Provincetown

The Memoir

‘You’d do well with a memoir,’ Cyn, her agent, said – was it thoughtfully, or desperately? Memoir sells, these days. And I’m sure you’d find a lot to write about.’

‘It’s so not my thing, Cyn.’ If Cynthis Booth was not her best friend, she wouldn’t have an agent, and they both knew it. But going back into the wilderness of the past, the chaos and the wild beasts lurking everywhere – how could she? She couldn’t.

‘Well, think about it,’ Cyn said with a brave smile. ‘We’ll talk again soon.’

‘Thanks, Cyn,’ she sloped out, another mid-list novelist of the 1980’s and 90’s with a single credit to her name in the new millennium, and that growing older every day. It was not something she usually focused on, but when even Cynthia seemed to be wavering in her faith, it was different. The much-anticipated crash that didn’t happen with the new millennium had in fact happened to some people, she decided gloomily, heading to her favourite wine bar for lunch with a glass of Sauvignon Blanc which she couldn’t afford, either fiscally or physically.

All it did was plunge her deeper. Costs had swollen as her royalties shrank. She facilitated workshops here and there with eager writers, mostly women, often older women, whom she wanted to warn, advise them to save their money and travel or at least enjoy a few lunches like the one she was having now, not that she was enjoying it. An occasional string of evening classes came her way, and they at least served the purpose of giving people an excuse to leave the house. But these things took planning and there was a layout of money for resources like printing, paper and pens for those who came without.

But there were no classes over the summer, and no workshops had beckoned. The rising cost of living had seen workshop numbers slump. As the nights drew in and the temperature dropped, the numbers fell in her evening classes. Eventually they dipped below the dreaded minimum and the classes closed. Nor was she working on anything. Why write novels that wouldn’t see the light of day, that stayed trapped in her computer? She fumbled her way home on the Underground and fell asleep on the couch. So much for lunchtime drinking.

But she woke up with Cyn’s suggestion front and centre. Memoir. Ok, the past was dense and complicated and scary. But maybe she could cut a swathe through it. Her mother was dead. And maybe, just maybe, it would get her out of the hole she was in.

Where to start? When had she started? Childhood was just too daunting and difficult. She needed some perspective. Then she remembered: Provincetown. The summer she was – ten, eleven? Make it ten, a good crossroads kind of age, double figures, and for her the edge of puberty. She’d started early.

Provincetown was a revelation, her Road to Damascus, and she’d never looked back. She’d described it that way, laughing a little, for decades. It was time to get it down on paper. The Sauvignon Blanc seemed to make the past vividly present. They had driven up to Cape Cod from the New Jersey suburbs in the station wagon – it was always station wagons, then, with wood sides, plenty of room in the back for the kids – who was born, that year? Just the first three, herself then Oscar, then Marcelle. The three oldest. And there had been Anthony, the baby in the middle who died at six months, splitting them into two families, a Before and After.

But no other babies had followed him yet, though there was one on the way, after her mother had waited and prayed and sometimes cried in the bathroom when she got her period, something only Adele knew. It was a heavy weight, that knowledge. Her mother told her to go away when she knocked and asked if she was ok, if –and all that spring they had gone to church together on Wednesday nights, to pray for a new baby. She didn’t pray for that, or for anything, really. She just soaked in her mother’s presence, sitting next to her in the car, thrilled to be out with her on a school night, thrilled to be next to her in the dim, changed church, the stained -glass saints in the windows suddenly darker, everything strange, including her mother’s warmth, her need.

But as her father drove them towards Provincetown, out on the tip of the Cape, the waiting and the praying were over. Her mother’s pregnancy was new and undisclosed, but she had suspected it the moment their Wednesday night dates stopped and her mother’s attitude changed. She was no longer needed. Her mother had moved away once again. She would embrace the new baby when it came, she would serve as a little apprentice mother as she always did, half in love with the little thing and half bored to death by the whole performance.

The images started to dance in her head as she began the journey to Provincetown in the hot, non air-conditioned station wagon. Cars were not air-conditioned then, except for limousines driven by chauffeurs in uniform, probably for Mafia bosses or their families, in New Jersey. Most people drove station wagons with wood sides, like they did. They were coming up in the world, and the latest station wagon was a flashy black number, the wood sides polished and gleaming.

The ride was long. Adele liked to sing in cars. She was usually shy and inhibited, but sat by the window in a car the world fell away and she sang without thinking about the people around her. Her parents ignored her singing in an amused kind of way, and her siblings were too busy sleeping or fighting to notice. All the Frank Sinatra songs they played at Cocktail Hour at home or on the radio, always on in the kitchen, all the ballads sung by all the crooners – she knew every word of every one, and out they came. It seemed like people said things in songs they never said out loud. They talked about the things that seemed to her so loud, so there. Always unspoken – things addressed only in church, and in songs. Otherwise, people ignored everything that spilled out in those two places.

They arrived in Provincetown and found the house where her father’s friend lived, after winding around stumpy little roads with funny little houses, little shops, a kind of pretend village with dollhouses and doll shops. She loved it at first sight. It was a place that asked you to play, and she had almost forgotten how to play, or never learned.

Not that she thought that. She only knew she was somewhere else, somewhere different, and she liked it. When they arrived, she was introduced to her father’s friend who bore, incredibly, the name Michael Victory. He was handsome and tall and his wife was called Eros, tanned and dusky and luscious in her sundress. Only she was not his wife, it emerged later, though they lived together in the house where the windows were sparkling stained glass and she had a daughter called Theochrista.

Theochrista. Why couldn’t she have a name like that, instead of stupid Adele, after her mother? Why did people name their kids after themselves? It felt wrong and limiting and she would re-name herself as soon as she could.

There was more to come. They stayed in a guesthouse- the stained-glass house was too small – and in the morning they had to go to a café for breakfast. Her mother hated mornings, and she stayed in bed. Her father took them, filing past houses like the stained-glass house where Michael Victory and Eros and Theochrista lived. Outside, beside their garages, out in their driveway, people sat or stood in front of easels painting pictures of the landscape with the sea swirling up between the houses.

People painting pictures in the morning, in their driveways – it was an epiphany, like Eros and Theochrista and names that were not passed down and people who were not married and a feeling that was like songs coming alive and church moving out into the world. Nothing had ever seemed as real as those people at their easels or their café breakfast or the day spent on the dunes with Theochrista, though she was a little duller than her name and wanted to know if Adele was Portuguese, like she was.

But evening brought another revelation. They went to a restaurant for dinner. Gathered round a table were Michael Victory and Eros with Theochrista, herself, her parents, Oscar and Marcelle, Samantha, who used to be married to Michael Victory, with her children, Roy and Patrick, with her new husband Willy, and Pete, who was Theochrista’s father and used to be married to Eros, along with his new wife Yvonne and their daughter Helen.

There were no ex-husbands or wives in Mahwah, New Jersey, at least none that she knew about. If there were, they weren’t talked about, let alone dined with. Or their kids, or – she was enthralled, entranced. There were other ways to live. There were other ways to be. You could paint pictures in your driveway. You could have breakfast in a café. You could be friends with a person you used to be married to, you could get to know their kids, you could be a huge big family with your past, even the parts of it that were usually kept secret, the parts that were shameful. You could be friends with the changes, even if they hurt. There was a sense at that dinner table, of things that hurt, things never completely mended, and everyone knowing it and having dinner together anyway.

She happened to glance at her mother at some point and caught an expression of acute disapproval, even shock, as she realized that the older Adele, usually vocal and articulate, had barely spoken. It gave her a flare-up of something like glee, a sense that she could revel in something her mother feared and hated, some sense of freedom, some spirit of play.

Her mother was subdued for the rest of the trip, furious on the way home, enraged once they were back in New Jersey. Her father was absent a lot and she began to get a sense that she was not the only rebel in the house. It was a time of tension and her mother’s temper, always volatile, was at its worst. But she hugged the images of Provincetown to herself like a vision, keeping the sense that there was another way, another kind of life entirely, if only she could find it.

Hugging them again, she had to go back. Before she handed the first part of the memoir to Cyn, to try and get it commissioned – a long shot, but one she felt much more optimistic about, now that she’d begun – she had to go to Provincetown again. It wasn’t cheap or easy, but she got there. There were travel pieces she could try and flog, to pay for at least some of it. But mostly she needed to be there again. Though she tried not to, she might be secretly, foolishly hoping the spell would hold.

Provincetown was flooded with tourists, stuffed with mega-expensive antique shops, overpriced restaurants and guest houses, changed almost, not quite, beyond recognition. Something of the old atmosphere remained. The dunes outside the town were still beautiful. Walking back from them, she stopped to watch a rescue team hoisting a dead porpoise into a tank.

‘She had a pup yesterday. It was stillborn. We took it away. She was alive, but I guess she just stayed here.’

She stood watching until the tank and the porpoise had been driven away. There was no need to say anything. Her mother would get it, or did get it. She was in the dark car again, going over the smooth hills to the little church where things were said in ways that only prayers and songs knew. Her way of life – lifestyle, it was called! -awful – hers or her mother’s, what did it matter? It came down to this. Provincetown’s Road to Damascus had led her somewhere else, again. And now it was time to go back to where she lived, and finish her memoir.