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On the Wednesday after Labor Day, when most of the summer people had,
thank God, left the Lower Cape, my bosom friend, Raymie Parsons, called
me around eight in the morning as she did several times a week before I
got down to work. Raymie is a geyser of gossip and hard news, a Wife of
Bath; she knows people in high and low places and most of them are crazy
about her, although she has her share of enemies, no doubt the result of
excessive candor on her part. I keep telling her she ought to write a
column for the /Banner,/ but she claims it would spoil the fun,
interfere with gossip's ad hoc nature. One of the things she told me was
about this great meal she had had at Caro's, a place I avoid because of
the noise made by diners ingesting the Lower Cape's priciest food and
shouting at each other as if everyone was deaf. I asked her what she'd
had. A Portuguese stew with five kinds of shellfish, halibut, sausage,
and rice on the side. Then she said her evening was almost spoiled by a
man who slipped the headwaiter a bill and thereby got himself seated
ahead of everyone else waiting for a table. "It was so out there, so
in-your-face. Before you knew it, he had the best seats in the house,
you know, the table way back in the corner they reserve for Norman
Mailer and Norris. That kind of sleaze really pisses me off. I suppose I
should be used to it by now."
They refuse to take reservations at Caro's -- that's another reason I
don't go there.
"What's he look like?" I asked her.
"Well, for one thing, he was wearing a suit jacket. Who wears a suit
jacket in P'Town in September? And for another, he had one of those
trophy wives with him. At least she acted more like a wife than a
girlfriend -- you know what I mean, like she was a little bored. She was
wearing tight designer jeans that showed off her butt, a skimpy silky
top, sort of lime green, and glued hair." I asked her what she meant by
glued hair. She said, "I guess it was moussed, not glued, but it looked
sticky."
"High heels?"
"Probably Manolo What's-His-Name," Raymie said. "Here's the thing. Where
have all the artists gone? Where the playwrights and poets? Where's the
pastel tourist? This town is being overrun by people whose only claim on
real estate has to do with gelt."
I told her she was being naïve and asked, rhetorically, when the world
had ever been different. "You told me what he was wearing, but not what
he looked like."
"Eyebrows," she said. "They were so bushy they almost covered his eyes.
Black eyes. Very white around the pupils, like a kid's. He had one of
those aren't-I-groovy five o'clock shadows. Have you ever smooched with
a man who hasn't shaved in two days? He had a mean mouth. Look, Dannie,
I may be making all this up. I only got a quick look. But the eyebrows
-- he puts Miracle-Gro on them and waters them every day."
"But the stew was good."
"Better than good," she said.
The one thing neither of us went anywhere near was that one year ago to
the day the Twin Towers had been destroyed in the blink of an eye,
sending most of us into a paroxysm of rage and fear and dreams of
revenge (sometimes followed by an unexpected sense of guilt: what had we
done to make them hate us so much?). I would have mentioned it if I'd
had the right words.
Raymie ran one of the very few bed-and-breakfasts in Provincetown. There
are a lot of hotels and motels, but only three B & Bs. I've always
thought them an awkward hybrid, but apparently enough people want to
stay in them to make them profitable. Raymie's divorced; Parsons is her
ex's name, but she prefers it to her own, which she claims is too hard
to pronounce. I think she secretly hoped that one of her male guests
would take the kind of shine to her that leads to the altar. Raymie was
fifty-one or -two and looked much younger, thanks to hours working out
and eating the right things. She's not deeply into feminism -- at least
on the surface. She's always been extremely self-sufficient and
opinionated, but she hates most labels, especially when someone tries to
stick one on her. The only one she's proud of is "environmentalist."
Whenever anyone violates the National Seashore Trust or pollutes -- even
by throwing a candy wrapper into the water -- she pounces. She's a
bulldog about saving the planet, undoing global warming -- there's just
about nothing interesting that Raymie isn't either for or against.
Superficially, Raymie and I are as unlike as Manhattan and Truro. She's
a lapsed Catholic from Queens, where she was born and where she lived
before her divorce. My New England roots go way back; my mom is
fifth-generation, a Yankee who married her second cousin, causing a
ripple within the family, but it wasn't enough to stop her. My difficult
but admirable father died last year. He was a World War Two vet who lost
the power of speech for three months after some harrowing action in
Germany, then recovered sufficiently to get a law degree at Yale and use
it profitably for thirty years. He left my mom comfortably off, meaning
she didn't have to sell either her house in Boston's Back Bay or her
place in Boca. She's a good egg, really, never comes to visit uninvited,
tries not to tell me how to raise my children, and has no major health
problems -- yet. Some people call me a hermit, but I don't like to think
of myself that way, mainly because it sounds as if I hate people, which
I don't. I just prefer being alone or in the company of my husband, Tom;
my children, Beth and Mark; Raymie; and one or two others. I don't much
like parties, especially when they're big and noisy. Some people think
that if you don't like parties there's something wrong with you.
I often walk around with a twenty-year-old Nikon hanging from my neck. I
shoot pictures mainly of things and animals rather than people, who seem
to freeze or act silly when exposed to the serious end of a camera. My
favorite subjects are pale reedy grasses, dunes whose vegetable cover
changes from week to week, houses in the middle distance, where they
seem most isolated and, even if they're nothing special in terms of
architecture or building materials, assume a kind of stalwart
personality. It's like when you take a picture of a man in a roomy
overcoat standing quite far off, with his back to you, he looks more
interesting than he probably really is.
My husband, Thomas Faber, is basically a gentle, distracted person who
teaches anthropology at MIT, an institution famous for its hard
sciences, its supertechno-everything. So subjects like the one Thomas
teaches are more tolerated than sought after. But it also means that his
best students are sort of like members of an offshoot religious sect.
They cling together. They have keg parties to which Tom is always
invited; they go hiking together in the White Mountains and play
penny-ante poker at least twice a month (at which he loses a relative
bundle because he doesn't know how to maintain a poker face). Tom often
lets one of them crash on our living room couch. They're slightly more
polite than our own children, but they eat everything in sight and Tom
encouraged them to raid our refrigerator, something that really ticks me
off, since I never know when or how many. This freeloading business
lurks between me and Tom, and whenever we're tired or stressed, we
return to it like an unhealed wound. I accuse him of being thoughtless;
he accuses me of being a tight-ass. There's nowhere to go with this. A
couple of years ago Tom won the Teacher of the Year in the Humanities
Award.
We have an arrangement: I stay on the Cape from late April to November,
and he's come and go. He spends most of the summer in Truro, but he also
travels a good deal -- conferences, consulting, other professional
commitments met, I must say, with lively pleasure. He's not the kind of
nature person I am. He likes watching the water come in and go out and
he's fairly into birds -- knows the names and identifying features of
most of the shore birds that live around here. But he gets antsy after
nothing but water and birds for two weeks or so -- and off he goes
again. Beth says, "Dad isn't very good at doing nothing." But all and
all it works out okay and we have, over the years, trusted each other
not to mess with other people. I only did once, after a harrowing trip
to the dentist when I was awash in self-pity. If Tom has, he has wisely
kept it under his hat.
I quizzed Raymie about the clueless man at the restaurant because I
thought I knew who he was. Abstractly, he was the enemy. If I was right
about who he actually was, he had built a monster house on the bay side
less than half a mile down the beach from our place, a house that was to
nearby buildings as an elephant is to an ant. There you are, nestling in
an area where the car with the most old beach stickers is considered
much higher on the food chain than a new one. Small is precious, and the
closer you come to inhabiting a shack, the better we genuine Truroites
like it. Most of the older houses are gray and weathered and patched.
What passes for gardens used to be the wild-growing rugosa and bearberry
ground cover, but over the last few years some people have started
planting heather and other hardy plants and flowers -- you can't blame
them: The urge to garden grabs you sooner or later -- the need for order
and color. The Cape wants color.
Just as soon as I hung up from my conversation with Raymie, the phone
rang again. The phone seems to have assumed a major role in the play
that is my domestic life and fate. I can't imagine how people managed
before the telephone. Your husband went to sea and maybe fell overboard
and you wouldn't know about it until a year later and all that time you
were writing him letters and knitting him socks and thinking what you
would say when you saw him come through the front door and the fire that
sex with him would ignite as soon as he took off his peacoat.
This time it was Molly Jonas, a retired New York advertising executive
who works in the Truro Town Hall and is almost as good a news source as
Raymie. In a small town, rumor and bits of questionable news float about
as ubiquitously as those little white bits of fluff in the spring,
keeping the populace satisfied. Molly wanted me to know that someone was
building a swimming pool next to his new monster house, already in a
choice location, overlooking the bay. "Another one of those weirdos,
thinking it's going to cut some ice with what passes for society out
here," Molly said. I was saddened to hear the swimming pool news, this
trend toward big and lavish, toward excess as unstoppable as tax cuts
for the rich under the Republicans. Bush /fils/ was the kind of disaster
you didn't even want to think about because you can't do anything about
it -- like a terminal illness. I told Molly I was getting on overload
and besides, I already knew about the swimming pool, which was untrue,
but I wanted Molly to believe I had got there before she had.
"I have to get to work. It's late," I said. "I'll see you next week at
the Stop & Shop meeting." This is one of our more heated concerns: the
huge chain market had threatened to erect one of its stores just off
Route 6 in Truro. Most of the populace is outraged by this threat,
largely -- ignoring the obvious convenience it would bring to weekly
food shopping -- because it would destroy the more or less bucolic
nature of this sweet little hamlet. For these people it would be like
putting a Wal-Mart in the middle of Yellowstone Park. I have to admit I
was partly seduced by the convenience aspect, not having to drive
thirteen miles to the A & P, but I joined the protest because my friends
would hate me if I didn't.
