Summer of '69(39)

Patty stares at Kirby for a second and Kirby wonders if her favorite of all the girls in this house, the one she pegged right away as a potential friend, is going to turn out to be a racist. She is suddenly sixteen years old again, sitting in her civics class and overhearing Steve Willard and Roger Donnelly call Miss Carpenter, who was Kirby’s favorite teacher, the N-word. Kirby had stood up and spit on Roger’s desk, which had caused a giant brouhaha—and Kirby was the one who had been kept after class. When Miss Carpenter asked what on earth would cause Kirby to do something so beneath her, Kirby refused to say. She didn’t have the heart to tell Miss Carpenter that she had been defending her. Miss Carpenter must have intuited this, however, because she said, “The best way to combat behavior or language that you find offensive is to peacefully protest. Do you understand me, Katharine?”

Kirby said she did understand. She’d apologized and scrubbed Roger’s desk, and the next week, Miss Carpenter asked Kirby to march alongside her with Dr. King.

“I support the civil rights movement,” Patty says, and Kirby exhales in relief. “My sister Sara was one of Robert Kennedy’s Boiler Room Girls. But I still can’t go with you.”

“Why not?” Kirby says. She’s impressed that Patty’s sister worked for Bobby Kennedy, but if Patty believes Inkwell is an inferior beach because it’s frequented by Negroes, then she’s a racist.

“Because we don’t belong there,” Patty says. “They don’t want white people there.”

“Darren invited me,” Kirby says. “He didn’t seem to think it was a big deal and he knows what color I am. ‘The times, they are a-changin’.’”

“Not that much,” Patty says with a wistful smile. “You’ll see.”



Kirby marches off to Inkwell on her own, her head held high. She entertains some ungenerous thoughts about Patty—Patty must have loose morals if she let a boy she doesn’t even know get to second base, and clearly, she has zero willpower. She says she wants to lose twenty-five pounds, but the second she wakes up, she reaches for a Payday bar. She must keep a stash of them in her nightstand. And what kind of boy says he likes long hair that he can pull? Some kind of maniac? Kirby doesn’t want to think badly of Patty; right up until that conversation, she liked Patty. It’s possible Patty doesn’t know any Negroes or people of color personally. Kirby decides she’ll introduce Patty to both Rajani and Darren. Her goal this summer is to turn Patty into a progressive.

Kirby walks onto Inkwell Beach as though it’s the most natural thing in the world, and in some ways, it is. Summer for Kirby has always meant sun and sand. Her mother brought her to Steps Beach on Nantucket when she was a baby, and they returned to Steps each summer until their father died. After that, Kate replaced their babysitter Lorraine (who ran off) with a babysitter named Ivy (nicknamed “Poison Ivy” by Blair), who started taking them to Cisco Beach, where the big waves were. Blair had been afraid to swim, but not Kirby or Tiger, and to this day, Kirby feels the most alive when she’s jumping waves and then drying off in the sun. When she was little, she was famous for not even bothering with a towel. She would just lie right down in the sand, and when she stood up, she was breaded like a fish stick.

Inkwell Beach is on the sound, so the water is calmer than Kirby likes, though it’s hard to argue with the view; the water looks like a blue satin sheet. It’s not so different from Steps Beach on Nantucket. There’s a group of women who have arranged their chairs in a semicircle to facilitate conversation; some of the women wear hats, and others raise their faces to the sun. At the shore, little kids dig for China, and girls with plastic buckets collect shells. Teenagers are up to their waists in the water, splashing one another; beyond them, an older gentleman swims a slow but steady freestyle. There are two guys around Kirby’s age lying on towels; one is asleep on his stomach, one is reading Slaughterhouse Five, his face inscrutable behind his sunglasses.

Everyone is black. Everyone.

Well, right—what did Kirby expect? She expected everyone to be black but what she didn’t anticipate was how this would make her feel. She doesn’t feel threatened, certainly, or intimidated. She feels conspicuous, as though everyone notices her, and what people are thinking isn’t that she’s thin or fat or pretty or ugly—no, those things don’t matter. What matters is that she’s white.

She walks past the semicircle of women and their conversation drops off for a second, then starts up again in hushed tones. Kirby thinks she hears her name, but obviously that isn’t possible. She moves closer to the water, past the little kids digging. They look up at her but appear unfazed, which heartens her somewhat. Children are color-blind.

The young man reading Vonnegut glances up and shakes his head at her, as if he’s warning her to go away. He’s as bad as Patty! Surely he understands that Kirby has as much of a right to be here as anyone else.

Patty’s words echo: We don’t belong.

Kirby hears a whistle and turns to see Darren, who’s perched on the white latticed lifeguard stand. He’s waving at…her? She checks the water behind her—there’s no one—and then walks through the sand in her bare feet, her huarache sandals dangling from two fingers as though she doesn’t have a care in the world.

“Hey,” she says. She feels like Darren just threw her the life preserver that’s hanging from the side of the stand.