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In memory of Carolyn Reidy
WILD GEESE
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
—Mary Oliver
I’m just a girl in the world.
That’s all that you’ll let me be.
—Gwen Stefani, “Just a Girl”
Prologue
She is fifteen years old that summer, a thoughtful, book-struck girl with long-lashed hazel eyes and a long-legged body that still doesn’t completely feel like her own. She lives in a row house in South Boston with her parents and two sisters, and attends a private school in Cambridge, on a scholarship, where she gets mostly Bs, except for As in English and art. She dreams about falling in love.
One afternoon in May, her mom, who is a secretary for the English department at Boston University, comes home from work with news. One of the professors in her department has two little kids and a house on the Cape. This woman, Dr. Levy, is looking for a mother’s helper for the summer, and thinks that Diana sounds perfect for the job.
Her father is against it. “She’s too young to spend a whole summer away,” he says. “She’ll probably meet a pack of spoiled rich kids and come back with her nose in the air.”
Together, Diana and her mother go to work on changing his mind. Her mother talks about Diana’s college fund, her dreams of the future, how she’ll get to spend every day with a real, live writer, and how the fifteen hundred dollars that Dr. Levy’s offered to pay will more than cover her expenses for the coming school year. Diana, meanwhile, reads every novel she can find that’s set on the Cape, and describes for her father the pristine, golden beaches, sand dunes with cranberry bogs and poets’ shacks hidden in their declivities. She conjures the taste of briny oysters and butter-drenched lobsters, fried clams eaten with salt water–pruned fingers, ice-cream cones devoured after a day in the sun. For Christmas she gives him a coffee-table book of photographs, holding her breath when he flips to the pictures of Provincetown, and the drag queens on Commercial Street, six and a half feet tall in their heels and more beautiful than most women, but her dad only shakes his head and chuckles, saying, You don’t see that every day.
She doesn’t tell either of her parents that what she is most looking forward to is what her sisters have told her about their own summer at the beach—how she’ll be on her own for the first time in her life, free to enjoy the sun, and the beach bonfires, and the boys.
“And you’re going to be in a mansion,” Julia says, her freckled nose crinkling at the memory of the cottage in Hyannis where she’d stayed three years before, sharing a bedroom with the kids, and a bathroom with the kids and the parents, in a one-story house that had smelled like mold. “Truro,” Kara sighs. “You’re a lucky duck.” For Christmas, Diana’s sisters present her with a yellow bikini. It’s neither polka-dotted nor especially itsy-bitsy, but it’s still enough to make her dad harrumph and her mom give a secretive, tucked-up kind of smile.
In the bathroom, Diana tries on the swimsuit, standing on the lip of the bathtub so that she’ll be able to see as much of her body as possible in the mirror over the sink, turning from side to side as she sucks in her stomach and regrets the stretch marks that worm across her thighs. She is fifteen years old and has never been kissed, but she knows that a summer in Cape Cod—on the Cape, as people say—will change that.
When her parents finally tell her she can go, she’s so happy that she throws her arms around them and says, “Thank you, thank you, thank you!”
Her grandmother gives her a hundred dollars—“you’ll need some new things”—and her mother takes Diana shopping. Together, they scour the clearance racks at Nordstrom and Filene’s. Diana packs her Christmas bikini, plus a plain blue tank for actual swimming, a denim romper, and a sundress made of white eyelet cotton, with skinny straps that tie in bows on her shoulders. She brings worn copies of A Wrinkle in Time, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, a collection of Stephen King short stories, and The Mists of Avalon, thinking that the familiar books will be a comfort, wondering if it will feel different to read them in a new place.
The children are Sam and Sarah, four-year-old twins. Mr. Weinberg, their father, is some kind of attorney. He’ll spend his weekdays in Boston, come up to the Cape on Friday afternoons, and leave Monday mornings. Dr. Veronica Levy—“call me Ronnie”—is a real-life novelist, with a doctorate in the Romantic British poets, the subject she teaches at BU. She’s written three novels, and, ten years ago, one of them, the story of a woman leaving an unhappy marriage, was turned into a movie—not a hit, but they still show it sometimes on cable. “I still can’t believe how well that book sold,” Dr. Levy says as they cruise along Route 6, through the Eastham rotary and on toward Provincetown. The road narrows from two lanes into one, a dark ribbon twining its way toward the ends of the earth. “Lots of women out there who want happy endings. I was very lucky.” Diana can’t help gasping when they crunch up the shell-lined driveway and she sees the house, three stories of glass and silvery cedar. “It’s an upside-down house,” Dr. Levy says, and tells her to go ahead and look around—“the kids can help me unload.”
Diana steps inside, breathing the faintly musty scent of a house that’s been closed for the winter. On the ground floor are two bedrooms, each with its own bathroom, and a powder room in between. The larger room, with framed finger paintings and ABC posters on the wall, is for the twins, and the room across the hall, with a queen-sized bed with a blue-and-green-striped comforter, is hers. Her bathroom (her bathroom!) has marble tile floors and a white-tiled shower, and the floors and the towel racks are heated. It’s sparkling clean and looks barely used. As she arranges her handful of toiletries on the counter, Diana can feel her cheeks starting to ache from smiling.
There are two more bedrooms on the second level, including the master suite, where the bed and the bathtub both have stunning views of the bay. The top floor is one enormous room, with a kitchen and dining room on one end and a sprawling living room on the other. Floor-to-ceiling windows surround the room, filling it with light, looking out over the sand and the water, making Diana feel like she’s standing on the deck of a ship. There are sliding doors with decks everywhere—decks off the kitchen, with a grill and a picnic table, decks off the second-floor bedrooms, and a half-moon deck off the living room. She’s brought a camera, the family’s Pentax, and she can’t wait to ask Dr. Levy to take her picture, to show her sisters and her mom where she’s living and how well
it’s all worked out.
“What do you think?” Dr. Levy calls from the kitchen.
“It’s the most beautiful house I’ve ever seen in my life,” she says, and Dr. Levy smiles, looking pleased and flustered.
“When I was about your age, my parents bought this tiny cottage on a dune, a few miles north. They’d rent it out for most of the summer, but every year we’d come and stay for two weeks, all six of us. Some of my happiest memories are in Truro. I always dreamed I’d buy a place here, and bring my kids for the summer.” She hums to herself as she unpacks the groceries, smiling, looking younger, and happier, than she did when they left Boston that morning.
Diana quickly falls into the rhythm of the summer days. She’s on the clock from eight a.m. to three o’clock in the afternoon, Monday through Friday. She sets an alarm for seven thirty so she’ll have time to shower before helping the twins through their morning routines, making sure teeth are brushed and beds are made and breakfasts, which always include fresh fruit, are consumed. Three mornings a week, Dr. Levy drives them to Gull Pond, a freshwater pond at the end of a long, rutted dirt road in Wellfleet, the next town over. The pond, carved out of the earth by a glacier, has clear, fresh water with a white-sand bottom, and it’s ringed by lushly leaved trees. A few docks protrude into the water. People paddle canoes or tack back and forth in sailboats. Kids paddle in the shallow end, putting their faces in the water at their instructor’s word, blowing bubbles. Teenagers sun themselves on the dock.
Dr. Levy stakes out a spot near one of the scrub pine trees and helps Diana get the twins ready for their lessons. Sam is skinny, and speaks with a lisp. He hates the feeling of sunscreen, and whines and tries to squirm away. His sister’s more stoic, patient while Diana dabs the thick white cream on her nose and her cheeks. “Stop being such a baby,” she says to her brother, her hands on her hips.
Dr. Levy kicks off her flip-flops and leaves her cover-up hanging from a protruding branch. In her plain black one-piece suit, she wades out until she’s waist-deep, then submerges herself, dunking her head, standing up with water streaming down her shoulders and back. Once she’s taken the first plunge, she launches herself into the water and swims in a slow, steady freestyle, all the way across the pond and back again.
“What if you get to the middle and you’re tired? Or you get a cramp?” Diana asks. Dr. Levy looks thoughtful, and then a little guilty.
“I really should use one of those personal flotation devices,” she says, half to herself. Then, brightening, she says, “But I’m a pretty good swimmer. Honestly, the only thing to be afraid of are the snapping turtles. And once, I was right in the middle, and something brushed my leg. It was probably just a fish, or a water weed, but I screamed like I was in a horror movie.”
Dr. Levy has the same stretch marks as Diana, plus more on her bosom. There are fine lines around her eyes and dark circles underneath them. She pulls her hair back in a scrunchie most days, and doesn’t seem to notice, or mind, that it’s frizzy. She has a nice smile and an easy laugh, and Mr. Weinberg still looks at her like she’s beautiful. She’s a good mother, too, calm and patient, never yelling (although Diana thinks it’s probably easy to be calm and patient when you’ve got someone to help you most of the day).
At Gull Pond, while the kids are at their lessons and Dr. Levy’s paddling across the pond, Diana sits on the shore with the other nannies and au pairs and mothers’ helpers. Alicia, who’s got short, feathered brown hair and wide-set brown eyes, a curvy figure, and golden-brown skin, is with the Dexters. The previous summer, Mrs. Dexter and the three Dexter kids, plus Alicia, had a place in Nantucket. “Ugh, don’t get me started about Nantucket,” Alicia says, using her fingers to comb her hair back from her face. “Everyone’s white and everyone’s thin. Like, I don’t even think they let fat people off the ferry. They just make you get back on and go back where you came from. I felt hideous!” she says, and the other girls hurry to reassure her that she’s not fat. Maeve, who’s Irish, tall and pale and freckled, with red hair and knobby knees, takes care of the Donegans’ new baby. The previous summer, Maeve worked at Moby Dick’s on Route 6, living in a dorm with thirty other Irish girls employed by the restaurants and hotels on the Outer Cape. Maeve still knows the Moby Dick’s crew, so she tells the other girls about all their parties and beach bonfires, and makes sure they know they have an open invitation.
Marie-Francoise is the Driscolls’ au pair, and Kelly works for the Lathrops, who live in a mansion on the same dune as Dr. Levy. Kelly helps clean, and watches the Lathrop grandchildren when the grandchildren are in residence.
Most days, Diana and Dr. Levy and the kids spend the late mornings and early afternoons by the water, either at the pond or at Corn Hill Beach with its wide stretch of sand and its gentle, lapping waves. Dr. Levy twists an umbrella into the sand, rocking it from side to side to make sure it won’t blow over, and Diana plasters the twins with more sunscreen, then gives her own shoulders and back a more modest coating from the bottle of Coppertone she keeps in her tote. Dr. Levy dons a gigantic red-and-white sun hat and sits in a folding canvas chair with an extra-large iced tea and a novel or a People magazine (sometimes, Diana notes with amusement, she’ll have the People folded up inside of the novel). On Fridays, Mr. Weinberg meets them, bringing them a late lunch of sandwiches from Jams, the convenience store in the center of town, or fried oysters and French fries from PJ’s in Wellfleet. “Oh, I shouldn’t,” Dr. Levy says, helping herself to his fries as the kids come out of the water.
“Feed me like a baby bird!” Sam says.
“Feed me like an animal in a zoo!” says Sarah.
Laughing, Diana gives them chunks of icy watermelon or bites of string cheese or pepperoni, dropping the food from her fingers into their eager mouths. Sometimes, after lunch, the Lewis Brothers ice-cream truck shows up. The driver, a young bearded man with an easy smile, emerges from the olive-green truck and blows a single note on a plastic horn, and the kids, screaming with delight, run out of the water to ask their parents for money. Dr. Levy always obliges. “Don’t tell Daddy,” she says, digging her wallet out of the tote bag and handing Diana a twenty. “If they’ve got that mint cookie, can you get me a tiny baby scoop in a cup?”
By two o’clock, the kids are tired. Diana and Dr. Levy gather up the blankets and towels, the plastic shovels and the pails full of scallop shells and jingle shells. Diana herds the kids into the outdoor shower, using the handheld attachment to spray their swimsuits and their bodies, making them raise their arms over their heads, then bend and touch their toes so she can rinse away every grain of sand.
After showers comes siesta. Diana gets the kids dressed again and puts them down for a nap. Usually they fall asleep immediately, stuporous from their exertions and the sun. Then she’s on her own. “Enjoy!” Dr. Levy says, from her spot on the couch, or behind the kitchen counter. “We’ll see you at dinner.”
Sometimes she takes a book from the crammed shelves in the living room. Each one, when opened, exudes the smell of sea salt and paper and damp. Sometimes she sits on the deck overlooking the bay and writes in her journal, describing the pond or the bay or the beach, the color of the sky at sunset or the sound of Maeve’s accent. Sometimes she paints—she’s brought a travel-sized watercolor kit, and a pad of artist’s paper, and she’s attempted several sunsets and seascapes.
But most days, she puts on her bikini, rubs more sunscreen onto her shoulders, and goes down the six flights of stairs to the beach. For the first two weeks, she strolls back to Corn Hill Beach, where she spreads out a towel and sits in the sun, listening to the cheerful din of kids and parents, the music from a half-dozen portable radios, the sound of instructions, sometimes patient, sometimes exasperated, as a dad tries to teach his kids how to sail a Sunfish or fly a kite. Sometimes one of her nanny friends will be there, and they’ll trade bits of gossip about their families. Diana hears all about it when Marie-Francoise almost gets fired after Mrs. Driscoll found a boy in her be
droom, and when, on a Saturday night in P-town, Kelly spots Mr. Lathrop through the window of the Squealing Pig with a woman who is not Mrs. Lathrop on his lap.
“What are you going to do?” Diana asks, wide-eyed, and Kelly says, “He gave me forty dollars to forget I saw anything.” She shrugs and says, “Turns out, I have a terrible memory.”
One afternoon, Diana rides her bike all the way to Provincetown, almost ten miles along the road that hugs the coastline. She passes the Flower Cottages, which are trim and white with green shutters, each one named for a different flower, the two motels, and the cottage colonies that straddle the line between Truro and Provincetown. When she’s in town, she locks her bike at the library and walks along Commercial Street. She tries not to gawk at the drag queens, and slips into a store that sells vibrators and lubricants and leather harnesses, flavored condoms, and other things, glass dildos and cock rings and anal beads in locked glass cases. She leans over, her breath misting the glass, trying to figure out how each item works, which part goes where, and to what effect. No boy has ever touched her, and at home, with her sister sleeping less than three feet away, she’s too nervous to touch herself.
But now, she’s got a bedroom to herself, a bedroom with a lock on the door, and her shower has a nozzle that she can slip off its post and hold between her legs, adjusting the flow and the pressure until she’s gasping and quivering, limp-limbed and flushed against the tiles, and the water’s gone from hot to warm to cold. Having a wonderful summer, she writes, in the postcards she sends home. Really enjoying myself!
One afternoon, she decides to try to get a look at the Lathrop mansion from the water, so she descends the stairs and starts walking in the opposite direction, toward Great Hollow Beach. She’s wearing her Christmas bikini, with a fine gold chain around her right ankle and her hair spilling loose against her shoulders. The sunshine warms her skin as she splashes through the shallows, and a school of minnows goes darting past, the fish flashing like shadows over her feet.
That Summer Page 1