children in a fairy tale, hoping our goodness might lure the sun from its hiding place. 'You and Father have been so kind to us. Here, let us massage your shoulders.'
If by late afternoon it still hadn't cleared, my sisters and I would drop the act and turn on one another, searching for the spoiler who had brought us this misfortune. Which of us seemed the least dissatisfied? Who had curled up on a mildewed bed with a book and a glass of chocolate milk, behaving as though the rain were not such a bad thing after all? We would find this person, most often my sister Gretchen, and then we would beat her.
The summer I was twelve a tropical storm moved up the coast, leaving a sky the same mottled pewter as Gretchen's subsequent bruises, but the following year we started with luck. My father found a golf course that suited him, and for the first time in memory even he seemed to enjoy himself. Relaxing on the deck with a gin and tonic, surrounded by his toast-colored wife and children, he admitted that this really wasn't so bad. 'I've been thinking, to hell with these rental cottages,' he said. 'What do you say we skip the middleman and just buy a place.'
He spoke in the same tone he used when promising ice cream. 'Who's up for something sweet?' he'd ask, and we'd pile into the car, passing the Tastee Freeze and driving to the grocery store, where he'd buy a block of pus-colored ice milk reduced for quick sale. Experience had taught us not to trust him, but we wanted a beach house so badly it was impossible not to get caught up in the excitement. Even our mother fell for it.
'Do you really mean this?' she asked.
'Absolutely,' he said.
The next day they made an appointment with a real-estate agent in Morehead City. 'We'll just be discussing the possibility,' my mother said. 'It's just a meeting, nothing more.' We wanted to join them but they took only Paul, who was two years old and unfit to be left in our company. The morning meeting led to half a dozen viewings, and when they returned, my mother's face was so impassive it seemed almost paralyzed. 'It-was-fine,' she said. 'The-real-estate-agent-was-very-nice.' We got the idea that she was under oath to keep something to herself and that the effort was causing her actual physical pain.
'It's all right,' my father said. 'You can tell them.'
'Well, we saw this one place in particular,' she told us. 'Now, it's nothing to get worked up about, but. .'
'But it's perfect,' my father said. 'A real beauty, just like your mother here.' He came from behind and pinched her on the bottom. She laughed and swatted him with a towel, and we witnessed what we would later come to recognize as the rejuvenating power of real estate. It's what fortunate couples turn to when their sex life has faded and they're too pious for affairs. A second car might bring people together for a week or two, but a second home can revitalize a marriage for up to nine months after the closing.
'Oh, Lou,' my mother said. 'What am I going to do with you?'
'Whatever you want, baby,' he said. 'Whatever you want.'
It was queer when people repeated their sentences twice, but we were willing to overlook it in exchange for a beach house. My mother was too excited to cook that night, and so we ate dinner at the Sanitary Fish Market in Morehead City. On taking our seats I expected my father to mention inadequate insulation or corroded pipes, the dark undersides of home ownership, but instead he discussed only the positive aspects. 'I don't see why we couldn't spend our Thanksgivings here. Hell, we could even come for Christmas. Hang a few lights, get some ornaments, what do you think?'
A waitress passed the table, and without saying please, I demanded another Coke. She went to fetch it, and I settled back in my chair, drunk with the power of a second home. When school began, my classmates would court me, hoping I might invite them for a weekend, and I would make a game of pitting them against one another. This was what a person did when people liked him for all the wrong reasons, and I would grow to be very good at it.
'What do you think, David?' my father asked. I hadn't heard the question but said that it sounded good to me. 'I like it,' I said. 'I like it.'
The following afternoon our parents took us to see the house. 'Now, I don't want you to get your hopes up too high,' my mother said, but it was too late for that. It was a fifteen-minute drive from one end of the island to the other, and along the way we proposed names for what we had come to think of as our cottage. I'd already given it a good deal of thought but waited a few minutes before offering my suggestion.
'Are you ready?' I said. 'Our sign will be the silhouette of a ship.'
Nobody said anything.
'Get it?' I said. 'The shape of a ship. Our house will be called The Ship Shape.'
'Well, you'd have to write that on the sign,' my father said. 'Otherwise, nobody will get it.'
'But if you write out the words you'll ruin the joke.'
'What about The Nut Hut?' Amy said.
'Hey!' my father said. 'Now there's an idea.' He laughed, not realizing, I guess, that there already was a Nut Hut. We'd passed it a thousand times.
'How about something with the wordsandpiper in it,' my mother said. 'Everybody likes sandpipers, right?'
Normally I would have hated them for not recognizing my suggestion as the best, but this was clearly a special time and I didn't want to ruin it with brooding. Each of us wanted to be the one who came up with the name, and inspiration could be hiding anywhere. When the interior of the car had been exhausted of ideas, we looked out the windows and searched the passing landscape.
Two thin girls braced themselves before crossing the busy road, hopping from foot to foot on the scalding pavement. 'The Tar Heel,' Lisa called out. 'No, The Wait 'n' Sea. Get it? S-E-A.'
A car trailing a motorboat pulled up to a gas pump. 'The Shell Station!' Gretchen shouted.
Everything we saw was offered as a possible name, and the resulting list of nominees confirmed that once you left the shoreline, Emerald Isle was sorely lacking in natural beauty. 'The TV Antenna,' my sister Tiffany said. 'The Telephone Pole.' 'The Toothless Black Man Selling Shrimp from the Back of His Van.'
'The Cement Mixer.' 'The Overturned Grocery Cart.' 'Gulls on a Garbage Can.' My mother inspired 'The Cigarette Butt Thrown Out the Window' and suggested we look for ideas on the beach rather than on the highway. 'I mean, my God, how depressing can you get?' She acted annoyed, but we could tell she was really enjoying it. 'Give me something that suits us,' she said. 'Give me something that will last.'
What would ultimately last were these fifteen minutes on the coastal highway, but we didn't know that then. When older, even the crankiest of us would accept them as proof that we were once a happy family: our mother young and healthy, our father the man who could snap his fingers and give us everything we wanted, the whole lot of us competing to name our good fortune.
The house was, as our parents had promised, perfect. This was an older cottage with pine-paneled walls that gave each room the thoughtful quality of a den. Light fell in strips from the louvered shutters, and the furniture, which was included in the sale, reflected the taste of a distinguished sea captain. Once we'd claimed bedrooms and lain awake all night, mentally rearranging the furniture, it would be our father who'd say, 'Now hold on a minute, it's not oursyet.' By the next afternoon he had decided that the golf course wasn't so great after all. Then it rained for two straight days, and he announced that it might be wiser to buy some land, wait a few years, and think about building a place of our own. 'I mean, let's be practical.' Our mother put on her raincoat. She tied a plastic bag over her head and stood at the water's edge, and for the first time in our lives we knew exactly what she was thinking.
By our final day of vacation our father had decided that instead of building a place on Emerald Isle, we should improve the home we already had. 'Maybe add a pool,' he said. 'What do you kids think about that?' Nobody answered.
By the time he'd finished wheedling it down, the house at the beach had become a bar in the basement. It looked just like a real bar, with tall stools and nooks for wine. There was a sink for washing glasses and an assortment of cartoon napkins illustrating the lighter side of alcoholism. For a week or two my sisters and I tottered at the counter, pretending to be drunks, but then the novelty wore off and we forgot all about it.
On subsequent vacations, both with and without our parents, we would drive by the cottage we had once
