Beautiful Day(27)
THE NOTEBOOK, PAGE 17
Hors d’Oeuvres at the Reception
Nothing with spinach (stuck in teeth) and no smoked salmon (bad breath).
Trust me.
Everyone loves a raw bar. Call Spanky—he invented the raw bar on Nantucket—and he is so in demand that he should be your first call once you say yes.
Your father loves anything wrapped in phyllo. He simply cannot resist a pillowy golden triangle—biting into one, for him, is as good as Christmas. What is he going to get?
Anything but spinach!
MARGOT
Outside the Chicken Box, there was a line a million people long. Margot felt herself filling with despair. All the people in front of them were kids in their twenties, and Margot’s feet were beginning to hurt in her four-inch heels, and she couldn’t stop worrying that either Rhonda or Autumn was going to spill the beans about her and Edge.
What had she been thinking?
Autumn said, “This line is pretty long.”
“I know,” Margot said. She wondered if they should cut bait and go home. It was after eleven now, and they had a big weekend ahead of them. She had already lost Jenna and Finn; she was only sailing with half a crew. Her dress was blotched with pink stains; it looked like the dress had hives. And yet Margot still felt there was fun to be had, if they stuck it out. They would go inside and dance, goddamn it.
She said, “Let’s go to the back door. I know someone.”
“I’m game,” Autumn said.
They stepped through the sand-and-gravel parking lot to the back of the bar, past the Dumpster and a silver tower of empty kegs. Margot marched up the back steps in her stilettos and knocked on the door.
She turned to Rhonda and Autumn. “I used to…”
The door swung open, and a dark-skinned man with wire-rimmed glasses stood looking at them.
Margot said, “Pierre? It’s Margot. Margot Carmichael.”
Pierre smiled. “Margot.” He enveloped her in a bear hug. “I would recognize you anywhere.”
He would recognize her here, half drunk, trying to avoid the line out front. This was the only place she’d seen him, approximately once each year, since 1995, when they’d dated.
They had only gone out three times, then Margot had met Drum and dropped Pierre like a hot potato. She had felt badly about it until she learned that Pierre had had a girlfriend the whole time they were dating anyway.
He said, “You’re down for the weekend? Or all summer?”
“Just the weekend,” Margot said. “Some of us have to work.”
Pierre laughed. He said, “I work, girlfriend. Believe me, a full house every night is hard work.” He ushered them into the back room and pulled three Coronas out of a cooler. He said, “You ladies have fun!”
“Thanks!” Margot said. “My sister’s getting—”
But her words were drowned out by the sound of the band and the writhing mass of humanity gyrating on the dance floor.
Autumn said, “Whoo-hoo, SCORE, girl, this is awesome!”
It was awesome, in a way. Margot had just capitalized on her long-ago quasi-romance with the bar’s owner to get them inside. The band was playing “Champagne Supernova.” Margot swilled from her cold beer.
“Let’s dance!” Autumn said.
Margot said, “I have to go to the ladies’. I’ll meet you up there.”
Autumn grabbed Rhonda by the hand, and the two of them threaded their way through the crowd, toward the stage.
Margot wandered to the back of the bar, where there were three pool tables and the crowd was thinner. The Chicken Box used to be the place she came to dance every night of the summer. When she was only nineteen, she sneaked in using her cousin’s ID to see Dave Matthews play. She had seen Squeeze, and Hootie and the Blowfish, and an all-girl AC/DC tribute band called Hell’s Belles, and a funk band called Chucklehead who frequented the same coffee shop that she did back in New York. Margot couldn’t decide if being at the Box made her feel younger or older.
She stepped into the ladies’ room. The girls waiting in line in front of her were all in college, with long hair and bare midriffs and tight jeans. Even when Margot was young, she hadn’t dressed that way. She’d worn hippie skirts and tank tops, or surf dresses with bright, splashy flowers. Her hair had always been in a bun because invariably she would show up here straight from a beach party where she would have been thrown into the ocean by one of her drunk brothers or one of her drunk brothers’ drunk friends.
Yes, she felt a hundred years old. She mourned her youth and lost innocence. She thought, I’m a divorced mother of three with a fifty-nine-year-old lover.
Imagine!
From her stall, Margot listened to a girl out by the sinks, talking on her phone.