Diary

Almost every old family has rented out their house and moved into the hotel attic. The rooms papered with faded roses. The wallpaper peeling along every seam. There’s a rusty sink and a little mirror bolted to the wall in each room. Two or three iron beds in every room, their paint chipped, their mattresses soft and sagging in the middle. These are the cramped rooms, under the sloping ceilings, behind their little windows, dormers like rows of little doghouses in the hotel’s steep roof. The attic is a barracks, a refugee camp for nice white gentry. People to-the-manor-born now share a bathroom down the hall.

These people who’ve never held a job, this summer, they’re waiting tables. As if everyone’s money ran out at the same time, this summer every blue-blood islander is carrying luggage at the hotel. Cleaning hotel rooms. Shining shoes. Washing dishes. A service industry of blue-eyed blonds with shining hair and long legs. Polite and cheerful and eager to run fetch a fresh ashtray or decline a tip.

Your family—your wife and child and mother—they all sleep in sagging, chipped iron beds, under sloping walls with the hoarded silver and crystal relics of their former genteel life.

Go figure, but all the island families, they’re smiling and whistling. As if this were some adventure. A zany lark. As if they’re just slumming in the service industry. As if this tedious kind of bowing and scraping isn’t going to be the rest of their lives. Their lives and their children’s lives. As if the novelty won’t wear off after another month. They’re not stupid. It’s just that none of them have ever been poor. Not like your wife, she knows about having pancakes for dinner. Eating government-surplus cheese. Powdered milk. Wearing steel-toed shoes and punching a goddamn time clock.

Sitting there with Tabbi, Misty says, “So, what’s your secret?”

And Tabbi says, “I can’t tell.”

Misty tucks the covers in around the girl’s shoulders, old hotel sheets and blankets washed until they’re nothing but gray lint and the smell of bleach. The lamp beside Tabbi’s bed is her pink china lamp painted with flowers. They brought it from the house. Most of her books are here, the ones that would fit. They brought her clown paintings and hung them above her bed.

Her grandmother’s bed is close enough Tabbi could reach out and touch the quilt that covers it with velvet scraps from Easter dresses and Christmas clothes going a hundred years back. On the pillow, there’s her diary bound in red leather with “Diary” across the cover in scrolling gold letters. All Grace Wilmot’s secrets locked inside.

Misty says, “Hold still, honey,” and she picks a stray eyelash off Tabbi’s cheek. Misty rubs the lash between two fingers. It’s long like her father’s eyelashes.

Your eyelashes.

With Tabbi’s bed and her grandmother’s, two twin beds, there’s not much room left. Mother Wilmot brought her diary. That, and her sewing basket full of embroidery thread. Her knitting needles and crochet hooks and embroidery hoops. It’s something she can do while she sits in the lobby with her old lady friends or outside on the boardwalk above the beach in good weather.

Your mother’s just like all the other fine old Mayflower families, getting their wagons into a circle at the Waytansea Hotel, waiting out the siege of awful strangers.

Stupid as it sounds, Misty brought her drawing tools. Her pale wood box of paints and watercolors, her paper and brushes, it’s all piled in a corner of her room.

And Misty says, “Tabbi honey?” She says, “You want to maybe go live with your Grandma Kleinman over by Tecumseh Lake?”

And Tabbi rolls her head back and forth, no, against her pillow until she stops and says, “Granmy Wilmot told me why Dad was so pissed off all the time.”

Misty tells her, “Don’t say ‘pissed off,’ please.”

Just for the record, Granmy Wilmot is downstairs playing bridge with her cronies in front of the big clock in the wood-paneled room off the lobby. The loudest sound in the room will be the big pendulum ticktocking back and forth. Either that or she’s sitting in a big red leather wing chair next to the lobby fireplace, reading with her thick magnifying glass hovering over each page of a book in her lap.

Tabbi tucks her chin down against the satin edge of the blanket, and she says, “Granmy told me why Dad doesn’t love you.”

And Misty says, “Of course your daddy loves me.”

And of course she’s lying.

Outside the room’s little dormer window, the breaking waves shimmer under the lights of the hotel. Far down the coast is the dark line of Waytansea Point, a peninsula of nothing but forest and rock jutting out into the shimmering ocean.

Misty goes to the window and puts her fingertips on the sill, saying, “You want it open or shut?” The white paint on the windowsill is blistered and peeling, and she picks at it, wedging paint chips under her fingernail.