A Season of Perfect Happiness fundamentally questions what makes a “good” mother, with a propulsive and heartrending portrayal of one woman’s efforts to find her voice.
Ten years after an unspeakable tragedy caused Claire to flee her hometown in Delaware, she finally feels content. She has a quiet, tidy life in Wisconsin, a place she picked at random for its shape on a map. Her careful existence centers on a simple plan: keep her social circle small and keep the past a secret.
But when she meets Erik—a lighthearted theater nerd who gives Claire more of a chance than she’s given herself in a long time—that plan seems increasingly impossible, especially after she finds herself emotionally entangled not only with Erik, but with his ex-wife, Annabelle; their three young children; and a small set of friends, the kind she’d always wanted to have around her. Life after the accident can be full of joy, Claire realizes—going on a date to see a thousand-pound pig at the state fair, giggling over obscure inside jokes with friends at a music gig, making smoothies while the kids wear their infamous cooking hats. Being a partner, a best friend, a mother.
But when a person from her past arrives, Claire’s worst mistake threatens her new life, and the deep friendships she’s made hang in the balance. If Claire chooses to share the parts of herself she has kept locked away for so long, will the family she has built still recognize her—and have a place for her? Or will everything she has spent the last decade working toward fall apart?
Release date:
August 20, 2024
Publisher:
Dutton
Print pages:
384
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If you could live an entire season of your life in perfect happiness, knowing that once the season ended, you'd remember nothing at all of that time, would you still take the chance?
A question I read in a book called What If, and I remember thinking, Of course I'd take the chance. Who wouldn't choose a season of perfect happiness? And the part about forgetting? I didn't believe it possible to live an entire summer or autumn in perfect happiness and not have those memories be part of you. If sadness can alter the chemicals in one's brain, alter how a woman loves, how she grieves, how she thinks-and I know all too well sadness does do this-then why not happiness?
Why do we assume happiness is benign, that it doesn't leave scars?
I read that archaeologists can determine-from a fragment of bone buried for centuries-a man's age and height, what he typically ate, what his job might have been. I like to believe that happiness, even at the level of bones, marks us similarly. A slight softening, a pale discoloration, and the archaeologist hundreds, even thousands, of years into the future will know: Once upon a time, there was a season, perhaps more, of perfect happiness.
It’s hard to believe I’ve been living in Wisconsin for over a decade, this state I chose based only on its shape. Shortly before moving here, browsing magazines in the library in the Delaware beach town where I lived, I’d happened upon a map of the United States that depicted the states in pastel colors according to annual rainfall or snowfall or maybe population density. All I noticed was Michigan and Wisconsin, like a pair of child’s mittens, pale pink, with their thumbs of land around a Great Lake. Were these the only pink states? The only pink states surrounded by yellow or blue or green, that minty green that for thirteen months was the dominant color of my life?
It was the green of new plants, the green of a fading bruise, and the green of the walls in the hospital that became, when I was twenty-five and twenty-six, the place I felt safest.
A child's pink mittens.
I didn't move to the Midwest right away after seeing the map. I didn't yet understand that I'd have to leave Delaware if I ever wanted to retrieve my life from the place I'd lost it, without ever meaning to, which is how we almost always lose the things that matter most. If I learned anything in the hospital, I learned that sometimes, maybe most of the time, it happens just that quickly: You can lose a part of your life as easily as you can lose an earring or a pair of sunglasses or a mitten. And you don't realize until it's gone.
I'd been living in Wisconsin for six years the summer I met Erik. We met at the Y. I'd noticed him before because I couldn't not notice him. He's so tall, at six foot three tall enough that when standing beside him, I have to tilt my head back to meet his eyes, which are a beautiful startling blue. Thick dark hair without the gray he has now; a lanky athletic body. When we saw each other, we'd nod in recognition, but that was it. I liked him for this. I didn't go to the Y to flirt or make friends. I went because I needed to, especially that summer, ten years since the accident. Exercise and work were the only things keeping the glacierlike depression from advancing once more across the surface of my life. Still, I did notice Erik wasn't wearing a wedding ring; later, he confessed he'd noticed the same thing about me.
By August, I was in the gym sometimes twice a day, and it was on one of those days when I saw Erik was also in for the second time. "Uh-oh," he said. We were both leaving, walking across the lobby. "You too?"
"Me too what?" I laughed.
"Twice in one day." He shifted his gym bag on his shoulder. "It's never a good sign."
He was right, and I wondered what in his life was troubling him. He seemed like one of those guys at ease with himself and at ease in the world. But isn't this what we often imagine? Everyone else is doing okay, we think. They look good, they're functioning, and we forget: We are too.
"Maybe I'm just disciplined," I teased as Erik and I stepped into the sticky midsummer night. Even the sky looked sunburned, a hot fiery pink.
"Disciplined, huh?" It was a Sunday. Only a few cars in the parking lot. "I wish that's what I was." He squinted past me, and I felt a pang of regret. Who was I kidding? I wasn't disciplined either.
But then he shifted his blue eyes back to me and grinned. "So, are you too disciplined to get a frozen custard with me?"
"Are you kidding?" I smiled. "Half the reason I come here is so I can eat stuff like that." This wasn't true either. But Kopp's Frozen Custard was down the road, and the sky was still light, and the thought of spending another night eating salad while I watched TV felt beyond lonely.
We didn’t talk about anything personal that night. In fact, he made a point of it. “Let’s have a moratorium on families, exes-especially exes-serious illness, therapy. . . .” He handed me a paper cup of custard. “My last date covered all that and more in the first ten minutes.”
"No tattoo descriptions either," I laughed. I didn't think he had any. I glanced at his tanned, ropey arms.
"Tattoos? You've had tattoo confessions? On first dates?"
"You haven't?" I dipped my spoon into the custard. "Well, okay, only once, but still. He thought I should know up front where his ex-girlfriend's name was tattooed. Talk about too much information."
"Jesus," he laughed. "No kidding."
We were sitting outside at one of a dozen picnic tables, the place loud with staticky music played from speakers, the crunch of tires over gravel, zigzagging strings of multicolored Christmas lights. It felt like a scene from the 1950s. Laverne and Shirley; Happy Days. We were both in workout clothes-running shorts and a tank top for me, my long brown hair in a ponytail; basketball shorts, Nikes, and a T-shirt for him.
We talked mostly about our jobs. The year before, he'd become project manager of the Ten Chimneys restoration. Ten Chimneys. The name was vaguely familiar. He told me it was the summer retreat built in the 1920s by Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, the most critically acclaimed American stage actors of the twentieth century.
"Does it really have ten chimneys?"
He cast a bemused look my way. Bemused. Had I ever used that word? But already I was different. Relaxed; happy.
"You have heard of Lunt and Fontanne, right?" he asked. And then, "Are you a theater person at all?" He arched an eyebrow, because no, I wasn't a theater person, though in that moment I wanted to be.
The sky was nearly dark, fireflies flashing, the murmur of conversation filling the air. "My closest friend growing up was-is-an actress." I was surprised at how easily the words slipped out, though as soon as I said them, I felt the night shift, memories kaleidoscoping: Kelly sitting on the beach, knees to her chest, practicing lines for Ophelia, or Kelly waving a pair of Broadway tickets, a Christmas gift from her parents, and of course she was taking me! Kelly in Audrey Hepburn sunglasses and red lipstick; Kelly flopping dramatically onto her bed, clutching the acceptance letter from Yale to her chest. No wonder Ten Chimneys had sounded familiar. She would have known who Lunt and Fontanne were, had probably mentioned them, mentioned Ten Chimneys. In another life, I would have phoned her the minute I got home and told her, I met this guy and you'll never guess where he works. Except that made no sense because in the life where Kelly had been my friend, I was married to her older brother.
"I need a moratorium on my job, don't I?" Erik said. "I'm sorry. I start talking about Ten Chimneys and-"
"No, no. It's fascinating." And it was. Noël Coward was such good friends with Alfred and Lynn, he'd had his own bedroom at Ten Chimneys; Katharine Hepburn used to visit, Helen Hayes, Laurence Olivier.
"We call him Larry around the office." Erik leaned forward and stage-whispered, "Vivien used to visit him during breaks in the filming of Gone with the Wind. He was still married."
"Vivien Leigh?" I whispered back. "Here?"
"It's wild, isn't it? All those people in this little town no one's heard of."
Is that when he asked how I'd ended up here? I told him I'd seen a map and liked that Wisconsin was shaped like a mitten.
"Seriously? You liked the shape of the state?" Lights from passing cars moved in a straight line along the rise of Interstate 94 to the east. A breeze riffled the leaves.
"Well, there might be a little more to it." I felt my pulse in my throat. "But we do have that moratorium."
"Ah, yes. We do, don't we?"
He asked about my job then, and I told him what I did as a graphic designer, how my real love was making collages that I sold in a local gallery.
"Collages? Like scraps of paper?"
"Photos, wallpaper, snippets of cloth, anything really."
"So, what do you love about it?" I could no longer see his face in the darkness.
"It's hard to explain. It's . . ." Healing, I wanted to say, or redemptive, but I wasn't sure if this was true or if I just wanted it to be. "The collages are like puzzles," I said. "There's all these random fragments, and if I can just figure out how to arrange them, I can make a completely different story." Of course, I was talking about my life. Trying to arrange the broken pieces into something whole. I wasn't sure it was possible, but sitting there with Erik, I felt such longing to believe it was.
We were silent then, but it was a good silence. Across the parking lot, an impossible number of teenagers-nine? Ten?-tumbled, laughing and shrieking, from their tiny car.
"What were you like as a kid?" Erik asked. "Goody Two-shoes? Nerd? Bad girl?"
"Pure Goody Two-shoes," I said. "And you were a bad boy, I can tell."
"Oh, bless you." He put his hand on his heart, grinning. "No one has accused me of that, ever." He shrugged. "I'm a rule follower. Always have been."
"Me too."
"You? The woman who chose where to live based on the shape of the state?" He shook his head, but there was this look in his eyes-I felt how much he liked me, and I liked him too, and for a second, I wished so much that I could tell him the truth. I never had a reason to move to Wisconsin so much as I had a thousand reasons to leave Delaware.
Or maybe not a thousand.
Maybe only three: My best friend, Kelly. My ex-husband, Nick. And Lucy, our daughter.
Erik asked me out for the following weekend, and I said yes, though it terrified me, the spike of joy when I saw him at the gym, the rush of adrenaline when I heard his voice on the phone. I’d been on a few dates since moving to the Midwest; I’d even been in a brief relationship, but I hadn’t, not since Nick, felt that whoosh! of hope plunging through me.
Shortly before I moved here, I'd joined a monthly outpatient group at the hospital for women like me, and one of the things we discussed was how we would talk about our children when we met someone new. Dr. Fasnacht had us role-play situations where we tried to explain. But no matter who acted as the friend or potential spouse or lover, the responses were the same: "How do you live with yourself?" or "How do you ever get over something like that?" It didn't matter that we were pretending to be someone else, some imaginary character from our unimaginable futures. We couldn't fathom that anyone would understand what we had done because we didn't understand it ourselves. "This isn't helping," I remember weeping in the middle of role-play. "Why would anyone decent want us?"
"Because what you did is not who you are," Dr. Fasnacht said.
I thought of that a lot the summer I met Erik.
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