The Loveliest Woman in America by Bibi Gaston

Author:Bibi Gaston
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

My mother had heard it all, or something like it, before when he’d spoken of ending it back in 1948 and 1949 in his letters to her during their sophomore and junior year. Here was his grief again, only this time she could add infidelity to the story. This time, she decided to stop feeling sorry for him.

In the summer of 1965, my father hatched a plan, and once again, it wasn’t her plan, it was his, and for all she knew, he was saving the best for someone else. We were going to build a shack of driftwood on Crane Island, Maine. To a child, the enterprise sounded like fun, but to my mother, the plan, coupled with my father’s disappearing acts, was the beginning of the end.

No one in his right mind would place a dwelling so close to the sea. And maybe he wasn’t in his right mind after he returned from Morocco and went to work on the little building he called “Shack.” In 1965, Shack was just a folly, a self-deprecating statement of where my father stood, a stone’s throw but a world away from his father’s island, Crotch, where, through the 1960s, Big Bill still held court in his great hall with his candelabra, flying putti, and famous guests. Shack was more than a world away from his brother, James, who always managed to come out on top, with the largest island in the Gaston archipelago, Hurricane Island, which he rented to Outward Bound for its first wilderness camp, mainly, people said, to avoid taxes.

Half Pinchot and half Gaston, Shack was purposeful, but with a feminine loveliness that defied her salty origins. Like my father, she made good use of what nature had deeded. Shack was not opposed to the sea; in fact, each year she became more a part of it. With her warped and mottled irregularity, her steely gray eyelids, and a delicate roll to her roof, Shack resembled a rail car that had run off its tracks just inches from the sea. My father hooked up a red hand pump to a hose that led to a fetid swamp that, in the wet years, siphoned enough liquid he called water into a small steel sink in Shack’s galley kitchen to wash the dishes or boil the lobsters. But that was Shack’s only utility so to speak. “No heat, no electricity, no bathroom, and complete luxury,” my father would say. Shack wasn’t tied down to a footing or a rock. Exposed and vulnerable, she accepted her destiny and braced herself against the winds and the storms that would ravage her each year. During the winter, tides swept through the cracks and fissures of her floorboards, leaving deposits of sand, ground barnacles, twigs, and strands of desiccated seaweed. Like a gentle friend, the sea would perform a kind of scrubbing action on my father’s little driftwood creation, wreaking no havoc, but leaving notice of its annual visit.

Courtesy of the sea, Shack stared out through two wide-eyed windows my father fashioned from a double-holer.

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