by Anita Shreve
“It’s freezing,” Julie says.
“You’ll get used to it.”
In the water, which today has taken on a slightly greenish tinge, there are bits of seaweed that sometimes brush against the legs. Also in the water, Sydney knows, are striped bass, schools of bluefish, baby seals, and even benign sharks—a fact she thinks she will neglect to mention to the girl beside her.
Two young boys skim-board along the shoreline. They leap onto flat boards at the water’s edge and ride them, sometimes for surprisingly long stretches. Sydney knows, from personal experience and the memory of a long, painful bruise, that it’s not as easy as it looks.
“Want to go to the knees?” Sydney asks.
She expects Julie to demur, but the girl, in a moment of bravery, lets go of Sydney’s hand and ventures farther out on her own. In a few steps, the knees are reached. When a wave comes, the water touches the tops of her thighs. Sydney watches Julie go rigid, and then relax as it recedes.
“How do you feel?” she asks when she is at Julie’s side.
“GOOD!” Julie shouts, as if Sydney were a hundred feet away. “I’M OKAY.”
“GREAT!”
“SHOULD WE GO OUT FURTHER?” Julie asks.
“NO. THIS IS FINE.”
Julie and Sydney stand in the water, looking out to sea. Julie dips once into a wave and shoots up like a rocket, the water sloughing off her like booster debris. An ultralight passes overhead. Sydney cannot see the pilot, even though the machine is low to the ground. There was a time, not so long ago, when she’d have said to herself, What a kick, but those days are gone now. She has a momentary thought of her aviator. The sight of any flying machine, large or small, brings on thoughts of Andrew. (The day she met him at the Boston Marathon, which on a whim she had decided to enter. She stopped just at the point where he had veered off the track. He was bent at the waist, panting for breath. Sydney offered him her water bottle, and he staged a physical comeback right before her eyes, as if his sudden life’s goal was to impress her.) Sydney suspects it will be this way all her life. She wonders what could possibly trigger reciprocal memories on Andrew’s part. A psychology textbook? Hair that is no color anyone can describe?
Sydney’s legs are so numb she’s lost communication with her feet. “So, what do you think?” she asks Julie, whose attention is on a young woman in a wet suit surfing fifty feet away from them.
“She’s good,” Julie says.
“No, I mean about heading back.”
“Oh,” Julie says. “Sure.” She watches the woman catch a wave. She puts her hands to her mouth like a megaphone. “GOOD ONE!” she shouts.
When Julie and Sydney turn to head for shore, which appears in the interval to have come to greet them, Sydney sees Jeff, still in tennis whites, standing at the water’s edge. In his hand is an empty bottle of Poland Spring, which he waves in greeting.
Sydney remembers with dismay her sagging tank suit with its sprung legs, more visible now in the bright sunshine than it was the night before. Julie leaps out of the water to tell her brother her good news—a lifelong fear conquered. Well, almost conquered. Sydney watches as Jeff hugs his sister, allowing her to soak his shirtfront.
“Who won?” Sydney asks when she emerges from the water.
“They did,” Jeff says. “Ben is something else.”
“I hope it was fun.”
Jeff’s hair is darker now, pasted to his head with sweat. “Vicki’s changing into her suit. We thought we’d go for a swim. How’s the water?”
“Ice,” Sydney says, wiping her hair from her forehead.
“Sounds good.”
“I’ll get some towels,” Julie offers, running ahead. Sydney decides, watching her, A child in a woman’s body.
“That’s a great thing you just did,” Jeff says. “No one’s been able to get her to go near the water in years.”
Sydney thinks to herself: You can’t have been trying very hard.
“Were you there?” Sydney asks. “The day of the riptide?”
“It was awful.” Jeff flips the empty plastic bottle between the second and third fingers of his right hand. “Did Julie tell you what she said to my father?”
“No.”
“When my father reached her, Julie was holding on to the boogie board. She looked right at him and said—amazingly calmly, given the situation—We’re going to die, aren’t we?”
“Was your father frightened?”
“Yeah, I think he was. He was pretty sure he could get himself back to shore, but he was afraid Julie would let go of the board, and he’d lose her.”
“Incredible.”
“I remember when Julie and my dad came back to the house we were renting then, Julie walked straight up onto the porch and lay facedown on the floor. No one could get her to say a word. I’m not sure she’s ever talked about it before now.”
“For a seven-year-old to be convinced she’s going to die. . .,” Sydney begins.
But Jeff is glancing up. Sydney follows his eyes. Victoria— polished, bikini-clad, and with perhaps the tiniest frown on her brow—is standing on the deck, gazing down at them.
Chapter 4
Drinks on the porch. A lowering sun has turned the water mauve. A candle at the center of the teak table flickers in the breeze. It will almost certainly go out, Sydney thinks.
Sydney has a light beer, as does Mr. Edwards. Mrs. Edwards always drinks red wine, about which she appears to be quite knowledgeable. Jeff looks to be holding a glass of something stronger, a gin and tonic perhaps, while Victoria is fondling the stem of a glass of champagne. Sydney might have predicted the champagne.
Julie has a Coke. Ferris, the recovering alcoholic, a glass of plain water. Marissa, who has come with Ferris, the Pellegrino.
A strong smell of sea wafts from the shore. The tide is dead low, revealing a luxurious stretch of beach. The owners of the beach houses, Sydney decides, must have the sense of possessing more property at low tide than at high.
Sydney notes that Julie is more dressed up than usual, with a tank top under her skimpy sweater, the pale blue silk billowing over her breasts. Her jeans are long and tight. She and Victoria, beautiful women, represent two centers of gravity on the porch, the eyes unable to let them be, much to the visible annoyance of Marissa, a lanky but toned redhead whose investment in her looks is not paying off tonight. Marissa crosses and recrosses her pale legs, then slips off her own tiny sweater to reveal her buff physique. Ben pays attention, but his eyes drift to Victoria, and then, uncomfortably, to Sydney. She is underdressed for the party in a sleeveless white blouse and a pair of navy shorts. Avoiding eye contact with Ben is more difficult than she would have thought, even perched as she is on the stairs, there being an insufficient number of chairs for the thirteen celebrants of this spectacular August evening.
Sitting near a couple who have introduced themselves as Claire and Will, Sydney is asked expected questions. Where do you live? Do you tutor all year? What were you studying? She answers as best she can, but there are gaps in her history—years for which she doesn’t want to answer just now—that gradually make the couple turn away. Will stands and offers to refill Sydney’s glass. When she declines, Claire excuses herself and joins a gathering that consists of Mr. Edwards, Jeff, and Art. Sydney can hear the words morning and fishfinder.
Sydney is mildly confused by the lack of physicality between Jeff and Victoria. Have they known each other for so long they no longer need to touch in public? Or is Jeff self-conscious in the company of his parents and his parents’ friends, a trait that Victoria—Vicki—might find just the tiniest bit unattractive? Certainly, they do not look like a couple about to announce an engagement, which must be something of a disappointment to Mrs. Edwards, who is unaccountably clad, given her fifty-nine-year-old upper arms, in a fuchsia chiffon tank top and black palazzo pants.
With a sense of foreboding, Sydney watches Ben stand and make the rounds with a bottle of red in one hand, a bottle of white
in the other.
“You’re drinking a beer,” he says when he reaches her.
“I am,” she answers, also stating the obvious.
“Ready for another?”
Sydney would like another drink but is reluctant to be beholden to Ben, even for something as innocuous as a glass of beer. “I’m fine,” she says.
Ben sets the wine bottles on the teak table and takes a seat opposite Sydney on the step. He leans against the railing. Sydney is immediately aware of her bare legs, one crooked under the other, in a way she wasn’t before.
She is aware, too, that Ben is studying her, and she minds the scrutiny. He has a fashionable stubble on his cheeks and chin, simply the result, Sydney guesses, of two days without a razor. At work, he would be clean-shaven.
“I’ll bet you play a mean game of tennis,” he says, eyeing her.
“Not as mean as yours,” she says, staring at the top of her beer.
“I hear you got Julie in the water.”
“I think she got herself in the water.”
“You’re too modest.”
“Not really,” she says, taking a sip.
“It must be hard to be at a party where you don’t know anyone.”
“I know Julie. I know your father,” she says, and then immediately regrets her defensive tone.
“And that’s enough?”
“For the time being.”
“Two more weeks of the grind, and then freedom,” Ben says.
Sydney wonders how she will negotiate Ben’s vacation. “You don’t have a girlfriend yourself?” she asks.
“No,” he says, as if he understands exactly Sydney’s wariness. “Not anymore.”
Sydney is quite sure that if Ben and Jeff were presented in a lineup, seven out of ten women would prefer Ben to his brother. He has the stronger face, certainly the stronger body, dark eyes, and long lashes. A sense of confidence that teeters on arrogance but doesn’t quite cross the line. There is, too, about Ben, a bit of mystery, an unreadable face, a quality many women would find intriguing.
“You play golf?” Ben asks.
“No.”
“So what do you do on your days off?”
Is the question intended to remind Sydney that she is hired help? “Depends on the weather,” she says.
“More of the same tomorrow,” Ben predicts, gesturing to indicate the sky and the Atlantic and, possibly, the entire universe.
“Read,” Sydney says. “Walk.”
“We might all go into Portsmouth,” Ben says casually.
“Sounds like fun,” Sydney says, though she is hard-pressed to think of what can be happening in Portsmouth on a Sunday.
“Want to come with us?”
“Thanks, but I have to go in on Monday anyway. No point going in twice in a row.”
Ben smiles at her. Sydney remembers her father saying, years ago, Somebody’s always got your number.
Sydney stands.
“Where are you going?” Ben asks.
“To get another beer,” she announces, desperate to get away.
In the kitchen, she presses her head to the stainless steel door of the Sub-Zero.
“Are you okay?”
The question is not an entirely sympathetic one, suggesting that this is not an opportune moment to be indisposed. Mrs. Edwards sets an empty plate on the granite island.
“I’m fine,” Sydney says, turning.
“Would you mind giving me a hand?” Mrs. Edwards asks.
“I’d be glad to,” she answers.
Sydney is seated at a part of the oval table that can only be described as nonexistent. She has a chair, in which she is trapped, and space enough for a plate, but not enough for silverware, which has been set near her water glass. She eats with her arms pressed to her sides so as not to bother Mrs. Edwards to her right or Ferris to her left. There might as well have been a children’s table, Sydney thinks, and then wonders if, possibly, she is not meant to be at the dinner. No, she decides, Mr. Edwards would never allow her absence.
“Washington and Tehran have crucial interests in common,” Jeff is saying, “but for historical and ideological reasons, neither wants to be seen dealing with the other.”
“Bush has made no secret of his intention to help liberate the Iraqis from Saddam,” Art offers.
“An objective that was part of the late Ayatollah Khomeini’s primary agenda,” Jeff points out.
Mr. and Mrs. Edwards once again anchor the table. Claire and Will, generationally cast adrift (they are not as old as Mrs. Edwards; not as young as Ben), present a united front, even managing to pull their chairs together, upsetting Mrs. Edwards’s seating plan, which almost immediately has to be abandoned. Marissa, imagined slights forgotten, seems mesmerized by Wendy’s inside scoop of the New York magazine world. Sydney sees a fast friendship beginning, though it is not clear yet what Marissa has to offer Wendy apart from riveted attention. Marissa’s husband, Ferris, has the studied reticence of a recovering alcoholic surrounded by alcohol. Victoria is speaking somewhat louder than necessary and is having trouble with the word decision. Before her sits a nearly empty champagne bottle from which only she has been drinking, Mr. Edwards—ever the genial host—pouring liberally. Sydney is fascinated by the way alcohol blurs the features as well as the consonants. Victoria’s mouth has relaxed considerably, and the whites of her eyes have grown pinkish. Even the skin under her eyes has loosened. In a subtle though somewhat devastating transformation, Victoria can no longer be said to be the most beautiful woman at the table.
“You’ve heard about Princeton and Yale,” Ben is saying.
“Princeton’s scandal, really,” Jeff says.
“No, what?” Art asks.
“Princeton was caught breaking into Yale’s admissions files,” Ben announces with some glee.
Perhaps the man did not get into Princeton, Sydney thinks.
“I thought they said they didn’t use the information,” Mr. Edwards says.
“Dad, they broke into the Yale computer fourteen times over a three-day period.”
“Heads will roll,” Art pronounces.
The dinner party cannot be said to be entirely successful. The lamb is underdone. Wendy and Art bicker publicly, Wendy annoyed at being drawn away from her conversation with Marissa by Art’s constant queries. When is that screening we’re going to? I already told you, the twentieth. Honey? What? Ben is quiet, and Jeff casts worried glances in Victoria’s direction. Mrs. Edwards, her attention on the dessert, does not ask where Julie is going or when she will be home when the girl rises with a quick good-bye—a lapse of parental attention Sydney finds unnerving. It is all she can do to stop herself from jumping up and following Julie into the kitchen. And jumping up is what she’d have to do, because Julie is almost instantly out the door. The girl doesn’t drive. Is she walking? Or is a car waiting for her on the road by pre-arrangement? And when exactly was this getaway prearranged? After Julie’s jubilant foray into the water? By phone? Initiated by the boy with the lovely brown hair or by Julie herself?
Sydney feels the responsibility of a parent. Mr. Edwards, locked in at the far end of the table, appears not even to have seen Julie’s departure.
Eleven o’clock, Sydney decides. She will not start worrying until eleven o’clock.
“The Acela’s been shut down,” Ferris ventures in one of his few contributions to the dinner conversation. Perhaps he has been saving it up all evening.
“You’re kidding,” Art says.
“Cracks in the shock absorbers.”
This has the makings of a major crisis. How will Art and Wendy get home? Even Sydney knows that the plan is for them to take the bus to Boston on Monday morning, the Acela, the high-speed train, to Manhattan later that afternoon. Mrs. Edwards looks momentarily stricken.
The dirty dishes are monstrous. Jeff comes in to help, and no one shoos him away. “Dad, I’ll take over,” he says, putting a hand on his father’s shoulder. Mr. Edwards appears exhausted, a sai
l collapsing in a dearth of wind.
Jeff rolls the sleeves of his blue oxford shirt. For a moment, Sydney studies his wrists.
The dishes are dotted with pink globules of fat, reminding Sydney of Mrs. Edwards’s hardening arteries. Plates of cake reveal varying appetites for a confection she knows was a trick, a cake mix doctored with Miracle Whip, instant vanilla pudding, and orange juice to make it look and taste homemade. Sydney has seen the recipes in Mrs. Edwards’s cookbook, the bizarre ingredients listed there: lemon Jell-O, chopped Snickers bars, condensed tomato soup. It is Sydney’s considered opinion, having had four bites of her piece of cake, that neither the Miracle Whip nor the instant pudding successfully masked the store-bought chemical aftertaste.
Sydney develops an inconvenient revulsion to the leavings of the guests. Is this dirty fork one that Will had in his mouth? Is this Victoria’s lipstick? Jeff works as if he’s done considerable time in a restaurant kitchen. His organizational skills rival Sydney’s, or perhaps she is a little drunk herself and it only seems that way. Dozens of glasses are smeared with lip and fingerprints, a forensic fantasy if only a crime had been committed.
“Where’s Vicki?” Sydney asks.
“Upstairs. Lying down.”
“Is she okay?”
“Works hard, plays hard.”
“Good plan,” Sydney says, slightly embarrassed for having called attention to Victoria’s altered state. For having even mentioned Vicki’s name.
“You don’t like her, do you?” Jeff says.
Sydney is startled by the abruptness of the question. Also by its accuracy.
“I do,” she protests.
But the do is damning, suggesting an unnegotiable flaw.
The space between the sink and the island is narrow, and a kind of dance needs to be choreographed so that no part of Sydney’s body touches Jeff’s. She is not aware of needing to perform such a dance when Mr. Edwards does the dishes.