Sag Harbor (3 page)

For instance: there were Famous Black People I had never heard of, but it was too late to ask who they were because I was old enough, by some secret measure, that it was a disgrace that I didn't know who they were, these people who had struggled and suffered for every last comfort I enjoyed. How ungrateful. One of my uncles would be over and mention Marcus Garvey and I'd ask, “Who's that?,” as the eyes of all the adults in the room slitted for a sad round of tsk-tsking. “Who's Toussaint L'Ouverture?” I'd stupidly inquire, and my father would shoot back, “You don't know who Toussaint L'Ouverture is? What do they teach you at that fancy school I bust my ass to send you to?” Not “Iconic Figures of Black Nationalism,” that's for sure.

What I did know about DuBois was that he fell into the category of Famous Black People—there was a way people said certain names so that they had an emanation or halo. The respectful way my mother pronounced
DuBois
told me that the man had uplifted the race. Years later in college I'd read his most famous essay and be blown away. And I quote: “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The history of the
American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.” I thought to myself: The guy who wrote that was chowing fried fish behind my house!

Driving with my father, it was potholes of double consciousness the whole way. There were only two things he would listen to on the radio: Easy Listening and Afrocentric Talk Radio. When a song came on that he didn't like or stirred a feeling he didn't want to have, he switched over to the turbulent rhetoric of the call-in shows, and when some knucklehead came on advocating some idea he found too cowardly or too much of a sellout, he switched back to the music. And all these sounds seeped into my dreams. One minute we were listening to the Carpenters singing “I'm on the top of the world looking down on creation,” like so:

Every time Karen Carpenter moved her mouth it was like the lid of a sugar bowl tinkling open and closed to expose deep dunes of whiteness. Then the next song would send my father's fingers to the preset stations and we were knee-deep into police brutality, the crummy schools, the mechanistic cruelty of city hall. The playlist of the city in those days was headline after headline of outrage, in constant rotation were bloody images of Michael Stewart choked to death by cops, Grandma Eleanor Bumpurs shot to death by cops,
Yusef Hawkins shot to death by racist thugs. On WLIB, they played the black Top 40, and the lyrics went like this:

My father announced his approval by singing along or muttering “That's just common sense,” depending on the song or stump speech. Is it any wonder my dreams were troubled? Ease and disquiet weaved in and out of reception, chasing each other down, two signals too weak to be heard for more than a few moments.

My father shut off the radio once we hit the manic nowhere that was East End radio, where ads for car dealerships and ladies' night at the latest one-season wonder duked it out between last month's hits. Ads for places we never went, services we never needed rendered. At the opening of summer, the words of the local DJs and merchants were cinder blocks, rebar, I beams, and bit by bit the edifice of the summer world rose from the dirt. Avoid the fender-bender on Stephen Hands Path, red flag at Mecox Beach, no swimming. With every mention of a landmark, that place came into being after nine months of banishment by the city. The words from the radio said, Stephen Hands Path exists again, Mecox Beach exists again, pulled out of mothballs, and even the tide itself has been conjured back to the shores. For we have returned.

We ditched Route 27 and cruise control and weaved down Scuttlehole Road, zipping past the white fencing and rusting wire that held back the bulging acres at the side of the road. I smelled the sweetly muddy fumes of the potato fields and pictured the corn
stalks in their long regiments. My mother said, “That sweet Long Island corn,” as she always did. Reggie had been farting for the last five minutes while pretending to be asleep. My feet scrabbled under the front seat in anticipation. Almost there. We slowed by the old red barn at the turnpike and made the left. From there to our house was like falling down a chute, nothing left to do but prepare for landing.

I kept my eyes closed. A few years earlier, I would have been panting at this point, up on my knees at the window and whipping my tail at the prospect of returning to Sag Harbor. I was beyond that—anything I could have seen here was not part of summer in a true sense, just a bit of warming up. I pictured what was outside and trees and houses in gray silhouette scrolled by, the featureless, unremarkable spots I had no connection to. The gray was interrupted by places that glowed, charged in my mind by association. The charred, heaped remains of that double-wide that burned down a few seasons back—we saw the fire, rubbernecking on the way to Caldor one afternoon. The dump, expeditions to which always had me and Reggie run-walking to the Dumpsters before the over-full bags broke open. Sometimes we pushed our luck, putting off a visit to the dump during a hot spell, and writhing maggots drizzled on our sneakers.

The glowing places were previews to the main attraction, previews most definitely, because some of them had ratings. Mashashimuet Park, Rated G for General Audiences, home to the only really good playground for miles, where Reggie and I and the crew had jumped, dangled on bars, and chased one another until we were sick, vomiting Pop Rocks and cola. There was also the PG part of Mashashimuet, the scrabbly baseball field, where the boys of my sister's age group had had a few mini race wars a few years back—black city kids versus white town kids over loitering rights to dirt and burrs. Then the turn at the pond and another hundred yards to the House on Otter Pond, Rated R restricted, as it was one of my parents' haunts, where they went out to eat without us and drank and did adult stuff. And on past the graveyard, the biggest coming attraction of all, rated I for Inevitable, where custom called for you to hold
your breath as you passed, no matter what age you were, lest a spirit enter your open mouth. Or so it was said.

ONE SMALL ASIDE ON MOVIE PREVIEWS
, more or less germane: our local movie palace was the Olympia on 107th and Broadway, chronic matinee destination for Reggie and me, and sometimes Friday night, too, when we had no other plans, which was more frequent than we liked. Site of what little hanging out we did that year, Hangover Central, a place to recover from the weeklong bender of misfitry that was our high-school experience thus far. The Olympia had survived the bad run that was the lot of uptown theaters in the '70s, when critters of insect and rodent descent often jumped into your lap for a little popcorn and the back rows were lost in the oily fog of cheap, laced cheeba. The real grimy joints had banks of phone booths in the lobby, old-school sliding doors and everything, so you could make a deal or a plea during the slow parts, and the worst characters were always diddling the coin slots with their fingers after that crucial dime.

The Olympia had a new marquee of hot-pink neon and new seats with red upholstery, but was still beset by a few gremlins. Management couldn't get the curtains going. First came the crackling of the speakers, and then we watched as the No Smoking/No Crying Babies messages and the first half of the previews played out on the stalled, crimson curtain in front of the screen. The ruffled images continued until the audience's invective grew loud enough that the projectionist or whatever multitasking character up there in the booth hit the switch and the curtain creaked apart. Every time. A couple of years earlier and you would have been bracing yourself for the volley of bullets aimed at the white slot of the booth, no joke.

The curtains always bugged me, apart from the obvious way they bothered everyone else. The curtains were just wrong in there, considering the dingy exploitation fare we had paid to see, the slasher flicks, the low-budget pyrotechnics of time-traveling Terminators.
It was a sentimental relic of the time when people came to the Olympia for the stage spectacles of a kinder, classier age, and had no place in our lives. As a former twin, I liked things separate. You are there, me over here. Be nostalgic for the old days, but do it over there on your own time. Right here is the way things are now. We're trying to watch a movie.

WE DROVE PAST
the weathered and splitting shingles of the old houses on Jermain Avenue and Madison Street, and the empty porches that referred to conversations long past or yet to come, never now, then the quiet plot that was Pierson High School, where no soul was ever seen, as if to aid in the illusion that the town was switched off when we weren't around. Those of a narcissistic bent could find such proof in any old place, everything was a prop if you wanted it to be, the beaches, Main Street, the sky, all of it gathering dust and waiting for your animating grace.

We stopped, which meant that my father was waiting for an opening to cross Route 114, and then we were rolling down Hemp-stead, the official start of our hood. Official—the book said so. We had this book,
Guide to Sag Harbor: Landmarks, Homes & History
, which we kept handy by the couch, for visitors I suppose, except that the only people who ever visited were other summer people, so we might as well have been displaying a pamphlet called
An Illustrated Guide to Your Own Damn Hand
. The book had a nice map of the village in it, tucked in between chronicles of the whaling boom and florid salutes to the quaint architecture, and we knew where our neighborhood began because that's where the map ended. The black part of town was off in the margins.

Hempstead was where the houses started to have names, with stories and histories attached. “That's the Grables,” “That's the Huntingtons,” even if the Grables and Huntingtons had sold off years ago. If I didn't know the people, I populated the houses using stories I'd heard, drawing material from the inflections of the speaker and the reactions of the listeners. The patriarch or numberone
son of the Franklin House, for example, was surely a skirt-chasing horndog, if my hoard of random intel was any indication. Call: “Then Bob Franklin walked in with this young little gal who looked country as hell, with that big hair like they're wearing these days and skirt up so high so everybody could get a look at her stuff.” Response: Shaking of heads, sliver of a smile.

Past Yardley Florist, whose greenhouses were visible from our old tree house. Our old tree house, which consisted of two pieces of rotting plywood lying in the dirt and three nails in the dead bark of an oak tree, was actually an ex–tree house, staked out by older kids years earlier, then abandoned. Maybe it had never been more than the idea of a tree house, an afternoon's fancy. But we had come upon it one day in the woods and decided it had been a home to adventure and we would make it so again. We were always coming upon paths made by those who had come before us, retracing their discoveries and mistakes. We told each other, some more wood, some nails pilfered from a jar in somebody's basement, and we'd make it into a real hideout. We hadn't been near it in years.

Then the turn onto Richards Drive, where I clenched my eyes tighter, for extra protection from a glimpse of the Hempstead House through the trees. Soon gravel popped against the undercarriage, the car gave one last rev of exhaustion before shutting off, and we had arrived. The bay could wait, the house could wait—they never changed so there was no need to appraise them, coo over them, honor them in any way—and me and my brother beat it to our bedroom for some proper sleep. Since my sister went off to college, Reggie and I had separate bedrooms after sharing a room our whole lives, either stacked on top of each other in bunk beds or head-to-head in a twin-bed L along the walls. Having our own space was wonderful. But out in Sag, we were back to sharing a room and we despised being so reduced in circumstance. The indignity of it all. There was an invisible fur covering everything, a musty coat, and it would linger for a couple of days until the house aired out.

It was six-thirty in the morning. That was that. We were out for the summer.

• • •

ONCE THE SEASON WAS IN FULL SWING
, you came across one of the tribe and they asked, Do you know who else is out? The tantalizing inflection meant that they'd run into someone who hadn't been seen in a long time, some unlikely soul who'd gone missing in the big wild world. Bobby Hemphill, they said, Tammy Broderick, they said, and all the ancient stories and escapades bubbled up, nods and winks all around before you got to the business of trading rumors, the undermining of cover stories. Heard he got his pilot's license, he told me he went back to dental school. Rehab. She followed the trail of hang ups and odd receipts to her husband's mistress, dumped him, and decided to start coming out again. What were they up to? “A little this, a little that, you know, making some moves.” That golden oldie: “Getting some stuff off the ground.” Vague as hell, but persuasive if the speaker quickly changed the subject with a “How's your mom and pops?” They were back out to see if it had changed, if it was still the same, to recoup, recover, catch a breath. It was the bed you knew the best and all that entailed. We tried not to smirk at their predicaments, smirk at home maybe but not out there in public. It's such a nice day and we were raised better than that. By that strict generation.