“Oh, no, Mom. You didn’t tell her either? We agreed that you’d call.”
“I made an executive decision not to,” I say in my most executive tone. “If she knows we’re coming, she’ll rush to fix the house or search for a gun. If we really want to know what’s happening there, we have to surprise her.” Besides, once I called her, I would be committed. But right up until the minute we left, I wanted the option of changing my mind—which I’ve done a dozen times in the last few days. It’s about those memories.
And here comes another, triggered by nothing more than a sign to Westport. Mom wanted to stop there. When Dad refused, they argued. After Elizabeth’s disappearance, when their marriage crumbled, we realized that he’d had a lover there.
Disconcerted by how quickly the angst returns, I focus on the music—Sheeran again, “Perfect” this time. I tell Joy about a friend who lived in Fairfield, an innocent enough memory. But by the time we pass Bridgeport, I’m back on the Aldiss family road trip. This time it’s my needing a bathroom and Daddy refusing to stop. Then,as we approach New Haven, I remember being rejected from Yale and Daddy blaming it on my portfolio, since, he claimed, photography wasn’t “real art.” Coming up on New London, where I did go to college, I remember the stomach cramps I used to have heading home for vacation. I’m not feeling full-out cramps now, just small knots of apprehension.
Another hunger complaint comes from Joy as we pass Mystic. It’s after two, and I would have been hungry myself had it not been for those knots, but when I offer to stop, she says, “It’s only twenty minutes more, Mom,” like I was the one who had complained, like I’d been complaining for the lasthour.Hunger is her version ofAre we there yet?
We are closing in. Leaving I-95, we’re on Route 234, a.k.a. Pequot Trail, which is a name I used to love, though now it brings us closer to the last place I want to be. Pawcatuck slows us down, same old for a Friday afternoon in June, but too soon we cross into Rhode Island, pass under the railroad bridge, and find ourselves in downtown Westerly.
Turn back!cries my scared little self. But it’s too late. Way too late.
Muscle memory takes over then, well, of a sort. I know these roads like the back of my hand; know which ones to take to skirt the worst of the downtown traffic and, after that, which ones lead to the sea. Little has changed in the years I’ve been gone, a fact that eases me in an odd kind of way. I see the same modest houses, the same gas station and hair salon. What used to be a strip mall has become a shopping center with a supermarket, a CVS, and Urgent Care, but the languor of seaside New England remains.
Joy turns off the radio and watches it all with the same awe she might show the Grand Canyon, which amuses me. This is no Grand Canyon. We are in understated Yankee territory here, a stiff backbone in the most unassuming of homes. Wood siding is uniformly on a gray scale, green lawns are neatly mowed, and while the occasional shrub patch has been left wild by a mutinous owner, the rest are neatly trimmed. Even the ancient maples and oaks, whose Puritanical primness hides motel cottages from prying eyes, are limbed with lavish green leaves in a way that suggests Old World wealth.
We pass a small independent pharmacy, a florist with purple petunias cascading from hooks on the porch, a cemetery stretching so far that my sisters and I always believed strangers came here from miles away just to be buried near the sea. I’m thinking that it’s really very sweet—when we hit the BAYBLUFFANIMALHOSPITAL, and my qualms return. There are no names on the signpost, no John Sabathian DVM or some such. But it has to be his, doesn’t it? How many vets are there in a small shore town?
This is the first visible reminder of what I’m walking into, and it shatters my poise. I dread being here, but feel guilt at not having come sooner. I’m afraid of what I’ll find when I get to the house, but feel an overriding responsibility for whatever it is. I’m having second thoughts about surprising Anne and not calling Margo. And seeing my father? That’s the worst. My relationship with him has always been iffy. And now? He may be angry to see me, or pleased that I’ve come. He may not recognize me at all.
Deep down, though, driving along these streets, I feel a touch of excitement. For all the emotional baggage this place brings, I loved it once. The Rhode Island shore and I have a past, and it isn’t all bad.
Take Gendy Scoops, I realize, smiling when I see the rambling white house with sea green awnings. “Gendy was an old lady,” I tell Joy, “but this looks rehabbed. Her kids must run it now. Or their kids. Summers, we hung out here.”
“Not in Bay Bluff?”
“Bay Bluff didn’t have an ice cream shop. Besides, everyone knew everyone in Bay Bluff, so if we didn’t want spies reporting to our parents, we came here.”
The bikes out front now have thick tires that make the ride over back roads easier. There are cars, too, and people eating ice cream under huge umbrellas that match the sea green of the awnings. The sky is a blanket of clouds with the occasional spot of blue, but the pavement is dry. Joy was right about that.
The final approach is lush with the rich green of oaks, the blue of hydrangeas that thrive in sea air, the fountains of ornamental grass that had become a landscaping mainstay. We pass the same three-way intersection that I remember, the same signs for Misquamicut and Watch Hill. Another several minutes in, and the houses start swelling in size.
“Crazy,” Joy murmurs when we pass a particularly grand one.
“That was there before, but the next one’s new.” I point ahead. “And that one.” These are expensive homes, with expensive cars parked in expensive circular drives. No overgrown shrubs here. All is as pruned as the salty air allows.
Bay Bluff is its own little peninsula halfway between Misquamicut and Watch Hill. A small, weatherworn sign with an arrow marks the turnoff, so that if you don’t know to look for it, you miss it. We used to joke that the arrow was flipping the bird to anyone who hadn’t been invited to town, but now I wonder if I’m welcome here myself. Is home always home? Why, then, does my mind see ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISKin that arrow?
Tucking the warning away, I drive on past banks of mailboxes at dirt driveways that burrow off into the trees. Once the road has angled along the peninsula, we pass homes I remember—the Mahoneys, the Santangelos, the Wrights, all still here in some generational form, to judge from the names on mailboxes. These houses have been updated with gables, turrets, and glass, and, to a one, their cedar shakes are weathered a deliberately stylish gray.
“Beach,”Joy cries when houses give way to diagonal parking, not quite filled but almost, and beyond that sand and surf. “Put down your window,” she orders, straining against her seat belt to see out my side.
Slowing, I do it as much for her as for me, and the warm salt air billows in, as if it was just waiting for the invite. No matter how much beach air I’ve breathed in the last twenty years, this is different. It smells of time and fish and a gazillion grains of sand that have washed through kelp, cradled crustaceans, or human toes. And still, it fills me with an odd…purity.How to explain?
Rather than try, I leave my window down. The tide is out, reducing the thunder of surf to a tuneful roll as the waves spill like dominoes down the shore. We pass a grove of stunted trees and shrubs, and while the green is dulled here, wild beach roses more than compensate.
Then those are gone, too, and we reach the square, which is as close to a center of town as Bay Bluff can claim. Slowing down, I’m impressed in spite of myself. When I left, only a handful of shops skirted a central patch of scruffy grass, but there are more than a dozen shops now, and the patch of grass has become a deck of pebbles hosting a large bench, whiskey barrels filled with blood-orange lantana, and a pair of gaslights. When I left, the shops had a freestanding feel, but the square’s corners are now pergolas to the sea, and the gaps between shops have been filled. Awnings and signage are of a style. Sidewalks have been widened for picnic tables outside eateries—and those? I can’t see details from the car, and with another car behind me I have to keep rolling, but there are three separate clusters of tables, all comfortably filled this mid-afternoon.
For a place that supposedly doesn’t give a fig whether people come or not, it’s an inviting little secret. Actually, not so much a secret, to judge from the flock of visitors milling in a splash of T-shirts and shorts, flip-flops and hats.
Feeling an inkling of pride, I ask Joy, “What do you think?”
“I need food,” she declares, which translates intoStop here, stop now,and even though the voice of wisdom says we should go to the house first, I’ve been promising Joy we’d have lunch.
So I park in the lot just beyond the square—once dirt, now neat gravel—pull my ponytail through a ball cap and slip on large sunglasses. By the time I’ve grabbed my camera, Joy is at my door, brows raised. “Seriously, Mom? Sunglasses?”
“For the glare,” I say and climb out.
