by Anne Bernays
But Provincetown and Truro aren’t Sodom and Gomorrah, however often off-Cape people insist they are. It’s just that, somehow, pushed to the edge metaphorically, a lot of folks out this way also pushed to the edge geographically and put down what passes for roots on the easternmost point of land in the U.S. Still, eccentrics are in the minority, and most of us just like living here for an assortment of reasons that have nothing to do with breaking the law or pederasty. There are thousands of men and women, retired from a life of hard work. There are men in the building trades, making a shitload of money, and who will go on doing so just as long as our town fathers and mothers refuse to put a cap on the number and size of the structures appearing here with the regularity of six-foot waves in a nor’easter.
I stopped working around noon and took our timid eight-year-old yellow Lab, Marshall, down to the beach for a walk. The sky was as blue as a Delft plate and almost cloudless except for a few wisps near the horizon. More and more people, I realized, were staying on past Labor Day, enough to make me uneasy. Figures, made tiny by distance, walked near the edge of Cape Cod Bay; a couple were sitting on the sand, wearing fleece of many colors. A man with bushy eyebrows appeared from over a dune. At his heels was a black standard poodle, clipped to look like a turn-of-the-century chorus girl. The dog calmly pooped onto the sand and failed to kick back over what he’d left there. The man was wearing one of those Irish tweed hats of the sort favored by Senator Moynihan and what looked like a brand new Windbreaker. He paid no attention to the dog, turned halfway around, so that he was facing the water, unzipped his fly, and peed near where the dog had shat. Marshall started to growl and approach them cautiously; courage is not his principal trait. The poodle barked and showed his fangs. I wanted to say something really nasty about using the beach as a public toilet, but I realized that if you pee in front of a woman you don’t know, you’re probably not the sort of person who’s going to take too kindly to the reprimand of a middle-aged woman with no weapon other than her tongue and a wimpy dog. The man was far enough away so that his features were somewhat blurred. But he saw me and touched the brim of his hat in greeting as if nothing at all had happened, and I was abruptly overwhelmed by the rudeness and selfishness of this man with his shitting dog and his peeing and, above all, his proprietary attitude: This is my beach. I can do whatever I fucking feel like on it. If I hadn’t been through menopause, I would have chalked up my sudden crankiness to PMS. But I couldn’t do that. Neither could I explain it by blaming the huge house looming nearby that seemed to breathe like a monster with its feet firmly secured to its cement foundation by iron chains. I couldn’t insist that it and the others like it had changed me from a nice, affable, quiet person into a curmudgeon. Spiritually, I was feeling off my feed and the man and dog didn’t help. Neither did the fact that it was a year since the catastrophe in New York and my unconscious supplied the memory so fiercely it felt as if it had just happened that morning. The air around me seemed to weigh more than usual and the sky began to cloud up. Everything conspired. And, even as I was aware of my superattentiveness and what for lack of anything better I’ll call sane paranoia, I knew I was going to have to snap out of it or it was going to hurt me.
As soon as I stepped over the threshold, the phone began to ring; it always knows. This time it was our daughter, Beth, calling from New York, where she’s the “Accessories and Makeup Editor” of Scrappy, a magazine for teens. She was making gulping sounds that nearly drowned her words. I finally figured out what she was crying about: she and her boyfriend Andrew had broken up and she was devastated. They had been living together in Tribeca for the last nine months or so and she was counting on their getting married. I asked what happened and she said that Andrew had told her he wasn’t in love with her anymore.
“It wasn’t even another woman,” Beth said. “That makes it so much worse.”
“You really think so?” I said. “I’m not so sure. This way you’re spared the jealousy.”
I heard Beth blowing her nose. “I have to tell you, Beth, I’m not nearly so unhappy about this as you are.”
“What do you mean?” she said. “I thought you liked Andy.”
“I didn’t altogether trust him,” I told her.
She said she hadn’t realized that and this pleased me: I hadn’t let on that I was frightened by his broad selfish stripe and his emotional distance, something Beth had apparently failed to recognize. We see what we want to see. Beth said she had saved up some vacation time and could she come up and stay with me? I love having her and her brother Mark visit, but I find that I use them as an excuse not to work. When there’s no one here, I eat in bed, ignore dirt, and let newspapers pile up. So there are two sides to my children’s visits. But how could I say no? My poor daughter needed her mom. I told her of course she could come up. Could she bring me some Stilton cheese and a dozen bagels?
Beth arrived the following day. She’d taken the plane to Hyannis, where I picked her up in the Saab. She looked as if she’d been dropped out of a window. She was wearing old jeans, a grimy NYU sweatshirt, running shoes, and a baseball cap over hair that didn’t look all that clean either. If she was trying to hide her distress, she wasn’t doing a very good job of it. She gave me a loose hug, dumped her duffel bag in the back seat, and got in the front seat beside me. I tried to get her to talk on the way home, but she wanted to listen to her CD player with plugs in her ears and I didn’t feel urgent enough to press her, figuring she would talk when she was ready. There were a few snuffles and once, taking a quick look to the right, I saw her palms over her eyes. A mother suffers every pang with her child. It was not a pleasant ride for either of us. But when, almost an hour later, we drew up to our house, she seemed to cheer up a little. “Is Dad coming down on the weekend?” she said.
“I think so,” I said. I wasn’t sure myself.
Marshall sauntered out to greet Beth, waving his tail, and she bent over to fondle his neck. I took this as a good sign. There was love still inside her; Andy hadn’t squeezed it all out.
We went inside and I started gathering up my art things to clear the table so we could eat off it. Beth said I didn’t have to do that on her account.
She told me that she’d like to walk on the beach—by herself. “That’s okay,” I told her. I knew the virtue of a solitary walk: it does help you organize your feelings. Is it the sea? Is it the sense of the vastness of a horizon that seems to shift when the weather does? Is it the particular kind of sound when the tide is high, and its opposite, when the tide has receded half a mile, leaving the flats, as the beach at low tide is known, like a body with its clothes removed: all sorts of interesting things—shells, bits of crab, an assortment of seaweed, dead fish, an occasional smashed plastic cup—lying there, waiting to be covered up again? Whatever it is, I knew exactly what she wanted and it had to be sought alone.
By the time Beth came back from her walk, I had a vegetable soup almost done—I’m a cook who relies heavily on shortcuts and yogurt. She came bursting into the house. “What’s that thing?” she said, pulling off her cap and coming over to stand right next to me—as if I’d done something nasty to her.
I asked her what thing she was talking about.
“That—whatever—that—I suppose—house!”
“Oh,” I said. “You mean the new house.”
“Yes,” she said through her teeth. “Who did that? It looks like a halfway house for druggies or something. It’s huge. It didn’t look so big last July. My God, they moved fast.”
“They actually had two crews working on it twenty-four seven,” I told her. “That house has kept more tongues wagging than Jellies has.” Jellies is the high-end convenience-cum-gourmet store that no year-round person would set foot in except in the direst emergency. They’re too high and mighty to sell lottery tickets. The markup at Jellies probably hovers around one hundred percent—like four dollars and seventy-nine cents for a tube of Crest and five dollars for a slim box of spaghetti.
; “I know I told you all about it in an e-mail.”
“You did not, Mom, I would have remembered a thing like that. It’s disgusting.”
“You and I each have a different memory about this,” I said.
It was obvious that in spite of her troubles of the heart, Beth was reacting to the house down the beach the same way I had, and the others who live here all or most of the year. To us it was far more than an eyesore. It was so out of scale and style with the older houses around it that it made only one statement, namely, “My owner has shitloads of money.” It’s a gesture of disdain toward its neighbors. It’s the shirtless punk who crashes the formal ball, determined to be in-your-face and to curse while he’s being escorted out. It works too—that’s the bitter part. Once the house has gone up and the carpenters and plumbers and electricians have cleaned up the mess that’s been a blight on the surrounding area for months, you can’t kick it out like you can the young man with his pierced nose and nipple rings and no intention of dancing the waltz. It will be there until time covers it with a shroud of sand.
“They’ve been working on the place for over a year, but there’s still a ways to go.” I also told her I’d heard that the owner had built himself a house that was a sister to this one on Nantucket and then, because of it, was blackballed at the Yacht Club. So he sold it at a profit and came here where there are no clubs to be blackballed by. Molly Jonas says they’re installing a burglar alarm. Beth asked what for. “Nobody I know even locks their doors.”
“I guess to keep burglars out,” I said. The whole community had had a not-so-mild case of the jitters since the murder, a year earlier, of Joanne Tinkham, a single mother with a small child, a crime so far unsolved and, from the looks of things, not likely to be, ever.
“You think you told me, Mom, but you didn’t.”
“Why are we going over this again?” I said, moving toward the pot of soup simmering on the stove. “There’s no point in it.” This conversation was now about whether or not I told her about the bad house and not about the bad house itself. This was not quite the way I wanted things to go, especially on Beth’s first day with me.
“How about some soup?” I said, reaching for two bowls on a shelf above the microwave.
“What kind?” she said, reminding me that one of Beth’s tricks is to manufacture tension between the two of us. I think it gives her a buzz.
“See if you can guess,” I said. Then she smiled and retreated. “Thanks, Mom,” she said. “Andy doesn’t do soup.”
I had to sit on the words I wanted to say out loud, namely, “Oh, is that so?” or “I care?” But the poor child was pining for her erstwhile love. Who could blame her? Being dumped by a man is even worse than being fired from a job. I’m a feminist and I don’t care what other feminists have to say about it—it leaves a wound.
As we ate—in more silence than sound—it occurred to me that the man who had peed on the beach the day before was probably the owner of the monster house. It all fit. The trophy dog and the hat and above all, his attitude. “You didn’t happen to see a man when you were on the beach before? A man with hairy eyebrows and a dog. Not a lap dog, a big floozy poodle?”
Beth said she hadn’t and wanted to know why I was asking. I told her I thought this man might be the owner of the house she’d seen.
“What’s his name?” Beth said. “What do you know about him?”
“I think it’s Brenner. He’s from somewhere on Long Island. I hear he builds hotels, or maybe it’s shopping malls. Everybody loves malls.” Beth said that Andy didn’t; he wouldn’t let her shop at one. Did she realize how bad this guy was for her—how he was taking small bites out of her? Probably not: I had the feeling that she hadn’t entirely absorbed the idea that Andy was no longer part of her life. And for all I knew, maybe he wasn’t, maybe he was just playing games with her and he’d be back. I kept my big mouth shut.
Beth wanted to know if there was a Mrs. Brenner. I told her that the word was, there used to be a wife. “They had three or four children together. Now there’s a younger missus—much younger. Like a trophy wife. He’s also got a trophy dog.”
“Jeeze, don’t you and your friends have anything better to do than gossip all day? When that weird woman was murdered last year, that was probably all you could talk about. Like September eleventh.”
“I don’t know what Nine-Eleven has to do with the Tinkham murder, but why do you think she was weird? How was she weird? I just thought she was pitiful.”
Weird, Beth said, because she lived alone with a two-year-old off the main road and went to P’Town bars two or three times a week, where she picked up guys and sometimes brought them back to her house. “I call that weird.”
“I call it tempting fate,” I said. “And you’re right about the gossip. But it happened in our very own backyard. And no one knows who did it. For all we know, the killer may still be hanging out here.”
She looked at me as if she thought I was going a little mental. “Well, you never know,” I said.
“I don’t know what’s happening to this place—these hideous trophy houses and…”
I interrupted her. “Maybe it isn’t quite so bad, pet. It’s the way you’re feeling about your own life that makes everything look so dark.”
I had my work to do and Beth’s problems were cutting into my psychic energy. That was how it should be, I told myself. This is your only and beloved daughter. But that same day I’d received an e-mail from David Lipsett, the book’s editor, asking me when I thought I would have the drawings finished—in order to keep to their schedule, they had to go into production ASAP. Beth went down the hall to her old room. I could hear her taking stuff off the bed—I had started to use it as a storage place for some old jackets and sweaters and things like that—and opening and shutting drawers I had filled with some overflow clothes, mine and Tom’s.
I spent about three hours doing dogs and little girls, suggesting a park with a zoo, animals and hard-to-read figures. I thought an impressionistic style would let the book’s readers fill in whatever was wanted, from their own imaginations. I climbed into the box that was my work and shut the door behind me so no one could disturb me. I was alone with the silly characters of someone else’s story and I felt like I was swimming in happiness.
Around five o’clock Beth said, “You have nothing to eat in the house—no wonder you look so skinny.”
I suggested we drive out to the A & P in Provincetown and restock the refrigerator and cupboards. The shortcut I take goes close to the water in North Truro, a road not very much used, as off-Cape people don’t seem to realize it’s there. On this one short stretch there are two brazen new houses, twice as big as their neighbors. Beth said, “I can’t look. What sort of people have this kind of money? Why would they want to live here? Why don’t they go to the Hamptons if they want to show off?”
I told her she’d been away so long she didn’t realize what was going on; this wasn’t your ordinary secret Eden any longer; it was the Hamptons of New England. “Real estate prices have gone sky-high. We could easily get more than a million for our house.”
Beth didn’t respond to this, and I figured she must be chewing over the double-edged business of enjoying your plump cushion of money while recognizing, at the same time, how unfair it is to have so much when so many people are poor beyond anything we’ve ever experienced, poor enough not to eat more than one meal a day and not own one pair of shoes. Maybe it was better to be like the Brenners and not have a clue about the suffering in other parts of the world—or, better yet, not caring. Just being blithe about your appetites and your comforts. Dividing the world’s wealth—one of the less successful solutions to unfairness.
The slim arc of Provincetown, resting on the water like a baby alligator, came into view as we rejoined 6A. The sun had spread a film of reddish-gold over the town, and houses along the beach were small enough at this distance to look charmed, like a landscape in an animated film trying not for ominous bu
t for romance. “Wow,” Beth said. “It never fails to get to you, does it?”
“I’d like to stop in at Raymie’s for a minute after we finish our grocery shopping.” Beth didn’t say anything. I could tell she wasn’t all that eager—probably thinking about how she’d have to explain about the missing Andrew. We had a good time at the A & P, fingering tomatoes, sniffing melons, spooning imitation crabmeat salad into plastic containers from the salad bar. Beth seemed surprised to see a Japanese sushi guy at the fish counter, rolling up rice and kelp. I told her this was simply another indication of the way things were headed. We bought some sushi for Beth. And a boneless lamb leg—for Tom, who likes lamb done outside on the grill.
In the parking lot, Beth said, “It’s late, Mom, do we have to go to Raymie’s?”
“I haven’t seen Raymie in a couple of weeks and since we’re here…” Here meant Provincetown. “I promise we won’t stay long.”
We stowed our bags of food in the trunk and then headed back toward Truro. Raymie’s B & B actually straddles the boundary between P’Town and North Truro and was given the choice of addresses by the U.S. government. She chose P’Town because, she figured, for visitors looking for action no matter how tame, P’Town would be a better draw than Truro, where there’s nothing but wind, sand, sky and some old houses. Not even a downtown. People coming off Route 6 drive round and round, looking in vain for downtown Truro. One man was known to have driven around for a day and a half before he was willing to ask someone for directions to Truro, only to be told he was already there.
