Summer of '69(25)

“My brother lives with two other guys out in Chilmark,” Patty says. “I’ll introduce you.”

“Do you have a car?” Kirby asks hopefully.

“Bike,” Patty says. She casts a longing look at the butter and apricot preserves. “My goal is to lose twenty-five pounds this summer.”



After breakfast, Patty shows Kirby her room. She’s on the first floor to the left of the front entrance (which is good, she says, because it makes it easy to sneak out after curfew) and she has to share the downstairs bathroom with only one other person—Barb, who traded the attic for the broom closet. Barb is odious, Patty confides. She’s always sullen and she was judgmental when Patty slept through church this past Sunday.

“Church?” Kirby says. “No one goes to church in the summertime.”

“You must be Episcopalian,” Patty says.

“Guilty as charged,” Kirby says. The Episcopal church on Nantucket, St. Paul’s, is located on Fair Street a scant block and a half from Exalta’s house, but she and the family normally go only once a summer, usually for an evensong service. Although they might attend more often this year, with Tiger overseas. Kirby wonders if she should go to Mass with Patty so she can light a candle for her brother.

“The other three girls live on the second floor and they’re Irish, from County Cork. I call them the Ms, for Miranda, Maureen, and Michaela. They’re square—don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t sleep around.”

Kirby decides then and there that she loves Patty. “How dull,” she says.



On Patty’s advice, Kirby dresses in a knee-length skirt and a proper blouse for her interview at the Shiretown Inn. She brushes her hair, collects it in a ponytail, then coils that ponytail into a bun. Then she walks to Seaview Avenue and sticks out her thumb.

A bunch of vehicles pass her by, including a laundry-service truck and an open-top Jeep filled with college boys. One of the boys whistles and another one holds up two fingers in a peace sign, but the Jeep doesn’t slow down and there’s no room for Kirby anyway. Kirby walks along the water. It’s serene and seems completely safe, but she still wonders what her mother and—God forbid—her grandmother would think if they saw her hitchhiking. They would think she had a death wish. Why else would she get into a car with a complete stranger? Anything could happen—abduction, dismemberment, rape, murder.

A cherry-red Chevy Corvair slows down, and Kirby sees that the driver is black. She knows this shouldn’t influence her decision about whether or not to accept the ride; how can she claim to be a progressive if she displays the very prejudice she’s seeking to change? The car stops and a young man cranks down the window. He’s good-looking, she notes. He wears a spotless white T-shirt and Ray-Ban Wayfarers. “Where you headed?” he asks.

“Edgartown?” she says. “The Shiretown Inn?”

“Know it well,” he says. “Hop in.”

Kirby hesitates, but only for a second. This is how hitchhiking works, right? When someone offers you a ride, you take it.

Kirby hurries around and hops in the passenger side. The car is clean—there’s no trash, no dust, and no sand. Kirby feels a pang for the International Harvester Scout that she drives on Nantucket. She was almost proud of how, by Labor Day weekend, the Scout contained the souvenirs of a summer well spent: her Bing Pintail surfboard, a handful of bikini bottoms, sand dollars and slipper shells, wadded-up takeout wrappers from the Seagull in Madaket, half a dozen damp beach towels, a few crushed Schlitz cans, the random horseshoe crab carapace, a swollen, rippled paperback of Valley of the Dolls, and approximately half a ton of sand.

This car looks like it just came from the dealer.

“I’m going to a job interview,” she says.

“Nice,” he says. “Did you just arrive for the summer?”

“Yesterday,” Kirby says. “I go to Simmons, in Boston.”

The guy laughs. “I go to Harvard,” he says. “In Cambridge.”

“Wait a minute,” Kirby says. “Are you…Darren?”

“I am,” he says. He shifts his Ray-Ban Wayfarers to the top of his head, then breaks into a truly radiant smile and snaps his fingers a few times. “You must be Rajani’s friend. Is it…Kathy? Kitty?”

“Kirby,” she says. “My real name is Katharine but everyone calls me Kirby.”

“Didn’t Rajani tell me your family has a house on Nantucket?” Darren asks.

“Afraid so,” Kirby says.

“So why the switch?” Darren asks. “Don’t get me wrong, we’ll take as many pretty girls as we can get on the Vineyard, but I thought Nantucketers kept to their own island.”

“I needed a change,” Kirby says. She gazes out the window as they cross a wooden bridge; to the right is a large, placid pond edged with reeds. “I had a trying year.” She closes her eyes and shakes her head. She had not meant to say that. “My brother was deployed to Vietnam in May.”

“Man,” Darren says, “that sucks.”

“I tried to convince him to go to Canada, but he said Canada was for people who were afraid of getting shot at. He agrees the war is wrong—”

“Really wrong,” Darren says.

“But he felt a sense of duty. Our father”—Kirby swallows—“was in Korea. He was a big hero, I guess. I don’t know. He died a few months after he got home so I never really knew him, but…I mean, we’d always been taught he was a war hero. I think Tiger took that legacy pretty seriously.”