A Fire Island Alphabet

A

An Island

Fire Island. This barrier reef sits between the Great South Bay and the Atlantic Ocean with a white sand wide beach 32 miles long, dunes covered with beach grass and a lighthouse at its western tip. It has jelly fish, sand crabs, horseshoe crabs, sea glass, seaweed, tangled fishing line, toenail shells and clamshells big enough to paint with sailboats, hearts and lighthouses and sell on the block for ice cream money. My forever summer family home. Everyone goes barefoot--all the kids, but lots of the grown ups too. No cars allowed except off season. Only bicycles, red wagons and the senior citizen cart. Oh, and the houses have names painted over the front door and on the back of the wagon. Ours was Time & Tide. Our family name was Timan. Get it?

B

Blueberry Bushes

lined the walks. There for the picking. No one ever said “Don’t pick.” This was before the greedy deer ate not only the berries but the bushes.

Birthday Parties

were always dress-up. Deane said she had to be the girl as she was both smaller and shorter than I. Anthony and Cleopatra and the Queen and King of Hearts are all I remember. As Cleopatra, Deane wore a striped window curtain, her mother’s nightgown and a crown. I, a white sheet draped into a toga and some branches around my head. I have the picture in the guest room. (I can go look to be certain, but I don’t need to. Except I looked anyway.) We were so young. Only 10 years old. Deane always remembers the year my mother canceled my birthday party. How could my mother do that to me, her only little girl?

Books

We read books, my friends Deane next door and Ann, the girl across the street. Gobbled up books like blueberries. Nancy Drew, Cherry Ames Student Nurse, Marie Curie and the orange biographies with silhouette illustrations. I wanted to be all of them but never believed I could.

C

Catching the Blues

Blues were the fish my father caught. He caught them with a nine-foot pole, a glittering lure and a mean three-pronged hook while the birds worked close to shore. He’d cast out smooth and reel in fast, with sharp jerks to keep the blues’ attention. He was an impatient man, my dad, but never then. He’d stand on the beach for hours, content to wait for whatever the ocean might bring.

My father’s favorite fishing shirt hung in the closet of my parents’ bedroom at Fire Island. It’s white linen, short sleeved, patterned with blue off-centered squares. He’d put it on, take down his pole, and call out, “Butch” (my mother would never tell us why he called her that), “I’m going down to fish.” When our house was sold a few years ago, I packed up the shirt and moved it to my closet in Berkeley.

Clams

I was ten years old—the magic year when I always had friends. And that morning I had met a new one at the beach next to the bay at Fire Island. Her name was Sammi and she had even more freckles than I did—a seamless line joined the ones on her nose to those on her forehead. For almost an hour we had been having a contest to see who could swim the farthest out. She had pretty much won every time when she said, “Let’s go eat.” When I said I didn’t have any money, she said not to worry.

Sammi took me to the house that her older cousin and her cousin’s friends had rented for the weekend. They were groupers. That’s what we, the families that owned summer houses and didn’t share our houses with anyone except our aunts and uncles and cousins or maybe really, really good friends, called them. Groupers weren’t like us. They were like Sammi’s cousin and her seven or eight girlfriends—two years out of college—who came to the Island to spend all day at the beach covered with the orangey elixir of Ban de Soleil and sand, slept three to a bed ,and spent all night dancing and flirting in bars looking for husbands.

I’d never been to a grouper house. I only knew houses with mothers and fathers who made rules and told you what to do, wear, and eat. This was a house where you could do anything. It was small, dark, and a little stuffy with not enough windows. There were clothes on the furniture and wet towels on the floor. I loved it and wanted more than anything to be Sammi.

In the kitchen, dirty pots and pans, glasses, and silverware and barely scraped plates filled the sink, the counter, the Formica table, and the top of the stove. Sammi reached for the biggest pot and moved a few plates to the other side of the table. We didn’t sit down. We stood over the pot. We dug our forks into clumps of cold spaghetti stuck to the bottom and covered with garlic and parsley. Slick with olive oil. The strands salty and sweet with clams.

Clothesline

For the first years we summered in the house we had a washing machine but not a dryer. We had a clothesline in back of the deck on the sand and put up the clothes with clothes pins. Clothes dried outside at the beach always smelled great. Don’t step on the poison ivy!

D

Deane

lived with her parents and two sisters next door. The day we moved in Deane waited for me to come outside. As soon as I did, she told me that a little girl named Cathy used to live there and she liked Cathy more than she would ever like me. That turned out not to be the truth. We are still best friends. Our houses were twins. Built on the mainland, put on a barge and pulled over to the Island by a tugboat. They were set down so close together that we could hear our mother’s yelling. We always knew who was gonna get it. Usually me. But Deane too.

E

Electrician

For Greacian. Dave was the name of the electrician who redid the wiring after we moved in. Dave had an apple farm in upstate New York. He brought us a bushel basket filled with just- picked MacIntosh apples in the fall. My mother made many pies.

Evenings

After dark there were fireflies. Practically every night was cool enough to wear sweaters. In the day we wore bathing suits and were barefoot. We never wore shoes, not even at night. We slept with a blanket or two and the windows open to hear the waves. After dinner Deane, Ann (my two best friends) and I walked into town, two short blocks up our street, Ocean Breeze, for ice cream. Vanilla fudge, cherry vanilla or pistachio—so hard to choose. Children could go anywhere. Parts of the street were dark and we always ran past the scary place without its house light on. That’s where the ghosts lived. It still gives me shivers to walk past that place when I’m alone. I think it makes me feel safe to have something familiar to be afraid of.

F

Fire Island Ferry Boats

There were no cars allowed on Fire Island during the summer season. Only ferries could bring you there and take you back to the mainland. Our town, Ocean Beach, had the Fire Island Miss, the Belle, the Flyer and the Queen. They used the Queen for the big holidays like Fourth of July, Memorial Day or the day before school started. She took the longest, almost an hour from the terminal on the mainland to the Island. The lower level was enclosed and the upstairs deck was open. Our whole family sat upstairs with our dog, such a good dog, Inky.

Furniture

People rarely bought new furniture for their houses. Or anything else for that matter. What people did was wait to see what other people were getting rid of. It went like this. If you wanted to get rid of something you put it outside in front of your house. This included books, clothing, appliances, kitchenware, furniture, rugs, towels. Anyone was welcome to take it without asking. If you wanted it, you would load it up on your wagon or if it was heavy and bulky you’d borrow a dolly from the village market. This went on from the time we arrived to the day we left 65 years later.

Fruit

Our house had a bright red and white awning and flower boxes filled with geraniums. Most of the furniture had been inherited with the house. There was a non-working wind-up record player that had been painted bright yellow and black. A distant relative showed up one day and was asked to decorate it with swirls of fruits and flowers. My father had painted the big oak dining table himself, first transforming the depressing brown to glossy white and then covering its surface with more images of brightly painted vegetables and fruits. There was a wagon-wheel chandelier and a daybed that when you lay down on it, you found an hour later that you had floated away on the tops of the waves. On the coffee table there was always a bowl of peaches, apricots and cherries. On the kitchen table a wicker bowl of cantaloupes lay ripening. In the summertime we ate cantaloupes before every meal.

G

Glass, Sea

Soft and smooth with tumbled edges in frosted colors is what we used to find in the wet sand. Now there is very little. It seemed as if every house had a table lamp with sea glass filling its base. It could take 20, 40, 100 years for the ocean to carve the perfect shape and the perfect smoothness to hold in your hand.

Girlfriends

Ann lived in the house across the walk called a Bushel and Three Pecks. Peck was their last name. The concrete walk between us was covered with hopscotch squares that only hurricanes washed away. Ann had two normal brothers and two baby twin brothers. We did not think of the twins as normal because her strange and strict mother gave birth to them long after any mother we knew gave birth. Even worse, it meant that her mother and father were still doing it. After the twins were born the name of the house was changed to A Bushel and 5 Pecks.

Ann was responsible for the twins as well as her two other brothers and because of this the front of her romper was often spotted with strained pea drips. Rompers were playsuits that looked a bit like old fashioned gym suits. They came in light blue, yellow and light pink. I never saw anyone outside of our town’s borders wear them.

Ann’s house was a mess. There was only so much a twelve-year-old could do to clean up after young boys and two infants. It smelled a bit of a diaper pail and the aforementioned peas and wet towels.

Deane had a glamorous older sister Lisa who at fifteen already had a throaty, sexy speaking voice. She wore thick black eyeliner and loved the female jazz singers like June Christy, Sarah Vaughn and Julie London. I learned to love Nina Simone when hearing “Plain Gold Ring” come through our windows. Lisa was a fast girl which meant she knew a lot more about sex than we did. Deane told me how Lisa would walk up the stairs backwards when she came home after curfew. If her parents woke up and found her on the stairs she would say she had fallen asleep in her clothes and woken up hungry and was on her way to the kitchen.

The summer Deane went to sleep-away camp and Lisa adopted me was the best summer of my life. I was an adorable thing cuddled by the older teenagers—boys and girls.

It was Deane who decided who was to be whose best friend. If you weren’t the best friend (and of course Deane always was), then you didn’t get to play at all. Ann didn’t seem to care about being in or out. She also didn’t mind Deane’s power. She found it easy to resist. After all, she had had her mother to contend with all her life. If Deane didn’t pick her, she’d go home and read a book and hope the twins didn’t wake up.

Gang

When Deane came home from summer camp she told Ann and me it was time for us to form a gang like the older kids. We were each to choose a boy and have a party. We had the party at my house and borrowed a few records and a record player from Lisa. We danced to one fast song and one slow song. Then my parents took pictures of each of us and our dancing partners. Everyone ate popcorn and drank soda. Then everyone went home. That was the end of the party and the end of the gang.

H

Hair

Most of my life I’ve been obsessed with my hair getting what my friend Deane and I called “frizzy.” I recently became aware that what I have are beautiful curls. For this alone I’d like to live another lifetime with this one change of attitude.

Hurricane

Every year at the end of August a few weeks before school started the hurricanes came. The first thing that happened was everyone had to figure out where to go if we were told to evacuate. One year we went to my aunt’s on Long Island and the second year I was invited to stay with Deane in her family’s apartment in Manhattan while the rest of my family went back to my aunt’s. In New York I remember lying on the beds in Deane’s room counting the seconds between the thunder and the lightning to know how far away the storm was…or some such.

If we didn’t have to evacuate and could stay on the Island, my parents would light the candles and the hurricane lamps in the house and we’d all get under the covers. The wind and the rain were amazingly strong. The house was on stilts and would sway back and forth and there was a howling sound. The windows would rattle but never once broke.

One year it was just my mother and me alone when the hurricane came. I was reading Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier. My mother had never read it. So we divided the book into sections and she started at the beginning and I read from where I was in the middle. It’s one of my happiest memories. My mother was never afraid, unlike me, but when I was with her I was brave too.

I

An Island Remains

1957. My parents told us we would be moving to Tucson, Arizona from the small town where we lived on Long Island. We would still return to Fire Island in the summers. I was excited. I would be able to keep all my friends at the Island and at the same time would have a new life to start over in a place I’d never been. No one would ever know in my new school that I couldn’t read until the fourth grade. And yet, I would be taking with me something that I never could leave behind no matter where I went, no matter how much I wanted to.

Infinity Mirror and Greacian

I never told anyone, but I too had an infinity mirror. It was in the small downstairs “powder room” in our house on Long Island. I used to go in there and look for what seemed like hours. I also called it an infinity mirror. I’ve never been able to explain it to anyone. It was two facing mirrors each attached on one of the sides to a larger middle mirror. I would put my nose against the place where two of the mirrors made a seam and look behind me—or maybe in front of me. But what I am certain of is that I could see my face over and over until forever. I never told anyone, especially either of my brothers, because they might try to take it away.

J

Jeanette, My Best Aunt

would come to visit once a summer. She’d arrive on the noon ferry and we would pick her up at the boat with our wagon. She always brought a brisket in her suitcase. No matter how much my mother would try to convince her not to bring it, it came along wrapped in aluminum foil and settled in a deep covered glass dish. Also in her suitcase was a perfectly folded beach towel, a bathing suit she bought at last year’s end of summer sale at Bonwit’s and a bathing cap with an under the chin strap. (We had two kinds of towels at the Island—the big beach towels for grown-ups and the raggedly ones for us kids to lose at the beach. I never understood why Aunt Jeanette brought her own towel to a house that was filled with towels.) Most important, there was a birthday present for me. Aunt Jeanette always left on the 4:30 ferry so she could be home on time to prepare dinner for Uncle Arthur (brisket). An hour before Aunt Jeanette left she and my mother would have a drink together. Always a gin and tonic. With some Ritz Crackers and cheese. They would sit and talk in whispers. After a little while they would start to cry. It wasn’t until I was an adult that my mother told me their sad secret.

Jewish

I loved being Jewish. I loved that it seemed almost everyone on Fire Island was Jewish. I loved that in the small town where we lived on Long Island the synagogue was only a block away. I loved learning all the prayers and songs. I especially loved all the food. Especially hot dogs and pastrami.

K

Kissing

I also loved kissing. It was just like Jewish food. I couldn’t get enough of what I liked. I thought for a long time that it was the boys who wanted me to do more. And it was sort of. But for me it was mostly my girlfriends. I knew if I didn’t keep up with them, I no longer belonged.

L

Lonely

The summer between high school and college was the loneliest I’ve ever been. During the week I lived alone in an apartment friends of my parents had lent them in Manhattan. I had a job at a small advertising agency but wasn’t equipped to do more than take coffee and lunch orders and deliver packages across town. (That’s how I learned my way around Manhattan which has stayed with me to this day.) I spent weekends on Fire Island where everyone was either older or younger than me. For the first time in my life I couldn’t wait to go back to school.

M

Marilyn Monroe

Deane told me a secret. We could tell no one. That morning we were going to walk a mile up the beach and get Marilyn Monroe’s autograph. Which is exactly what we did. We each carried our autograph books. Mine was faux white leather with a zipper. I didn’t quite believe Deane until we reached a part of the beach with one large umbrella and no people. We walked up to it and approached the beautiful woman sitting on a beach towel and said in unison “Miss Monroe, may we have your autograph, please?” We were 10 years old and irresistible.

Mothballs

Once we moved to Tucson, there were no longer spring or fall weekends at the Island. So it meant we practiced the ritual of closing the house before Labor Day and opening it mid-June. The main job of closing was covering everything that stayed in the summer house with newspaper and mothballs which included furniture, kitchenware, clothes, linens. No matter how thoroughly we vacuumed when we opened the house in June, the smell of mothballs lingered faintly throughout the summer. I always thought of it as the most delicious scent and the memory of it can bring me to tears.

N

Nectarines

Whenever I see nectarines at the market I can hear my father say, “Choose the ones with the rough skin.” The rough skin, he taught me, traced the sweetness the sun had drawn to the surface. I would take one from the bowl on the kitchen table and it on my bed with the curtains filled with salt air. I’d spend as long as I could eating the fruit and pulling the strings from the pit with my teeth. It was the best way to spend a summer afternoon at Fire Island wait for my friends to pick me up to go to the beach.

O

Ocean Waves

Every night I’d lay in bed listening to the in and out breathing of the ocean. Loud crashing or quiet soothing. It was my favorite song.

Ocean Rocks

One summer Bob and I collected ocean rocks at the beach. They were round, smooth rocks that fit nicely held in one hand. We gathered enough to half fill a heavy aluminum birdbath that now sits in our Berkeley garden. We packed them in a large suitcase. The birds come and perch on the rocks, then jump in.

P

Planting Trees

Our house was a half block from the ocean and a ten-minute meander into town. The walkway that ran from beach to bay was eight feet wide—wide enough for the volunteer fire department engine to get through. We each had a bit of something growing in front of our houses, in our case a rusted three-wheeled red wagon filled with dirt and faded painted shells. But only Deane’s mother Evelyn was determined on growing trees. Hers was in no way a traditional garden. She used a combination of seaweed and discarded mattresses to add to the only thing there—sand. She planted seedlings from evergreens. With a tremendous amount of work, they grew higher than the house her family lived in.

Q&R

Quiver, Red

Red-suited lifeguards with twirling silver whistles still give my heart a quiver.

Ritz Crackers

Originally both of our houses had open front porches. Deane’s parents had screened in theirs. My parents framed ours in and made it part of the living room. Deane’s house had mostly uncomfortable furniture. Wooden chairs with thin cushions. There wasn’t much of it either, because the rooms were so small. Deane’s porch had a swing big enough for two of us to lie down with our head on the side arm. I could only lie on it for a few minutes before I got dizzy. I would stop it with my foot and Deane would get mad and tell me to go home.

But before I went home and before we started to swing, we had spent an hour or so up in her room talking and eating Philadelphia scallion and cream cheese sandwiches we made by spreading a Ritz cracker with the cream cheese and then putting another cracker on top. We were very exact. The cream cheese came in a small silver package and the ends were folded in perfect hospital corners. We made our sandwiches very slowly and very carefully. It tasted better the longer we waited to eat. We did not dare get either the bedspread (tufted chenille) or the floor dirty. The sisters were responsible for cleaning their rooms. Evelyn would inspect every morning.

S

Siblings

None of us particularly liked our siblings. Family meant your siblings and your mother. The fathers were away working in Manhattan during the week and has no interest in their half- grown children on the weekends. Deane had a younger sister who was a genius whom we ignored simply because she was younger. Her name was Irna. I had two brothers, Jeff and Richard, one younger, one older. I pretended they weren’t part of my family. But it was Ann who was in the worst fix. And among the three of us, it was she who complained the least.

Standing at the Sea Shore

What I love most is standing at the sea shore and feeing the sand between my toes and my heels lowering into the wet sand. And watching the waves. Yes, that and that and that

Sarah

would have been 89 on December 2. Each year she and her best friends Woody and Jill would celebrate at Sarah’s favorite restaurant, Bondini’s, at 8th Street and Fifth Avenue, a block from Sarah’s apartment in Manhattan. Jill described the scene for me.

“Sarah had forgotten to put on her lipstick before she left home. We stopped for just a moment as she reached into her handbag, pulled out the beautiful gold case that held her very red 40’s style lipstick and with what appeared to be a single swipe, applied it perfectly. She dropped the case back into her bag and gave a nod indicating we could proceed. When I expressed surprise that she could do it so quickly and perfectly, and without a mirror, she said, “Honey, at 89, you better know where your fuckin’ lips are.”

“Then she closed her smooth black Italian hand bag, the embroidered handkerchief tucked within its depths. In one gloved hand she held her carved cane, in the other Woody’s arm. Her legs and feet might have been swollen, but her spine was straight and her neck long. She wasn’t an old woman. She was a presence.”

Bob and I never knew the downtown Fifth Avenue Bondini’s Sarah. The Sarah Bob and I knew was the Fire Island Sarah whom we had summered with over the past years. We knew the Sarah who said, “You just never know. After you’ve lived a long time and think you’ve made your quota of friends and loved ones in life, after all that, you meet someone and it’s a perfect fit.” We agreed. We felt that way about her, too. The Sarah who taught us the joy of eating two dogs on one bun. Secret dinners best eaten alone with mustard and relish dripping from your fingers and your chin.

The last summer we spent together we spoke to Sarah daily and visited her three or four times a week. As always, friends came to Sarah—she never went to them. She told us of long-past cocktail parties on the screened-in porch. The guests would arrive in bathrobes over bathing suits, have a drink, maybe a little cheese, a Ritz cracker, then take a dip and go home.

There were still friends filling the chairs on the porch. We’d watch the boats on the Bay and the deer in the dune grass as Sarah held court and smoked the forbidden cigarettes that the corner market tucked into her grocery delivery. “I don’t smoke,” said Sarah, puffing away.

Sarah died this past winter. But not before we all drank martinis and ate eggrolls together the summer before on the deck of the Chinese restaurant. Not before Woody and Jill and Bob and I commandeered the town’s senior citizen cart and took her joyriding from beach to bay on the narrow lanes under the full moon. Not before Sarah cried out, “Crazy, you are all crazy.” Loving us and life so much.

T

Tuna Fish Sandwiches

Carol’s house smelled like her grandfather’s cigars. Her parents both worked somewhere near Manhattan, and on weekends when they came out to Fire Island, they didn’t seem to move from the upstairs deck that looked out at the back of a sand dune. Both parents were shoe-leather tan. It wasn’t the ocean or the beach they were after. Only the sun. I never saw them downstairs, in town, on the ferry. I couldn’t remember Carol or her brother Mike saying much about their parents. It was Grandpa who took care of them, and as Carol and I were inseparable that summer, the summer I turned twelve, it was Grandpa who took care of me.

The same way I don’t remember the parents moving from the deck, I don’t remember us ever being anywhere in that house far from the kitchen. We went there every day for lunch after day camp. We’d walk in, and Grandpa would come from somewhere dressed in a shirt and tie and bedroom slippers and would say something to Carol and she would nod. Between the cigar that never left his mouth and his English that sounded like Yiddish or might have been Yiddish, I didn’t understand him at first, so I just nodded along with Carol.

After a while I understood that what Grandpa said was, “Tuna fish for lunch.” It wasn’t a question and it wasn’t just tuna fish. It was tuna, not mashed into a paste, but gently separated into chunks with the tines of an upright fork. His opening moves had me mesmerized. On a wooden board, Grandpa chopped the celery small and neat —a lot of celery, maybe three trimmed stalks—and added it to the bowl. Next the black olives. The fat ones without pits, which he knew were the only kind we’d eat. He opened the olive can so fast the juice threatened to spill onto the counter. The olives were sliced so that each piece had a perfect hole in the center. The most important ingredient came next. Mayonnaise. Hellmann’s Mayonnaise, so good that if they sold it in France, the French would stop making their own. It was a big jar. Not as big as the commercial size, but big enough for Grandpa to scoop it out with a soup spoon. He folded the mayonnaise into the tuna and celery as if he were making a soufflé. The olives sat waiting in a small cut-glass bowl.

By that time my tongue wanted to lick the spoon, but we had only reached the second act—the toasting of the bread. It was whole wheat bread that came in a cellophane package. The slices were small and square. The denseness of each slice made up for its size. The bread itself, I discovered, was sweet, like chocolate cake without frosting. While the bread was toasting, Grandpa cleaned off the wooden board. As soon as the toaster popped, he arranged the slices on a board, top and bottom, and dropped in two more to toast. When there was enough toast for four sandwiches (two for Mike), he spread on the tuna and on top of it arranged the olives in a swirling pattern. Then a final slide of mayonnaise—not too thick, not too thin. In between the tuna and the top slice of bread went a big chunk of iceberg lettuce. After Grandpa had cut our sandwiches on the diagonal, placed each one on a plate, and folded our napkins, he shuffled out of the room.

We ate on paper plates because it was summer. We ate at the table because that was where we always ate. There were approximately fifty-five weekdays between Memorial Day and Labor Day. Every single one of those days, we ate tuna fish sandwiches.

U

Universe

At night on the walk home from town licking our ice cream cones, we looked up at the Milky Way and wondered at the universe.

V

Voyage

People who didn’t know Fire Island thought my family was crazy to go all the way across the country to take a vacation. We knew otherwise. Besides it wasn’t a vacation, it was a whole summer long.

W

Waves

We called it getting creamed. When you just missed diving under a wave. Being hit hard with all its force. Tumbling into shore. Your nose and mouth filled with sand. Your elbows and knees scraped raw by fierce broken shells. I was always afraid of the ocean.

Whatzit

Every year Bob and I bring a few impossible objects to Fire Island for everyone to guess their purpose. Incredibly someone always does. The best Whatzits I can’t tell you. It would ruin the game if you already knew. Come to our house and play with us.

X

Xxxo

is how I often sign my name. Today it took me a long time to find the perfect entry for the letter X, but then it just came to me.

Y

Robert Ken Yagura

owns my heart wherever I am. Tucson, Berkeley, Paris, Fire Island. The first time Bob came to Fire Island he said, “I grew up here too. I did. This is my home.” I and everyone else agreed with him. Who else would paint the universe inside of clam shells and give them away as presents?

Z

Zed: End of Story

Summer’s over. I can hear the ferry churning toward the Island. I hate the sound. I hate leaving. Hate the packed bags piled by the door and the windows dark with pulled-down shades. Hate the ferry that takes me from this place I love most in the world. This is the house I grew up in. I’ve spent my summers here since I was ten.

My friend Jill is sitting on the couch in the living room. It’s the same couch we’ve slouched on together for twenty-five years. Never mind that we see each other only once a year. We’re summer friends. With summer friends, what comes in between doesn’t matter. We pick up right where we left off.

Our dog Maisy lays her head heavy on Jill’s lap. On the wall beside Jill is my father’s painting of a dancer. Bob says it’s my father’s best work. The frame is ornate—heavy gold-leaf plaster, cracked from a long-ago fall from the top of the stairs. Bob, who can fix most things, has wired it together, but the plaster shows through. It’s a beach house—perfection not required.

I’m on the non-Maisy side of Jill. (For such a small dog, Maisy’s long dachshund body takes up an inordinate amount of room.) Jill and I sit close, shoulders touching, sharing a box of Entenmann’s powdered donuts—sacred food saved only for our time together. Jill eats a half to my one. Maisy eats one and licks at all the powdered sugar that drifts down. It’s seven in the morning. Jill came into the house, laughing with a coffee cup half filled with rain. I want to cry with how much I’m going to miss her.

It’s Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. Jill leaves for the synagogue after only two donuts. In an hour Bob, Maisy, and I will get on the ferry to go across the Great South Bay, then taxi to JFK. The leaving is always the same—sixty years, always the same.

Using delay tactics, I go into the tiny market that has everything you need—dry goods packed up to the ceiling. I order bologna sandwiches with swiss on Kaiser rolls—mustard, pickles, and mayo—knowing that these will be the last real Kaiser rolls I’ll have for a year. Knowing that these sandwiches, wrapped tight in white paper, will taste better than anything in the airport. Knowing that with each bite, they promise summer for a little longer.

I leave the market and walk a block over to the synagogue to see who’s there. I stand on the ramp outside. Worshipers with dripping umbrellas crowd the wide doorway. The High Holy Days command a full house. The rabbi’s voice comes through a microphone. He surfs in his spare time. The summer’s scandal had him running off with the cantor.

The rain has stopped. Maisy and I walk to meet Bob at the ferry. I’m early. I’m never early. As we wait to get on the boat, there’s a break in the service. I can see friends come running down the path, calling our names.

Sixty years, and now my brothers want to sell the house. I say to people, “It’s okay. It’s fair. Two to one.” And Bob and I don’t want to take it on alone. We will come back every summer and rent. Every year. I promise myself. It will be fine.

But it’s a lie. It’s not fine. Bob kept fixing things, the way he always has. As if we never have to leave. Even as prospective buyers were walking through the house, his tools were out. He loves it here as much as much as I do. Loves it so that he believes that he grew up on this fragile barrier reef island—not seventy-five miles away in the farm country of South Jersey, where his family was planted after the internment camp.

Yesterday, he stood in the kitchen sink for two hours, repairing the weights in the window sash. Who else would do such a thing? He can’t stop loving the house. For me, no other house holds the sound of my father’s footsteps walking up the ramp, his nine-foot pole and a tangle of bluefish, calling out my mother’s secret name. And my mother and I reading Rebecca aloud, sharing the flashlight as a hurricane sways the house on its pilings.

Three years ago, Bob, my brother, my sisters-in-law, nieces and nephews scattered my mother’s ashes on the shoreline with rose petals at low tide. My dad’s had floated away twenty years before. As usual, he couldn’t wait for her.

My heart is broken. On the ferry I sit behind the wheelhouse, convincing myself that what I see moving away is becoming closer. What appeared to be over is about to begin.

*Please contact Margo Hackett for permission to reprint or post.