The Rumpus: Part 3

In which five Somervilles (plus one stowaway) make a secret trip to the Youbou General Store.

Find Part 1 here, and Part 2 here.

“This was not the reaction I was expecting," said Mawney from the backseat, raising her voice to be heard over the music.

“Seriously!” said Claire. “What's their problem? Maybe they don’t see us?”

“How could they not, though?” I replied. “I mean…maybe it isn’t loud enough? Maybe they’re just not getting it. Let's turn it up and try again.”

I put the Volvo in reverse and awkwardly backed down the narrow lane, trying not to hit any cars or stray garbage cans. (This was the second time today that I’d had to reverse my way down a narrow road, and I was getting quite good at it.)

Back in place at the lane’s entrance, we restarted the song (“Move B*tch” by Ludacris) and cranked the volume all the way up.

The station wagon felt electric, buzzing with the nostalgic familiarity of five Somerville sisters, bodies squeezed together and overlapping the same way they always had. It had the familiar excitement of old family road trips: bright bursts of laughter and the occasional squabbles. Stomachs sore from laughter. Bass thumping like heartbeats.

“Okay!” Lizzie shouted giddily over the music, “Let’s gooooo!”

I shifted into drive, slid low in my seat, hung my arm out the window, and began cruising slowly down the narrow road parallel to the pickleball court. (If you’ve seen Bridesmaids, it was basically the scene where Annie and Helen drive back and forth in front of the cop, trying to get his attention.)

(And if you haven’t seen Bridesmaids, please watch it immediately)

Ludacris blared from the car speakers as the five of us bounced in our seats to make the Volvo hop, singing at the top of our lungs, voices hoarse and happy:

“CAUSIN’ CONFUSION, DISTURBING THE PEACE! IT’S NOT AN ILLUSION, WE RUNNIN’ THE STREEEETS!”

When we got to the chorus, we sang even louder, laughing so hard we could barely get the words out, yet, to our dismay, the pickleball players stayed resolutely focused on their game.

It was only when I started honking obnoxiously along to the beat that Mom finally looked up at the spectacle and made a quick gesture with her paddle, somewhere between a wave and a shooing motion. Sean gave a half-hearted nod of acknowledgment. Mike and Liam never even took their eyes off the ball — they were a little too focused if you ask me. 

"What the hell is going on?" Lizzie cried, “This is objectively hilarious!” 

She turned down the volume, thoroughly deflated, and I began to back up again, Ludacris’ sweet rhymes replaced by the sound of tires crunching on gravel and our disgruntled muttering.

This milquetoast reaction was a far cry from the heroes’ welcome we'd envisioned when we hatched this plan — we had pictured Mom waving with joy, our partners swarming the car, everyone doubled over with laughter at our charming antics.

We thought they’d ask questions about our trip, flood us with inquiries about our adventures. Maybe even shed a tear or two. Would that have been too much to ask?

After all, we’d been gone almost half an hour. 

---

The pickleball drive-by had started with a candy craving.

It was day four or five of the Rumpus. We’d eaten dinner and were lounging around, reading, chatting, and getting the kids ready for bed. I was feeling antsy and craving something sweet, so I decided to sneak out and go to the nearest store in a town called Youbou.

Candy runs are always more fun with a friend, so I sidled up to Mawney, who was wiping counters in the kitchen.

“Hey, Poops,” I whispered, a little too close to her ear. “Want to come to Youbou and get some candy?”

Her eyes went wide. “Now?” she asked.

“That’s right. You in? Come on, it’ll be fun!”

I knew she’d say yes. Luring Mawney is never hard. As the baby of the family, we’d bullied her into submission far too many times for her to put up much of a fight.

At this point, Lizzie, always with a finely tuned spidey sense for shenanigans, had noticed us conspiring in the kitchen, tiptoed over, and stuck her head between us.

“Whisper, whisper, whisper,” she said, “What are y’all plotting over here?”

“We’re doing a candy run to Youbou. Wanna come?”

Lizzie looked at the clock and hesitated. “It’s almost Owen’s bedtime,” she said. “Let me just talk to Eric-”

”NO!” Mawney and I hissed at the same time. We knew she'd feel bad and stay behind if she thought about it for too long.

“No,” I continued, more calmly this time, trying to summon my older sister authority (as much authority as you can muster, that is, as an adult woman whispering in the kitchen about a late-night candy run.) “Don’t ask. Let’s just go. He’ll figure it out!”

Lizzie looked doubtful.

“I don’t know. Maybe I’ll-”

“Let’s just go,” Mawney repeated brightly. “He’ll figure it out!”

“We can get more Caesar mix!” I added, hopefully.

The only thing that comes close to how much Lizzie loves her son is how much she loves a good Caesar. She was in.

Claire was sitting in the living room nearby, we grabbed her, too, and made hushed plans to get our stuff and meet outside in five minutes.

Sneaking out of a Somerville family gathering isn’t necessarily required, but it makes life much easier. If I’d made a general announcement, everyone would have wanted to come, or they’d have sent us with long lists of things to pick up. We’d end up with two or three carloads and spend ages waiting on this person or that. The kids would inevitably overhear and want to come, too, and then the parents would have to say no because of sugar and car seats and bedtimes, and these conversations would take so long, and everyone would take forever running around trying to get organized, that the whole vibe of the thing would have been lost.

In these situations, it’s much easier to make an Irish exit. (And fitting, too, since we’re Irish on my mom’s side.)

So, under the cover of late evening, the four of us snuck out and met at my old Volvo station wagon. There was no earthly reason that four grown women making a quick trip to the store fifteen minutes away should feel so exciting, but it did.

It felt somehow sneaky and clandestine like we were shedding the skins of our wife and mother and adult selves to become teenagers again — sneaking out and keeping secrets. Driving around in the dark.

We were giddy and giggly as we got settled; I handed Lizzie my phone and asked her to choose some music. With a few quick taps, the familiar first notes of “Roll Out” started playing through the speakers.

(I’ve embedded it here so you can replicate the vibe.)

I backed out of the driveway and gunned it up the winding gravel road to the main street, windows down, sunroof wide open, music blasting.

Me and my homies, so drop that/We rollin’ on 20s with the top back.

One thing you might not know about Lizzie is that she remembers every word to every song—even the fast-rapping parts. I don’t know how she does it! I might seem like I know the words, but I always start overconfident and end up deeply humbled, mumbling my way through most lines, then hitting the last word too loud to make it seem like I know what I'm doing: “Now where’d you get that vmsnhrhmmmhmm mmhmm with them DIAMONDS IN IT? Where’d you get mhmmnn mmm hmmm with them WINDOWS TINTED?”

Not Lizzie, though. She’s on it the whole time. Tonight was no different. Perched in the passenger seat, she was rapping like Ludacris himself, if Ludacris was a thirty-seven-year-old white woman who once made Twizzlers from scratch: “Who them girls you be with when you be riiiidin’ through? Man, I ain’t got nothing to prove, I paid my dues, breakin’ the rules, I shake fools while taking a cruise!”

Lizzie also has fantastic taste in music. None of us has terrible music taste, necessarily, but it’s just very different. For what felt like a solid decade, for example, if you put Hilary in charge of the speaker, we’d inevitably end up listening to cumbia. (And cumbia is great! It's great. Just maybe not quite the vibe we were going for at this particular moment.)

Shit. Shit!

Hilary.

I stopped the car and killed the music.

“We forgot Hilly.”

There was a pause as we all looked at each other. I could almost hear the internal debate we were all having. We aren't going to be that long. We could bring her a treat? She might not even want to come anyway.

But there’s an unspoken etiquette about these things. If it was just two of us going, or three, excluding a sister or two was fine. But all four of us leaving one sister behind? That’s a real jerk move. Inexcusable. Unforgivable. A slight that would be brought up for years to come. One that would likely be repaid, with interest.

“We have to go back,” said Lizzie, firmly. (She’s also the most tender-hearted.)

The gravel road was too narrow to turn around, so I started reversing down the hill while Claire and Mawney shouted helpful instructions in all caps from the backseat.

Lizzie called Hilary as we backed our way down the driveway, and she ran outside a few seconds after we pulled up, breathlessly adjusting a captain’s hat over her dark curls. (Something you might not know about Hilary is that she always has a hat, and it always looks fantastic, which is rude considering that some of us can't even find one hat that we look good in.)

I turned around as she clambered into the backseat and started to say, “I’m so sorry we forgot y-” but Mawney cut me off with a glare. “WE NEVER LEFT YOU. YOU WERE ALWAYS HERE.” she loudly corrected me.

“Right!” I repeated, laughing. “We never left you! You were always here!”

Hilly rolled her eyes and buckled her seatbelt. Lizzie restarted the song. We tore out of the driveway once again, sunroof open, wind on our faces. Wild and unencumbered and free.

Now tell me who’s your HOUSEkeeper? What you keep in your HOUSE? What about diamonds and gold? Is that what you keep in your MOUF?

We love Liam, and we love our various spouses and children, and we love each other’s spouses and children, too, but there is something undeniably magic that happens when it’s just us five sisters.

No one else is better at making an adventure out of the ordinary; and memories out of the mundane. No one else can create this kind of environment, cracking with life and laughter and a ferocious kind of love: rapid-fire conversation, dozens of asides and roasts and inside jokes. A party on wheels.

There’s got to be a name for the five of us like this, the same way they name a murder of crows or a parliament of owls.

A rumble of Somerville sisters. A cluster, a cloister.

We wove our way down the narrow, winding streets, bass thumping, eventually pulling into the gravel parking lot of the tiny Youbou General Store.

If you were there, you would have seen a Volvo station wagon arrive in a cloud of dust, music rattling the windows, stuffed with thirty-something women rapping along to early 2000s bangers. You’d have seen the car doors spill open to release a wild tangle of long legs and short shorts; women doubled over with laughter. You would have seen one of them wearing a captain’s hat slung at a jaunty angle, scurrying behind the store to pee, while the rest loped up the steps and went inside.

A swarm of Somerville sisters. A chaos.

The store was tiny but had everything we needed: candy, chips, and even spicy clamato juice for Caesars. I collected our supplies and headed to the till, chatting with the cashier and apologizing repeatedly when she kept having to re-do the total as various sisters slid “just one more” thing onto the counter, avoiding eye contact with me as they did.

“Mom’s night out?” she said wryly, surveying the scene.

A cacophony of Somerville sisters. A ferociousness.

“Sort of,” Claire replied. “We’re sisters.”

“All of you?”

“All of us.”

---

We didn’t know then, while coasting through the late light of summer, feeling the warm wind on our skin and the bass in our bones, that we had a small stowaway with us—a tiny interloper.

Unbeknownst to us, Mawney had taken a pregnancy test on the second day of the Rumpus. It was positive. She and her husband had debated telling everyone, but it was still so early. They wanted to wait.

A motherhood of Somerville sisters. A Mayhem.

We found out later that they were having a girl.

We didn’t know it then, but she was with us for all of it. She was there as we laughed and sang with our bodies pressed close to each other, familiar as fingerprints. She was there as we piled back into the car, arms filled with snacks, and started the short drive home. We didn’t know it, but she was there. It was the five of us, plus one.

As we pulled up to the house, we saw players on the pickleball court.

“Oh my god, let’s do a drive-by!” I cried. A wild chatter of agreement flooded the car.

A gaggle of Somerville sisters. A spectacle. A social.

We cued up the music, cackling with anticipation.

“This is going to be so good!”