When my father purchased this house in the fifties, he got it for a song. I remember to this day how proud he was, telling my mother that he’d bought something set back from the beach, not on the beach. All the views, none of the upkeep, and half the price. Like he’d won. He’d strategized and made his move and was smarter than the rest of the ninnies who perched on the ocean. Of course, there were no homes blocking our view directly across the street from us then, just a small saltbox to the left and the right, catty-corner on either side.
He’d traveled alone to make the deal; my mother had approved on the basis of his description and his enthusiasm and her undying love for anything he did. My father was smart, and he made a wise deal for the time. He figured we’d summer here and his daughters would meet young men here and marry them here. And he was right. Sort of.
Tripp’s family summered all the way on the eastern side, on ’Sconset, but to my parents, it may as well have been Mars. I still remember my mother explaining to a friend perusing real estate on the island: “’Sconset is somewhere you picnic, not somewhere you live.”
To my parents, it was all about access. ’Sconset was too remote, the homes either too sprawling or too twee. Little sheds with roses. Almost like camping, I suppose, or glamping, as Caroline says they call it now. She tells me there’s something called the tiny house movement, and so more and more people flock to ’Sconset every summer to see what is, most assuredly, the world’s best example of it—I have never said ’Sconset and its rose-covered cottages and eastern beaches wasn’t charming in its own way—but the idea of living out there, with all the erosion and the dreadful wind and all those tourists saying “Isn’t it just darling?” was, and is, absurd. I remember my father asking Tripp if he slept on the porch of his cottage or in a hammock. And Tripp laughing heartily, assuring my parents that he slept in a proper bed, with a nightstand and a reading lamp and everything. He didn’t tell them about the single bathroom and the outdoor showering, nor did he tell them about his summer job, working at ’Sconset Market, filling bushel baskets of food to be delivered to the North Bluff. He had a golf cart to buzz around in, or if the customers lived closer, at the larger cottages, sometimes he’d walk, the bushel half-balanced on his head like Carmen Miranda in a golf shirt.
Everyone’s sons were expected to work to some degree; wealthy young men were admired for hard work and forays into entrepreneurship, even in the summer. But these were undertakings like Buzz Harrington’s boat-cleaning business, or Skip Stewart bottling his mother’s Bloody Mary mix. These were jobs that you made you think What a go-getter. I could just hear Mother wondering if Tripp could be taking his menial job from someone who needed it more. You had to leave things for others: the clothes at the thrift shop, the take it or leave it section of the dump, the jobs that an islander would be grateful for performing.
Of course, I was young, and I didn’t think about such things. Tripp was happy, handsome, a good dancer; he was a good conversationalist, a good host who knew how to muddle mint and pour from a cocktail shaker. Those things seemed stylish and, therefore, important. That his happiness and conversation depended on the level of alcohol in his body had not occurred to me. I did not yet know that I could learn to see this, to gauge it like temperature or oil in a car. In the beginning, I suppose, it seemed like his tipsy self was his authentic self because he was drunk on love.
That his family was poor by Nantucket standards—not by anyone else’s, mind you—concerned me not in the slightest. We met at the Independence Day Ball at the yacht club, each of us there with others, catching each other’s eye on the dance floor. He said my hair was so pale and fine that the harbor lights were reflected off it, like I was wearing a headpiece of Christmas lights.
“Like an angel?” I said as I took a drag off his cigarette.
“No,” he said, “more like St. Lucia, with a crown of lingonberry and candles.”
“Lingonberry? Aren’t you exotic.”
“Well, you look Swedish. The feast of St. Lucia.”
“Oh, I’m sure someone in my English family ran off with a Swedish nanny somewhere along the line. You’re rather well-informed about the maiden traditions of other countries.”
“History major,” he said. And that should have been the end of it, I suppose, right there. Who didn’t love history? Good God, we lived with it, the obsession with where we all came from, the pride of our past, the crests and trees and ancestors’ stories whispered to children in the night. My mother loved to tell stories of our Mayflower ancestors, descended from John Smith. But Tripp was always silent about his family; he changed the topic, and of course, we knew his background was different. That his family had arrived later than mine, far later. Was that what spurred his college major, the obsession with why some people end up on the right side of history and some on the wrong?
I thought for a while, even after the children came along and the cocktail hour always seemed to run longer than an hour, that Tripp and I might still beat the odds. That we’d be one of “those couples,” still annoyingly mad for each other, still pinching each other’s rear end, still happy at the end of a long marriage. But that man is gone.
What on earth am I to do with him now? Send him out to golf and hope he doesn’t jump off a cliff into the sea, while I rattle around this big house by myself and try to make new friends with all the awful people who’ve built up across the street, edge to edge, only a sliver of a walkway between them? Thank God for Beryl, Kip, Karen, still up the street, around the corner. Still holding strong against these others.
My father wanted a remove from the water, but oh, what a barrier these fools have created. They hug the cold sand, dug in, braced like a beach umbrella. So close to each other, they almost link arms to fight the breeze and rain and the clouds to keep them from going further. Keep it all, all the fury, all the danger, and yes, all the beauty.
When we sit on our porch, we see the lights in their kitchens, their garages, their fat brown packages from Restoration Hardware and L.L.Bean on their stoops. We watch their new Range Rovers coming and going, their security lights blinking on and off every time a rabbit skitters near. The same way we used to watch the lighthouse, the ferry, the red dinghies bobbing in the blue waves.
Now, instead of wide swaths of a view, there is only an inch of ocean-y blue between houses, a blue that pulses now, bolder and more vibrant than I remember it, fighting to be seen.
And the assault now coming from all sides! That awful man behind us thinking his view is more important than ours, because he has more property, more house, more toys, more gall than anyone I’ve ever met!
Back in my parents’ time, when someone bought a piece of land or, God forbid, renovated—a word we barely knew back then, for who did such things? Who tore apart the core of a house, ripping out its soul, in an attempt to make it better? Is there anything sadder than an oven yanked from a wall, a washer and dryer pulled from a closet, silvery hoses flailing about behind them like space men lost, untethered?—yes, back then when anyone dared to take a project on, we had them over for drinks on the porch, to remind them of our sight lines, to subtly ask them to be sensitive to this view that we all share. And they were. Of course they were!
We all knew each other. We were from different states, yes, and different country clubs, but all of us, up and down the street, were in the Social Register. That was reassuring. There was a time when all of Nantucket was like that in the summer, and that’s part of what people hate about it, but it’s what I loved about it, always, that sameness. And I don’t think that’s wrong. We clammed together; we fished together; our children ran in a tanned and towheaded tribe up and down the beach. We did the same things, yes, but more importantly, we believed in the same things. Or thought we did.
We believed in fresh air and cold, bracing water. We believed in cocktail hour and afternoon tea. We had chairs on our front porches, but we believed in motion, in not sitting still. We believed in growing things, tending things, keeping them up instead of trying always to keep up. We boarded our children in school, but not our dogs. We named our boats, but never our houses. We didn’t believe that bigger and newer was better. Quite the contrary. Older and smaller made us feel best. Cozy and worn down a bit, broken in. The smell of new things felt wrong, plastic, horrifying. Where was the fresh air? Where was the sun bleaching everything fresh? What is this new obsession with new?
This way of life fell out of favor, and people think it’s coming back now, with all the organic farming and recycling and so forth. But it’s not the same. Those people, the farm-to-tablers, and the back-to-nature minimalists I keep reading about—they aren’t like we were. They care so much, think so fervently, too much about everything. We didn’t care; we just believed, and we did. We cared so little! Our insouciance about it all—holes in our clothing, scrapes on our knees—so what? I look at Caroline’s friends, who research everything and think through every little decision, and I think, Wasn’t life so much easier when we didn’t give a rat’s behind, when we didn’t have to know so much?
How things have changed! People don’t wish to know one another. No one cares if they do business with a stranger. Uber, Craigslist, all those things—it’s madness. That’s part of what’s happened in Nantucket, what’s gone on across the street. The problem isn’t renovating so much as it is selling. Once a house leaves a family, once they sell to a stranger, to someone with no history and no understanding of the way things used to be done, well, that was the end. The new people have no interest in the old ways. The proper, decent ways. No. They are selfish; they turn away.
They orient themselves toward the harbor, the vastness of the sea, toward what is out there, not what is in here. Not toward us. They don’t have to look at us, but we have to look at them. And they prefer it that way.
And yes, sometimes, I confess, I sit on the porch watching the clouds gather, the squall forming, the inevitable nor’easters that come in the fall, and I wish it on them. For that is how I have come to think of it: them, and us. Let their slate crack. Let the wind lift all their hand-carved shutters. Let the waves rush into their basements, with their pool tables and their viewing rooms, and let their flat-screen TVs be taken out to sea! I’ll sit here, on the rise above them, and let them take the hit for me, over and over and over again. And that man who lives behind us, that awful, awful man, he was just biding his time, I knew. Just staking his claim until he could leap over my house and go to live on the other side. Well, I would see about that.
After I’d come home and toweled off, I put on my thinking cap. And I got out my trusty old camera.