Chapter 5 #4
It took a total of five vehicles to carry them all to the beach.
They could have managed with fewer, but Red insisted, as usual, on driving his pickup.
How else could they bring everything they needed, he always asked—the rafts and boogie boards, the sand toys for the children, the kites and the paddle-ball racquets and the giant canvas shade canopy with its collapsible metal frame?
(In the old days, before computers, he used to include the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica.) So he and Abby made the three-hour trip in the pickup, while Denny drove Abby’s car with Susan in the passenger seat and the food hampers in the rear.
Stem and Nora and the three little boys came in Nora’s car, and Jeannie and Jeannie’s Hugh started out separately from their own house with their two children, though not with Hugh’s mother, who always spent the beach week visiting Hugh’s sister in California.
Amanda and Amanda’s Hugh and Elise traveled on a whole different day—Saturday morning instead of Friday afternoon, since Amanda always had trouble getting away from her law office—and they stayed in a different cottage, because Amanda’s Hugh couldn’t tolerate what he called the hurly-burly.
None of the dogs came. They were all boarding at Penpals.
The house the Whitshanks rented every summer stood right on the beach—a comparatively uncrowded stretch of the Delaware coast—but it wasn’t what you’d call luxurious.
The walls were tongue-and-groove, painted a depressing pea-soup green; the floorboards were so splintery no one dared go barefoot; the kitchen dated from the 1940s.
But it was big enough for all of them, and far homier than the glittering new mansions with giant Palladian windows that had popped up elsewhere along the shore.
Besides, Red could always use a few fix-it jobs to keep him occupied.
(He wasn’t a natural vacationer.) Even before Abby and Nora had unpacked the food, he had happily catalogued half a dozen minor household emergencies.
“Will you look at this outlet!” he said.
“Practically dangling by a thread!” And off he went to the truck for his tools, with Jeannie’s Hugh not far behind.
“The next-door people are back,” Jeannie called, stepping in from the screen porch.
Next door was almost the only house as unassuming as theirs was, and the people she was referring to had been renting it for at least as long as the Whitshanks had been renting theirs.
Oddly enough, though, the two families never socialized.
They smiled at each other if they happened to be out on the beach at the same time, but they didn’t speak.
And although Abby had once or twice debated inviting them over for drinks, Red always voted her down.
Leave things as they were, he told her: less chance of any unwelcome intrusions in the future.
Even Amanda and Jeannie, on the lookout during the early days for playmates, had hung back shyly, because the next-door people’s two daughters always brought friends of their own, and besides, they were slightly older.
So for all these years—thirty-six, now—the Whitshanks had watched from a distance while the slender young parents next door grew thicker through the middle and their hair turned gray, and their daughters changed from children to young women.
One summer in the late nineties, when the daughters were still in their teens, it was noticed that the father of the family never once went down to the water, spending the week instead lying under a blanket in a chaise longue on their deck, and the summer after that, he was no longer with them.
A muted, sad little group the next-door people had been that year, when always before they had seemed to enjoy themselves so; but they did come, and they continued to come, the mother taking her early-morning walks along the beach alone now, the daughters in the company of boyfriends who metamorphosed into husbands, by and by, and then a little boy appearing and later a little girl.
“The grandson has brought a friend this year,” Jeannie reported. “Oh, that makes me want to cry.”
“Cry! What for?” Hugh asked her.
“It’s the … circularity, I guess. When we first saw the next-door people the daughters were the ones bringing friends, and now the grandson is, and it starts all over again.”
“You sure have given these folks a lot of thought,” Hugh said.
“Well, they’re us, in a way,” Jeannie said.
But you could see Hugh found that hard to understand.
On the Friday that the Whitshanks arrived, only the men and the children went down to the water.
The women were busy unpacking and making beds and organizing supper.
But by Saturday, when Amanda and her family showed up, they’d all settled into their routine of a full morning on the beach, and lunch at the house in their sandy swimsuits, and then afternoon on the beach again.
The canvas canopy sheltered the white-skinned Whitshank grown-ups, but the in-laws sat brazenly in the sun.
Stem’s three little boys challenged the breakers to bowl them over but then ran away at the last minute, shrieking with laughter, while Stem stood guard at the water’s edge with his arms folded.
Amanda’s Elise, storky and pale in a tutu-like swimsuit, stayed high and dry on a corner of the blanket underneath the canopy, but Susan and Deb spent most of their time diving through the waves.
Susan was fourteen this summer—Elise’s age, but she seemed to have more in common with thirteen-year-old Deb.
Both she and Deb were children still, although Deb was a skinny little thing while Susan was more solidly built, waistless and nearly flat-chested but with something almost voluptuous about her full lips and her large brown eyes.
The two of them had a bedroom to themselves this year.
Elise used to bunk with them rather than in her parents’ cottage, but not any longer.
(She’d gotten stuck up, Deb and Susan claimed.) Alexander was mostly on his own as well—too young for the girls and too sedentary for Stem’s boys.
Mostly he stayed seated at the water’s edge, letting the surf froth up and then ebb around his soft white legs, except for when his father coaxed him into a game of paddle ball or a ride on a raft.
Elsewhere on the beach, teenagers built giant sand castles, and mothers dipped their babies’ bare feet in the foam, and fathers threw Frisbees to their children. Seagulls screamed overhead, and a little plane flew up and down the coastline, trailing a banner that advertised all-you-can-eat crabs.
Amanda and Amanda’s Hugh didn’t seem to be getting along.
Or Amanda wasn’t getting along; Hugh appeared cheerfully unaware.
Anything he said to her she answered shortly, and when he invited her to take a walk on the beach, she said, “No, thanks,” and turned the corners of her mouth down as she watched him set off on his own.
Abby, sitting next to Amanda but outside the canopy, under the sun, said, “Oh, poor Hugh! Don’t you think you should go with him?
” (She was eternally monitoring her daughters’ marriages.) But Amanda didn’t answer, and Abby gave up and went back to her reading.
A stack of trashy magazines had been discovered beneath the TV, no doubt left behind by a previous renter, and they had passed through the hands of her granddaughters and then her daughters and ended up with Abby herself, who was leafing through one now and tsk-ing over the silliness.
“All this excitement about could so-and-so be pregnant,” she told her daughters, “and I don’t even know who so-and-so is!
I’ve never heard of her.” In her skirted pink swimsuit, her plump shoulders glistening with suntan lotion and her legs lightly dusted with sand, she looked something like a cupcake.
She hadn’t ventured into the water at all so far, and neither had Red.
In fact, Red was wearing his work shoes and dark socks.
Evidently this was the year when the two of them were declaring themselves to be officially old.
“I remember when I first met him, I thought he was a jerk,” Amanda told Denny.
She must have been referring to Hugh. “I had that apartment on Chase Street with a garbage chute at the end of the hall, and I kept finding bags of garbage just sitting on the floor around the chute, not sent down the way they should have been. And poking out of the bag I’d see beer bottles and chili cans, things that should have been put in the recycling bin.
It made me furious! So one day I taped a sign to a bag: WHOEVER DID THIS IS A PIG. ”
“Oh, Amanda! Honestly,” Abby said, but Amanda didn’t seem to hear her.
“I don’t know how he knew it was me,” she told Denny, “but he must have. He knocked on my door and he was holding my sign. ‘Did you write this?’ he said, and I said, ‘I most certainly did.’ Well, he put on this big charm act. Said he was terribly sorry, it wouldn’t happen again, he didn’t know the recycling rules and he hadn’t sent the bag down the chute because it wouldn’t fit, blah blah—as if that were any excuse.
But I admit, he won me over. You know what, though?
I should have paid attention. There it was, all spelled out for me from the beginning: This is a man who thinks he’s the only person on the planet. How much clearer could it have been?”
“So, now does he recycle?” Denny asked.
“You’re missing the point,” Amanda said.
“I’m talking about his nature, the very nature of the man.
It’s all about what’s expedient, for him.
He’s just arranged to sell the restaurant to someone for next to nothing, for a song, merely because he’s bored and he wants to go into something new. Can you believe it?”
“I thought you approved of the something new,” Denny said. “I thought you said it was brilliant.”