by Claire Cook
I sighed. Anticipation was better than chocolate, rich and dreamy, but also like a shot of adrenaline, snapping me out of the coma I’d let myself fall into over the past few months. I wanted to savor every minute of this week, to walk the beach, to splash in the ocean, to imagine the exact moment of seeing Finn at the reunion over and over again, in every possible variation.
I pulled my carry-on along, following the signs for baggage, slowing my pace so I could count the Red Sox hats on the heads of the people I passed. I thought about stopping at Legal Sea Foods Test Kitchen to have live lobsters shipped to Trevor and Troy, but I was afraid Trevor had been in California long enough that he might try to turn his into a pet, and Troy’s would be long dead before he got around to cooking it.
My cell phone rang and I stopped to pull it out of my purse. “Sixteen,” I said.
“Candles?”
“Nope.”
“Okay, I’ll bite,” B.J. said. “Sixteen what?”
I smiled. “Red Sox hats since I landed.”
“That’s nothing. The Hubster has more than that in his closet.”
“Impressive,” I said. “I didn’t realize Tom was that big a fan.”
“I think it’s more about covering his bald spot.”
“By the way, is he okay with you spending all this time with me?”
“He didn’t get a vote. That’s why we’re still married.”
“Got it,” I said. “How about work? Did you get the time off-off, or just sort of off?”
“Off-off. Someone’s covering for me, and I’m not going to check messages once. Shit, shit, shit. This cop is trying to tell me I have to go wait in the live parking lot, which for your information has been moved to Timbuktu in the eternal quest to keep everyone entering or exiting Logan Airport totally confused.”
“But at least they finally finished the Big Dig. Didn’t they? Can you just circle around and I’ll wait at the curb till you get back?”
“How about you run and I’ll play dumb till you get here? Hurry, my acting range is limited.”
I jumped into Mustang Sally, B.J.’s red vintage Mustang convertible and longtime companion, and gave B.J. a quick hug. After B.J. put on her blinker, she turned to look at me. Her hair was long this time and blond—actually more like calico, with highlights and lowlights that ranged from platinum to a deep warm brown. There was gray in there, too, if you looked carefully, but somehow it just added dimension to the whole effect instead of making her look old.
“Your hair looks great,” I said.
“Thanks. Yours looks like shit,” B.J. said. “I knew it would, so I got a referral from my stylist to Salon TAJ, which he assures me is the cutting-edge Marshbury salon, and made you an appointment for later today.”
“I didn’t see that on the itinerary.”
“Sure you did. It falls under primping.”
“Thanks so much for asking first,” I said. “And for insulting my hair. Oh, and I’m starving, so at the risk of throwing off our schedule I think we should eat first.”
As hungry as I was, I also couldn’t wait to get to the beach. Maybe we could stop first at Maria’s Sub Shop and bring our lunch with us to eat by the water. Maria’s was one of those quirky little local places that you appreciated more with every year you spent living in the Land of Subway. In your memory, the sub rolls became softer, the meatballs grew more tender, and the fact that Maria’s had refused for generations to add lettuce, chopped or otherwise, to their subs because they considered it “filler” became less ridiculous and more charming with the passage of time.
As we paid the toll coming out of the airport and followed the signs for the Southeast Expressway, I held my breath and waited for my heart to start doing its highway dance. B.J. was an aggressive driver, and a little bit erratic, too, using one hand to drive and flinging the other one around as she talked or hunted down her lip gloss. But with her, I was remarkably symptom-free. Maybe I’d left my driving issues behind in Atlanta. Maybe it was just one of those fluky things that happened, like a sniffle that you keep waiting to turn into something bigger, but instead you wake up one day and find that it has simply disappeared and you’re all better again.
I breathed a sigh of relief and leaned back into Mustang Sally’s worn leather seat. We stayed left at the Braintree split and headed south on Route 3. A few exits later we got off and followed the back roads through Norwell. It had been at least four years, maybe five, since my last visit, and it felt both like coming home and visiting a strange new planet for me.
I couldn’t take my eyes off the houses, shingled and weathered and shuttered, and I felt a pang as I remembered that to qualify for old-house status here they had to be at least a hundred years old instead of Atlanta’s maybe ten or twenty. The Georgia trees were lush and gorgeous, but seeing my New England sugar maples and sycamores again, with their frayed rope swings, next to old stone wells with water buckets attached gave me another twinge. And the hydrangeas. Hydrangeas, hydrangeas everywhere.
“Déjà vu all over again,” I said.
B.J. tilted her head in my direction. “Coldplay?”
I laughed. “Yogi Berra. And that’s all the sports talk you’ll ever get out of me.”
“They’re big in the South, huh?”
“Not so much baseball, but they’re crazy for football down there. If I never see another tailgate party, it’ll be too soon.”
“Bless your little pseudo-Southern heart,” B.J. said. “Y’all come back now, ya hear,” she added in a really bad Southern accent.
“Hey, knock it off,” I said. “That’s my abode you’re making fun of.”
“I thought you hated it there.”
“Where did you get that idea? I hated that Kurt made the decision to move there, not me. And I hate it when people who don’t live there think they know what it’s like.”
“Got it.” B.J. put on her blinker and pulled over to the side of the road. She unbolted two metal latches above the windshield, then jumped out and shoved the convertible top into submission. It finally folded, then nestled into the space behind the backseat.
She jumped back in, reached past me to the glove compartment, and pulled a silky red scarf out like a magician. “Here. Not that I think that hairdo of yours is worth saving.”
“Thanks,” I said. “My self-esteem is soaring already. In another minute you’re going to have to start being mean to me so I don’t get all conceited.”
B.J. laughed. “Ha. I forgot about conceited. Maybe we can add it to the awards at the reunion. Who was the most conceited girl in our class?”
“I’m pretty sure it was you,” I said.
“Of course it was. And I’d still blow those wannabes out of the water.” She turned the rearview mirror in her direction while she tied an animal print scarf over her hair. “Okay, now you’re Thelma and I’m Louise.”
“Why do I have to be Thelma?”
“Because you’re more naive and vulnerable.”
“I am not.”
B.J. rubbed her index fingers under her eyes, not quite touching her concealer. “I. Am. Not,” she said in a pouty little voice.
“Screw you,” I said, “and your stupid dress-up scarves, too.”
“Okay, you can be Louise, but just this once.”
Our scarves rattled in the wind as we drove through the tree-lined streets.
B.J. plugged her iPod into an adaptor. Billy Joel broke into a spirited rendition of “Only the Good Die Young.”
“I think we missed last call for dying young,” I said. “But how cute that you made a reunion mix tape.”
She turned up the volume. “It’s called a playlist now.”
“I know that.”
As soon as Billy Joel finished singing, Cyndi Lauper jumped right in with “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” B.J. started singing along at the top of her lungs. I held out as long as I could, but I couldn’t resist joining in on the chorus.
We were still singing, way off key and reall
y loud, especially considering we had the top down, when we pulled into the parking lot in front of Maria’s Sub Shop.
“Wow,” I said. “Great minds think alike.”
B.J. barked her crazy laugh, and I couldn’t imagine anywhere in the world I’d rather be.
We carried our subs over to the town bandstand and sat on the steps overlooking the water.
Across from us, boats bobbed up and down at their slips and I breathed in the decomposing smell of low tide as if it were perfume. The poured concrete between the bandstand steps and the inner harbor sparkled with colored flecks, like fairy dust.
“When did they put sea glass in the sidewalks back here?” I asked.
“A while ago—isn’t it awesome? I tried to talk The Hubernator into having it done at our house, but he wouldn’t go for it.”
“Wow, I’d love to try doing that. I think you’d just sprinkle the sea glass in with the aggregate while the cement is still wet, and then smooth it out with a board or something.”
B.J. took a bite of her Maria’s Special: a domestic ham and American cheese sub with yellow mustard. “You always were so artsy fartsy.”
“Really?” I pushed a meatball that was trying to escape back into my sub with one finger. “I didn’t think I had any street cred at all as an artist. The art teachers only liked the kids who knew how to draw. You know, if it came out looking like it was done with paint-by-numbers, they must have talent.”
“Ugh,” B.J. said. “That’s how I felt about the English teachers. Remember, you couldn’t even get into a Creative Writing elective unless you were in Honors English? I had a lot to say—who the hell cared if I knew where the fuck to put my commas?”
I reached for my iced coffee. “They should have at least been impressed by your vocabulary.”
“Exactly,” B.J. said. “And Home Ec, don’t get me started on Home Ec. I had this purple jumpsuit I was dying to make. But nooooo, Miss McWhoosiface made me rip out the stitches on my apron three times until they fully satisfied her anal tendencies.”
“Miss McNally,” I said, “or maybe it was McNulty. I petitioned to take Shop instead, and they totally shot me down. And then the very next year, all the boys and girls had to take half a year of each. I couldn’t believe they took away my one chance for a Norma Rae moment. Wait, did Norma Rae come out before or after we graduated?”
B.J. shrugged. “Who knows. You have to admit, Home Ec got a lot more fun then. Remember when Michael Giacomo added a quarter of a cup of pot to those brownies and left them in the teachers’ lounge?”
I leaned back on my elbows and turned my face up to catch the sun. “I don’t think he ever got in trouble for that. I think the teachers were hoping if they let it go he might do it again. Remember how we all used to think Mr. Oswell looked like Davy Jones?”
A seagull hovered over us until I threw a piece of sub roll a few feet out. The gull nose-dived and caught it before it hit the ground.
“Ohmigod, how the hell did we get to be so freakin’ old?” B.J. yelled.
CHAPTER 14
B.J. shook her head to make sure her animal print scarf was tied on tight. “Okay, your choice. Do you want to be Romy or do you want to be Michele?”
“Do we have to?”
“Of course we have to. Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion is a classic chick flick.”
I rolled my red scarf into the shape of a headband and tied it in a knot on top of my head. The ends stuck out like little wings. I did have fashion flair when I focused.
I sighed. “I hate that term. And I think we’re too old for it anyway—it’s high time we moved on to hen flicks.”
“If we were men at least we could have dick flicks. It sounds a lot edgier.” B.J. put the Mustang into reverse and backed out of the parking space. “Okay, I’ll be Michele.”
“Was that Lisa Kudrow’s character or Mira Sorvino’s?”
“Lisa Kudrow’s.”
“See, you always do that. Why do I always have to be the sweet, innocent one?”
“Fine, you can be Michele. But I think we need to come up with something better for our reunion elevator speech than inventing Post-its.”
I reached for a tin of mints in my purse. “Ooh, I love that part. Do you think it’s human nature to be so insecure that we want people we haven’t seen in years and have no real interest in to believe we’re more successful than we really are?”
I took a mint and then held the tin out to B.J.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said, taking one. “We have nothing to prove. But just in case, I filled out your profile form for the reunion booklet, the one you never emailed back to the committee. I said you’re an internationally renowned sculptor currently working on an abstract series for an independent collector in Dubai.”
“You did not,” I said.
The traffic light ahead turned yellow. B.J. floored it. Once we’d made it through the intersection in one piece, B.J. turned to look at me. “And don’t worry, under Personal, I just said that after years of standing by Kurt through his many and myriad personal issues, and much soul-searching, you’ve finally moved on and you’re now actively but not exclusively dating again.”
“If you’re not kidding, you are so dead meat.”
B.J. laughed. We drove along the bumpy streets close to the water, the ones that flooded in practically every hurricane. Most of the houses had been lifted up on top of tall pilings, like stilts, with money from the same federal grants that rebuilt the seawalls every time the ocean knocked them down. The people who lived here joked about opening all their doors in a storm and just letting the waves go in the back door and out the front.
Growing up, we’d lived in a safer part of town, and I both envied these more adventurous families and wondered how they could decide which of their precious things to take when they evacuated for a storm. The diary with the heart-shaped lock or the autograph book from eighth grade? The 45s or the albums? Their favorite bell-bottom jumpsuit or the long hippie skirt made from thrift shop ties?
B.J. pulled into the driveway of an old gray-shingled beach house with a big wraparound porch covered in flaked white paint. She put the car into park and we jumped out. The crushed mussel shell driveway crunched under our feet.
“Just wondering,” I said, “but what did your profile say?”
B.J. shrugged. “That I was in the process of inventing a second generation of virtual Post-its, but it was top secret and I couldn’t talk openly about it yet.”
“Genius. Hey, are you sure this is the right place?”
“Of course I am.” B.J. walked up to one of the salt-sprayed windows to get a better look inside.
There was no sign of life at Jan’s beach house. No cars in the driveway, no answer to our repeated knocking. Both the front and the back door, which B.J. insisted on trying, turned out to be locked.
“I used to have dreams about living in a beach house like this when we first moved to Atlanta,” I said. “Did you tell Jan what time we’d be here?”
“Of course I did. At least I think I did. Let me try her cell.”
I sat on the porch swing while B.J. dug through her purse and found her phone.
“She’s not answering.” B.J. tucked the phone in the crook of her neck and bent down and picked up a corner of the weathered sisal welcome mat. “You’d think she would have at least left us a key under here.”
“Like we would have just walked right in,” I said.
“We could try the windows,” B.J. said, “but you’ll have to be the one who climbs in. These jeans are brand new.”
“Sorry,” I said. “But I don’t do breaking and entering. Let’s just leave the car here and take a walk on the beach.”
We crossed over to the water side of the street and walked until we found a beach entrance.
I leaned forward to smell the beach roses in front of a dilapidated wooden fence that flanked the path. “I spent years trying to find a perfume that smelled like the beach—you know
, a little bit of beach rose, a splash of salt air, a dash of suntan lotion. Bobbi Brown’s ‘Beach’ is pretty close, but I don’t think you can ever completely duplicate the real thing.”
“So, move back,” B.J. said. “I mean, think of how much money you’ll save on perfume.”
“Ha,” I said. “You make it sound so simple.”
B.J. dropped her head and looked over the top of her sunglasses. “Your kids are grown, you’re self-employed, and your husband left you. It doesn’t get much simpler than that.”
“Leave me alone,” I said. “I’m not ready to think about it.” I loved B.J., but boundaries were not her strong suit.
“I can’t leave you alone,” B.J. said. “I’m your best friend and I think it might be time to start pushing yourself a little bit.”
I shook my head. “Why should I, when I have you for that?”
B.J. grinned. “Love you, too.”
I kicked off the flip-flops I’d been wearing since Atlanta and bent down to pick them up. “You know, flip-flops are truly the world’s best invention, much better than Post-its. I think you should change your profile to say that you invented flip-flops and have been living off the proceeds at an undisclosed location on a private island in the Caribbean.”
B.J. held on to my shoulder as she stepped out of her jute espadrilles. “Ooh, good one. Do me a favor and remember that so I can write it down when we get back to the car.”
“Whoa,” I said, finally noticing. “What happened to the beach?”
The ocean came right up to the seawall. A few huge rocks broke through the surface. The sandy beach I remembered had completely disappeared.
“Erosion,” B.J. said. “I guess you have to wait for low tide to walk the beach now.”
“Oh, that’s so sad.”
We climbed a ladder and walked along the top of the seawall for a while, then turned around and walked back the other way. A young couple in bathing suits was out walking the seawall, too. They stepped way off to one side and teetered on the edge to let us pass.
“Did you see that?” B.J. hissed. “It was like they thought they were helping two little old ladies cross the street.”