The setting for some of my most treasured childhood memories is a one-bedroom condo that stood 75 feet from a white sand beach, overlooking the absurdly blue Caribbean. To my sister and me, it was heaven, with Murphy beds — the coolest gizmos ever — folding down at night and disappearing each day.
To my parents, as with so many American families, the condo was a symbol of postwar success, a tropical retreat where a young family could make memories. But as families age and transform over the decades, those memories can turn a place that was once an escape into its own type of burden.
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The story begins in 1968, when I was 13 and we left Long Island to vacation with a family of lime green lizards in a bare-bones motel next to a windy beach on the east end of St. Thomas, in the U.S. Virgin Islands. My father had recently purchased a secondhand propeller plane with a cruising range of 1,487 nautical miles, making it possible to fly from New York with just one refueling stop.
My father, Jerry, grew up in a working-class immigrant Jewish family in Brooklyn, went to Harvard Law School on scholarship, then flew Navy air transport in World War II before going into commercial real estate. He was a master of selective frugality. When white leather go-go boots became the rage among fourth grade girls, my father insisted I get plastic knockoffs, but he didn’t think twice about flying to Block Island for a tuna on rye.
My mother, Mickie, was beautiful, with short, blond wavy hair — a gift from Lady Clairol — and a wide smile with perfect teeth. She was petite and svelte, but nevertheless swore by Weight Watchers with its low-fat cottage cheese, sprinkled with cinnamon and Sweet’n Low and accompanied by a cool, refreshing glass of Tab. She was one of six women in her Columbia Law School class in the 1940s. But after rejections from all-male law firms, she sold hats at Macy’s, then retired to be Mommy to my sister and me. She channeled her brilliance into presidencies of the P.T.A. and League of Women Voters.
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