Page 10 of Our Last Vineyard Summer

For the next couple of days on the island, Virgie tried to get accustomed to the new normal, a summer devoted to raising the girls on her own, avoiding Charlie, and not making too much of a fuss about her canceled column, even if she felt resentment building like the rising tide. She tried to find joy in subversive moments, like looking at Betsy right now. The bottoms of her feet were black, and Virgie wished Charlie could see how out of place her hair was, how she had a smear of dirt up her cheek from playing. She’d been constructing a fort in a corner of the yard with her friend James, the paperboy who called for her that morning after he finished his route. Every ounce of pretension—of little girls playing in pretty sunrooms in party dresses—had been left behind in Washington. Her girls had a week before sailing campstarted, and Virgie sat on the Adirondack chair in the grass watching the kids play.

Last night she’d woken at exactly 3:08 a.m. for her nightly tossing and turning. She gazed at the inky water, the moon casting a spotlight across the surface of the sea. If Charlie was going to go as low as he had, what did that mean for their marriage? Did he even love her anymore? Not only that, how could you claim to love someone if you weren’t concerned about hurting them? Virgie couldn’t exactly call her editor and say it was a terrible misunderstanding and ask for her column back; men sided with men. Maybe she should continue to write it, collecting a stack of back columns to submit after the election.

Or she could accept defeat and move on.

“Spray us with the hose, Mommy.” Betsy jumped over an inflated beach ball, her bangs arranged haphazardly behind her headband (she’d trimmed them herself in the mirror last week), with James following, the two of them belly laughing as they tried to evade Virgie, who got up to run after them. She pointed the hose directly at the two kids, laughing as she sprayed.

Suddenly, Virgie wanted to go to the ocean. She needed to see the light feathering the waves, and she rallied Betsy and James to pack up the beach stuff. Wiping her grass-wet feet on the mat at the back door, Virgie clambered up the staircase to Louisa’s bedroom, finding her eldest daughter sitting up in her twin bed in a jumper and knee socks. A Beatles record played on the turntable as her daughter seemingly gazed at the walls, a pen and notebook at her side. It was a mystery sometimes what her eldest daughter did all day in her bedroom.

“It’s like a cave in here.” Virgie pulled the thick drapes open, sunlight pouring into the bedroom. She had little patience for dark teenage moods. “Get your bathing suit on, honey. We’re going to Katama.”

“Mom, I’m in the middle of something,” Louisa said, jumping up and lifting the needle on her turntable. “You can’t just start making demands on me.”

“Actually, honey, I can make demands on you.” Virgie opened the top drawer of her daughter’s white wicker dresser, lifting out her favorite striped bathing suit and tossing it to Louisa. “C’mon, scoot.”

“I’m old enough to stay here alone.” Louisa tapped her pen against her hairless thigh, clean and smooth since she’d started using Wisk hair removal cream a few years before. How much younger Louisa had seemed then. Even last summer, the girls had lined up shells on their bedroom windowsills as a form of decoration, and they were still there: clamshells, oysters, slipper shells.

“I know you’re old enough, and I leave you alone all the time, but right now, we’re going to the beach.”

Louisa threw her pen at the blanket. “Well, don’t expect me to swim. I’m not putting my suit on.”

After calling her name through the house, Virgie discovered Aggie on the front porch in a white wicker chair, her legs draped over the peeling arm, a sketchbook balanced in her lap. She’d drawn in detail a basketball court, a full roster of players symbolized by small circles, with arrows arranging them in various plays. It was lovely if it didn’t portend a conversation Virgie was tired of having.

“Can you go get your bathing suit on? We’re headed to Katama.” Of all the Whiting women, Aggie was the one you’d look to if you needed saving from a rip current; her muscles pulled at the water with the strength of an Olympian.

Aggie shaded the free throw line. “I just don’t get why I can’t play, Mom.”

“Oh, Agatha, I’m not sure how much clearer we can be. Your father said no, I said no, and our answers aren’t going to change.” Virgie should have known that forbidding her daughter from joining the private Bethesda–Chevy Chase women’s basketball team would only deepen Aggie’s desire to play. The idea had felt like a Dear Virgie column, and before everything with Charlie unraveled, she’d planned to propose the idea to her editor: Virgie would pen a fake letter from a mother feeling frustrated that herdaughter was insisting on playing a sport that was rough and physical, and then Virgie would respond with step-by-step advice on how to disengage from a power struggle with your daughter. First: rather than emphasizing what she can’t do, find something else for her to focus on.

But alas, Virgie would never see that column in print. She’d no longer run to the front door for Sunday’s edition of the paper, smelling the newsprint before she saw her byline, opening to the Styles page, where she’d find a small square photo of herself running beside the Dear Virgie logo. She had been so angry with Charlie in these last few days that Virgie hadn’t had a moment to grieve the column. Now it hit her square in the chest, the weight of it like a ferry boat plowing right over her.All to protect his campaign.

Virgie still had to pack the thermos with ice water; she hoped Louisa was gathering the towels. The day felt like it was slipping away from her, or maybe it was that her life was slipping away. “Why is it so hard to get us to the beach?” she hollered at Aggie, louder than she’d intended. “It’s eighty-five degrees out and your cheeks look as red as strawberries. The ocean will cool you down.”

All last winter, Aggie had begged her parents to let her try out for the team—she’d sat in Charlie’s study in their Kalorama house on numerous evenings, Charlie smoking a cigar, while Aggie tried to make the case that basketball was no different from any other sport. This was a league for girls—it’s not as though she was joining a men’s team. “A woman’s body isn’t made for that kind of strain,” Charlie argued. “Your arms don’t even have the strength to get the ball up in the net.”

“Oh, Charlie. I’m sure she could make a basket. I’m more worried the boys will tease her at school for playing a man’s sport.”

Her husband swiveled his chair, placing his stockinged feet on the desk. “And what if another player slams into her and she falls on the court and gets hurt?”

“I agree with Daddy,” Virgie said, nodding and leaving the study to make clear the conversation was over.

The mailman walked a letter up the steps of their front porch, making small talk about the island’s fireworks that night in Oak Bluffs.

“I’m going to find a way to play,” Aggie said when the mailman left, like it was a fact that Virgie would just have to accept. Her daughters made these kinds of declarations all the time. Virgie had learned to tune them out. Was it possible that she could simply tune out Charlie as well?

Thirty minutes later, they all piled into the car. The little ones, James and Betsy, squeezed into the front seat and took apart Oreo Cremes. There was a parking spot near the first entrance to the beach and Virgie pulled into it. In the blazing heat, they set up near a large driftwood log.

“See you later.” Virgie smiled at the girls. She peeled off her sundress and raced to the water, diving in. When she surfaced, Aggie and Betsy were right behind her, laughing and swimming nearby; on the beach, Louisa rubbed tanning oil onto her fair skin while a couple of teenage boys shyly approached. A zap of fear coursed through Virgie. It was as though her fifteen-year-old wore a sign on her chest that flashed the words:Come get me into trouble. She noticed James in the shallows, kicking at the water.

“Why won’t he come in?” Virgie called to Betsy, who was floating up and over each gushing wave as it rolled in. Aggie began swimming laps.

“He says he can’t swim in the ocean, only the sound.”

“An islander who can’t swim?” Virgie stared at the boys near Louisa, who had convinced her to play catch with a beach ball. She joined them near the dunes in her shorts, a tightening creating a viselike sensation in Virgie’s throat. This is how it started with Brandon Millerton. A few innocent flirtations that turned her daughter into a…

She exhaled, wishing she could wrap her daughter in shrink-wrap and ship her to an all-girls school.

“I’ll get James,” Virgie said, swimming toward the skinny child; his shorts were too big and sloppily stitched in the waistband. Her youngest had met the boy back when he’d been enrolled in the local sailing school’s scholarship program, and they’d become fast friends even though he was one year older. Virgie had a soft spot for him too. Something about James had always reminded her of Charlie, how it didn’t seem like anyone fed him, how no one was ever accounting for his whereabouts.

---