When I walked into the musty library, Alva was at her desk gently trying to pry apart two pages of a picture book.
“Should I come back later—or will the impending diatribe against the evils of chewing gum be brief?”
Alva put down the book and smiled.
“I was wondering when you would show up. Please tell me you have finally arranged to spend an entire summer here.”
“Nope, just a long weekend,” I said, sitting in the wooden rocking chair beside her desk. “I came up for a party at Henry Grey’s. First time I ever met him. Tell me: How did I not know he had a son?”
Alva took off her glasses and let them hang from the chain around her neck. She folded her hands on the desk and leaned toward me.
“The plot thickens,” she said.
“What do you know about him?”
“He was a delightful child, as I recall. He was not much of a reader, however, but was quite the artist. He had his first exhibit of photographs in this very room when he was fifteen. Portraits of fishermen that he printed himself. Not a bad eye.”
“Not bad to look at either,” I said.
“You know what they say about judging a book by its cover,” Alva said, with a sly smile.
“Because you’re a librarian, I’ll let you get away with that.”
Remembering the milk in my car, I told Alva I had to leave to get my groceries home. In response, she took an old hardcover from a stack of books on her desk, opened the back cover, and stamped the “due by” card on the last page. It was one of my favorites, I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith.
“How do you always do that?” I asked, flipping through the pages. “I read this years ago and absolutely loved it.”
I stretched out my hand to return the book, but she didn’t take it. She put her glasses back on and peered over them at me, saying, “Well, then, you’ll enjoy reading it again.”
3
After a late lunch, with Franny still on my mind, I decided to bike to the beach. I changed into my favorite T-shirt and shorts, then pulled my thick hair back and clipped it loosely with a barrette, letting a few strands hang down by my face. I smudged on some brown eyeliner, pleased that it made me appear a little older without looking like I was wearing makeup.
I set out toward the ocean and flew fast down Castle Road and along the marsh toward Truro Center. After riding beneath Route 6, I turned onto North Pamet Road, a longer route to the ocean, but one that would take me by Franny’s. The air was surprisingly cool, suggesting that the ocean was still fogged in. Paying little attention to the turns in the road, I tried to figure out what I would say if I got up the nerve to stop in. As I approached the house, I slowed down to look through the beach plum bushes toward the tennis court. I heard the pop of tennis balls being hit and then a woman’s shout, “Gin for the win!” I got off my bike and was walking along the edge of the road, peering through the thicket to see who was on the court, when a branch snapped beside me. I turned to find Franny.
“What do you think? Are they cheating?” he asked, pointing a pair of hedge clippers toward the court.
“Oh my God, you scared me.” Embarrassed at being caught snooping, I tried desperately to think of an amusing excuse to explain myself. “Yes, there were reports of cheating, which was why the tennis police sent me.”
“The tennis police?” Franny looked amused. I wished I had come up with something wittier. “Trust me. That tennis game is not even worth watching. By this time of day, they’re generally too tipsy to keep score, let alone play well. And after last night, everyone’s a little shaky.”
“It was pretty wild,” I said, remembering how I’d danced at the party. When my white-haired tango partner had dipped me back so low that my head was nearly touching the floor, I’d seen Franny watching from the corner of the dining room.
Franny looked up at the white expanse of sky.
“Not much of a beach day,” he said.
“I like the ocean on days like this.”
“Me too. Want company?”
He suggested I leave my bike on the side of the driveway so we could walk down together. After a few minutes of silence, I asked Franny how he had decided to become an artist. He seemed surprised by the question.
“It’s just what I always did, who I am,” he said. He’d gone to art school in Chicago, which he hated because it was “all theory and no fun.”
“Really? That’s what it was like in some of my literature classes,” I said. “It was text, subtext, and literary theory, like we were dissecting frogs instead of reading books.”
“All head and no heart?”
“Exactly,” I said. “It made me even more self-conscious and critical of my own writing than I was before.”
“That’s why I dropped out of art school,” Franny said.
“You just up and left?”
“Yup. An easy and excellent decision.”
It had never occurred to me that the problem might be Brown and not me.
Franny had spent the past several years in New Orleans and Santa Fe, working in restaurants and bars so he’d have time to paint and take photographs. He was back east for the summer to figure out where to go next. “Possibly Maine,” he said, as we walked past the path to the old cranberry bog and up toward the youth hostel. We could see the back side of the dunes by the ocean, the windswept landscape beautifully empty of people.
At the top of the bluff, Franny stopped in front of the hostel, an imposing white building that was once a Coast Guard station. He told me about his dream to paint a mural on the entire ocean-facing side of the building. “I see it as larger-than-life fishermen, maybe whalers, in bold strokes and dark, stormy colors.” The way he spoke, his idea didn’t sound like a vague artistic fantasy, but a pronouncement that the old building would be his canvas, that if he wanted to make it happen, it would.
Franny was completely comfortable with his identity as an artist in a way that astounded me. I thought of all the stories I had started and thrown away, rarely thinking one was good enough. When I did finish, I kept the stories to myself, shying from criticism and the risk of exposing a side of myself—angry, biting, needy—that I had learned to keep hidden.
“How can this place not inspire you?” Franny said. “You could write a thousand stories of things that might happen here.”
As we descended toward the parking lot, I told him about a story I’d written in middle school about a girl walking along the towering sand dunes at Longnook Beach who falls into a secret dwelling created inside the dune by a mysterious boy.
“She marvels at his hideaway, which has a table and a chair, if you can believe it, and he tells her how he created it, somehow defying physics and propping up the mountain of sand with planks of wood. They talk for a long time, until they hear a rumbling that gets louder and louder.”
“What was it?” he asked.
“It was … the Wave.”
Franny raised his eyebrows, waiting for more.
“That’s it. That was the last line of the story. They were washed away. Awful, I know,” I said. “The story won a prize, and I had to read it to the entire seventh grade. Kids made fun of me for weeks, coming up to me in the cafeteria and whispering, ‘It was … the Wave.’” Daunted by the attention and the ridicule, I didn’t write another story for several years.