Chapter One Caroline #3
“Maybe if you find a break in your busy and important schedule, we could grab a drink this weekend?”
“Hmm.” Caroline pretended to think. “The Cranes do keep me pretty occupied with all the sailing and ballroom dancing, but I think I can manage.”
They exchanged numbers, and as Caroline walked back to her car, she grinned hugely at every ancient European tourist she passed.
Wow, you really committed to the bit with the Guest of a Crane thing, texted Nina.
He thought it was funny too. He laughed.
Was it a polite laugh?
It would have been a big laugh but we had to be quiet
Yikes. Please tell me you’re doing something normal for your first date
I found a doll museum in Wenham!
You’re killing me.
While the doll museum was tempting, Caroline and Van spent Friday night at the brewery drinking beer, Saturday at Appleton Farms hiking, and Sunday at Van’s house ostensibly getting a pair of binoculars but, in actuality, taking off their clothes and having sex in the middle of the day.
Van’s house was out on the marsh off Jeffrey’s Neck Road with long views out the back, a basketball hoop, and a big screened-in porch.
As Van parked his car and led Caroline inside, she caught a glimpse of herself in the hall mirror.
She had left her long brown hair loose around her shoulders, her cheeks were pink from the cold, and you could just see the outline of her bra through her thin sweater.
“I have two sets of binoculars, but I think you might freeze out there.” Van brought her up the stairs to the bedroom and riffled around in his chest of drawers.
“Why don’t you borrow some extra layers?
” He handed her a long-sleeve thermal and a soft, cream-colored sweatshirt.
Caroline was tired of waiting for Van to kiss her, so instead of taking his shirts to the bathroom, Caroline pulled off her sweater and smiled as Van looked at her with the unbridled delight of a child looking at a birthday cake.
He kissed her and took her to his bed, and Caroline grinned through the whole thing, glad to finally get naked with a boy who didn’t taste like Pabst Blue Ribbon or want her to subscribe to his Substack.
After they finished, as Van dozed in bed in the late afternoon, Caroline wandered the house dressed in Van’s cream-colored sweatshirt, investigating various artifacts and treasures.
His place was neat and masculine, but every bookshelf was full, every windowsill was lined with little clues for Caroline to study.
A pair of long feathers, maybe from a hawk, stuck out of a glass jar on the counter.
Geodes, spilling with purple and white crystals, were arranged in a careful row.
A dried blowfish, spines sharp, mouth open, was perched next to a little dish of shark’s teeth, and beyond that was a fossil showing the ancient outline of a fish.
It was like the home of a very tidy mad scientist.
“Come back to bed,” Van called down from his room, and Caroline skipped back up the stairs, her feet cold from the wooden floors. Van had pulled on a pair of boxers and was sitting propped up against the pillows. He patted the bed next to him for Caroline to climb in.
“I was just looking at your collections.” She crawled over and pulled up the duvet to warm her feet.
“Did you find the fox skull?”
“No?” She looked at him curiously.
“Oh, good. I was worried it would creep you out.” Van grinned.
“Well, I didn’t find it, so we can just pretend you don’t have one.”
“Perfect. I definitely don’t.”
Caroline laughed. “Nah, it’s great. You like what you like.”
“Yeah?”
“Yep. You like plants and animals, books, and beautiful things.”
“I do like beautiful things,” Van said, and jokingly raised an eyebrow at her.
“Smooth.” Caroline winked. “So, what don’t you like?”
“Mayonnaise?” Van suggested.
“What else? Tell me five things you actually hate.”
“Okay.” Van thought for a moment. “Corporate greed. Big oil. Golf. Mint-flavored chocolate. Astrology.”
“Spoken like a true Capricorn.” Caroline nodded seriously, and Van snorted.
“What are five things you hate?” he asked her.
“Hmm.” Caroline thought. “Nepotism. Waiting in a long line for some hyperspecific food item that was featured on TikTok. Bad grammar. People who correct other people’s bad grammar. Sun-dried tomatoes.”
“I believe it’s ‘people whom correct other people’s bad grammar.’ ”
Caroline snickered. “Is this a bad time to tell you that I actually love mayonnaise?”
“No…”
“Mmm, so white and squishy.”
“I’m going to be sick.”
“Sometimes I just squirt it into my mouth.”
“Please tell me you’re kidding,” Van groaned.
“Or eat it straight with a spoon.”
“Caroline, you were literally the perfect woman until this moment.”
“I’m joking!” Caroline pulled Van’s hands off his face. “I would NEVER eat straight mayonnaise!”
“Oh, thank God.”
“But let’s go back to where you said I’m the perfect woman,” Caroline cajoled, and Van kissed her and took off the cream sweatshirt.
Van Whittaker was both the same as guys she’d dated before and also completely different.
He was a passionate environmentalist, a serious person who recycled, who believed in taxes, who tried not to buy new things when he could fix something old.
Caroline liked that he was a grown-up, a real person instead of some impossible man-child.
At the same time, he was utterly unselfconscious, never seeming to care what he was wearing, or if something he liked was objectively uncool.
He didn’t understand celebrities, he listened to the same music he’d liked in high school, his fanciest jacket was a fleece, and he occasionally wore a belt pack around his waist when they went hiking so that he could carry a pair of clippers and collect any invasive species they encountered, like garlic mustard or barberry vines.
He picked up litter when they walked on the beach, empty beer cans or tattered candy wrappers, and once Caroline saw him pick up the plastic applicator of a tampon that had floated in from the sea and carry it in his hand two miles to put it in the trash.
Caroline appreciated that she was a steward of the earth, but even she had her limits, and they hit long before touching a stranger’s tampon.
Van took Caroline hiking along the paths in the woods of Castle Hill, through the cuts in the sand dunes, all along the beach from Cedar Point and Steep Hill down to the end closest to Gloucester and Good Harbor.
There was an old wooden ship, a wreck from a hundred years ago buried deep in the sand, that reappeared when the storms beat the shore.
There were huge tide pools that changed every year, moving with the contours of the beach.
Osprey could be found on Choate Island, piping plovers nested in the fenced-off area by Baker’s Pasture, seals poked their heads up among the choppy waves.
When Van asked her to kayak across the channel from her house on the Neck to Steep Hill she almost laughed.
The kayaking guy kayaked! But it was February and freezing and so instead she asked for a raincheck, and they spent the afternoon making out, playing cards, and drinking hot toddies he made with whiskey and clover honey from Russell Orchards.
He was always doing little things for her, cleaning the mud off her hiking boots, putting a patch over the rip in her screen door, setting ant traps around her kitchen.
He wasn’t even her roommate, but he took care of the cottage like he was.
He introduced her to his friends, a big group of townies who had all grown up in Greenhead and gone to high school together, who seemed to spend every weekend finding different ways to get drunk and wild in a town with only two bars.
Caroline found their clique slightly impenetrable—they were older than her, most of them married with kids, but they drank like college students on spring break and communicated in private jokes and quotes and had strong opinions about sports Caroline couldn’t follow.
Van introduced her to his parents after just a few weeks of dating, and it all happened so suddenly she didn’t even have time to get nervous or obsess over what to wear or bring.
They were on their way to Boston, and he dropped by his parents’ house to pick up his dad’s parking pass.
“He’s a professor at BU and even though he keeps talking about retiring he has access to a really great parking lot right by Fenway Park and so he can’t quit,” Van explained.
Caroline had the ingrained snobbishness of all native New Yorkers, the view that life outside the city was provincial and possibly Republican, but Van’s parents had a Prius in the driveway, NPR on the radio, a copy of The New York Times dismantled on the counter, and Caroline breathed a sigh of relief.
His mother had a chic little gray haircut with Anna Wintour bangs and his father wore round reading glasses with colorful plastic frames.
Unlike Van’s friends, who seemed moderately insane, his parents felt like people she recognized, people who might have been the parents of her high school friends.
His mom made them sourdough toast and scrambled eggs with chopped chives, and they sat around the table and talked about immigration and Ukraine and sustainable fisheries.
When her own parents, Gregory and Gwendolyn Lash, announced their intention to visit Greenhead and see her fellowship cottage, Caroline nearly told Van to avoid them entirely.
Her mother could be demanding and cranky, could pick a fight for no particular reason, and Caroline had visions of Gwendolyn wrinkling her nose at Van’s belt pack of weeds and ocean trash.
“She’s just a difficult person,” Caroline tried to explain. They were curled up on Van’s couch, a fire in the fireplace. “I don’t know if she’s technically a narcissist, but she kind of exists in her own world and can be cutting and rude without really meaning to be?”
“Oh, I’m not too easily offended.” Van shrugged.