Page 59 of Endless Summer: Stories
Lorraine Crimmins—back in the sixties, she changed her name to Lavender, and now apparently she’s Rain. While Lorraine was working for their family as a housekeeper, cook, and nanny back in the 1950s, she and Wilder had an affair and she became pregnant. Kate had left Wilder, but he came crawling back. And then, when Kate announced that she was divorcing him, he shot himself.
Afterward, Lorraine moved to California and raised her son, Pickford, in a commune. She abandoned Pick in 1969 when she wanted to do some “traveling.” Bill Crimmins had driven out to the West Coast to pick the boy up and bring him back to Nantucket.
The last time Kate had seen Lorraine was in August of 1969, when she showed up—barefoot, grungy, and probably high on all kinds of drugs—to take Pick back to California. By way of Woodstock. (Kate rolls her eyes every time she thinks about this. What kind of mother takes her child to Woodstock!)
Kate had been crystal clear—with Lorraine, with Bill, with Pick. She never wanted to see Lorraine again. Kate didn’t own Nantucket, of course, but she’d thought it was understood that Lorraine had forfeited her right to be here. This was Kate’s turf!
She sounds hopelessly old-fashioned; they aren’t the Sharks and the Jets. Two decades have passed since Kate last saw Lorraine. Maybe Lorraine thought that was enough time.
When the clock strikes seven, Kate calls Bitsy. “Will you come get me, please?”
“Again?” Bitsy’s voice is groggy; it’s too early even for Jane Fonda.
“I need strawberries,” Kate says.
There’s a pause. “Kate.”
“Bitsy,” Kate says. “I need strawberries.”
Bitsy shows up fifteen minutes later and for once in her life, she seems to be at a loss for words. This is just as well; Kate needs to think. How can she persuade Lorraine to leave? Kate has no idea, but she knows one thing: The island isn’t big enough for both of them. She can’t be bumping into Lorraine Crimmins at the Finast or the post office.
The Miata rumbles up the cobblestones of Main Street and Bitsy snags the first available parking space. “The farm truck is in front of the Camera Shop,” Bitsy says. “I’ll wait here. Whistle if you need backup.”
Kate wants to laugh but she’s too anxious. “You make it sound like I’m going to a rumble.”
“Aren’t you?” Bitsy says, and Kate climbs out of the car.
Thirty years ago, twenty, even ten, Kate would have cared about how she looked when she faced her husband’s mistress, but Kate doesn’t care anymore. This morning she’s wearing a plain navy T-shirt and capri pants, white Keds, and she didn’t bother with makeup; she can’t remember if she ran a brush through her hair. She’s beyond thinking that Wilder slept with Lorraine because Lorraine was prettier or more desirable. Wilder slept with Lorraine because he was unstable and wanted to act out.
Kate marches up to the farm truck and sees the back of a woman with very long gray hair. Couldthisbe Lorraine, looking so… old? Lorraine is four years younger than Kate, so sixty-four. And she’s always had long hair.Yes,Kate thinks.
When Lorraine turns around and sees Kate, she reels back, stumbling in her Birkenstocks. Things have improved a bit for Lorraine, Kate thinks. She’s wearing shoes.
“Katie?” Lorraine whispers.
Kate shakes her head. No one has called her Katie since… well, since David died, but David’s “Katie” was sweet and tender, whereas Lorraine’s “Katie” hearkens back to their long-ago past. Lorraine came to work at All’s Fair when she was sixteen and Kate only twenty. The war had been raging in Europe, but the Japanese had not yet bombed Pearl Harbor.
“Good morning, Lorraine,” Kate says.
“I go by Rain now,” Lorraine says.
Yes, that’s what Jessie said. When Lorraine showed up at All’s Fair twenty years earlier, she’d called herself Lavender. Lorraine Crimmins is the kind of troubled soul who sheds identities—and names—like a snake sheds its skin.
“I heard you were selling strawberries.” Kate eyes the rows of green cardboard containers filled to the brim with fat, bright red berries. There are no gnats, no mold; these are the nicest-looking strawberries Kate has ever seen. The hand-printed sign says they’reORGANIC, from thePOLPIS FARM COOPERATIVE, and that they cost six dollars a quart. Highway robbery. “You must have known I would find out you were here eventually.” She sweeps her arm like one of the gals onThe Price Is Right.“You’re on Main Street.”
Lorraine picks up a quart of berries and shoves it at Kate. “Take these, free of charge,” she says. “Just please leave me alone.”
“You know what’s funny?” Kate says. “I’m here to askyouto leavemealone. You don’t belong on this island and you know it.”
At this, Lorraine sets her shoulders back and juts out her chin. “I was born and raised here. And my father before me. I’m a native islander, not some summer person from the big city who shows up every summer to take the best bite from the apple and then leave.”
Kate nods. Since she was a child she has understood the resentment that locals have for the summer people. “I thought we had an understanding.” Kate lowers her voice but inches closer to Lorraine, so close that she can smell Lorraine’s musky odor, her unwashed hair. She won’t make a scene, she tells herself. But she will get her point across.
“Such an interesting choice of words,” Lorraine says. “Understanding. What I remember is that your parents told my father that I had to go. They gave him a hundred and fifty dollars. He bought me a bus ticket to California and made it eminently clear that I was not to show my face back on the island again.” She grimaces. “My own father.”
“And yet here you are,” Kate says.
“My father is dead,” Lorraine says, and the quart of strawberries that she holds in her hands starts to quiver. “Pick didn’t even bother to call when it happened. Instead, he sent me a letter telling me you all had decided against a service, that my father’s ashes would be buried in a small plot next to Exalta’s and Penn’s.” Lorraine narrows her eyes, which are still a lovely frosted-glass blue. “My own son asked me not to come back east to pay my respects because he didn’t want to upsetyou.”
