Track 25: Holiday House by Ash Trebisacci
In 2013, Taylor Swift bought Holiday House, a historic seaside mansion in my hometown of Westerly, Rhode Island. Growing up in this tiny corner of the state, my years were defined by the arrivals and departures of people like Taylor—the summer people. From the time I was old enough to notice the beach traffic filling Atlantic Avenue, I was constantly aware of them, and the ways they were separate from me—separated by the 4.5 miles of backroads that wind between picture-perfect Watch Hill village and the rest of the town, separated by the millions of dollars we did or didn’t have in our bank accounts, separated by the fact that I lived here year round while they had the luxury of leaving at the end of summer.
Taylor arrived a few years after my friends and I had officially grown up and moved away—after Emily stopped working at the boutique on Bay Street and Kate stopped wrangling kids at the carousel and Jen stopped serving ice cream at St. Clair’s. When we heard the news, we were more than a little dumbfounded. We read and reread the news articles, texted each other in shared disbelief, searched the internet for the answer to our question of: “Why here?” What was so desirable about this place, the hometown we often felt suffocated by, fed up with, restless in, that spoke to Taylor? Was there something we had been missing all those years? How could this little town—one that couldn’t even contain us normal people—possibly be enough for her?
Equal with our dismay was our sense of pride in knowing that she chose us over flashier places—Westerly over Newport, Rhode Island over the Cape, New England over The Hamptons. We harbored a deep feeling that, despite all its flaws, our town was special. Here she was anointing us the chosen coastal community for millennial celebrities. Soon, we moved from: “Who would ever buy a house here, in this boring town?” to: “Who wouldn’t want a house here, on this gorgeous slice of ocean?”
Of course, this was not the first time someone famous graced us with their seasonal presence. In my many summers cashiering at the local market, I sold fried chicken to Conan O’Brien and grinders to Ryan Murphy’s parents, who overheard me excitedly chattering about Glee and remarked “my son writes that show!” I will never live down the day when I rang up Sandra Day O’Connor for a copy of the New York Times before learning we had already sold out (she left with a conciliatory USA Today).
Until Taylor, though, no one really felt relevant to my friends and me. No one else our age chose to come here of their own accord; rather, they came by virtue of family money or tradition. No one who moved to town was a Grammy award-winning singer/songwriter continuously topping the charts, a star whose songs we knew by heart: whose ballads we'd cried through, whose anthems we'd belted at the top of our lungs as we drove around the same streets she would now frequent. No one, until Taylor, brought all of their equally famous friends to visit and took them to the same restaurants where we spent every weekend in high school.
When Taylor released her surprise album, folklore, in July of 2020, it didn’t take long for fans to identify the “saltbox house on the coast” that she sings about in track three. While the gossip blogs are blowing up about “betty,” this is the one my local friends are Tweeting about: “She finally did it! She finally wrote about us.” Coronavirus means this is the first summer I haven’t returned home to the beach, and I find myself listening to the song over and over again, mining it for glimpses of the waves, rocks, and sand. In part it’s historical fiction, recalling the antics of Rebekah Harkness, the famous woman who owned Holiday House long before Taylor did; in part, it’s an assertion of Taylor’s own fame—her own antics, her power, and how it's all perceived.
I’ve never heard of Rebekah Harkness before, but I look her up and I love what I read—a woman who conducted ballet rehearsals in her backyard, dyed a neighbor’s cat green, and made a ruckus. I wonder how I could have grown up here not knowing this and then I remember: it isn’t my history; Rebekah isn’t my hometown girl any more than Taylor is. My history takes place just down the road, where you can’t see the ocean from your bedroom. I realize, listening to the song again, that I lived the first 22 years of my life in the gap between lyrics, during the 50 years that “Holiday House sat quietly on that beach” before, as Taylor brashly declares, “it was bought by me.”
The song is called “the last great American dynasty,” referencing the Standard Oil fortune that Rebekah squandered and the place Taylor sees herself occupying in music history. You could say that my high school best friend is from a kind of Westerly dynasty: what my grandfather would call a “top shelf” family. Well-known and well-respected. Very, very Italian. Days after Taylor drops folklore, my friend posts on Facebook about how her grandfather did the electrical work in Holiday House. Her family’s mark is on the place where Taylor writes songs and hosts parties and takes selfies with her cat, ghostly fingerprints of where my friend’s ancestors crossed paths, even briefly, with the rich and famous. I wish Taylor could see her post, the way it seems to say: “see how my dynasty literally built yours, how we made yours possible.”
I want so badly to see the town I know in Taylor’s lyrics—my friend’s grandfather and my classmates and me. I imagine we’re the people she refers to: the “they” who observe and question and gossip about the goings on in her mansion on the hill. I know the local history well enough to know the people she's actually singing about: the old money, upper class summer visitors who would have been thoroughly scandalized by Rebekah's free-wheeling ways. But I know, too, the ways that the town's year round residents function in the same way: as onlookers, keeping tabs, quietly judging anyone who doesn’t quite fit. Growing up here, I felt the same claustrophobia that Rebekah did, even if I didn't have the means to act out on the same scale.
When Taylor moves to town, my friends and I burn with the knowledge of how close we came to our own brushes with fame, but we’re also aware of the particular roles we would have played in her summer romps. We’ve patrolled parking lots, took out the trash, sold bags of popcorn and bottles of sunscreen. We’ve pretended we were tourists—eating at the Ocean House hotel a few doors down from Holiday House and walking through the hallways with feigned confidence like we were staying there. We’ve used the extra soft towelettes in the bathroom and marveled at how anyone could become accustomed to this level of luxury. How people like Taylor could relish these joys, free from the awareness of the work that went into curating them. After eating lobster rolls that cost a few hours’ pay, we’ve paraded off the porch deck with a wink for our star football player who worked as a valet, silently saluting him for not driving these people’s BMWs directly into the ocean.
Of course, there were times when these tensions broke through to the surface. In the summer of 2013, we feuded with Taylor over who had a right to the beach behind her house, decrying the rock wall she built separating “her beach” from the rest of the shoreline. And yet, we’ll let her have this: her voice in our speakers on a summer night as we cruise into Watch Hill to catch the sunset, this latest song playing over and over again in my headphones. With Taylor on our turf, we can’t help but feel like we’re in on the secret, and that’s a feeling I (and I suspect many of my fellow local fans) can’t help but love.
After so many summers, we are practiced at the insider/outsider dynamic that Taylor sings about, that Rebekah Harkness must have felt, when “they said, there goes the last great American dynasty.” We know what it’s like to grapple with being invisible and exposed at the same time, how it feels to grow up in a place but not always be at home in it. How we appear in this song is akin to how we feel every summer when people like Taylor and Rebekah arrive. So while I relish the feeling of making it onto Taylor’s album, I also wish the town had a chance to talk back. That we could attempt to explain how and why we feel so conflicted about her presence and Holiday House and this place we grew up in. I want to tell her: You “picked out a home and called it Holiday House,” but we (I) didn’t choose to be born on this beautiful bit of ocean. I waited 18 years to leave the place you spent over $17 million to own a piece of.
As I write this, I find myself trying hard to tone down my language, edit out residual resentment in my word choice, cut back on what will seem like jealousy when I talk about the ways we were made to feel small in comparison to our summer counterparts. In part, it’s because I know the refrain I was told so much throughout high school is true: these people paid my salary. They ensured I could save up enough to pay for my meal plan and study abroad and eat ice cream twice a day from June to August. They were the reason I had a job at all. And as much as I could hate the way they snapped at me when their order wasn’t ready, or threw their hundred dollar bills at me as if it was nothing, or managed to not have anything to do but tan and play tennis for a quarter of the year, I couldn’t deny that I also needed them. We needed them. (As Taylor sings: “who knows, if she never showed up, what could’ve been?”)
Eventually, summer always comes to an end—the Rebekahs and Taylors and their ilk always leave for their real lives back in the city. After Labor Day, we know, it will just be us here, and with that knowledge comes a unique sense of ownership over the places we could never afford to literally own. We were the ones who saw what it looked like when Hurricane Sandy filled the streets with pebbles and choppy waters, who kept tabs on the progress when construction crews moved the electrical wires underground, who drove through to “check the town” (as my grandfather called it) in the winter when everyone else was tucked away far from the freezing shore. We bear witness to the change in seasons and then make sure it's shining and clean and beautiful—ready for when Memorial Day rolls around and the crowds descend once again.
There’s one line in the song that stands out to me, after the turn to first person, when Taylor riffs “I had a marvelous time ruining everything… a marvelous time.” In some ways, this line, out of all of them, gets at the essence of Watch Hill for us locals. Rich people, regardless of how or when they come into their fortunes, can have a marvelous time ruining the things around them without consequences, and all we can do is complain and question, watching it happen even as we are powerless to do much about it. There’s a bitterness to this, but at the same time, despite my resentment, my class loyalty, a little piece of me also wants to rejoice in the ruin, to share in Taylor’s triumph of all that this song builds and breaks down. In the song, the town is a collective voice whose individual identities can be easily glossed over. I’ve been part of that collective, but I’ve also been a girl singing out loud in the car, feeling the summer breeze in my hair, butting up against the too-smallness of the town where I spent most of my first two decades. Like Taylor, I’ve been the girl “pacing the rocks, staring out at the midnight sea,” and that girl wants to say:
Tell them, Taylor. Tell them about this jewel of a place and the mad, loud, perfectly imperfect people who have lived here. Tell them how we love it all more than we hate it, how we like being seen and named more than we don’t. Tell them how we're grateful you chose us just as much as we resent you for laying a claim to our town and its history. Tell them how your wall couldn’t ruin the awesomeness of the waves that crash onto our beach, how the secret that you, and Rebekah, and I all know is this one: this place is something special—a great American shoreline of sky and rocks and water—and it is pretty marvelous, isn’t it?
Ash Trebisacci (they, them) is a writer and study abroad advisor based in the Boston area. They have recently published nonfiction in Cleaver Magazine, Off Assignment, and Hunger Mountain, among other places. Their little Leo heart is often finding and losing themselves on the beaches of nostalgia and in their favorite pop songs. Find them on Twitter until the bitter end at @ishmish17.
