42. The Drop II
Caroline finds Brooke in the kitchen making herself a cup of herbal tea. She’s still wearing her dress from the night before, the white LoveShackFancy, which is, Caroline has to admit, very pretty, though now it’s a bit rumpled and holds an odor that Caroline thinks of as classic Chicken Box—beer and sweat—and there’s an orange drip stain (it looks like pizza grease) on the front.
“You had fun last night?” Caroline asks.
She expects Brooke to say, So fun, best night of my life, those boys were so cute, can you believe they wanted to dance with me?
But Brooke just smiles and hops her teabag around in her mug as the air fills with jasmine steam.
“Do you have a few minutes to come downstairs so we can have a little one-on-one chat about your friendship with my mom?”
“Of course,” Brooke says. “Lead the way.”
Caroline shows Brooke where to sit and sets up the ring light.
“It feels like I should know this,” Caroline says once she gets the camera rolling. “But I don’t. How did you and my mom meet?”
Brooke takes a breath. “I met Hollis at Dr. Lambert’s office in Newton- Wellesley Hospital. She was pregnant with you, due three months sooner than I was, but we were the same size. There was some amazement about this on Hollis’s part—I’m sure she thought I’d way overdone it on the Oreos— until I told her I was expecting twins.”
Caroline laughs. She can’t believe how smooth and poised Brooke is in front of the camera. She’s a natural.
“Hollis introduced herself, said she and your dad had just moved to Wellesley from the city. We exchanged numbers and became friends. When you were born, I took her a platter of sandwiches from the Linden Store.
When Will and Whit were born, Hollis brought over a roasted chicken with
potatoes au gratin, a green salad with vinaigrette, freshly baked bread, a caramel and chocolate tart, a six-pack of Belgian ale that she’d found helped with her milk production, and two of the softest baby blankets I’d ever felt. I knew from the time and effort and thought that your mom put into dinner and the gifts that we would be friends until our children graduated from high school, and beyond.” Brooke winks. “I was right.”
“What are your fondest memories of your friendship with my mom?”
Brooke takes a moment to think.
“There was the golden age, the years our children were nine, ten, eleven.
Fourth and fifth grade.” Brooke pauses. “Of course you never realize it’s the golden age until it’s over.”
It’s 2011 in Wellesley. Brooke’s twins and Hollis’s daughter attend Fiske Elementary. Brooke and Hollis are part of a larger group of mothers that include Liesl, Bets, Rhonda—and Electra Undergrove, the unspoken leader.
She organizes post-drop-off coffee at Maugus on Wednesdays and a monthly “Moms Night Out” in downtown Boston where they go to dinner at places like Mistral and the Bristol Lounge, then inevitably end up singing to the dueling pianos at Howl at the Moon. (The following morning, there’s always a round-robin of texts, the moms complaining about their hangovers and how they can’t handle soccer practice so the husbands will just have to do it for once. But it felt so good to be wild and free for a night, to be a person again, not just a wife and mother.) When the kids enter middle school, Electra invents rock and roll football.
The idea is a Sunday Funday at Electra’s house, which has an open floor plan with a huge television and a basement tricked out for her kids, Carter and Layla. (Beanbag chairs, video games, pool table, and a refrigerator filled with soda.) Every Sunday of football season, parents and kids gather at the Undergroves. Electra makes the main dish—fish tacos, white chicken chili, a spiral-cut ham—and the rest of the friends bring appetizers, side dishes, dessert. Electra’s husband, Simon, is the mixologist. He turns beers into Micheladas; he creates large-format cocktails that he serves out of an enormous glass jug with a stand and a tiny spigot; he blends up margaritas and daiquiris. The parents get… pleasantly buzzed while the kids are safely downstairs.
After the football games end, when the ticking clock of 60 Minutes begins, when most normal people would pack up their kids and head home to prepare for the busy week ahead, the music starts. Simon deejays—he likes it loud—and the kids come running upstairs. Everyone dances.
It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.
Dancing lasts an hour, sometimes longer, depending on the mood in the room (and how strong the cocktail is). Liesl, Bets, and Rhonda can all walk their troops home; Hollis has to drive, but it’s less than a mile away. Brooke and Charlie live the farthest and for this reason, Brooke has to stay somewhat sober, because Charlie certainly isn’t going to.
Monday mornings at school drop-off, items of clothing, sunglasses, and serving dishes are returned and exchanged among the members of the group.
The teachers and other parents notice this, along with the bloodshot eyes and sagging countenances of the football parents. A rumor goes around that there’s an orgy at the Undergroves’ every Sunday and that the parties involve switching sexual partners.
Electra loves these rumors. Everyone is so jealous!
Rock and roll football is the coolest thing going on in Wellesley. Brooke looks forward to it all week—studying up on the teams playing, planning her outfits, ordering the cheese platter from Wasik’s (she can’t cook so this is what she brings every week). What she loves most isn’t the food or even the dancing—it’s the camaraderie. Raising children is hard (and twins are really hard!) and it can be lonely—but for years, when they’re in an insular, unified group in the trenches together, Brooke feels like part of the proverbial village.
Yes, Caroline remembers those parties. Things in the basement weren’t quite as wholesome as the parents might have believed. One week, they watched Ted even though it was expressly forbidden. Once the kids hit eighth grade, Carter Undergrove would steal a couple of his father’s beers and they would pass the cans around, each taking a sip or two. Then there were the hookups in the powder room—Will Kirtley and Layla Undergrove, for example. But Caroline won’t tell Brooke any of this. Why ruin her burnished memories?
“Are there any not-so-fond memories?” Caroline says. This is a leading question. She knows the answer is yes, the whole thing with the Undergroves
fell apart, but as a kid, Caroline was never quite clear on what, exactly, transpired.
“Well, yes,” Brooke says. “Electra dropped me.”
Everyone knows there’s a hierarchy at rock and roll football, with Electra and Hollis at the top of the pyramid and Liesl, Bets, Rhonda, and Brooke down at the bottom. Brooke doesn’t care much about Liesl, Bets, and Rhonda.
They’re perfectly nice women with perfectly nice husbands and kids the same age as her kids. If she were to nitpick, she might say Bets can be judgy, Liesl needs more cowbell, and Rhonda is always bragging about how hot her marriage is (which makes Brooke think maybe it’s not so hot). Brooke prefers the company of Hollis and Electra, but really that means Electra.
Brooke always offers to clean up, following right behind Electra every time she leaves the room, complimenting Electra on her hair, her earrings, the new mirror in the powder room; she inserts herself into conversations between Electra and Hollis, she apologizes too much and generally emits a cringey “Will you please sign my yearbook” vibe. Electra has a tic of her own: She’s fixated on the accomplishments of Brooke’s children. Will is the captain of soccer, basketball, and lacrosse, he’s also class president and started a chess club. Whitney is the lead in the school play and she scored in the ninety-ninth percentile on the MCAS. Brooke tries not to talk about them, because to talk about the twins is to brag, but Electra is always asking where Brooke gets them tutors, if she hires personal trainers, if she gives them vitamin supplements.
“No,” Brooke says. “They’re just good kids. I have no idea why.” She belatedly (too belatedly?) adds, “They certainly don’t get any of it from me or their father.”
Who knows which reason it is—pick one or all—but one random Thursday, Brooke receives a text from Electra. This isn’t unusual; Electra sends the whole football group a text every Thursday. But this one is sent only to Brooke.
It says: We’re trying a different format with football this week. We’ll miss you and Charlie. Thanks for understanding! XO, E.
It’s only looking back now, today, that Brooke can admit to herself that she
had a terrible crush on Electra, and sublimating it turned her into someone weak, vulnerable, and—she’ll just say it—very annoying. Brooke regards the camera frankly. “I can be slow to pick up social cues,” she says. “But even I got the message: Charlie and I were no longer invited.”
Immediately Brooke calls Electra, but she’s treated to her voice mail. Brooke calls back—voice mail. She tries a third, fourth, fifth time. Finally, she leaves a message so pathetic, she can’t bear to think about it: “Electra, please, I’m not sure what I did wrong. Please, Electra, call me. Let’s talk this through.”
She considers calling Charlie or even Simon Undergrove—but they’re bros and are therefore useless.
By the time Brooke calls Hollis, she’s in full-blown hysterics. She can barely get a coherent word out, so finally she just cuts and pastes Electra’s text and sends it to Hollis. What can Hollis say? “You’re right, it sounds like
maybe—”
“Did she text you?” Brooke asks.
In a meek voice, Hollis says, “Yes, she said she’s making shrimp fried rice in the wok. I’m bringing potstickers.”
“Who else was on the text?” Brooke says.
Hollis checks: Liesl, Bets, Rhonda. “I’m sorry,” Hollis says. “I didn’t realize you weren’t on it too. You’re always on it.”
It makes no sense! Brooke has been racking her brain, trying to remember anything that was out of the ordinary the Sunday before. Electra’s sister, Nadine, had been visiting from Manhattan. Nadine was a slicker, shinier version of Electra, all done up with hair, makeup, clothes, nails, perfume. She was like a woman fashioned from enamel. Brooke had exchanged only a few words with her before Nadine turned away to talk to Rhonda. Had Nadine asked Electra why someone as underwhelming as Brooke was included in the football group? Then Brooke gasps. Had Charlie been inappropriate with Nadine, maybe followed her to the powder room and made advances?
“Can you call her?” Brooke asks Hollis. “Can you ask what I did?”
“Oh, Brooke,” Hollis says. “I don’t want to get in the middle of this. You and Electra need to work it out between yourselves.”
“I’ve called her six times,” Brooke says. “I’ve left messages. She doesn’t want to talk to me. She just… kicked me out, like we’re kids in a clubhouse.”
“I’m so sorry, Brooke,” Hollis says. “It won’t be the same without you.”
“Your mother kept going to Electra’s house. Not only that Sunday but every Sunday for the rest of the football season,” Brooke says. “She went to Electra’s knowing that Electra had dropped me from the group.” Brooke holds up a hand. “I could see why Liesl and Bets and Rhonda didn’t take action. They were followers. But your mom is a good person, a strong person, and I guess I assumed she would stand up for me.”
“She did at some point,” Caroline says. “She and Electra are no longer friends.”
“She waited until after the Super Bowl,” Brooke says. “Electra and the other girls were planning your senior spring break in Harbor Island, and Hollis told Electra she wasn’t going. She called me up and we planned a trip to the Virgin Islands instead.”
“Ah,” Caroline says. This makes sense. She and Hollis did go to the Virgin Islands with Brooke and the Kirtley twins. Charlie stayed in Wellesley because it was tax season and Matthew had a paper to present somewhere.
Caroline, for one, had been glad to be rid of Carter, Layla, and the other kids.
She’d known there was some kind of drama going on with the adults, but what did she care? Because they were eighteen, she and Will and Whitney were legal to drink in St. John and they had spent the week inhaling rum punches and listening to live music at the Beach Bar.
Caroline shuts the camera off. “Wow, Electra is a real bitch. I’m sorry that happened to you.”
Brooke shrugs. As she was telling the story, she felt a refreshing detachment, as though she were talking about someone else. “Electra is a small person who steps on others to make herself feel big,” Brooke says. She worries she sounds like a pop-psychology cliché. “In her defense, I always felt insecure in the group, insecure in my life—and that affected how I acted.
I tried too hard, I lacked confidence. I thought that to make people like me, I had to defer to them instead of acting natural.” Brooke sighs. “It doesn’t matter now. Your mom and I are friends and Electra is irrelevant.”
Something is different about Brooke this morning, but Caroline can’t put her finger on what. The first part of the weekend, she was such a meme— showing up in her overblown straw hat, oversharing about her sex life with
Charlie, getting badly sunburned even though she’d wrapped herself up like King Tut—but now she exudes self-possession. It’s as though she took a Brené Brown seminar in her sleep.
“I should go,” Brooke says. “I want to read my new book by the pool before we leave for lunch.”
Caroline checks her phone. It’s ten forty-five already; how did that happen? She won’t have time to talk with Gigi now, which means she’ll have to do it after the sail. She feels bad that Gigi has to go last. Gigi has known her mother for only a short time, and virtually at that. There’s no way Gigi will have a story that rivals the ones Caroline heard from Tatum, Dru-Ann, and Brooke. It’s just not possible.
