by Fay Jacobs
April 1996
WEEKEND WARRIORS
Morning coffee in hand, I sit in my sunny front room and watch Rehoboth wake up. Early-birds come by for a look at the ocean; I wave as a man I recognize zips past on roller blades; dozens of people and their dogs head towards the water for a last boardwalk stroll before the April doggie ban.
I feel like I’ve always been here.
In fact, I can’t even remember the day my partner and I stopped reciting “the speech.”
Do you know the one I mean? Driving home after visiting friends at their new beach houses we’d tell each other “their place is great, but we’d hate driving all that way every weekend. Besides, we wouldn’t use it enough to get our money’s worth. And we’d be bored going to the same places all the time. And getting home so late on Sunday, Yech! It’s not for us. Besides, with summer rentals we’d only have it off-season. No way we’re driving to the beach in the snow.”
So now I have a beach house with a mortgage that won’t be paid off until 2025.
We worried about not using the place enough? We’re ubiquitous. Rehoboth can’t get rid of us. I blame the few missed weekends on the Maryland lottery. They haven’t picked my numbers yet and I had work obligations.
The not-driving-in-the-snow thing was a lie. Not only didn’t the wicked weather keep us from our appointed round trip, but we’re the only idiots we know who drove to the beach in a blizzard so we could be stranded here, not home.
The next tradition to collapse was the get-home-early thing. At first it was 4:30 at the latest to make it home for 60 Minutes. Then we started staying for our cherished ambush journalism. And once it got to be 8 o’clock, well, we started getting sleepy, and...it got harder and harder to go home.
Now our alarm goes off at 5 a.m. Monday so we can hot-foot it home (except through those rural speed traps!) see sunrise over the chicken coops by Elmer’s Market and be at work by 9.
It’s the same on the other end. Last fall we’d arrive Friday nights for a late dinner, having taken time to change clothes and pack after work. By January we were leaving clothes at the condo, jamming toiletries into a backpack on Thursday night and taking off a little early on Friday—getting out of our corporate drag in the car. By the first sign pointing to “Shore Points” we were dyked-out and waving at all the other rainbow-stickered cars heading East.
Last Friday I called in sick with mad cow disease and we packed and left on Thursday night.
Even with our gradually expanding weekends we couldn’t live up to my arrogant statement about being bored with the “same old places.” We’re regulars at the restaurants which stayed open this winter, having gotten to know the wonderful folks at our favorite places. If we miss Sunday brunch on Wilmington Avenue they file missing persons reports. We’ve been accused of living in a condo without knobs on the stove. I don’t know, I haven’t looked.
And we don’t just dine here. The three of us (me, Bonnie and Max the Schnauzer) all have haircuts in Rehoboth now, although not at the same place. Hey, I’m sure our respective stylists would swap scissors for clippers and vice versa in a pinch.
And Max loves strolling Baltimore Avenue, sampling from water dishes provided by the merchants as if he were wine tasting. He drags us right to the courtyard bookstore on our way into town each Friday so he can catch up on news and chat with his friends. And he’s discovered that most of the shops serve dog biscuits to shoppers of a canine orientation.
In fact, all of Rehoboth is a shopper’s paradise. From paper towels on up we’re tax-free-shopping groupies. By now, the only groceries we shop for at home are the perishables. And last week I smuggled a fish packed in ice over the Bay Bridge.
This jaded, native New Yorker just can’t get enough of Rehoboth’s small-town feeling with its special sensibility. As more of our friends settle here—some full-time—and we make new friends from Delaware and Philly, it’s getting tougher to spend weekdays away.
But we really got panicky last Sunday when I heard myself saying “I love the beach, but I don’t think I could live here full time. I’d miss the theatre, the city, the pace. It’s nice to have both but I really don’t think I could...I mean what could we do to earn a living? Maybe when we retire, but I don’t know.…”
Bonnie slapped her hand over my mouth and kept driving West. For now.
May 1996
THE RENTERS ARE COMING!!!
THE RENTERS ARE COMING!!!
I was late. For me. Only an hour and a half early for my flight. My spouse, used to my neurosis that the plane might, just this time, leave early, ignored my muttering as we walked briskly to the gate. Reluctantly I put my purse on the conveyor belt and watched it disappear. I’d rather have my breasts x-rayed than my purse. What if there’s scissors or matte knife in my bag? I haven’t been down to the bottom of the thing since 1986. Are tweezers a weapon? Nervous and hassled, do I look like a terrorist?
It had been a bad week. We had to pack up the beach condo for our first-ever renters.
“What promise?” I said to Bonnie as she caught me stuffing a set of dishes and a cherished cork screw into the lockable owner’s closet.
Oh right. That brave mumbling last fall about buying inexpensive furniture and not putting anything that means anything to us in the condo. Now I was clutching weird bathroom kitsch, running in circles and shouting “the renters are coming!” I’d already replaced the $39 bedspreads with $24 bedspreads and was obsessing over their fate.
Bonnie, shoulder to the bulging closet door, was just slamming the vault when Chicken Little appeared with matching green coffee mugs.
“Get a grip,” she hollered, “they were a dollar each!”
So we locked up the condo and didn’t look back. If we had, we’d have noticed the rainbow flag still hanging in the window. I hope the first family that moves in doesn’t mind.
Back in Maryland we packed for my conference in Chicago; Bonnie was going along for fun. After years of devoted Oprah watching, a friend had secured her a scarce ticket for a taping.
So here we were, waiting (...and waiting...says Bonnie) for take-off.
Once aboard we shared an aisle with a passenger suffering from, at a guess, Ebola Fever. And the flight was not smooth. It wasn’t as bad as our turbulent Palm Springs flight when they showed the film Apollo 13. The plane was bouncing and free-falling as Tom Hanks is shouting “Houston we have a problem” with video of debris being blown out the side of a fuselage. What were they thinking?
Anyway, we arrived in Chicago more or less intact. My conference (to cure baby boomer technophobics like me of fear of merging onto the information highway) was a success. We had great networking sessions, where I networked myself into a group familiar with Chicago’s gay nightlife. That gaydar thing is really the only technology I seem to understand.
As for Bonnie, after years of waiting for a heartwarming, healing, touchy-feely subject for her at-long-last Oprah tickets, she got a show about Mad Cow Disease—a disgusting hour about the filthy things in your dinner.
We’re in Chicago, sirloin butcher to the world, with the best steakhouses known to humankind, and an expense account waiting to be abused, and Bonnie turned vegetarian at 11:30 that morning. This mad cow wound up with spaghetti and vegan sauce for dinner.
On our flight home we finished obsessing about tainted meat and began obsessing about renters tainting the condo. We conjured up smokers, drinkers, barfers, Crayola fiends and air-conditioning abusers.
They arrive to storm the beach next week. I’m scared. At our settlement walk-through we found a VCR with a cassette slot stuffed with pretzels.
Fears aside, we’re going to close the door and not look back. In fact, we’ll be back on the boat for summer weekends beginning Memorial Day. And Bonnie won’t let me go near the condo ‘til the last renter is gone in the fall.
“Imagine the fun you’ll have, using your terrorist tweezers to extract pretzels from the appliances,” she said.
In the mea
ntime, I hope the renters find the twelve sets of coasters I left strewn about. And if you know where I can get $12 bedspreads, let me know.
• Author’s note: As it turned out, Oprah was slapped with a lawsuit by Texas Cattlemen over the “Mad Cow” show and it became a hot topic…with Bonnie coming to love the fact that “Mad Cow” was the one Oprah show she caught!
May 1996
A SEPARATIST BEACH BUM
We were seated at the worst table in the restaurant. Valley-girls, juggling trays of fried food that looked like heart attacks on a plate, wiggled by, adjusting their tiny skirts, not bothering to say “Excuse me” for slamming my chair with the kitchen door.
It was Happy Hour at a popular Annapolis restaurant. The place teemed with prom night couples, Naval Academy Midshipmen and their dates, politicians, and yacht clubbers. And the two lesbians at the table by the kitchen. I gulped my beer, fought the raucous din, and hollered to my spouse, “Get the check! We’ll eat dinner at the beach!”
I couldn’t believe what I was thinking. Help! I’m becoming a separatist!
Well, not a guitar-strumming-get-naked-in-the-woods-separatist. Not that those lesbians aren’t heroic for embracing the land and its rustic life. But for me, a Noo Yawka who, until 1982, didn’t know vegetables grew in dirt, going back to nature is oxy-moronic.
In fact, on my first night in the first house my lover and I shared, I threw open the window, gasped at a frightening moan I heard and started dialing 911. A drunk was being rolled in the gutter. Never mind that the fledgling subdivision didn’t have a street much less a gutter.
When Bonnie told me I was hearing a cow I got confused. Who’d want to rob a cow in the gutter? They have no wallets (they are wallets, but that’s another story).
No, my spouse, who, by this time was talking real sloooow so I would get it, explained that what I was hearing was a local cow, making a normal cow noise. I was sure she was nuts. Finally, still in our pajamas, we had to drive around the corner so I could see that some old MacDonald had a farm abutting our property. A shock to say the least.
The next day I almost drove over a chicken crossing the road (Stop that. I have no idea why he was crossing). I cheerily reported seeing this darn chicken with floppy-looking red stuff on its head. It seems I was hopeless.
But I digress. My original point was that I was in Annapolis, a town I’ve loved and enjoyed for many years. But now, I wanted to rush back to the nurturing atmosphere of Rehoboth and be a separatist beach bum.
I wanted to hunker down in Rehoboth with gay men and lesbians, and all of the gay and lesbian-friendly shops, restaurants and beaches. Plus all of our straight but not narrow friends. Is this so much to ask?
I’m sure my condition is a result of Rehoboth emersion therapy. Being in town almost every weekend for a year does something remarkable to your expectations. Comfort becomes the norm.
Waving shopkeepers and conversations with folks on the street—even one’s you’ve just met—are a delight. In most cases, the rapport is so instantaneous you feel you’ve known these strangers for years.
Dining out is really cool. You can toast to your anniversary and gaze into your mate’s eyes without giving the waiter an aneurysm. And the only other place you hear restaurant staff call everyone “sweetie” or “hon” is Baltimore—but there, instead of attractive, sincere people, you get octogenarian waitresses with bad teeth and beehive hair. It ain’t the same.
I still can’t believe how my spouse and I sauntered into our Rehoboth furniture store to buy a headboard and didn’t wince saying “for our bedroom, for our king size bed...we’ll use our credit card.”
Back in civilization (and I use that term loosely), we used to shop in shifts for sheets, consulting in the parking lot. Anything to avoid embarrassing gaffs or evil-eye salespeople.
Once we were at a non-Rehoboth furniture place with friends. One woman loudly exclaimed “I love You!” and her partner dove behind a sofa. Turns out the message was “I love Yew,” as in the choice of wood for the bedroom set. We got the attention of everyone in the store.
Before coming to Rehoboth, I’d only experienced gay-friendly cities on vacations. By the time I got used to shedding my “outsiders” protective armor, it was time to go home. But now, feeling—for once—like a first class citizen, it’s mighty tough to go back to those old defensive and destructive ways.
And, after being ruined, in a fabulous way, by my new hometown, I guess I wasn’t in fighting trim for Annapolis. I stared at odd-looking middle-aged men in Sansabelt pants and worried that the profusion of polyester violated the fire code. I tried to eat, drink, be merry and avoid saying, doing or touching something I shouldn’t. Unhappy Hour.
I felt like an outsider again. Before experiencing the freedom of Rehoboth Beach, I hardly noticed that sense of “otherness.” It was part of life; I dealt with it. But Rehoboth showed me it doesn’t have to be that way. As we hurried toward Route 50, a car behind us honked. We’re used to that—our rainbow sticker always gets friendly honks and waves. But this driver came around on our right, cut us off and angrily gave us the finger. “Uncle!!!” I cried. “Get me back to the beach!”
Arriving in town, we bee-lined to a lovely center table at the window of one of our favorite places. We ate wonderful food and watched Wilmington Avenue come alive for the night. Several folks waved as they passed by; our favorite waitress welcomed us back; the music was strictly Streisand and Sondheim.
Spying a straight couple outside on a bench, kissing and pawing each other, I shook my head. “Blatant heterosexuals. Get a room! Why do they have to keep flaunting it like that?”
There’s really is no place like home, Auntie Em.
June 1996
HAM AND CHEESE AT 30 KNOTS
We’re baaack, but we’re different.
The captain and I pulled our floating mini-condo into our slip on Rehoboth Bay on a drizzly, yucky Memorial Day weekend. The first thing we did was blow-dry the dog and take hot showers.
The miserable weather had its up side. Drizzle usually flattens the water. This was good, since a friend with a history of motion sickness was aboard. She chose our trip from Annapolis to Rehoboth to face down her demons in a personal outward bound experience. We were flattered, I think, as we armed ourselves with every pharmaceutical, herbal, homeopathic, and velcro seasickness cure marketed.
So the Captain, First Mate, First Dog and Mal De Mer poster girl set out on a gloomy morning. Our fledgling crew member steered the boat to keep her mind off her gag reflex.
With Captain Bonnie at the throttle and navigational charts, the dog and I had nothing to do. So Max monitored the seagulls and I pondered.
I continue to revel in being part of Rehoboth’s mainstream. And while I’ve been pretty “out” for years in a relaxed, non-confrontational way, I never realized just how “out” I wasn’t.
My mate and I never celebrated an anniversary in suburbia like we did at the Back Porch Restaurant this year. No shrinking in horror at a loud, proud “Best Wishes on your 14th Anniversary” from the waiter; no stares from gay or gay friendlies in the room; no embarrassment at “good for you!” toasts from perfect strangers at the next table.
I’ve got the freedom of unedited conversations with shopkeepers and new acquaintances. I can join straight neighbors in casual chatter about everyday details of married life no different from their own. I don’t have to wonder if people think “why does she always have to bring up homosexuality?” when we’re really just describing our lives. Amazing.
I glanced starboard and saw sea gulls. Not swimming. Walking. I could see their bony little knees. As I turned to relay the bad news, the boat lurched and landed on a sandbar.
“What’s the depth finder say?” muttered the captain.
Now if you ask me, a depth finder is a useless instrument, proudly revealing how shallow the water is around the thing you’ve already hit. We were in 1 ft. 8 inches of water. That’s putting the drama in Dramamine.
<
br /> “I thought it felt unusually calm here,” said our crew member, who, despite our best efforts, had obviously been monitoring every pitch and roll for the last four hours. Fortunately, we were quickly re-floated and back in the channel.
Returning to my ponderments, I realized that my beach personality was creeping into weekday life. Recently, my spouse and I were immersed in a production of the show Side By Side By Sondheim in Annapolis. The mostly straight company included longtime friends as well as folks we’d just met. While we’ve always been quietly open with theatre friends, we shut the closet to others until we gauge their comfort level. It’s exhausting being unflaunting lesbians. This time, unconsciously, we arrived with matter-of-fact “we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it” attitudes.
In the show, I expressed my identity by staging an appropriate ballad with the singers wearing red ribbons. On opening night it looked great, except for the clueless soprano with her ribbon pinned upside down.
After the opening, the company did the bonding thing. Among everyone’s getting-to-know-you details were casual questions asking how long Bonnie and I’ve been together and unsolicited support for sending us to Hawaii to get hitched should the court okay gay marriage there.
I was interrupted. “Is it lunchtime?” asked the captain and pilot-in-training. That everyone actually wanted lunch was a good sign.
I volunteered to make sandwiches while we kept going, since it would be cruel to ask a person who was, incredulously, not yet hanging over the rail, to eat lunch meat and pickles in a boat bobbing at anchor like a rubber ducky.
I absently juggled ham, cheese, plates and condiments while continuing my attitude adjustment review. Last week at an Eddie Bauer in a mall near home, a salesperson and I connected gaydar blips. As she totaled my spree at the register, I said, “Well, it’s no more than my other half is probably spending for a leaf blower downstairs.”
