1
never buy a beach house. Don’t even dream about one. Don’t save your money or call real estate agents or pick out a white couch. If you must do something, pray for the people who do own beach houses. Pity them. Certainly don’t, under any circumstance, envy them.
Maybe it’s too late for you. Maybe you’ve gone ahead and picked up some starfish tchotchkes and turquoise nonsense and you feel you’re in too deep. Well, then let me tell you right now that those warm summer nights you’re dreaming about will be spent arguing over parking restrictions and beach access. You won’t paint or write or play tennis. You’ll be too busy filing code enforcement complaints in the town attorney’s office. You’ll wake up to the sound of leaf blowers and you’ll either spend half your life trying to protect a tree or cut one down. The village will be charming. The view will be beautiful. You’ll attend countless meetings about how to keep them that way. Do yourself a favor and put a lawyer on retainer. Don’t waste any time about that. You will, without question, not be on speaking terms with at least one of your neighbors in a year’s time.
And, if you’re like me, you’ll eventually end up in a courthouse conference room in some godforsaken town, nervously clutching a tattered, overflowing, cardboard Christmas box with a picture of a dopey snowman and the words, “Bring on the Snow!” The box will be filled with letters and emails and blueprints and surveys and photos that began as minor grievances but are now exhibits in a money-laundering scheme. And what you’ll think to yourself as you stare at that stupid snowman and search frantically for a tissue to wipe away the sweat which now routinely rockets from the top of your head is this: Why did I ever buy that house?
The worst part about all of this, I mean the really worst part—worse than the alleged wire fraud or the ruined view or the mounting therapy bills—is that now I am one of these people. I’m now the kind of horrible person who genuinely cares about what so-and-so had to say about the traffic from the chowder festival. I’m the kind of person who has an opinion about whether the beach sticker should be placed on the front or rear bumper of the car. I know more than one person named Bunny. I spend weekends reconstructing osprey nests. I carry around Freedom of Information forms in my purse. I fantasize about a tsunami sweeping away my neighbor’s house and floating it out to sea (preferably with them in it). I, honest to God, look forward to town board work sessions airing on Channel 36. I’m the kind of person who has the town supervisor’s cell phone number posted on my refrigerator and who has cried more than once in the town attorney’s office. I’m that kind of person. The worst kind of person. I’m a beach person.
Three years ago, I didn’t have a beach house. Three years ago, I was a normal person. I had a husband, a job, and a house with no view in Kansas City. Every Sunday, my husband and I would go to the same diner for breakfast. We’d order two omelets. We’d request the same waitress. We’d eat at the same table. We’d leave the same tip. We’d talk about work or we wouldn’t talk at all. Then, one day, we went to a different diner and Tom ordered pancakes and he left me.
I don’t know about you, but I’d like to think that if I were rotten enough to leave someone over pancakes after thirty years of marriage, I’d have the decency to have a good, juicy reason for it. I’d, at the very least, have the decency to make something up. You’d like to think there’d be some seedy affair or coming-out proclamation or witness protection situation. But, Tom didn’t have any reason at all. He just looked up at me while he very casually poured his maple syrup and asked me, “So…do you think this is working?” I thought he meant the restaurant. I said I thought it was wonderful. I really did. I said, “I think it’s wonderful.”
I guess Tom hoped that I would say something like, “No, I see what you’re saying. It’s not working. Let’s get a divorce.” That would have been better. Then, we could have gone on enjoying our breakfast and possibly could have still made that stop at the estate sale on the way home to buy yet another old radio to add to Tom’s collection. Instead, Tom launched into a twenty-minute monologue about feeling trapped and stuck and in a rut and weighed down and a few more metaphors meant to say, “I just can’t stand you anymore.”
Tom said he needed adventure. He said he felt suffocated. He wanted to “find himself,” a phrase he no doubt picked up from one of his many self-help manuals about breathing and thinking and eating and general basic living. Whether Tom’s “self” was lost or never found in the first place, I don’t know. But, either way, he felt the most likely place to find it was on the Queen Mary 2 ocean liner. So, he went ahead and booked a solo ticket for a four-month world cruise. It was setting sail from New York in a week. “It’s the only way,” he said. “I’ve had a paradigm shift.” This was the man who needed the butcher to put pieces of paper in between each slice of American cheese—the one who had me ironing his boxer shorts for thirty years. It was the man who told me every summer that a beach vacation was not necessary because we belonged to the YMCA and that traveling to Europe would be nothing but a headache.
While Tom continued to walk me through all the reasons why he now considered our life to be unbearably dull, I started thinking about a pain in my rib that I had for about three years in the ’90s. I started thinking about it because the pain came back right around the time Tom mentioned that he was planning to purchase a tiny home and trailer it across the country when he returned from his world cruise.
The pain first started in 1994 when my daughter was six. I woke up with a lightning bolt feeling in my rib and like any good hypochondriac, I immediately consulted my 1978 copy of The Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy, which I always keep on my nightstand in the event of such a situation. After a good deal of poking, I was able to identify the exact location of the pain—left side, fourth rib from the clavicle, smack-dab over my heart. If you’re wondering how it is that I was able to poke a rib that was sitting directly over my heart, well, then you’ll discover the reason why I married Tom in the first place. When I was twenty, I brought Tom home for Thanksgiving and my mother told me that if he ever asked me to marry him, I should accept because he was the best I would ever do considering my cup size, which was and remains nonexistent. This was bad advice. But, I took it. My mother also told me to never sign a prenup. This was good advice that I, of course, ignored.
Anyway, the pain in my rib lasted for about four days. On the fifth day, when it moved down my arm, I started writing my will. Lucky for me, my husband is a cardiologist. When he got home from work, he asked, “How was your day?”
“Pretty good,” I said. “I think I’m having a heart attack.” Something you should know about Tom is that he rides bicycles. Many people ride bicycles, but Tom has somehow managed to make it into a personality trait. It takes Tom at least fifteen minutes to enter or exit the house due to the amount of bicycle accouterments required for his everyday living. The news of my impending death did not interrupt this routine. When he finished clicking off his cleats and tucking them neatly into a basket beneath the bench by the door labeled Cleats, he asked, “Right now?”
“What?” I said.
“Right now you’re having a heart attack?”
“Yes, Tom,” I said. “Right now. Right now, I’m having a heart attack.” He walked over to me and asked me where it hurt. I pointed to the spot—fourth rib down from the clavicle, left side. Then, without saying a word, he took his index finger and gave me a tremendous poke right in that very spot. I lurched backward.
“You’re not having a heart attack,” he said and casually opened the refrigerator to gather the ingredients for his midafternoon cool-down protein smoothie.
“Well, I’m having something,” I said.
“It’s muscular,” he said. “Muscular or skeletal. Classic presentation. I see it all the time.” Tom was always saying things were classic presentations. I hated that.
Over the course of the next few years, the pain would come and go. I went to at least eight doctors. I had x-rays and MRIs and EKGs and all kinds of acronyms, which all came back perfectly normal. I was sick over it, the not knowing, I mean. I was sure there was a tumor buried somewhere in there, too small to show up on any scan. Then, one day, I was at the gynecologist and I happened to mention, just for the hell of it, that I get a terrible pain in my rib that seems to come and go at random. She said it was anxiety. She said everyone in the office had had it. “You’re hyperventilating,” she said. “Stop doing that.” And that was the end of my rib pain.
This is a long way of explaining why I was doing highly noticeable breathing exercises at breakfast. I resented Tom. God, did I resent him. Bad enough he was asking for a divorce, or a separation, or I don’t even know what he was asking for. But, now, my rib pain was back and I would have to go around until the end of time practicing something called triangle breathing and chewing gum and sucking on mints, all while Tom gallivanted off into the sunset. That’s the problem with a bad marriage. I don’t mean a bad marriage. I mean, a just-okay marriage—one that isn’t awful, but isn’t quite good either. It’s like a benign rib pain. It’s not lethal. It’s not causing excruciating pain. No one cares about it. You can still perform normal activities. It’s just a worrisome annoyance that eats away at you until one day it decides to leave.
I’m sorry to admit that my first thought when Tom brought up the divorce was, What will people say? That’s not true. My first thought was, What the hell is a paradigm shift? My second thought was, What will people say? I should be more evolved than this, but there you have it. Tom had thrown me a big surprise retirement party a few weeks before all of this. Everyone we knew was there. The decorations were still lying around. Balloons were still deflating in corners of rooms. I decided in the car ride home from breakfast that if people asked me what happened, I would tell them the only thing you could tell people in a situation like this—he left me for a younger woman. I would call her Jessica or Caitlin or Tiffany or something like that. I would say she had a degree in rhetoric from a liberal arts college on the Eastern Seaboard. I would say Tom is off playing shuffleboard in the Arabian Sea with her as we speak.
Good riddance, you’re probably thinking. I thought that too. But, it was more complicated than that. It always is. When we bought our house in Kansas City, the old owners took the matching bedroom wall sconces and replaced them with two slightly different sconces—one clear glass, one frosted, both square. “Huh,” we said, the day we moved in. They were almost right. They were just slightly wrong. We said we’d get them fixed. We said we’d find a matching pair. But, we didn’t. We kept them. I slept on the clear side of the bed and Tom slept on the frosted. Thirty years and one terrible breakfast later, Tom and I had become the sconces. We were almost right. We were just slightly wrong. And no one had bothered to fix us. When we got home, I tore the sconces off the wall and fell into bed.
If I had a wedding ring, I might have very dramatically removed it and set it on the bathroom vanity or the nightstand or placed it in a little dish on the bureau and stared at it longingly for a while. But, I didn’t have a wedding ring and neither did Tom. The night before leaving for our honeymoon in Saint Martin, I told Tom that I thought it would be best to leave our wedding rings in the safe in the closet of our cramped studio apartment on Seventy-Seventh Street. “We’re going to be swimming,” I believe was my argument. Tom agreed. A week later we returned to the apartment. Door open, safe empty, dirty dishes in the sink. “How did they get into the safe?” Tom asked.
“The key was in the lock,” I said.
“Why?” Tom asked.
“I bought it for fire,” I said.
We called the police, who confirmed that the robbers had more than likely lived in our apartment for the week. They ate our food. They slept in our bed. They watched our TV. They took our TV. “How did they know we’d be gone for the week?” Tom asked.
“I left a note on the door,” I said.
“What?” Tom said.
“For the paperboy,” I said.
“What did the note say?” a policeman asked me.
“It said: Dear Rodney, We are going to Saint Martin for the week. Please do not deliver the paper.” They never found the guys. We didn’t get our rings back. We could have replaced them. But, we didn’t. We didn’t replace the sconces. We didn’t replace the rings. And look what happened.
Before I told Tom to drop dead and get out of my sight, I had him set up the old VHS player that had been gathering dust at the bottom of our closet for the last twenty years. For the next week, while downstairs Tom excitedly packed for his cruise, I lay in bed upstairs and watched a tape of Carly Simon’s 1987 concert on Martha’s Vineyard. In 1988, my daughter was born premature and sick. During that time, I did a lot of weeping. I ate a lot of hospital cafeteria food and drank a lot of vending machine coffee. I did a fair amount of yelling, which was usually accompanied by more weeping. I did plenty of staring into space. But, I didn’t do much sleeping—hardly any. Before this, I had been a world-class sleeper. I was one of those enviable people who could sleep on a bus or a train or any mode of transportation and wake up refreshed at my destination. And then, just like that, it was gone. I haven’t slept well since 1988.
I found insomnia to be an excruciatingly lonely experience. Many nights, I remember feeling like I wanted to be anywhere or anyone else. I drank tea. I tried to meditate. I wrote down positive thoughts in a journal. I even prayed. Nothing helped, not even a little. Then, I found Carly Simon’s concert on TV and for whatever reason, it made me feel just a little bit better. And that’s really all you need when you’re in a deep rut. You don’t need a miracle or a cure. You just need something that will make you feel the slightest bit better. And at that time in my life, I thought nowhere looked as perfect as Martha’s Vineyard and no one looked as effortlessly cool as Carly Simon.
But, I will tell you this, Carly Simon’s music is a lot more uplifting when you’re not facing a divorce and it’s possible that I now harbor an unhealthy and unreasonable resentment toward James Taylor. The first time I watched the tape, I thought about Tom and I cried. I cried through the whole thing. The second time I watched it, I thought about my daughter, Hattie, so I called her and she cried. And by the end of the week, after about the fifteenth replay, I thought about myself. I thought about beach houses. I thought about ferry boats and sea breezes and pink sunsets. I thought about fresh starts and silver bangles and coral Keds and shoulder pads. I didn’t think about Tom. All right, fine, I thought about “finding myself.” I had a paradigm shift.
2
in 1971, I met Josie Friedman from Levittown at Camp Laughing Waters. We were both eleven years old. For years, my parents had threatened to send me to sleepaway camp, and in the summer before sixth grade, they made good on that threat. I thought everyone who went to camp was being punished for something. I thought that was the whole point. Why else would summer camp have been invented if not to whip rotten children into shape? In my case, I was serving an eight-week sentence for smuggling a tribe of baby bunnies into my bedroom. For this and possible other infractions, I was forced to swim day in and day out in a leech-infested lake in New Hampshire.
It turned out, the only two girls who were at Camp Laughing Waters against their wills were me and Josie Friedman. Josie was in for running an illegal candy operation out of her locker at school. Not only did her business go belly-up in the spring semester, but her profits were ironically and unjustly used to pay her camp tuition. After being ruined financially, she spent the entire summer trying to get back in the black. She sold contraband nail polish and magazines. She charged a cool three dollars for forged letters home and started a hair-braiding operation from her bunk. It was not exactly difficult for Josie to run circles around our camp counselors who were a mere three years older than us, if that. I swear I never saw anyone older than fifteen at Camp Laughing Waters. For five decades, Josie has been a reliable storm that has blown through my life every few years. Josie was what my mother liked to call a “bad influence.” Josie’s mother called me a “godsend.”
About ten years ago, I started receiving Christmas letters from Josie. These were not the usual yellow legal pad, ballpoint pen, mid-January letters that I had grown accustomed to receiving from her. These were proper Christmas letters—linen stationery, holly trimmed, antique typewriter–typed letters. No longer did the return address reference her much-beloved rent-controlled studio on West Sixty-Fourth Street. Josie was now living in a quaint, cozy, seaside town in a farmhouse with a vegetable garden somewhere east of Manhattan. She enthusiastically owned and operated a boutique gift shop while her husband farmed potatoes.
The Christmas letters read like tourism ad campaigns and I ate up every word. Josie described her new home as a bucolic paradise—a cornucopia of natural beauty and small-town charm. The effects of this beauty and tranquility were so powerful that they turned Josie’s graying hair back to its brilliant red and had her unironically wearing things like overalls and aprons and bandannas in her hair. She talked about having picnics on the beach every Wednesday night with her girlfriends to watch the sailboat races. They would sip their favorite local wine and wave to the boats as they rounded the harbor. She said she picked up fresh fruits and vegetables every afternoon from a farm stand that ran on a cigar box honor system. Mind you, this was not one letter. These letters came every year, each one more saturated with words like blessed, and lucky, and grateful, which of course made me feel things like annoyed, and infuriated, and enraged.
The truth of the matter is, Christmas letters are the original social media, and by that, I mean full of lies and designed to make your friends and family feel bad. There is only one person on this planet, of whom I am aware, who writes an honest Christmas letter and that person is Cindy Schwartz, a real estate agent from Duluth, Minnesota. I do not know Cindy Schwartz. I have absolutely no idea who she is and yet, paradoxically, I know everything there is to know about her.
Neither Tom nor I have ever met anyone named Cindy Schwartz. We have never been to Minnesota. We never want to go to Minnesota. As far as we can recall, we have never even had a single conversation with anyone from Minnesota or about Minnesota. Cindy is a complete stranger and yet, somehow, our favorite person. Every Christmas, ...
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