PROLOGUE
BETTY
September 1951
Any other bride might have gazed into the mirror, stepped away, and then glanced back over her shoulder for another peek. Not Betty. She hadn’t looked at herself once today, and in fact she’d avoided her reflection all week. She knew the person looking back from the mirror would not be her. Betty Claire Stern no longer existed. She wanted to say she died, but Betty was mindful of her reputation for melodrama.
Perched gingerly on the window seat with a layer of crinoline crunching beneath her thighs, Betty studied her bedroom. Pink and floral, it had been perfect for growing up, for playing with her friends, and for private times. Her slice of North Beach and Lake Michigan was also perfect. She turned, glanced out the window to the west, and sighed.
As of tomorrow, Lake Michigan would be to her east, and her bedroom—one she had never seen, but that likely wouldn’t have pink posies—wouldn’t boast a view of anything besides a patch of grass or a front stoop. Betty was moving from Michigan to Illinois, from South Haven on the lake to Skokie in the suburbs.
It wasn’t really that far. Just a few hours’ drive.
Would she have a car?
Betty lifted the curl cluster at the nape of her neck with one hand and fanned herself with the other. She inhaled through her nose, puckered her lips, and exhaled so hard it sounded more like the wind than the sigh she’d intended. Perspiration gathered on her brow. If she blotted or wiped, the pancake makeup would lift, so she leaned toward the sill and a light breeze brushed over her face, refreshing her as it dried the dampness. The air chilled Betty’s skin, giving her a cold forehead to go along with her cold feet.
Pre-wedding jitters, that’s all it was. According to Ladies’ Home Journal, it was normal. And hadn’t Betty longed for normalcy?
Nerves were not the same as doubt.
A man strolled at the lake’s edge; his shirt hung loose over his shorts; his arms swung wide. Betty’s heart pattered for a hopeful second, and then regained its steady beat. There would be no unexpected visitor today. No impromptu drive, hike, or ice-cream cone. The day had been perfectly planned from her dress to the guests, flowers, and food. She needed to stop daydreaming about what-ifs. The fellow on the beach seemed capricious—without a care, a schedule, or a mandate. He was likely looking for dropped coins. No, he was probably collecting bits of beach glass for his sweetheart, the way visitors had done all summer.
Her whole life had included treasures for the taking right outside her door. Sometimes she’d grabbed them. Sometimes she’d overlooked them. But they’d been within reach. Betty flinched, about to abandon her room in search of riches, forgetting, for one sliver of a moment, that she was getting married today.
That beach glass might as well have been on the moon.
Turning away from the window, Betty pressed her hands against her thumping chest. No matter where she lived or traveled, South Haven would always be home to her heart. She had always counted sunsets as a way to mark time, tracked the migration of birds and the level of rain. She’d peeled carrots in the kitchen of her family’s resort at age eight and learned to use the rotary iron when she was twelve.
Betty was accustomed to the unconventional calendar, composed only of summer and the off-season. She had always loved how, from Memorial Day until Labor Day, the town’s population swelled from six thousand to thirty thousand. Summer transformed her unassuming lakeside town into the “Catskills of the Midwest.” She was proud when that slogan was printed in big sunny yellow letters on the brochure for Stern’s Summer Resort, “the premier family destination in South Haven.” But she also loved the off-season—the serenity of autumn and the isolation of winter—when she had her grandparents’ full attention. The peculiarities of South Haven were as much a part of her as her blue eyes.
Betty scanned the sparse pearls Nannie had sewn onto the tulle overlay on her tea-length wedding dress. They caught the sunlight and glinted, just like the sand. Her dress was perfectly fitted and flattering. Still, this wasn’t what her grandparents had had in mind for their only granddaughter.
No matter, Nannie had ordered the finest material from a friend in Chicago who was a dressmaker, and then in record time had created the dress without a pattern. Had Betty been afforded the luxury of time or circumstance, it was the dress she would have chosen. She could almost picture herself poring over the latest bridal fashion magazines with Georgia and Doris, and then pointing to this very dress as “the one.” She’d already decided that would be the wedding dress story she would tell.
The real story was that for three weeks Nannie had done little more than sew and bead, neglecting her duties at the resort until the end of the summer. And with pins between her teeth, she’d mumbled through it all in a mix of Yiddish and English about her troubles, her tsuris.
Betty had told her not to go to the trouble of making a dress. She’d buy a pretty one at Lemon’s department store. But Nannie wouldn’t have her granddaughter married in a shmata off a rack. What would people say?
Betty traced her hips with her hands and felt how her body curved like an hourglass beneath the gathered, full skirt that ended just below her knees. The dress was long enough to be modest but short enough to show off her calves, muscular from a summer of leading calisthenics, carrying piles of laundry, and dancing with her friends on the beach after dark. She clamped her lips at other thoughts and swept them from her mind like cake crumbs. She touched the neckline that scooped just below the gold locket at her throat, a present from her grandfather and a quiet gesture of hope for her future “to shine like this,” he’d said. Betty knew the gift was due to relief, but pragmatic Zaide would never say anything negative and tempt fate any more than Betty already had. She considered whether the locket could be her “something new.”
“Knock, knock.” The door opened and Georgia entered as if walking onstage for a one-woman show. Her hair had been curled and teased into a fashionable bouffant—something Georgia loathed. Betty loved a good bouffant, and she’d never forget this effort of fashion and friendship.
“I can’t believe you’re here,” Betty said.
“Wild horses couldn’t keep me away.” She shrugged. “Plus, it’s Sunday. No classes. I came up yesterday and got this.” Georgia spun once and stopped, like a weary jewelry-box ballerina.
Her dress was a sophisticated, sleeveless, corn-on-the-cob-yellow sheath that skimmed her curves and stopped just below her knees. The color accentuated her gold and copper hair and highlighted the amber flecks in her green eyes. Even Georgia’s freckles seemed to sparkle atop her nose. That the dress was more meant for summer than fall didn’t matter. She could have worn a romper or her tennis whites, Betty wouldn’t have cared.
“You look beautiful. You’re not supposed to show up the bride, you know.”
“Oh, Betty, don’t be ridiculous! You’re beyond stunning.” Georgia grabbed Betty’s hand and twirled her around like a dance partner until Betty stopped. “You’re going to have a wonderful life. I know it,” Georgia said. “Doris thinks so too, and she knows these things. She’s beside herself that she couldn’t get the day off.”
Betty coughed, and then burst into tears. Her throat felt as if she had swallowed sand, and she imagined her mascara dripping and scattering like polka dots onto the dress. She tapped at the tears with her fingers, but then Georgia reached into her ivory satin clutch and handed Betty a folded handkerchief. Betty dabbed beneath her eyes, and then Georgia yanked her to sit on one of the matching twin beds they’d used for sleepovers. “You’ll see Doris soon; you won’t be far from her at all once you’re in Skokie.”