Page 33 of On Fire Island
“What’s he gonna do, throw me overboard?”
Neither commented on the possibility. The truth was, Jake had barely made eye contact with Dylan over the past few days, and she was beginning to worry she would leave for school with them in a bad place. She was not about to ask him for a favor—especially one involving Matty.
Jake had silently handed her a book the morning after the now legendary night. (I’d already overheard the girls at the register whispering about it.) The look Jake gave Dylan during the exchange was the closest they had come to discussing the incident. She held his gaze, preparing herself for some embarrassing and archaic manual on sex education. But the book, titledThe Fragile Ecosystem of the Barrier Beach, mortified her more.
“You’ll have a day off soon, and we can spend it together,” Dylan promised Matty.
“Well, at this rate, it’s a good thing you only want to do it once,” Matty joked.
Dylan didn’t think it was funny.
“We’ll figure something out,” he assured her, reeling back in his joke.
“You still have to get a condom, you know. Don’t forget!”
“Believe me, I haven’t forgotten.”
The conversation made me wonder about their determination. As far as I was aware, neither seemed to be trying very hard to put their plan into action.
A group of kids wearing arm floats or life vests climbed the ladder to the dock and surrounded the two teenage sunbathers, putting an end to their R-rated conversation.
Matty and Dylan sat up and watched them longingly as they laughed and swayed their linked arms back and forth and backand forth to the shouts of one, two, three, before jumping back in to the bay.
“I have to get back to the store,” Matty said, his tone in great contrast to the gaggle of giggling children.
“I’m gonna stay here for a bit,” Dylan said, adding, “Don’t forget to ask for off for my birthday.”
“I already did,” Matty managed, before sliding off the dock without so much as a splash.
Dylan lay on her belly for a bit, dangling her hand off the dock in the dark bay, a pensive look on her face. Two kids climbed the ladder, stormed past her, and cannonballed off the back of the dock, outside of the confines of the swim cradle.
“You’re gonna get in trouble,” Dylan preached knowingly, as the lifeguards blew their whistles.
In my head, I imagined her cannonballing off the back of the dock with them, as opposed to warning them. It would have been a better ending.
twenty
Incoming
The first summer after we bought the house, we were excited to invite guests, myself more than Ben, I may add. There was more than one instance when he kicked me under the table as whomever we were sitting with in the city pronounced, “I’ve never been to Fire Island,” usually with a bucket of hope in their eyes. The kick was to stop me from responding, “You have to come visit us this summer, then!”
We had a full house nearly every weekend of our first summer as homeowners. We hadn’t put down roots yet, and we filled our calendar with sincere and greatly anticipated invitations. By year two, we cringed as those same guests began hinting at the next summer’s invite as early as October. By year three, Ben scribbled the wordsNO GUESTSin red Sharpie over half the weekends on our calendar. By year four, he wrote his version of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”
There are good guests, and bad guests, but the best guests are no guests.
He wanted to have it needlepointed and framed and hung on the wall over our entranceway.
“We’ll lose all our friends!” I protested.
“Or rule out the humorless ones,” he responded with a hopeful smirk.
We are not ogres or ingrates, but the truth is, most guests don’t know how to behave. They arrive full of potential, bearing gifts of food and wine and, if we are really lucky, a case of toilet paper, but things quickly sour. They overstay their welcome (two nights tops), use up all the good sunblock, don’t help themselves or help in general, and forget to shut the screen door and wipe the sand from their feet when entering the house.
My family, especially my mom, who adheres to the old “we’re not guests we’re family” adage, were the worst offenders. They’d arrive empty-handed and hungry, no matter what ferry they made. And my mother, regardless of how much she complained about the short walk to our house, always wore inappropriate shoes. The belief that “a lady should always wear heels” was a pillar of her personal brand of insanity.
Now Ben pulled the wagon to the ferry at a sloth-like pace to meet my sister and my parents. Unlike him, I was happy they were coming. While my relationship with my mom was fraught with typical mother-daughter stuff, teenage blowouts over ridiculous things like my bra strap showing or her constant cry of “Don’t forget lipstick!” every time I left the house, I didn’t feel badly about any of it. I was a good daughter, and there was no doubt she was a proud mother. She loved bragging about my accomplishments and Ben’s. She replaced her coffee table books with the novels I had edited and told anyone who would listen, “My daughter is married to the bestselling author Benjamin Morse,” in ahaughty voice that she could turn on and off in an instant. My sister, Nora, and I called it her Highland Manor tone in reference to the elocution lessons she took at the fancy boarding school she was sent off to as a teenager. Apparently, her younger self hadn’t gotten along with her own mother very well either. She insisted it was on account of her mother being a classic narcissist—there was lots of pot-calling-the-kettle-black action between my mother and my grandmother.
Generally, I think the classic narcissist label is thrown around too liberally, but in my mother and grandmother’s case, it was spot-on. Hopefully, it would prevent her from looking inward too much after I passed. I would hate for her to dwell on the shortcomings of our relationship for the rest of her life. I certainly never did. Though I appreciated that my relationships with my dad and my sister were much simpler.
