The Rumor Page 34

Eddie loved the summer as much as anyone on Nantucket. He loved it not because the shops and restaurants opened, not because the lifeguards in their red tank suits and trunks patrolled the beaches, not because the lilacs were blooming and the weather was finally warm enough for barbecues and Wiffle ball games and outdoor showers. No… Eddie loved summer because summer meant the steamship was low in the water, the martini-and-oyster-seeking crowds milled outside of Cru, a line formed at the Chicken Box to hear the band Maxxtone, the parking lot of the Stop & Shop was filled to capacity, with people illegally parked in the handicapped spots, and the traffic on Orange Street made the year-rounders shout profanities at their dashboards.

Summer on Nantucket meant people. And people meant money—the buying and selling of houses, the renting of vacation weeks.

However, Memorial Day on Nantucket also meant Figawi, a Nantucket tradition that only grew bigger and more obnoxious every year. It was, ostensibly, a sailing race from Hyannis to Nantucket and back again. The genesis of the name was everyone’s favorite fact about the weekend. One year, while sailing in dense fog, some old salt called out, “Hey, where the figawi?” And in this way, the race was named. Because, really—who doesn’t love sanctioned profanity?

Figawi Weekend had morphed in recent years from a sailing race to a drinking race. It was a contest of who could drink the most, who could drink the fastest, who could stay up drinking the latest, who could get up the earliest and start drinking, who could act like the biggest jerk (this was the nicest term Eddie could come up with, although he had dozens at his disposal) while drinking. Figawi was popular with the postcollegiate crowd—kids who had just graduated from Hamilton or Bowdoin or Middlebury or, Eddie’s least favorite, Boston College. (“How do you know if somebody went to BC?” he liked to quip. “They’ll tell you.”) These kids now had jobs in Manhattan or Boston as editorial assistants or Wall Street grunts or preschool teachers, or they were in law school at NYU or medical school at Harvard. They lived in apartments in the West Village or the Back Bay that their parents still paid for, but in general, they were trying to be adults. They met for drinks after work on Newbury Street or in Soho, they skipped church on Sundays and brunched instead, and on summer weekends they “went away.”

Figawi Weekend on Nantucket was made for them. The men wore their faded red shorts from Murray’s; they tied cable-knit sweaters around their necks, they wore sunglasses inside because they were so dreadfully hungover. The girls—or, rather, women—paraded around in patio dresses without underwear. They all thought they were Diane von Furstenberg by the Beverly Hills Hotel pool in 1973. And they all carried handbags that seemed to contain as much crap as a thirty-gallon Hefty bag. Eddie wanted to tell them that they could go on Let’s Make a Deal with all the stuff they had in their purses—but they would have had no idea what he was talking about! Certain women, however, wore outfits that looked like they’d been stolen from the trailer-park clothesline—cutoff jean shorts and tight T-shirts that said SORRY FOR PARTYING.

The women irked Eddie more than the men, probably because he had daughters.

If the weather was sunny, the Figawians—truly their own nation—funneled down Hummock Pond Road in their rental Jeeps with cases of Bud Light in the back. The beaches were patrolled by rent-a-cops on ATVs who had a field day issuing tickets for public consumption and littering. The red-suited lifeguards pulled people out of the ocean left and right because the riptide was notoriously bad in May, and no matter how educated these young bucks were (bucks substituted for dozens of other terms Eddie had at his disposal), they didn’t seem to know that the way to get out of the rip was to swim parallel to shore until the grip of the waves let them go.

But this year, there was rain.

Rain on Figawi weekend was a thousand times worse than sun on Figawi because the activities of beaching and drinking were replaced by drinking and drinking. The epicenter of Figawi drinking was always the Straight Wharf—specifically, the Tavern, the Gazebo, the eponymous Straight Wharf Restaurant, and Cru. These restaurants were bursting at their seersucker and madras seams with screaming, laughing, swearing, hiccupping, posturing nouveau adults who were only just learning how to appreciate a good Bloody Mary and suck down an oyster without dripping onto their Brooks Brothers.

Eddie wasn’t sure what made him decide to head down to Cru at two o’clock on Saturday afternoon; he realized it was going to be a blender (this was the nicest word he could come up with, though he had dozens of others at his disposal). Barbie refused to leave her house during Figawi Weekend. She never told Eddie exactly what she did at home, but if he had to guess, he would say that when it was sunny, she sat on her back deck and drank prickly-pear margaritas. And if it rained, she indulged her lifelong crush on James Garner and watched old episodes of The Rockford Files.

Eddie supposed if he had to name what truly motivated him, he would say he wanted to be where the action was. Some day, these Figawians would grow up to be attorneys and surgeons, college presidents, NFL coaches, and, of course, hedge-fund managers. In five years, many of these Figawians would be married with a toddler on the ground and a baby on the way, and looking for a rental—one week, then two weeks, then the month of July, then the summer. In ten years, these Figawians would be ready to buy.

So basically, Eddie thought, the drink he was about to have was an investment in his pre-retirement years.

He bypassed the Gazebo, even though a rumor was circulating that two defensemen from the Boston Bruins were snuggled up against the bar in the midst of that dense black hole of humanity.

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