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Why I Moved to Martha's VineyardApril 22, 2010 Another piece from (of?) To Be Rather Than to Seem. I've been describing my memoir's process and structure as quilt-like: like a quilt or an afghan, the book comprises many squares that eventually I'll stitch together. This gets the idea across well enough. Some of the squares are reasonably self-contained, like a paddock or a fenced-in yard. Others open into paths than lead out and beyond. This is one of the latter. The tale of why I moved to Martha's Vineyard in 1985 starts in 1965 and it's not over yet. In the summer of 1984, my writer friend Tina crocheted me an amulet bag in royal blue, then my favorite color. A few weeks later I headed for Martha's Vineyard, looking forward to my semiannual break from my bookstore job and the D.C. women's community. Around my neck was the amulet bag, still empty. Walking on South Beach one afternoon, I was caught by an oblong piece of clamshell, characteristically purple and cream and almost two-thirds the length of my pinky. I slipped it into my amulet bag. I continued to wear it when I returned to D.C. Within weeks I'd decided to move to Martha's Vineyard. The decision was so crazy I didn't tell anybody about it for months. I make the small decisions of my life consciously: Shall I go to the concert? Can I put grocery shopping off for another day? If I don't finish entering my checkbook data into Quicken, I'll never get my taxes done on time. But the big decisions make themselves. My subconscious mind absorbs information, assimilates it in some mysterious way, and decides what I should do. It's like making bread: throw in the ingredients, stir them up, push them around, then leave them alone to combine and ferment and rise. My job is to figure out how to manage what my mind has settled on. Moving to Martha's Vineyard was like that. When I tell people I'm a cautious, even fearful person, they usually don't believe it. Looking at the trajectory of my life, I don't believe it either. No really cautious person would have done any of it. You know how some people teach their dogs or their kids how to swim by tossing them into deep water? I toss myself. No, I don't believe that bit of clamshell hijacked my brain and made me move. But if I'd left it on the beach, would early July of 1985 have found me driving north from D.C. with all my belongings packed into a 14-foot U-Haul truck? I doubt it. Being a more-or-less rational person, I'll venture a somewhat rational explanation: Picking up the cream-and-purple shell, tucking it into the blue amulet bag, wearing it close to my heart -- these unobtrusively, subconsciously expanded my realm of possibility. If you'd asked me in early 1984 if I was thinking of leaving the city, I would have responded with an unequivocal no. I loved my bookstore job, I liked where I was living; my reviews, essays, feature stories, and poems were starting to be published in feminist, lesbian, and gay publications. To the best of my conscious knowledge that "no" was true, but as usual my writing from the time yields many hints that my D.C. roots were tenuous and that I was looking north, toward New England, Massachusetts, home. My essay "Azalea: A Short Meditation on Letting Go" was published in the autumn 1984 issue of the quarterly Common Lives / Lesbian Lives. In it I wrote about my reluctance to put down roots in D.C. even though I'd lived there for ten years, and about my feeling that the Boston area, where I'd grown up, had become unfamiliar. What comes through most clearly a quarter century later is my longing for home. "Azalea" referred to a turbulent, mostly unrequited non-affair that had gone on for several years and had finally come to an end. This was the subject of a series of poems I wrote between 1982 and 1984, self-published in 1989 as Leaving the Island. Yeah, that island. The first stanza of the first poem, "Merry Meet Again (Leaving the Island)," ended with the lines "loving you, island, fiercely / leaving." The novel I was then trying to write featured Jamie, a thirtyish woman who chucks her publishing job and moves to Martha's Vineyard to manage a small horse farm. My subconscious can be as subtle as a semi barreling down the interstate and I still won't get it. Meanwhile, being chronically parsimonious, I had saved almost enough money to live frugally for a year and buy myself a PC. Not only did I have the longing, I had the means to indulge it -- on trial, of course. For a year, I told myself. I was taking a year off to write and regroup. By the end of July 1985 I was on the Vineyard, minus most of my books and belongings, which were stowed in my parents' basement. When I met Martha's Vineyard, I was fourteen. It was not love at first sight. My parents had decided that we were spending the summer there, and I was there under protest. I had bred my grade mare, Kelly, to a young Arab stallion. We thought she hadn't "taken," so my father had arranged to bring her with us and board her at a nearby farm. She turned out to be in foal after all, and due in early July; trailering a mare that close to her due date was out of the question. I wanted to be there when she foaled, even though she was at Mainstone Farm, owned by Grandma's friend E. L. Hamlen, and would be well taken care of whether I was there or not. We'd never gone away as a family before. Tony Lewis, who in the late 1940s was a colleague of my father's on the Harvard Crimson, had been assigned to the London bureau of the New York Times. He and his family were moving to England; their Martha's Vineyard summer house was available for rent, and was my father interested? The house was on Deep Bottom Cove of Tisbury Great Pond, with water, water in almost every direction and the ocean not far away by canoe, dinghy, or sailboat. Dad loved the water and small-boat sailing: you bet he was. My parents said I had to come with the rest of the family, but after two weeks I could go home and live at Grandma's for the rest of the summer. My relationship with Martha's Vineyard might have taken a very different course had Kelly come too. In those days the Vineyard had a lively horse community, where horsegirls hung around barns all day, helped with the chores, and rode whenever and whever they could, the way I and my 4-H friends did at home. I probably would have made friends and maybe maintained relationships with them over the years; I might have moved to the Vineyard earlier, or known more people when I did move, or got the Vineyard out of my system and never have moved at all. I got back to Weston eight hours after Kelly's colt was born. The birth was uneventful, the foal was healthy, and I named him Kelarabi, Rabi for short. Through high school the pattern continued: I'd come to the Vineyard with my family, stay a short while, then return to the horses. My summer job was as a farmhand for the family that owned the 4-H barn where Kelly and Rabi lived. They hayed not only their own fields but several belonging to other people. My younger brother and sister eventually found a gang of Vineyard summer kids around their ages to pal around with; my sister worked a succession of island summer jobs. I didn't make such connections -- mainly because I wasn't looking. My friends and my job were somewhere else. In 1969 I graduated from high school. That was the year my brother Roger totaled the family station wagon on the Edgartown–West Tisbury Road; the story was that it would have been front-page news in the Vineyard Gazette if only Teddy Kennedy hadn't gone off that bridge on Chappaquiddick. I was getting in my last summer of horse showing before leaving for college; while the rest of the family went to my father's 25th Harvard class reunion, I went to a 4-H horse show in Lexington. So I wasn't around when my brother crashed the car, and "Chappaquiddick" didn't take on real significance for me until I met a college classmate who interned on Capitol Hill and had met Mary Jo Kopechne. Once I went off to college and became a city girl, Martha's Vineyard offered a respite from the intensity and hard surfaces of urban life. No longer was I itching to leave as soon as I got there. Finally I learned to sail a Sunfish. While mastering the jibe, I capsized so often that I left my glasses onshore so they wouldn't sink to the bottom when they went overboard. I became pretty adept at righting the boat once I'd gone over, but once it turned turtle and the top of the mast got so stuck in the Deep Bottom mud that only a neighbor with his small outboard could pull it out. I still didn't develop my own circle of friends; my family's connections offered all the social life I needed or wanted, which wasn't much. This was part of the island's magic. Back in Weston, my siblings and I spent as little time at home as we could. As soon as we were old enough to be somewhat independent, each of us improvised a life that enabled us to avoid our mother's alcoholism and our parents' failed marriage: mine revolved around school and the barn. On Deep Bottom Cove -- where in the early 1970s my father had bought a piece of land not far from the Lewises' house and built an old-style Vineyard camp, sans electricity -- we hung out together and shared chores and actually acted like a family. Spending time with family on Deep Bottom was usually pleasant; going back to Weston, especially for holidays and other fraught occasions, never was. Deep Bottom wasn't free of family drama, however. Throughout the 1970s, my father carried on an affair with Linda Lewis, our near neighbor on the pond, who with her husband had moved back to the U.S., to Cambridge. Tony, I figured, was married to his work, which made my mother the odd one out. When she got drunk, which was often, we heard what she thought about Dad, Linda, and us for having anything to do with the Lewises, but we'd all long since developed Teflon shields against my mother's tirades. Sturgises and Lewises, in various configurations, swam, sailed, went to the movies, and generally hung out together. One of my clearest memories from those years is watching Richard Nixon resign. August Tony Lewis had rented a small battery-powered TV -- all the lights and utilities on our side of Deep Bottom Cove were powered by propane, and you couldn't plug a TV into a gas line -- and we gathered round the coffee table in the Lewises' sunny living room to watch. No one wanted to miss anything, but of course the lead-up coverage went on and on. As the TV's battery wore down, darkness closed in on the already small picture from all four sides. In between the cheers and jeers, we cajoled the battery to carry on till the speech was over. It obliged; we heard and saw the whole thing. It was thrilling, not to mention hilarious, to be watching this historic event in the company of someone who had made Nixon's famous "enemies list." Dad's affair with Linda had the effect of expanding my family, both blood-related and not. By strange coincidence, during their years in London the Lewises had become friends with Tim and Jean Sturgis and their five children. We met the English Sturgises when they visited the Lewises on Deep Bottom; they were our third cousins once removed, and we had known nothing about them. Not long after Nixon left the White House, I left the U.S. for a year's graduate study at Sussex University. Linda gave me introductions to several of her friends; the English Sturgises issued a standing invitation to come visit; and Liza, the eldest of the three Lewis kids, was at London University. When I moved to Martha's Vineyard, a decade had passed. Linda and Tony had divorced; Linda was remarried, to an Englishman, and living in Oxford. I didn't own a car. Linda offered me the use of her sturdy 1980 Subaru wagon for the off-season; she'd keep it registered and insured, I'd cover running expenses and basic maintenance, and all I had to do was let the Lewis kids use the car when they came to the island, which in the off-season wasn't often. I drove that car for three off-seasons, till I bought my very first own vehicle, a Toyota pickup, in 1988.
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