A friend from school turned 40 this week. We went for a walk on Monday night and we talked about her birthday. I don’t remember her 30th for some reason, maybe she didn’t celebrate it, or maybe it didn’t seem as big a deal at the time – forty is the new thirty, and all that. But her 21st birthday is a core memory of mine, one I often think about. We were on our J1 in East Hampton that summer, three of us sharing a room in a house belonging to an Irish couple, another group of our friends renting a basement apartment nearby. We were working in a variety of retail jobs – an ice cream stand, a clothing boutique, a shoe shop, some babysitting on the side – and using our disposable income to eat at fancy restaurants and go to dive bars and buy stacks of gossip magazines at the drugstore. (It was the summer of Brad, Angelina, and Jennifer, this was important research, you understand) I remember sitting on the couch with my two friends, one of them sneezing because she was allergic to the owners’ dog, as we watched celebrity weddings on VH1 and footage of Hurricane Katrina and old episodes of Family Guy, drinking cans of Diet Coke, a small American flag fluttering on the porch outside. I remember hitch-hiking into town and the celebrity spotting we did – Diddy bumping into me on the sidewalk and not apologising, Kim Cattrall in the line at Starbucks, Alec Baldwin sitting behind us in the cinema, Paul McCartney popping his head into the shop I worked at and saying, hey, didn’t this used to be a bar? – and getting the Jitney into the city in the sticky heat to go shopping, and sitting in the air-conditioned calm of the bookshop, reading about American sororities, parts of which would stick in my brain for years, until I would eventually use it as material for my first novel.
At the end of that summer, my sister came to visit. I met her at JFK, escorted her on the train to East Hampton, showed her around the little town that felt like home by then. We flew to San Francisco together, stayed there for a few days with a family friend. (A very patient family friend. It turned out that I’d forgotten my passport on the plane. Obviously, the man who was hosting us was perturbed about this but I dismissed his concern with a wave. “Don’t worry about it,” I said, “if I’m meant to have my passport, it will find its way back to me.” What can I say? The East Hampton bookshop stocked a lot of woo-woo material and I’d been reading all of it.) We rented a car, a purple Chrysler convertible, and drove down the Big Sur to Los Angeles, stopping in adorable towns on the way; Carmel By The Sea, Monterey, etc. After LA, we went to Vegas, staying in a hostel dormitory with a group of American girls who were both unhinged and delightful, before flying home to Shannon airport, exhausted, hungover, and broke. We talked about this trip recently, my sister and I, marvelling at how we navigated it without Google Maps or Sat Nav, and how she had managed to drive with the six lanes of traffic in LA’s freeways. I don’t remember ever feeling anxious, I said to her, and she agreed. We were so young, I guess. Too young to worry, too young to