The Summer House

by Hannah McKinnon

  “How’s the water?” Flossy called.

  Clem waited as they made their way down. “Beautiful,” she said, realizing she hadn’t stepped foot in it yet.

  “Uncle Sam! Uncle Evan! Look what we got,” George shouted, grabbing the blue pail with the urchin. He rocketed past his mother, Maddy in hot pursuit.

  “He’s mine,” Maddy told them, a warning rather than an invitation. She glanced back sheepishly at her mother. “For five more minutes.”

  Coolers were opened and towels laid out. Sam cracked a beer open, and Evan set up the umbrella.

  “Where’d you find it?” Sam asked. “I haven’t seen one of these in years.”

  “Some guy,” George said.

  Flossy frowned. “Which guy?”

  Clem pointed next door. She realized she hadn’t even introduced herself or the kids. She had no idea who he was. “The guy next door. I think he’s a summer renter.”

  Flossy considered this as she set up her beach chair. “At the Weitzmans’?”

  Clem nodded.

  “Oh, that’s not a summer renter. That’s their youngest son.”

  “Fritzy? The baby?”

  Flossy sat down, a look of amusement crossing her face. “Well, I don’t imagine anyone’s called him that in a long time, but yes. He just graduated from Duke.”

  Clem reached over and plucked Sam’s beer out of his hand.

  “Hey,” he protested.

  “I need this more than you,” she said. She’d been ogling baby Fritz.

  Paige

  Damn it. Her mother had given her a grocery list, which it seemed she’d left somewhere back at the house, where Flossy was supervising the painting of the entire place for a mere birthday party and bossing said birthday boy around the yard with a shovel. She was not going back for it.

  Paige remembered limes (likely for Sam’s evening gin and tonics), milk, cereal, bread, and fresh berries, which she’d stop and pick up at the farm stand. She listed these out loud to Clem as they stood outside McQuade’s Marketplace in the hot sun. “What else did Mom want?”

  But Clem was distracted by George’s sudden departure toward a giant bin of beach balls near the entrance doors. “Do they sell wine here?” she asked.

  Paige really did not want to call Flossy to ask what else was on the list. Her mother seemed frazzled enough already with the party planning. And needier. Paige found herself being pulled aside to not only answer inquires about Clem but also David. Was everything okay? David looked tired. In fact, so did she. Was she okay? It was exhausting.

  Late last night Paige had tiptoed out of the kids’ bunkroom after checking on everyone one last time and come face-to-face with her mother, hovering outside the bunkroom door. Flossy was brushing her teeth in the hallway. “How did it go?” she’d asked, her mouth full of toothpaste.

  Paige blinked in the bright light of the hall. “Shhh. They’re fine, Mom. They’re asleep.”

  “No, I meant the interview,” Flossy pressed. “Any good news?” The toothbrush dangled out of her mother’s mouth at an irritating angle.

  “Just as I told you at dinner, no news on the interview. But I’ll come wake you up if we hear something during the night.” She’d felt bad after, when she climbed into bed beside David. It was the kind of thing she used to share with him, the kind of thing they’d lie nose to nose and laugh about in the dark: her crazy family, her nosy mother. But not recently. Besides, when she’d climbed into bed and pressed herself against him, she’d realized with disappointment that David was already sound asleep.

  Maybe he’d hear some news about the interview today. Maybe Emma, who’d been somewhat reticent since arriving at the summer house, would let her mother join her for one of her mysterious long walks. Now, frustrated and determined to get in and out of McQuade’s as fast as possible, she grabbed a grocery cart. “C’mere, George—want to go for a ride?”

  George spiked a swirly blue beach ball into her cart before hopping onto the front, and they sailed into the refreshing cool of the produce aisle.

  Clem lurched toward the cart, as if Paige might suddenly lose control and swerve into a display of watermelons.

  “Oh, I don’t let him do that at home,” Clem said.

  “You’re not at home,” Paige said flatly, winking at her nephew.

  Maddy skipped beside her mother holding her hand. “What’s that yummy smell? I’m hungry.”

  Paige knew that smell. When they were children, her father used to pile them all into their woodie station wagon and take them to the market, where he made a beeline for the seafood counter and ordered four bags of clam fritters, covered in tartar sauce. They were served in small brown paper bags, stained with the grease and salt. Clem usually dropped hers, and Sam practically swallowed his whole. But Paige would savor them one at a time as they followed their father’s wandering path up and down the grocery aisles as he plucked jars of caramel syrup and bags of chips from the shelves, forgetting all the staples Flossy had written down for him to buy. Her mouth watered at the memory.

  “Want to order fritters?” Paige looked expectantly at Clem.

  She didn’t seem enthused. “I’m not hungry. But you can get some for the kids.”

  “Come on, we can share one.” Paige had noticed Clem picking at her dinner the night before. Flossy had made a deconstructed lobster salad, arranging the split crustaceans with spears of lettuce over ice. It was as succulent as it was lovely to look at, and yet her sister had only managed to eat maybe a claw or two.

  Paige stopped at the fish counter and ordered three packets of the fried clams. “Careful,” she warned the kids, passing each their own bag. George frowned doubtfully into his, but Maddy took a game bite.

  “Did you realize Mom invited more than sixty people to Dad’s birthday?” Clem asked, inspecting the fritter Paige had handed her. Paige gave her another so each hand was full, a technique she’d used on her own kids when it came to eating vegetables. “Where is she putting all those people?”

  “Under a tent in the backyard. We need cereal. What aisle is the cereal in?”

  “What if it rains?”

  The large celebration was a surprise. A picnic of six seated on a large blanket by the water with wine and cheese boards was more Flossy’s style. Or at most, a smattering of neighbors and Richard’s Fairfield colleagues mingling in the backyard over a lantern-lit table of seasonal greens, grilled seafood, and oysters. Through all the years of anniversaries, birthdays, and promotions, there had been no grandiose celebrations Paige could recall. Certainly nothing requiring the Irish crystal and heirloom linens her mother had asked her to search for in the attic. Aside from the fact that her father was turning seventy-five, Paige wondered why this year.

  “It’s a lot of work,” Clem went on. “And have you noticed her knees seem to be bothering her? When she took the kids out to cut hydrangeas in the garden I noticed she had trouble getting up.”

  “It wasn’t our garden she was cutting the hydrangeas in,” Paige said. She’d been horrified to find Flossy standing at the fence that morning in the backyard, whispering into the dense shrubs separating their property from the Cookes’ property next door. The Cookes’ had not been around, as far as she could tell, but it didn’t excuse Flossy’s hacking into their hydrangea bushes. She’d sent the children in, at least.

  Paige had noticed the knees, though, and even though her family teased her about being an animal doctor, ACLs were ACLs, and she’d suggested her mom see an orthopedist. “And Dad’s back is bugging him, though he’d never admit it in front of us. They’re just getting older.”

  “But they’re getting older older,” Clem said, pressing a finger to her brow.

  Paige inspected her sister’s furrowed forehead out of the corner of her eye. Frankly, she was surprised it wasn’t more creased, given the year she’d endured. Then again, Clem didn’t have teenagers. “How much longer do you think they’ll be able to keep the summer house going? None of us are close enough to
help them open it and close it up each season. It’s a lot of work.”

  They were in the dairy section, and Paige put two cartons of milk in the cart. She eyed George and Maddy, who were now devouring their fritters, and grabbed another carton. “It’s not like they can’t afford to hire someone to do that stuff. Mom’s just too stubborn.”

  Clem looked at her. “I have a confession. I really didn’t think I could do this this summer. But I think it’s good we’re all here.”

  Paige smiled with relief. It was the first time her little sister had actually shared something of substance. “Me, too.” She reached for Clem’s hand to give it a small squeeze.

  But Clem moved away, not noticing. She’d already turned her attention and the grocery cart sharply toward the cashier.

  “Now, can we please go to the liquor store?”

  * * *

  Twenty minutes and two stops later (Sam had requested “tonic syrup,” not tonic water, necessitating a trip down Main Street to the more expensive liquor store), they were back in the driveway, unpacking groceries from the hot car. “Go get one of the uncles to help,” Clem told the kids as they careened toward the front door.

  Only there was no sign of David or any of the others. Flossy had left them a note: Down by the water. Clem grabbed it off the fridge and pressed it to her chest after reading it aloud. “Remember these?”

  “What?” Paige asked, wishing Clem would help put away groceries before the milk got warm.

  “Down by the water. It’s like the title of our childhood summers!”

  Paige raised an eyebrow, something that drove her sister crazy, both for its intent and the fact that she’d never been able to do it herself. “You’re suddenly in a good mood.”

  Clem ignored this. “Remember how Mom used to leave these same notes for us when we came home from playing with friends or being in town?”

  Paige snorted. “Yeah, probably hoping the three of us would leave her there in peace.”

  “Not so.” Clem showed the note to her kids, who didn’t seem to get it, but seemed happy to see how happy it made their mother. She trotted outside to the back porch and plucked their swimsuits from the railing where they’d been left to dry. “Let’s catch up with Grammy on the beach. It’s a gorgeous day.”

  Paige crammed the last of the perishables into the refrigerator and shut the door. It hummed loudly. “This thing is on its last legs. I know Dad takes comfort in the fact that it was here when Grandma Mae was alive, but seriously. They need new appliances.”

  Clem frowned. “I love that fridge. It’s part of this house’s history.”

  “Precisely.”

  Clem ducked into the small laundry room and emerged with an armload of fresh beach towels. “Come on, kids, I’m going to teach you how to make dribble castles, just like Mommy did when she was little. Remember those, Paige?”

  Paige folded the grocery bags and tucked them neatly into the cupboard beneath the sink. “What I remember is you crying when the waves washed them away. And how I had to carry you all the way up the beach path one day after a crab pinched your toe.”

  “Really? I don’t remember that at all.”

  “You don’t remember how it got infected, and the local doctor told Dad to carry you into the waves so you could soak it in salt water every day?”

  Clem clapped her hands. “That’s right! I almost forgot about the fiddler crabs. Kids, we should have crab races!”

  Paige laughed. “There you go again.”

  “Don’t listen to your auntie,” Clem told Maddy and George, who were following their banter curiously. “She forgets what it’s like to have fun.”

  Paige knew Clem was teasing, but it sounded like something her own kids had begun saying to her lately. “I didn’t forget. I just don’t have a need to sugarcoat everything.”

  Clem looked up from the rug, where she was tugging Maddy’s purple swimsuit up her bean-shaped body. “It’s not a need, Paige. It’s how I remember things.”

  “Lucky you,” Paige muttered. She opened the cupboard in search of a water glass. Her mother’s mismatched Depression-era tumblers were stored precariously close together. She began to rearrange them.

  It wasn’t fair. Paige knew how to enjoy life as much as the rest of them. But as the oldest of the three, it had been she who toted the cumbersome lunch cooler across the hot sand while the others ran heedlessly down the dune path with their pails. Just as she had been the one to drag Clem out of rough water and remind her to reapply sunscreen before her freckled shoulders burned. Which had actually happened to Paige’s one day, because she’d been so focused on protecting Clem’s that she’d forgotten her own. Interesting that Clem never seemed to remember those things.

  “Okay, we’re off.” Clem heaved her beach bag over her shoulder and ferried the kids out onto the back porch. Maddy streaked across the dry lawn straight for the beach path, her bright-purple figure disappearing into the dune grass. “We’ll meet you down by the water,” Clem said, peering back through the screen door.

  “Down where?” Paige called.

  George paused on the back porch beside his mother. “Doesn’t Aunt Paige remember where the beach is?”

  Clem ushered him down the porch steps, and turned to stick her tongue out at her sister. “She remembers, honey. What she forgets is where she left her sense of humor.”

  Flossy

  The birthday party had been a ruse to get the kids back to the summer house. And it had worked. Sure, it was also about Richard’s seventy-fifth birthday, which she cared deeply about, even if he did not. Family needed to be celebrated, and seventy-five years on this earth was noteworthy. Seventy-five good years was just plain remarkable.

  She was aware that she and Richard had lived a life not only comfortable and successful by anyone’s gauge but unscathed as well. There had been none of the major upheavals some of their peers in Connecticut had experienced—no jobless years stemming from corporate layoffs, no scandals or affairs. The kids had each been raised to be not only productive citizens of a certain means and education but also good people—people Flossy and Richard were genuinely proud of and whose company they enjoyed. Unlike her friend Rhoda, whose eldest daughter had been class valedictorian and coasted easily into Dartmouth on an academic scholarship only to become pregnant her sophomore year and drop out to move home. Or Eddie and Elaine, whose marriage had been ruptured by a redheaded paralegal in his firm with coltish legs and an extramarital invitation Eddie had not been able to turn down. Yes, there had been hard years. Years when the children were young and Richard was teaching classes that ran from morning until evening, returning home with his tie loose around his neck as he collapsed into his wing chair and shut the study door, in spite of the three sets of little hands that pounded on it and needed to be busied, then washed and tucked beneath blankets by eight o’clock. Flossy had felt a chasm open and widen between them during that time, one that she’d initially been too tired to consider, and later regarded with no small amount of resentment.

  But there had been milestones and vacations, and they’d somehow muddled onward, then upward, as the kids had grown. Richard’s mother, Mae’s, illness, in later years, had been difficult. They’d moved her closer to them in Connecticut, after his father had passed, to an assisted-living facility with tennis courts and Spartan apartments that Flossy had eyed warily, silently beseeching her own children to keep her from this when she grew older. When Mae began to convalesce, they’d made all the arrangements for her care, visiting her weekly, then daily; sitting for hours at her bedside to hold her hand or read a book. Oddly enough, it had softened their bond rather than straining it, moving it from a place of committed practicality to one of demonstrations of gratitude. After Mae had passed, Richard surprised Flossy with a trip to Bordeaux, where they wandered cobblestone streets and sought out tiny outdoor cafes where they ate—and drank too much wine. Flossy felt lucky: their partnership had been strong and staid, if not remarkable. But as the kids bega
n to graduate from college and enter the workforce, she took pause; all the collective labor to get the children to this point was largely done, and yet her worry did not recede with the tide of work when they left home. It rose. Like a wall of panic, as the grandkids came, Flossy realized the obstacles were greater and indiscernible: she felt out of touch, too tired, too old to protect her children and now her grandchildren from them. In the seventies it had seemed so much simpler. Yes, there were the Halloweens when the kids’ candy bags were delivered to the local hospital to be X-rayed for razor blades. The years of Cold War fear, but even that seemed so remote in both probability and proximity. On the daily scale of things, her advice had been simple: If a van pulls up, don’t climb into it. If your sister falls out of a tree, run to get me.

  Back then, the dangers had been obvious and blunt. Nowadays they were invisible and more cutting: there was the Internet, and with it predators, cyberbullies, and identity theft; drivers who texted on devices she wasn’t familiar with; drugs she couldn’t name. It brought with it a tide of anxiety so acute there were moments she couldn’t breathe. And yet also a measure of freedom that she had learned to embrace. If those horrors were unseen, then perhaps it was best she attend to what was in front of her: her grandchildren, minus all those perturbing “what ifs.” As for her grown children, this year had nearly felled them. The struggles and the suffering had kept them down, individually and as a whole. Flossy could not protect her offspring from the world, just as she could never shed her role as mother. No matter how many tiny shoes had been tied or graduate degrees earned, the past year had imparted, in no gentle way, that she could not protect her offspring from the world at large. But the summer house had always been their way to try to escape it.

  * * *

  Ci Ci Le Blanc was a member of the summer Sea Spray Supper Club. The club had begun in the mid-eighties with a small group of summer residents. There had always been backyard barbecues and beach tailgate parties among the families and couples who lived along the same narrow strip of beach. The engagements were rustic and simple, where everyone brought a side dish and a bottle of wine. Within that loose amalgam of visitors and summer residents, a smaller group of women formed. The rules were simple: twelve members only, for the twelve weeks between Memorial Day and Labor Day. The supper club would meet each Friday. And each member hosted one time during the summer.