Land's End: A Walk in Provincetown (7 page)

Eating and Drinking

P
ROVINCETOWN IS, OF
course, part of New England, a region of hard-knobbed hills and low mountains rising up from a cold ocean amenable only to crustaceans, squid, and some of the hardier, less glamorous finned fish: cods and blues, flounder and bass; fish that tend toward practical shapes, the torpedo or the platter; fish with powerful jaws and blunt, businesslike heads and sleek strong bodies of gunmetal, pewter, or muddy brown. The soil around there produces almost nothing delicate—no fragile or thin-skinned fruits, no tentative greens that would expire in a cold snap, hardly anything that can reasonably be eaten raw. Cranberries and pumpkins do well; bivalves flourish in the chill waters. It is most agreeable to that which has developed thick rinds or shells. If New England has been, from its inception, home to preternaturally determined human settlers, to those who equate hardship with virtue, its Puritan and Calvinist roots are apparent in its diet, which runs not only, of necessity, to that which must have the toughness boiled out of it before it can be served but which tends to eschew, by choice, any spices more flamboyant than salt and pepper. When a friend of mine moved from New Orleans to Boston, she said one night in exasperation, after another bland and sensible meal, “You notice they didn’t call it New
France
. You notice they didn’t call it New
Italy”

Fresh fish is Provincetown’s most prominent glory, and most fabulous among its fish, to me, are the clams and oysters that come from the tidal flats of Wellfleet, two towns away. A Wellfleet oyster, especially in the colder months, is supernal: firm and immaculately saline, a little mouthful of the Atlantic itself. One autumn several years ago when I was staying for a few days with a friend, she came home in the afternoon with a bucket each of clams and oysters she had dug from the flats in Wellfleet, bearded with bright brown seaweed, and a huge bouquet of wild irises, dark as bruises, with tight, cogent little blossoms so unlike the paler, more ephemeral irises sold in flower shops it was hard to believe they were the same flower at all. It is possible to stride out into the landscape and return not only with dinner but with flowers for the table as well.

Fresh local fish is not, however, as abundant in the restaurants of Provincetown as you might expect it to be. A century or more of excess has depleted the surrounding ocean, and much of what can still be coaxed from the water is bedded in ice and shipped elsewhere. There are only two or three raw bars in town, where you can actually procure shellfish forked out of the sand nearby. Fried clams are easier to find, and while a proper clam roll—crisply fried clams with briny, gelatinous bellies served on a grilled hot dog bun—is a marvelous thing, the precise origins and even the pristine freshness of the clams in question are not matters of great concern. Squid and scallops, among the less endangered inhabitants of these waters, are mysteriously hard to find in restaurants in town, and you’re at least as likely to be offered fresh cod in New York or Philadelphia as you are in Provincetown.

To whatever extent a discernible local cuisine exists, it is Portuguese. The Portuguese food most common in New England runs to soups and stews, whatever can be simmered until its fibrousness or bitterness begins to yield. Kale soup studded with circles of linguiça, a Portuguese sausage, is a staple, as are dark, tomato-based squid stews and salt cod in various forms. Some of the local Portuguese families still dry cod in their yards, either laid out flat on the ground or hung from the limbs of trees. But Portuguese food, too, is increasingly hard to find, at least in part because the restaurants of Provincetown have, for some time now, aspired to a certain pan-American sophistication that tends to involve the same pasta and chicken, the same tuna and salmon and beef, that you can get just about anywhere. Generally speaking, you are best advised while in Provincetown to forget any protracted search for indigenous foods and just eat and drink whatever most appeals to you. You need not seek out the rare or quintessential; no one back home will be disappointed if you’ve failed to taste something famous that’s made in a seaside cavern and aged ten years in kelp, or that’s been retrieved by specially trained ferrets from the upper branches of particular trees, or that secretes a deadly venom unless harvested at the apogee of the full moon. You are free.

P
ROOF OF
G
OLD

You think, living in this town, no one’s at war
because of how we all respect savage flowerings
for instance, or the queer biker who walks a stranger
to the curb because the wind is lit up from some strange
cellar to make us late. We think we belong
where we are better known
.

I ride my bike. I ride my bike through speeds
like flavors, unzip the mile-long zipper that cinches
the street and sad bay together
.
Fletcher named it the Bay of Take What’s Left
.
But I have seen mornings when all the bay could do
was give nothing but proof of gold
waving. Gold, going on without us
.

M
ICHAEL
K
LEIN

Acquisitions

W
HEN YOU REACH
the middle of town, you will see, if it is not the dead of winter, that there is a lot for sale. Like any tourist town, Provincetown needs you to buy things, many things, so it can live. The human impulse to shop is, of course, eternal and universal, one of our identifying characteristics as a species, and I confess to a queasy but ardent devotion to the search for magical objects among the gross output of the civilized world. I’ve never entirely shed my sense of shame about material-ism—if I were a true and poetic spirit, if I were the hero of the story I’d most like to tell about myself, wouldn’t I go to art museums with no thought of the gift shop?—but have long abandoned hope of transcending my own urge to search out and acquire. It’s hard to know what to do or say about this endless desire, our collective urge to feather and refeather our nests, to return bearing the golden fleece. Here we are (we who are lucky enough), in our houses, among our things, and for most of us there is always the tantalizing possibility of something else out there—the shell, the goblet, the golden slipper. Here we are standing before the relics of a saint or the fossilized bones of a mythical monster, moved by the sight and wondering, at the same time, if there may be a postcard or tote bag or snow globe waiting, an addition to our ongoing collection of memento mori; something for us to have.

Provincetown’s retail offerings are narrow in one sense (it is difficult to buy a proper hairbrush there, or good stationery, or a pair of dress shoes) and in another sense vast and rich. Treasures abound, though they are hidden among an enormous amount of questionable merchandise. It is as depressingly easy to procure a T-shirt emblazoned with a picture of kittens in bathing suits, a rubber seagull on a string, ugly jewelry, or a “personalized” coffee mug as it is in most beach towns. The town is prone to mysterious retail proclivities that evolve over the years. For quite some time there were a dozen or more shops that sold leather goods—in the business district you were never more than a hundred yards from some place offering an array of leather belts, bags, and jackets. The goods didn’t vary much from store to store; each sold variations on the same essential articles: leather knapsacks and cowboy boots; tooled belts with big silver buckles; unsupple, medium-quality leather jackets that never fully shed the smell of their tanning. Over time the leather shops gradually disappeared and have since been replaced by an equally bewildering profusion of stores that sell esoteric household goods. It is now as easy to buy a pair of sporty Italian salt and pepper shakers or a set of wooden sake boxes as it once was to get a black leather jacket with a half-dozen zippered openings. I can only imagine that the customers of Provincetown have matured along with the times and that a certain general fantasy about outlaw status has been replaced by one of stylish domestic prosperity.

Provincetown also boasts several stores so locally vital I feel I should tell you about them in detail. All of the following are, heroically, open year-round, weekdays as well as weekends.

A
DAMS
P
HARMACY

Adams Pharmacy has been in business for over a century and was, until recently, the only drugstore in town. It is full of a sepia-toned version of any drugstore’s smell—cosmetics and ointments combined with a subtle odor of powdery cleanliness. It has, over the decades, been halfheartedly modernized. Wood-grain Masonite paneling covers its walls; fluorescent tubes hum on its hundred-year-old wooden ceiling. It is a small hole punched into the present, through which you can see the past—not the preserved, romanticized past of faux general stores and various Ye Olde enterprises but the shaggy genuine article, more than a little dog-eared and moth-eaten, the great-grandmother of the monolithic modern drugstores that abound everywhere in North America. Adams Pharmacy is clean enough and prosperous enough—its shelves are well stocked, it does not reek of decline—but unlike its descendants, with their scoured surfaces and perfect light, it has not shed its sense of our collective meagerness in the face of mortal processes. It is palpably stalwart but puny, and although its pharmacists dispense the same drugs you could get anywhere else, it is more difficult to believe that they will do much good. Adams Pharmacy belongs to a different period in the ongoing history of healing; its roots are not in magical machinery but in artificial limbs, in desperate possibilities ground to dark powders with mortars and pestles, in liquids meant to be poured into handkerchiefs and inhaled by wives with nervous conditions.

The pharmacy’s main attraction is its soda fountain, unaltered since at least the mid-1940s. The fountain is staffed by a succession of buxom, semisullen young girls who make a good frappe (the New England term for milkshake). The fountain’s cloudy chrome stools are perennially occupied by middle-aged or elderly people who have lived in town most or all of their lives, dressed in finery of their own (a plaid Carhartt jacket, a bright crocheted cap), usually sipping wan coffee from cone-shaped white paper cups set in brown plastic holders. As you walk through the aisles, you can look over and see their faces in the yellowed mirror behind the fountain, under the big old-fashioned Bulova clock with the red second hand big as a conductor’s baton, that makes a soft whirring sound as the seconds disappear.

T
HE
A&P

Provincetown has several fine little grocery stores—Angel Foods, on the East End, is particularly good—but in addition to shopping there, I maintain a perverse allegiance to the massive A&P on Shankpainter Road. In the abstract there is nothing good about this store. It was built on wetlands—what was once home to herons and migrating dragonflies is now a parking lot and a big Olde Cape Cod—style strip mall, replete with faux wood siding and faux dormers, that contains a bank, a liquor store, and the A&P. The A&P should, by all rights, be boycotted. I’m slightly ashamed to admit that I go there at least once every time I’m in town.

My devotion stems, in part, from the fact that I live most of the time in New York City, where these gigantic grocery stores are virtually unknown. I shop in corner markets and delicatessens; if it weren’t for the A&P in Provincetown, I would have no idea of the number of breakfast cereals produced in America, or of the full range of pork by-products. But more important to me, this standard-issue grocery emporium, being located in Provincetown, is pervaded by a quality I can only call surreal. It is filled, during the summer months, not only with the thriving heterosexual families for whom such a store is intended, but with butches, muscle boys in bathing suits, gay families of various kinds, and the occasional drag queen. Many of the checkout clerks, hired for the summer, check groceries by day and do drag by night. On duty they are brisk and efficient, if more prone to sarcasm than most checkout clerks in most A&Ps. There they stand, every summer, ringing up purchases and putting them in bags, bathed in the fluorescent light—that deeply familiar, shadowless light that fills big stores everywhere; light that is not so much illumination as it is the total obliteration of dark. There they stand, calmly accepting money and making change, ordinary-looking men for the most part, not young, not prosperous, prone to crew cuts and potbellies, with bits of glitter sparking in their hair or on their fingernails, with hints of kohl not quite removed from around their eyes.

M
ARINE
S
PECIALTIES

Marine Specialties is a store of such surpassing idiosyncrasy that I can’t say, in a simple sentence or two, what exactly it is that it sells. It is a cavern of sorts, something like the genie’s cave in the story of Aladdin and the lamp, if by way of treasure the genie had accumulated scented candles (vanilla being especially well represented), laboratory beakers, safari hats, combat boots, ossified starfish, wool sailor’s jerseys, vintage pajamas, wind chimes, seconds from the Gap and Banana Republic, rubber balls, Red Cross blankets, pea coats, wool undershirts, camouflage pants, and a hoard of World War II artifacts, up to and including unopened C-rations. It would not be entirely surprising to see stalactites growing from the ceiling toward the back of the shop, dripping on the more elderly merchandise.

Marine Specialties sells more apparel than anything else, but really it just has whatever it has at any given time. It is a repository of the overlooked, the lost, the surplus, the irregular, the no longer needed, and the outmoded. I still wear a pair of orange-and-black-striped pajama bottoms I bought there seven or eight years ago. My friend Dennis owns a glass bottle I bought there for him, prominently labeled
HYDROCHLORIC ACID
.

Merchandise moves in and out, but some of it takes up what appears to be permanent residence. Certain eccentric parkas, hats, and other items have been there since I first came twenty years ago, still bravely offering themselves for sale. It is hard to find anything that costs more than thirty dollars, and most items are under ten. On the upper, unreachable shelves stands a jumble of random objects (kiddie cars, pennants, piles of ancient hats) and a series of bronze-painted busts of American presidents, the obscure as well as the legendary ones, looking blankly down like carved saints. Marine Specialties is always full of the same light, a brackish yellow-brown, and of the same smell, composed as far as I can tell of mildew, dust, human oils, and an ineffable something I can only describe as age. It is a museum of the disregarded and overlooked; it is the Land That Time
Meant to Have
Forgotten but was not allowed to.