Saturday Afternoon
“So how ya been, Doc?” Chappy asks as they splutter toward Baxter Road, Bess wedged between him and her mother.
Cissy has her eyes closed and her head pressed against the frame of the car. She keeps emitting small burps, as if she might be sick.
“Fine,” Bess answers curtly. “I’m just dandy.”
“So what brings you to our lovely island all the way from California? Far as I can remember, you haven’t been round since your wedding. And that was, what? Two years ago?”
“Four,” she says.
Chappy whistles.
“Wow. That’s a long time away from your mom.”
“Give it a rest, Mayhew,” Cissy says. “She visits us in Boston and I go to San Francisco at least once a month.”
“You do?” Bess says, and cranes her neck to look at her.
“Anyway, mind your own damned business.”
“Wouldn’t that be a treat?” he says with a snort.
It would be tough for Chappy to mind his own damned business, given that he lives in the gray saltbox directly across from Cliff House. Within shooting distance, as Cissy would say, with some degree of cheer. Chappy’s been their neighbor since before Bess was born, and even if they didn’t live so close, Cissy Codman is impossible to ignore, with that incessant biking, her town-meeting intrusions, and the general propensity to raise hell.
In short, Cissy and Chappy are natural enemies. He: a grotty local, the last commercial fisherman on the island. She: an indulged off-islander trying to screw with the ecosystem and therefore his livelihood. Of course, as Cissy has lived in Sconset (mostly) full-time for over twenty years, she considers herself a local through and through. But the real locals don’t necessarily agree. She is not from there, after all.
Cissy doesn’t help her cause with the Back Bay townhome and tendency to abscond to Boston at the first snowflake, not to mention the millions she collects in bluff-restoration dollars among her Summer People squad. They are saving the shoreline, dontcha know? To benefit residents and visitors alike. Why, they’re downright heroic!
True Sconseters aren’t buying that claptrap, though. In their estimation, off-islanders don’t care about Nantucket. They care about their fancy summer homes. It’s their own stupid fault, too. Locals never would’ve been so idiotic as to build directly on a bluff.
“Minding my own business,” Chappy says, “would be a dream come true. Ya know, you two are pretty feisty for hitchhikers. I’m only gonna pick up dirty hippies from here on out.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Cissy grumbles.
As they drive along in achy silence, Bess wonders if they should’ve biked after all. She has no real beef against Chappy, other than his salty demeanor, but being cordial feels like a direct betrayal of Cissy. Plus, his truck seems to lack shock absorbers. Bess swears her bones are clinking together.
“I assume you’re here to pack up your mom,” Chappy says at last. “Yank her out of that house.”
“Something like that.”
“The fight’s not over,” Cissy reminds them both. “If I have to go down, it’ll be swinging.”
“Oh brother. Lady, I know you see this as a battle royale, an us-versus-them smackdown…”
“How many times do I have to tell you? There is no us or them. It’s we! I’m one of you. I live here! We want the same thing: a better Nantucket.”
“A better Nantucket?” Chappy says, and rolls his eyes. “Better for you. Using your golf-ball money to keep property values sky-high and screw with the environment in the process. I mean, really. Just buy another damned house, why don’t you. Or better yet, go back to America.”
Bess smirks. The hallmark of a true Nantucketer. He views Boston as “America” and the island as something else entirely.
“First of all,” Cissy says, “that is my home. I don’t want another one. Secondly, we sold that company ages ago, as you are well aware. Thirdly, golf balls were the very least of it. My grandfather started his company by reconstituting rubber scraps into usable material. In other words: recycling. Before it was fashionable to do so.”
“Meanwhile, he had a factory on the riverbank, spewing God knows what into the Acushnet.”
“That’s quite enough.”
“So this is fun,” Bess pipes in.
“Listen,” Chappy says. “I don’t much care if your family got their wealth saving orphans or trading them on the black market or in some other way. I don’t care and God doesn’t care. Not even ballsy Cissy Codman and her sacks of cash can fight the hands of time.”
“Ballsy. I appreciate the compliment, really I do, but you already gave this strikingly unexceptional speech two nights ago. We have a plan. Hell or high water, fire or brimstone, I’ll get this done.”
“There’ll be high water all right.”
“In conclusion, as I’ve said so many times before: Fuck off.”
“All right then. You keep your plans. I’ll stay on the side of Mother Nature and of God.”
Chappy cranks the wheel hard left and steers them into his driveway. Bess can almost feel the strength and size of Cliff House at her back. She realizes then that she didn’t even glance its way as they passed. Four years. Chappy is right. It’s far too long.
“Here we are,” he announces, unnecessarily.
Bess takes in a sharp breath.
“Well, thanks,” Cissy says as she leaps out of the cab. “I suppose.”
She heaves her bike from the truck bed. Meanwhile, Bess takes her time in disembarking, first scooting across the cracked leather seat before ultimately sliding down onto the ground.
“Stop dawdling!” Cissy yips.
Bess hears the bike’s wheels crunch on the gravel.
“Good grief, you’ve turned into a bona fide Californian, haven’t you? Heaven help me. Hang loose brah.”
“I’ve literally never heard anyone say that.”
Dr. Bess Codman is indeed dawdling. What she’s afraid to see, not even Bess understands. A lot can happen in a thousand-plus days. Perhaps the home will be as wrecked and keening as Dudley described. Or else it’ll be the same old place, the house even she lived in year-round, for a while, after her life had gone to shit. In other words, the glory days. It’s funny what amounted to problems when you were sixteen.
Alas, Bess can no longer stall, particularly if Cissy has anything to say about it, which of course she will. And so with both eyes squinched closed, Bess shuts the car door. She inhales and twists her torso to the left and then to the right. At last Bess reopens her eyes. She lets her mind swallow the scene.
And there it stands: the inveterate Cliff House. Large. Gray. Shingled. Surrounded by a massive privet hedge. Looking almost like it did before.
“Oh,” she says aloud.
Maybe this isn’t so bad.
Bess takes a few steps forward, and more after that, her knees shaky beneath her. As her toes touch Baxter Road, Bess realizes that although the home resembles its usual self, the ocean seems closer than it’s ever been.
She shuffles onto the white-shelled drive, suitcase dragging behind her. To the left is nothing but a view of the Atlantic. There were once two guest homes in that spot, and Bess expected to see at least one. Cissy told her that “Overflow” was lost about a year ago, but now “Family Room” has vanished with it. To the right looms Cliff House itself, secure for now behind its hedge.
Bess exhales and walks farther up the drive, past her mother’s ancient Land Rover Defender, plastered as it is with bumper stickers from her kids’ colleges. Cissy’s “ACK nice” sticker had been covered up—by Chappy—with an “ACK naughty” one instead. (“Oh, Chappy Mayhew wants naughty?! I’ll show him naughty!”) Bess chuckles, thinking a truck like that beats the heck out of a basket and a bike. Sometimes her mother is in tight supply of that good New England sense she yammers on about.
Suddenly Bess notices the flagpole, or, rather, the lack of one. When she pictures Cliff House, her mind begins with only three things: a big, gray house, the privet hedge, and Old Glory fluttering above it all. Bess abandons her suitcase and rushes through the hedge’s arbored gate and into the side yard.
The flagpole is in fact gone. So are the tennis courts, the outdoor shower, and the storage shack. All of these things, and more, turned to air. Bess’s breath goes thin.
“Jesus,” she gasps.
Cissy is a tenacious old broad, but Chappy Mayhew is right. It’s time to give up on Cliff House. There’s already too much they’ll never get back.