There’s a tall hedge between Wyatt’s house and ours. I slow down to take it in. It’s technically on the property line, so both of our families are responsible for maintaining it. Wyatt’s dad, Frank, always wanted to hire someone to deal with it and split the cost, but my dad wouldn’t have it. The hedge, or “privet” as he calls it, using air quotes, is an honor to maintain. He trims it with small clippers and no measuring stick. Some years it’s wavy on top, some years it reaches a high peak in the middle. It’s never, ever straight, and this year it leans toward the ocean.
The beach house and every tree and bush on the property are a great source of pride to my dad. He bought the house and eventually paid off the mortgage during a decade when he had epic success as an abstract artist. It started with a painting called Current, which is basically swirls of black and white on a sky-blue background. Galleries all over the country sold versions of this painting as quickly as he could produce them. I was just a kid, but I loved seeing him emerge from his studio with canvas after canvas. I thought it would go on forever. But when the zeitgeist changed and the demand for swirly dried up, he was never able to come up with the next thing. He’s now fifteen years into a dry spell, and this property is what he has left.
To my eye, the hedge is approximately the eight feet tall that it’s always been, but it seems denser from years of branches comingling. Throughout my childhood, Frank thanked my dad for doing the hedges with a nice bottle of scotch at the end of the summer. I assume the scotch stopped coming after Marion and Frank divorced. The real barrier between our houses is now as much psychic as physical anyway.
“Are we here?” Jack asks.
“No, that next one.”
The sound of tires on gravel welcomes us into our driveway. People say it’s hard to tell if our house is a house with a porch or a porch with a house. The porch wraps around the entire ground floor and is comparable in square footage. Wisteria lines the railing, climbing up the posts and running along the gutters like delicately placed lavender frosting. The smell of the wisteria welcomes you in from the street and then lures you around corners to the ocean view.
Jack’s already gotten out of the car, and I take a deep breath. I look out over the steering wheel and feel like I’m about to watch a home movie. I’m not sure I want to press play, but I get out of the car anyway. Gracie barrels out the front door, all limbs and dark braids waving in the air. “Sammy!” she calls, racing past Jack to get to me. I bury my nose in the top of her head and am transported back to when the weight of her infant body in my arms felt like the only thing that was keeping me alive. The sweet smell of her hair and the fierce energy of her hug have kept me tethered to the earth for a long time. My twelve-year-old sister is a walking, singing, laughing silver lining.
“Hey, kiddo,” I say. “Did you say hi to Jack?” This is rhetorical, as we both know she did not.
“Hi.” She gives a quick wave.
“You want to fill us in on what we’re walking into?”
“Granny and Gramps are here. They seem older than at Christmas. Travis and Hugh are coming for dinner. There’s lots of talk about where you two are sleeping, like before you’re married.” Gracie blushes and I try to remember what it was like to be twelve.
“Eew,” I say. “In the same room with him?”
“Right? So gross. So I think he’s staying in the garage apartment.”
Jack doesn’t seem to mind. “Water view?”
Gracie gives him a yikes face. “Looks over where we keep the garbage cans. And the garage is where Dad paints so it kind of smells like poison.”
“Is he painting?” I ask.
“I don’t think so. Last week I could smell paint, but he was just opening cans. All his brushes are clean.”
“Well, it sounds like a good spot for me. My own bachelor pad,” Jack says.
“Sam, sweetheart!” It’s my mom. She’s in a lavender caftan to match the wisteria, her dark hair swept back off her face as if she got out of the ocean and just let it dry like that. No makeup, no shoes. She’s painted her toenails silver.
I give her a hug. “Hi, Mom.”
She beams. “Jack! Welcome. We’re thrilled you’re finally here.” She takes his face in her hands as she says this, and I see him wince. Jack has a thing about foreign oils (on my mom I’m guessing Coppertone and canola) mixing with his Serum Hydrée.
“Hello, Laurel,” he says, and kisses her cheek.
Gracie locks her arm in mine and leads me up the stairs to the porch. “Mom put flowers in your room and changed your sheets twice.” I feel briefly guilty that I haven’t been here all summer.
When I have the door halfway open, the smell surrounds me. Old Bay seasoning, sourdough bread. And something fishy I can’t identify. This is what summer smelled like.
Jack steps in beside me. “It’s a lot of stuff,” he says.
I look around. It is, truly, a lot of stuff. This is how our beach house has always looked, sort of like a preschool classroom before they sing the cleanup song. A low table in the entry hall is covered in mason jars filled with shells, sea glass, and self-adhesive googly eyes. A large jar overflows with seaweed, which explains the fishy smell. My dad collects seaweed to use as paintbrushes, which I’m not ready to explain to Jack.
Right past that collection is a wide hallway where the dining room table has been shoved against the wall. On it are piles of sticks and larger pieces of driftwood. There are vats of water and a drying rack. This is my mom’s pet project, making a single sheet of paper and then printing the first copy of a new poem on it. She says it’s a ritual of gratitude. I can’t even describe what a mess it is to make paper.
“What’s all this?” Jack says, almost to himself. It alarms me to see our house through his eyes. Their apartment in the city is packed with papers and books, but it’s small and efficient in a way that Jack appreciates. This place, with its endless collections of what he must consider garbage, is a whole other story.
“Makes her own paper,” is all I can get out.
“Sam!” My dad comes in from the back porch, letting the screen door snap behind him. He’s tan and his silver hair almost touches his shoulders. He looks like an ad for expensive beer. “Well if it isn’t Sam Holloway’s annual visit to the beach! Nothing makes me happier than seeing you out here.” I give him a one-armed hug. There was a time when I would run up to my dad and hug him so fiercely that my feet would lift right off the ground. I love my dad, but I don’t worship him anymore. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned that it’s totally possible to love someone from a safe distance.
“Bill. You have a beautiful home,” Jack says with as much conviction as he can muster.
“Thanks. We’ve got a lot going on, that’s for sure. Now come out back. We have a slew of old people with serious opinions about how close you should be sleeping to my daughter.”
* * *
My grandparents are the best, hands down. They’re straightforward and familiar and not at all afraid to tell you what’s up. When they came from Pennsylvania to visit us the first Christmas after Jack and I moved in together, Granny was quick to criticize our muted, minimalist apartment: “I’ve seen prisons with more personality.” My parents gasped, and Granny and Gramps laughed and laughed. That’s how it is with both of them, machine-gun fire of thoughts and opinions and then a big laugh that tells you none of it mattered at all.
We find them on the porch, and they cry out, “The bride!” in unison. Someone has given Granny a kazoo, and she blows it.
My mom pours mai tais, which seem out of place but, I admit, are delicious. Each one is adorned with a handmade cocktail umbrella, found sticks glued to scraps of homemade paper. Jack immediately plucks his out and checks his glass for debris. I don’t know how to tell him that there’s a little bit of sand in everything at the beach. Also, glue.
There’s a toast and a lot of small talk, and I take in the welcome beauty of the Atlantic Ocean. Just beyond the porch, the thick run of dunes leads to a stretch of beach that leads to the shore. The sun is low and casts speckled light on the water. The gulls soar and dive as the waves roll in, one after another, reaching out and pulling back in an infinite loop. The endlessness of it all overwhelms me. I feel like the ocean should have stopped and changed when I did.
“Your boyfriend is here,” Granny is saying.
“Mother!” my mom scolds, and looks at me. The words register first in my chest, which is suddenly tight and hot. She can’t mean Wyatt.
Gracie sits up straight.
Granny smiles over her nearly empty mai tai. “Oh, you know what I mean. Your old flame, Wyatt.” Then to Jack, “She lost her mind over that one.”
I am staring at a spot on the table, just beyond my hands, where my mom has placed a citronella candle in the shape of a conch shell. I’m afraid the heat from my chest and the panic in my eyes might melt it into a puddle of wax. “What do you mean ‘here’?” I ask without looking up. “Like on the East Coast? Or at the house?”