36. Captain’s Table
Only the luckiest among us witness Hollis Shaw and her stars walking into Nautilus; it is, after all, an impossible reservation. Or nearly impossible.
Blond Sharon and her sister, Heather (who is brunette), are sitting at a two- top against the wall, and Sharon is, naturally, facing out so that she can see everyone who comes and goes plus keep tabs on all the action at the bar.
When Sharon spies Hollis and her friends, she literally gasps—and this gets Heather’s attention because, as the years pass, Sharon has become harder and harder to impress. Who could it be? Heather wonders. The Duchess of Cambridge, Sydney Sweeney, cute Jack Harlow?
“It’s Hollis Shaw.” Sharon is doing that thing where she talks without moving her lips. “And her four stars.”
Even Heather, whose idea of “home cooking” is DoorDash sushi, knows who Hollis Shaw is. She discreetly pivots in her chair and sees five women of a certain age take seats at the Captain’s Table—of course. It’s a large, live- edge wood table snugged into the front corner of the restaurant; it’s not only the best table at Nautilus, it’s the most sought-after table on the island of Nantucket.
“We should book that table sometime,” Heather says.
“Ha!” Sharon says. “You’d have to sneaky link with one of the owners.”
Their server arrives with their cocktails—an Ack Nauti for Sharon (she drinks tequila) and the Nauti Dog for Heather (she prefers vodka).
“Here’s to being Nauti,” Heather says as she raises her glass for a toast.
But Sharon’s attention is elsewhere.
Hollis and her friends are all wearing black, white, or both. Is this a coincidence? It can’t be, Sharon thinks. They must have planned it—and Sharon approves. In town that morning there appeared to be some discord among the women, but they seem to have found harmony. Sharon rises from her seat and strides over to the Captain’s Table.
“Okay, cheers,” Heather says to Sharon’s empty chair. She takes a long
swallow of her drink before turning around to see what kind of trouble Sharon is getting into.
“Would you like me to take a group photo?” Sharon asks.
Hollis herself answers. “That would be amazing, thank you for offering.”
She hands over what Sharon can only assume is the very phone that Hollis uses to film her cooking videos. Sharon is so dazzled that she nearly fumbles it.
Get ahold of yourself, Shar, Heather thinks. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say the entire restaurant is watching as Sharon directs Hollis and her friends to get closer—really close!—then snaps a zillion pictures from various angles. This goes on a bit longer than it needs to, but finally, Sharon relinquishes the phone.
“You’re a stunning group,” Sharon says, and she’s not just fangirling, she means it. There’s glamorous Dru-Ann Jones, whom Sharon recognizes from television; a gorgeous woman with a pixie cut; a brunette who, if Sharon isn’t mistaken, works for Irina Services (Sharon uses Irina Services whenever she has houseguests coming, and hasn’t she noticed this woman’s perfect figure?); a curly-haired woman who is smiling so brightly, it looks like her face is going to break open in a burst of confetti; and, finally, the golden- butter-and-sugar glow of Hollis herself.
“Thank you,” Hollis says. The other women slide back to their seats and pick up their menus. Sharon is about to introduce herself and maybe provide her Instagram handle in case Hollis wants to give her a photo credit when she feels a hand on her elbow. It’s Heather, who gently guides Sharon back to their table; their blistered shishito peppers have arrived.
“Excuse my sister,” Heather murmurs to Sharon once they are both seated again. “She has a stalking problem.”
Sharon doesn’t mind the teasing. “They all seem so happy,” she says.
“Leave it to Hollis Shaw to make that crazy idea work.”
The Captain’s Table is worth all the hype and more, Hollis thinks. It screams special occasion. Their server, Sean, leads them through the menu, globally inspired small plates meant to be shared and larger “feasts.” Then he takes their order. The others call out the dishes they want to try: yellowfin tuna lettuce wraps, tempura oyster tacos, Japanese street corn. Hollis throws in an
order of the Thai lobster curry, the chicken frites, and, her personal favorite, the blue crab fried rice with two crispy eggs.
Hollis is at the head of the table with Gigi and Brooke on one side and Tatum and Dru-Ann on the other. She can’t believe Tatum and Dru-Ann are voluntarily sitting next to each other.
She raises her glass for a toast. “I just want you to know how much it means to me that you’re all here.” She feels her eyes misting up. “When I lost Matthew, I thought my world would collapse. But I have a strong foundation beneath me, and that is all of you.”
“Love you, sis,” Tatum says, and she clinks glasses with Hollis.
“You’re the best, Hollis!” Brooke says, a bit too loudly.
Gigi says, “I’m sure the other women know the story, Hollis, but I don’t.
How did you and Matthew meet?”
“The old-fashioned way,” Hollis says. “At a bar.” She takes a sip of her wine. Can she tell the story? Earlier tonight, the answer might have been no; it was too painful to think about Matthew in that much detail. But right now, she feels okay. “This was in Boston in 1995.”
Hollis is twenty-five years old and her life is exactly as she’d hoped it would be. She rents a studio apartment with wood floors and an exposed brick wall on Cedar Lane Way on Beacon Hill. She fills the apartment with plants and decorates it with pillar candles, throw pillows, and white fairy lights. She gets takeout Thai food from the King and I, listens to her Natalie Merchant CD, and marvels at her own happiness.
She has a dream job: assistant food editor at Boston magazine, a position that comes with the use of the corporate credit card. In February of 1995, the real food editor comes down with mono and will be out of commission for three weeks. This gives Hollis a chance to pitch an article entitled “Are There Any Decent Restaurants on Beacon Hill?” Popular opinion in 1995 is “No, there aren’t,” but the editor in chief is willing to give Hollis a chance to prove everyone wrong.
Hollis goes to the Paramount for brunch (she waits in line for ninety minutes, but the caramel-banana French toast is worth it), to the Cheers pub where everybody knows her name (not really, nobody knows her and the places is filled with tourists, but she finds nice things to say about the potato
skins and the chowder), and to the Sevens (it’s a storied dive bar with a better-than-it-needs-to-be French dip). She goes to Figs for pizza, the Marliave for Welsh rarebit, and the neighborhood darling, Toscano (which, Hollis believes, has the best steak in the city). She intentionally stays away from the culinary wasteland of Cambridge Street, but then her friend Regency, who lives in the apartment upstairs from her, tells Hollis she can’t write an article about Beacon Hill restaurants and not include Harvard Gardens.
Ugh, Hollis thinks. “Even the name of the place is a turnoff,” she says.
“The restaurant has nothing to do with Harvard, and there are no gardens.”
“That may be so,” Regency says. “But meeting a cute doctor there is as easy as shooting fish in a barrel.”
“It turned out Regency was right,” Hollis says now. “Because sitting at the bar that night was Matthew Madden.”
“Was it love at first sight?” Gigi asks.
“I bet it was!” Brooke says. She’s leaning forward, drinking her Lemon Krush way too quickly, but who cares? She’s sitting next to Gigi and across from Dru-Ann; she feels pretty in her dress and she wants to hear this story.
She has no idea how Hollis and Matthew met.
“Not even close,” Hollis says. “He only noticed me because I had a notebook.”
Hollis walks into Harvard Gardens prepared to be underwhelmed but immediately finds that the restaurant has what would in later years be called a “good vibe.” The lighting is low, there’s a lot of chat and laughter, and the air smells enticingly of French fries and bacon. Hollis goes to the bar, where the only free seat is next to a rumpled-looking guy in glasses and blue scrubs.
He’s reading a textbook and wolfing down a Reuben; Hollis watches a strand of sauerkraut fall onto the page of his book. When Hollis asks if the seat is free, the guy mumbles something that sounds affirmative.
“Are you a doctor?” Hollis asks.
He nods without even looking up, but Hollis isn’t offended; she watches E.R. and understands that residents work long hours without eating or sleeping and conduct their love lives in empty exam rooms.
“How’s the Reuben?” Hollis asks. She can tell just by the buttery grilled rye and the oozing melted Swiss that it’s exceptional. Hollis orders one even though the guy hasn’t deigned to answer her. She’s just an unpleasant buzzing in his ear.
Hollis also orders a glass of chardonnay (she has not yet discovered sauvignon blanc) and the onion soup and the strawberry arugula salad (she has to sample the menu, after all), and when her food arrives, she whips out her notebook and starts writing: Onion soup classically prepared with notes of bacon; salad is both sweet and peppery; Reuben well constructed, perfect meat-to-sauerkraut ratio, and the Russian dressing is made in-house.
Surprise, surprise: There is good food on Cambridge Street. This bar meal at Harvard Gardens proves it!
An even bigger surprise is when the guy next to her slams his textbook closed, turns to her, and says, “What’s that you’re writing?”
“A restaurant review,” Hollis says. “I’m the food editor at Boston magazine.” She leaves out the word assistant because she sees this guy’s green eyes behind the lenses of his glasses and suddenly wants to seem impressive.
“That’s neat,” the guy says and Hollis giggles. Who in the year 1995 uses the word neat? “I’m Matthew Madden, a surgery resident across the street.
Sorry if I was rude earlier, I just wanted to finish up reading on takotsubo cardiomyopathy, otherwise known as ‘broken-heart syndrome.’ I saw an unusual case in the cath lab earlier and I didn’t know what it was.”
“I’m Hollis Shaw,” she says. She and the green-eyed surgery resident at Mass General shake hands. Hollis thinks, It’s neat that he knows how the human heart works and can fix it if it breaks.
It’s possible there’s more conversation. She must mention that she lives a few blocks away; he must say that he still lives with his parents in Wellesley, which isn’t as pathetic as it sounds because he’s always at the hospital. She must say she grew up on Nantucket, and he must say that his family are summer-in-Maine people. But Hollis has lost most of this. What she does remember is that, after she pays the bill with her company card and after she tucks her notebook into her bag, Matthew says, “There’s a hospital fundraiser next Friday night. I’m expected to attend and bring a date. Are you free, by any chance?”
Hollis knows she should be surprised—they’ve been acquainted for
maybe thirty minutes, and he’s asking her to a work function? Aren’t there a hundred hot nurses across the street?—but she doesn’t miss a beat. “I am free,” she says. “I’d love to go.”
“It’s black-tie,” he says. “At the Ritz. I’ll come pick you up at six thirty?”
Hollis smiles. “Sounds great!” she says, and when she gets home, she slips a note under Regency’s apartment door. You were right, the note says. It was as easy as shooting fish in a barrel.
Sean, the server, delivers their food and everyone digs in. Dru-Ann says, “If you think I’m sharing this chicken, you’re wrong. Look at this beauty!”
Gigi helps herself to the blue crab fried rice. “So your first date was a black-tie work event. Was it happily ever after from there?” She feels a keen, almost manic, interest. Matthew never talked about his history with Hollis.
“Pretty much,” Hollis says, though this is a wild oversimplification.
Phrases like love at first sight and happily ever after aren’t realistic. But Hollis has always been good at recognizing quality, in food, in service, in linens, in movies and books—and in people.
When Hollis sees Matthew Madden upright and groomed (his hair cut and combed, glasses polished) in his tuxedo (his own tuxedo, not a rental), she realizes that he is the rarest of finds. He’s not only a superstar surgery resident; he has also been raised a gentleman. He owns a tuxedo, he knows about wine (it’s Matthew who introduces Hollis to sauvignon blanc); he can handle elevated dinner conversation about topics as varied as the Sargent portraits at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the budgetary woes of the Big Dig, and Seiji Ozawa’s expert conducting of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
Hollis is dazzled by Matthew’s moves on the dance floor and then by the make-out session when he takes her home.
The week following the fundraiser, Matthew invites Hollis to dinner at his parents’ house. The brick mansion in Wellesley Hills is grand but warm; there’s a fire lit in the library, where they have cocktails and talk about books.
Matthew’s father, Robert, is an attorney who loves Boston crime novels; he
lends Hollis The Friends of Eddie Coyle. His mother, Judith, sits on the board at the Boston Public Library; she turns Hollis on to Barbara Kingsolver and, since Hollis likes to write about food, the collected works of M. F. K. Fisher.
They eat dinner in the formal dining room, which sounds stuffy but Robert and Judith make it feel intimate and fun. The two of them are clearly madly in love, clinking wineglasses and kissing before they eat. Hollis is mesmerized, watching them. She makes a joke about how many forks there are and if she doesn’t use the correct one, don’t hold it against her, she grew up in a five-room cottage on an island thirty miles off the coast. Judith says, “You could eat with your hands and we’d still find you delightful.”
When Hollis leaves, Judith gives her a squeeze and says, “I hope I’ll be seeing a lot more of you.”
Finding Matthew seems like an impossible stroke of luck, and yet it makes a certain kind of sense. Hollis hasn’t dated anyone seriously since breaking up with Jack Finigan seven years earlier. She has been waiting for the right person—and her patience has finally paid off.
“Matthew and I built a beautiful life together,” Hollis says. “I was blessed to have met him.”
In general, nothing drives Tatum crazier than when someone uses the word blessed, though honestly, she could use a blessing herself. If Gigi picks up her wineglass before I count to ten, Tatum thinks, then I don’t have cancer.
Tatum counts really slowly, but Gigi’s attention is fixed on Hollis.
Tatum feels a stab of dread. HER2-positive cancer, she thinks, must have been the kind her mother had. Aggressive.
Dru-Ann hands Tatum the platter of roasted chicken and crispy fries.
“You’ll like this.”
You have no idea what I’ll like or won’t like! Tatum thinks, but she accepts the platter and takes some chicken. The fries look good too, actually.
Tatum ended up sitting next to Dru-Ann because Brooke said, “Gigi asked to sit next to me,” as though they were girls in the middle-school cafeteria.
Tatum turns to look out the front windows for Jack and Kyle. They said they’d meet her and Hollis “later”—and “later” can’t come fast enough.
Dru-Ann tries to be calm and present. She won’t dwell on, or even fully
acknowledge, the fact that she has been fired from all three of her jobs. It’s actually funny (from, say, a nihilist’s perspective) how with one sentence, Dru-Ann vaporized her entire life. So what now? Well, now she enjoys her cocktail and helps herself to the Thai curry lobster and wonders what Hollis will say when Dru-Ann asks if she can live in the Twist forever.
Gigi wants to know more, she wants to know it all, a full history of Hollis and Matthew, how they acted when they closed on their first house, which side of the bed each of them slept on, how they named their daughter and chose their dogs. And where did things go wrong? How did Matthew Madden turn into a man who would lie about being divorced to a woman he met at an airport lounge—and then sustain that lie for seven months afterward?
But Gigi knows better than to ask any more questions right now. She turns to Tatum. “What do you do, Tatum? I don’t think I know.”
Tatum says, “I clean houses and run errands for a company called Irina Services.”
“That sounds so fun!” Brooke says. Brooke stopped working after she got married. Charlie is one of those men who want to be the sole provider. It’s a self-esteem thing, but also a power thing; he has spent the past twenty- something years calling the shots because he brings home the bacon. “I’m jealous that you have a job. I basically do the same things—clean and run
errands—only nobody pays me.”
“It’s honest work,” Dru-Ann says.
“I would appreciate it if the two of you would stop patronizing me,”
Tatum says. “I’m not a fancy sports agent, I’m not an airline pilot, I’m not internet-famous. I’m a maid and a gofer. I work for people like you.”
Dru-Ann is about to say she wasn’t patronizing anyone, but she knows Tatum won’t believe her.
Brooke says, “If I leave Charlie, I’ll probably get a job like you have.”
“At the rate I’m going,” Dru-Ann says, “I might too.”
“Please just stop,” Tatum says. “You don’t have to try to level the playing field. I’m a big girl. I can handle it.”
An awkward silence falls over the table, and Gigi deeply regrets asking the question.
Hollis can feel their ship about to capsize. How can she right it? She starts to say, My first job was opening scallops in sixth grade, down on Old North Wharf, but at that moment, a woman wearing a sundress in dramatic black-
and-white-zigzag stripes walks into the restaurant, and Hollis’s first thought is that this woman somehow belongs to their group.
But their group is complete. This woman just happens to be wearing black and white—And isn’t that funny, we should buy her a drink—but then Hollis wonders if it’s a superfan who decided to crash (with all the people who subscribe to her blog’s newsletter, there are bound to be a few with questionable judgment).
Then Hollis takes in the dark red hair and the snide one-arched-eyebrow- pursed-lips expression and thinks, Lord have mercy.
It’s Electra Undergrove.
If a hungry Siberian tiger had walked in, Hollis would have been less alarmed.
Electra must be here on vacation. Hollis has heard through the Wellesley grapevine that Electra still comes to Nantucket, and what can Hollis do about that? She doesn’t own the island. Hollis instinctively lowers her face.
They’ve finished eating; all that remains on the plates are chicken bones, a smear of egg yolk, some garnishes. Hollis was going to suggest espresso martinis for dessert but never mind that now.
Hollis and Electra’s friendship ended five years ago under very bad circumstances because of how Electra treated Brooke. Brooke! Hollis glances up to see if Brooke has noticed Electra. Yes, Brooke’s eyes are as round as plates and she’s shaking her head at Electra but Electra glides right over to the table and says, “Good evening, ladies.”
Hollis rises from her chair. She feels like a queen in a chess game or like a character in Game of Thrones facing her rival. Poor Brooke, she thinks. First Charlie, now Electra. But Hollis will protect her. “What do you want, Electra?”
Electra tips her head back and laughs. Her hair is different (it used to be brown), and her posture has changed—she’s leading with her chest. Yes, that’s right, Hollis heard she had her boobs done. They look lovely, good for her, Simon must be thrilled, but Hollis doesn’t care. For years, this woman was Hollis’s closest confidante. They kept each other sane when the kids were growing up. Hollis loved Electra’s sense of humor and her joie de vivre.
She made every playdate a party and single-handedly created an enviable social life for all the Fiske Elementary School moms, then the middle-school moms, then the Wellesley High moms. Her rock and roll football parties
became so legendary, there was an article about them in the Globe.
Then everything soured.
Electra says, “Brooke and I had drinks yesterday at Slip Fourteen and she shared the itinerary for your little weekend, so I thought I’d pop by to see how it was going.”
“You…” Hollis isn’t sure what she’s hearing. Brooke and Electra had drinks? Yesterday afternoon… when? Before Brooke came to the house?
Hollis remembers Brooke saying she’d already had a couple glasses of rosé, but she’d assumed she’d meant on the ferry. “You and Brooke had drinks?”
Electra turns her laser-blue glare on Brooke. “You mean to say you didn’t tell Hollis I treated you to a bottle of rosé?”
“You didn’t treat me,” Brooke says. “I treated you. Or we split it.”
“That bottle cost a hundred and fifty dollars, Brooke. You didn’t give me even half,” Electra says. “But it’s fine because we were celebrating, weren’t
we?”
“Celebrating?” Brooke says.
“We were celebrating the rekindling of our friendship,” Electra says. She smiles at Hollis. “Brooke is coming back to rock and roll football this year.
Sunday, September tenth. Brooke wrote it in the calendar on her phone.”
“I did not!” Brooke says. “I mean, yes, I did, but Charlie and I have no intention of coming.”
“From what I hear, Charlie will be tied up in court,” Electra says. “Liesl called this afternoon and told me he’s looking at another lawsuit for groping a coworker.”
Brooke wants to hide under the Captain’s Table—but no, she won’t cower. Not in front of Gigi and Dru-Ann. She raises her face and in the coldest voice she can muster, she says, “Leave me alone, Electra.”
Good for you, Brooke, Hollis thinks, though she can’t believe Brooke was gullible and, she’ll just say it, weak enough to fall prey to Electra. Hollis pictures Electra promising to include Brooke in all the fun, and Brooke, in return, offering up the itinerary for the weekend, which Hollis had sent only to her blog’s subscribers.
As Hollis is about to say, Leave us all alone, Electra, you’re not welcome here, she notices Electra staring at Gigi, of all people. “Have we met before?”
Electra asks.
An uneasy expression crosses Gigi’s face, and Hollis thinks, Good God,
even Gigi is intimidated by Electra.
“No, I don’t think so,” Gigi says. “I’m not from here.”
“The British accent!” Electra says. “Yes, I’m certain we’ve met somewhere—”
“Definitely not.” Gigi’s voice is clipped.
Tatum finishes what’s left of her wine. This is precisely what she thought Hollis’s friends would be like—Real Housewife–type bitches. She supposes she should be glad that Brooke and Gigi are nice and normal. Even Dru-Ann is a peach compared to this hellcat.
Dru-Ann is dying to push back her chair and take this woman on— nobody talks to Hollis and Brooke that way, not while she’s around—but out of the corner of her eye, Dru-Ann sees her old friends Gucci Bex and Laura Ingalls walk into the restaurant. No, she thinks, not possible. But of course possible, because she simply can’t catch a break this weekend. Dru-Ann has lost everything, and you can’t fall off the floor, as the saying goes, but even Dru-Ann isn’t brave enough to create a scene while those two are in the building.
As it turns out, Dru-Ann isn’t needed, because someone else takes hold of Electra’s arm, pulls her away from the table, and whispers angrily in her ear —and that person is Blond Sharon. Sharon recognized Electra Undergrove the second she walked into Nautilus because earlier that day, Sharon had received a text from her old friend Fast Eddie, the well-known real estate agent. The text said: Meet the worst renter I’ve had in thirty years in this business. Wait until I tell you the stories! And underneath was a picture of this woman.
All Sharon has to say to Electra is “You will leave everyone at that table alone right now or I will see to it you are forever banned from this island.
Trust me, I have that power.”
For one moment, Electra looks like she might challenge Sharon, but then she waves a hand and laughs it off. “I just thought it was funny that we were all wearing the same colors. I thought maybe they would buy me a drink, but not to worry, ha-ha-ha, I’m going to LoLa!” And she disappears out the door.
