They lay on the bed, fully clothed, the inn’s cozy attic bedroom lit only by the bathroom light, softly glowing through the cracked-opened door. She breathed, slow and deep. He realized she was asleep. The clock radio was on, low, tuned to a college station on the mainland. Van Morrison’s “Glad Tidings” bopped along.
The plan had been to take a short rest, then head out, on this last night on the island, to a bar below the big inn. It was the place they had stayed on their first visit but could no longer afford now that they had kids.
A young man was playing an acoustic guitar as they’d walked by earlier, singing songs popular in the ‘70s. The cool mist in the autumn air carried the music into the street.
“Let’s just relax a bit in the room, and then we’ll go out and have a drink and listen to a few songs,” he had proposed. “OK?”
Lorraine agreed, but he now knew it wouldn’t happen. He was disappointed.
The mist had turned to light rain. He could hear it, tapping soothingly on the cedar shingled roof just over their heads.
He could wake her, he knew, and she wouldn’t object. But the thought of her rousing herself to join him in this last moment of vacation fun irritated him. That sense of her feeling obligated killed it, he thought. Or was he reading too much into an imagined response?
In some ways, it had been a long week. They had kept busy. James often felt torn between impulses on getaways like this. Wrest every possible moment of fun out of the week, or accept the relaxation it offered? And if vacillating between the two, when to chill out and when to pack in fun? That could, sometimes, bring its own stress.
The island setting did provide a welcome limit to options. No other town to go stroll around, no scenic drive to consider, not many dining opportunities. In their first years as a couple, they believed they were unique in their love of islands. The romance of arriving by boat, the circumscribed landscape, with the sea ever present. The worries of work, the tug of bills and appointments, all lay beyond that watery horizon.
Yes, these island getaways offered a much-craved and much-missed intimacy from their early years together. Many instances of intimacy were had, in fact, on these trips. But just as welcome were the conversations that weren’t interrupted by a child’s voice or hand, demanding attention.
As was his habit, though, James’ thoughts wandered back across the water to that job, teaching high school students how to write. Papers needed to be graded. Lesson plans for a new class in September had to be completed. Reality, they both labeled it, when he would talk about it on these trips. She would listen when he would share these thoughts. Listen, but not share similar thoughts.
~ ~ ~
On the ferry ride out, their moods were high. Wind in their hair as they sat on the upper deck, the sun just barely keeping the temperature tolerable.
Another family walked by, the husband with a camera.
“Pictures!” he said, as if just discovering the device in his hands. “Gotta have lots of pictures!” Something in his smile and movements suggested trying too hard. His wife’s rigid facial features underscored James’s imagined plot line—he had done something. Cheated? Been out drinking with his buddies too often? Blew some money on something? He felt sad for both of them. The island might not be enough for them.
The couple’s children wandered to the boat’s rail. The husband took a step toward them, but when his wife turned sharply past him, he looked down at the camera in his hands again and tried to rally the smile.
Arriving at the inn, James looked at their luggage with fresh eyes. Not the latest kind, as seen in the L.L. Bean catalogue.
The innkeeper was kind and greeted them with a warm smile. He probably is happy about the busy summer season easing into fall, James thought, but felt welcomed.
“How was the ferry ride? A little chilly out there, I bet,” the man said, standing at the Dutch door. A dark-skinned woman was behind him in the kitchen, working on tomorrow morning’s muffins for guests. She turned and looked at them blankly.
While they completed the registration paperwork, a young man with a ball cap came into the kitchen from an outside door, and the woman handed him an envelope.
“And that’s it!” he said to her, overly brightly. She glared at him in jest, a joke he seemed to understand. He smiled broadly at her, and she glared again, muttering something under her breath, revealing a Jamaican accent.
A few moments later, after James and Lorraine climbed the two sets of stairs, there was a tension when they opened the door to their room, which James had booked months before. Would it meet her expectations?
“Oh, this is nice,” she said, arriving in the garret-like space on the third floor. “Huh… The bathroom ceiling is kinda low.”
“It will work,” James said, a little louder than he’d intended. “Don’t worry about it.” She set about unpacking, briskly moving from the bags to the dresser.
She’d grow comfortable with the room by evening, he knew. For now, a silence between them held sway.
The inn brought an odd social immersion. They wouldn’t know anyone, but they would expect themselves, at the 4 p.m. cocktail time, to be chatty with the other guests. James hoped they would look and sound like they belonged.
Holding small plates of cheese and grapes while sipping drinks, they described where they lived and what they did, as introductions were made around the front parlor. It was a pleasant room, with a fireplace, antique settee, and an oriental rug, which might have been a sea captain’s prize from a century ago.
Having married young, James and Lorraine were a decade or so younger than the other five couples, who seemed to also be getting away from young children, which became apparent as they chatted. These couples seemed to exude a casual confidence, he thought, which James envied and tried to emulate.
The woman who had been working in the kitchen slowly entered the parlor with a tray of freshly baked cookies, not making eye contact with the guests. James said, “Oooh, cookies!” and reached for the tray. Lorraine thanked her. The woman smiled, looking down at the floor, then turned and walked away.
James grabbed his drink and led them outside to the garden where the fall blooms were catching the last of the day’s sun. Just one couple, in their mid-40s, sat on a bench outside. They were from Texas, they said, introducing themselves. The husband smiled in a mechanical way, his eyes aimed at some middle distance over his drink.
When James explained where they lived, using a nearby town widely known for its tourist charms as a locator, the wife nearly gasped in response.
“Oh, I love it there! It’s sooo pretty!” Turning to her husband, her voice almost desperate and pleading, she said, “We have to go back there! Soon!” His smile held, but his look suggested she wasn’t going to get her wish.
“Yes, it’s a nice town,” was all James could muster. “Our town is nice, too, if you want to drive a bit farther north.” He wondered if he sounded like her when he talked about this trip with friends and coworkers.
They talked about that moment later, as they walked to the restaurant.
“Wasn’t that sad?” he said. “Well, I guess if you lived in Texas…”
“I know,” she replied.
“We really should never take it for granted, where we live,” he added. “But if she could see it in winter. Like at the end of February, when the snow is all gray.”
They both chuckled. Later still, while finishing their desserts, the woman’s aching plea for more New England quaintness came up again.
“I didn’t think her husband was as into this place as much as she was,” James said.
“I think you’re right,” she said of the Texans. “He probably brings her here to make her happy. Nothing wrong with that.”
“No, I know,” he said, “but it’s just weird that she seems to have this longing for places like this, and he just doesn’t share that, you know, that love of an island like this, a place like this. I don’t know.”
“Well, I guess it’s not for everyone,” she said.
James felt his face color. He had hoped Lorraine would be… Well, he couldn’t find the words. Maybe charmed? Charmed to the point of finding it all so romantic? He found the Texan woman’s yearning sad, but what if Lorraine felt a little more of that excitement? Wouldn’t that be nice?
As they left the restaurant, Lorraine thanked the hostess who was standing by the door.
“You were working at the farmers market this morning, weren’t you?” Lorraine asked. The woman, blonde hair, with facial features that seemed to be Eastern European, nodded.
Once they were outside, Lorraine said, “She must work so hard. I bet she’s sending most of her earnings back home, too.”
James agreed, and tried to imagine what that home life was like.
Walking up the stairs back at the inn, they had to pass close by a second-floor room, the door wide open. The couple inside, probably in their mid-50s, were in the bed under the blankets, both reading. Neither looked up. James was embarrassed at the scene, feeling as if he shouldn’t have seen it.
In their room, he wondered if she had the same reaction.
“Did you see that couple?”
“I know,” she replied.
He knew that she could guess what he was thinking: Why weren’t they savoring the joy of staying in this pretty old inn? Why weren’t they putting the bed to better use? But surely she had the same thoughts?
On the afternoon of that last day, they biked through the village and out to a cobblestone beach they’d read about. No one was around, and they enjoyed sitting on the cobbles, watching the sunlight dance on the water, he skipping stones, she wading.
On the ride back, the front tire on James’s bike blew out.
“Are you kidding me? It’s going to take forever, walking this back,” he said. “We’re going to miss our restaurant reservation.”
He could see Lorraine arriving at the same conclusion.
“I’ll hitchhike, and you keep riding,” he said. “It’ll take you longer to get ready for dinner anyway.”
She left, and within 15 minutes, a beat-up old pickup truck stopped, and James threw the bike in the back and climbed in the cab.
“Headed back to the village?” the driver asked.
“Yes, and thanks so much for stopping,” James replied. He took a stab at conversation, trying to sound as local as he could, but probably failing. The ropes coiled in the pickup’s bed suggested a way in.
“So, have the bugs moved offshore yet? I heard the shedders showed up late this year.”
“Eh,” the driver said, “it’s been OK. The guy I work for just bought a new truck, so I think it was a good year.”
James chuckled, and tried another tack.
“Bet these roads are pretty rough in the winter, right?”
“Uh, well, they do a good job plowing,” he replied.
Why did it matter if James wasn’t a fisherman or a carpenter? Was there shame in being himself?
On the road’s steep, narrow decline into the village, they passed Lorraine on her bike. James quickly realized he couldn’t ask the driver to stop there. But out of some sense of obligation, he pointed out his wife.
“Uh-huh,” the driver replied.
Lorraine smiled and waved as they drove past. They would make their dinner reservation, after all.
As the old truck bounced into the village, a police car in the oncoming lane flashed its blues. Oh no, James thought. I’m going to be responsible for this guy getting a ticket.
But the pickup driver just smiled and waved, and the officer smiled and waved back, clearly sharing a private joke. Was it at their expense? Those dumb tourists, needing to get bailed out again?
After dropping James and the bike in the village center, the driver continued another hundred yards and turned in at a small Cape Cod house, with a jumble of fishing gear in the yard. A small dog greeted the man as he climbed out of the truck.
Back at the inn, as they readied for dinner, James asked, “Remember, after our honeymoon, we were going to apply for summer jobs on an island?”
“Yeah, we didn’t get too far with that, did we?”
“And then we were thinking of house-sitting on an island for the off-season. Remember?”
“It’s all done with webcams now,” she said.
~ ~ ~
The guitar player had probably packed up his gear by now, James thought. He was better off not having had that drink, he concluded. Early start tomorrow.
His mind pictured the night’s low clouds and mist, lying above the gray waves, extending mile after mile back towards “America,” as islanders called the mainland. The radio waves continued to glide this way across those same silent waters, and they carried music enough. The song reminded him of where they’d come from, where they’d met before moving to New England.
“And we’ll send you glad tidings from New York,” Van Morrison sang. “Open up your eyes so you may see. Ask you not to read between the lines. Hope that you will come right in on time…”
The next day, a jittery fluttering filled his chest as the parking lot attendant on the mainland waved at him to start his car and leave the jammed grassy field. There was always that moment of panic, wondering if the battery had died. The car bounced through the ruts and within minutes, they were on a busy road, fighting their way through a commercial strip where fast food chains and gas stations signaled that they were not on-island anymore.
James could feel himself tensing up, a sensation that was oddly comforting in its familiarity. Ready to do battle again. Ready to be the responsible husband. No need to take pictures… lots of pictures. Memories were better. Their colors didn’t fade. In fact, they grew richer.
“Back to reality,” she said. Back to jobs and kids and hanging on for the weekend.
“Yep,” he replied, but thought, “I wonder.”
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