Do you hold too much inside?

Perhaps you were told as Beth Ellen, nicknamed Mouse, was as a child, “The importance of remaining a lady at all times cannot be overestimated.” Or “Ladies never lose control.” Or “There is no sign as ugly as the human face in anger.” Or any number of other things that all mean, “Don’t get angry.”

This book resonates with me because my mother also taught me that anger was not a permissible emotion. Even as a very young child, when I experienced these difficult emotions, I hid them and acted out in other ways. Many of us do. A male colleague at work did something once that irritated me. He came to talk to me about it and remarked that I seemed angry. “Oh no,” I said, “not angry; just hurt.” He challenged me to at least own my anger. I kept insisting I wasn’t angry until he finally left my office. Then I thought about what he had said and realized he was right: I wasn’t just angry; I was furious – and with good reason! I reflected on that conversation a lot after that and tried to admit – at least to myself – when I was angry.

And yet, all through Covid, we all replied, when asked how we were doing, “Fine. I’m fine.” when deep down we were furious. Furious at a situation out of our control. Furious at officials who made things worse. Furious at stupid people who refused to take basic precautions and put others at risk. Furious at people who used it as a political football. Furious at myself for choosing, in February of 2020, not to visit my elderly father, who had just moved into a care facility with Parkinson’s, because I could do that later, maybe in May… and then it was too late.

But “Fine, I’m fine” we replied when people asked how we were doing. While we put on weight, started taking blood pressure medications, disappeared down crazy rabbit holes online, became shut-ins, formed new addictions. And some of us jumped off buildings with babies in our arms because, although we kept saying fine, we were fine, we were not.

In The Long Secret, Beth Ellen lives with her wealthy grandmother. Beth Ellen’s grandmother is old money, Her house in the Hamptons is not just huge, and peopled with servants up the wahzoo, it has extensive grounds covered in smooth green lawns punctuated with summer houses and a long driveway with a gate to keep people out. But during the summer, Beth Ellen runs wild, as we children did in those days did, disappearing from the house on our bikes from sunrise to sunset, the adults having no idea where we were. Beth Ellen spends all day, every day, disappearing with her friend Harriet.

That’s Harriet, from Harriet the Spy, which The Long Secret is a sequel to.

I wasn’t a Harriet the Spy fan as a little girl. I don’t think I even read it until I was an adult. In fact, I’m pretty sure I read The Long Secret first and then read Harriet the Spy. As a character – in Harriet the Spy – Harriet and her world felt inaccessible to me. I found Harriet irritating and unsympathetic as a character, the world she inhabited seemed weird to me – broken – and I didn’t really care about what happened to her or to anyone else in the book. In my mind, she is much better as a supporting character, as she is in The Long Secret, where her spying on people is used to move Beth Ellen’s plot forward.

In The Long Secret, Harriet spies on people to discover who is leaving poison pen notes for people, little one-liner notes, mostly quotes like “NO MAN CAN SERVE TWO MASTERS” which is the note left for the chauffeur who works for Beth Ellen’s grandmother and moonlights as a limo service with the grandmother’s car. Harriet is fascinated by the notes, determined to find out who has received them, what each note is referring to, and who is writing them, and she drags Beth Ellen into her investigation.

What goes unsaid is that whomever is writing the notes must be as good at spying as Harriet is, to know all these secrets that they’re putting in the notes. Perhaps that’s the real reason that Harriet is obsessed with solving the mystery: to know who is treading on her territory.

At first Beth Ellen is content to be towed about in Harriet’s wake, following her to spy on the man who runs the local inn – Beth Ellen has a crush on him for no particular reason other than she is at the age where you get crushes on inappropriate people – and on a southern family with strange children their age who has just moved to town. She lets Harriet chart the course for their adventures.

But then Beth Ellen gets distracted by the return of her mother – Zeenie – who has lived abroad for years, since Beth Ellen’s parents divorced. Zeenie is, to put it mildly, a piece of work. For some reason, she has decided that the time has come to take over Beth Ellen’s life, send her to finishing school, and launch her into the high-end European society that Zeenie inhabits, until Zeenie can arrange an appropriate marriage for Beth Ellen. The kid is, what? 12? and her mother is planning an arranged marriage for her and a life in a jet set society? Beth Ellen’s grandmother allows this because she wants Beth Ellen to make the decision about whether to continue living with “an old woman,” or spend time with her mother.

One of my favorite parts of this book is when Harriet’s mother, who also grew up summering in the Hamptons, meets Zeenie. Zeenie condescends to reminisce over the summer she dated Harriet’s father when they were both teens (“Les histoires d’enfance,” she sighs). She pretends not to remember Harriet’s mother, “I don’t seem able to place you… Were you there… around the club, I mean?” and Harriet’s mother replies sweetly, “Oh yes. But I was much younger, of course.”

The bitchy interplay among the adults in this book is something else. I wonder how much girls reading it catch on or if it’s just there to entertain any adults who might be reading the book aloud to their kids – parents used to do that; do they still? – because I can’t imagine young readers getting this interplay. Harriet, who witnesses this exchange, certainly does not. She understands that there’s something happening that she doesn’t understand, but she doesn’t get what it is and her mother refuses to explain.

The children and the adults in this book inhabit two different worlds, in much the same way that Zeenie and her crowd inhabit a world different from that of Harriet’s parents or Beth Ellen’s grandmother. Another world is added when Janey, Harriet’s friend from the city, comes out for the weekend. Beth Ellen goes to the same school in the city as Harriet and Janie, but she’s not friends with Harriet in the city; only when Harriet comes out to the Island, so hanging out with Janie is new for Beth Ellen.

Some of the best scenes occur when all these different worlds collide, causing sparks. The fabulously affluent with the merely wealthy with the poor. The jet set with the locals. Old money with new. Janie with Beth Ellen and Harriet. Beth Ellen and some new friends she’s making, with Harriet.

Things are ripe for an explosion of some sort and, when it comes, it takes you by surprise and is surprisingly cathartic for the character and for the reader. Even Beth Ellen’s grandmother has to admit, “There are times when we must express what we feel even if it is anger… If we don’t know what we are feeling, we get into trouble.”

This is a great book to read if you haven’t been feeling your anger. Even though it’s a children’s book and you may be pretending really hard to be a grown up, there’s still a little Beth Ellen inside who needs to hear what it’s saying.

My copy is falling apart; I’ll have to find a new one.