SWIMMING AT SUPPERTIME: Seasons of Delight on the Wrong Side of Buzzard's Bay
Carol Wasserman, . . Crown, $23 (208pp) ISBN 978-0-609-60840-1
"Except for the crickets, there is exquisite silence here in the bright weeks after everyone goes home," Wasserman writes in this touching memoir of life as a year-rounder in salty, fog-blown Weweantic, Mass. Her village is on the mainland, across the bay from Cape Cod, "on the wrong side of Buzzard's Bay"—a place where "no one thinks themselves above those who collect empties to earn a couple of bucks." Bypassed by an interstate that links the mainland to the Cape, Weweantic still has some summer people and new settlers, who Wasserman makes gentle fun of. They are "The People Who Moved Here by Mistake"—the well-to-do city folk from, say, Cambridge, who want to remake the town into a smaller version of that hip, intellectual community. But the recently widowed Wasserman and her friends, like the majority of the townspeople, are poor, making a living as carpenters, house cleaners, grocery baggers and babysitters. Hard times come after the season: some young families spend the winter in a cheap rental cottage unequipped for the squalls that blow across the bay. Despite the hardships, Wasserman, who has told some of these stories on NPR's
Reviewed on: 03/04/2002
Genre: Nonfiction
Paperback - 208 pages - 978-1-4000-4690-4