see how a book becomes your house. But soon you are just a function of your house. The house tells you what you want, how you should live. At the same time, everything that comes into your life goes into the house. The house transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary, and without it, you’d never even know yourself, never even know that all those choices and consequences mattered. Your life has purpose inside that house, in its moldings and floorboards, in the way the light falls on the windowsill, and you pass on that house to others.
One day we take the hour drive to Ocean City, the Buick too wide for the lanes of the causeway. Austen, Denise’s six-year-old daughter, sits up in the backseat, studying the whitecaps on the bay, the blue power plant at Beesley’s Point. We’re here to find Emily’s house. For Denise, the task is not so much about finding the house that would be right for Emily as it is an act of attention, finding the house that’s always existed. But before we find that house, we park. We walk the boardwalk, scrubbed and bright on this cold spring day. Waves boom against the shoreline. They retreat and break once again, this time with the sound of a whip crack. We smell the ions in the air. There is a triumph about the three of us moving as one, the sights ahead of us—the Music Pier, Wonderland, Gillian’s Fun Deck—calling up old stories. A woman walks by, mystified, alarmed by us. Ocean City is comfortable. Looking at it the way we’re looking at it? Well, that would be like looking at your aunt Barbara as if she were the most wondrous creature on the planet, when in fact she’s just Aunt Barbara, with her loose cardigans and her wide hips. But we’re liked here, too. Others smile at us; they seem to want to be taken in by our laughter. They want to play along. I’m positive they’re mistaking Denise and me for a happy couple with their daughter—the wonders that await the happy heterosexual couple with their daughter! Don’t I feel it, a new stature accorded to me? I feel the swagger in my walk and talk. When we step inside Litterer’s, for instance, we’re directed to a table close to the boardwalk, as if we’re some centerpiece of fertility.
We drive up and down the streets. One three-story is almost right for Emily but is immediately discarded for its vinyl siding. Another fails to make the grade because it is too close to busy West Avenue: bad for Lizzie, who likes to push her toys about the yard. We drive past the houses of the Gardens, with their suburban landscaping and surgically edged driveways. We drive past the Port-O-Call, near where Grace Kelly and her family once summered, but that’s not right either: Emily values trees, charm, wood shingles, and tradition—a smart, studied mess. Everything we’ve come across is blocky and practical. More than once we think Emily would never get any writing done in such a place, even though Nan and Gay Talese spend summers here. Maybe Emily would find Ocean Gate—the city based on Ocean City—deadening, stultifying. Maybe the Ocean City that Denise wants to exist doesn’t exist. She wants a perfected version of the perfected imagination of her childhood, just as Emily is a perfected version of Denise, even if she doesn’t think of Emily as having come from her. She doesn’t claim ownership of Emily, Lizzy, or Gene; that would be wrong. It’s as if they’ve already been fully formed, birth to death, outside of time. And that is as close to religion as Denise gets.
We’re headed down Atlantic Avenue now, drifty, overheated, probably a little exhausted from having spent so much time with each other. We’re already talking about coming back another day, when there’s no school prep waiting for us, no front on the horizon—see the swollen blue clouds coming in from the bay side? We’ve left our heavy coats at home. We’re probably wearing sneakers and our feet are numb. Then, when we’re not trying, we see it. On the
One day we take the hour drive to Ocean City, the Buick too wide for the lanes of the causeway. Austen, Denise’s six-year-old daughter, sits up in the backseat, studying the whitecaps on the bay, the blue power plant at Beesley’s Point. We’re here to find Emily’s house. For Denise, the task is not so much about finding the house that would be right for Emily as it is an act of attention, finding the house that’s always existed. But before we find that house, we park. We walk the boardwalk, scrubbed and bright on this cold spring day. Waves boom against the shoreline. They retreat and break once again, this time with the sound of a whip crack. We smell the ions in the air. There is a triumph about the three of us moving as one, the sights ahead of us—the Music Pier, Wonderland, Gillian’s Fun Deck—calling up old stories. A woman walks by, mystified, alarmed by us. Ocean City is comfortable. Looking at it the way we’re looking at it? Well, that would be like looking at your aunt Barbara as if she were the most wondrous creature on the planet, when in fact she’s just Aunt Barbara, with her loose cardigans and her wide hips. But we’re liked here, too. Others smile at us; they seem to want to be taken in by our laughter. They want to play along. I’m positive they’re mistaking Denise and me for a happy couple with their daughter—the wonders that await the happy heterosexual couple with their daughter! Don’t I feel it, a new stature accorded to me? I feel the swagger in my walk and talk. When we step inside Litterer’s, for instance, we’re directed to a table close to the boardwalk, as if we’re some centerpiece of fertility.
We drive up and down the streets. One three-story is almost right for Emily but is immediately discarded for its vinyl siding. Another fails to make the grade because it is too close to busy West Avenue: bad for Lizzie, who likes to push her toys about the yard. We drive past the houses of the Gardens, with their suburban landscaping and surgically edged driveways. We drive past the Port-O-Call, near where Grace Kelly and her family once summered, but that’s not right either: Emily values trees, charm, wood shingles, and tradition—a smart, studied mess. Everything we’ve come across is blocky and practical. More than once we think Emily would never get any writing done in such a place, even though Nan and Gay Talese spend summers here. Maybe Emily would find Ocean Gate—the city based on Ocean City—deadening, stultifying. Maybe the Ocean City that Denise wants to exist doesn’t exist. She wants a perfected version of the perfected imagination of her childhood, just as Emily is a perfected version of Denise, even if she doesn’t think of Emily as having come from her. She doesn’t claim ownership of Emily, Lizzy, or Gene; that would be wrong. It’s as if they’ve already been fully formed, birth to death, outside of time. And that is as close to religion as Denise gets.
We’re headed down Atlantic Avenue now, drifty, overheated, probably a little exhausted from having spent so much time with each other. We’re already talking about coming back another day, when there’s no school prep waiting for us, no front on the horizon—see the swollen blue clouds coming in from the bay side? We’ve left our heavy coats at home. We’re probably wearing sneakers and our feet are numb. Then, when we’re not trying, we see it. On the
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