Two Sides of the Border:
a sketch about girlhood
When I was a teenage girl spending summers in Provincetown, Café Blasé marked the border between the quiet edges of the East End of Commercial Street and the busier, hurly burley at the centre nearest Macmillan Wharf, where twice a day ferries arrived from Boston pouring out their crowd of three-hour visitors. Across from the Café was the bike rental, next to the leather shop. Beyond it, though, there was only the library, art supply shop and a handful of galleries before the sandy gardens and tall widow’s walks of the summer-houses took over.
I ate there many times over the years, but remember two moments in particular; once from just before adolescence, and the other, right in the middle of it.
At 13, I was also at a border. What I felt was not young, but old, old and worldly wise — at the end of something, not its beginning. We’d come to the Cafe with our babysitter, myself and my two younger siblings, to spy on my 16 year old cousin. Her parents had sent her to us for work experience. She’d landed a waitress job right away, and what became clear soon after, the attention of the owner.
He was a rare heterosexual bachelor in a town where most men were either gay or Portuguese family men in the fishing fleet. In our household, we weren’t too graced with straight men, either: my father was 3,000 miles away in Los Angeles, and in my mother’s shop all the workers were women, as were the other summer entrepreneurs around us: jewellery makers, booksellers, bakers and theatre producers, movie house proprietors, lobster restaurant mavens, local government representatives.
So I guess he had a unique status, and he was dashing, in a 1970’s Warren Beauty way; he wore white jeans, with printed shirts open at the collar, and a straw hat tipped over one eye, espadrilles. He had a nippy little open-topped sports car and when my mother was not home, he picked her up, and they drove off together, and now we were at the café to find out more.
My 16 year old cousin had inherited beauty from both her dashing father and her mother, my father’s sister, a heartbreaker who cut down swathes of eligible Jewish bachelors in Baltimore. Her hair was long and dark and shiny and she had a collection of pastel cotton sweaters she wore over matching polo shirts, light chinos. Her skin was perfect, as if washed in Atlantic rainwater.
We ordered food. My favourite at that unself-conscious age was a croque monsieur: crisp, golden, buttered toasted bread, cut into triangles, stuffed with ham and melted swiss cheese that stretched as you tore the two halves apart. I was young enough to be excited about the treat, but soon after gobbling it down, the sandwich sat uneasily in my stomach. All the time, I watched my cousin.
She darted around the tables, through a forest of pink and white umbrellas, wiping, carrying, taking orders, beaming at the customers. Everything she did seemed natural and easy, the possessor of a secret she would not reveal. In the room she shared with us, my sister and I watched her fold her clothes into colour coded piles, selecting the outfit she would wear each day. Her physical confidence seemed effortless.
After the food, we began bickering; I wanted to separate myself from my siblings — but where could I go? I said I was going to check on a book at the library and would be back.
The summer before, our first in the town, I spent hours in the cool of that one-room building stacked with shelves full of dusty books. On the upper level I’d found the complete Frank L Baum Oz series, in the original hardbacks. I’d become hooked on the stories of Ozma, raised as a boy on a farm only to become a princess in Oz as soon as she hit adolescence. The stories all focused on bodily transformations of a hallucinogenic kind. I too was leaving my flat and wiry body behind. What would I become? I was a girl — I knew that much, but what on earth did that mean?
Three years later, I went back to the café, with another teenage friend. In the meantime, my confidence and self-belief, my arrogant contempt for others’ opinions of me, had vanished. I was painfully aware of every other person in the world and how they might judge me: even strangers. I wanted above all to fit in.
That evening, my friend and I were on our own, ready to roam the town. The famous peninsular light bathed the tables and umbrellas in soft orange glow. I told her the story of my cousin, looking out for the owner, wondering if now we were older, we might be swept down upon, also.
My cousin had a new boyfriend, in college, artistic and lovely, with mournful brown eyes and a mane of Jackson Browne hair. Theirs was a tragic love story because he was not only not Jewish, but poor, and while her parents had not known anything about her affair with her boss, they disapproved of the Catholic boyfriend and put pressure on my cousin from the day she met him until they broke up two years after graduation.
That evening, we ordered grenadines. The waitress came, she was friendly and chatty, an older woman: mane of dirty blond hair flopped in a messy bun, strong, speckled artists’ hands, a leathery skin and piercing green eyes: striking.
We talked and listened to ourselves talking, always aware of the invisible audience. I caught sight of a flash of thinning yellow hair behind the cash register. The owner didn’t look as dashing as he had three years before, a bit harried and crumpled around the eyes. I imagined him heartbroken over my cousin, and told my friend to look. We wanted, still, for him to glance at us, to be given the chance to be cruel and rejecting, but he ignored us, as did everyone else there.
Soon, our interest in ourselves and our self-performance waned. Hunger took over as we watched our waitress carry out plates of burgers and thin French fries, giant bowls of Salad Nicoise, vichyssoise soup. Finally I called her over. We had been waiting for an hour.
“Oh honey! I’m so sorry! You must be in the black hole. There’s always a black hole and I guess you two sat in it tonight. I’ll get your stuff right away.”
I have forgotten everything else: what happened to us that night, or other nights, the name of my friend, the food we finally ate, other meals of the many I’d had in that same place, but I will never forget the older woman’s confident assurance that it was fine to be forgotten, to disappear, and my own mortification, sure at 16 I would never be the one to shine out, to be chosen, and now, many years later, only grateful that that in fact was true.
