The Family Beach House

by Holly Chamberlin

  Tilda shook her head. If Frank could hear her thoughts he would scold her for indulging in unnecessary, negative, superstitious, unproductive thinking. It was true. She did have a dark, even macabre streak, something Frank absolutely had not had. Frank had been deep but he had not been dark. He was a person who could see in the coldest, gloomiest day of winter the opportunity for something good—like gathering the family to learn a new card game or making popcorn and watching a favorite movie.

  And, Tilda thought now, there certainly were enough cold and gloomy days in southern Maine, though autumn could be surprisingly warm, at least into early October, when the marshes became golden and sere. Leaf-peeping season was brief but spectacular, usually put to an abrupt end by a violent but majestic thunderstorm that left trees bare and so drenched they felt pulpy to the touch. Bird life was still visible until then. If you watched you could still spot a variety of wild ducks, graceful egrets, loons with their mournful cry, and cormorants, their silhouettes eerily vampirelike when they dried their outstretched wings.

  Then came the winters, which were so bad primarily because they were so long, the cold, ice, and snow slowly, slowly evolving into a season of gray, brown, and mud. Most restaurants closed for a month or two, the Ogunquit Museum of American Art went dormant, people left for homes in Key West or Phoenix. It was possible to drive through the entire downtown and then back to Larchmere without seeing one other person, on foot or behind the wheel of a car. It was possible to feel you were going slightly mad. A trip to the Hannaford supermarket in York or Wells, whether or not you needed groceries, became a sanity-saving expedition. People who shunned church during the rest of the year turned up at Sunday services just to hear a voice other than their own.

  Of course, there was also a certain charm to winters in Ogunquit. Those who lived there year round had transformed entertaining at home to a fine art. Friends hosted potluck dinners and played board games and cards. The open fields, the town itself, the houses, all was picture postcard perfect, New England at one of its most romantic moments, single white candles in a house’s every window and pines sugared with glittering snow.

  And then it was early spring, March, when everyone was desperate for sun and warmth and got only mud season, when stretches of marshy land (thankfully, protected from development) were under water and even carefully planned developments, with their big, tasteful houses and perfectly groomed landscapes, seemed ugly and sad.

  In April, when warmth began to creep into the air and the sun to shine for a few hours every day, the town, as if desperate for celebration, sponsored a Patriots’ Day event in the parking lot of the beach. There were craftspeople selling their wares, and hamburgers and hot dogs sold to benefit the fire department, and sometimes even a band to get people dancing.

  May, though still fairly chilly, was a gorgeous month in Ogunquit and the surrounding towns. Late spring was Tilda’s favorite time of the year, partly because of the enormous contrast it presented to the barren, brownish-gray damp of March and April. Lilacs were suddenly everywhere, the dark purple French variety, the common pale purple, and the creamy white ones Tilda particularly loved. Stretches of Shore Road presented virtual walls of lilac. The scent could be overwhelming, sweet to the point of intoxication, and Tilda loved it, though the lilacs had made poor Frank sneeze.

  Yes, Tilda thought now, as she passed and nodded to another early morning walker—a woman in an electric blue sweatshirt with the cartoonish image of a smiling red lobster splashed across the front—living in Maine, an official Vacationland, was an interesting, sometimes annoying, sometimes exhilarating experience. Living in Ogunquit intensified or concentrated that experience because Ogunquit was, in many ways, the perfect vacation destination.

  There was the venerable Harbor Candy Shop on Maine Street, and fantastic bakeries like Bread and Roses, which made, in Tilda’s opinion, the best white toasting bread she had ever eaten. There were fine dining restaurants, such as Arrows on Berwick Road, and 98 Provence on Shore Road. There were more casual eateries, like the Cape Neddick Lobster Pound in Cape Neddick, and Barnacle Billy’s in Perkins Cove, where George and Barbara Bush had often been spotted, and down in Wells, there was Mike’s Clam Shack on Route 1, which made the juiciest fried mushrooms you could want, and Billy’s Chowder House right smack in the middle of a marsh, with excellent steamers and onion rings. And of course, on Post Road in Wells, there was the famous Maine Diner, not to be missed by anyone wanting an authentic “small town” diner experience.

  There were local golf courses and scenic cruises like those run by Finestkind, and art to be found in galleries like the Van Ward Gallery and the Barn Gallery on Bourne Lane, the birth of which was spearheaded by the actor J. Scott Smart in 1958. The Ogunquit Museum of American Art, a beautiful white building overlooking the ocean, was esteemed for its large and diverse collection of work by artists from all across the country.

  And of course there were more quaint pleasures like the trolleys—Polly, Molly, Holly—to shepherd tourists and the occasional local to and from Ogunquit and its neighboring towns. There were no end of guesthouses and bed and breakfast offerings, as well as family-oriented motels like the Anchorage and grander hotels, like the Cliff House.

  Tilda had always had a love/hate relationship with the summer visitors to Ogunquit, complicated by the fact that for a long time she herself had been—and to some extent still was!—a summer visitor to the town. The town’s population in winter was a mere one thousand people. In summer it swelled to twenty thousand. There was no doubt that tourists were good for the economy. It was just that traffic became a nightmare from Memorial Day to Labor Day. Once it had taken Tilda forty minutes just to get from her favorite farm stand to Larchmere, a drive that usually took less than fifteen minutes. And that had been on a rainy weekend! But people had booked vacations and, come rain or shine, they would be flocking to Ogunquit and Wells for the beach, family accommodations, and miniature golf, and to Kennebunk and Kennebunkport for a bit more upscale vacation experience, or farther up to Booth Bay to visit the botanical gardens or to Bar Harbor to hike the trails in the Acadia National Park, or farther still to Greenville and Moosehead Lake, where you could take a moose cruise and, if you were lucky, actually see one of the gigantic animals in its natural habitat.

  The massive cruise ships would be unloading in Portland through the early fall, their passengers flooding the Old Port’s pubs, gift and craft shops, then making their way up into the city to visit the L.L. Bean outlet on Congress Street and then to the Portland Museum of Art, and after, maybe to Victoria Mansion. Others would be day-tripping north to Freeport or south to Kittery to shop at the outlets. Others would take a bus (provided by the cruise line) down to Ogunquit for the day, with maybe a stop at a lobster shack for a lobster roll, a red hot dog, and a whoopee pie.

  And there would always be shopping. There would always be husbands and boyfriends hunched glumly on small wooden benches outside the shops on Main Street, Ogunquit, or Commercial Street, Portland, waiting while their wives purchased souvenirs for the kids back home or overpriced T-shirts with slogans like “Lobstahs Rule” and “The Way Life Should Be,” and snow globes with plastic mermaids and sand dollars inside. Or they would be pacing nervously outside high-end shops and galleries, the kind that sold one-of-a-kind jewelry, art, and crafts for exorbitant prices, while their wives “treated themselves” for the third time in a week. Tilda herself still wore a gold starfish charm she had “treated herself” to back when she was in college. She had bought it in a shop down in Perkins Cove called Swamp John’s. It had been an outrageous purchase for her, but a deliciously satisfying one as most outrageous purchases are.

  Tilda suddenly realized that she was almost at the Wells town line. Ogunquit Beach—or Main Beach, as it was also known—ran about one and half miles to Wells, where the temperature of the air changed dramatically. Her father’s old friend Bobby, who had been born and raised in Ogunquit, as had his father before him, had expla
ined the phenomenon to her once a long time ago, but Tilda, who didn’t have much of a head for science, could not now remember much of what he had said.

  She did, however, keep close watch of the tide chart, though it was her habit to go to the beach each morning no matter how high or menacing the tide. The beach had a different beauty and interest every day of the year. It was the one place where Tilda could not imagine anyone ever being bored. In fall came the welcome return to the beach of dogs (and their people), banned from April until October. In the winter came weird drifts and patterns of snow and ice on the sand.

  She had walked the length of the beach in all types of weather—in snow and in fog, in rain and in sunshine. Frank had thought she was crazy to go out in subzero weather, even though she was properly dressed against the cold in layers upon layers of fleece and wool. “You’re not a mail carrier, Tilda,” he would say. “You’re under no obligation to leave the house no matter the weather.”

  But the beach called to her. To walk on Ogunquit Beach was a necessary part of her well-being. It was often inspiring and always interesting. The saddest thing she had ever seen on the beach was a dead dolphin. Tears had come spontaneously to her eyes and she had quickly looked away. The oddest thing she had ever seen on the beach was a roasting pan. A large roasting pan, washed perhaps from some wreck of a pleasure boat. Or maybe an irate wife had thrown it overboard when her ungrateful husband had criticized the meal she had made for him. But who would roast a piece of beef or a chicken out at sea, other than, maybe, a chef on a large ocean liner? And unless he was Gordon Ramsay, why would he toss his kitchen equipment overboard?

  A more common site after a storm was the scattering of broken lobster traps. It was illegal, of course, to make off with one to use as decoration for your lawn or screened-in porch, but Tilda had seen people do just that, pick up the tumbled, sandy traps and carry them off to their cars.

  Once she had approached an opportunist in the beach parking lot, someone she had watched haul a washed-up trap from the beach to her car. It was a woman who looked to be in her sixties, wearing a pair of skin-tight hot pink shorts and a T-shirt that proclaimed she was a “FOXY GRANDMA.” She was definitely not a local, probably not even a Mainer. Politely, Tilda had told the woman that taking a lobsterman’s trap was illegal, something she suspected the woman already knew. For a moment the woman had simply stared at Tilda through her spangled designer sunglasses, and then she had shrugged. “Finders keepers,” she had said, and put the battered trap in the trunk of her car.

  Tilda could have reported her to the police; maybe she should have, but she had not. She had felt bad about that for a long time. After all, Bobby, her surrogate uncle, made his living as a lobsterman. Tilda knew how tough a life he led. She knew he couldn’t easily afford the loss—or theft—of his equipment. She had put her silence down to basic cowardice, to an innate distaste for making trouble, even when trouble was just what was called for. Confrontation in any form was not something Tilda ever sought and when she sensed it coming, she turned tail and ran. It wasn’t one of her more stellar moral traits, emotional cowardice.

  Worse, Tilda had a sneaking suspicion that this cowardice was what was holding her back now, preventing her from really embracing her life without Frank.

  At the Wells town line, Tilda stopped and scanned the blue morning sky. No eagle. She turned and began the long walk back to her car. Then she returned to the easy comfort of Larchmere and the good, strong coffee that would be brewing in its kitchen.

  5

  Adam McQueen, fifty years old, new fiancée and his two children in tow, arrived at the house around eleven o’clock. He swept through the front door with the air of the lord of the manor returning from a successful foray into the larger world. All he needed was a chained, defeated dragon trailing behind and a big bag of booty slung over his shoulder. At least, that was how Tilda saw his entrance.

  “Everybody,” he announced by way of greeting, “this is my fiancée, Kat Daly.”

  Ruth, Tilda, and Hannah were left to introduce themselves. Bill was out, no one knew where. Susan had taken a work-related call in her bedroom. Percy, not a fan of greetings and departures, especially those involving children, was absent.

  The children, eight-year-old Cordelia and six-year-old Cody, were slightly cranky, maybe from the traffic-choked ride up from Boston, maybe from boredom, though Tilda had recently learned that her brother’s family car, a Range Rover Sport, was equipped with a DVD player so Cordelia and Cody could watch movies from the backseat. Cordelia was tall for her age, and like her father, slim. She liked clothes and was already a bit of a fashionista. Cody closely resembled his mother but his eyes were the same changeable hue as Adam’s and Tilda’s were. Now, when the children were told they were to sleep in one of the upstairs bedrooms, apart from Adam and Kat, Cody looked like he was going to cry. Cordelia put her arm around her little brother and the gesture almost made Tilda cry. Her own two children were close, too. They were lucky.

  “Have you heard the big news, Adam?” Hannah was saying.

  “What big news? You’re moving to Vegas to be a show-girl?”

  “Screamingly funny. No, it’s more earth shattering than that. Dad’s got a girlfriend.”

  “He what?” Adam looked both outraged and disbelieving. “What right does he have at his age…? I’ll have a talk with him.”

  Hannah turned to her sister and muttered, “Oh, that’ll solve everything.”

  “Will you people stop,” Ruth said. “There is no problem to be solved. Enough.”

  Adam McQueen was a male version of his mother, Charlotte—handsome, tall, with a slim, muscular build. He had a dashing quality about him that, in his sisters’ views, was dampened by a generally annoyed, harried expression. His hair was dark brown and expertly, expensively cut; his eyes were hazel or green, depending on the light, like Tilda’s. Adam was known to spend a lot of money on his wardrobe (too much, according to his ex-wife) and his taste in cars was clearly meant to impress the sort of person susceptible to obvious displays of wealth. Currently, in addition to the Range Rover Sport, he owned a Ferrari 460 Spider. At the moment he was wearing a conspicuously designer polo shirt tucked in to crisply creased cotton-blend slacks. On his left wrist he wore a Rolex. It was real; he had made it a point of letting his family know that. Tilda wore a ten-year-old Timex. Hannah wore a Swatch. Craig didn’t own a watch and probably wouldn’t wear it if he did.

  Adam was obviously self-obsessed but entirely self-deluding and unaware. In this way he was also like his deceased mother, which, of course, was not an observation he was capable of making. This similarity did not go unnoticed, however, by his siblings, though Tilda was loath to think or say anything negative or critical about their mother.

  Hannah watched her brother not so subtly checking his image in the hall mirror. He seemed like such a caricature. She wondered if he had always been so one-dimensional, or if he had flattened out somewhere along the line, morphed from a three-dimensional person to a cartoon of a being. Hannah didn’t know. She realized that she had never paid much attention to Adam when they were kids. Maybe it was the age difference. Six years could be a big divide when you were young.

  Once she had asked Tilda about her memories of Adam as a child; they were only three years apart. Tilda had hesitated before saying, “Adam was an indifferent older brother, at best.” It hadn’t exactly answered Hannah’s question but it had revealed something about her sister’s feelings regarding him. Still, Hannah found Adam amusing in spite of his being a bit of an ass. Or maybe, she found him amusing because of it.

  His fiancée, a woman named Kat Daly, was very attractive in a blond ingenue sort of way. Certainly, she knew how to dress to emphasize her enviable figure. She was wearing tight, white, low-rise jeans, a hot pink halter type top, high, skimpy, silver sandals, and perched on her sleek, shiny head was a pair of designer sunglasses. Her eyes were a suspiciously bright blue (colored contacts, Hannah wondered?) and her n
ails sported a French manicure. In fact, Hannah thought, she had a bit of a Jessica Simpson thing going on, but she seemed not half as ditzy. Maybe she was a good actress. Whatever the case, it was no surprise that Adam would find her a suitable replacement for his middle-aged wife with her crinkly middle-aged neck. Who cared if she could cook or clean house? Kat looked good on his arm and, as Adam was loudly pointing out to Tilda, she made a good income as a junior account executive in a small but thriving marketing firm in a Boston suburb. Huh, Hannah thought. So Kat has brains and beauty. Maybe she had underestimated her brother. It was doubtful but stranger things had been known to happen.

  Kat and Adam went upstairs to get settled. The children trailed after them, dragging backpacks almost bigger than they were. (That was another thing that puzzled Hannah. Since when had kids needed to lug around so much stuff? They would all be having back surgery before their twenty-first birthdays.)

  “What kind of stepmother is she going to be, I wonder?” Tilda was at her sister’s side, asking her question softly.

  Hannah whispered back, “As long as she can open a juice box, she’ll do for his kids. Adam doesn’t want another maternal presence in his life. He wants a trophy.”

  “I wonder if Sarah has met her yet.”

  “I don’t know. Poor Sarah. On second thought, she knows she’s well rid of Adam. She’ll probably feel sorry for the kid.”

  “She does seem nice,” Tilda said. “She shook my hand.”

  “Dogs shake hands. Let’s wait and see what this girl’s really like.”

  Tilda shrugged. Her sister was right. Only time would tell.