Betts

WE WAKE ANNIE and Iz not long after we’ve dried off and dressed. We make pancakes with Faith’s flour and we sit in the Sun Room with the drapes open. We tell them the story of what happened that spring break.

We say we made some choices that look pretty bad in retrospect. Drinking and skinny-dipping. Details we’ve never shared. We say the consequences of telling anyone had seemed worse than the consequences of not telling. Maybe we were right and maybe we were wrong, we say. But now it’s time to admit the truth.

“I’m as much to blame as anyone,” Ginger says. “I … I had a relationship with Trey when I was a young girl.”

Her daughter’s eyes the practical green Faith’s were.

“A sexual relationship that started when I thought I was old enough to understand, but I wasn’t,” Ginger says. “I’m going to have to speak about that, too, Annie. So I wanted you to know first.”

“Laney feels she needs to tell the truth now,” I explain. “It’s important for her to say this happened to her. To make the world see that it isn’t the victim’s fault.”

When we finish explaining, the girls are silent for a long time.

“It will cost you the Court, Mom,” Izzy finally says.

I say nothing. She is probably right.

“Have you told … who do you tell this to?” my ever-practical daughter asks. In her expression I see the same little girl who insisted on making her own peanut butter sandwiches to take to school. God, how she loved peanut butter.

“The president?” she asks. We all laugh. It seems so improbable. But there it is.

“I’ll go into town when we’re done with breakfast,” I say. “But we wanted to tell you girls first.”

“You’re going to, like, call the president of the United States from a pay phone on some street corner?” Izzy says.

“Outside the market,” Annie says.

“Sometimes we have to make do with the resources we have,” I say.

“You could call from Max’s phone,” Annie suggests. But Max is out on the ferry collecting the press.

“This will cost you the Court, Mom,” Isabelle repeats. “It will be a scandal. A woman who was wild like that now up for the Court?”

“A woman,” Ginger says. “Would you feel differently if we were talking about a man?”

Izzy looks like her father in that moment. She wants to say no, but can’t. She would feel differently. Even her generation holds to the imbedded double standard. Boys sow oats, with all the implications of something positive and sustaining growing from their youthful indiscretions, while girls are loose. Or sluts. Or asking for it.

Asking for what? I wonder as Ginger and I make our way to town in the little skiff not much later; I have no idea how to steer a boat much less how to find my way through the island guts.

Asking for what? I think as Ginger ties the skiff up at the public pier.

A fishing boat unloads an odiferous pile of crabs beside us, the season not quite over.

We walk across the road to an old-fashioned phone booth with an accordion door. Ginger smiles at me through the dirty glass as I close it. She continues to watch me as I dial the number. As I wait on hold. As I say my piece. And listen. And insist that, yes, this is something that simply has to be said. It ought to bother me to be watched in this moment. But Ginger’s presence leaves me comforted.

I tender the withdrawal of my name for the Court. It’s taken from me and bantered about a room increasingly full of advisers. I cover the receiver with a hand and push the phone booth door open. The guys on the dock across the road are having a big time. I don’t suppose they would quiet down if I told them I had the president on the phone. I suppose they’d be quite sure I was pulling their sturdy legs. Or perhaps the blue-tinged crab legs they are still offloading from their boats.

“Imagine Matka looking down from the mother-heaven,” I whisper to Ginger. “Saying, ‘Look at my Betsy. She’s stirred up a whole lot of excitement, hasn’t she?’ ”

“Mother is sitting beside her,” Ginger says, “saying, ‘I always knew that daughter of yours would go far, Mrs. Z. I figured if she could make it halfway across the country in that wreck of a car you loaned them, she could get anywhere she ever wanted to go.’ ”

“You drove the last leg, Ginge,” I say. “You’re the one who got us here. And got us home, too.”

Ginger grins her double-wide grin. “Your mother up in the mother-heaven is saying, ‘Betsy, honey, that’s the president of the United States on the telephone. Stop talking to your friend and pay attention, for heaven’s sake.’ ”

The room full of advisers is beginning to talk about the language. What exactly should be said about why exactly I don’t want to be a Supreme Court justice after all, thank you very much. The secretary of state pipes up, then. This isn’t her bailiwick of course. But she happened to be meeting with the president when I called and no one has asked her to leave.

“Gentlemen,” she says, “I don’t want to be a naysayer here or intrude where I don’t belong.” This draws a chuckle from the whole room. “But isn’t anyone concerned about how this is going to look? We’ve staked a claim on this whole gender agenda thing, we’ve been telling the world how important women’s issues are to us, and here we are with a chance to show we mean it and instead we’re slipping out the back door?”

There’s a long silence at the other end. Then the conversation comes right around the bend, turning to the details of exactly how this all should be presented to the press. I mention Ginger and everyone leaps on that idea. A non-official breaking the news. If it doesn’t go over well we can rewrite the script and deny anything Ginger has said, the idea seems to be.

“I think you better hear this, Ginge,” I say.

She crowds into the narrow booth with me to listen on the same receiver. Our heads press together. People go in and out of the grocery store. Onto the dock just yards away, fishermen unload the last of the season’s crabs.