“Because they’re assholes,” Lee had said succinctly, and winked at his son as Veronica frowned and said, “Language!”
“They are, though,” her husband said, opening a new section of the New York Times.
“They’re jerks,” she’d said primly, and told Sam that he hadn’t done anything wrong.
Ronnie had her own ideas about why the Pond People were so possessive of the shoreline, and why they reflexively despised people like the Levy-Weinbergs. Once upon a time, she imagined telling her son, the entire Cape was theirs （the entire world, she could hear her husband thinking, his good-natured face wearing an unusually cynical expression）。 Back then, Jews weren’t allowed to buy houses in their neighborhoods. They started beach clubs and neighborhood associations, just to keep people like us out. But we worked hard, we became successful, and some of us did well enough to buy our own homes in the handful of towns that would have us. Maybe some of the people who lived near the pond are unhappy about that. Maybe they wish the whole world still belonged to them alone.
Veronica had never set foot in a Pond Person’s home, but one of her friends had. “It was unbelievable,” Dolores had reported to the other members of the book club that met at the Truro library. “There’s one building with a kitchen, a living room, four teeny-tiny cabins that hardly look big enough for a bed, and one toilet for everyone.” Her eyes had gleamed as she’d shared all the details. “Everything was held together with duct tape. Literal duct tape. And they had barrels of booze and no food. Nothing to eat except a sleeve of Ritz crackers and supermarket cheddar.” She’d sniffed. “Not my idea of entertaining.”
Veronica had murmured something about the expense of keeping a place on the Outer Cape in good repair, how, between the damage the salt air could do and the paucity of trustworthy, available contractors, everything was more expensive and time-consuming than it would be on the mainland. “And it sounds like it’s very eco-friendly,” she’d added.
“Oh, it sounds just like my husband’s family’s place in Maine,” said Trudy, one of the other members. “Towels so thin you can see through them, sheets that are seventy years old, one bathroom in a six-bedroom house. It’s their idea of fun,” she’d said. “I think it takes them back to summer camp, or something.” She’d had them all laughing with stories of her stay in Maine as a young bride, how she’d driven twenty minutes to the nearest town each morning to use a gas station restroom after she’d caused her in-laws’ single toilet to flood her first night there.
Of course, back then there’d been a way to tell who was playing at poverty and who was genuinely broke. The local paper had published a biannual list of property owners who’d fallen behind on their taxes. Everyone in town had condemned the practice. Everyone had also read the lists the second they were published. But the paper had been purchased by new owners. These days, Ronnie wasn’t sure which of the Pond People were like Trudy’s in-laws and which of them actually, genuinely didn’t have enough money for the upkeep of a summer home. All she knew for sure was that the Pond People all seemed to be fanatics about keeping everyone from the public beach away from their shores… and that once, years ago, one of their children—Son of the Pond People—had hurt her daughter.
In the water, Veronica kicked and stroked until she could make out the purse-lipped expression on the woman’s face. “Good morning!” she called, and gave a cheery wave. “Beautiful day, isn’t it?” The woman’s lips tightened. Without a word, she turned and walked back to the cabin, mostly hidden by the reeds. Ronnie saw faded, peeling paint; the ripped screen of the door, the old chintz cushions of the daybed on the porch. She could hear the screech of unoiled hinges as the door creaked shut.
Ronnie sighed, submerged, and started the return trip. Back to the shore, back to her car, back to her house, which had central air and bathrooms in multiples. Flashy. Showy. Nouveau riche, they’d say, these people with Mayflower pedigrees and first names that were indistinguishable from last names. Forty years after she and Lee had bought their house, they were still newcomers. Forty years meant nothing to people whose ancestors had arrived in America when Ronnie’s had still been in the shtetls, picking potatoes and running from the Cossacks.
Forty years might not mean much, but Ronnie still felt, would always feel, that the Outer Cape was her place. She hated to think of leaving the house that she had loved so much and for so long; the house where she’d lived for the last ten years, after she and Lee had sold their place in Cambridge and become year-rounders. When the kids were little, they’d added on a guest house, dreaming of summers surrounded by their children and eventually their grandchildren. She wanted her grandkids to have the kinds of summers she’d been able to give to her twins: days spent on the beach or the bike paths, eating lobster rolls and ice-cream cones and going to the Wellfleet Drive-in. But, after years of dreaming and invitations and increasingly pointed hints, she had to acknowledge the reality. Sam lived all the way on the other side of the country, so he and his stepson couldn’t visit often, even if they’d wanted to. Sarah was close enough, but she had decidedly different opinions about summer than her mother. At eight, Dexter was already studying Mandarin and judo and the violin; Miles, at nearly seven, played on two soccer teams and had just started to learn ASL （“It was his idea,” Sarah said, sounding defensive, when Ronnie had asked）。 Their school days were scheduled from morning until night; their summers were even worse. The boys came to the Cape for a week in June, right after school ended, before their camps began, and much of that week was occupied by mandatory practice of their respective instruments and sports. Ronnie had felt like a teenager trying to avoid Mom’s censorious eyes when she’d sneak the boys out of the house for a walk on the beach to look for shells, or for a quick bike ride.