Tate decided she was never going to spend another summer day working. Next year, she would take off not only all of July but all of August as well. She would live in the Tuckernuck house. God, she wanted to ask Barrett to anchor the boat right here so she could strip off her clothes and dive in. She wanted Barrett Lee to see her swimming naked like a native creature-a seal, a Tuckernuck mermaid. Okay, she was happy, she was high. Would it be inappropriate of her to shout? They were here! Barrett cut the motor by half. Their crescent of perfect, pale beach was in front of them. Their house waited on the bluff.
Tuckernuck Island was a stone held in the ocean’s palm. The name meant “loaf of bread,” and it did look a little like a loaf of bread-it was vaguely oval-though Tate had always thought it looked like a fried egg. The coastline was amorphous, shifting over the years, depending on storms, she supposed, and global warming. The island was only nine hundred acres, all of them privately owned by the residents; there were two large ponds-one in the northwest called North Pond, and one in the northeast called East Pond. Tuckernuck had thirty-two homes, as well as a firehouse, which held a fire truck with a 250-gallon tank. There was no electricity on Tuckernuck other than that provided by generators, and no running water other than from wells powered by generators. The Tate house sat on the somewhat flattened eastern shore, facing Eel Point on Nantucket. Just south of them was the spit of sand called Whale Shoal. The next closest house was a quarter mile to the southwest.
The drill for disembarking hadn’t gotten any easier or more glamorous. Barrett anchored the boat and then hopped into the knee-deep water to help them down. Poor Birdie! She was okay; she was only fifty-seven, still small and spry and, as her name implied, birdlike. She removed her white tennis shoes, hopped down into the water, and waded to shore. Aunt India was wearing a gauzy skirt with an asymmetrical hemline, which probably cost six thousand dollars; it made disembarking gracefully a challenge. She ended up sort of falling into Barrett’s arms like a new bride, and what could Tate do but admit she felt jealous?
There was a new set of stairs from the beach to the bluff. The staircase, always treacherous and rickety, was now sturdy, built from bright yellow pressure-treated lumber.
“Wow!” Birdie said. “Look, girls!”
They ascended to the bluff. There was the lone tree with its gnarled branches, the very same tree Tate had meant to hang herself from. Nice to know they had both survived. In the yard, the old picnic table was centered in an oval of dirt, and from the oval was a white shell path that led to the front door of the house. The house had been reshingled and it smelled like resin. The door was the same weather-beaten blue, and next to the door hung the driftwood sign that Birdie and Aunt India had made when they were girls. Using thumb-size slipper shells, they had formed the word TATE. The sign was the closest thing the house had to an antique; it was taken down when they left for the summer, stored in a kitchen drawer, and brought out again to harbinger their arrival. TATE.
On the far side of the house, where the white shells widened to form a driveway, sat their jalopy, a 1969 International Harvester Scout with a white vinyl roof and a stick shift that was longer than Tate’s arm. The Scout had, once upon a time, been fire-engine red, but it had faded to a grayish pink. Tate looked upon the Scout as a long-neglected pet, a trusty though beat-up veteran of Tate family summers on Tuckernuck Island. The Scout had been brought to Tuckernuck on a car barge by Tate’s grandfather in 1971; Tate and Chess and all three of the Bishop boys had learned to drive in that car at the age of twelve. Tate remembered her own initiation, with her father in the passenger seat coaching her about the gearshift and the clutch. Despite its appearance, shifting the Scout was like cutting through butter, which was good because the Tuckernuck “roads” were challenging; they were dirt, gravel, or grass, potholed and ridged, a bitch to navigate. Tate had always had an affinity with machines; she had learned to drive with incredible ease and had savored every second of freedom behind the wheel. Freedom! At thirteen and fourteen, she had taken the Scout out by herself, she had explored every inch of Tuckernuck’s roads, she had given her mother a heart attack, staying out until after dark when the Scout had only one working headlight.
Tate ran her hand over the hood. Did it still run? She believed it would, like a magic car-Herbie the Love Bug, or Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. It would run for her.
Birdie had discreetly mentioned that the girls’ father had agreed to put “some money” into the house for necessary improvements as prescribed by Barrett Lee, and Tate had feared this meant the house would be different-shiny, new, unrecognizable. But the house looked the same. Tate was the first one inside; it smelled the same-like mildew and mothballs and pine sap and ocean air. She walked right into the galley kitchen-long and narrow, with a working sink and a gas camp stove and a half-size fridge lining one wall, and a Formica counter over the cabinets on the other side, with three feet of pale linoleum separating them. The “dining room table,” which sat three, four in a pinch, and therefore was never used except when it rained, was pushed up against the outside kitchen wall. Beyond the “dining room table” was the “living room,” which featured a braided rug, a sofa and two chairs upholstered in an abrasive bottle green fabric meant to survive a nuclear holocaust, and a “coffee table” fashioned from a slab of glass over a lobster trap. The “coffee table” was another house antique; it had been made by Birdie and India’s grandfather, Arthur Tate.
Birdie and India both sighed when they saw the table, and Tate sighed, too. Chess didn’t sigh. Chess, Tate realized, wasn’t in the house. She was outside, sitting at the picnic table with her head in her hands.
Tate pushed open the screen door. “Hey,” she said to Chess. “We’re sharing the attic, right?”
Chess nodded morosely. Well, okay, it wasn’t great, sharing a room with your sister for a month, but wasn’t there a certain slumber-party appeal for all of them in this venture? Wasn’t part of the idea that they would all have constant sisterly-motherly-auntish comfort? They would never be alone, and because they were all related, there was no need for Tate to shower, clip her toenails, worry about deodorant. Tate could fart or burp or pick her teeth with abandon. The others would love her anyway.
There wasn’t much of an option in the way of bedrooms. On the second floor of the house, there were two bedrooms-the Cousins bedroom and the Bishop bedroom. The Cousins bedroom was slightly bigger; it was “the master,” though incongruously it had two twin beds. This was where Tate’s parents had always slept. (Had they ever had sex in those narrow, spinsterish beds? They must have, though Tate didn’t want to imagine it.) The Bishop bedroom had a queen bed with a squishy mattress that was low to the ground. This was where Aunt India and Uncle Bill had slept when Uncle Bill was alive. Tate peeked inside on her way up to the third floor. She was delighted to see Roger, the name given to the quixotic sculpture of a man that Uncle Bill had fashioned out of driftwood, shells, seaweed, and beach glass. Roger was recognizable as a Bishop sculpture, though far smaller than Uncle Bill’s other works (which were made of copper and glass and which populated nearly every major metropolitan area in the first and second worlds). Roger could have been sold to a museum for tens of thousands of dollars, and that was what was remarkable about having him just sitting on the dresser in the long-abandoned family summer home.
Tate heard footsteps and turned to see Barrett coming up the steps with the bags.
“Third floor?” he said.
“You guessed it,” Tate said. “Kids sleep in the attic.” She reached for her bag.