Page 6 of Summer of '69
“Correct,” Kate says. “She should come to Nantucket, where she belongs.”
“There’s also a house a few blocks from Rajani’s that I found in the classifieds. Six bedrooms to let, college girls preferred. A hundred and fifty dollars for the summer.”
“That makes more sense,” David says. “We can pay the rent, but your day-to-day living expenses will be up to you.”
“Oh, thank you!” Kirby says.
Kate throws up her hands.
Kirby and her best friend from Simmons, Rajani Patel, drive to Woods Hole in Rajani’s maroon MG with the top down. Kirby secured a room in the house on Narragansett Avenue for the summer. She gave her parents the phone number and the name of the proprietress, Miss Alice O’Rourke.
I suppose she’s Irish Catholic,David had remarked.Let’s hope she runs a tight ship.
When Rajani and Kirby drive the MG off the ferry into Oak Bluffs, Kirby brings her palms together in front of her heart in a gesture of gratitude. She is starting over on her own somewhere completely new.
Well, okay, maybe notcompletelynew. She’s still on an island off the coast of Cape Cod; as the crow flies, she’s only eleven miles away from Nantucket. She could have gone to inner-city Philadelphia to work with disadvantaged youth. She could be driving around rural Alabama, registering people to vote. So this is just a first step, but it will be good for her.
Rajani is excited to play tour guide. “There’s Ocean Park,” she says about a large expanse of green lawn with a white gazebo at its navel. “And to the left are the Flying Horses Carousel and the Strand movie theater.”
Kirby swivels her head, trying to take it all in. The town has a carnival feel; it’s a bit more honky-tonk than Kirby expected. She eyes the carousel—which Rajani has informed Kirby is the nation’s oldest operating platform carousel—and then turns her attention to the people on the sidewalks eating fried clams out of red-and-white-checkered cardboard boats and swirling their tongues around soft-serve ice cream cones. The town does offer the diversity Rajani promised, which is refreshing. A black teenager glides by on a unicycle. Somewhere, there’s a radio playing the Fifth Dimension:This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius.Kirby bobs her head along to the music. This is the dawning of something for Kirby as well. But what?
“We live in the Methodist Campground,” Rajani says, and Kirby tries not to grimace. The only thing she can think of that’s less appealing than living in a campground is living in areligiouscampground. But the “campground” turns out to be a neighborhood of homes painted the colors of Easter eggs, each house decorated with elaborate gingerbread trim. “That one’s mine.” Rajani points to a lavender home with a sharp triangular gable over the front door; the white fretwork drips from the eaves like icing on a fancy cake. The house is straight out of a fairy tale, especially when compared with the architecture of downtown Nantucket, where every house resembles a Quaker widow.
“Look at that blue one,” Kirby says. The blue house down the street is a showstopper. It’s nearly twice as big as Rajani’s with two gables over a gracious front porch that has a bench swing and a row of ferns in hanging baskets. There are blue hydrangea bushes on either side of the front walk, and the gingerbread trim all around is fashioned to look like icicles—or at least that’s how it seems to Kirby.
“That’s my friend Darren’s house,” Rajani says. “He’s going to be a senior at Harvard. Do you want to go see if he’s home?”
“We don’t have to,” Kirby says.
“Come on,” Rajani says. “You want to meet people, right? I don’t see his car but it might be in the garage. His parents are really nice. His mother is a doctor and his father’s a judge.”
A doctor and a judge. Harvard. All Kirby can think is how happy both Nonny and her mother would be. She’s meeting the right kind of people, just like on Nantucket, where everyone is a judge or a doctor or holds an Endowed Chair of Effortless Superiority at Well-Bred University.
“Okay,” Kirby says. She’ll write her mother a postcard later, she decides, and mention all the esteemed people she’s met on Martha’s Vineyard. “Let’s go say hi.”
Rajani strides up the walk and jabs the doorbell. Kirby wonders about Darren from Harvard. It would be nice to have a summer romance, a romance where she, Kirby, calls the shots instead of being an emotional wreck. It would be nice to stop thinking about Officer Scottie Turbo, with his devastating green eyes and his geisha-girl tattoo and his powerful hands that could pin both her wrists over her head as he kissed the spot just below her left ear.
A black woman in a white tennis dress opens the door. Her arms have sculpted muscles and there’s a sheen of perspiration on her forehead. Her hair is in a ponytail and she’s wearing diamond earrings. She looks at both girls—women!—but her gaze settles on Rajani and she smiles.
“Rajani!” she says. “Now the summer can officially begin!”
Kirby is initially confused. She thinks,Maid? Housekeeper? In a tennis dress and diamond earrings?And then, one instant later, she’s mortified by her own obtuseness and—let’s just say it—bigotry. This woman must be Darren’s mother, the doctor.
Darren’s mother holds open the screen door. Rajani steps inside and Kirby follows. The house is bright, summery, and modern. A peek in the living room to the right reveals a navy-and-white-striped divan with bright yellow throw pillows and a white coffee table shaped like a kidney bean. Kirby loves it. There isn’t a piece of furniture in Nonny’s house that’s less than a hundred years old.
“Dr. Frazier,” Rajani says. “Meet my friend Kirby Foley.”
Dr. Frazier offers her hand. “Nice to meet you, Kirby.” She studies Kirby for a second longer than she might have—or is Kirby just being paranoid? Kirby looks respectable, she thinks, in a strawberry-print wrap skirt, a white scoop-neck tee, and a pair of Dr. Scholl’s. She abandoned her usual minidresses, peasant blouses, and cutoff jeans in favor of this outfit because she wanted to make a good impression with her landlady, Miss O’Rourke. She senses hesitation on Dr. Frazier’s face. Is it because Kirby is white? Should Kirby inform Dr. Frazier that she’s a civil rights activist and a feminist, that she marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. next to her beloved high-school civics teacher, Miss Carpenter, and that she personally defended Miss Carpenter against the racial slurs of the ignorant boys in her class? Should she show Dr. Frazier her National Organization for Women membership card? Should she mention that she’s read Simone de Beauvoir, Aimé Césaire, and Eldridge Cleaver?
All of that would sound like bragging, she fears, or, worse, like she’s trying to appropriate African-Americans’ struggle for rights and respect when anyone can see that she’s as white as Wonder Bread. Besides, it’s exaggerating a bit—shehasread Aimé Césaire, but she barely understood a single word. She decides the best defense is genuine human warmth. She smiles at Dr. Frazier, and as she does, she realizes she has seen this woman before. But where? Dr. Frazier doesn’t work at Simmons, and yet somewhere…Kirby has met her somewhere.
“Are you here visiting for a few days?” Dr. Frazier asks. “Or for the summer?”
“The summer,” Kirby says, hoping this will be a point in her favor. “I’m renting a room from Alice O’Rourke. I’ll be working as a chambermaid at the Shiretown Inn in Edgartown.”
“Chambermaid?” Dr. Frazier asks. She gives Kirby the once-over with what appears to be an incredulous eye. “Where are you from, Kirby?”
Kirby clears her throat. “My parents live in Brookline?” She’s so nervous she sounds like she’s asking the question instead of answering it.
