We are past the solstice, and I am trying not to get too down about it. The fog that rolls in each night is a welcome break from the heat. The other week, my sister and her family and I were out in Provincetown, where we grew up. It was during the late June heat wave, my little nephew Salvatore’s short summer haircut plastered to his face with sweat.
Salvatore, obsessed with history, wants to take a trolley ride, something we haven’t done in a long time. I am convinced the trolley tour’s script has not changed in a half century, as though time stopped long ago. The tour guide speaks with a slight old-Provincetown accent, like all the Portuguese grandmothers of my friends growing up. As we crest the hill in the west end, right before the end of Commercial Street—or the beginning, really—Long Point reveals itself on the left. There was once a house here at the top of the hill, leveled this winter, and the view is exceptional as new construction has yet to begin. For one summer, anyone who stands here will be able to see this sweeping view of Long Point that will soon be confined to somebody else’s picture window in their living room.
My sister and her family retreat to the air conditioned comfort of an old motor inn on High Head, leaving me to wander Commercial Street alone. I always begin this walk—which is more like a pilgrimage—in the east end, near the Route 6 split, where old summer houses are all lit up. I have been walking by these houses for almost four decades, memorizing their eaves, their sagging rooflines, their plank shutters.
I watch a man come out from one of my favorite summer houses at the very end of Commercial Street. He is dripping wet, with only a blue-and-white striped towel wrapped around his waist. He stands there for a good long time, in the center of the street, under a blinking streetlight. The fog swirls around his ankles, and I wonder if I am seeing things. Perhaps he is just another ghost. And then he sees me there, and just as quickly he slips back into the house, the screen door slapping on its worn hinges.
At Lopes Square, where fried clams and foot-long hot dogs are served in a weather-beaten shack by weathered old women, drag queens in heavy, sequined gowns walk past in five-inch lucite high heels. They are trying to drum up business for their seven o’clock shows, barely breaking a sweat.
Provincetown has changed, there’s no saying it hasn’t, in my lifetime. Houses along Commercial Street are getting raised up above base flood elevation (I’m reminded, again, of the drag queens on silt-like shoes), other older homes that I thought would always remain intact are gutted just as they are back here on Nantucket. People I thought would live forever have all died.
But I do believe that on a summer night, between the hours of ten at night and three in the morning, Commercial Street is pretty much as I remember it. The night air is thick and heavy, the sounds of bicycle brakes squealing with so much moisture in the air. Kids throw snap poppers at the pavement, old air conditioners struggle like a car engine trying to turn over, Elton John sings “Mona Lisa and Mad Hatters” from somebody’s distant stereo. In the east end, the approaching high tide slaps against concrete seawalls. Every summer smells the same — honeysuckle, wild roses, garbage, tobacco, bicycle tires on hot asphalt, and salt.
At slack tide, I walk down somebody’s staircase at the end of Snail Road into the water, the harbor as black as pitch. For a few moments, time is suspended. Then the tide turns, and begins to recede, and I must make my way back, out of memory, to the present day.
