LITMIR.BIZ

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1962

      Until my sister’s death the summer I was twelve years old, I’d had a nearly idyllic childhood. The school year was spent in Westfield, a town that offered everything I could possibly need and was an easy bus ride to New York, where my parents often took my sisters and me to the zoo or the history museum or a Broadway play. My parents were smart, well educated and loving, and my overindulgent maternal grandparents, Grandma and Grandpop Foley, lived nearby. Their house was as open to us as our own.

      I was a creative child—too creative, some of my teachers said—and loved making up adventures for myself and my friends. I made up stories about things going on in the neighborhood: the old lady on the corner was a witch, I had a boyfriend in another town, I was found abandoned on my parents’ doorstep as an infant. I told the kids in my class that wolves had been spotted in Mindowaskin Park, close to our homes. I loved to write plays to put on in our garage and poetry to read to my classmates.

      My mother was popular among my friends, because she always took our endeavors very seriously. She’d paint scenery and sew curtains for the “stage” when we put on a play, and she’d go along with the tall tales I told the neighborhood kids, as long as I wasn’t scaring any of them too much.

      My father was a physician with a busy schedule, but he made time for my sisters and me. Even though he walked with a limp from a World War II injury, he still managed to take us tobogganing or ice-skating or bowling. My world was safe and fun and easy.

      Things started getting rocky around the time Isabel turned fifteen. She wanted to hang out with her friends instead of with the family, and she wanted to go to parties my parents didn’t approve of. She was nasty to me, suddenly viewing me as a liability rather than an asset. She no longer wanted me around and barely spoke to me if she was with her friends. It was a fairly tame rebellion, in retrospect. My father still seemed to think his eldest daughter could walk on water, while my mother bore the brunt of her defiant behavior. The worst part was that, by the summer Isabel was seventeen, my parents had begun arguing about how to handle her. I had never heard a cross word pass between the two of them before, and their disagreements worried me.

      All during the school year, I’d hunger for my grandparents’ summer bungalow down the shore on the Point Pleasant Canal. It was in a little beach community called Bay Head Shores, only an hour from Westfield, but it seemed a world away. In 1962, we arrived at the bungalow a few days after school ended, caravanning with my grandparents, who towed our boat behind their black Studebaker. Lucy, my mother and I followed in the Chrysler, and Dad and Isabel brought up the rear in our father’s flashy yellow Lark convertible. Everyone pretended that Isabel was riding with Dad in order to get a head start on her tan in the open car, but I knew it was really that she and my mother were in the middle of one of their battles and that having her ride with Dad would be more peaceful for all concerned.

      Like me, Lucy, who was eight at the time, was a book lover, but she couldn’t read in the car without throwing up, and her propensity to motion sickness also meant she had to sit in the front seat of the Chrysler next to Mom, which was fine with me. I lounged between suitcases and pillows in the back seat, reading Nancy Drew’s The Secret of Red Gate Farm, which I’d read before. I’d read all the Nancy Drew books and was systematically working my way through them once again. I liked to pretend that I was Nancy Drew myself. A few months earlier, I’d started collecting things I found around my yard or my neighborhood. I’d found a glove in the gutter, a money clip on the sidewalk and—much to my mother’s horror—someone’s bra, discovered in the woods behind a friend’s house. These items I squirreled beneath my bed in case a mystery occurred in the neighborhood and one of my finds might prove to be valuable evidence. I planned to do the same down the shore.

      The small bluish-gray, black-shuttered Cape Cod was one of two bungalows at the end of a short, dead-end dirt road. My sisters and I had our shoes off before we’d even stepped out of the cars. Grandpop unlocked the front door, pretending to fumble with the key, chuckling at our impatience. The musty smell of a house closed up for ten months washed over us as we walked into the hallway, and Lucy and I raced from room to room to see that everything was exactly as we’d left it the year before.

      The two bedrooms downstairs were used by the adults, while the three of us girls slept in the attic. Izzy and I loved the attic, but it terrified Lucy, who seemed to have gotten all the fear genes in the family. She and Mom had been in a car accident when Lucy was little, and she’d been pulled screaming from my mother’s arms in the emergency room and taken away somewhere for the treatment of several broken ribs and a broken leg. Since that day, she’d been afraid of everything. The attic could only be reached by rickety, pull-down steps, and Lucy was always afraid those steps might somehow snap closed while she was up there and she would be trapped. The attic itself was a source of endless fascination for me. It was wide-open, its ceiling the bare wooden underbelly of the roof, and it was filled with enough beds to sleep eight people. The beds were divided by curtains strung on wires across the room, so everyone had a little bit of privacy if they wanted it. During the day, we usually drew the curtains back, though, to allow a breeze through the small windows. The attic could suffocate us with its heat.

      Everyone’s favorite part of the bungalow—and the reason for its very existence—was the canal that ran behind the house. Our backyard was a broad rectangle of sand shared with the Chapman family next door and sandwiched between their boat dock and ours. Our boat was just a runabout, a tiny, open thing with an outboard motor, but the Chapmans owned a big Boston Whaler fast enough to pull two skiers at once.

      Anyone wanting to take the inland route from Barnegat Bay to the Manasquan River and the ocean had to pass through our canal, and some of the boaters were celebrities. My father boasted to everyone that he’d received a wave from Richard Nixon one time, as the then-vice-president’s boat cruised past our house. On weekends, the water could be frightening to navigate as the canal filled with boats of all shapes and sizes. The water beneath the little Lovelandtown Bridge, well within sight of our house, grew as choppy as the ocean during a storm, and accidents were not infrequent. We all loved to watch the boats dodge the pilings on a busy weekend afternoon.

      When we arrived at the bungalow that summer, though, my father did not care about going into the backyard to watch the boats or climbing down the ladder in our dock to touch the water with his toes, as my mother and I did. Instead, he went directly to the phone. He’d made sure it was already turned on for the summer, because he was on a vendetta. He was outraged by the recent Supreme Court decision forbidding school prayer, and he wanted to call every Catholic person he knew to organize a protest against the court ruling. My father was a recipient of the Purple Heart, a civic leader in our community and a well-respected member of our church, since he wrote a regular column for a Catholic magazine. Still too young to think for myself and having adopted the mores of my parents, I was as outraged as he was about the school prayer ruling. I couldn’t imagine starting the school day without the Lord’s Prayer. So we all gave my father the time he needed to sit near the wall phone in the living room with his pad of names, making his calls, his voice at times loud with his anger.

      All four of the Chapmans were in their backyard when we arrived. My mother and sisters went over to greet them, but I walked outside the chain-link fence and sat down on the bulkhead, my book in my lap and my feet dangling a foot or so above the water. Even though I wasn’t looking in his direction, I knew Ethan was probably watching me. I imagined him sitting on one of the chairs, swinging his legs, his flip-flops hanging halfway off his feet. Ethan and I had once been great summertime buddies. We’d ride our bikes to the little Bay Head Shores beach or fish together or climb trees. We’d even sleep over at each other’s houses. We’d been born on the same day—March 10, 1950—and we thought that gave us a lifelong bond. But we’d started drifting apart the previous summer, as opposite-sex friends sometimes did as they grew older. It seemed mutual to me, as if we’d both received word at the same time that we should avoid each other. As far as I was concerned, he’d gotten weird. He’d developed a fascination with marine life, dissecting everything he could find—crabs, blowfish, eels, starfish and the tiny shrimp that clung to the bulkhead just below the water’s surface. I was glad my mother didn’t insist I go over to say hello to him.

      We

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