“Or eat it straight with a spoon.”
“Caroline, you were literally the perfect woman until this moment.”
“I’m joking!” Caroline pulled Van’s hands off his face. “I would NEVER eat straight mayonnaise!”
“Oh, thank God.”
“But let’s go back to where you said I’m the perfect woman,” Caroline cajoled, and Van kissed her and took off the cream sweatshirt.
Van Whittaker was both the same as guys she’d dated before and also completely different. He was a passionate environmentalist, a serious person who recycled, who believed in taxes, who tried not to buy new things when he could fix something old. Caroline liked that he was a grown-up, a real person instead of some impossible man-child. At the same time, he was utterly unselfconscious, never seeming to care what he was wearing, or if something he liked was objectively uncool. He didn’t understand celebrities, he listened to the same music he’d liked in high school, his fanciest jacket was a fleece, and he occasionally wore a belt pack around his waist when they went hiking so that he could carry a pair of clippers and collect any invasive species they encountered, like garlic mustard or barberry vines. He picked up litter when they walked on the beach, empty beer cans or tattered candy wrappers, and once Caroline saw him pick up the plastic applicator of a tampon that had floated in from the sea and carry it in hishand two miles to put it in the trash. Caroline appreciated that she was a steward of the earth, but even she had her limits, and they hit long before touching a stranger’s tampon.
Van took Caroline hiking along the paths in the woods of Castle Hill, through the cuts in the sand dunes, all along the beach from Cedar Point and Steep Hill down to the end closest to Gloucester and Good Harbor. There was an old wooden ship, a wreck from a hundred years ago buried deep in the sand, that reappeared when the storms beat the shore. There were huge tide pools that changed every year, moving with the contours of the beach. Osprey could be found on Choate Island, piping plovers nested in the fenced-off area by Baker’s Pasture, seals poked their heads up among the choppy waves.
When Van asked her to kayak across the channel from her house on the Neck to Steep Hill she almost laughed. The kayaking guy kayaked! But it was February and freezing and so instead she asked for a raincheck, and they spent the afternoon making out, playing cards, and drinking hot toddies he made with whiskey and clover honey from Russell Orchards. He was always doing little things for her, cleaning the mud off her hiking boots, putting a patch over the rip in her screen door, setting ant traps around her kitchen. He wasn’t even her roommate, but he took care of the cottage like he was.
He introduced her to his friends, a big group of townies who had all grown up in Greenhead and gone to high school together, who seemed to spend every weekend finding different ways to get drunk and wild in a town with only two bars. Caroline found their clique slightly impenetrable—they were older than her, most of them married with kids, but they drank like college students on spring break and communicated in private jokes and quotes and had strong opinions about sports Caroline couldn’t follow.
Van introduced her to his parents after just a few weeks of dating, and it all happened so suddenly she didn’t even have time to get nervous or obsess over what to wear or bring. They were on their way to Boston, and he dropped by his parents’ house to pick up his dad’s parking pass. “He’s a professor at BU and even though he keeps talking about retiring he has access to a really great parking lot right by Fenway Park and so he can’t quit,” Van explained.
Caroline had the ingrained snobbishness of all native New Yorkers, the view that life outside the city was provincial and possibly Republican, but Van’s parents had a Prius in the driveway, NPR on the radio, a copy ofThe New York Timesdismantled on the counter, and Caroline breathed a sigh of relief. His mother had a chic little gray haircut with Anna Wintour bangs and his father wore round reading glasses with colorful plastic frames. Unlike Van’s friends, who seemed moderately insane, his parents felt like people she recognized, people who might have been the parents of her high school friends. His mom made them sourdough toast and scrambled eggs with chopped chives, and they sat around the table and talked about immigration and Ukraine and sustainable fisheries.
When her own parents, Gregory and Gwendolyn Lash, announced their intention to visit Greenhead and see her fellowship cottage, Caroline nearly told Van to avoid them entirely. Her mother could be demanding and cranky, could pick a fight for no particular reason, and Caroline had visions of Gwendolyn wrinkling her nose at Van’s belt pack of weeds and ocean trash.
“She’s just a difficult person,” Caroline tried to explain. They were curled up on Van’s couch, a fire in the fireplace. “I don’t know if she’s technically a narcissist, but she kind of exists in her own world and can be cutting and rude without really meaning to be?”
“Oh, I’m not too easily offended.” Van shrugged.
“I wish I wasn’t. She recently told me that the reason I’m such a bad driver is because I can’t tolerate conflict.”
“I hope you fought back on that point.” Van playfully rubbed her shoulders like a boxing trainer.
“In high school she refused to come to a single play—even when I was the lead inOur Town—because ‘watching bad theater disturbed her artistic sensibilities.’ ”
Van snorted. “I was the plant inLittle Shop of Horrorsin the fourth grade. They made me be a plant.”
“I feel like that’s your vibe, though,” Caroline teased. “As an environmentalist.”
“It was basically Method acting,” Van agreed happily.
It turned outthat Caroline didn’t need to worry about her parents’ visit. That despite his low-key demeanor, Van Whittaker excelled in the arts of parental charms. Before they arrived, he read several of Gwendolyn’s novels and asked her thoughtful questions about her creative process. He took Gregory out fishing on his boat at six in the morning and they caught a striped bass almost big enough to keep. He drove them to Gloucester to eat sushi, to Newburyport for chowder on a deck overlooking the marina, to Woodman’s in Essex for plates of fried clams served on wax paper in red plastic baskets.
If Van were a blood type, he’d be O negative, that rare universal donor, compatible with anyone he liked. Caroline knew that Gwendolyn was more like AB positive, only able to donate to people exactly like her, and it thrilled her to watch her mother succumb to Van’s quiet appeal in spite of herself. She stood in her little kitchen drinking coffee watching her mother, resplendent in a black Eileen Fisher sweater (her mother only wore black, believing it to be slimming and also theuniform of New York’s creative class), peering through a pair of binoculars as Van, in fleece and a ridiculous pair of Crocs, pointed out the terns and cormorants across the channel by Plum Island.
“Van seems more cosmopolitan than most New Englanders,” Gwendolyn told Caroline approvingly as they watched him drive away on the last night. “And well read too.”
Nina teased herincessantly about her perfect new boyfriend.
Are you describing the plot of a Hallmark movie where a city girl moves to a small town? Does he wear plaid shirts and drive a truck? Is he the Good Guy who’s going to remind you of the true meaning of Christmas and family?
He drives a Subaru and I’m pretty sure he’s agnostic, Caroline replied.
So the plaid shirt is a yes?
The morning Van told Caroline about the baby was a bad one. It was a Tuesday and Caroline had just woken up and was still wearing her pajamas, a pair of sweatpants, and a Katz’s Deli T-shirt that said “Send a Salami” when Van knocked on the cottage door.
“Hey.” Caroline let him in. “Are you playing hooky? Did the piping plovers give you a day off?” She kissed him hello.
“Caroline,” Van started, and she realized that he looked exhausted, that something important was about to happen. “I have to tell you some news.”