Girls Like Us(8)

“East. Come on. I’ll give you a lift. I’ll even buy you a bagel on the way. You look like you could use it.”





3.



Lee drives and I stare out the window. We cross the Ponquogue Bridge and make our way through Hampton Bays. It hasn’t changed much. The houses are small and nondescript. There isn’t a real town center: just a few mom-and-pop shops lining the highway and a handful of cheap bars down by the waterfront. There aren’t chain restaurants or tourist-type boutiques to browse in. Just fish markets and bait-and-tackle stores and gas stations and thrift shops that scatter their wares on patchy lawns out front.

There’s a small strip mall now, with a Starbucks and a King Kullen and a stoplight in front of it, all of which I’m certain Dad hated. He wasn’t a big fan of development in what he called “our part” of the island. Other than that, everything is the same. We pass a half-dozen signs for the annual pancake breakfast at the fire station. My heart lurches when I see the park where my mother used to whirl me around on a roundabout after school. It sat at an awkward angle, and it groaned while she sang to me. I sit up and catch a glimpse of it as the car rolls past. It’s still there, rusted and tilted as always.

At the edge of town, we pass the marina where Dorsey keeps his boat. There’s a joint next to it called Hank’s, where Dad and the guys used to go for beers after work. After that, the Shinnecock Canal bisects the land in two. Locals call it the Cut. The highway narrows to a bridge, which spans the Cut like a tourniquet. When you see it on a map, you realize that this bridge is the only thing tethering the eastern tip of the South Fork to the main island itself. The Cut is as psychological as it is physical. It’s the demarcation line between the summer people and everybody else.

Once we cross the bridge, we’re in the Hamptons. The change is immediate and noticeable. To the east of the Cut, there are no pawnshops or bait-and-tackles. Main Street in Southampton is populated with designer clothing and jewelry boutiques. Restaurants serve overpriced seafood and French wine. The lawns here are manicured. Hundred-year-old elms line the streets like sentinels. The summer people like their towns perfect. God knows they pay enough for it. It’s strange to think of this as Suffolk County, but it is just the same. The people who reside here don’t know there’s anything else. To them, our part of the island is just something they have to drive through on the way to the beach.

We pass a gardener on a ladder, shearing the top of a hedge with surgical precision. He wields a long, silver chainsaw; the blade glints in the sun. The man looks at us, his eyes trailing our car with suspicion. I’d guess he’s not documented; a lot of the landscapers around here aren’t. My maternal grandfather was one of them. He and my grandmother crossed the border from Juarez just in time for my mother to be born here. They stayed awhile in Texas before moving north, eventually settling in Central Islip. My grandfather owned a small farm back in Mexico. He found work as a landscaper. My grandmother cleaned rooms in a retirement home. They lived in a trailer with my mother and one other family. As rough as the Third Precinct was for them, it was better than Juarez.

I roll down the window and catch the faint scent of ocean air. The chainsaw falls silent. Cicadas buzz. On the other side of the street, sprinklers turn on and water the already wet, lush grass. Two girls in tennis dresses and matching windbreakers ride bicycles side by side. They head south, toward the beach. I always went back to school the week before Labor Day, but the private schools in Manhattan don’t open until late September. The girls’ slim legs pump in unison. Just as we’re about to pass them, one lifts her arms over her head and raises her feet from the pedals. The wheels wobble, and for a moment, I think she might fall. She swerves toward us, regaining her balance just before she nearly collides with the passenger-side door. I suck in a breath; Lee slams on the brake. I hear the hush of her ponytail against the glass. She has a pink ribbon in her hair. It presses against my window like a kiss.

“What the fuck,” Lee mutters.

The girls sail by, laughing. They both look back at us, their sun-streaked ponytails shaking in the breeze, their heads bobbing in disbelief at their near-miss. I expect Lee to speed up and pull alongside them. Give them a lecture about street safety. He doesn’t. He just lets them go. Nothing bad ever happens to girls from Gin Lane, I guess.

We pass the turnoff for Coopers Beach and take a right onto Meadow Lane. Meadow Lane is known as Billionaire’s Row. It’s a thin strip of land with Shinnecock Bay on one side and the Atlantic Ocean on the other. The houses on Meadow Lane are enormous. They make the other houses in the area look like guest cottages, which is saying something. They have oceanfront pools and tennis courts. The lawns go on forever. One is studded with large, bizarre sculptures. A giant balloon dog made of shiny, magenta-colored metal. A naked, obese woman cast in bronze. It looks like a museum, and one I’m not particularly eager to visit. Toward the end of the lane, there’s a rectangle carved out of the sand. It’s marked with a large H. A helicopter lifts off from it as we approach, its sleek, silver form disappearing into an overcast sky.

The irony of Billionaire’s Row is that it dead-ends into Shinnecock County Park East, a public preserve where, for thirty bucks, you can park a camper van overnight. The park is a favorite spot for locals to bass fish and take their off-road recreational vehicles. My father loved it there, especially in the off-season. It’s where he taught me how to fish. In high school, my classmates would drive down to the park to drink beer and smoke in the dunes. I’d tag along now and then, not because I enjoyed parties but because anything was better than spending a night at home with Dad when he was drunk. We’d chuck bottles and butts as far as we could in the direction of Meadow Lane. It was just a little fuck-you to the summer people, who acted as though this part of the island belonged to them and them alone.