Mating Rituals of the North American WASP (42 page)

Besides, Peggy and Bex had their hands full at the new store. Home Grown was a showcase for products made locally—fine art
by area painters, bread from a nearby baking company, vegetables from the Sedgwick/Ver Planck Cooperative Farm, dahlias from
the back garden—and
Sweet Fire,
Luke’s first book of poems. The store had been open six months, and business, though nowhere as steady as it might be in
New York, was promising. Meanwhile, Josh had recently passed the Connecticut bar and had hung out his shingle downtown—he’d
taken the second office at the Law Offices of Lowell C. Mayhew. He was currently representing a group of environmentalists
in Bethlehem.

But Luke seemed distracted as Peggy told him her story, and she could see he wasn’t in the mood to listen. She touched his
arm. “You’re nervous.”

“A little.” Peggy knew in WASP-speak “a little” meant he was petrified. “I’ve never read one of my poems in public before.”

Peggy smiled at him. “What do you call the streets of New York?”

Luke nodded but didn’t smile back. “This is probably how you felt walking over the Brooklyn Bridge—nothing underneath you
but air.”

“If you fall, I’ll catch you,” Peggy said. “You don’t have to be afraid.”

A few hours later, as the grandfather clock struck eight, Peggy answered the door knocker to find that all of their two dozen
guests—including the Ver Plancks, the Fiorentinos, the Rigas, the Mayhews, Geri, a reporter from the
County Times
—had arrived precisely on time. Peggy led them to the library, where Bex and Josh offered them peanut-butter-and-bacon crackers
and showed them to their chairs. Everyone waited in respectful silence for Luke to appear. Peggy watched the portrait of Silas
Sedgwick. The great man’s expression seemed more stern than usual, as if he disapproved of his descendant’s every action:
allowing non-Sedgwicks to live under the Sedgwick roof, letting in the press, writing poetry and reading it to the public.
Some things didn’t change.

Luke didn’t emerge. Peggy and Bex looked at each other, concerned. Had he changed his mind? “Maybe you should go get him,”
Bex whispered, but just then, Luke entered and made his way to the front of the room.

He stood tall and confident. Unafraid.

“I do plan to read from my book,” he said, his eyes on Peggy, taking a folded scrap of paper from the tweedy pocket of his
blazer. “But I thought I’d start with a poem I wrote this afternoon. It’s called ‘Roses in the Snow,’ and I’d like to dedicate
it to my bride, Peggy Adams Sedgwick.”

And Luke Silas Sedgwick IV began to read.

We’re still disappointed about the chestnut. We were going to quit corporate America off that chestnut. I’d write in the studio
my husband would build for me when he wasn’t reading the newspaper and drinking coffee on our front porch.

Once again, the house got the last laugh.

We hadn’t been living in New York City for long when, like many New Yorkers, we decided our lives weren’t complete without
a second home. Specifically, a Connecticut farmhouse, circa 1780, with a red barn, sloping hardwood floors, and ancient apple
trees that still bear fruit.

The house is charming but challenging, like a crazy lover who won’t set you free. It takes two hours to get there on the weekends,
and when we arrive, something has always happened. The apple trees have dumped a dozen bushels of rotting fruit into the yard.
There’s a bat upstairs. A pane of glass has popped out of a window, the driveway needs to be regraveled, the paint is peeling.
We’ve come to call the place the Great Big Hole in Connecticut We Throw Money Into.

A few years ago, the barn started leaking. (“That’s what happens when you leave an antique out in the rain,” my husband said.)
Long story, but we decided, instead of just slapping on new shingles, to replace the whole roof, down to the rafters.

Along with the rest of the barn, the original roof was built from great wide boards you simply don’t see anymore. New Englanders
pay a fortune for old wood like this to use as replacement flooring in their period homes. So when our contractor mentioned
he thought our roof planks might be chestnut, we had a brilliant inspiration: We’d sell them to help pay for the new roof!

We looked up vintage-lumber dealers on the Internet, figuring we’d make two or three thousand dollars. But as our research
began, the figure crept up in our heads, from a few grand to ten thousand to twenty-five. Soon it became clear just how rare
two-hundred-year-old chestnut planks are. Suddenly we were fantasizing wildly,
three hundred and fifty thousand dollars,
mentally paying off our mortgages and quitting our respective jobs to live the simple life.

The day arrived, and the vintage-lumber dealer came to our house. My husband invited him out to the barn, at which point the
dealer explained that the wood was not chestnut, it was oak, and offered us six hundred dollars for it.

As our dream died, I thought I heard the house laughing—a faraway, lunatic cackle. It might have been the apple trees creaking
or the floor settling. I’ll never know.

But if anyone wants some nice antique oak, we’ve got a stack of it to sell you out in the barn.

Visit me on the Web at
www.laurenlipton.com
.

1. Your neighbors have a tag sale. (That’s “tag sale,” not “yard sale” or “garage sale.”) You buy their old kitchen table for fifteen dollars. In ten years, when you tire of the table, you sell it to another neighbor. In time, he sells it to yet another neighbor. Repeat for a hundred years.
   
2. A couple shows up at the town’s favorite breakfast spot in the summer. She’s got a flashy handbag and high-heeled sandals. He, a sports car and a huge, shiny watch. The other patrons exchange sidelong glances with a meaning only those in the know can decipher: “This isn’t the Hamptons.”
   
3. Firemen are summoned to work by a siren mounted on a pole in the center of town, where its air-raid wail can be heard for miles. By everyone. In the middle of the night.
   
4. The fox that lives under your barn enjoys a possum dinner on your lawn. Mice stash seeds in your underwear drawer. Each spring, your living room is mysteriously infested with ladybugs. Eventually you stop noticing.
   
5. You moved there a decade ago and the locals still call you “the new people.”