Grew Up With Money
Amy Day Wilkinson “You could tell she grew up with money,” my sister said recently at the beach. We were in the living room of an oceanfront house our parents had rented. I’d driven down from the city with my family— husband and two teens—and my sister, Penelope, had driven down from Massachusetts with hers—husband and preteen. Penny, her eleven-year-old daughter, and our mother had just gotten back from a walk on the beach road. On one side were ocean-facing mansions like ours, swollen pastel homes on tiny sandy lots, and on the other were similarly large houses interspersed with access streets, also lined with houses. The streets were named for Southern states up the Eastern seaboard—Florida Ave., Georgia Ave., South Carolina Ave., etc.—and led to the four-lane, divided Coastal Highway where one finds surf shops, ice cream windows, crab shacks, seashell stores, caramel corn slingers, all variety of minigolf. “You could tell she grew up with money,” my sister said, referring to a woman they’d seen on their walk. My sister, two years my junior, forty-six to my forty-eight, is into wellness. And, quite frankly, starving herself, though she has other language to describe her miniscule eating practices. She’s angular in ways she never was as a teen or a twenty-something. Her clothes are flowing, italicized. Natural fibers, earth tones. Our first day out on the beach—me in my Lands’ End black one-piece;