“Nothing,” we gasp.
Dorchy stops laughing. “It’s your turn now,” she says.
“What do you mean?”
She tears the paper off our second Hershey’s bar. “I got us away.” She hands me a square of chocolate. “Say it.”
I smile at her. “Dorchy, you got us away.”
“So now it’s up to you.”
“So now it’s up to you.”
“No, you.” She splits the last of the chocolate with me. “We’re on this train because you love the ocean and know how to camp on the beach, right?”
“Well, yes.”
“So you’re the leader. I follow you.”
We stand on the platform at Eastham under a blazing sun and clear blue sky. The only other passengers who got off are two noisy twin boys about six years old, a tired-looking mother with a bulging knapsack, and a distracted father carrying suitcases. With a burst of steam and a long whistle, the train chugs away.
A man pulls up in a rusty automobile and calls out the window, “Need a lift?” Dorchy walks straight past him down the steps and across the street. I hurry after her. We’re walking east, toward the ocean, and the breeze strokes my face. I suck in a deep breath of warm, salty air.
“Randolph, Rudolph!” the mother shouts. The names make me laugh. Ahead of me, Dorchy’s shoulders shake.
I catch up to her.
She says, “We need to buy new clothes and blankets. And a cooking pot and…”
“No.” I hold up my hand. “I’m the leader, like you said. And I say you need to take a deep breath. Right now.”
Dorchy closes her eyes and breathes in.
“You’re breathing in the Atlantic Ocean,” I tell her. “That salt air came across three thousand miles of ocean to reach us.”
She opens her eyes. “It smells good, like seaweed and clams, but…look at that.” She points at a building across the street. Chandler Dry Goods and Sundries says the sign out front. “What are sundries?” she asks.
“Anything under the sun, I guess.” As we walk to the store, I concentrate on the smell and taste of salt air. It will cure me. I know it will. Already my leg feels stronger. The practical, organized part of my mind is being blown away. All I want to do is see, feel, taste, and be the ocean. But I watch my step on the rutted, unpaved street.
Inside the store a tall woman in a gray smock, face creased in wrinkles, comes from behind a pile of lobster pots, fishing poles, and galvanized buckets. “We need one of those buckets for clams,” I tell Dorchy.
The woman smiles. “You girls visitin’ our fair town?” The smile doesn’t reach her pale-blue eyes.
Dorchy puts down the knapsack and sighs. “We are,” she says.
“You wouldn’t be with the artist ladies down the beach, would you?”
“Why, yes,” Dorchy says. I poke her ankle with my crutch. What is she doing? “Or at least we hope to be. You wouldn’t know exactly where we could find them, do you?”
The woman runs her finger over some jelly glasses on the counter. “They’re stayin’ in a cottage down toward Nauset Light. But on a day like today they’ll be on the shore painting, easels and all.” She shakes her head. “I don’t understand the appeal myself, but to each her own, I guess.”
Women artists. And we’re free to meet them.
“We’ll be camping,” Dorchy says. “Near the cottage.”
The woman looks at my crutch. I shift my weight. “I broke my leg, but it’s almost healed.” The lie rolls off my tongue.
The woman makes a tsk sound, reaches up to a shelf, and hands me a small tin of Gurdey’s Farmer-Tested Udder Cream. “Rub that on your leg three times a day, and it will feel a hundred percent better. It’s good for lots more than sore udders.”
“We also need clothes,” Dorchy says. “We lost our suitcase back in Boston.”
The woman points to a corner of the store. “Clothes on a rack back there next to the brooms. You’re out of luck if you’re lookin’ for fashion.”
The dresses on the rack look like uniforms. Tan, white, and light blue, buttons from collar to hem, round collars with dark-blue trim. I finger the material. Heavy cotton. Dorchy looks doubtful. “Try them on,” the woman urges.
“We should have shopped in Boston when we had the chance,” Dorchy mutters. I shoot her a silencing look. We don’t want this woman to know any more than she already does.
“You girls employed?” the woman asks Dorchy while I’m behind a curtain, trying on the light blue dress. She’s either nosy or bored. Either way we don’t want to give her information.
“My friend is a student, and I work for a wealthy family in New York City,” Dorchy says. “We’re on vacation.”
I pull open the curtain, feeling a hundred times better in this surprisingly comfortable dress. “It fits,” I say. “But it will be too long for Dorchy.”
“I can hem it for you for twenty-five cents,” the woman says quickly.
Dorchy says, “I’ll take a tan one. Better to look like a soldier than a nurse. And my friend here is a quick hand with a needle and thread. We’ll take the rest of our supplies, but she’ll wear the dress.”
When we leave, we have spent ten dollars and now have a bucket, needle and thread, two heavy sweaters, two blankets, a waterproof ground cloth, cans of soup and beans, a loaf of bread, a cooking pot, a tin box of matches, two canteens of fresh water, a can opener, and a gift—a small tin of Gurdey’s Udder Cream.
“Now as you’re going down the beach, my son Jeb can give you a lift,” Mrs. Chandler says. We have exchanged names. I’m Clara and Dorchy is Rose.
Jeb, a pimply boy who looks annoyed and says nothing, piles everything we bought into the back of his pickup truck and then helps me climb in. Dorchy winks at me as she gets in the front seat next to him. The wink says, “He’ll be eating out of my hand before we get there.”
Sure enough, he’s all smiles when he stops at the edge of the sand. “Can I give you a hand carrying things?” he asks. “The artists are a ways down there.” He points toward the shimmering shape of a lighthouse far down the beach.
I nod, but Dorchy says, “Thanks, we’ll manage. And thanks for the ride. Are you sure I can’t pay you?”
He shakes his head. “Service of the store.” He points to a small pond next to the road. A metal pipe gushes water into it. “There’s the spring for your water. Otherwise it’s a mile back to town center.”
“He was nice,” I say as the truck coughs back down the sandy road. “What changed his mood?”
“Me. I was smooth as udder cream,” Dorchy says. “According to him, the artists are ‘a bunch of dumb Doras who think they’re the bee’s knees and ain’t.’ We’ll steer clear of them, I think.”
This is pure Dorchy. What she doesn’t understand or think is important she discards.
“Well, I want to meet them.” I fill our bucket with some of our supplies and tie one sweater around my waist. “They sound interesting and independent. Like us.”
The sun beats down and hurts my eyes when I look at the beach stretching into the distance. Due east is the heaving chest of the Atlantic, and that sight hurts my soul. How can it be five years since I stood on a beach up to my ankles in sand? Regret for lost time piles up like a wave and threatens to sweep me away.
Chapter 22
I take a deep breath and pick up the bucket. As my lungs expand, the regret vanishes. I feel dizzy with relief. At last. I haven’t drawn a breath like this for five years. “Let’s go.” The sound of the ocean is as familiar as a beloved nursery rhyme.
We walk a short way in the sand; it’s slow going with the crutch. Dorchy stays with me, carrying most of our things. “We’ll pick out a spot together,” she insists when I tell her to go ahead.
Without even knowing exactly what I’m looking for, I find it—a perfect spo
t where the sloping sides of two dunes come together to form a protected hollow. We drop our supplies.
“Home,” Dorchy says. “We lived in a carny caravan,” she says. “Mother, Father, and me.”
Where else would a snake lady live? I realize I know nothing about Dorchy’s life with her parents. “Was she a normal mother?” I want to bite back that normal as soon as I say it.
“More normal than yours,” Dorchy snaps.
I bite my lip. “Sorry.” I spread out my blanket and put the sweater on top. I left my old dress in a dustbin outside the store.
Dorchy says, “I’ll get some driftwood,” and runs down to the beach. I follow slowly, soaking in the white-fringed breaking waves, hot sand, and endless quicksilver ocean.
Better than any home with Father and Julia.
Better than the beach where I lost both my legs and Father in the same day. The legs came back, which is more than I can say for him. In the deep sand, I can’t pretend walking with a crutch feels anything like walking on the beach before. Dorchy runs back and forth above the tide line collecting driftwood. She has two strong legs. It’s not fair. But Dr. Friedlander’s voice comes back to me, “Don’t waste time comparing yourself to anyone else. Jealousy and self-pity delay your progress.”
Dorchy comes toward me with an armful of wood, and we walk together back to the dunes. It’s too early for a cooking fire, so we pile the wood and I begin hemming Dorchy’s new dress.
“We should have paid Mrs. Chandler twenty-five cents to do this,” I complain after stabbing my finger with the needle for the fourth time. “Blasted thing.”
“But you do know how to sew,” Dorchy says.
It’s hot in our sheltered spot between the dunes. A drop of sweat falls on Dorchy’s dress as I hem it. “No, I sat in a room at the Home shoving a needle and thread through unbleached muslin to make a curtain, but I wouldn’t say I learned anything from that.” I bite off the thread and hold up the dress. “Oh, except for curse words. Hattie, a girl from Boston, would make you blush, Dorchy.”
“Oh, I know a few choice ones myself,” Dorchy says. She slips on the dress; it looks good on her now.
She spreads the ground cloth, lies down, and is instantly asleep. I have never seen her so completely relaxed. I stretch out on my blanket and fall asleep too.
When we wake up, after an hour or so, we drink some water and head back to the beach. The sun is no longer directly overhead, and the breeze has picked up, so we don’t feel hot.
This time I stay on the hard-packed, damp sand, close to the incoming waves. I can move faster here; my crutch leaves slight depressions that slowly fill with water. Dorchy stays in the deeper, dry sand, keeping me between her and ocean.
“There they are.” Dorchy points down the beach.
“Who?”
“The artists you’re so interested in.”
Women in hats and colorful, billowing dresses surround three easels. A burst of laughter reaches us. It sounds like sweet bells chiming.
Their easels are very close to the incoming waves that I read as a flood tide, maybe halfway in. “If they stay there, the easels will wash out to sea,” I say.
“How long till that happens?”
“Maybe three hours.”
“What time do you think it is?”
I look at the sky. “Four o’clock.”
She pulls a gold watch out of her dress pocket. “Not bad. It’s three forty-five.”
I stop. “That’s Mr. Ogilvie’s watch!” I can’t believe she took it. Now they will come after us. “He said it was his grandfather’s.”
“It’s not his. I found it.” She drops it back in her pocket without meeting my eyes.
“Give it to me. For my ‘pain and suffering.’”
She shakes her head.
I’m about to argue with her when one of the artists shrieks. A piece of white paper skims across the sand, pushed by the breeze, and lands in the ocean, just beyond the knee-high surf. The woman runs down the beach toward us, holding her hat on with one hand.
“It’s gone now, Daisy,” calls one of the others. “Nature’s verdict on your painting.”
The woman stops to shake her fist at the others, and Dorchy calls out, “I’ll get it.” She runs past me straight into the water. Dorchy, who’s so afraid of the ocean that she won’t walk near it, is up to her knees in the foam, now up to her thighs in calm water behind the breakers. She grabs the paper just before the breeze snatches it again.
She waves it over her head. “I got it.”
Cheers and applause and a sharp whistle erupt from the other artists, who are coming down the beach toward us.
As Dorchy wades out, her dress soaked to the waist, the artist—slim and blond, with a streak of red paint on her chin—embraces her. “Oh, thank you, kind stranger.” Then she takes the painting—violet streaked with black above blue-green hills or waves; it’s hard to tell which—and runs to meet her friends.
“Dorchy.” I grab her arm. “You did it! Were you afraid?”
She looks surprised. “You know, I wasn’t. I knew I could get the picture, so I did.” She smiles, remembering. Then she adds in a low voice, “But from the looks of it, I don’t understand all the fuss.”
“It was a mess before it landed in the water,” I say, “but it meant a lot to her.”
One of the artists—fuchsia turban, black wool bathing suit, and round, dark glasses—strides up to us.
“Good afternoon,” she says to Dorchy, holding out her hand. “Thank you from the bottom of my heart. My sister Daisy wouldn’t let me hear the end of this, were it not for you.” She speaks in a slow, sarcastic drawl.
She takes off the dark glasses, the first pair I’ve ever seen, and shakes my hand too. “April Keene. I’m here with Daisy and her friends. Heaven knows why.” She laughs. “They smoke cigarettes, drink wine, and constantly talk about Art with a capital A. If it weren’t for my sister, I would beg you to rescue me as you did the watercolor. What are your names? Where are you staying?”
Alarm bells go off. We can’t reveal anything about ourselves, but I would like to. April has a warm smile and sparkling brown eyes.
Dorchy looks at me.
April presses on. “Are you in a cottage too? We’re here for another week.” She looks closely at us. “Forgive me if this sounds rude, but are you here with your employers? Is this your afternoon off?”
She thinks we’re servants. “Yes,” I say. “We must get back.”
Dorchy turns a laugh into a cough.
“Look at them.” April waves at the four women now regrouped around one of the easels. They break apart with little cries of delight and laughter. “They are watercolorists,” she goes on. “Sometimes I wish a wave would rear up”—she raises her arms and then lowers them as she speaks—“and splash down on their precious Prussian blue, cadmium red, and China white palettes and give them saltwater watercolors.”
Dorchy wrings out the skirt of her dress.
“Aren’t you interested in watercolor?” I ask April.
“No.” She holds up a sketchbook. “I draw. The dunes mostly, in pencil and charcoal. Their lines and shadows fascinate me more than the ocean’s million shades of blue, impossible to capture with a camel-hair brush.”
“My mother loved the dunes too.” I speak without thinking. “She used to photograph them and develop the pictures herself.”
“A photographer,” April says reverently. “I envy her. Alas, all that is beyond my librarian’s salary.”
A librarian. My heart leaps. I could talk to her about books. I feel tipsy on the wealth and variety of the world beyond the Boston Home and the Unfit Family show. “Where is your library?”
Dorchy shifts impatiently; she’s uncomfortable around this woman who holds the key to what I used to have. But I’m too excited to care. “Yo
u may read any book in here,” Father told me on the day I received my own public library card.
“Boston Public Library, Children’s Room,” April says, “but I didn’t take you girls for readers.”
“We’re not,” Dorchy assures her, grabbing my elbow. “Now we’d better start back. We have a long way to go.”
I nod to April and turn away. The difference between me and Dorchy opens like a chasm between us. I can talk to April, to any of these women, even though I haven’t been to real school in five years. Father saw to that. “Collier women are interesting and interested” was one of his sayings. I haven’t felt so proudly and firmly and completely a Collier since I got polio.
“You said we had to be careful,” Dorchy scolds me as we walk back down the beach. She quotes me, “Don’t give anyone information they could use when asked if they’ve seen us.”
“No one will come after us out here,” I say, and I believe it.
She shakes her head. “The Ogilvies might, not the police. I doubt they would even go to the police, but they’ll want to catch us. I know them.”
“I know them too. And this place is way out of their orbit. We don’t have to worry here.”
“They know your real name.”
I shiver. “So what? Father will protect me.”
“Really? When has he ever protected you?”
I say nothing. She’s right. The weight of my disappointment in Father threatens to crush me, to drive me to my knees in the sand. Where was Father when I was at the Home? Even Julia couldn’t explain his absence.
“I’m dead to him, aren’t I?” I asked her once, and even though she said no and waved her hands and said I was an ungrateful daughter, I knew I was right.
“Look,” Dorchy says. “On the other hand, by now the Ogilvies know we bought tickets for New York. They know I wanted to find my uncle there. They know your family lives there. They’ll waste a lot of time looking for us there.”
“And don’t forget”—I grab her arm—“they think we’re stupid.”
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