“You’ve got to be kidding me!”
“I’m sorry, Vivian.” And with that, Martha disappears through the green door.
Vivi is allowed to use the hours when her world is asleep to travel back in her memories. Every single moment of her life—days, weeks, months, even entire years that she has long forgotten—can be revisited in crystal-clear detail, as though she’s living it again. She isn’t bound by chronology. She’s like a contestant on a game show—she spins the wheel and sees where it lands.
My first summer on Nantucket. Sure, why not.
It’s 1991; she has just graduated from Duke, she has no job and no prospects, but she did win the creative-writing award at graduation, which came with a five-thousand-dollar prize. Five thousand dollars is a fortune. It’s enough that she can ignore her mother’s pleas to come home to Parma （“You can get a job at the mall, take a typing class…”） and go with Savannah to Nantucket for the summer.
“It’ll be so great,” Savannah said when they were back in Durham packing up their dorm room. “I have a part-time job in a needlepoint store on Main Street and when I’m not working, we can hang out on Madequecham Beach. We can go to the Chicken Box and the Muse at night.”
“I’ll have to get a job too,” Vivi said.
“You’ll be writing,” Savannah said. “You’re bringing your word processor, right?”
“Right,” Vivi said, but her voice faltered because she wasn’t sure she considered “writing” a job—a job was supposed to produce income. Maybe she could write in the mornings, then wait tables or work retail. She wanted to use the five thousand dollars as a nest egg, not as pocket money to blow through during her fun Nantucket summer.
Her fun Nantucket summer! On the ferry, Vivi and Savannah sit on the top deck with the sun in their faces and the wind blowing their hair back like they’re a couple of J. Crew models. The island comes into view—sailboats in the harbor, the town skyline, such as it is, consisting of two church steeples. When the girls disembark, Savannah waves at her mother, Mary Catherine, who is driving an ancient Jeep Wagoneer with wood-panel sides. Mrs. Hamilton helps them load their luggage into the back while Savannah’s yellow Lab, Bromley, chases his tail in excitement.
“I swear, Vivian, you brought so much luggage, I’d think you were planning on spending the summer!” Mary Catherine says.
Vivi’s mouth opens. Savannah squeezes Vivi’s wrist in a way that Vivi knows means Don’t respond and says, “You sit up front, Vivi, so you can see. I’ll sit in the back with Bromley.”
On the way to the house, Vivi cranes her neck trying to take it all in: the bike shops, the pizza place, the Nantucket Whaling Museum, a young woman in a yellow sundress crossing the street with an armload of flowers. When Mary Catherine said Vivi brought enough luggage to make her think she was spending the summer, what did that mean? Isn’t she spending the summer? Vivi tries not to panic, although she has nowhere to go except back to Ohio, where she’ll end up working at one of the Parmatown Mall kiosks that sell markers with disappearing ink or paper planes that fly in loop-the-loops or, even worse, she’ll be stuffing her legs into nylons and showing up at some blocky office building to become a Kelly girl.
But she has her heart set on a summer at the beach.
The Hamilton summer home, Entre Nous, is on Union Street in a row of what Mary Catherine calls “antiques.” （Vivi thought antiques were pieces of furniture or cars, not houses.） The home was built in 1822 by Oliver Hamilton. It has white clapboard siding, black shutters, a black front door with a silver scallop-shell knocker, and huge blooming hydrangea bushes flanking the “friendship stairs”—seven steps on either side of the door that ascend to meet at a landing.
When Vivi enters, she holds her breath. She knows, somehow, that this is a moment she’ll remember until the day she dies （and beyond, as it turns out!）。 Vivi had thought the house would be beachy, like an upscale version of the place they rented in Wrightsville during spring break, but this house has Persian rugs, chandeliers, a grandfather clock, and a huge vase of Asiatic lilies on a marble-topped table in the foyer. The dog bounds inside and sniffs at Vivi’s crotch for what seems like an indecent amount of time while Vivi tries to pry his muzzle away. Nobody else seems to notice, but Vivi feels exposed, as if even the dog has rooted her out as a stranger. The house is the grandest Vivi has ever been inside. The staircase has a runner held across each step with a brass rail and Savannah points at the scrimshaw button embedded in the cap of the newel post at the bottom of the balustrade; it was placed there when “good old Ollie” paid off the mortgage in 1826.