Page 26 of Our Last Vineyard Summer

Louisa’s eyes were glassy.

“Oh, sweetie, no. I love your father. I’ve only ever loved your father. Wiley is only a friend. He’s your father’s friend too.”

“Not really.”

The way her daughter looked at her now, full of accusation and fear, made Virgie fiddle with a dial on the instrument panel.

“But going up in this plane, Dad’s going to be upset. It’s like you’retryingto upset him.”

Once when Louisa was nine, she’d asked Virgie why she’d been sad lately. Virgie wondered how Louisa could have intuited her mood—even now it was as though Louisa could sense Virgie’s topsy-turvy emotions. She cupped the smooth of her daughter’s cheek. “This isn’t about Dad. This is about you and it’s about me. It’s about showing you girls that life can be exactly what you want it to be.”

The plane bounced with Wiley’s weight as he got out of the back seat to look over the side of the plane, then dropped back into it. The pilot always sits in the back to keep the plane balanced, Wiley had told them.

Her daughter looked at her like she had snakes coming out of her head. Louisa stepped off the plane, backing away as the propellers kicked up, the smell of gasoline and cut grass finding her nose. Virgie hollered over the engines: “Dad wants you to get out of your comfort zone. Your lives are too easy. You need challenges. We’re going to write goals.”

“What?” Louisa pointed to her ear.

It became clear to Virgie. Her daughters should be using this summer to make bigger plans too. Charlie wanted them to get a lofty degree, yes, but how far did he want them to go? How far did he believe they could go? “We’re going to write goals!”

Wiley turned to glance at her, holding up his hand in a thumbs-up motion, as the plane jounced while taxiing on the uneven ground to the freshly mowed tarmac. In the distance, she saw her girls sitting on top of the picnic table, watching with a combination of anxiety and awe. Louisa pulled her knees to her chest, while Aggie cheered like she was clapping at Yankee Stadium. Betsy too.

The plane took off down the grassy runway, and Virgie closed her eyes for a moment in the front, whispering a prayer:Please, God, bringme back to my girls. Faster, faster still, until the bumps of the ground disappeared entirely as they rose into the sky. The feeling made Virgie think of her first date with Charlie, when they’d ridden the Cyclone at Coney Island, and he’d been more scared than she was. As soon as she’d met him nearly two decades ago, she’d known that her entire life would be in service to him. Not only would she be his wife and confidante and lover, but she would support him in every aspect of his political rise. Being an elected official was all he wanted, a distraction to the reality of his past, the ultimate form of reinvention. She’d wanted to save him from his loneliness, and saving him had given her purpose in their early years. When this plane landed in twenty minutes, he would still be the one she would want to call first. She’d tell him how small the island looked from a thousand feet in the air, how when you passed through a cloud, the air turned cold and wet all at once.

The plane banked over the ocean, and Virgie grinned under her leather air helmet. The exhilaration of being up in the air brought back more memories with Charlie, that summer when he ran his first congressional election. Back then she’d accompany him to factories and apartment buildings and spout off ideas about workers’ rights. She’d pass out campaign postcards with Charlie’s name on them on city street corners, and when someone asked if she’d met the candidate, she’d smile and say: “I married him.” Years later, when she was pregnant with Aggie, holding a pint-sized Louisa by the hand, they’d gone door-to-door with Charlie in a poor neighborhood in Queens, and she’d thought it one of the most meaningful experiences of her life. The way silver-haired women in aprons and missing teeth would invite them in for a lemonade, or the way mothers with dark circles under their eyes would share their dreams for their own daughters. These women would tell them of their struggles—younger women who needed childcare help to work, divorced women without enough money to pay for food, elderly women with no one to care for them. How she and Charlie would take those stories and go home and lie in bed and talk aboutwhat type of legislation could help a person like that. Was it expanding the reach of government welfare or raising minimum wage from $1.25 to $2? Maybe there needed to be access to preschool, regardless of a person’s income.

The plane turned back toward Edgartown, and Wiley yelled for Virgie to hold the throttle; she gripped it, her heart pounding as she looked down, trying to find her house. She saw Pamela Sunday’s instead, the rusted-out Buick visible even from up here. Just yesterday she had seen James and Betsy readingWhere the Red Fern Growstogether in the hammock, and she’d thought how lucky Betsy was to have a friend like him. How she and Charlie had been best friends before they were lovers, and how she hoped each one of her daughters experienced that kind of deep and enduring love. The love that came with disappointment when a person changed on you, the joy that emerged when they evolved alongside you.

Wiley lifted his hand and pointed down to the lush, flat landscape as they cruised over the harbor, the sailboats looking like toys. A happy yelp escaped her as she spotted the rooftop of their summer cottage, the small widow’s peak off her and Charlie’s bedroom. Years ago, they would sit out there when the babies were asleep, and one night, during the summer just before his first Senate election, when they were both bouncing with nerves and excitement, Virgie had taken his hand and said to him, “I’ll always love you, Charlie, but you must promise me that you will put your women constituents first. That you will help us pass a childcare tax break or some kind of equal pay or both.”

“Of course I will. This is our campaign. I’m merely the face.”

Wiley told her to let go of the throttle, and she released her clammy hands. She could see the landing strip, and Wiley started to lower the plane over the farm field. In the distance, she could see her daughters, specks on the horizon growing larger with every second. The thing no one ever told you about having children is just how scared you’d feel all the time about hurting them. She worried shewas pushing them too much or not enough, and she knew the world they’d enter was like a hungry wolf ready to pounce and eat them up. Louisa would enter her junior year in the fall and then soon enough she’d be off to college, which made this one of Virgie’s last summers with her girls all together. There was an urgency inside her. If she didn’t teach them everything she knew about male bosses and male egos and men who made promises they wouldn’t keep, they’d go out into the world without direction, without knowing the dangers that lurked in seemingly benign places.

The plane was nearly to the ground when an unpleasant sensation bubbled to the surface. ThatNew York Heraldheadline from a few years back: WHYWOMENLOVESENATORWHITING. Only, the article wasn’t about the legislation he’d been proposing. It was about a woman he’d been caught in a tryst with, which he denied vehemently, and how his good looks had won him many female admirers. How even New York women voted for him, in part, because of that unforgettable smile and neat row of white teeth! The article had sent Virgie into a fury. It was insulting to Charlie as a candidate, and it was incredibly insulting to women. As if women voters only cared for a candidate who charmed them rather than won them over with their ideas and proposals. She could havescreamed, and she did—at Charlie.

He’d apologized. He always apologized. Another memory then: she and Charlie having cocktails at Katharine Graham’s elegant Georgetown home, the newspaperman’s wife pulling Virgie aside and saying, “He has the kind of charisma that can get a man in trouble. I know something about that, and if you ever need to talk…”

Virgie was expected to turn the other way, smile, and move on. It’s what women did! That was when she began to carry her resentment like a handbag.

And yet, this life! Together, she and Charlie had built an incredible one filled with interesting people and heady conversations and three beautiful girls that challenged her every single day. It was somehowperfect and imperfect all at once, and if she hadn’t met Charlie, she wouldn’t have any of it.

The plane bumped against the landing strip, the grass rumbling under the plane’s wheels, a wheelbarrow racing through a mowed grassy meadow.

The propellers slowed their spin as Wiley steered the plane to the end of the runway. After squeaking to a stop, Virgie peeled off her goggles and tossed her head back against the leather headrest. She’d done it. She’d gone up in this single-engine two-seater and she’d flown away—but she’d come back. She’d always come back to her girls.

Virgie lowered herself down in the footholds and jumped into the warm grass. Betsy and Aggie ran up to her, both wrapping their spaghetti arms around her waist. They ran hand in hand toward Louisa, who remained at the picnic table, acting cool. Virgie perched beside her, waiting for Louisa to say something. Didn’t Louisa realize that Virgie had feelings? That she needed to feel loved, just as Louisa needed to feel it?

“Girls, you’re never going to forget the feeling of going up in the air. There’s a weightlessness to it, and yet the weight of life closes in, and you see what really matters. Truly, this may be the first moment of the rest of your lives.”

Using the back of her Jesus sandal, Louisa pushed off the picnic table. “We’ve been on commercial jets, Mom.” She signaled to Wiley that she was ready.

“Not an open airplane, not a plane where you could stick your arm out of the cockpit and rest the other on a yoke.”

Reaching for Louisa’s frail shoulder, Virgie attempted to give her a squeeze, but her daughter ducked away. Virgie followed her to the plane. “Looking down on the island, Lou, I realized how infinitely big life can be, if we want it to be. Sometimes our small little lives don’t seem to add up to anything, but what I realized flying up there is that it does matter. Every one of our actions on earth matters.”

Virgie thought of how she was helping Pamela and James, and how happy Betsy made him. She thought of Louisa working at the bookstore, and how important it was that she was working, and Aggie’s new friend, a Negro whose skin color didn’t separate the two girls, even if headlines separated white and Black children each day. That was what she’d decided up in that plane: that the most important thing she could do in this lifetime was to accept people as they are. Maybe these were small symbols of change, but she wanted to believe they mattered.

Before climbing up to the seat in front of Wiley, Louisa turned and said, “You sound like the lady with the signs at the Seventy-Second Street subway stop, Mom.”

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