“Now you’re going to have to get a cellphone,” Eleanor said triumphantly. Martha was kind of a technophobe, using a landline telephone and her old Kodak camera.
“Well, I thought of that,” Martha said. “But you know how I hate those things. We’ve decided that, if necessary, I’ll use Al’s, but really we’ll only need to check on the children, and they’re all grown up so we don’t even need to do that.”
“I’ll miss you,” Eleanor admitted.
“I’ll send you postcards!” Martha told her.
Eleanor restrained herself from rolling her eyes—did anyone even send postcards anymore?
“Please do.” Forcing herself to be cheerful, she said, “Oh, Martha, I hope you have a spectacular time!”
She had been sad and hurt and angry when she left Martha’s house, because it didn’t seem like Martha not to tell Eleanor about something so important before.
Now she tossed the remote control on the quilt. “Alexa,” she said, “play Bob Seger.”
As his rough and growly voice filled the room with “Against the Wind,” Eleanor snorted, because if anything was against the wind it was her old house on the bluff.
Then came the words: “We were young and strong,” and Eleanor couldn’t help it. She burst into tears.
She’d been young and strong, once. She’d spent all her summers in this beautiful house. Her grandparents had owned it, and then her parents, and now Eleanor. She was an only child, and this house, with its eccentric creaks and uneven floors, was like a living companion to her. A friend. She could walk through the house with her eyes closed and know what room she was in. The house had been built long before fast ferries and UPS, back when islanders made do with what they had or could scavenge, so the doorknobs were all different—porcelain, brass, glass, metal latch—and Eleanor had always thought that made the house friendlier, somehow.
She could put her hand on the wall in the guest bedroom and feel where a door into another room had been removed and the space plastered over. At a casual glance, you wouldn’t see it because it had been so carefully done and painted. But Eleanor remembered when the door was there, connecting her bedroom to her grandparents’ room. When she was a small child and the night was howling with rain and wind, she would leave her bed to hurry across the cold wide-planked board floors to her grandparents’ bed. Her grandmother would lift Eleanor up, tucking her in beside her. Even now Eleanor could remember the warmth of her grandmother’s body curled around her, the protection of the heavy quilt over her, the snores of her grandfather on the other side of the high, wide bed.
She felt affection for the small crack in the window of her bedroom because it reminded her of that long-ago summer night when Kay, her island friend, roused her by throwing pebbles at the window, just like in stories. Eleanor had snuck out of the house, biked down to the beach with Kay, and together they’d gone swimming in the dark waves, something they’d both been forbidden ever to do, swim at night. Oh, they’d felt wicked and brave! Now Kay was living with her husband in California, both of them doing yoga and drinking almond milk, and Eleanor was widowed.
At the end of the downstairs hallway, the wall was marked with not one but two indentations, both by Eleanor’s son, Cliff. One summer when Cliff was three, he had a small plastic tricycle. Zooming around on that was his favorite activity. The house was large, with many rooms, so on rainy days Cliff was allowed to ride his bike inside. Eleanor could remember his fat legs pedaling furiously as he whizzed around, laughing maniacally. Only once did he crash into the wall. Cliff wasn’t hurt nor was his bike but the accident caused a zigzag fissure in the wall. It was minor. They painted over it at some point and forgot about it until Cliff was eleven and bored out of his mind on another rainy summer day. He was throwing a football at his older sister, Alicia, who kept rolling her eyes and saying, “This is stupid.” One time he threw the ball too high and too hard, so it slammed into the wall, causing a section of the old wood to splinter and cave in. When Eleanor saw it, she shook her head and hugged her son. “What do you have against that poor old wall?” she asked. A carpenter came to repair it, but the wall never looked the same.
One time, Ari, Eleanor’s three-year-old granddaughter, had terrified them all when she disappeared from the house and never answered their calls. Eleanor’s daughter, Alicia, Ari’s mother, had been at the point of phoning the police when Eleanor opened the kitchen cabinet and discovered the child curled among the baking tins, her baby doll neatly tucked in a bread loaf pan. The doll’s eyes were open, but Ari was sound asleep.
“Ari?” Eleanor had asked gently.
Ari had opened her big blue eyes and smiled. “Hi, Gram,” she’d said, and yawned.
Memories were everywhere. Five generations had summered in this fine old house on the bluff. The house was beloved, and so very old. Eleanor knew she was not keeping up with the repairs on the house. When her parents were alive, her father did most of the maintenance, but Eleanor’s husband, Mortimer, an insurance executive, was very much not DIY, and besides, they were mostly there in the summer, and who wanted to think about power drills and saws in the summer? After her husband died, Eleanor had had a new roof put on the house.
It had always been a tradition for the family to spend summer weekends on the island. Some years the mothers and their children had stayed the entire week and the fathers came down Friday night. After Eleanor’s parents died and Alicia married Phillip, the tradition continued. Mortimer and Eleanor’s son, Cliff, often came, too, and the family was all there, together, sleeping under one roof. Eleanor loved this custom. She was happiest when her family was with her in the summer. She’d delighted in the shouts of Cliff, Phillip, and Mortimer playing tag football in the yard, and the sudden musical splashing of the outdoor shower when someone returned from the beach. And the casual, messy lobster dinners eaten outside on the long wooden table on the deck, where Eleanor put two large bowls at each end of the table, one full of nutcrackers and picks, the other for people to discard the shells. Smaller bowls at each place held melted butter. Or the rainy summer nights when they sat in the dining room, eating clam chowder and hot rolls, drinking a not very good champagne, telling tales on each other, and laughing.
When her husband died three years before, Eleanor had sold her Boston house and moved to the island to live year-round. She already had friends here, and she’d quickly constructed a routine of social events. When she went to church, she sat with Bonnie and Donnie Hamilton, retired year-rounders who’d been bridge partners with Eleanor and Mortimer. After church, the three often went to lunch at the Seagrille, where within the relative privacy of the booths they discussed all the town issues and who was joining what community committee and how delighted they were that Muffy Andover had joined the board of the Hospital Thrift Shop, even though Muffy (that name!) tended to flash her wealth about. Clarissa Lourie was on the board of Ocean Matters with Eleanor, and they had lunch at least once a week to discuss books. Even after Mortimer died, the Andersons and the Andovers and the Hamiltons always invited Eleanor to their cocktail parties, and when Eleanor became brave enough to give a dinner party herself, it was the Hamiltons, Andovers, and Andersons who were her guests.