Hurts So Good

It's a fabulous hostess who presents her beach guest with a nightgown to sleep in.

Pru had invited me to visit her during her week in Nags Head and since I am constitutionally unable to turn down an invitation to the seaside, I obliged today.

The UCI reared its encroaching head almost immediately when I got on Route 5 only to be stopped shortly by a line of policemen blocking traffic east. So, after driving 15 minutes east, I had to turn around and retrace my drive 15 miles west.

Once restored to my usual Route 460, I passed a stuffed shirt with its arm pointing to a sign reading "Hoarder Sale." I can only imagine.

Surprising license plate because it was N.C. and not RVA: "Inkfreak."

Sure sign that we're post-Labor Day and not high season summer: "Watermelons 3/$5. Next they'll be giving them away.

Arriving to find most of the house's inhabitants at the beach, I did a quick tour of the four-story rental before walking out on the deck off the bedroom I'll share with Pru. Down below at the backyard pool, I see a girl in a bikini sunbathing with no top.

Welcome to the beach.

I soon meet the bare-chested one when the sun goes in and she gives up tanning her breasts to walk down to the beach with me. There I meet the other house denizens enjoying a glorious September afternoon by the ocean.

They tell me that compared to the past few days, today's weather is not nearly as sunny or hot, but having just arrived, I think it's gorgeous and set up my chair under one of the umbrellas. Pimm's Cups and pitchers of margaritas are already being served on a colorful tray. Estrogen is rampant.

After I hear about the ocean being cooler than yesterday (hard to believe once I walk down there) and how the breeze was off the land the first few days, I realize I need to move. The drive down has left my limbs in need of a good stretching.

That, and it's the ideal way to ease into a house full of people, only three of whom I know.

Leaving them to their cocktails, I set off down the beach toward Jeanette's Pier, appreciating the less-crowded beaches of September, ducking under fishing lines (one particularly friendly duo said they'd pulled in some drum) and enjoying periodic detours into the very warm, very low tide water.

The pier turns out to have been a tad further than I'd guessed, but I'm the last person who's going to complain about a four-mile walk on the beach on a lovely, warm day. I know Fall is coming and I'm not happy about it.

When it comes time to make dinner, Pru directs the troops like the general she was born to be. Maybe it's my recently arrived status, but my only job is to sit at the kitchen island, drink Sancerre and point out what she's really saying when she politely condescends to one of her minions.

I wander out on the deck while she's grilling salmon and look down to see a girl in a bikini stretched out in the hot tub, looking blissful.

It's only when she comes upstairs that I learn that on entering the tub, she'd dropped her lighter in the tub. Unwilling to get out, she'd soaked without a cig, the whole goal of going down originally. I point out that she wound up with an unexpected experience because she'd never have been in the tub without smoking otherwise.

"Yea, I guess you're right. I wouldn't have." Let me guide you, grasshopper.

Restaurant talk follows when one of the women, a server at a recently-reviewed restaurant, bemoans how her bosses have handled the negative observances of the review (embarrassingly defensive) online. It's a shame when the employees have more sense than the managers.

Directing the conversation and interacting with each other in the overly-familiar way Pru and I do results in one of the women sighing. "I can't wait until I'm..." and I rush to finish her sentence. "Older like us?"

"...as smart as you guys are for having had so many experiences," she says, perhaps back-pedaling, perhaps wiser than she appears.

It's going on 10 before dinner winds down entirely and then Pru and I move to the big deck facing the ocean, where we have the occasional guest wander by for a chat. Cards Against Humanity is suggested, but we decline to join, far preferring to talk about why we read what we do, what we would do if we had a week at the beach with no other guests (pure indulgence) and why Christie Brinkley could possibly be dating John Mellencamp.

Somewhere in there, she tells me she's the best friend ever and that she has a gift for me. Sitting together on the rocking Adirondack double-seater, she presents me with a navy and pink nightgown. "It looked like you," she says, as if she has to explain why she got it for me.

Stylistically, it does look surprisingly like a nightgown I had when I was 25. It's adorable. Speaking of, the last time someone gave me a nightgown was 1985 and I still have it.

I'm not a hoarder, but experience teaches a smart woman to hang on to some things, cute nightgowns and smart friends among them.