August 15, 2005
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Joseph J. Delconzo for The New York Times
SUMMER EXILE Alexis Waller with Millicent and Wick. Once she shifts to the Jersey Shore, Mrs. Waller rarely returns to New York
Jill C. Becker for The New York Times
CHILD’S PLAY Allie DeMarco at a pool in the town where she and her mother and sister spend the summer
Joseph J. Delconzo for The New York Times
STAY-AT-SUMMER-HOME MOM Alexis Waller and her children at their Jersey Shore vacation house. Her husband joins them on weekends
August 12, 2005
Every Friday a Reunion
By STEPHANIE STROM
IT’S twilight, and Kelly DeMarco is making her usual last-minute Friday rounds.
The first stop is Tom Bailey’s Market, where she picks up a selection of cold cuts and some cheese, and then on to the Bottle Shop for a bottle of Conundrum, her favorite wine, and a couple of bottles of rosé. She has already laid in plenty of what she calls “man food,” meaning anything that can be cooked on a grill, and caffeine-free Diet Coke, in preparation for the arrival of her husband, Michael, from New York City.
“I once tried to feed Hubby chicken salad on a Friday night,” she said. “Never again.”
The DeMarcos’ daughters, Allie, 10, and Charlotte, who just turned 9, have washed away the last vestiges of their afternoon at the beach and wait impatiently, hair slicked back and skin gleaming in Hawaiian print dresses, for their dad’s red sports car to pull into the driveway.
When it finally does, at about 8:30 p.m., they attack before he has a chance to climb out, high-pitched voices crying, “Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!” Hugs muffle their attempt to tell him as much as they can as quickly as possible about everything that’s happened since he left on Sunday evening- about how their new kitten got out and the candy that’s waiting for him from their trip to Hershey Park and the afternoon’s tiff at the beach.
If you asked Charlotte what is the best part of summer, she’d tell you horses and riding, then pause for a moment. “My other favorite thing is when my dad comes,” she’d say. “I just like it.”
The DeMarcos are a modern-day version of the family in “The Seven Year Itch,” the Billy Wilder classic in which Richard Sherman dispatches his wife, Helen, and son, Ricky, to Maine and returns to his Manhattan apartment to discover Marilyn Monroe has moved in upstairs.
The crucial difference, Mr. DeMarco says, is that no one like Marilyn Monroe lives in his building, and even if she did, he travels too much to know it. “I haven’t spent seven consecutive nights in any bed in 10 years,” he said.
The trip to the Jersey Shore has defined Mr. DeMarco’s summer weekends since 1998, when the family purchased a house there, but for Mrs. DeMarco and the girls, the weekend is effectively three months long. “I’ve only been back to the city once, to play a trick on Michael” – packing the refrigerator in their apartment with the Diet Coke that he chain drinks – “and pick up something I thought I needed, and when I got there, I asked myself why I’d made the trip,” she said.
Mr. DeMarco noted that it is a historic migratory pattern. “When you look back to, say, 1905, people planned their lives around the seasons and said to themselves, what’s good for my family in the summer heat?” he said. “They went to places like Bar Harbor, Kennebunkport, Amagansett, Cape Cod, where there was nice air, pleasant weather and great opportunities for outdoor activities. I took that exact same approach and asked, what’s good for my family in 2005? Is it better for them to be in Manhattan sweltering or at the shore?”
No one seems to track the numbers of families who spend their summers this way, with the men toiling away in “the city” and the women and children elsewhere at carefree play. But even in these days of the two-career family and increasingly harried commuting, there are still a good number of people whose summer existence has a vintage quality to it. The clothing and cars and jobs are different – not surprisingly, many of the husbands spend their days attending to matters of high finance and the legal work that accompanies it – but otherwise, it is easy to imagine Beaver and Wally and June spending their summers in exactly this way.
And while one does hear rumors of the husband who packs the kids into the S.U.V. and lights out for the beach, leaving his wife to commute, he is a rare and shy breed along the lines of the ivory-billed woodpecker. No, by and large, this particular sojourn is a mother-and-child phenomenon, and the few men who happen to be hanging around during the week, perhaps taking a bit of vacation with their families or just playing hooky from work, seem oddly out of place.
They couldn’t, for instance, go to the midweek parties put together by Alexis Waller and five friends who all spend the summer along the Jersey Shore. Always on Wednesdays, “when the husbands aren’t around,” they are all-women parties, with invitees instructed to bring “a bottle, a bite or a buddy.”
On a recent Wednesday, 125 women turned out dressed all in white (the theme was summer white). White tablecloths, white flowers, white candles, white teeth to set off glorious summer tans. And though some of the parties have ended with a late-night dip in the pool or ocean, on this night they whiled away the evening with glasses of chilly white wine and soft chatter.
Mrs. Waller first came to the Jersey Shore when she was dating her husband, John, driving down from New York City each weekend. They continued that practice after their first child, Wick, now 10, was born. That changed after the arrival of their second child, Millicent, about a year later. “It was just too much to schlep back and forth with two small children,” Mrs. Waller said. Soon Colt, who’s now 5, arrived, buttressing that rationale.
Like Mrs. DeMarco, she decamps shortly after school is out and doesn’t return to the city unless she has to. This summer, for instance, she has been back once, to take Colt to a doctor’s appointment.
It is, in many ways, an idyllic existence, with time marked by the tide pools and the jingle of the ice cream truck, as one shore resident put it. The major pressure is shuttling the children to their various activities – junior lifeguard classes and horseback riding lessons and basketball camp – on time. Front lawns are littered with children’s bicycles, waiting for their owners to be summoned home for dinner. People sit on their porches as evening melts into night, sipping something cool and swapping stories across their yards, and the proprietors of the mom-and-pop shops in the two- or three-block long “business districts” in the string of towns that line the shore greet their customers by name, even those who are just summer residents.
The sleepy informality disguises a sophisticated surveillance system with which any child who’s ever done something he wasn’t supposed to do is well acquainted. “In New York, I hardly let Wick go to the lobby alone, but here everyone knows everyone and we all kind of keep an eye out for each other,” Mrs. Waller said.
Her husband, John, usually drives in from the city on Fridays around midday and is greeted with much the same excitement and furor that attends Mr. DeMarco’s arrival, as three children vie for his attention. Friday night is usually family night in the Waller summer household. “John doesn’t like it when I plan for us to be out both evenings,” Mrs. Waller said.
Saturday is Dad’s Day, when Mr. Waller rises early before sun and heat can conspire to sap the will to exercise, then mounts an expedition on bicycles with Wick, Millicent and Colt. They head for Mueller’s Bakery nearby to get in line for doughnuts. Stuffed, they go crabbing or kayaking and take a few dips in the ocean or pool before noon, when Mr. Waller takes it easy with a book, perhaps grabbing a nap.
SATURDAY evenings on the Jersey Shore seem to be largely devoted to parties, like the one the DeMarcos attended early in the summer at the home of Louise and Joe Miller. About 125 people mingled inside and outside their house, enjoying margaritas and crab appetizers and other finger foods before tucking into a grilled buffet dinner.
Each family expects to hold a similar party each summer. They tend to be casual affairs, with guests arriving on bikes and wearing the latest fashions from Target and Banana Republic rather than pulling up in Maseratis and wearing Dolce & Gabbana, as in the Hamptons.
Often, smaller gatherings that are entirely impromptu occur at that time of evening when mothers go in search of misplaced children and end up staying wherever they find them to watch the sun set over a glass of wine.
“There’s no scene here,” said Mrs. Waller, who, as president of the Associates Committee of the Society of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, knows a scene when she sees one. “There might be a fund-raiser for the local church or Save Barnegat Bay, but usually it’s just a party at someone’s house. It’s nice not to have that kind of pressure.”
Mr. DeMarco got a rowboat for Father’s Day, which for $5 can be chained on the shores of a nearby lake, and on weekends, he and the girls take it out for a spin. They bring along treats for the ducks, which are so spoiled they waddle up to the window of any car idled by the lake and beg for food. “It’s great to be out here with them,” he said. “We’re all more relaxed, and I know that Kelly likes it out here so I don’t feel so badly about all the travel I have to do for work.”
Home alone in the city, he tends to work longer hours and just have dinner at his desk. Sometimes, he said, he goes to work out or grabs dinner with a friend. “All the talk about bachelor life is just that, talk,” he said. “It’s a little lonely.”
During the week, Mr. Waller also spends more time than usual at work. He often heads to JG Melon, the Upper East Side burger joint, for drinks and dinner, with other abandoned dads, his sister-in-law or friends. He calls Mrs. Waller sometime after 9 p.m., and by 10 p.m., they are both in bed.
Mrs. Waller also rarely goes back into the city, but when she does, she is always surprised by the way her husband has made their apartment his own. “A chair will be in a different place because he likes it better there, and I never realized that he wanted to move it,” she said. “It’s always interesting to see how we have compromised with each other without even knowing that’s what we were doing.”
This month, the Waller children are going into business selling the eggplants, squash, celery, string beans, strawberries and other natural delights they’ve tended this summer. They’re calling their stand We Be Growin and set it up along the street. “Last year, we made a hundred bucks!” Wick said, though his mom recalled a more modest profit. “I think we can do even better this year.”
An air of somberness infects Sunday evenings, brought about by the impending departure of dads. Most leave after dinner, their cars driving up the Garden State Parkway looking ever so much like a migrating metal herd. But some hold out until the wee hours of the next morning, catching one last sunrise as its turns the ocean into a sheet of aluminum foil.
Mr. DeMarco shares the final meal of the weekend with his family, which he says is usually a rather subdued dinner, and heads back to the city around 9 p.m. “That way, I get home with just enough time to fall into bed and go to sleep,” he said. “And then the whole schedule starts all over again.”
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