Summer of '69(7)
Blair had lowered the book and said, “There’s no reason to be grossed out by sex. It’s perfectly natural. Angus and I have sex every single day, sometimes twice.”
Jessie had been both intrigued and repulsed by this information, and she hadn’t been able to look at Angus the same way after. He was ten years older than Blair and had dark hair that he never had time to comb because he was too busy thinking. He was always working on math problems and Nonny liked him so much that, while they were staying at All’s Fair, she let him sit in Gramps’s leather chair at Gramps’s antique desk. Angus rarely went to the beach because he hated sand and he burned easily. Jessie didn’t relish the thought of Angus’s voracious sexual appetite. Blair was beautiful and smart enough to have any man she wanted, but she’d married Angus and given up teaching English at Winsor in order to keep house for him. Now she worshipped Julia Child and wore Lilly Pulitzer patio dresses—but on the beach, she was more like a naughty aunt than a matronly older sister. She smoked Kents, lighting up with a silver lighter from Tiffany that was engraved with a love note from Angus’s younger brother, Joey, who had been Blair’s boyfriend before Angus. She reapplied her lipstick every time she came out of the water, and she shamelessly flirted with the Cliffside lifeguard Marco, who hailed from Rio de Janeiro. Blair spoke a few select phrases in Portuguese. She was glamorous.
Kirby also took Jessie to the beach, but she opted for the south shore, where the surfers and the hippies hung out. Kirby would let some air out of the tires of the fire-engine-red International Harvester Scout that their grandmother had bought for island driving, and they would cruise right onto Madequecham Beach, where every single sunny day was cause for celebration. People played volleyball and plucked cans of Schlitz out of galvanized tubs of ice, and the air smelled like marijuana smoke. Someone always brought a transistor radio, so they listened to the Beatles and Creedence and Kirby’s favorite band, Steppenwolf.
In Jessie’s opinion, Kirby was even prettier than Blair. Kirby’s hair was long and straight, and while Blair was voluptuous, Kirby was thin as a rail. Surfers with wet suits hanging off their torsos like shed skin would throw Kirby over their shoulders and toss her into the waves. She would scream in protest, but secretly, Jessie knew, she loved it, and unlike Blair, Kirby didn’t care what she looked like when she climbed out of the water. She wore no makeup and she let her blond hair dry in the sun, uncombed. She smoked weed instead of cigarettes, but two tokes only when she was watching Jessie; that was her rule. Two tokes mellowed her out, she said, and the effects had always worn off by the time they stepped back into All’s Fair.
Jessie’s days with Tiger were adventures. They rode their bikes to Miacomet Pond to fish; they hiked to Altar Rock, the highest point on Nantucket, and shot off Tiger’s potato gun. But their favorite activity was bowling. Tiger was a legend at Mid-Island Bowl and had been since he was twelve years old. All of the locals knew him and spotted him games and bought birch beers for Jessie, which she savored because Exalta didn’t tolerate any soda except for ginger ale mixed with grenadine at the club, and even then, Jessie was allowed only one.
Tiger’s prowess at bowling was surprising because they played the game only on Nantucket and only when it rained. Exalta didn’t believe in children staying indoors on beautiful summer days. Once Tiger was old enough to drive, of course, he could bowl whenever he wanted. On days when he minded Jessie, he took her with him, but they kept it from Exalta, which made it an even bigger thrill. When Tiger lined the ball up with the pins and then let the ball sail from his fingers as his back leg lifted behind him, it was like he was dancing. He was graceful, he was strong, and he was accurate. Most of the time he swept away the pins in their entirety like he was clearing a table. Jessie had hoped and prayed that his God-given talent would prove to be a genetic trait she shared, but no such luck; Jessie’s balls veered to the right or the left, and at least half the time, they dropped into the gutter.
Jessie tries to imagine a Nantucket summer without her siblings. She will rattle around All’s Fair with her summer-reading book, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl—that is, when she’s not at tennis lessons, which her grandmother is insisting on even though Jessie has less than no interest. Jessie isn’t spoiled enough to call the prospect of a summer on Nantucket dreary, but why, oh why, can’t she just stay home?
Her father, sitting on her bed, pulls a small box out of his jacket pocket. “Turning thirteen is a very big deal in the Jewish tradition,” he says. “I had a bar mitzvah, but since we haven’t raised you Jewish, we won’t be having that kind of ceremony for you.” He pauses, looks away for a moment. “But I want to acknowledge how important this age is.”
Jessie sits up in bed and opens the box. It’s a silver chain with a round pendant the size of a quarter. Engraved on the pendant is a tree.
“Tree of Life,” David says. “In the kabbalah, the Tree of Life is a symbol of responsibility and maturity.”
The necklace is pretty. And Jessie loves her father more than she loves anyone, even Tiger, though she knows love can’t be quantified. She feels protective of her father because, while Jessie is related to everyone in the family, David is related by blood to no one but her. She wonders if he ever thinks about this and feels like an outsider. She loves that her father has chosen to acknowledge this bond between them. She has heard that to be considered a “real” Jew, one’s mother must be Jewish, and if that was true, Jessie wouldn’t qualify, but she feels a connection to her father—something spiritual, something bigger than just regular love—when she secures the clasp and lets the cool weight of the charm rest against her breastbone. She wonders if Anne Frank owned a Tree of Life necklace, then decides that if she did, she probably hid it with the rest of her family’s valuables so the Nazis wouldn’t take it.