Page 54 - Philly Girl

38 Janice Shapiro

Then: maid at the new hotel. Couldn’t clean a bath-
room—out again. Cleaning girl for a rich guy in Truro—
fell asleep on the job. I was basically failing at everything in
the Cape. I started to believe Cora Horowitz’s predictions
about me. (See “Not College Material.”) But I did love swim-
ming in the Atlantic, and I met some Kennedy cousins in
the ocean who flirted shamelessly. This was the summer of
Chappaquiddick and I saw the scandalous effect that it had
in Hyannis.
I couldn’t lie very well about all of the firings. My father
took a Greyhound bus to Hyannis to bring me home. We
had lobster for the first time in our lives. He begged me to
come home. He said Esther was a wreck hearing about all
of my failures (and she hadn’t heard about half of them). I
said no to Dad. I said that I was never coming home again. I
said “home life” was killing me and I had to go my own way.
He cried and cried and I saw him take the return bus home.
Honestly, it never occurred to me to say yes.
Draft dodgers from everywhere used our big house on
the water on Columbus Street as a safe waystation to get up
to Canada. There were six of us cute, “hippie-dippy,” free-
loving girls happy to feed and entertain them. I met and fell
for Joey. He liked me but not as much as I liked him. Ellen,
the queen bee and organizer of the Columbus Street rental,
liked him too. She had huge breasts, was wealthy, a flirt,
and a liar. I had always believed her camp-days story about
her so-called stepmother being so close to her, yet the glazed
weird look in her eyes ultimately revealed her to be a victim
of molestation, a girl who harbored a huge desire for revenge.
She shocked us all at the end of the summer by ransacking
our suitcases of tips (tuition and Williams Hall money for
me) and running off. Disaster—everyone left but me and
Lynne: we had tickets in August to go to Woodstock, and
this was not going to stop us.