Paradise Lost

Someday, we may have to sell the Vineyard house.

I said that to my mother the other day, although I felt like a traitor putting the thought into words. It’s a statement loaded with privilege – who has a Vineyard house anyway? – and, at the same time, loss.

Let me explain. In the sixties, my very smart grandfather had the good idea to buy land on Martha’s Vineyard and build a summer home with an ocean view. His family had rented cabins there in summers past. He was a physics professor at Harvard, so Martha’s Vineyard was a natural vacation spot, only a couple of hours away. When my grandfather chose a place, he chose well. There is a private beach for those with houses on the hill where we are. Drive a few minutes in one direction, and you are at a picturesque fishing village. A tiny town can be found the other way down the road. We’re away from the crowds. At least we were.

We can walk up the hill to the cemetery. My mother has started saying she knows more people in the cemetery these days than on the hill. Visitors leave stones and shells and wildflowers for their loved ones. Our plot is in a shaded corner. My grandmother Peg I never met who died suddenly in her sixties after enjoying only one summer in the Vineyard house, my cousin Keith who drowned at the age of 9 (not at the beach as I believed for years, but in a swimming pool in Dayton, Ohio), my uncle who died of cancer and the oddly jarring blank space on the same stone for his widow, still living. And the stone for my grandfather, who made this summer home for his extended family and lived into his nineties. We’re not the sort of people with big fancy gravestones. We’re the sort of people who pick out just the right natural stone, rolling boulders and smaller rocks, part of the landscape, to mark that we were here.

Our house is small, but I never noticed. Then the new people started building their houses bigger and bigger. I wonder what their gravestones will look like.

My mother, my aunts, my cousins, and my brother no doubt have their own Vineyard memories, as I have mine. Childhood adventures with my brother and cousins - fishing expeditions on the pond, sneaking food into the movies, hitchhiking home from the fair when I knew we shouldn’t. My Grandpa’s big birthday parties. Gatherings of neighbors, physicists, New Yorker cartoonists, artists, and writers (my grandfather remarried before I was born, my Grandma Helen, an editor for a New York publishing house), their cigarette smoke, cocktails, and chatter filling the room. Helen’s fabulous cooking. Learning to drive on the dirt roads on the hill. The summer I spent on the Vineyard as a teenager. Walking the beach to get through difficult times, and picturing it when I couldn’t be there. Years later, my husband proposing marriage on that same beach. Burying my beloved grandfather. Now bringing my children to see the ocean and meet old friends.

What started the conversation the other day? My mother informed me that another new resident is building an enormous house, blocking the view of many others, and is importing tall trees to boot. They’re building a swimming pool – a swimming pool! – on the property, despite that there is no municipal water supply and a pond and the ocean are just steps away. The last few times I’ve been to the Vineyard, I worried as much about the massive Mercedes and Lexus SUVs racing down the road as I did about the poison ivy we had to practically jump in to get out of their way as we wandered down to the beach. I can’t relate to the super-rich families I see on the beach these days, their children trampling in the dunes. The middle class owners of my grandfather’s day have sold, died, or are fading away.

I guess I have an old money attitude, but without the money. My family doesn’t want these upstarts spoiling our view, the ones who don’t even know enough to keep their kids off the dunes or board up the windows for a hurricane. We want our privilege, but the way it always has been, the way we inherited it. It’s embarrassing really, but there it is. Or maybe it’s just resentment, because they can afford something we might be losing our grip on. The old summer residents are the Vineyard’s first wife, traded in for a newer, richer, tackier model. And we don’t quite know if we should leave the party and go home.

There is something about holding on to a family house on Martha’s Vineyard when you are not otherwise wealthy. You know you belong (at least you did), but the people around you are perhaps beginning to wonder.

For some people, the Vineyard is all about belonging, and more importantly, showing that you belong. Who owns, who rents, who stays the whole summer, who can only get away for a week or two, who still says Gay Head instead of Aquinnah, who has perfected that Vineyard style of dress – tastefully disheveled with the right color of faded red or blue, like you have just awakened after sleeping on a sailboat, with salt in your hair. Who has the oldest date on their Black Dog shirt. And who is connected enough to know all the new people on the hill.

I don’t see my family fitting in with the nouveau riche crowd. In my generation of cousins, we have a puppeteer, a storyteller, a musician, and a writing teacher. We’re not exactly stockbrokers. We can’t afford to stick around, the intellectuals and artists, I guess. We aren’t rich enough, not in the right way. We haven’t raised our standard of living the way our grandparents did for the next generation; in fact, our trend is downwardly mobile. With the Vineyard house, we might struggle to manage and share the property and its burdens. As it is, the family has to rent it out most of the summer to afford to keep it. The house could someday divide us where once it brought us together.

A decision on selling is a long way off. My mother and her sister manage the house, and it is still a gathering place for family. It will fall to my generation, someday, to decide what to do. A year ago Labor Day the younger generation gathered on the Vineyard. It was magic to see my cousin Josh and my son Jonah playing together, to see my cousin Mark’s daughter reading with my son, my toddler riding the tricycle I rode as a child, to be together the way we all were as kids, and to still have a place to be, with memories filling the room.

We’ll never lose those memories. But I sometimes wonder if there’s still room for us on the Vineyard at all.