Page 74 of Summer Longing
“I’ll never understand her,” Olivia said.
“She’s an interesting woman.”
They shared a smile of comradery.
“I’m really glad you came, Dad,” Olivia said. “So, what do you think of the town? Is it what you expected?”
“Expected? I’ve been to Provincetown before.”
She looked at him in surprise. “When?”
“The summer before my sophomore year at Penn.”
“How did I not know this? What made you come all the way out here?”
Her father hesitated, turning his bottle of Whale’s Tale Pale Ale. “I won a spot at the Fine Arts Work Center for my playwriting.”
“You wrote plays? You never told me that.” She wondered, seeing the sheepish expression on his face, what else she didn’t know about her father.
“It was a very long time ago.”
“Yeah, but when I said I was coming out here, you never thought to say,Oh, by the way, I spent a summer there as a playwright?”
He shook his head. “Your trip out here isn’t about me,” he said.
Olivia hated that kind of double talk, and it wasn’t something she was used to from him. “Wait a minute,” she said, something suddenly dawning on her. The realization was like a weird dream intruding on rational thought. “That day at your house—when I told you Mom had moved out here—I asked you if you had any idea why she’d choose this place. I told you it seemed very random. And you never said anything about it.”
Her father took a swig of his beer. “Your mother was out here that summer too. It’s where we met.”
Olivia felt like someone had pulled the bench out from under her. On the surface, there was nothing nefarious about this, nothing odd about it aside from the fact that she’d never heard it before. But somehow, it felt like her father had colluded with her mother in keeping this origin story from her. It was irrational to feel this way—she knew that. But she couldn’t help it.
“You said you met at the beach.”
“We did.”
“I thought you meant at the Jersey Shore,” she said.
He shook his head no.
“Why didn’t you ever tell me about this place?”
“Why would I talk about it, Olivia?”
“I don’t know!” Olivia said, certain there was some reason he should have.
Her father looked out at the water, then back at her. “Olivia, why are you making a big deal out of this?”
“I’m not. I just don’t understand how we all ended up out here this summer and somehow I had no idea that you two have a whole history here.”
“Two lobster rolls?” a waiter called out. Olivia held up their number and waved at him.
They ate in silence. The song “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go,” by Wham, played loudly on the sound system, infusing the moment with a bouncy cheer that she did not at all feel.
A group of young people, probably college age, took over the rest of the space at their picnic table. Every one of them held a colorful cocktail, and they were dressed in bathing suits. The women had wet hair. The air filled with a rapid-fire conversation Olivia couldn’t quite make out over the music, and it was punctuated with a lot of laughter. Listening to them, stealing glances, Olivia thought that her parents had been around that age when they met. Who had she been dating in her early college years? Certainly no one significant. The idea of a relationship beginning when you were that young and lasting a lifetime was unthinkable. Yes, some couples made it work. But she could barely sustain something now, at thirty. Maybe it had been inevitable that her parents would split up. Maybe if they’d met later in life, they would have had more staying power. Or maybe, if they’d met at a different time, they would have known better than to get married in the first place.
What difference did it make that her parents had met right here, in Provincetown? Why did she care? She wasn’t sure. Maybe it was because, for as long as she could remember, she’d simply thought of her parents’ relationship in terms of its failure. She was detached from it. Why should it matter how it began? Now she was faced with this new information about where her parents had met and fallen in love. She was walking the same streets, gazing out at the same water. It made it difficult to keep their marriage and divorce in a neat little emotional box. The idea of them as a couple suddenly had a new dimension, and it made her feel the loss all over again.
Or maybe she was letting herself feel the loss for the first time.
