On fire island, p.4
On Fire Island, page 4
As kids, Pam and Andie were thick as thieves. Both girls grew up in the suburbs, Pam in Jersey, Andie on Long Island, and both were shipped to their grandmothers’ apartment building in Brighton Beach on school vacations, while their parents worked. What may sound like torture held some of their greatest childhood memories.
For two kids from the suburbs, an apartment building in Brooklyn may as well have been Disney World. They played sidewalk games with the neighborhood kids, like hopscotch, jump rope, and handball, while the bubbes sat on lawn chairs, relishing the faint sea breeze coming off the ocean just a block away. They rode their scooters up and down the boardwalk, and when the weather was bad they scooted in circles around the lobby. When they were old enough to cross the street, the bubbes gave them a couple of bucks to walk over to Mrs. Stahl’s Knishes, a tiny shop tucked under the elevated train on Brighton Beach Avenue. Pam still dreamed of the crispy cushions of mashed potatoes and onions. Andie would always get the smelly kasha flavor instead of potato—even though the neighborhood kids would turn their noses up at her “old lady” choice. She didn’t care. She had always danced to the beat of her own drum. It was one of the things Pam admired most in her. Pam, on the other hand, had always been a conformist.
As they tell it, on one particularly hot spring day when they were around sixteen, Andie smuggled a bottle of Boone’s Farm wine in her overnight bag and the two of them snuck out in the middle of the night and headed for the beach to escape the heat of their grandmothers’ stifling apartments. They took off their shoes under the boardwalk, dug their feet deep into the sand until they reached the cold layer, and passed the bottle of cheap sweet wine back and forth till they felt light and tipsy. They lay back on the sand. The wind had picked up a bit, and Andie turned on her side and looked into Pam’s eyes with a serious expression. She reached out and tucked a few errant hairs behind Pam’s ear. Pam felt a stirring in her groin that she had never felt before, and it frightened her. She jumped to her feet to counter it.
“Let’s go,” she’d insisted, already on her way back to the building. Sixteen-year-old Andie followed, feeling as if she had crossed a line but still too young and inexperienced to put it into words.
After that, other than quick hellos in passing during Jewish holidays, they didn’t see each other for years. Until that kiss in the elevator, when everything changed.
“You hungry?” Andie asked Pam now, at the ferry dock.
“Not really,” Pam replied.
“White or red chowder?” Andie inquired.
“White.”
We all laughed.
Hungry or not, the first ferry ride of the season was not complete without a cup of clam chowder from the snack-bar window. Nothing compares to that first spoonful after months of longing for it—thick with chunks of potato, bits of bacon, and dollops of nostalgia. I would have been envious but, lo and behold, I seemed to have lost that emotion as well. C’est la vie, c’est la mort.
* * *
• • •
We stepped in line at the snack counter behind Matthew Tucker, the sixteen-year-old son of my across-the-street neighbor Renee—the one who shuddered at her ex-husband’s touch at the funeral. I looked around for Renee but didn’t see her or her ex, Tuck, anywhere. I was surprised Matty was on his own, though he wasn’t completely—his cat, Houdini, was strapped to his back in one of those pet carrier backpacks. It was usually Renee’s job to bring Houdini out at the beginning of the season. I looked around for her again, then imagined her trying to keep her distance from Tuck at the shiva at our apartment in the city. I was sure she was questioning what she was doing there since Ben was nowhere to be found. I was sure that many people were wondering the same thing right about now—especially our friends and work colleagues. For Ben’s sake, I hoped the widower card was on par with the cancer card—I hadn’t done anything that I didn’t want to since my diagnosis.
The kid behind the counter looked at Matty familiarly.
“Extra crackers, right?” he asked.
“Yeah, thanks,” Matty responded, adding the obligatory, “how was your winter?”
“Awesome, man. You?”
Matty knew there was little worse than asking the standard question “How was your winter?” and receiving the shit truth in return.
I hoped no one would ask Ben the “How was your winter?” question. I assumed that my death was common knowledge by now, while Matty’s problems, I thought, were more on the q.t. Not for me, by the way: his mom had fully shared every hideous detail of their divorce as it transpired.
“Yeah, pretty awesome too,” Matty lied.
Matty’s winter had sucked. I could search for a more sophisticated word but sucked sums it up too perfectly to bother. Back in September, Matty’s straight-as-they-come father “Tuck” Tucker broke his mother Renee’s heart by running off with his twenty-seven-year-old assistant, Lola. You may think that sounds apropos for a guy nicknamed Tuck Tucker, but his moniker wasn’t a cool pet name lovingly given to him by his college frat bros or his best friend since kindergarten. He literally asked people to call him Tuck and corrected them when they called him by his given name, Arthur, until they finally gave up and gave in.
Tuck is a forensic accountant and Renee is a divorce attorney; pitting the two of them against each other registered a solid 8.9 on the divorce Richter scale. It was truly a cataclysmic event. They nearly killed each other during the proceedings, and both parents blurred all boundaries and shared terrible things about the other with poor Matty. In the end, neither party could bear to give up the one material thing that the other cherished the most. And so, they put the house on Fire Island into a trust for their only child. Obviously, the house still belonged to all of them. Matty was just a kid, and his parents paid for its upkeep and could come and go as they pleased, but legally it was considered his. Tuck and Renee were supposed to rotate their time there—switching up every two weeks. But Tuck still wanted to be with Lola, and Lola wanted no part of Fire Island. Lola, who aspired to an influencer lifestyle, fancied herself a Hamptons girl.
Apparently whatever Lola wants, Lola gets. Tuck rented them a “cottage” in Sagaponack. It was doubtful he would be on Fire Island all summer, and I doubted Matty would leave to visit him in the Hamptons.
“All aboard, Bay Harbor!” the ferry captain beckoned as everybody fell into line. I was excited to get on the boat—excited to be on the water once again.
six
The Four O’Clock Ferry
Pam and Andie pushed their baby and a ton of baby gear aboard the four o’clock boat. The twinkle of anticipation for Oliver’s inaugural ride, not to mention the warm chowder, helped erase the lingering sadness in their eyes from the day’s event. I was glad they had skipped the shiva and headed straight out to the beach. I would have done the same if I were them.
The ferry boats have interior seating below and open-air seating up top. In keeping with their nor’easter dress code for little Oliver, Pam and Andie remained down below. Ben and I only ever sat down below during an actual nor’easter.
I followed Matty, who tossed his bag onto the piles of provisions and climbed the stairs to sit up top with Houdini. Within minutes, an older man, Joel Mandel, slipped into the powder-blue metal bench behind him, his cronies watching intently from afar. They had all been at the funeral, along with Joel—their suits and sports jackets were a far cry from their usual T-shirts and gym shorts or sweats. Joel greeted Matty with a hard tap on the shoulder.
“Matty, Matty, how are you, my young friend?”
“All good, Joel. You?”
“Just came from your neighbor Julia Morse’s funeral, so—what can I say? Not so good.”
“Must have been aw-awful,” Matty stammered.
“It was awful,” Joel continued. “We all went.”
It was bizarre to hear a review of my funeral in person, but oddly satisfying to know that my death affected people. Selfish as that sounds, it would feel horrific to spend thirty-seven years in a place and not be missed when you leave. Before I was diagnosed, when death was just a punch line, I remember Ben contemplating the topic. He joked while surveying the crowd at one of his book launches, “These people will probably be at my funeral, but they’ll only cry if I’m in the middle of writing a trilogy. When you die, there won’t be a dry eye.” I doubted the first part of his statement was true, but the second was now fact.
Joel motioned to the men sitting a few rows back. They all shot a quick wave to Matty. He shot one back.
“We didn’t go back to Ben’s apartment afterward. None of us could bear anymore.”
“I couldn’t bear choosing who to stand with, my mother or my father, so I skipped the whole thing,” Matty admitted.
“I’m sure Ben will understand.”
I knew he would. Ben wasn’t one to judge. Joel squirmed in his seat and looked back at his friends. They were all watching the conversation with great interest, and it was easy to figure out what was going on.
In our small town, the men, especially, can mostly be divided into three groups—ballplayers, tennis players, and beach bums (surfers and volleyball players included). It doesn’t matter what age you are, what religion or sexual proclivity you subscribe to—these are the basic categories. The men here, along with Ben and Matty, (though both could surf and hit a tennis ball well enough) were in the ballplayers’ group. And Matty, with his powerful stick and cannon arm, was a star. A star they had all helped to create and all took pride in. His father, on the other hand, was a horrible softball player—a fact that had never stopped him from insisting on a spot on the roster for the big Labor Day Homeowners’ Game against the neighboring town. It was this fact—and the intensity of that game—that had Joel Mandel and his cronies all up in Matty’s face.
“So, talking about your parents,” Joel asked nervously, “is it true?”
“That my parents divorced this winter?”
“No, Matty, please, that’s none of my business.”
Matty waited a beat to let Joel squirm. I was obviously completely correct in my analysis, and now Matty seemed to have figured it out as well. He put Joel out of his misery.
“That I got the house in the divorce and will officially be able to play in the Homeowners’ Game instead of my father?”
Joel tried to hold in a smile, but it was useless. A huge grin broke through. He looked back at his teammates and shot them two thumbs up. The men, all three in their fifties or sixties, high-fived each other like teenagers. Matty turned to look at them, and they quickly stifled their reactions.
“Sorry, Matty. It’s been years since we won the big game and, well, your father’s a nice guy and all, but the Strikeout King did plenty of damage.”
“My father’s a prick.”
“Yeah, well, sorry about that too, kid. See you on the field this weekend?”
Matty nodded, and Joel stood and patted him on the shoulder again, this time more in empathy than salutation. Matty drowned his sorrows in his soup until the shore appeared in the near distance. He squinted, looking for his best friend, Dylan.
Every year, Matty rose from his seat as the ferry reached the harbor and waved his arms back and forth over his head like a madman, or a mad boy, really. And every year, his best friend, Dylan, would return the favor from the shore, jumping up and down like a puppy spotting its owner. Today was no different. Add in the catastrophic shifts since summer last, the predictable sight of Dylan greeting him from the dock filled Matty with a palpable sense of relief—and me with love. When I was lucky enough to witness these two in action, they had always tugged on my maternal heartstrings.
Dylan’s father, Jake Finley, was the ferry captain. He looked out at Dylan from his vantage point, towering over Matty, and shook his head. I had no doubt he was considering what kind of trouble these two would get themselves into this summer. The list of past infractions was long. Especially for a strict single parent like Jake.
Matty took in Jake’s barreling legs. They were the size of tree trunks, especially compared to his own father’s, which were more like twigs.
“Hello, Matthew,” Jake said, barely acknowledging Matty’s response as he walked away.
Things had definitely changed between Jake and Matty in recent years. Not that he was ever warm and fuzzy, but when they were young, Jake would let Matty and Dylan ride the ferry back and forth for fun and would even allow them to sit in the captain’s chair and steer a bit. And on his rare days off, he’d take them out fishing on the Boston Whaler he kept docked at the market. Those youthful days of innocence were long gone. Matty was definitely cautious around Jake now that the two kids’ summer antics had elevated to fooling around. I knew from Renee that Jake was mostly misunderstood. Yes, he was as big as a lumberjack and strong as a longshoreman, but his heart was a lot softer than he let on. There was no doubt he was feeling the weight of his baby girl leaving the nest.
Yes, Matty’s best friend, Dylan, who could skim a rock on the bay and make it skip seven times if it skipped once, was a girl. At least she was until a couple of summers back when, to everyone’s great shock, a woman with breasts, a bikini, and a belly button ring showed up at the ferry dock.
Breasts aside, Dylan and Matty had been best buds since I arrived on the island. But, since postpubescent teenagers can rarely put breasts aside, it recently began to escalate into something different. The two spent many hours last summer kissing and groping on chilly August nights. Ben and I embarrassingly witnessed them making out on the bleachers or at the beach on more than one occasion during Sally’s nighttime walk or when returning home from dinner in town. I knew they rarely saw each other over the winter, and Matty’s parents seemed clueless about the change in their relationship status. The two kids usually picked up right where they left off, and I hoped, for Matty’s sake, this summer would be the same. He’d certainly weathered enough change lately.
Matty tossed the cardboard soup container in the trash and bounded down the stairs of the ferry to be the first one ashore to meet Dylan. Seeing her was the only thing he had looked forward to in a long while. Dylan was extraordinary—like lightning in a bottle.
Part Two
Summer is, after all, the season of escape: the landscape in which to contemplate, alone, our failures and our possibilities; the safety valve, the frontier that none of us wants—or can afford— to see closed.
—JOAN DIDION,
“American Summer,” Vogue, May 1963
seven
Dylan Finley
Most year-round residents experienced a mix of happiness and dread as the summer people arrived on the island, but for Dylan Finley it was pure happiness. The main source of that happiness was the chance to spend time with her best friend, Matty.
Dylan navigated the crowd, setting herself up in a prime spot to greet him, as she had been doing for years. She used to make her dad phone her up at the first sight of Matty and his parents on the mainland, but Jake hadn’t acquiesced to that in ages. Now she just waited for Matty to text her. Aside from the standard check-ins for Christmas and whatnot, the two barely kept in touch over the winters. When scrolling back, his text that morning of “Meet me at the 4 o’clock ferry?” had been the first he’d sent her in months. Although he did call a few times this winter to vent about his parents’ sudden divorce.
Dylan took in the crowd. It was the typical bedlam.
For starters, let me explain that everyone basically knows each other here. So, the happy people getting off the boat have only seconds to call out “Hello” and “Goodbye” and “Why are you leaving on such a glorious day?” to the not-so-happy people waiting on the dock for their ride back across the bay. When the boisterous exchange of passengers is complete, the new arrivals fan out onto the sidewalk, most dragging their bags over to the adjacent wagon park. There are usually a spattering of guests being picked up by their hosts, whose big welcoming smiles usually mask their true feelings: Why did I invite them, and when are they going to leave?
I recognized the three Fauser sisters waiting with empty wagons, hoping to make a few bucks carting people’s belongings to their houses. I saw Bonnie Zucker with a beaming smile on her face, searching the throngs for her children and grandchildren. A deckhand tossed a prescription from the pharmacy on the mainland down to Ruth, the zinc-faced doctor’s wife, and another passed a large box of fresh mozzarella from the Italian grocer in Bay Shore to one of the kids who work at the town’s beloved market.
Everything seemed to be as it always was, though of course it very much was not.
Dylan controlled herself from charging the boat when she saw Matty debark, mostly because she was aware of her father’s watchful eye, I’m sure. Matty must have been aware as well; when he reached her they hugged cautiously. Dylan grabbed his duffel and threw it in the basket of her bike, while Matty gave her a once-over, landing on the bikini top peeking out from under her denim shirt.
I wondered if she just threw on the outfit without a second thought to meet her BFF or contemplated every aspect of her appearance in the mirror to meet her BF. My gut said it was a combination. She caught him looking, and he blushed.
“Nice pegs,” he teased, motioning to the fresh additions of two metal tubes sticking out from either side of her back wheel. He swung his leg over her rear tire and stepped on them for a lift home. Dylan scanned the crowd for Matty’s mom or dad before shoving off.
“You’re alone?”
“Except for Houdini.” He turned his back so that Dylan could say hello.
“My mom’s coming later tonight, she let me come out alone—you know—it’s part of the broken-home dispensation package,” Matty joked.
For two kids from the suburbs, an apartment building in Brooklyn may as well have been Disney World. They played sidewalk games with the neighborhood kids, like hopscotch, jump rope, and handball, while the bubbes sat on lawn chairs, relishing the faint sea breeze coming off the ocean just a block away. They rode their scooters up and down the boardwalk, and when the weather was bad they scooted in circles around the lobby. When they were old enough to cross the street, the bubbes gave them a couple of bucks to walk over to Mrs. Stahl’s Knishes, a tiny shop tucked under the elevated train on Brighton Beach Avenue. Pam still dreamed of the crispy cushions of mashed potatoes and onions. Andie would always get the smelly kasha flavor instead of potato—even though the neighborhood kids would turn their noses up at her “old lady” choice. She didn’t care. She had always danced to the beat of her own drum. It was one of the things Pam admired most in her. Pam, on the other hand, had always been a conformist.
As they tell it, on one particularly hot spring day when they were around sixteen, Andie smuggled a bottle of Boone’s Farm wine in her overnight bag and the two of them snuck out in the middle of the night and headed for the beach to escape the heat of their grandmothers’ stifling apartments. They took off their shoes under the boardwalk, dug their feet deep into the sand until they reached the cold layer, and passed the bottle of cheap sweet wine back and forth till they felt light and tipsy. They lay back on the sand. The wind had picked up a bit, and Andie turned on her side and looked into Pam’s eyes with a serious expression. She reached out and tucked a few errant hairs behind Pam’s ear. Pam felt a stirring in her groin that she had never felt before, and it frightened her. She jumped to her feet to counter it.
“Let’s go,” she’d insisted, already on her way back to the building. Sixteen-year-old Andie followed, feeling as if she had crossed a line but still too young and inexperienced to put it into words.
After that, other than quick hellos in passing during Jewish holidays, they didn’t see each other for years. Until that kiss in the elevator, when everything changed.
“You hungry?” Andie asked Pam now, at the ferry dock.
“Not really,” Pam replied.
“White or red chowder?” Andie inquired.
“White.”
We all laughed.
Hungry or not, the first ferry ride of the season was not complete without a cup of clam chowder from the snack-bar window. Nothing compares to that first spoonful after months of longing for it—thick with chunks of potato, bits of bacon, and dollops of nostalgia. I would have been envious but, lo and behold, I seemed to have lost that emotion as well. C’est la vie, c’est la mort.
* * *
• • •
We stepped in line at the snack counter behind Matthew Tucker, the sixteen-year-old son of my across-the-street neighbor Renee—the one who shuddered at her ex-husband’s touch at the funeral. I looked around for Renee but didn’t see her or her ex, Tuck, anywhere. I was surprised Matty was on his own, though he wasn’t completely—his cat, Houdini, was strapped to his back in one of those pet carrier backpacks. It was usually Renee’s job to bring Houdini out at the beginning of the season. I looked around for her again, then imagined her trying to keep her distance from Tuck at the shiva at our apartment in the city. I was sure she was questioning what she was doing there since Ben was nowhere to be found. I was sure that many people were wondering the same thing right about now—especially our friends and work colleagues. For Ben’s sake, I hoped the widower card was on par with the cancer card—I hadn’t done anything that I didn’t want to since my diagnosis.
The kid behind the counter looked at Matty familiarly.
“Extra crackers, right?” he asked.
“Yeah, thanks,” Matty responded, adding the obligatory, “how was your winter?”
“Awesome, man. You?”
Matty knew there was little worse than asking the standard question “How was your winter?” and receiving the shit truth in return.
I hoped no one would ask Ben the “How was your winter?” question. I assumed that my death was common knowledge by now, while Matty’s problems, I thought, were more on the q.t. Not for me, by the way: his mom had fully shared every hideous detail of their divorce as it transpired.
“Yeah, pretty awesome too,” Matty lied.
Matty’s winter had sucked. I could search for a more sophisticated word but sucked sums it up too perfectly to bother. Back in September, Matty’s straight-as-they-come father “Tuck” Tucker broke his mother Renee’s heart by running off with his twenty-seven-year-old assistant, Lola. You may think that sounds apropos for a guy nicknamed Tuck Tucker, but his moniker wasn’t a cool pet name lovingly given to him by his college frat bros or his best friend since kindergarten. He literally asked people to call him Tuck and corrected them when they called him by his given name, Arthur, until they finally gave up and gave in.
Tuck is a forensic accountant and Renee is a divorce attorney; pitting the two of them against each other registered a solid 8.9 on the divorce Richter scale. It was truly a cataclysmic event. They nearly killed each other during the proceedings, and both parents blurred all boundaries and shared terrible things about the other with poor Matty. In the end, neither party could bear to give up the one material thing that the other cherished the most. And so, they put the house on Fire Island into a trust for their only child. Obviously, the house still belonged to all of them. Matty was just a kid, and his parents paid for its upkeep and could come and go as they pleased, but legally it was considered his. Tuck and Renee were supposed to rotate their time there—switching up every two weeks. But Tuck still wanted to be with Lola, and Lola wanted no part of Fire Island. Lola, who aspired to an influencer lifestyle, fancied herself a Hamptons girl.
Apparently whatever Lola wants, Lola gets. Tuck rented them a “cottage” in Sagaponack. It was doubtful he would be on Fire Island all summer, and I doubted Matty would leave to visit him in the Hamptons.
“All aboard, Bay Harbor!” the ferry captain beckoned as everybody fell into line. I was excited to get on the boat—excited to be on the water once again.
six
The Four O’Clock Ferry
Pam and Andie pushed their baby and a ton of baby gear aboard the four o’clock boat. The twinkle of anticipation for Oliver’s inaugural ride, not to mention the warm chowder, helped erase the lingering sadness in their eyes from the day’s event. I was glad they had skipped the shiva and headed straight out to the beach. I would have done the same if I were them.
The ferry boats have interior seating below and open-air seating up top. In keeping with their nor’easter dress code for little Oliver, Pam and Andie remained down below. Ben and I only ever sat down below during an actual nor’easter.
I followed Matty, who tossed his bag onto the piles of provisions and climbed the stairs to sit up top with Houdini. Within minutes, an older man, Joel Mandel, slipped into the powder-blue metal bench behind him, his cronies watching intently from afar. They had all been at the funeral, along with Joel—their suits and sports jackets were a far cry from their usual T-shirts and gym shorts or sweats. Joel greeted Matty with a hard tap on the shoulder.
“Matty, Matty, how are you, my young friend?”
“All good, Joel. You?”
“Just came from your neighbor Julia Morse’s funeral, so—what can I say? Not so good.”
“Must have been aw-awful,” Matty stammered.
“It was awful,” Joel continued. “We all went.”
It was bizarre to hear a review of my funeral in person, but oddly satisfying to know that my death affected people. Selfish as that sounds, it would feel horrific to spend thirty-seven years in a place and not be missed when you leave. Before I was diagnosed, when death was just a punch line, I remember Ben contemplating the topic. He joked while surveying the crowd at one of his book launches, “These people will probably be at my funeral, but they’ll only cry if I’m in the middle of writing a trilogy. When you die, there won’t be a dry eye.” I doubted the first part of his statement was true, but the second was now fact.
Joel motioned to the men sitting a few rows back. They all shot a quick wave to Matty. He shot one back.
“We didn’t go back to Ben’s apartment afterward. None of us could bear anymore.”
“I couldn’t bear choosing who to stand with, my mother or my father, so I skipped the whole thing,” Matty admitted.
“I’m sure Ben will understand.”
I knew he would. Ben wasn’t one to judge. Joel squirmed in his seat and looked back at his friends. They were all watching the conversation with great interest, and it was easy to figure out what was going on.
In our small town, the men, especially, can mostly be divided into three groups—ballplayers, tennis players, and beach bums (surfers and volleyball players included). It doesn’t matter what age you are, what religion or sexual proclivity you subscribe to—these are the basic categories. The men here, along with Ben and Matty, (though both could surf and hit a tennis ball well enough) were in the ballplayers’ group. And Matty, with his powerful stick and cannon arm, was a star. A star they had all helped to create and all took pride in. His father, on the other hand, was a horrible softball player—a fact that had never stopped him from insisting on a spot on the roster for the big Labor Day Homeowners’ Game against the neighboring town. It was this fact—and the intensity of that game—that had Joel Mandel and his cronies all up in Matty’s face.
“So, talking about your parents,” Joel asked nervously, “is it true?”
“That my parents divorced this winter?”
“No, Matty, please, that’s none of my business.”
Matty waited a beat to let Joel squirm. I was obviously completely correct in my analysis, and now Matty seemed to have figured it out as well. He put Joel out of his misery.
“That I got the house in the divorce and will officially be able to play in the Homeowners’ Game instead of my father?”
Joel tried to hold in a smile, but it was useless. A huge grin broke through. He looked back at his teammates and shot them two thumbs up. The men, all three in their fifties or sixties, high-fived each other like teenagers. Matty turned to look at them, and they quickly stifled their reactions.
“Sorry, Matty. It’s been years since we won the big game and, well, your father’s a nice guy and all, but the Strikeout King did plenty of damage.”
“My father’s a prick.”
“Yeah, well, sorry about that too, kid. See you on the field this weekend?”
Matty nodded, and Joel stood and patted him on the shoulder again, this time more in empathy than salutation. Matty drowned his sorrows in his soup until the shore appeared in the near distance. He squinted, looking for his best friend, Dylan.
Every year, Matty rose from his seat as the ferry reached the harbor and waved his arms back and forth over his head like a madman, or a mad boy, really. And every year, his best friend, Dylan, would return the favor from the shore, jumping up and down like a puppy spotting its owner. Today was no different. Add in the catastrophic shifts since summer last, the predictable sight of Dylan greeting him from the dock filled Matty with a palpable sense of relief—and me with love. When I was lucky enough to witness these two in action, they had always tugged on my maternal heartstrings.
Dylan’s father, Jake Finley, was the ferry captain. He looked out at Dylan from his vantage point, towering over Matty, and shook his head. I had no doubt he was considering what kind of trouble these two would get themselves into this summer. The list of past infractions was long. Especially for a strict single parent like Jake.
Matty took in Jake’s barreling legs. They were the size of tree trunks, especially compared to his own father’s, which were more like twigs.
“Hello, Matthew,” Jake said, barely acknowledging Matty’s response as he walked away.
Things had definitely changed between Jake and Matty in recent years. Not that he was ever warm and fuzzy, but when they were young, Jake would let Matty and Dylan ride the ferry back and forth for fun and would even allow them to sit in the captain’s chair and steer a bit. And on his rare days off, he’d take them out fishing on the Boston Whaler he kept docked at the market. Those youthful days of innocence were long gone. Matty was definitely cautious around Jake now that the two kids’ summer antics had elevated to fooling around. I knew from Renee that Jake was mostly misunderstood. Yes, he was as big as a lumberjack and strong as a longshoreman, but his heart was a lot softer than he let on. There was no doubt he was feeling the weight of his baby girl leaving the nest.
Yes, Matty’s best friend, Dylan, who could skim a rock on the bay and make it skip seven times if it skipped once, was a girl. At least she was until a couple of summers back when, to everyone’s great shock, a woman with breasts, a bikini, and a belly button ring showed up at the ferry dock.
Breasts aside, Dylan and Matty had been best buds since I arrived on the island. But, since postpubescent teenagers can rarely put breasts aside, it recently began to escalate into something different. The two spent many hours last summer kissing and groping on chilly August nights. Ben and I embarrassingly witnessed them making out on the bleachers or at the beach on more than one occasion during Sally’s nighttime walk or when returning home from dinner in town. I knew they rarely saw each other over the winter, and Matty’s parents seemed clueless about the change in their relationship status. The two kids usually picked up right where they left off, and I hoped, for Matty’s sake, this summer would be the same. He’d certainly weathered enough change lately.
Matty tossed the cardboard soup container in the trash and bounded down the stairs of the ferry to be the first one ashore to meet Dylan. Seeing her was the only thing he had looked forward to in a long while. Dylan was extraordinary—like lightning in a bottle.
Part Two
Summer is, after all, the season of escape: the landscape in which to contemplate, alone, our failures and our possibilities; the safety valve, the frontier that none of us wants—or can afford— to see closed.
—JOAN DIDION,
“American Summer,” Vogue, May 1963
seven
Dylan Finley
Most year-round residents experienced a mix of happiness and dread as the summer people arrived on the island, but for Dylan Finley it was pure happiness. The main source of that happiness was the chance to spend time with her best friend, Matty.
Dylan navigated the crowd, setting herself up in a prime spot to greet him, as she had been doing for years. She used to make her dad phone her up at the first sight of Matty and his parents on the mainland, but Jake hadn’t acquiesced to that in ages. Now she just waited for Matty to text her. Aside from the standard check-ins for Christmas and whatnot, the two barely kept in touch over the winters. When scrolling back, his text that morning of “Meet me at the 4 o’clock ferry?” had been the first he’d sent her in months. Although he did call a few times this winter to vent about his parents’ sudden divorce.
Dylan took in the crowd. It was the typical bedlam.
For starters, let me explain that everyone basically knows each other here. So, the happy people getting off the boat have only seconds to call out “Hello” and “Goodbye” and “Why are you leaving on such a glorious day?” to the not-so-happy people waiting on the dock for their ride back across the bay. When the boisterous exchange of passengers is complete, the new arrivals fan out onto the sidewalk, most dragging their bags over to the adjacent wagon park. There are usually a spattering of guests being picked up by their hosts, whose big welcoming smiles usually mask their true feelings: Why did I invite them, and when are they going to leave?
I recognized the three Fauser sisters waiting with empty wagons, hoping to make a few bucks carting people’s belongings to their houses. I saw Bonnie Zucker with a beaming smile on her face, searching the throngs for her children and grandchildren. A deckhand tossed a prescription from the pharmacy on the mainland down to Ruth, the zinc-faced doctor’s wife, and another passed a large box of fresh mozzarella from the Italian grocer in Bay Shore to one of the kids who work at the town’s beloved market.
Everything seemed to be as it always was, though of course it very much was not.
Dylan controlled herself from charging the boat when she saw Matty debark, mostly because she was aware of her father’s watchful eye, I’m sure. Matty must have been aware as well; when he reached her they hugged cautiously. Dylan grabbed his duffel and threw it in the basket of her bike, while Matty gave her a once-over, landing on the bikini top peeking out from under her denim shirt.
I wondered if she just threw on the outfit without a second thought to meet her BFF or contemplated every aspect of her appearance in the mirror to meet her BF. My gut said it was a combination. She caught him looking, and he blushed.
“Nice pegs,” he teased, motioning to the fresh additions of two metal tubes sticking out from either side of her back wheel. He swung his leg over her rear tire and stepped on them for a lift home. Dylan scanned the crowd for Matty’s mom or dad before shoving off.
“You’re alone?”
“Except for Houdini.” He turned his back so that Dylan could say hello.
“My mom’s coming later tonight, she let me come out alone—you know—it’s part of the broken-home dispensation package,” Matty joked.
