Ella Leroy dreams of escaping the dreary routine of her 1950s wife-and-mom life. Without telling her husband, she enlists her son Peter and his locally notorious girlfriend Patti in a scheme: to buy a run-down clamboat and reinvent it as an elegant cruising vessel for summer people in the beach town of Babbington, Long Island. But after Arcinella is purchased, Peter discovers that it is slowly sinking—and so each night he sneaks from his home to the harborfront, where he pumps the boat dry and so inflates his mother’s hopes a bit longer.