Reading: Little Men

Moving: Not much

20 April 2000: Vacation

I should have been prudent and not mentioned the house until we had thoroughly closed. But I have, and so everything must go well. It's the 20th, and a month from today we'll be priming walls.

The other aim for our money target-practice is our vacation this summer. RDC bemoans that I have only just over a week, but since I used up every last scrap of time to go for two weeks with four cats and six-year-old boy and no transportation, even if it did happen in Florida, with his mother, JJT, and a new dress pour moi, he can leave me alone.

We're debating Provincetown vs. Martha's Vineyard. I love both. RDC has never been to the Vineyard. We date our relationship from a day trip to Provincetown and its aftermath.

I have been to the Vineyard only once, with an eighth-grade schoolmate who wanted someone to boss around for a week (actually I was invited along because she and her mother were going courtesy the mother's new rich boyfriend; by bringing me as well, the mother and boyfriend got the girl off their hands. She was called Katty, apparently a holdover from her being unable to pronounce "Katherine," and oh how richly deserved that was. So charmingly grateful, was I not, at 14?). I loved the Vineyard. We stayed near Oak Bluffs but, not surprisingly, it was Edgartown I most liked and the bird sanctuary on the south shore. I would love to go back with someone who wouldn't want to spend his afternoons in an arcade. As a destination, it is more expensive to get to and stay at than Provincetown, which in my head makes a strong case for the latter with all its affectionate associations.

SSP is the only boyfriend I never went to Cape Cod with. He was poorer than NCS or PLT and his family had a summer house in northwestern Connecticut that we could go to instead. (I'm counting NCS as my first here, which means "first I had a long-term relationship and sex with." There is also "my first kiss," and to call him my first boyfriend would be extremely generous, plus "my first love," whom I was with for a week and then long-distanced it for four months with two visits.)

Getting back on track, NCS and I camped on Cape Cod for several days the summer after sophomore year. That was a really good time. You can't make reservations at Nickerson State Park, and he thought that arriving unreserved in August would be fine--because we'd arrive on a Tuesday. So we ended up somewhere farther up the arm, in Wellfleet. We saw the last two of Marconi's four first radio towers and swam off Race Point and explored Provincetown and found a lake somewhere (that I haven't found since) in which I did a great Ed Grimley impression, because even after several days without applications of fresh Dep gel my hair had so much residue it could hold a shape.

Three years later PLT and I went for a day, perhaps more than once. From Boston that's not so much of a distance as from Connecticut. Again, we swam on Marconi Beach and ate in Provincetown. By this point I had been growing my hair for a year and women were no longer interested in me. Sigh.

One year later--it always surprises me how little time elapsed, only a year--RDC and I went up for a day, from Storrs. That was madness; we drove eight hours for an eight-hour day. But it was a roadtrip, and therefore fun. We went again in 1993, to camp for a few days, and twice in 1994, once with his mother in her long-time favorite guest house, the Cape Codder, and again, on our own at the Cape Codder, in the fall, where we got engaged. We were supposed to go again in 1995 on the anniversary of our first trip (which is also the anniversary of our beginning to go out), but RDC's broken clavicle put the kibosh on that.

So. Martha's Vineyard is much less crowded than the Cape and I've given up finding where Cynthia Voigt imagined the Tillermans' Provincetown cabin to be anyway. We could leave the rental car in Woods' Hole, take the ferry, rent bikes, and tour the island. When I was 13, nineteen miles seemed like a long way. Now it's a pleasant morning ride. I won't get a Black Dog t-shirt, though, I promise (or is that from Nantucket?) However, the Vineyard will have more jellies than Provincetown, and I'm not going anywhere I can't swim. Hmm. Or WJC might have planned his Vineyard vacation for then, in which case to go anywhere on the southern shore would be madness. Oh shit, the week we plan to go would also be the anniversary of JFK Jr.'s death off the island. Well, Provincetown and Race Point are also lovely.

(We're going to New England instead of California because the coldest winter Mark Twain ever spent was a summer in San Francisco and because our dear friends' house Charenton will be 30 and they're having a party.)