Upstairs in the penthouse, three floors above us, a radiologist and his wife were having a July 4^th party. We had dressed ourselves for poolside East Hampton or perhaps Southampton because those were the leftover clothes we had. I wore red crepe pants and a St. Laurent jacket and Edward wore white pants and one of those thin linen Ben Silver shirts, his was lavender, that weekend men wear at the east end of Long Island. He did not have a cable knit cashmere sweater draped over his shoulders like a talis, or, worse, tied like a scarf. That was because it was hot, even with the sea winds blowing in far above the summer beach. Somehow, even with the sleeves of my white silk jacket rolled up and my red pants and giant platforms, I did not feel out of place.

The host’s sister had been an LAPD sergeant, her husband was in Iraq for his second tour of duty, now working with General David Petraeus. The man I was talking to had retired from the Drug Enforcement Administration where he worked with the Clinton White House—Hillary had a foul mouth he said—and now ran a detective business. His stepdaughter, a former Washington cop, was working for Homeland Security, but didn’t like it as much as kicking in doors with a gun in her hand, or so her mother told me.

“I testified for the Senate Judiciary Committee on quaaludes,” I said, trying to make conversation with the ex-drug man, “Birch Bayh’s committee.”

Yes, the small shelf of books I had written or been part of included a thick green paperback whimsically titled Hearing Before the Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency Before the Judiciary Committee of the Senate 1973 on Methaqualone (Quaalude, Sopor) Traffic, Abuse and Regulation. Senator Bayh had questioned me on my articles on juice bars in New York magazine, places where kids who legally could not drink instead took Quaaludes with fruit juice

In the middle of the questioning, Ted Kennedy had come into the hearing and given me one of his big full-of-mischief smiles. I had written about him right after Chappaquadick when he was running for reelection to the Senate seat from Massachusetts and had traveled with him all over the state and a little swing out west when he had considered running for President. I had made an indelible impression on him by wearing five dresses, one on top of the other, one day in the Massachusetts cold. He never forgot that and always introduced me as the girl who wore five dresses. He had signed his book In Critical Condition to me “I will never be happy on the sea, in the air or on fire unless I am with you,” a daring and untrue statement, but very kind and surely proof, even in the pre-digital age that he was not quite ready to be President.

I did not mention my minor French criminal record to the drug man. Just off a plane, (like all criminals, I had an excuse) I had been caught shoplifting a suede miniskirt at the Galeries Lafayette and arrested in Paris long ago. A stern older woman in a navy trenchcoat clamped her hand on my shoulder and did not let go. I was marched to a police station and signed a confession. Then the inspector had led me through corridors right out of The Castle and up and down stairs and, on one staircase, had grabbed me and kissed me, with tongue, much to my horror. I feel the grotesque “French” kiss planted on a trembling young American girl wiped out my crime completely. Ever since then, I have obeyed the law. That day I stumbled to the first café and cried into my Coca Cola, which I had to hold with two hands.

Out on the terrace, eating our honeyed chicken wings, we looked down at the families staggering up from the beach, sandy, salty, their flesh reddened despite the sunblock so that if you touched them, it would make a small white dimple in the swollen red.

We, the lifers, kept to our apartments with their arrival and hunkered down until the last Grand Cherokee crammed with deflated sand toys and burnt flesh pulled out. The garbage bins overflowed with the renters’ spent sparklers and crushed Bud Lite cans. The radiologist emerged with his surfboard.

Celebrating American Independence Day had come late to Northern Florida, British in 1776 and remaining so until 1821. Here, on July Fourth, they once burned the effigies of John Hancock and Samuel Adams just because they had signed the Declaration of Independence. Now all was forgiven.

There was a little pop down on the beach which meant the fireworks were about to start. I left the party to keep Kukla company. Kukla and I did not like fireworks at all. By the time I got downstairs, the Ritz had begun to set off its blasts, exploding the night sky above a quiet ocean, sending the pregnant turtles back into the sea and the gopher tortoises deeper into their dune burrows.

In our darkened bedroom, to the flashes, the gunshot pops and whistling screams outside, as Kukla cowered and quivered, I watched a rerun of the John Adams miniseries.

The Americans among the French were forced to put on a show. Both diplomats were out of place: Ben Franklin, unwigged, unpowdered, brown-skinned among the painted faces; John Adams, unable to speak the language, horrified by the manners, morals, and customs. Was this not what we were—something softer than the law enforcement crowd, something apart from the other beach people?

If we didn’t quite fit in here we hadn’t quite fit in the last time we wore these clothes either. We would not wear our knockabout Connecticut clothes to East Hampton, but planned costumes that we put on for a borrowed weekend. There had been something false about us then, out where people were very rich and had gotten spectacularly richer. They had driven away my sister-in-law Mary Anne, a descendant of Judge John Mulford, one of the eight Puritan families that founded East Hampton in 1648.

In New York, my mother’s dog, lunging for a new companion hired for the weekend, had pulled my mother down and she had fallen. I had warned her but she never listened, finding it impossible to take advice from a child, however old, especially a child who WAS NOT THERE.