Over the weekend, Husband and I took an overnight trip to Kennebunkport to have a grown-up dinner at a nice restaurant and sleep late in a nice inn, sans child and dog. It was our second trip to the beach town. Three years ago we spent an extremely frigid President’s Day weekend at another Kennebunkport inn, this one on the beach. We were walking through the courtyard after sunset on our way out to our car when we were arrested by a sight in one of the second-floor windows. A young couple — she naked, he in a dress shirt and boxer shorts — was standing in front of their window, shall we say, embracing. It was dark outside, but the room was brightly lit and the curtains were open — a free show for us and the other guests who were headed out to dinner.

The next morning at breakfast, we were curious as to whether the exhibitionist couple would appear. When the room was almost full, they showed, and it was comical to see the heads swivel and the disapproving expressions as they took their seats. They were very beautiful and very young, college students most likely, wrapped up in one another and seemingly unaware of the stir they had caused. I found myself wondering not so much at their sexual proclivities as their finances. How on earth could such young people afford to rendezvous at that inn? At those prices? One night’s rack rate for that room would have paid two or three months’ rent for me when I was in college.

For this year’s trip, our voyeuristic pleasure was limited to 1. spotting Barbara Bush in a Secret Service van on her way home from church, and 2. watching a few escapees from the Portland Jehovah’s Witnesses convention shop for knick-knacks. Amazing — Jehovah’s Witnesses blow off their sessions just like I do when I’m at a convention! How “godly obedient” is that?

At any rate, vacationing in the summer watering place of our First Family, a virtual stronghold of WASP power, made me reminisce about my “preppie” past. I was in high school when The Preppie Handbook popularized the pink-and-green lifestyle. I wanted desperately to go to boarding school, despite the horrifying scenes chronicled in Good Times, Bad Times, A Separate Peace, and (of course) The Catcher in the Rye. Prep to me meant wealth, tradition, and social acceptance, things I desired and felt I did not have. I tried to cover the ignominy of my public school education by enrolling in a pricey private college (with an excellent financial aid package). I wore Bermuda shorts, an Oxford shirt, and penny loafers to move into the dorms, and if I didn’t blend in perfectly with the real preppies, no one ever went out of their way to make me especially conscious of it. It didn’t really sink in, at the time, that with the number of vowels in my last name I was never going to be a WASP, but by the time I figured it out I was interested in a new, more achievable identity.

Does the preppie world even exist any more? Or have all the old families been infiltrated by ethnic minorities, and all the old enclaves by new money?