Jul
20
A quiet Sunday afternoon, a pitcher of vodka gimlets. Laying in the haze under a relentless sun. I’ve forgotten my bathing suit and am sprawled on my back on the grass by the pool, wearing only my grey Gap thong, oblivious to Fawn’s husband padding around the kitchen.
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looking at the eels edgartown docks, 1976 |
The icy mug of mostly vodka melts on my stomach. The television plays quietly inside the house, the dim buzz of the search helicopters casting a pall over the day. None of us are talking much. Waiting.
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This is our second day at Fawn’s. I came yesterday to feel her boobs. Fawn got new boobs, and, having never seen breast implants up close and personal, I couldn’t resist the urge to check them out. Not exactly being up on the etiquette of groping breasts sans intent, I ask a male friend how to go about it. “Avoid the nipples,” he said. Seemed like sound advice. Fawn was a very good sport about letting me come over and feel her up.
We start drinking at one. After my third mug of vodka, I stumble into the den to call Nan. She’s crying, now. “If he had to die, it seems right that it was the Vineyard…” She can’t go on.
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I know what she’s thinking about, times when we were kids running amok in Katama, riding our bikes like banshees through Oak Bluffs and dipping candles and buying penny candy in Edgartown. Sunday brunch at the Black Dog. Hot dogs at Quarterdeck on the pier. Stealing brass rings from Flying Horses. David.
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JoJo and I each got $1.50 a week allowance. Fifty cents of that would buy two white candles to dip, thirty-five cents would buy the latest Richie Rich comic, and the rest would be spent filling a little blue straw basket at the penny candy shop. Jo went for the dots stuck to the paper, I favored the little wax bottles of sugar water.
Dripping with sweat, listening to the news, drinking slowly and steadily, thinking about Carolyn now, and not John.
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Marriage is the brass ring he said to me once. I had to think for a long time about why that upset me so much, barring the obvious reasons. Standing up in a room full of people and creating a family, pledging love before God and pedigree.
It wasn’t him, it was Carolyn, the Patron Saint of Excellent Marriages. It wasn’t John I cared so much about initially, it was really Jackie. By extension I cared about him, too. But why so much that I completely lost it watching Dan Rather unraveling before me on the television?
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It wasn’t John, it was Carolyn. All of that golden blonde promise. For girls like us, anachronisms, defined by our husbands or our lack thereof, she was our queen.
I miss my sister. I think I need to go home to New York, for a while.
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*
I love my lonely mother
And I miss my lovely father
I know I owe my brothers
One thing and another
I hear my sister singing
And I ought to be on my way right now
Moving across the land
With my heart in my hand
On my way by now
Ought to be on my way by now
Oh end this day
set me in motion
Ought to be on my way
Out of the west
of Lambert’s Cove
There’s a sail out in the sun
And I’m on board
though very small
I’ve come home to stop yearning
Burn off the haze around the shore
Turn off the crazy way I feel
I’ll stay away from you no more
I’ve come home to stop yearning
-james taylor, carly simon
Jul
18
John and Carolyn and Lauren. Poof.
I woke up this morning and opened the blinds to the spectre of an elderly black woman throwing white roses into the sea. I watched for a few moments with a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach before I turned on the television.
I often see women in crisply starched uniforms, women in the service of the grand estates that line the beach, praying by the ocean at sunrise. At first I found it a bit curious, and then I realised, where better to praise God than in the presence of such beauty?
All day today, images from his life spilling across the screen– Martha’s Vineyard, New York City, Washington DC. The day his mother died, mourners gathered outside of her Fifth Avenue apartment, six blocks away from mine, their arms full of roses, weeping.
I’m glad she didn’t live to see this.
We used to trade our Jackie sightings like currency. Even my most sophisticated New York City girlfriends would become undone at the sight of her. When you recognised her on the street, she’d meet your eyes and smile her little Jackie-smile. She didn’t look away. And we loved her for that. She belonged to us all.
As I write this, the night search for his Piper is underway off the Gay Head Cliffs in the waters surrounding Martha’s Vineyard.
I wish for so much.
tell me all your thoughts on god
’cause I’m on my way to see her…