“I’d like to be. But it’s hard until you know what you want to say.”
“Is it?” he said.
“I suppose it’s easy for you, growing up with it and everything.”
“Nope. Books are not my thing.”
He stated it as a simple fact, one which I found hard to believe, considering who his parents were. I was sure that if my parents were writers, rather than a tax attorney and a part-time interior decorator, I’d be further along toward becoming one myself.
Franny cocked his head. I heard the jumpy beat of “Walk Like an Egyptian.”
“I think there’s dancing,” Franny said.
He led me through the porch and inside, where the furniture had been pushed back to the walls and the rugs rolled up. A younger crowd was dancing barefoot in the living room and dining room. The kitchen was filled with people standing in small groups or sitting on counters, drinking beer and talking. Everyone seemed happy to see Franny, grabbing his hand or tousling his hair or swallowing him in a hug. A little girl scampered up and wrapped her arms around his waist, squeezing until he swept her up onto his shoulders and danced around the kitchen. When he set her down, she skipped away, and he turned to a short, wrinkled old woman with her gray hair knotted in a bun on the top of her head. She had paint on her hands and Birkenstocks peeking out from beneath a long black skirt. Franny rested his hands on her shoulders and, leaning in and talking loudly so she could hear him over the music, promised to come soon to photograph her work.
Franny introduced me to some friends and cousins as “a writer friend of Henry’s from New York,” which everyone accepted so readily that I gave up trying to explain over the music that I was a mere editorial secretary. As much as I wanted to be a writer, my habit of starting stories and ripping them up after a few pages didn’t give me the right to call myself one.
“This is Rosie Atkinson—video artist,” Franny said, kissing the cheek of a petite young woman with a jet-black bob and magenta lips. “How goes the installation?” Before she could answer, a cherubic guy wearing round glasses and a faded Brooks Brothers shirt grabbed Franny from behind, bellowing, “Franster!”
Franny whipped around.
“My man!” They hugged again. “Eve, remember this name—Stephen Frick. This goofy-looking creature is on a fast track to becoming a famous composer.”
Creativity was clearly this crowd’s currency. Franny’s introductions each included some artistic cachet: Up-and-coming playwright. Jazz saxophonist. Gallery manager. Actor. There didn’t seem to be a preprofessional among them—none of the law school or med school students, junior consultants, or account executives found among the children of my parents’ friends. From years of vacationing in Truro, I’d been vaguely aware of this crowd, but never expected to be hanging out with them, let alone being welcomed as if I belonged.
The party had an easy, unscripted feel. Two barefoot boys in overalls ran through the kitchen, one with a bag of marshmallows. Three women sat on the steep wooden steps of the back staircase engaged in what seemed to be serious conversation. I grabbed a Corona from an old washtub on the counter and took a few quick gulps. Someone turned up the music, and Franny started dancing as he gently pushed me and several of the people in the kitchen into the dining room. At first, I danced awkwardly, wishing I hadn’t worn a prissy cotton dress. But as I finished that first beer, I began to relax. I kicked my sandals into the corner and twirled into the center of the room, where I was happy to catch Franny’s eyes a few times and be spun by him, though I wasn’t sure if he was dancing with me or with everyone. As it grew darker, more people came inside until the house was packed.
In the living room, Henry danced with a slim, long-necked woman in a floor-length halter dress patterned with swirls of orange and green, her graying hair swinging in a thick braid down her back. I assumed she was his wife, Tillie Sanderson, whose poems I had tried to understand when I was at Brown. Henry and Tillie and the rest of the older set looked loose and happy in a way that made them seem not only younger than my own parents, though they were ostensibly the same age, but ageless, as if being artists and writers freed them from anything as conventional as growing old. Henry and Tillie, laughing, looked like they were doing “the bump.” I tried to imagine my parents dancing to the Talking Heads or doing the bump, but it was impossible. Just then Franny appeared and grabbed my hands.
“What’s so funny?” he asked, spinning me beneath his arms.
“This,” I said. It was clear he had no idea what I was talking about.
Once every summer, my parents had a party too. Instead of barefoot dancing, rolled-up rugs, and old women in Birkenstocks, a cocktail party hosted by my parents demanded a strict headcount, from which would be calculated the number of mini quiches required to guarantee four per person; tailored summer outfits purchased at Filene’s in the Chestnut Hill mall; and, in every bathroom, freshly ironed embroidered hand towels and trays of soaps shaped like scallop shells.
I had been vacationing in Truro since I was a child, and each summer was as predictable as the tides. On sunny days, we would go to Ballston Beach, where we would spread our blankets to the right of the entrance, never the left. If the ocean was stinky with mung, we would go to Corn Hill to swim in the bay, where, when the wind died, it was easy to skip a flat rock six times over the water’s glassy surface. My parents would unfold beach chairs and read: my mother multigenerational, from-the-shtetl-to-Scarsdale family sagas, my father the latest Book of the Month Club presidential biography or the stock tables. My brother, Danny, and I would dive for fiddler crabs or swim. The pattern adjusted, without really changing, as we got older. Instead of frolicking in the water, I would lose myself in novels while Danny tackled the problems in the Mathematical Games columns in Scientific American.
On the last night of our vacation, we would buy lobsters and boil them in a big black pot. When we returned home to Newton, we’d shake the sand from our beach clothes and, like someone had flicked a switch, restart our old routine: work, school, dinner at six, my parents’ praise for Danny’s genius at math, and their gentle annoyance with my dreamy bookishness. This mold, set so long ago, endured.
Even now, my parents obsessed about Danny’s trajectory through grad school at MIT, their hopes for familial greatness fully staked on him, while they waited for me to abandon my dream of becoming a writer and buckle down to go to law school or get a teaching degree. Lately, I also had been doubting my path, wondering how I could be serious about an ambition that had yet to yield results more notable than the piles of paper scattered about my room.
But watching Franny dance, his long hair flipping around him, I was buoyed by a sense of possibility. A tentative belief that I could have a creative life too. It was intoxicating to have spun my way into Franny’s orbit and this other Truro. And now that I had, I didn’t want to let it go.
2
Late the next morning, I awoke to the drippings of a rain that had passed through while I slept. A thick fog hung in the air, hiding the marsh and the harbor beyond. The way it surrounded the house, blurring the view outside, added to my sense that the night before had been a dream, leaving me with vivid yet unconnected images: being swept into an improvised tango by an old man who looked like Albert Einstein; crowding onto the screened porch when Henry recited a creepy yet mesmerizing old poem, “The Cremation of Sam McGee”; wandering the second floor in search of a bathroom and coming upon Henry and Tillie’s bedroom, which was adorned with so many half-burned candles that it looked like a shrine.