That Old Cape Magic

more admirable than rapt thickheadedness?
    The Great Truro Accord. That was how, in the years to come, Griffin jokingly referred to the future he and Joy mapped out on their honeymoon. At the time, deeply in love and drunk on sex, it had seemed they agreed about everything, as if they’d spend the rest of their lives excitedly finishing each other’s sentences. Still, it wasn’t just the love and sex. They really
had
agreed. They both wanted a family—okay, maybe not immediately, but someday. And when they had a family, of course they’d need a house, and there was nothing wrong with the one Joy dreamed of. And so what if Griffin had surprised himself by floating that trial balloon of one day turning his talents to something more worthy and real? Maybe it felt like a lie at first, but the more he thought about it, the more he wondered if the lie hadn’t tapped into some deeper, subconscious truth. After all, he’d gotten into screenwriting, at least in part, to thumb his nose at his parents and their insufferable pretensions. But what about him? What did Griffin himself really want? After telling Joy he might want to write a novel one day, he’d discovered he actually did. Moving back East made sense, too. Why live in L.A. if you weren’t working in the industry?
    Okay, maybe it should have been the Great Coastal Maine Accord, and perhaps, early in their marriage, he’d used his superiorrhetorical skills to gain an advantage when he might have been more generous, more considerate of her desires. Sure, the time line had always been a bone of contention, and you couldn’t say Joy hadn’t been a model of patience. But when you looked at the original accord, as he’d been doing lately, the thing that jumped out at you was that Joy didn’t have much to complain about. She’d gotten everything she wanted, hadn’t she? They had Laura. He’d quit screenwriting. They’d moved back East. She’d gotten her house.
    But he had to admit there
was
something they
hadn’t
agreed on, something the Great Truro Accord hadn’t even addressed. With respect to their families, Griffin had hoped to invoke a simple, equitable policy: a plague on both their houses. Have as little to do with Harve and Jill, and with William and Mary, as decency permitted. And he was more than willing to make the first gesture. He had no intention of inflicting his parents on Joy or, when the time came, on their children. Was a little reciprocity too much to hope for?
    What he’d failed to comprehend in Truro was stark in its simplicity.
Joy loved her family
. Maybe she didn’t share their politics or their values, but she loved them still. Whenever they visited Harve and Jill in Sacramento, which he only did under protest, she slipped effortlessly into the old family routines, doing the complex ballet of kitchen and dining room with her mother and sisters, with children always underfoot, not to mention singing along with the songs on the oldies station that they made fun of back in L.A., banishing him to the family room to watch sports he didn’t care about with Harve and the idiot twins.
    Perhaps because Jason and Jared were both marines and because their father was so full of bellow and bluster, it had taken Griffin a while to understand the gender dynamic that ran just under the surface at these family gatherings: it was the women who charted every course, who made every decision. As military cops, the twins were enforcers of rules, but in civilian life they were trained to await instructions, and so was their father. When thedining room table was cleared, the dishes and pans washed and stacked, the dreadful board games came out—Monopoly, Clue and Life; Scrabble they refused to play because Griffin always won—and they were called back to the table whether or not the sporting broadcast had finished. They grumbled, of course, as men do, wanting to know why they couldn’t be left in peace, but it wouldn’t have occurred to them to decline the invitation, which, to their credit, they recognized as a command. It was over these ratty, faded board games, many of them held together with Scotch tape along the center fold, that all the old family stories, many of which originated in that old Maine summer rental, got trotted out and told at a decibel level that sent only-child Griffin out onto the patio in search of quiet, though he knew full well that this made him seem standoffish.
    At the conclusion of these endless visits, he always