Page 6 of Our Last Vineyard Summer

“Have not,” hollered Aggie, kicking at her sister in her enormous bare feet through the open door. She sat up and clasped shut her rubber-soled sandals. “I’m sorry, Louisa, if you’re smelling your own breath.”

Lovely, Virgie thought.We’ve been reduced to animals in a pen.

At some point on the drive, Betsy had crawled onto the floor—she’d been annoying the older ones the entire drive by begging them to play cat’s cradle with her beloved elastics. To get her away, Aggie had encouraged Betsy onto the foot mats, so she could stretch out her legs across two seats while Louisa, in her short shorts, squished against the door and buried her nose in a Patricia Highsmith novel.

Betsy popped her head out the back window. “Wait! I’m coming.” Virgie’s youngest daughter, always in a red-and-white polka-dot headband, tripped in her rush to get out of the car. Much to Virgie’s dismay, her ten-year-old had insisted on wearing her scuffed black-and-white saddle shoes, refusing the pale pink sandals she’d bought her for summer. Motherhood could be maddening in ways big and small.

Waving a five-dollar bill out the window, Virgie called after her girls. “Louisa, take your sisters to get chowder.”

“Why do I always have to take care of them?” Louisa snapped back, becoming aware then that there were other vacationers staring, her pimpled cheeks turning the color of watermelon.

“It’s one time, not every time.” Virgie grimaced.

Virgie’s own mother had never driven alone—she wouldn’t dare to drive, even in their New York suburb, instead waiting on her husband to shuttle her about. Her mother wore smocking necklines and was nothing like Virgie, who could cook a soufflé, paint peeling trim, hammer a nail into the wall,andwrite a newspaper column. Virgie’s was an adulthood formed in opposition to her mother’s propriety. Even choosing Charlie had been a form of resistance.

Louisa groaned, snatching the money and storming off, Betsy right at her heels and Agatha—with those long awkward legs, bony at the knee and muscular in the thigh—following closely behind like a hunched giraffe.

Virgie hated to admit that she wished Charlie were here. Then again, he probably would have just turned up the Yankees game on the radio and expected Virgie to break up any arguments between the girls anyway. If she pulled her small notepad out of her purse to scribble down an idea for the column, he’d frown; but what he didn’t understand was that writing the column had been a lifeline when it was offered to her last year. She’d been drowning in boredom while the girls were at school each day, and the column gave her a new kind of purpose. Angling the rearview mirror to see her reflection, Virgie grimaced, using her fingers to comb her wind-blown hair and tie a sheer black headscarf around her crown.Better, she thought. Then she pulled out her compact and reapplied a thick round of peach lipstick. The last thing she needed was to run into someone from Washington who reported back to Charlie that his wife looked as though she were falling apart.

Because she wasn’t falling apart. Virgie had come to the island on her own to give her daughters a real summer and to give herself time to figure out why she and Charlie were bickering so much. “Honestly,the drive was nothing,” she would tell Charlie on the phone later that night. “I don’t know why you’re making such a big deal out of it.”

Virgie found her girls spooning creamy soup and salty crackers into their mouths on the upper deck where crowds of visitors crammed into the limited shade. Dropping her raffia drawstring purse in her lap, Virgie sat between Betsy and Louisa, smiling at them when they acknowledged her. It had been a stressful ride, with Betsy crying when they got stuck in traffic on the George Washington Bridge, and Aggie complaining endlessly about not going to Birch Lark.

“Shut up,” Louisa had snapped as one highway exit blurred into the next, after Aggie complained she’d never try archery. “Birch Lark isn’t all that great. My friend says the food is mush and the cabins have bugs.”

At that, Aggie had heaved her back into the seat. “Well at least I could play basketball there.”

“Not if Daddy can help it,” Betsy had snickered.

The plan all along was that they’d visit the island as a family in August when the Senate was in recess; in the meantime, since it was an election year, Virgie would attend campaign events with Charlie in New York in June and July, while the girls were shipped off to Birch Lark Camp for Girls. Yet, when it came time for them to leave, Virgie didn’t want her girls attending some snobby sleepaway camp with the children of diplomats and government royalty. She wanted them on the Vineyard, running barefoot and swimming and having the same kind of summer she’d always had. Plus, there was the matter of getting Louisa away from Brandon Millerton. She’d found out only last week that Brandon would be at the Birch Lark boys camp, just a mile down the road. Her daughter didn’t need any more trouble.

The horn of the steamship blared, announcing the boat’s departure. Virgie looked at Louisa. It gave her the curious sense that she was looking in the mirror: They had the same golden hair, the same straight nose and light freckles. They were fair to a fault, both in skin tone andin life. “We’re off to the island.” Louisa grinned, craning her neck to see over the railing as they left the mainland.

The velvet quality of the sea swept away the stress she’d had pinned between her shoulders, and Virgie decided she’d call Charlie tonight and apologize for leaving without saying goodbye. She couldn’t think of a single time she hadn’t gone along with his plans, down to the timing of their second child. But she knew he wouldn’t stay mad forever. Once he heard the light in her voice, he would see that the island was exactly what she’d needed.

The ferry slowed as they approached Vineyard Haven, Virgie’s eyes crinkling at the sight of familiar houses lining the cliffs. How far she’d traveled this year, and how reassuring it was to return to this comforting place. Last month, she’d been part of a delegation of political wives who were sent to England to lunch with the queen. They’d nibbled chicken and mushroom pie in a formal room at Buckingham Palace, and the young queen had given a speech about a woman’s responsibility as a voter, a mother, and citizen. “Always ask questions, even as women,” the queen had said, the diamonds in her crown sparking a million little gasps in Virgie’s mind. It had made her question everything she knew. Small things, like: Why did she wash her face every night and apply cold cream—was there actual proof this did anything? And bigger things, like: Why did she smile politely at people at cocktail parties who said offensive things rather than respond curtly?

The ferry bumped into the pilings of the dock, and then came an announcement on the crackly speaker welcoming passengers to Martha’s Vineyard. She and the girls gathered their things and moved with other vacationers toward the painted-steel stairwell leading down to the car park. Virgie watched the back of her daughters’ heads as they walked down the steps, each one a couple of inches shorter than the other. A line of growing women who would one day watch their own daughters descend into the dim, cavernous belly of the ferry, driving out minutes later into blinding sunshine.

CHAPTER FOUR

There were cobwebs in the corners of the living room she hadn’t seen the night before, and before Virgie could even think of attempting breakfast, she found herself going about the house with an upside-down broom and brushing them off the ceiling. The lace curtains in the living room had yellowed, and she fetched a stepladder from the root cellar, accessed through a pair of metal doors outside, so she could remove the drapes for washing. Then she opened all the windows despite the early morning chill, determined to free them from the stale air. By afternoon she’d have the wood floors gleaming, the fridge wiped clean, and the cupboards stocked.

There was that low-level vibration in her hands again, almost like the muscles of her fingers were trembling on the inside. But when she stared at her hand, she could hold it perfectly still. Nerves, her doctor had told her. A flare-up that had started on the highway yesterday all because she dreaded the phone call with Charlie. She had phoned him last night after she and the girls put clean sheets on the beds and everyone turned in for the night, but there had been no answer at their small Kalorama rowhouse.

The last nuclear fight they’d had was last August. They’d left the Chilmark estate of Senator Prescott of Massachusetts. He’d had a party to celebrate his fiftieth birthday. She and Charlie were cutting through the back roads by the illuminated Ferris wheel of the Agricultural Fair when Charlie asked why she’d spent so much time talking to Wiley Prescott, the senator’s younger brother, who happened to be a bit of a playboy. The truth was that she’d noted Charlie’s continual checking in on her from afar, and she’d tried to get out of the conversation, but ithadbeen an interesting chat. Wiley had said the women reporters at his family’s Boston newspaper were the best of his staff, and when she mentioned that she had always wanted to be a writer, he encouraged her to contact an editor at a paper in New York, which was how her Dear Virgie column had come about.

Last week, after reading her latest column, Charlie had marched into the kitchen where she was pan-frying salmon and yelled: “Do you even think of me when you write these things?”

Do you even think of me when I smell the perfume of another woman on your collar?Virgie hadn’t said that about his latest dalliance—suspected, never confirmed—although she’d wanted to. Instead, she’d flipped the fish in the pan. “I simply did the math, Charlie. If a woman cooks six nights a week from the age of twenty-five until the average age of seventy years, she will have cooked fourteen thousand dinners. I’m not even counting breakfast or lunch.” Of course, Virgie had also suggested in her article that the burden on womenmight beunjust; that while men wanted to imagine their wives prancing about the kitchen like gazelles, they often thought of cooking as a dreaded chore.

While running a dust cloth along the living room bookshelves, Virgie wondered when exactly things had gotten so fiery between them, but it was hard to say. Certainly not when the girls were little or before he won his first election. In those first few summers on the island, after they inherited the summer house from her aunt and uncle in 1951, Charlie was a first-term congressman from New York withoutany committee obligations. They’d begin each weekend with scrambled eggs and a walk on the beach while passing Louisa and Aggie from one pair of arms to the other. At night, they’d listen to the radio by lamplight near the open windows and snuggle on the navy-blue couches. It was her father’s brother who bought the house in 1935, but he and his wife, Celia, never had children, so each summer they adopted Virgie as their own. By the 1940s, the island changed immensely when the air force used the Vineyard’s landing strip to practice dropping air bombs, and when the war ended, some men stayed. By the ’50s, summer tourists had discovered the island, thanks to a reliably traveling ferry; in Edgartown, there was a fruit stand, a barber, a hat store, and a few pool halls, and life everywhere was altogether simpler.

“I’m starving, Mom,” Betsy muttered as she came downstairs.

Her youngest child was an early riser, and Virgie smiled at the sleep crease across her daughter’s cheek. “I’ll look through the cupboards in a few minutes.”

The thud of the newspaper slapped against the front door; the work of their reliable paper boy, a local kid named James who lived across the harbor. Betsy ran to the window to knock and wave at the scrawny child on his rusted bike, and he waved back, a sweet smile brightening his face. The boy’s arrival was as predictable as everything else on the island, a neighborhood built upon tradition and community. Virgie gazed out at the view of glistening Edgartown Harbor, the small ferry to Chappaquiddick arriving on the small island opposite them. She went about opening the cabinets, finding a bottle of canola oil and an unopened box of pancake mix she’d been smart enough to put in the refrigerator before they’d left; there was no syrup, but this would do. She plugged in the Frigidaire, the refrigerant gurgling back to life in the ice box.

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