Mack sat back in his seat and looked at the water. Maybe he should just drive into the sound. Then he heard a voice, a low thrumming voice. Home. He bowed his head. Home.
“I can’t believe this,” Mack said. He closed his eyes.
5 Independence Day
July 2
Dear Bill,
The answer to your question is yes, I am a parent. You do not need to know how many children I have, or if they are sons or daughters-it isn’t relevant and it’s too painful for me to discuss anyway, even in a letter. I know your daughter is quite young-seventeen? eighteen?-and I know she lives away from you a good part of the year. I wonder, Bill, if you have any idea what goes on in your daughter’s heart and mind. Does she want what you want? Does she see herself continuing with the family business? Does she love the hotel the way you do, Bill? Have you ever asked her? Maybe before you turn my offer down, you should.
Sincerely,
S.B.T.
Cecily’s job this summer was to watch the beach, keeping her eyes peeled for people who blatantly ignored the signs saying Nantucket Beach Club: Private Property. After four years at Middlesex-tens of thousands of dollars spent on her education-this was the job her parents gave her. Lookout. Policewoman. Head scout of the Nantucket Beach Club patrol.
Cecily sat on the steps of the pavilion with a clipboard and a computer generated list of the Beach Club members. If she saw people on the beach she didn’t recognize, she had to ask their names. If their name appeared on the list, she smiled and repeated their name, “Why hello, Mrs. Papale!” as though she had recognized them all along. That was what a club was about: Being recognized, belonging.
If their names didn’t appear on the list, she had to ask them, politely, to leave. Cecily’s father was too chicken to do this job himself, although he claimed he wasn’t afraid, but rather, too busy, doing financial things and reading from his volume of Robert Frost.
On one very hot and crowded day just before the major holiday of summer, Cecily encountered her first squatters. She was sitting with her legs stretched out in the sun when an unlikely couple wandered in from the right. What made them “unlikely” was exactly the thing that Cecily hated about her job: they looked poor. The price to sit on a swatch of her father’s beach under one of the umbrellas her mother ordered from the south of France was five thousand dollars for the summer. It was too much money for almost anybody to afford-and definitely too much money for the couple spreading their towels (short white towels, the kind one might find in a Holiday Inn) under a royal blue umbrella.
The couple looked like Jack Sprat and wife. The man was skinny and pale, wearing a black T-shirt and cut-off jeans, and the woman wore an enormous turquoise muumuu. The woman carried a red Playmate cooler, which she plunked down at the foot of the towels.
Cecily heard a clicking noise behind her. She turned to see her father tapping with his pen on the window of his office. He pointed at the couple.
Reluctantly, Cecily stood up. She trudged through the hot sand, savoring the torturous burning on the soles of her feet. The man turned his head from left to right, checking, literally, to see if the coast were clear. The woman plucked a green bottle out of the cooler: a Heineken. The beer of choice at Middlesex. The man offered the woman a penknife from the front pocket of his jeans shorts and the woman flipped the top off the bottle and let it land in the sand.
“Excuse me,” Cecily said. The man’s head whipped around. He hadn’t thought to look behind him. “I just need to check your name off our list.”
The man stood up. The front of his T-shirt had a mandala on it. He had long dirty blonde hair and a mustache. He touched his mustache when Cecily spoke.
“The name’s Cadillac,” he said. “Joe Cadillac.”
Joe Cadillac. It was a good try: maybe he thought it made him sound rich. Cecily checked her list. She could feel her father’s eyes boring into her back. The burning of her feet became unbearable and she moved to stand in the shade of the royal blue umbrella.
“Cadillac, hmmmm. Like the car, Cadillac?”
The man cleared his throat. “That’s right.”
“I don’t see it here,” Cecily said. She didn’t meet the man’s eyes.
“Are you sure you’re spelling it right?” he asked. “Cadillac, with a ‘C?’ With two ‘C’s?’”
“Yes,” Cecily said, “I’m sure.”
The man shoved his threadbare towel under one arm. “Okay,” he said, “we’ll go then.”
The woman let out a long, shrill laugh, like a hand trickling down piano keys. “Heavens, Joe,” she said. She had curly blond hair and wore red lipstick. “Would you please let us stay, sweetie?” she asked. “Just for today? I’m afraid in this sun I’ll positively fry up.” The woman had a stripe of bad sunburn already-across the tops of her round cheeks and the bridge of her nose.
“I can’t let you stay,” Cecily said. She felt horrible; she felt like a child or an angry neighbor saying “Get off of my property!”
The woman held out the beer. “Would you like a swig?” she asked. “It’s ice cold.”
Cecily eyed the sweating bottle. How she wanted to take it, and force her father to watch her making her own choices.
“Debra, let’s go,” the man said.
The woman beamed at Cecily. Mrs. Sprat, Mrs. Cadillac. Cecily tore her eyes away. She looked, instead, at Nantucket Sound, lapping lightly onto her father’s beach.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
Cecily was also maître d’ of the beach, the goodwill ambassador. She chatted with the Beach Club members, and made sure everyone was happy. Once she got to know the members by name and learn a little bit about them, the list would become unnecessary. Cecily hated chatting, she even hated the word chatting. She could never think of what to say that would sufficiently mask her real question. Why are you spending your money this way? Haven’t you heard of world hunger? Don’t you have a conscience? The Beach Club had existed since 1924. Back then, the club cost a quarter a day and was open to the public. Her father had sepia-tone pictures of men and women in old-fashioned bathing suits sitting under crazily striped and polka-dotted sunshades, drinking bottles of sarsaparilla. This was how Cecily preferred to think of it. She’d kept one of those pictures, framed, in her dorm room at school.
The number of people on the beach peaked on the Fourth of July, and this year, it was sunny and hot. On the south shore, Cecily knew there would be radios blaring, volleyball games, picnics, kegs, Frisbee, dogs. But here at the Beach Club, things were as much fun as a pile of wet bathing suits, as exciting as a handful of sand. Mr. Conroy, who had a glass eye and a pair of saggy old-man breasts, sported his starspangled swim trunks. That was it in the way of excitement.
Cecily stood in her father’s office. “Total hell,” she said, looking out the window at the beach.
“Someday it’s going to be yours,” he said.
“What if I don’t want it?” Cecily said.
“What’s not to want?” Bill said. “Now get out there and show ’em who’s boss.”
“You’re the boss,” Cecily said. “You get out there.”
Bill laughed, then his voice got serious. “Go,” he said, “and don’t forget to wish everyone a happy Fourth of July.”
To start her rounds, Cecily had to walk past Kevin and Bruce, the beach boys.
“Hey, sexy!” Bruce called out. Bruce was skinny with pimples and glasses, and he thought he was a hot shit because he was going to Yale in the fall.