Up Island (17 page)

“It’s a tiny little room, but it has the best view of the bay in the entire house, and I’ve always loved it,” Livvy said. “I hide up here for hours sometimes, when the house is too full of people. And even when it’s hot, it’s high enough to catch any breeze that comes off the water. Open your casements tonight and pull up the pouf; it’s the best sleeping in the world.”

After we had hugged good night and she had gone, closing the door behind her, I did just that: I peeled out of my clothes, scrubbed my teeth in the tiny, minimal, adjoining bathroom, skinned into a long-sleeved nightgown, and opened the windows. A river of fresh sea wind flowed in. I ran across the floor and jumped into the bed, pulling up the camphor-smelling pouf and snuggling down until only my eyes peered out, gave a great sigh, and relaxed. When I was UP ISLAND / 141

a child, I had never felt quite safe until my ears were covered with bedclothes, even if it was only a sheet on hot nights.

Now I lay, covered to the ears in freshly aired old sheets and goose down smelling of sun and salt air, having only to lift my head a bit to plunge it into the great, wet-salt stream that was the living breath of the Vineyard. I lay very still, smelling it and waiting to see what would come to me, which of the old pains and sorrows I had lain with for the past weeks, which of the guilts and regrets and what-ifs. My mother: Would my mother come, in her hats and her glinting ambi-guity and her disapproval? Tee, in the fresh redness of his betrayal? My father, in his quiet, inexorable grief? My needing, hurting children? Which? Who?

But no one came. I had brought none of them with me to this tall room on this fogbound island. I had landed here alone, and if I felt naked and lost to myself, I also felt lighter than I had in years. Almost—though I did not dare even think the word—free. Maybe I did not know, quite, who I was yet, and maybe no one out of my world lay beside me, but neither, so far, did pain and fear and sadness.

I can do this, I thought, and shut my eyes; when I woke, it was to the sun.

Livvy was right; there are several distinct small countries on Martha’s Vineyard. From that first morning, when the sun and sea wind turned the surface of Katama Bay to blue metallic chop and Katama and Bluefish Points across it looked like a New England primitive sea scene, I could smell the separate breaths of all of them. It has been the strongest and longest

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held conviction of mine about the island, that when I am in one part of it I can smell the exhalations of the others.

On Chappy I can smell the peat-brown wetness of the moors of Chilmark; in Vineyard Haven I catch the loamy hot-pine-needle breath of West Tisbury. On a wild Squibnocket Beach I smell the rich, fishy exhalations of the clam flats of the Great Ponds. The rowdy scent of summer wildflowers follows me all over. The hot, dusty, tobacco-colored smell of autumn scrub oak creeps into even still, foggy spring nights in Menemsha. People talk about the great light of the Vineyard and the huge weight of the living past, but I think both are born of its disparate smells. To me, all its essential otherness is.

All this gave me, from that first day, the sense that I was in a very foreign place, separated not by seven miles but many thousand times that from the mainland. It is not for nothing that the Vineyarders say they are going to America when they mean the Cape, or perhaps to Boston beyond it.

On that first morning, I stood looking at white sails on blue water as clear and shadowless as childhood, and smelled the secret, far-dark breath of a brook that had its genesis in the high glacial moraine up island, laid down in the Pleisto-cene by the Buzzard’s Bay lobe of the Wisconsin glacier. I did not, of course, know the facts of this, but in that smell was the dark old truth of it. Old, old…from the very beginning, the sheer and sentient age of the Vineyard called out to me.

“I think I’m in love,” I said to Livvy, standing in my nightgown on her front porch and stretching my arms up to meet the brightening day.

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“Told you,” Livvy said. “So what do you want to do first?

Walk? Swim? Sail?”

“Eat?”

We ate breakfast on the porch, at a small table set with a blue cloth and old Quimperware, with a mason jar full of beach roses in the center. We ate melon and sweet Portuguese bread from the farmers’ market in West Tisbury, Livvy said, and beach plum jelly that she’d made herself.

“
You
made jelly? Livvy, you can’t even turn the microwave on.”

“Well, this is my specialty. Everybody on the Vineyard brags about their goddamned beach plum jelly; you have to learn to make it or they don’t let you off the ferry. I picked the plums, too. Do you like it?”

“It’s heaven. Will you give me the recipe?”

“Not on your life. Find your own beach plums. Make your own jelly. It’s the law of the Vineyard.”

After breakfast we took the Cherokee and went over to the ocean side of Chappy and walked on the great wind-scoured beach that stretches from Wasque Point to Cape Pogue. The glitter off the surf was relentless, and beyond it the deep blue swells of the Atlantic rolled and heaved. The wind was strong and cool, picking up the fine golden sand in little whorls here and there and tossing it high in mini-cyclones. Low dunes topped the beach, crowned with undulating green sea grass.

The sand was the color of golden tea with cream, and it shone in glistening smears where the surf met its packed surface.

Because of the reflections in the shining slicks, and the radiant spume that the wind blew off the tops of the breakers, nothing seemed corporeal or solid; everything was in motion, restless, breathing, murmuring, shifting. Fishermen in
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rubber boots stood at the edge of the surf, casting, but their reflections in the wet sand seemed at times realer than they did. It was a glorious beach, but not a soothing one, not a place where three separate great elements met in a magical stasis, as they did on our beach at Sea Island. Here everything surged and shifted, was too big, too open, too lonely. There seemed to me no human scale here.

It was beautiful though. After we had walked almost an hour we shucked off our sweatshirts and ran into the surf.

After the first shock of cold, I felt as if I were swimming in champagne, or liquid diamonds. Lying in the sun afterward, feeling its red weight on my closed eyelids and shoulders and thighs, I laughed aloud in sheer well-being.

“I haven’t felt this good since camp,” I said to Livvy, lying beside me. I remembered it suddenly: the wonderful, weightless, washed feeling of lying under hot sun with cold water drying off your body. A young feeling, before it seemed necessary to think ahead.

“I never felt this good at camp,” Livvy said. “I went to camp in northern Maine. There were maybe two days at the very end of August when human beings could swim. We swam every day from July to September. I was cold for two months.”

“Did you good, didn’t it? Stiffened up your spine.”

“I’d rather have been spineless and warm.”

We went home and showered and changed and went to the beach club for lunch. I did not want to go, but Livvy was adamant.

“You have to see somebody sometime,” she said. “And if we don’t go, I’ll have to cook, and that means going into Edgartown for groceries, and I hadn’t planned to leave Chappy for days and days. We’ll just UP ISLAND / 145

eat lunch and then go sailing. Or not, whatever you want to do.”

So, because I could not gracefully refuse, I went, grumpily and defensively, in white pants and a red T-shirt and borrowed boat shoes and, as an afterthought against the sun, my mother’s great floppy hat, and I had a very good time.

At noon on a weekday the club was full of women and children; the few men I saw were in pairs and obviously on their way somewhere else: sailing, or golfing, or arranging hostile takeovers. The women were, on the surface, much like me and Livvy: not sleek, not coiffed, not “done.” Some were young and slim and some were older and not, but none seemed unduly aware of the state of their bodies. I did not get the old Atlanta sense of body anxiety. All were tanned and many were freckled; all had well-worn, serviceably cut bathing suits or shorts or pants soft from many washings; all smiled with their unlipsticked mouths and unmascaraed eyes, displaying the sound, unbleached teeth and stubby, pale lashes of New England. All spoke in the genial honk that Livvy had. All drew me as comfortably into their ranks and their afternoon as if I had just gotten on to the island for the summer from Wellesley. Their children were like well-raised children everywhere, busy and loud and only marginally whiny. Their teenagers were remote and cool but unfailingly polite. None of either sex wore an ear or nose ring.

No one asked me what I was doing on the Vineyard. No one asked me what my husband did, or where he was. No one called my mother’s hat darling or adorable, though one or two did ask me where they could get one like it.

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“She inherited it from her mother,” Livvy said, grinning wickedly. “It’s an heirloom.” I had the wit to say, “Well, she left the silver and the stock portfolio to my brother, but she knew I’d rather have something personal,” and everybody laughed. It was as if I had known them a long time, these plain, solid women from the big, square houses we passed on the island, with their slightly frayed bathing suits and their open, angular smiles and their cool old family millions. I had been right the night before. I could indeed do this.

After a Bloody Mary and a wonderful baked bluefish, we went back to Livvy’s house and I slept, deeply and sweatily, on the piled white bed under the rafters, and woke when the first blue of the evening was coming into the air, feeling detached and temporary, like an astral traveler accidentally parted too far from her body. The sense of being fervently alive in every cell and atom, but not having a corporeal re-ceptacle for all this pulsing selfhood, was very strong. But it was not unpleasant. I fairly floated down the stairs to find Livvy.

We took a sunset sail in her little catboat, ghosting on the pink-mirror surface of Katama Bay as far up as the mouth of Edgartown Harbor. The harbor was full of activity: big white yachts slipping silently in past Edgartown Light, fishermen coming in with the day’s bounty, launches plying to and fro, taking people to and from docks and dinner, small sailboats like ours crossing and recrossing the soft breeze. Edgartown, its lights just blooming, looked like a pointillist’s painting.

The afterglow from the west stained the water dappled peach.

Over on Chappy the beach roses glowed on the darkening dunes, and beyond them the lights in the big houses were coming on. Smells of picnic smoke and grilling meat and fish mixed with the

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hundred breaths of the Vineyard. I never forgot that twilight sail. Even though we repeated it practically every night for almost two weeks, it is that first night that I remember when I look back now.

Day followed golden day, in a run of clarion-clear weather that had everyone saying, “It just doesn’t seem possible that fall is right around the corner, does it? Not possible that pretty soon we’ll be back home and school will have started…”

I shut my ears to those wistful, end-of-summer eulogies. I did not want to hear them, and somehow managed not to.

Time was, for me, suspended in the amber of those perfect days, each one as same and whole and simple and seamless as an egg. Fall was not coming for me. School was not starting for me. On the top level of my mind I knew that summer was slipping by, that in a matter of days Caleb would be joining us for his annual holiday, and then he and Livvy would begin closing the house and getting the boats hauled and stored, and I would pack and take an ephemeral, jackrab-biting little airplane back to Logan and then a lumbering Delta jet on to Atlanta. But the other levels of my mind did not know this, and for long stretches at a time I forgot that I was a woman contemplating divorcing her husband for his adultery with a younger woman; a woman who had run away to an island to hide; a woman with, suddenly, a dead mother and a grieving father and an angry, heartbroken son and daughter and a puzzled, anxious dog and a medium-sized house in a silly little enclave of a big city, all to which I owed allegiance and service. I don’t think any essential wounds began to heal, precisely; it was far too soon for that. But I do think that, in those long summer days, the bleeding began to stop.

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“See?” Livvy said over and over. “I told you. Didn’t I tell you?”

“You did,” I said. “I’m sorry I ever doubted you. I’ll never argue with you again.”

We walked, late one night, along South Beach, with Edgartown Great Pond on our right and the star-silvered Atlantic on our left. It was the time of the Pleiades, that great, late-summer meteor shower, when the very sky above you arcs and blooms with huge, hot flowers. We had been to dinner at L’étoile, in the Charlotte Inn in Edgartown; my treat, because I wanted in some measure to repay Livvy for what her island was giving me. We wore silky, unaccustomed dresses, but no panty hose, and carried our high heels in our hands. Livvy had said we ought to see the meteor shower from the beach, away from most of the lights. It was spectacular, magical, and we oohed and ahhed with the rest of the shadowy people who were out in the soft, warm, black night to see the stars fall out of the sky.

Abruptly, my eyes pricked with tears, the first I had felt in a long time. But they were not, now, tears of hurt.

“I want to thank you,” I whispered to Livvy. “I mean it.

Before I came up here I didn’t know if I could…do all this.

But now I know I can. As long as you’re here, I can do it.”

She was silent for a time, and then she said, “This is just like school, isn’t it? You and your best friend out on an adventure that doesn’t have anything to do with anybody else, certainly not with any man. Or no, not school, but right after, when you’re out and working and you’ve made your first adult best friend, and you’re off doing something totally perfect that’s