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107 chapter thirty-six For the first twenty summers of Lucy’s life, the Gold family rented the same kitchenette cabin at the seaside . A small white chalet with sky-blue shutters and what she remembered for many years to be a thatched roof (but was not a thatched roof) sat in a courtyard with four other identical cottages each with fantastic and mysterious names. Clammer’s Delight, Barnacle Billy’s, Snail Castle. How Lucy loved to arrive that first Sunday at noon. Mrs Gold packed the children and suitcases and boxes of food into her VW bus (some of their neighbors whispered that they owned Hitler’s invention—him being the man who killed Jews still to this very day, Lucy knew—how lucky they were to live far away from him and all evil!). The children ran in the aisle of their very own bus as it went down the Cape highway. They munched bologna sandwiches, potato chips, sucked root beer from straws. Arriving at the kitchenette cottage, they made a great show of claiming their beds, though every summer they took the same ones: Merry and Ketzia in the knotty-pine room with sticky sap on the walls, Lucy and their brother 108 down the hall in the windowless corner. Mom and Dad in the room they called The Bed Room for it was filled wall-to-wall with a mattress! On the concrete patio,Mrs Gold set up the hibachi and the kids ambled down the street for fried clams to bring home for supper. They’d eat the fried clams while they waited for hot dogs and chicken wings to be done. After supper, as the sun set over the gravel parking lot, together they all walked to a glass booth at the edge of the driveway . Mrs Gold deposited coin after coin in the phone and breathlessly, overheated, the kids talked to their dear and beloved father, still at home because of his occupation. O the chlorine,o the bats,o the daddy longlegs in the attic! On Wednesday Dad would join them, bearing puzzles and bagels and soda and his fine fatherly arms to toss them, one after another, one after another again, in the turquoise swimming pool. Waterlogged every evening, Lucy would sit on the porch on a towel (PEACE, MAN it said in rainbow letters ) and dangle her arm over the edge of the wall. There, planted in row upon row, were Asian lilies, the purple, bell-like variety. If you took them between your two fingers and pushed,they made the sweetest pop you ever have heard. Lucy, an innocent darling, did not know that this killed the flowers. That would have crushed her. Our child of wonder. She wore a t-shirt with two fried eggs ironed onto its front. On a knee-scrape, one pink princess Band-Aid. Around her neck, a necklace of a green troll. That sweet girl. “Pop!” ...

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