Teddy has been trying on khaki shorts this week, in anticipation of his first-ever proper job. He is to be a runner at the snack bar at the Maidstone Club this summer, along with his bestie, Leo, and the excitement is mounting as their snack-bar training session in early May approaches. Another classmate is starting as a caddie at the club this year, and a fourth has been hired as a beach boy. Never did I expect my son to express enthusiasm over a pair of khaki shorts, but he’s a business-minded lad of 14 with working papers in hand and understands that his career as a great man of commerce begins here and now. Do you think I kid? I only sort of kid. Watch out, Wall Street.
As I understand it, Da Boyz will be delivering snacks — burgers, fish chowder I’m given to understand, club sandwiches, presumably? — from the snack bar to the patio tables or pool-deck loungers where club members sun themselves. (In my mind’s eye, because I’ve never been to the club myself — not during daylight swimming-pool hours, that is — I see them lounging in the boxy swimwear and silk kimonos of the 1920s, with painted-paper parasols; my visual reference for Maidstone attire being the social-register photos in the Star archive.) Teddy joins a long line of East Hampton boys with summer jobs at the club, stretching way back 132 years to the days of knickerbockers and Knickerbocker Glories. His own grandfather worked there in the summer in high school, if I’m not mistaken. We only live a mile away and, if traffic weren’t so bad, he could ride his bike. The jury is still out on the subject of biking down Dunemere Lane in August.
Side note to Maidstone Club management: I swear to God that Teddy’s mother won’t write another word about the club, ever again! The secrets of a teenage snack-bar runner will remain sacrosanct.
Nettie will be working once more at the Amagansett Beach Association at Indian Wells, also at the snack bar, some 2.5 miles of powdery-white sand east along the ocean. She has declared the A.B.A. the “best job she ever had.” She hasn’t had that many jobs, mind you, but really warmed to the kitchen camaraderie and the smiling-chitchat-with-customers element of snack bar work. She wears her Exeter T-shirt and kind ladies congratulate her on her education. She prepares salads, makes change in the till, hands out many French fries, shows off her excellent manners, and mops up in late afternoon when lunch service ends.
I think the reason I never had a summer job at one of the beach clubs, myself, is because by the time I was of working age, I had decided I wouldn’t go anywhere in shorts, much less a bathing suit, and had become something of a nightcrawler. I was too pale for beach club employment.
My own career in the working world began at the Amagansett Farmers Market, where, like Nettie, I made good because I had decent manners and understood the correctness of looking the customers in the eye when taking their order for blueberry muffins. Despite an incident in which I was threatened with near-firing because I gave free jelly beans to a little boy of 6 or 7 who came in daily asking for jelly beans, I was promoted from the bakery counter to the heady heights of the cheese department. I was 14. I served crottin au poivre to Lauren Bacall and when I ground fresh peanuts in the peanut butter machine for Paul Newman, he asked for a taste, and when I held up the scoop, looked me in the eyes with his icy blues and, holding my gaze, said the immortal words: “I can take the peanut from your hand.”
I could judge at a glance who had been, as the saying goes, “brought up in a barn” — and, mind you, that’s a slander on milk cows not on farmhands — because the worst and most Hamptons-y patrons, the obnoxious ones, the gauche ones, would look anywhere but your face when issuing their orders. Nota bene. There is no scorn like the scorn of a shop assistant for a customer with money but no manners. Everything I understand about social class in America I learned over a tray of cinnamon sticky buns.
At 15, I moved from the Amagansett Farmers Market a quarter-mile west down Main Street for a job the next summer at the Coach Factory Store. It was where Organic Krush is now, where Mary’s Marvelous used to be. These were the days when Coach was still a New York leather-goods company specializing in handbags made from, as we explained to the customers, a thick “saddle leather.” We sold a special saddle soap for keeping the leather conditioned and used the word, new to me, “patina” to describe the desirability of how the bags looked when they had a few years’ use on them, like worn-in Levi’s 501s, better with age. I doubt any major labels are still marketing their handbags by extolling how they age. Nothing ages well anymore.
Somewhere around this house is a burgundy saddle-leather Coach briefcase from the 1980s that I bought with my employee discount for my mom, presenting it on her birthday in September at the end of a long and sleepless summer. By 15, I had become a regular at the Stephen Talkhouse and rarely got to bed before 3 or 4 a.m. I’d hitchhike home and close my eyes as the bobwhite began shouting “bob-white! bob-white!” in the thicket of wild blueberry and honeysuckle at the foot of our sandy yard in Promised Land.
Also somewhere around here is a white-leather, genuine vintage Coach shoulder bag designed by Bonnie Cashin in 1969 with a kiss-lock kangaroo pocket that I found, to my astonishment, in the late 1990s at the Southampton Hospital Foundation Thrift Shop when I was an editor at Vogue. You don’t find stray Cashin-Carry bags in thrift shops anymore, either. They sell for a cool grand online at theRealReal.
The only disappointing thing about my children’s upcoming snack bar summer is that they are both employed at private clubs to which their mother does not belong. I will not have the pleasure of planting myself under a patio umbrella to lick a popsicle and watch them work, reveling in their magnificent trajectory. I trust Teddy will learn the art of a firm handshake, nevertheless, and I’m also sure he will be thrilled at my absence. Beach boys, snack bar runners, and caddies don’t need their mother hanging around.