We were Vineyard summer dinks, or at its most deroga
tory, just dinks. We drove up from New Jersey each year, just after school let out, and stayed until Labor Day in my grandparents’ house on Pennacook avenue in Oak Bluffs.
My mother, a teacher, stayed the whole summer, too, but my father had to make do with weekends and whatever vacation he could save up.
I heard tales from my mother of how lonely my father was sweating it out back home. We lived close to the stinky part of New Jersey where the air smells like a bad meal left out to rot for weeks.
