Summer of '69(9)

She needs a fresh start.

She appeals to David, who has always been more compassionate than her mother. “I’m bombing in my classes at Simmons because they’re boring. I don’t want to study library science and I don’t want to teach nursery school.”

“You want to clean hotel rooms?” he asks.

“I want to work,” Kirby says. “And that was the job I happened to nail down.” Here, she casts her eyes to the floor because she’s not being 100 percent truthful.

“You don’t know anyone on Martha’s Vineyard,” Kate says. “We’re Nantucket people. You, me, Nonny, Nonny’s mother, Nonny’s grandmother. You’re a fifth-generation Nantucketer, Katharine.”

“It’s that kind of us-and-them attitude that’s destroying our country,” Kirby says. When David laughs, Kirby realizes she’s going to get her way. “Spending the summer somewhere else will be educational. Do you remember my friend Rajani from school? Her parents have a house in Oak Bluffs and they said I can stay with them.”

“Stay with Rajani’s family all summer?” David says. “That sounds excessive.” He turns to Kate. “Doesn’t it? Rajani’s family shouldn’t have to shelter and feed our daughter.”

“Correct,” Kate says. “She should come to Nantucket, where she belongs.”

“There’s also a house a few blocks from Rajani’s that I found in the classifieds. Six bedrooms to let, college girls preferred. A hundred and fifty dollars for the summer.”

“That makes more sense,” David says. “We can pay the rent, but your day-to-day living expenses will be up to you.”

“Oh, thank you!” Kirby says.

Kate throws up her hands.



Kirby and her best friend from Simmons, Rajani Patel, drive to Woods Hole in Rajani’s maroon MG with the top down. Kirby secured a room in the house on Narragansett Avenue for the summer. She gave her parents the phone number and the name of the proprietress, Miss Alice O’Rourke.

I suppose she’s Irish Catholic, David had remarked. Let’s hope she runs a tight ship.



When Rajani and Kirby drive the MG off the ferry into Oak Bluffs, Kirby brings her palms together in front of her heart in a gesture of gratitude. She is starting over on her own somewhere completely new.

Well, okay, maybe not completely new. She’s still on an island off the coast of Cape Cod; as the crow flies, she’s only eleven miles away from Nantucket. She could have gone to inner-city Philadelphia to work with disadvantaged youth. She could be driving around rural Alabama, registering people to vote. So this is just a first step, but it will be good for her.

Rajani is excited to play tour guide. “There’s Ocean Park,” she says about a large expanse of green lawn with a white gazebo at its navel. “And to the left are the Flying Horses Carousel and the Strand movie theater.”

Kirby swivels her head, trying to take it all in. The town has a carnival feel; it’s a bit more honky-tonk than Kirby expected. She eyes the carousel—which Rajani has informed Kirby is the nation’s oldest operating platform carousel—and then turns her attention to the people on the sidewalks eating fried clams out of red-and-white-checkered cardboard boats and swirling their tongues around soft-serve ice cream cones. The town does offer the diversity Rajani promised, which is refreshing. A black teenager glides by on a unicycle. Somewhere, there’s a radio playing the Fifth Dimension: This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius. Kirby bobs her head along to the music. This is the dawning of something for Kirby as well. But what?

“We live in the Methodist Campground,” Rajani says, and Kirby tries not to grimace. The only thing she can think of that’s less appealing than living in a campground is living in a religious campground. But the “campground” turns out to be a neighborhood of homes painted the colors of Easter eggs, each house decorated with elaborate gingerbread trim. “That one’s mine.” Rajani points to a lavender home with a sharp triangular gable over the front door; the white fretwork drips from the eaves like icing on a fancy cake. The house is straight out of a fairy tale, especially when compared with the architecture of downtown Nantucket, where every house resembles a Quaker widow.

“Look at that blue one,” Kirby says. The blue house down the street is a showstopper. It’s nearly twice as big as Rajani’s with two gables over a gracious front porch that has a bench swing and a row of ferns in hanging baskets. There are blue hydrangea bushes on either side of the front walk, and the gingerbread trim all around is fashioned to look like icicles—or at least that’s how it seems to Kirby.

“That’s my friend Darren’s house,” Rajani says. “He’s going to be a senior at Harvard. Do you want to go see if he’s home?”

“We don’t have to,” Kirby says.

“Come on,” Rajani says. “You want to meet people, right? I don’t see his car but it might be in the garage. His parents are really nice. His mother is a doctor and his father’s a judge.”

A doctor and a judge. Harvard. All Kirby can think is how happy both Nonny and her mother would be. She’s meeting the right kind of people, just like on Nantucket, where everyone is a judge or a doctor or holds an Endowed Chair of Effortless Superiority at Well-Bred University.