excited for the baby to come, but she knew the things that went with it: bottles, diapers, spit-up. She loved how neat and tidy being pregnant was, carrying everything with you, giving the baby everything it needed without having to think about it.
It was harder once they came out, harder with each year that went by. Weezy wanted her children to have everything they needed and more. But it was hard to figure out just what that was. Sometimes she got fixated on things that she wanted the kids to have. She was determined to get bunk beds for Claire and Martha, something she’d always wanted so badly when she was younger. She used to picture herself and Maureen building forts, and talking to each other in their bunks, late into the night. What little kids wouldn’t want that?
Her girls hadn’t seemed as interested, but Weezy pushed for it. “You’ll love them,” she kept saying. It turned out that they were both too frightened to sleep on the top bunk. Martha cried the whole first week she was up there, so Claire agreed to switch, but ended up falling out of it a few days later and spraining her wrist. Weezy tried to remain hopeful that they’d end up falling in love with the bunk beds, but after waking up to find them both squished into the bottom bunk for almost a month straight, she gave in and had Will take the bunk beds down.
So maybe Weezy hadn’t always been right about what would make the children happy. But that didn’t mean she was going to stop trying or step back and let them search all by themselves. They didn’t know what they wanted. She was their mother, and she couldn’t help it. She was involved.
That was why she was hell-bent on getting them all to the shore. They didn’t know how important this time would be to them later. Maureen seemed to have given up on her kids’ coming to the shore. “They’re busy,” she said. Maureen’s daughter, Cathy, was living in Ohio with her partner, Ruth, and her son, Drew, was all the way in California, and somehow this didn’t seem to bother her. It seemed absurd to Weezy—they’d all gone to the shore together when the kids were little; it had been a tradition. Maureen should have encouraged her kids to keep coming. Didn’t she want them to be able to look back on the family vacations and appreciate all the time they’d had together?
“They’re adults now,” Will said, when she complained about getting the kids to clear their schedules for the shore. But they didn’t really seem like adults to Weezy—Claire didn’t even do her own laundry. She had it sent out to the cleaners around the block. Martha was still living at home. And Max was practically a child, still in college, likely to eat cereal for dinner if no one was there to cook for him. They weren’t adult enough to know what was good for them, that was for sure. So she was going to get them to the shore, come hell or high water.
Weezy and her family had been going to Ventnor City since she was a little girl. Her father’s family had acquired the house, and every summer her father and his brothers used to pack up their families for the summer and head out there. The husbands went back to the city during the week and returned each weekend to the shore, where the children greeted them like long-lost explorers, running out to meet them at the car, jumping on them like monkeys, wrapping their sunburned arms around their necks and saying, “Daddy, we’re so glad you’re back.”
There were four bedrooms in the house where the adults stayed. Weezy and Maureen and their cousins were crowded on cots on the sleeping porch, lined up like little soldiers, waiting for a breeze to cool them down. From there, they would listen to the sounds of their parents outside on the front porch, getting drunk with the other neighbors, laughing and singing, smoking cigars, and saying, “This is the life.”
Those were the best summers of Weezy’s life. She firmly believed that. She was shocked when her own mother, Bets, had told Weezy that she’d always hated going to the shore. “It was so crowded, and no one had any privacy. Your aunts weren’t the best company, and anyway we had to cook and clean and what kind of a vacation is that?”