by John Glynn
I came to the top of a hill and decelerated. The roads were steep and narrow and canalled with big snow banks. I was, for the most part, a cautious driver. I slowed to about ten miles per hour and passed through a covered bridge. I continued downhill, the tires sloshing. On the right side of the road was a steep drop-off with no guardrail. At the next bend, I guided the wheel, but it didn’t respond.
Time elasticized. The back tires fishtailed and floated, the steering wheel stopped responding. I could feel the whole car careening to the right, then skidding to the left. The brakes weren’t working. I had lost all control. It happened in stop motion, my vision flickering. Ahead I could see the sharp drop and a telephone pole.
My only thought, as the car slid off the road, just before it flipped over: This can’t be it.
The Jeep was at rest, tipped over on the passenger side. I was still buckled and hanging sideways, in full-body shock. Somehow I managed to stand up with my feet on the passenger window. I pushed the driver’s door upward and climbed out of the car as one might ascend a manhole. I was still in my socks.
The car was totaled. I was numb and shaking, but had not been hurt. If the car had skidded a few inches to the right, it would’ve struck the telephone pole, and I would have died.
There had to be more, I thought. That couldn’t have been it. That couldn’t have been my whole life, over before it started. There had to be something more.
Chapter Four
The next week, at work, I received an email with the subject “Montauk.” It was from Mike. He had sent it to five of our BC friends.
I worked as an editorial assistant at Scribner, one of the oldest publishing imprints in the city. Our office was located in Rockefeller Center, around the corner from where they filmed The Today Show. In nicer weather I could hear the muted roar of the summer concert series. I had grown up watching The Today Show and still tuned in as I got ready every morning. To a younger me, this job, in this location, would have been the fulfillment of all my dreams. New York was the hub of the world, and I was there.
Over my lunch break I opened Mike’s email. One of my bosses came over as I chomped into my PB&J, asking for a list of sales figures and comparative titles for a potential acquisition. I loved both my bosses and sponged up everything I could from them. They were generous about pulling me into the editorial process, including me on emails with high-profile authors and soliciting my feedback on manuscripts. I admired them professionally, but also liked them as people, and I felt the same level of kinship with my other coworkers. But I hadn’t told any of them about Vermont.
Beyond the deep currents of guilt I felt for destroying a friend’s car, the accident had dislodged something dark within me. I was emotionally unmoored, immensely mortal. Perils lurked around every corner. I pictured being pushed onto the subway tracks or falling off a happy hour roof deck. I went to bed each night afraid that I would die in my sleep. I began to move through the world with a heightened sense of urgency.
The one reason I was alive, I believed, was because of my grandmother. I sensed she had placed a force field around the car, shrouding me from injury. I began a silent dialogue with Kicki, asking her for help. I felt a pressing need to figure things out, and a crippling inability to do so.
I looked up sales figures for four debut coming-of-age novels with male appeal. My boss was considering a manuscript by an author named Nickolas Butler. The novel was called Shotgun Lovesongs. I had read it in one night and loved it. I emailed my boss the sales units. Then I returned to Mike’s email.
Hey Guys,
So we just got a call from our Montauk share house owner, and she’s gotten multiple offers on her house for well over the price we paid last year. I spoke to our realtor and I guess the market is the most competitive it’s ever been.
The owner offered us a first-right-of-refusal, for a very reasonable price if we committed by this Sunday.
I don’t really have the time to look for another house, and I don’t want to risk this not materializing. Caroline, Charlotte, and the rest of the girls are doing a share house again too, so most of our friends will be out there every weekend.
I wanted to gauge your interest now. It will most likely be 25-30 people and the price would be $2,000 for a half share (8 weekends).
I want to manage expectations though. The house is large and can accommodate a lot of people. But occasionally you may have to share a bed or sleep on an air mattress. The house is equipped with a large back deck, a grill, a pool with a diving board and slide. I assume at least 20 people will want to return from last year, which leaves a few open spots. Email me if you’d be interested.
I strongly encourage you to do this because I think you’d have a lot of fun and meet some awesome people in our house.
Let me know,
Mike
That afternoon our managing editor, Perrie, came by my desk. She was from the Philadelphia Main Line. Her best friend from college had grown up with my friend Mike. We had discovered the coincidence the summer before. Perrie had been in the share house and planned to do it again.
“John, I’m telling you. It’s the most fun thing ever. You need to do it. Everyone in the house will love you.”
Perrie was switch-thin, elegant, and constantly cold. She nestled into a long gypsy sweater festooned with cinches. She had bright red hair, like Mike. The summer before, they’d pretended to be siblings.
“Mike sent me an email today,” I said. “He said there are a few open spots.”
“I’m telling you. It’s summer camp for adults.”
“That’s exactly what Mike said. I like the idea of meeting new people.”
“Remember in college how you’d wake up on Saturdays hungover and everyone would meet in someone’s common room and you’d just piece together the night before and laugh and feel connected? That’s what it’s like every day.”
I’d been to Montauk twice since college—sun-slathered weekend trips for friends’ birthdays. The beaches were sweeping and majestic, and the town had a surfery charm. But in the wake of the accident I didn’t feel worthy of such a privilege. Plus I didn’t have the money. I’d sacrificed a savings account and any temporary shot at financial independence for a dream job in a dream city. My parents already helped me with rent. I couldn’t ask them for more.
The days grew colder, the dim light of winter battering down. My friends slipped into hibernation. I went to bed earlier each night, seeking refuge in sleep before the waves of anxiety struck me. The walls of my bedroom seemed to shrink. The air went still, as if poised to disappear.
At night my thoughts turned dark: I was surrounded by friends, but deeply lonely. Time seemed to pass with no meaning. I worried that life would only get worse. That all the good things—friends, family, nice apartment, good job—would eventually disappear, and I would be left with nothing. I was single because there was something wrong with me. Something hardwired into my DNA. Something I didn’t know how to fix. Either that or I wasn’t good-looking. Or couldn’t feign confidence. Or if not one of those things, then something less tangible, some invisible force that veiled my whole being and was entirely exclusive to me. I would die alone. I would never find love. I hadn’t before and never would. I would grow old and be poor and have no one and this would all happen quickly, because life accelerates, just look. Yesterday I was seventeen and now I was twenty-seven.
Thoughts like this occurred without warning, snatching my breath. I attributed them to a nameless ineptitude, an inability to connect with anyone on a profound level. They’d first begun in the months after college. Once they came on I was incapable of rerouting them.
I propped my laptop on a pillow, opened Netflix, and pressed play on The Dick Van Dyke Show. Rob had just brought home two baby chicks for Richie.
In the past two years I had watched every single episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show multiple times. The black-and-white frames sedated me. Each episode followed a set structure of chaste jokes, marital banter
, and physical humor. The formula numbed me like Novocain. I lay there, bathed in the glow of my screen. It was the only way I could fall asleep.
Chapter Five
A week later, I received a card in the mail.
My grandmother, living rent-free at my aunt’s in-law apartment, had managed to accrue a small nest egg in her last few years of life. Her life savings were divided evenly among the sixteen grandchildren.
My mom sent me a Hallmark card with a note explaining the inheritance.
Tucked in the card was a check for $2,000.
I called her immediately. I told her about Montauk.
“Use it for the share,” she said without hesitation.
“I shouldn’t save it?”
“Use it for the share. Kicki would have wanted you to.”
Almost a month had passed, and I still thought about her every day. Kicki visited me in my dreams, and in dream-soaked memories. From the ages of two to five, we lived above her and my grandfather Pop-Pop in a two-family house in Springfield. Kicki would chase me around the chain-link-fenced backyard, playing hide-and-go-seek and Spud. I ran everywhere, even inside.
Occasionally, on rainy days, Kicki could entice me to sit still. In her TV room we’d unclasp a Sesame Street playset comprising a storefront, a functional mailbox, and a two-floor apartment. The plastic rooms were filled with Fisher-Price Little People—hard peg figurines each the size of a thumb. We game-pieced the people up the stairs and down the sidewalks, building out their stories and constructing small worlds. Kicki never tired of my make-believe games.
She was my first best friend.
My mom read to me before bed each night—The Runaway Bunny, Mickey Meets the Giant, a Little Golden Book called The Ginghams—always pairing my books with milk and graham crackers. But sometimes Kicki would read to me, and I’d nestle into her words, struck by the notion that this was what connected us—my mom, my aunts and uncle, my older cousins and younger—we had all been cradled by Kicki’s stories. We had all been children in the crook of her arm. In the deep heat of summer, dazed from a nap, I’d listen to her voice glide across the pages, soft and cool like a cotton sheet. She would read from The Shirley Temple Treasury, a beautifully illustrated anthology my mother had loved as a little girl. I remember sitting on Kicki’s lap on the upstairs porch, the city noises drifting through the rusted screen. A page of verdant mountains unfurled across her lap. She’d read me Shirley’s “Heidi” until my eyes fluttered closed.
Fred, Kicki, the accident. All of these events had to happen, in the order they happened, at the intensity with which they happened, or my life as I know it would not be my life.
I emailed Mike. Then I waited for the snow to melt.
Summer
Chapter Six
I began my trip to Montauk in the rain.
It was the Thursday before Memorial Day, and I was about to leave my office in Rock Center. I’d spent the afternoon working on the marketing materials for a forthcoming book called The Opposite of Loneliness by Marina Keegan. It was the first project I had strongly advocated we acquire. Marina had graduated from Yale in 2012. She’d had a job lined up at the New Yorker, an apartment awaiting her in Brooklyn, and a serious boyfriend. Her laptop had contained a trove of essays and stories, some of which had won awards. Four days after graduation, on Memorial Day weekend, she had died in a car accident. She was twenty-two.
The Opposite of Loneliness, her first and last book, echoed with what could have been.
I thought about Marina as I exited the elevator. That weekend would mark the first anniversary of her death. In the lobby of the Simon & Schuster building, between gold deco moldings and marble columns, I said a little prayer to her.
The plan was to meet Mike and Shane at Fifty-Third and First at five thirty. They were some of the few people I knew who kept a car in the city—a hunter-green 2004 Land Rover Discovery with brush guards, a ladder, and tan leather interior. Shane diligently cared for it, adding washer fluid, Pennzoil, and premium gasoline. It was too much car for Manhattan, but it meshed with the tinctures of their glamorous relationship. They relished the chance to drive it out of town.
Over the past few months Mike had detailed the fees, rules, and scheduling of the share house. Each group email set off a cascade of inside jokes and references, an activation of shared history. It was clear that I had wandered into a self-contained world. The house was an ecosystem, complete with rituals, social structures, and systems of morality. I struggled to decipher it without context, but I had at least absorbed the house’s name. It was called the Hive.
I’d chosen my dates with mounting anticipation. From Memorial Day to Labor Day there were sixteen weekends. Everyone was guaranteed eight. On the spreadsheet we ranked our preferences for the weekends in each month—one through four, marking an X next to any weekends with a known conflict. Then we ranked the holidays—Memorial Day, Fourth of July, and Labor Day—one through three. We were guaranteed at least two holiday weekends, and everyone was also entitled to two full weeks (ten weekdays) at the Hive. But those extended vacations had to be approved by the house captains prior to the summer.
The other house captain was a financial analyst named Colby. Mike controlled the scheduling and Colby ran the books. They alone had access to the owner. As house captains they were entitled to unlimited weekends and their choice of rooms, but if something went wrong, their names were on the lease. In early May they’d sent out a contract that each housemate had to return with a digital signature.
The Hive House Rules
Half Share
8 Weekends guaranteed
10 weekdays
Bed priority, unless an extremely crowded weekend
General House Information EVERYONE is to be familiar with:
This is NOT a share house; the term “share house” is never to be used. Number of occupants is confidential. If any housemate implies anything to the contrary, there will be immediate consequences. As far as you’re to be concerned, this is a house rented by a few couples whom you are visiting.
No fraternizing with the neighbors. A hello and a smile is required, but no speaking to (the less contact the better).
House address is ______. Know where it is and what it looks like. If anyone enters a neighbor’s house by mistake there will be immediate consequences.
Everyone is expected to pull their weight. Planning events, cleaning, cooking, calling cabs, knowing bouncers, food/alcohol errands, music/entertainment, etc. If you are asked to do something by a house captain, do it.
House Captains: Mike, Colby
Overnight Guest Policy
Each person is allowed guests on any weekend, depending on house capacity
Guests must be scheduled with house captains
If guest is approved, price is $150 per guest per night
Guests sleep with host, or on couch unless there is a bed available
Full-cost must be paid to one of the house captains prior to guest arrival via cash, PayPal or check
Guests are responsibility of housemate who brings them.
Room Assignments
Each weekend, you will have specific room and roommate assignments. You are required to stick to the room you were assigned. Couches may be used if there are no housemates reserved on them.
Cleaning
All housemates are required to pick up after themselves, leave the house on Sunday in an acceptable manner. No matter what time you have to leave, you are required to contribute in some way.
Professional cleaning service will do sheets, towels, and general cleaning each week (Mondays), but everyone has to chip in. We are paying by the hour. You must put your towels and sheets in the laundry room prior to departure.
Each person must do laundry at least 2 of their weekends for the rest of the house. There will be a laundry chart and you can log in when you contribute so we can keep track of this.
Sexual Relations
No sexual relations in any public area of
the house (pool, living room, kitchen, etc.)
No “sexile”ing your roommates. (No locking doors for that matter.)
Zero tolerance for unwelcomed sexual advances. Respect your housemates, no is no.
Day Guests and Parties
If guests are invited over during the day or for a party, this must be approved by house captains or by majority of housemates that weekend (not a free-for-all, be respectful).
You are 100% responsible for the actions of your guests.
Make sure your guests know our address and what the house looks like. If any of your guests enter/approach a neighbor’s house by mistake there will be immediate consequences.
Supplies
General house supplies will be stocked at the beginning of the summer. Extra supplies can be purchased out of the house account when needed, must be approved by house captains.
Calendar
The calendar is set before summer begins (a week before Memorial Day). All weekend requests/conflicts must be finalized before this date. Once the calendar is set, it is final. If you cannot make a weekend, you forfeit that weekend. Extenuating circumstances in which weekend swapping is requested is allowed and will be dealt with on a per-case basis (just email house captains).