That Old Cape Magic

been that recent. His father had been the sort of man who considered the bungee cord a permanent solution, at least as permanent as the car itself. “He was an English professor,” he explained.
    For the first several years of their marriage, with the Great Truro Accord temporarily on hold, Griffin and Joy had lived almost as nomadically as his parents, moving from apartment to apartment, as people often did in L.A. if they were young and worked in “the industry.” Sometimes they changed apartments to be closer to the ocean, other times to be closer to work. Or a new complex offering better amenities—a nicer pool, or Jacuzzi, or tennis courts—would open up. Once they’d even moved to be closer to a favorite restaurant. “This place is so much better,” they agreed after each move, settling into their new surroundings. “Why didn’t we think to do this sooner?” They didn’t have or want a lot of possessions, and friends like Tommy and his wife, Elaine, always helped with the moves, which was sort of fun, and of course they returned the favor. There were no trick knees yet, no stiff lower backs. Every other weekend, it seemed, there’d be a housewarming party somewhere. Back then, Joy also enjoyed feeling footloose and fancy-free, spending their money in restaurants and running off to Mexico when Griffin and Tommy landed a lucrative gig. She and Elaine were good friends, and they loved lounging around the pool while “theboys” banged away toward their deadline at the portable typewriter set up on the balcony above.
    But then Tommy and Elaine split up, and overnight things began to change. Little stuff, mostly. For instance, Joy had always worn her hair straight and long, which Griffin loved, but one day he came home and found her shorn and styled. “I can blow it dry,” she explained. “Ten minutes and I’m done.” He doubted it could possibly take that long. Then, other things. Instead of keeping one or two bras on hand for when they visited her parents, Joy’s top drawer was suddenly crammed full of them, and when he asked about this she replied that she couldn’t very well go through her whole life braless, could she? A rhetorical question, apparently. Not long after this she told him, “I woke up yesterday morning, and for some reason I was thinking about Truro.” Remembered, “for some reason,” that the life they were now living wasn’t what they’d planned. Okay, it had been fun, she admitted, but was all this moving around and jaunting off to Mexico natural? (Again, rhetorical.) The whole time she was growing up, she reminded him, not counting the place they rented in Maine, her family had lived in just two houses, the one in Syracuse and the other, after her father got transferred, in Orange County. “It’s time we stopped pretending to be your parents,” she concluded, “and started pretending to be mine.”
    If this included a gated community in Sacramento, Griffin wasn’t so sure. Still, until Joy put it into words, it hadn’t occurred to him that this was what they’d been doing. He’d always assumed that the way they lived was, if anything, a repudiation of his parents. Certainly that was how
they
viewed it. Their son
choosing
to live on the West Coast? Who wrote television scripts instead of books? Who’d chosen a profession where you didn’t get summers off? Why, he didn’t even own a decent tweed jacket. But okay, point taken. Yet, even if their nomadic ways
were
an unconscious reflection of his parents’ behavior, did that mean that it was now time to start consciously reflecting Joy’s? Worse, he suspected that his wife’sjust happening to remember the Great Truro Accord “for some reason” wasn’t entirely credible. Her whole family loved to interfere in their lives, and he sensed their shadowy presence behind the string of changes. Was it her sisters—one newly overweight, the other newly religious—who’d convinced her it was time to start wearing a bra again, to get a more “grown-up” hairstyle? For years now Jill, whom Joy talked to on the phone every other day or so, had been wondering out loud, “Do you kids think you’ll ever settle down?” Or, as her father, who gravitated to sports metaphors, put it, “What’s your endgame, is what I’d like to know.”
    Griffin assumed that the true subject here was children. Joy’s sisters had started their families right after they married (or, in Jane’s case, according to his arithmetic,