How far the mighty have fallen, she thought. She scooped the quarters into her pockets and counted out thirty-six, laying them carefully on top of the washing machine in nine piles of four. When she knocked against one pile with the outer edge of her hand, one quarter rolled off and under the machine. Sherri crouched down and tried to retrieve it, but it had traveled too far under for her to get to it from her crouching position. She’d have to go lower on the floor, Flat-Stanley style. She was not above doing that.
Now the mighty have fallen even farther. That’s what she was thinking when she heard the tinkle of the bells, and a semi-familiar voice say, “Sherri? What are you doing?”
Sherri righted herself, then stood. One of the women from the birthday dinner the night before was facing her. Dawn, Sherri thought her name was, but she wasn’t certain enough to say it.
“Nothing,” she said, trying to maintain the smallest shred of dignity. “I lost a quarter under the machine.”
“Ohmygod, do you need a quarter?” Dawn opened her handbag and peered inside. “I was just coming from getting my nails done and I thought I saw someone familiar. I almost never have coins on me but let me see.” Dawn was wearing gold platform flip-flops with little jewels on the straps, and her toes were painted a spirited pink. It had been so long since Sherri had had her nails done that it almost hurt to look at Dawn’s toes. What Sherri wouldn’t give to soak her feet in a warm tub and have somebody rub them with a pumice stone.
“It’s fine,” said Sherri, smiling through gritted teeth. “I got it.”
“You sure?” Dawn crept closer to Sherri and whispered, “Do you not have a washing machine in your place?”
“I have a washing machine,” said Sherri untruthfully. “I just need to wash something big, that’s all.” She smiled a hard, bright smile and turned back to the machine. This was not, she told herself, going to be the quarter that broke the camel’s back.
“Hey, you should come to barre class tomorrow,” said Dawn. “Nine fifteen. A bunch of us go.” She looked again at the washing machine. “Give me your number and I’ll text you the details. If you’re new to town, I’m pretty sure the first class is free!”
11.
The Squad
“She was crawling around on the floor,” Dawn told us later. She said she felt sorry for Sherri Griffin! Scrambling on her hands and knees in the Laundromat for a quarter. Who knew the state of that floor?
(We certainly don’t—we don’t go to the Laundromat.)
“You felt sorry for her, but not sorry enough to walk by and pretend you hadn’t seen,” said Tammy. The conversation stopped for a moment. But that was Tammy for you, you couldn’t always be sure when she was joking and when she was serious.
Dawn and Tammy have never gotten along perfectly; it went back to a beef that Dawn’s daughter Avery and Tammy’s daughter Izzy had back in second grade, smoothed over but never really forgotten. Dawn gave Tammy a look and said she would have been happy to give Sherri Griffin a quarter but she simply didn’t carry cash anymore. And certainly not coins. Everything is credit cards or Venmo these days.
“I told her she should try barre class tomorrow,” said Dawn. “Why not, right?” We used to go to a different barre class, but we’d recently switched. And ever since we’d switched, Rebecca had stopped going. We didn’t know why.
Tammy said, “Okaaaaay,” but didn’t look too happy about it.
12.
Sherri
All through the barre class, Sherri chewed the inside of her cheek to keep herself from screaming. It. Was. So. Hard. And it was the strangest kind of hard. Sometimes you scarcely moved at all, you did strange swingy things with your hips, you picked up teeny tiny weights. But by the time they’d done their damage, you felt like you were holding two four-ton concrete pilings in each hand.
In the first section (“arms”), she thought she was going to throw up. In the second (“quads”), pass out. By the time they got through glutes and abs to the stretching, at the end, she didn’t even have the energy to lie down flat on the mat, the way all the other women were doing. “Savasana,” apparently. She just slunk out the door and made her way on quivering muscles to her car.
It was difficult to explain the sensation that had come over Sherri during the barre class—it was a feeling of helplessness, of haplessness, such as she hadn’t experienced in a very long time, not since she’d been forced to play volleyball in high school gym class. (“Look where you want the ball to go, Sherri!” the gym teacher had cried again and again. “Not where you’re afraid it’s going!”) Sherri had never, ever gotten the hang of volleyball. Nor badminton. Really, anything with a net. And now, apparently, anything with a barre as well. In her old life, of course, she’d been curvier. And if she got too curvy, there was good old-fashioned dieting. A home gym, although Bobby used that more than Sherri.
It was some time later that she fully felt the sting of her failure and her exclusion. She had stopped in to pick up Katie’s summer reading book at the lovely little bookstore on State Street. She peeked in the window of the coffee shop next door and saw the whole group, bent over their lattes and cappuccinos, talking earnestly. Her cheeks burned, and she ducked her head, turning away from the window.
She thought she’d navigated the most difficult experiences of her life already, before she and Katie had arrived here. Now, with her legs about to give out on her, looking at these women whose daughters controlled the incoming sixth grade, she wondered if her biggest challenges might still be coming.
There had been talk of a lunch table. Katie had to get a seat at that lunch table.
She turned around and almost ran into another woman, the woman who had been kind to her at the restaurant. She combed her mind for the name.
“Rebecca,” said the woman. “Morgan’s mom? We met briefly at the beach, and then at dinner.” Rebecca’s eyes flicked toward the coffee shop and back to Sherri. Instantly Sherri understood. Either by her own choice or the choice of others, she hadn’t been included either.
“Hey, Morgan and I are planning on going to the beach today. Are you free? You and your daughter should come.”
Rebecca offered to pick up Sherri and Katie, explaining that she already had a parking pass to get onto the reservation and it would be silly for Sherri to pay the parking fee. Sherri didn’t know what “the reservation” was until they arrived; apparently it was a state-owned beach with a campground and miles of parking for which you could use the special pass. Nothing to do with Indians, as Sherri had initially thought. Oh, she had so much to learn.
Sherri found out a few things about Rebecca right off the bat, after they settled themselves into their beach chairs (Rebecca had brought one for Sherri) and watched the girls run off with boogie boards. Rebecca worked in a nearby town as a second-grade teacher. Her older daughter, Alexa, was almost eighteen, headed to Colby in the fall.
In Sherri’s old life her best friends had been the wives of the guys Bobby worked with; they’d been tossed together by circumstance more than temperament or choice. Jennifer with the stables. Lauren with the acrylic nails. Amber with the indoor swimming pool. She’d sometimes wondered what it would have been like to choose her own friends, women she’d met at work (difficult, since Sherri didn’t have a job) or in a book club (impossible; Sherri had never been in a book club). She hadn’t made a friend from scratch in a very long time—since high school, really, and she’d lost touch with most of those friends when she’d started up with Bobby. None of her friends had liked Bobby.