Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [6]
I don’t ever remember him passing up going to the beach with all of us, even though he probably should have been doing some work. That summer my father cleared the beach twice in one week with shark spottings that turned out to be schools of fish. He ran up and down the beach, waving his arms, a maniac in yellow-and-green Lilly Pulitzer trunks, cupping his hands to his mouth to amplify the danger. “Shark! Out of the water! I mean now, God damn it!” he said as if the entire beach were made up of insolent daughters. It was the summer after Jaws came out. He hadn’t seen Jaws, of course, but everyone else had, and that was the problem. It got to the point where if he came down to the kitchen asking who wanted to go ride the waves at the beach, he was teased and made to promise not to save anyone that day.
Days later you’d hear him on the phone to St. Louis talking about how he couldn’t get any work done.
“Jesus, Hereford, you wanna know how the novel’s coming? People wanting to play tennis in the middle of the afternoon and throw a ball around every five minutes and there hasn’t been one goddamn night that we haven’t been to somebody’s house for cocktails.”
At Devon we met Elise. She became Julia’s and my best friend. She was a summer person, not a townie like us. She went to Dalton with Robert Redford’s children. The closest thing we had come to a celebrity was seeing Stan Musial, Stan the Man, St. Louis Cards baseball great from the ’40s and ’50s, in the parking lot of my grandmother’s church after mass. Stan Musial / Robert Redford. Not much of a match. Elise’s father was a lawyer. They had a pool. To Julia and me, Elise was our George Plimpton, our idea of New York; she knew everybody. We weren’t going to meet anyone like her in St. Louis: she was urbane.
Eleanor and Kate were in Junior Yacht, Julia and I were in Sandpipers, the younger kids at Devon. One day the Sandpipers all headed out on sailboats by ourselves. Elise and I and one other girl, Tracy, kept capsizing and were terrified. The motorboat that was meant to monitor new sailors, The Terror, was nowhere to be seen. Elise and I decided to swim back to shore, even though this meant breaking the cardinal rule of sailing, Never abandon your vessel. Elise and I were kicked out of Devon for abandoning our sailboat. I couldn’t go sailing anymore and I couldn’t go on the camping trip and I was banned from the Thursday dances for the remainder of the summer. I ended up playing a lot of tennis by myself, hitting balls against the old backboard on Stony Hill Farm, and strangely developed an incredible serve.
Since Elise had nothing to do either since getting kicked out, Julia and I spent days and days at Elise’s house, eating all their cold cuts and their fancy ice cream, never once calling our mom and never receiving a single call checking up on us. Mrs. Fleming would explode when we made messes and left wet swimsuits everywhere (we never had suits with us and were always borrowing them). “I will not have it! I will not have it in my house!” she’d yell, storming through rooms, Georgette Klinger cold cream on her face, in her white, feathered slippers, to find the three of us. Inevitably she couldn’t take it anymore and would call our mother to say it was really time for us to go home.
At Elise’s house we played a game called The Weinhausers, in which a poor townie family named the Weinhausers imposed themselves on this wealthy family. The Weinhausers stayed with you and ate all your food and watched your TV and would never leave. They complained a lot about the conditions, too, in their irritating, loud voices. “Your house is too cold!” “You’re out of mayonnaise again!” Until finally the rich family would get fed up and attack the Weinhausers, evicting them from their home.
“Get outta my house, you lousy Weinhausers!” and Julia would throw me and Elise out the kitchen back door. We’d rap on the windows to come back