dirt with the worms?
Hollis offers a faint smile of acknowledgment. “This peach cobbler was his favorite.” She stares into the candlelight as her mind wanders. Matthew loved any kind of fruit dessert and always ordered halibut if it was on the menu. He couldn’t abide Joe Buck calling a football game, though he loved Cris Collinsworth. His favorite color was green; his car was a color he called “hunter green.” (Hollis can’t think about his car; she yanks herself back from the topic like she’s pulling her hand from a hot stove.) Matthew preferred blondes over brunettes, or so he always claimed, though all of his old girlfriends were brunettes. He wore Ferragamo loafers to work, driving moccasins on the weekends, Chuck Taylors if he was going to a rock concert.
He hated gambling and wouldn’t even throw five bucks into the football pool; he’d had an uncle who had lost everything on a craps table in Vegas.
He read Michael Connelly, David McCullough. Did he have any regrets? He used to say he wished he’d coached Caroline’s soccer team when she was little, but who was he kidding, he barely made it to Sprague Fields as a spectator. He had better friends from college than from high school, and he had no friends from medical school unless you counted his professors—like Dr. Schrader, his mentor. Hollis had e-mailed Dr. Schrader only hours after Matthew died to tell him the news right away because Dr. Schrader would have been expecting Matthew’s visit. Dr. Schrader’s wife, Elsa, had written back with her condolences. Our hearts go out to you and Caroline. We had no idea Matthew was planning a visit; how sweet for him to want to surprise us. He was such a good egg on top of being the most brilliant student Manny ever had.
This struck Hollis as odd because Matthew loathed surprises, for himself or anyone else. He was a planner.
Matthew’s favorite city was San Francisco; he and Hollis always stayed at the original Fairmont on Nob Hill and ate, their first night, at Swan Oyster
Depot—it was the one place Matthew didn’t mind waiting in line. He preferred an aisle seat to a window seat on an airplane; his guilty pleasure was a root beer float; he loved movie theaters, especially historic ones, and he always got popcorn with lots of butter. He donated a mind-blowing sum every year to the Pine Street Inn in Boston—homelessness was his cause, though he also talked about joining Doctors Without Borders once he retired.
Hollis had privately suspected that he would never retire.
“Hollis?” Brooke says. Both Tatum and Dru-Ann call her Holly, but Brooke can’t imagine doing that. “Are you okay?”
“Yes, yes,” Hollis says. “I’m sorry, I was just remembering things about Matthew.”
“Do you think he’s… watching us?” Brooke asks.
This makes Hollis laugh. If Matthew were alive and she’d told him she was hosting a weekend for Tatum, Dru-Ann, Brooke, and someone she’d met on the internet named Gigi Ling, he would have run for the hills. Nothing would have interested Matthew less than what’s transpiring here at Hollis’s
Five-Star Weekend.
“No,” she says.
Caroline checks her phone. There’s a text from Dylan: Meet me at Cru later if you can?
OMG, she thinks. Does Dylan actually want to link?
K, she responds. Depends what time the fun ends here. She adds the laugh-crying emoji.
Hearing from Dylan is a boost, but there’s nothing from Isaac. The I miss you text is just dangling there, a bad judgment call. He probably deleted it as soon as it came in. She’s aching to send another text, something about what she’s filmed so far. She is, after all, using his equipment. And the material is so much better than she expected.
Tatum returns to the table, followed by Dru-Ann, Gigi, and finally Caroline.
Hollis gets a second wind. The evening can’t end yet—the food was impeccable, and the conversation was spicier than she expected, but what about fun? Can she make this fun? When “American Girl” by Tom Petty starts playing through the speakers, Hollis turns up the volume.
Brooke shrieks, “I love this song!”
In so many ways, this song was Hollis’s anthem growing up. She sings out, “She couldn’t help thinking that there was a little more to life somewhere else!”
In another second, everyone starts dancing on the deck. Caroline can’t pretend to be surprised; she knew this was coming. The follow-up song is the Romantics’ “What I Like About You,” and Brooke bops her head from one shoulder to the other in a way that must hurt her neck.
Dru-Ann pours another round of shots for everyone. Really, is this necessary? Caroline wonders. It’s nearly eleven o’clock now. How much gas is left in the tank here? She wants to go into town to meet Dylan.
The song changes to “I’m Still Standing,” by Elton John. Brooke raises her arms over her head and shimmies her hips and the rest of the stars form a circle around her, their unlikely hero. Caroline wonders if she can quietly slip out. Would anyone notice (well, her mother would notice) and would she miss anything important?
The next song in the queue is “Take My Breath Away” by Berlin, which brings a totally different vibe.
“Everyone backward-skate!” Dru-Ann shouts.
What does that even mean? Caroline wonders.
Hollis reaches for Tatum’s hand, and the two of them spin, twirl, and dip.
Dru-Ann grabs Brooke, who is so smashed she simply clutches Dru-Ann around the middle and rests her head against her chest.
What have I done? Dru-Ann thinks. Dru-Ann and Brooke shuffle in a tight circle and an unwelcome memory pops into Dru-Ann’s mind: a seventh- grade dance with a boy named Philip Price. The song then was “Stairway to Heaven,” eight minutes of torture—or of ecstasy, if you were Philip Price pressing your thirteen-year-old erection into Dru-Ann’s leg.
Caroline focuses the camera on Gigi as she sits at the table watching the other women dance. Gigi’s expression is neutral; she doesn’t seem hurt or offended that she’s a fifth wheel, and she doesn’t fidget or check her phone or pick at the remaining cobbler, which is right in front of her. Instead, she remains so present and serene she might be a painting. Her gold necklaces glint in the candlelight; the breeze off the beach lifts her bangs off her forehead. What could she be thinking? Caroline wonders.
Gigi feels like a villain of literary proportions. She’s Lady Macbeth. She’s the narrator from “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Her guilt pounds in her ears, stains her skin. How can the others not see it, hear it?
She longs to come clean. She fantasizes about interrupting the music, making an announcement—I was Matthew’s mistress!—then dramatically exiting through the glass sliders while the others stare after her in shock and confusion. It would be hideous, yes, but also cleansing, cathartic. The yoke of guilt biting into her shoulder would be lifted.
She imagines visiting the Hungry with Hollis website before she goes to bed. A Kitchen Light will appear here, at Hollis’s Nantucket house. Gigi will write on the Corkboard:
To the Hungry with Hollis Community: My name is Gigi Ling, and I’ve been interacting with all of you under false pretenses. I led you to believe I was enthusiastic about banana bread and bouillabaisse, but really, I came here because I was conducting a love affair with Hollis Shaw’s husband, Dr. Matthew Madden, and I was curious about the woman whom I saw as my rival. After Matthew died, Hollis and I became so close that she invited me to her home for her Five-Star Weekend.
I realize some of you might not care about the interpersonal drama, and to those of you, I say: Hollis served grilled swordfish with avocado sauce, fresh baguettes with butter she churned herself, and a peach cobbler with a hot sugar crust. Hollis Shaw
is the genuine article.
I, however, am not.
What would Molly Beardsley of Twain Harte, California, think of that?
How about Bailey Ruckert from Baton Rouge? Gigi wonders which of Hollis’s subscribers would cast stones. Nearly all of them, she assumes, though she’s curious if there are any out there who might offer mercy, empathy, understanding.
It hardly matters. Gigi is too much of a coward to reveal herself.
