Page 30 of Our Last Vineyard Summer

“We should form a search party and go out to find him,” said Betsy, making it sound like an installment ofThe Hardy Boys.

“No, no,” Virgie said, waving off the idea. “Let’s not mistake false hope with ambition. Now back to the question at hand.” But Betsy and James had already slinked off to the sofa, whispering more about Nomans Island.

CHAPTER TWELVEBetsy

1978

Betsy had always loved teaching at the yacht club, and it was funny how easy it was during that third week visiting the island to slip into her old summer routine. After a morning meeting with campers to discuss the wind and where they would sail, she helped the kids attach sails to the small boats, dragging the Optis or 420s or Sunfishes off the beach and into the harbor. By ten, she had the children in life vests sailing. Today she was accompanying a pair of precocious nine-year-old twins whose parents left the boys with a nanny during the week. The boys had limited interest in how to operate the boat, the one named Seth often pinching her calf, only to claim it was his brother.

“Boys, stop fooling around.” Betsy pushed her sunglasses on top of her head so they could see she meant business. “Sailing is about the coolest thing you can do in summer—someday you might take a girl out on a boat.”

“Bleh.” Petey pretended to vomit into his hands. “I’d rather be playing kickball.”

“My dad says girls can’t sail and he doesn’t know why we have a girl teacher.” Seth waited for her reaction, a flash of mischief in his eyes,but Betsy was unruffled. She handed the boy the tiller, encouraging him to steer.

“Well, your dad has never seen a powerful girl like me go sailing,” she said. Betsy showed the boy how to pull tight against the wind, then how to avoid getting hit in the head with the boom. Working with kids had always suited Betsy’s personality, but when she’d mentioned an interest in teaching middle school to her mother, she’d blown her off. “Women are always being told they’d be a great teacher or social worker. Get a job at a newspaper and they’ll put you on wedding announcements. Well, ignore that person. You can do what you want! You can be a scientist!”

The refrain had made Betsy and her sisters fall into belly laughter when Virgie had said it, and in their teenage years, any time one of them felt a shred of self-doubt, the other would yell out: “But you can be a scientist!”

The irony was that when Betsy was in graduate school and her professor had encouraged her to switch to school counseling, she’d realized that her mother was right. Women were encouraged into more nurturing fields. It had made her push harder in her program, and she decided she would be a clinical psychologist working in private practice. She even knew what she wanted her specialty to be: women. Housewives and career girls, and all the women in between. She wanted to help women find the balance they craved, to help them find confidence to stand up to their abusive employers, to stop letting people in their lives relegate them to the second row. One of her professors had told the class that a psychologist’s biggest interests were often dictated by their biggest hang-ups; a man with mommy issues would probably most often tune in to the parental tensions of his clients. It had made Betsy wonder if she was interested in helping women only because her mother had, the only difference being that Betsy would work with one woman at a time. A smaller life, sure, but that was okay with her.

Many of my clients spend their entire lives trying to avoid becoming like their parents, only to realize that chasing their affections doesn’t makethem feel whole.It was a different professor who told the class this, and thinking of it now, Betsy thought maybe it was true.

Maybe her psychology classes hadn’t been all bad.

It was warm on the water now, and Betsy unzipped her windbreaker, stuffing it in her dry bag. All at once the boys got into some kind of scuffle about steering, and Betsy scolded them once more. “Boys, boys! Sailors need to pay attention to everything. One time when I was out on one of these very boats as a kid, something scary happened.”

Now she had their attention, and she told the story like it was an episode ofThe Swiss Family Robinson. She told them about how she and her friend James had snuck away from morning lessons to attempt a sail to faraway Nomans Island, where he believed his missing father was stranded. The sun was strong, luring them out of the harbor, but then the wind picked up in the wrong direction and they got their boat stranded in a cove. “We’d been forced to drag the boat ashore and walk the beach for help,” Betsy told the children. “If we’d tuned in to the wind, we would have felt the threat coming.” Their boat was grounded since they’d broken the rules and left the safety of the harbor, she said. “Our parents made us volunteer to fix up the yacht club as punishment.”

But the punishment had also been fun since they’d been stuck together all day, hammering shingles onto the sailing shed on the beach, mopping the kitchen floors in the yacht club, organizing files in Wiley’s office, and snooping around his desk. That was the day she’d discovered that Wiley kept a photo of him and Betsy’s mother in his desk drawer, her mother dressed up in a long iridescent dress and Wiley’s arm around the small of her back. When she told her mother about the picture, admitting she thought it odd, her mother had hugged her. “Aw, Betts. You keep pictures of your friends in your drawers, too, don’t you?” Shehadkept a photo of her and James in her nightstand drawer beginning in fourth grade, the two of them in his dinghy while mugging for Betsy’s mother’s 35mm camera. Later, in her teen years, she’d tucked asecond Polaroid of them in her diary, the two of them lying on a beach blanket on his lawn while reading Walt Whitman.

After the last camper was picked up on Wednesday, Betsy made her way home through town. She walked into a house smelling of potato salad, with Aggie and Louisa looking deflated on the navy couches. Louisa shook her head. “The Realtor said we need to clean out everything, and it’s a bigger job than we thought,” she said. “The house is going on the market in two and a half weeks.” Cabinets and closets, most of their personal belongings had to get put into boxes and stored in the attic.

A different thought niggled at Betsy as she listened. Why wasn’t Louisa returning to Washington as planned? She’d announced last night that her boss had encouraged her to take as much time away as she needed, which had sent Aggie and Betsy to whisper on the patio when Louisa went to shower. Neither of them believed a law firm would allow an employee, let alone a woman employee, to take off that much time. “Something is up,” Aggie had said, and Betsy had agreed.

Betsy slumped into a living room armchair. “We’ve already packed a good bit. Isn’t that enough?”

“People need to imagine that the house is theirs,” Aggie said, the sarcasm evident in her voice. Upstairs, Betsy could hear the furious click-clack of the typewriter in the study.

Betsy sighed. “Well, we might as well start on dinner.”

They spent a few straight days packing up old records, figurines, and dishes, each one of them volunteering to take on a section of the house and Betsy working between shifts at sailing. By Saturday, they needed a break. The theaters were still packed with the release ofJaws 2, but it was getting terrible reviews and the Whiting sisters had decided theydidn’t want to spoil the first one in seeing the second. Instead, the plan for this Saturday night was to go to Oak Bluffs to hear a folk singer performing at Ocean Park, a lush green space facing the sea.

After her second week teaching, Betsy had been looking forward to a day at the beach with her own thoughts. Her mother and Aggie had decided to take the kids window shopping in busy Vineyard Haven, while Louisa announced that she was meeting a friend for lunch. Betsy hadn’t been bickering with her eldest sister as much, thanks to their shared desire to save the beach house. A meeting at the bank was set for next week. This morning, Aggie had even pulled her aside after breakfast.

“Things are really thawing out between you and Louisa,” she’d whispered as soon as Louisa left the kitchen to get dressed.

“Well, I’m still pissed at her,” Betsy said, drying the last dish and putting it into the cabinet they’d pared down to include six bowls, six dinner plates, six saucers, and six salad plates. “But she’s being nicer than usual. Do you think she wants something?”

Aggie pushed the baby’s swing with her bare foot, Mikey blowing strawberries. “Sisterly love?”

Betsy emitted a high-pitched scoff. “You know as well as I do that Louisa doesn’t want my love. She wants my admiration.”

“Well, maybe she wants both,” Aggie said. She looked like she’d been awake for hours, in her pale pink striped knee-length skirt and matching sweater-shirt, blue eyeshadow and liner already applied.

After everyone in the house had left, Betsy packed a beach bag with a fluffy towel and suntan lotion, a small cooler with a Tab. Then she spread jam on a ham sandwich. Just yesterday she’d noticed the wild blueberries growing along the garage, popping one of the ripest plump versions into her mouth. Later she’d pick the fruit and make her own jam to spread inside a crepe at one of their next breakfasts.

Betsy went to fetch her bike from the garage, tossing her bag into the basket, but then she realized she’d forgotten her sunglasses. It was a minor miracle she hadn’t lost them yet. She was always losingsomething. Betsy raced up the crooked steps and grabbed the glasses off her dresser.

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