Close Encounters

By Eugenie Allen

The invitation was irresistible: "Wanna join us on Nantucket Island this summer?" Of course we said yes. We had always wanted to go there, and close friends were doing the asking. Then I did the math. Six adults and seven children would be sharing a four-bedroom house. We weren't going on vacation. We were forming a commune. Survivors of such experiments had warned us about feuding spouses, clashing parenting styles and conflicting itineraries. But they had also rhapsodized about the chance to reconnect with old friends or get to know new ones, the fun of cooking for a crowd, the guarantee of playmates for the children and extra hands to care for them.

And so we set sail, hoping not to be voted off the island for bad behavior. Our kids are perfectly manageable, but I feared a reprise of the cutthroat game of Monopoly the six adults had played back in 1991, after which I was forced to apologize for cheating. (I know, being the banker is no excuse.) I needn't have worried. We played Ping-Pong, a sport in which it's hard to cheat if you're not that good to begin with and if you've had a little wine to boot.

Now that we're home again, family and friendships intact, I'm happy to divulge our Top 10 rules for co-vacationing.

1) Leave the children with their grandparents. If you can't do that, see Rules 2 to 10.

2) Establish ground rules for the kids. For example, some parents were bothered by a gunlike toy, and there was a debate about whether nonswimming children should use flotation devices or stay out of the water. (The toy was put away, and each child had to follow her own family's water rules.)

3) Determine whether everyone actually enjoys the group activities you've planned--in our case, eating, going to the beach, eating, coming back from the beach and eating some more--and order dissenters either to stop whining or to take a nap.

4) Buy more than enough of the right kinds of food, keeping in mind that grocery prices rise in accordance with the local census of private jets and celebrity yachts and that everyone eats twice as much on vacation as at home.

5) Buy more than enough of the right kind of beer. (See Rule 4, above.)

6) Tread lightly when it comes to insulting friends' sports allegiances. (Even Bill Buckner, it turns out, still has his fans.)

7) If there aren't enough bathrooms to go around--and there never are--be 10 times as fastidious as you are at home, especially if sand or shaving is involved.

8) Get our friend Lisa to keep a running tally on the fridge of how much you owe for hot dogs, milk and paper towels. (Lisa, the check's in the mail.)

9) Don't let children who are not siblings sleep in the same room. They can't handle the novelty. If you break this rule, you will be awakened by joyful hoots at 4:49 a.m.

10) First to arrive fills the fridge, last to leave does the final cleaning, so plan accordingly. We got lucky on this score. We had the house to ourselves for a couple of days after the commune disbanded.

We hope to be invited back, but my husband forgot to remove the last bag of garbage from our hosts' SUV before joining the kids and me at the ferry. Leaving rotting food in an Isuzu seems worse than slipping yourself a few extra C notes for passing Go, but we won't know for sure until next summer.

See our website at time.com/personal for more columns by Eugenie Allen. You can e-mail her at [email protected]