The Whole of It

Saturday

No one would blame you if you thought that Nora and Lyla Simon were twins. In fact, most people did, and, most of the time, Nora and Lyla let you believe it. The truth was, Nora was exactly six months, two weeks, and three days older than Lyla, but most people looked at their brown curly hair, their dark brown eyes, and their unmatched (except by each other) love of swimming and sarcasm and assumed they were made of the same genetic material. Or at least that they shared some.

Nora and Lyla lived in an apartment in Brooklyn with their parents, Hapa and Mama. Except for one week every summer when they "lived" in Provincetown, Massachusetts, for their favorite holiday, Family Week. Brooklyn in the summer was loud, hot, sticky, and stinky. It was, honestly, pretty perfect. There was nothing like sitting on the stoop with the kids from their building waiting for the predictable post-dinner siren song of the ice-cream truck. Or the first day of summer when the playground sprinklers (and some fire hydrants) came on and even the teenagers jumped in like little kids. Or outdoor movies that covered you with mosquito bites but made you feel both tiny and so grown-up, out late in Prospect Park. Brooklyn, with its sea of people, its cacophony of languages, its bodega cats and subway rats, was its own kind of paradise. And Provincetown was another.

This July, like every July before it that Nora and Lyla could remember, Hapa would go to New Jersey on a Friday, rent a car, drive it to Brooklyn, and complain about parking. The next morning, while both girls were still asleep, Hapa would load up the car and Mama would go to Bagel World and come back juggling bags of bagel sandwiches of four different varieties, chocolate milk for Nora, orange juice for Lyla, and the two largest iced coffees the world had ever known for Hapa and Mama. Hapa woke Nora and Lyla just enough to get them to walk down the three flights of stairs to the packed car. Mama dropped keys under the doormat of 3C so that Freddie could feed the cats while they were gone. Both still in their pajamas, Nora and Lyla snored quietly in the back of the car. Mama passed Hapa the sunglasses he had invariably forgotten, and off they set for Provincetown, the smallest, gayest town in the world.

It was a drive Hapa had been making forever, or at least it seemed like forever. Hapa and his best friend, Jack, started going to Provincetown when they were teenagers, spending the week with Jack's gay uncles (better known as the Guncles) or as Jack's parents had called them, Uncle Charlie and his "friend" Bill. But Jack knew them for exactly what they were: gay as a couple of picnic baskets, as Uncle Bill would say. Uncle Bill and Uncle Charlie had taken in Hapa and Jack as their own, and it was their one week of respite every summer from the tortures of rural New Hampshire. Later, when Hapa met Mama, the three of them would go. And then after Jack died and the girls were born, they began this ritual-bagels, iced coffee, and a long drive north with sleepy kids in the back seat.

As usual, Nora and Lyla started to stir somewhere in Connecticut.

"Mama," Lyla said as she stretched.

"Here," said Mama, passing Lyla her sesame bagel with strawberry cream cheese and orange juice. Mama knew better than to attempt more of a conversation with Lyla before she was properly awake and fed. Mama felt a tap on her shoulder and handed Nora her breakfast. The song requests started coming in fast and furious as they reached Rhode Island, Nora and Lyla taking turns until Mama insisted that she get a turn, and she and Hapa sang the Indigo Girls at the top of their lungs while the girls pretended to fume but secretly tapped their toes inside their sneakers. The second they crossed the bridge to Cape Cod, Hapa rolled down everybody's windows.

"Can you smell it?" Hapa asked.

"What?" said Nora, knowing full well what the answer was.

"The ocean!" said Mama.

"The lack of trash baking on the sidewalk!" laughed Lyla.

When they turned onto Route 6, everyone breathed in extra deep. The side of the road went from asphalt to sand, the grass first growing longer, then sun-bleached, and finally changing to dune grass.

As they passed the first sign for Wellfleet, Nora and Lyla started begging Hapa to stop the car.

"We'll stop when we get to the house," said Hapa, half-smiling.

"No!"

"Come on!"

"We always stop!"

"Mama! Make him stop!"

"Babe," said Mama.

"You're a bunch of fools," said Hapa, pulling into a parking lot. "You really thought I wasn't going to stop? Marconi's is a tradition. I know how you people work. Do it once, you have to do it again. And again. Forever."

"It's a tradition!" Lyla and Nora yelled. On the way to Provincetown, there were two nearly identical beach shops across the road from each other that seemed to be constantly competing to have the biggest, most ridiculous inflatables strapped to their roofs. And then, less than a quarter mile down the road, beating them both at their own game, there was Marconi's, with a pink flamingo so large that its legs stretched from one end of the roof to the other. For no reason in particular, but now because it was "tradition," they always went to Marconi's, and only Marconi's, even though it was the third of three shops, even though it was on the wrong side of the highway and Hapa had to do a U-turn to get there.

Lyla and Nora raced from the car, stretching their legs as they went to scope out this year's floats. Nothing inside the store was ever as exciting as the floats on its roof, but it didn't matter. They exclaimed over the ride-on dragon, the smiley face that had armholes for eyes so you could paddle. Lyla loved the float shaped like a bag of potato chips; Nora considered the hamburger. Every year, their parents would let each of them get one ridiculous float. There were pictures of the sisters on their floats over the years: The girls' first Family Week, each kid slathered in sunscreen, floating in tiny yellow inner tubes, complete with sun hats and an umbrella that came up from the back of each float to protect the precious children from the evil sunrays. The year they were five, on floating ice creams, with enormous floaties around their arms, still both scared of the tiny waves and the threat of seaweed. And the year they were ten, when they had picked out semi-matching swimsuits-yellow flowers for Nora, green leaves for Lyla-and then matching yellow and green inner tubes, thinking themselves at the height of fashion.

This year, though, something else caught their attention. The float was, in a word, humongous: a gigantic yellow square the size of a table with holes for at least nine people to float in. They could envision it immediately-each girl on a corner, diving in and pushing the other off, lying out on it with their eyes half-closed, like a huge floating bed. They needed to have it. It must be theirs. Nora nodded at Lyla. Lyla's arguing skills had earned her the nickname Little Lawyer when she was only three. She would be up to the task of convincing their parents that this float was the key to the success of Family Week.

"Mama," Lyla began in a singsong voice.

"Don't try it, kid. We're not getting anything besides the floats. Remember those bracelets that you guys bought last year? Turned your wrist green in a day."

"I wasn't going to ask for something besides the float! In fact, I was going to ask for just one float. For both of us." Mama looked at her askance. "What are you trying to pull?"

"Nothing! I found this float. It's obviously perfect, but it's really for more than one person, so Nora and I thought we could share it instead of getting one each, plus it's a bit on the expensive side, and so we figured this would be more cost-effective. You know, more fiscally responsible. We know how hard you both work to be able to provide us with this experience every summer, and we respect that. We recognize, of course, that this float is extravagant, but that's why we've decided to pool our resources, if you will, and ask for this one thing."

"Oh, good god," said Hapa, coming over to steel Mama against the power of the Little Lawyer's argument. "How much is it?"

"Seventy-five dollars.""You're funny," said Hapa.

"That's a lot of money," said Mama. "Let us talk about it."

"What's there to talk about?" said Hapa. "It's a piece of floating plastic—it's not a new pair of shoes."

"Just come over here." She pulled Hapa out the front door. Lyla and Nora gathered at the window to listen.

"You know," said Mama, "it is ridiculous, I agree, but I can't help thinking, they're twelve. We're about to head into the storm of adolescence. Right now, they're all: We're twinners, we're besties, we only want to be with each other. But who's to say that in six months, in two years, that might all be different? I'm not saying let's buy their affection. I'm saying how many more summers do we have like this? One of them will want to go to camp, and then there's college—"

"You're spinning," said Hapa, putting his arm around Mama.

"I am," she acknowledged.

"But you're also right," said Hapa. "Get the stupid raft. A nine-person raft for a four-person family . . . sorry, Mother Earth," he grumbled with a smile. Mama laughed, shook her head, and kissed Hapa.

Inside the shop, barely hiding by the window, Nora and Lyla silently high-fived.

Back in the car, the excitement of Lyla's win filled the back seat. This would be the best Family Week ever-there was no doubt now. As they pulled back onto Route 6, everyone was silent, happy, lost in the promise of the week to come. There had been so many weeks before it, some better than others but all colored by the gentle wash of time so that the scraped knees, the silly fights, the rainy days had all faded into a happy movie that played in each of their heads in its own way.

For Hapa, the movie was the longest. It started a lifetime ago, before he transitioned, when Jack was the only person who could see who he was beneath the drag that the world had forced him into, all the trappings of girlhood on someone who was obviously a boy, though no one else seemed to be able to see it.

The first summer with the Guncles, Hapa's eyes were wide as he walked down Commercial Street for the first time, never having seen so many rainbow flags, so many queer people in one place, never having felt so unafraid and so whole. The second year, Jack shaved off Hapa's long hair in the Guncles' bathroom, brown curls falling to the floor, happy tears streaming down his face. And when the Guncles came in, they exclaimed over Hapa's new look and tried not to show their horror at the mess Jack and Hapa had left on the floor. The next day, when Jack and Hapa went for their daily walk for ice cream at Spiritus, the butch behind the counter handed Hapa the change with that unmistakable head nod that people give when they see one of their own and said, "There you go, handsome." And Hapa blushed so deeply that Jack laughed until his ice cream melted.

One year, they came by accident during Family Week. Every week of the summer in Provincetown had a different theme, and the third week of July, right between Bear Week and Carnival Week, was Family Week, the bane of the locals, and the most mind-blowing moment of Hapa's nineteen years of life. Family Week filled Commercial Street with families he had never seen before, families he didn't know existed. Everywhere he looked, little kids swung happily between their moms, their dads, and their grown-ups who didn't fit quite so easily into those two tiny boxes. All of a sudden, a whole new future opened up to Hapa, one where he could have a family of his own, kids with their hot, sticky hands in his, whining their way down Commercial Street, a world where he could be seen, known, and loved for exactly who he was.

It was that feeling that kept him coming back year after year. It was that feeling that made him bring Mama to meet the Guncles when they first fell in love in college. There was a picture on the wall of the apartment of Hapa, all smiles, standing in the waters of Herring Cove, the growing cluster of cells that would be Lyla already beginning to stretch the tattoo of a seahorse that he had on his side, his belly pushing slightly over his swim trunks. The movie of Family Weeks with Lyla and Nora sped by, twelve years in what felt like twelve seconds. The year they ate so much sand that it showed up in their diapers for days. Lyla singing with drag queens. Nora saving up money all year to buy as much fudge as she wanted. Sitting at Bubala's By the Bay with them, eating french fries that were growing cold in the ocean air and watching the sunset, just like the Guncles did with him and Jack.

Mama was thinking about Jack, too, and how nervous she was the first time she came to meet the Guncles. She had met Hapa only a few months earlier at a party a week before their college graduation. They had fallen in love quickly, and just as quickly headed back to their own corners of the country, Mama to go to rabbinical school, Hapa to "figure it out" as a carpenter/writer/waiter, far from their campus and dorms where they had been circling each other for four years without knowing it. When Hapa said he wanted her to get on a plane from her parents' house in Texas to a tiny place called Provincetown, she did it. If he had asked her to go to the moon to visit him, she would have done that, too. Uncle Charlie and Uncle Bill wanted to meet this southern lady that Hapa was so taken with, and Jack wanted to know what in the world Hapa was doing dating a would-be rabbi. Uncle Charlie looked her up and down, said "Cute," and gave her a cup of tea. She and Jack stayed up late in the Guncles' immaculate kitchen looking out over the water and talked about God, and queerness, and the synagogue that Mama wanted to start one day, when she finished rabbinical school, where everyone would be welcomed-everyone. How, for her, Judaism didn't mean the 613 mitzvot in the Torah, it meant standing up for all people, that we are not free until all people are free. Jack said, "That's a beautiful vision. I hope you make it happen. There should be more people like you in this world. Now don't break my friend's heart, or I'll kill you," and that's when she knew she had passed the test. She thought about the summer she came pregnant with Nora, how Hapa timed how long it would take to drive to the hospital in case she went into labor.