My grandmother lived in a big house on a ghost of a road at the end of which lay the Atlantic Ocean. Her house had once been an inn, was reputed to be haunted, and had been purchased for eleven thousand dollars in the late 1940s. Once a year, from wherever we were living—Baltimore, New Orleans, Minnesota—my family made the trek back for summer vacation. The place was always the same. Always the same bright green grass, the big gray front porch, the huge elms, flowering privet and roses and salty air, always the beach at the end of the road. Always summer.
At Bigmom’s the smell of camphor and old books mingled with whatever was in the oven. There was always something good going on in her kitchen. The first thing I did when we arrived was run and look in her icebox. There (as I’d hoped) were glass ramekins filled with custard, each with a sprinkling of nutmeg. This silky treat was my favorite, and I was allowed to have two or even three in a row. Sometimes she made applesauce, hard green apples cut up and cooked in orange juice, which she pressed through a fine sieve. This thin, delicious substance was served with heavy cream. Her recipe for fudge, now lost, contained the instructions “Cook until the bubbles look as if they don’t want to burst.” My mother poured it over marshmallows. On the back of the old stove was a pot of broth, thick chunks of beef cooking with rice in water. Even though this was meant for Winston, the ancient, ailing English bulldog, I would stand at the stove and secretly eat spoonful after spoonful.
The earliest aroma of the day was Bigmom’s coffee percolating at five thirty, and I tiptoed down the wide front stairs and into her kitchen, where I sat in the old rocker (now in my living room) and talked, about what I can’t remember. For an hour, my grandmother was all mine. She let me have a cup of coffee with sugar and cream, and I felt alive with the possibilities of what life might be like for me. I guess this was because she appeared to take me seriously. Our coffee was accompanied by buttered toast cut into long strips she called soldiers.
When the rest of the household woke up, we kids went to the beach. We grew up there as much as anywhere, on that beach, in that water, stopping for lunch at noon, eating our chicken sandwiches—white meat, plenty of butter and salt, the crusts cut off the bread—or red onion sandwiches on tiny rounds of rye, hard-boiled eggs, everything eaten with the sand you could never quite keep off.
When the sun was over the yardarm, we trudged our sunburned selves back down Indian Wells Highway to her house. Interesting grown-ups were drinking their pink gins in the library; to the left was the parlor, filled with mysterious objects under glass domes and always as hushed as church. We’d race one another to the shower (her upstairs bathroom had a skylight with an old metal chain) and then back downstairs, avoiding the room where our parents were happily occupied. Our winter lives were harder. Schools and cities changed; almost as soon as we got settled somewhere, we were moving again. But summer was always summer.
My grandmother died and the house was sold, but for years and years afterward, whenever I returned to Amagansett, I felt at home. This was where I belonged. Anytime I walked down that half mile of road to find the ocean glittering at the end, I was a child.