Undertow

by Elizabeth O'Roark

  “Such a pretty color,” says Heather. Damn her. That’s what I was going to say.

  “Silver-sage,” beams Elise. “It’s so weird because you’d think it’d be a green but it really looks kind of blue, doesn’t it? The bathroom walls are beige. I love blue and beige together.”

  “They’re so soft,” purrs the girl beside me, as she places them in my hands.

  Expectant, happy faces turn toward me. I draw a complete blank. “Nice,” I murmur, but I fail to sound appropriately enthused and the faces fall a little. My mother shoots me a look that tells me to pick up my game.

  Elise is opening another gift. I grin, thinking of my conversation with Ethan. It’s a pan.

  “Oh my gosh! The 3-quart saucepan!” she squeals. Holy. Fucking. Shit. I will never get married if it requires squealing like this over a 3-quart pan. Never. Of course, I don’t cook, so I have no clue what you even do with a 3-quart saucepan. Make sauce? How much sauce could you possibly need to make over the course of your life? Especially the women in this room. Have any of them ever made sauce? More likely, they’ve peeked into the kitchen while their staff made sauce.

  “Oooh, feel the weight of this thing!” cries Kendall, as it begins to make the circuit. She’s good. They all are. All of them but me. I’m not sure what gene I failed to inherit, but I’m missing the one that will make me buzz with excitement about kitchen goods. And it hangs over my head like a dark cloud, one I know every woman in this room can see. It embarrasses my mother. She’s embarrassed by the fact that it’s not me getting married. She’s embarrassed that I don’t care. I think she’s even embarrassed by the fact that I’m going to law school instead of coming home to pass time in a less intellect-heavy way.

  “You should be watching carefully, Maura,” teases Mrs. McDonald. “From what I hear, you’re next.” All the moms titter, my mom and Mrs. Mayhew especially, looking at each other meaningfully. Jesus. We’ve dated for less than two months and they all know.

  “Hardly,” I mutter sourly, refusing to play along.

  Before the shower ends, Elise pulls me aside. “Can I talk to you for a sec?” she asks tentatively.

  “Of course,” I reply. She seems anxious, which makes me anxious in turn.

  “I’m sorry,” she says, gesturing back at the room strewn with silver bows and white wrapping paper. “I know you hate this stuff.”

  “God, Elise, don’t apologize! I don’t hate it. I’m excited for you,” I say, and I sound sincere, because I’m so horrified that she’s apologizing. “This was great.”

  “I have to tell you something,” she breathes.

  “Okay.”

  “Brian asked Nate to be one of his groomsmen,” she says, watching me with her big worried eyes, holding her breath as if I’m going to explode in response. It’s been our rule, all this time: don’t mention Nate, under any circumstance. It’s the first time she’s broken it.

  I feel my stomach plummeting, my chest tightening. Just the sound of his name would have had this effect. But God, it’s not just that. It’s the prospect of seeing him, after five years of silence. It’s finally happening, and I really have no choice in the matter.

  “Okay,” I say, my voice whistling high through a constricted throat.

  “I’m so sorry,” she pleads. “I hope it’s not going to be weird.”

  Oh, it’s going to be so weird that weird isn’t even the word for it. “No,” I murmur. “It’s fine.” I feel like I’m replying to her from far away, an international call in another time zone.

  She looks relieved. She’s the only one of us who is.

  I haven’t seen Nate in five years. I have to be over it by now, I tell myself. I have to be.

  CHAPTER 13

  I came home from school during the winter of my junior year of high school and found both my parents sitting in the living room, their faces drawn. I couldn’t imagine why they’d even be there. At this time of day my father should be at work, my mother at the club. She claimed to divide her day up between tennis and golf, but on the rare times I saw her, my impression was she was dividing her time up between martinis and vodka tonics. There was no other noise, another unnerving development. Even without them home, there was always noise, the sound of a distant vacuum, the clang of a cookie sheet slapping against a counter.

  My mother’s eyes were swollen, and she’d cried her makeup off. I couldn’t remember ever seeing her without it. She tried to tell me something, but began crying before the words were out.

  “Your grandfather died this morning,” my father said.

  “What?” I cried, my voice equal parts grief and anger. It had to be a mistake. My grandfather played tennis every Saturday at the club, and golf every Sunday. He hadn’t even retired yet. “He’s healthy!” I argued, as if I might somehow make them recognize their error. My mother cried harder.

  “He had a heart attack, Maura,” my father said quietly. “It happens.”

  We left for the beach, stopping by USC to pick up Jordan on the way. For once even he didn’t try to lighten the silence.

  The town was so different in the winter. Not cold, really, by anyone’s standards, but grayer and wetter. Without the sun to burn off the moisture, the air hung like netting around us, settling on our shoulders and refusing to push away. And it was quiet. The stores were closed, the beaches were empty, the tourists had disappeared. It felt like the island had died too. As if it had been my grandfather who brought all the people and the weather and the life, and without him nothing could flourish.

  Nate wasn’t there. I’d known he wouldn’t be. UVA was too far away and he’d have no way to get home anyway. But it only made the emptiness, the lack of reality, more intense. Even after I saw my grandfather lying there at the wake it remained unreal. He didn’t look like himself, with his face waxen and his hair flat to his head. I was still unconvinced that I wouldn’t find him the next summer swinging golf clubs into the trunk of his car or sitting on the porch. I felt, from the time we arrived until the time we left, that I was merely caught up in the gray fog of a dream that I couldn’t seem to scratch away. That I would wake. But of course, I did not.

  I didn’t realize, until he was gone, how safe I’d felt with my grandfather. How, at times, he and Nate felt like the only normal things in my life, the only people whose love wasn’t offered as a bargaining chip for good grades or good behavior. Without either of them there, the world felt like a precarious place for the first time in my life.

  Things that once seemed certain were now more tenuous. And especially now that Nate had been away at college, I needed to see him with my own eyes to know this one thing would stay the same.

  The beach was crowded on my first day back that next summer, but I saw nothing but him as he approached. He pulled me to him tightly and neither of us cared who saw. I knew, suddenly, that my home wasn’t Charlotte or the beach house. It was him, here, and as I sank into him I couldn’t imagine how I would ever leave it again. I wasn’t able to wait for it to get dark until I had him to myself. “Let’s get the canoe,” I whispered. He knew what I meant.

  We paddled quickly toward our old fort. He jumped out the minute it ran aground and tugged the canoe onto the sand. And the moment it was there, he was pulling me out of it, our movements made frenzied and desperate by the long separation, by the way the earth had shifted during it. I stripped his shirt off of him and then my own. He loosened the strings of my bikini and it fell to the ground.

  “Maura,” he breathed. It was the first time we’d been together in daylight. “God you’re beautiful,” he said quietly, regarding me. I stood before him in nothing but my bikini bottoms, and then I removed them as well. He stepped back into me, his kisses almost reverent, and I sank to the ground, pulling him with me.

  “Nate,” I said, as he hovered over me. “I’m ready. I want to.”

  “Are you sure?” he asked, his voice strained with need. I nodded.

  He grabbed his wallet and pulled out a condom. I was
both surprised and relieved he’d thought to bring one — it hadn’t even occurred to me. I watched him put it on, feeling torn between need and outright fear.

  “Are you ready?” he asked. I nodded, and he began to slide into me.

  “Stop!” I cried.

  His face looked strained. “I’m barely in, Maura. Does it hurt?”

  I tried not to wince. “Just give me a minute. Let me get used to it.”

  He pressed in farther, and I gasped at the burning pain of it.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “I’ll get used to it,” I said in a small voice. I began to think that maybe I didn’t need this after all. He pushed in a little more, and again the pain was bad enough that I seriously considered making him stop. I gripped his arms.

  “How bad is it?” he asked, but I could tell by his face that he knew.

  “Just do it,” I gasped, bracing myself. He did, and it hurt like a bitch.

  “Shit!” I cried, when he was finally all the way in, in too much pain to worry about how absolutely-not-hot I was making this.

  “I’m sorry, baby,” he groaned.

  “It’s okay,” I whispered. “It’s over.”

  “Um, not exactly, Maura,” he replied.

  Just as it stopped hurting, just as it began to feel unbelievably good, he came. And it was worth every ounce of lingering frustration I felt afterward to be able to watch it happen, and to know I’d made him happy.

  **

  We went to the pier with everyone that night. He held my hand carefully, as if it could be crushed under the pressure of his if he wasn’t diligent. We sat with everyone but his fingers constantly returned to me, entwining with mine, running along my cheekbone, combing through my hair.

  After an hour of sitting next to him, feeling his thigh brushing against mine, sharing a bottle of beer, touching his hand every time we passed it back and forth, my desire for him was overwhelming me. Just the memory of watching him come made me weak.

  “Can we leave?” I whispered in his ear. He silently took my hand and pulled me behind him. The second we found darkness I grabbed him, tugging at him with a desperation even I didn’t understand.

  “I don’t want to hurt you again,” he said, his voiced strained and thin.

  “Please, Nate,” I breathed, placing my palms on either side of his face and kissing him. “Please.”

  “Are you sure?” he asked, his voice hoarse.

  “I need this,” I said.

  As soon as the words were out of my mouth, his hands went to my hair and he was pulling me into him. He laid me down in the sand and pulled my dress around my waist, unable to move quickly enough.

  I braced as he slid inside of me, and was amazed to discover it didn’t hurt. I gasped when he was all the way in.

  “Am I hurting you?” he asked anxiously.

  “No,” I moaned.

  He hovered over me, moving slowly. I felt desperate and greedy for more, arching against him, without entirely knowing what I wanted more of.

  He was saying my name, fervently, like a prayer, against my ear. The ache grew unbearable, and my hips rose to meet his. I wrapped my legs tight around him, like a vise, wanting more.

  “Maura,” he gasped, a warning in his voice, and I didn’t listen, I couldn’t listen, just pushed harder and harder until finally I was shattering in a million pieces, crying out, and not a moment too soon. There was one long, guttural noise from his throat and then he clutched me to him, moaning, exploding inside of me.

  When he finally pulled his head off of my shoulder he smiled. “Do you know how much I love you?” he asked.

  “Not half as much as I love you,” I answered with a smile.

  He grinned, brushing my mouth with his. “That’s impossible.”

  For as close as we’d always been, we’d never been as close as we were right then.

  “You’re going to be sore tomorrow,” he warned, kissing the top of my head.

  I paused, wanting to ignore the unnerving thought that was dancing at the edge of my mind, wanting to return to the satisfaction I’d felt only seconds before. Finally, I pushed away from him. “How do you know?” I asked.

  “How do I know what?” he said, still trying to catch his breath.

  “How do you so much about it? How do you know I’ll be sore?” I said, sitting up, my voice rising. “And why did you have condoms? Have you done it before?!”

  I waited for him to deny it, my heart constricting.

  “I’m sorry, Maura.” He reached out to me and I pushed him off, curling up into myself in shock, struggling to come to terms with something I should have known long before — that while I had been saving myself for him, while I hadn’t gone on a single date in two years, he’d gone on as if I’d never been there at all. I couldn’t believe my own stupidity. I covered my face with my hands as I began to cry.

  I felt him surrounding me, felt him trying to pull my hands away. “I’m 19,” he pled. “You couldn’t expect me stay a virgin all through college?”

  I cried harder, refusing to look at him.

  “I’m so sorry, baby,” he went on. “With what your grandfather said I just thought … ”

  “Thought what, Nate?” I cried, finally looking at him. “You thought you might have to wait a little while? Was it that hard to do?”

  He shook his head frantically, “No, I just thought it might be a long time, maybe not until we were married, and I … ”

  “So you thought it was okay for you, but not for me? It was okay for you to do whatever you want, while I skip all of my high school dances?”

  “I never asked you to skip all that,” he argued.

  “Yes you did!” I cried. “Or do you not remember the summer you flipped out on me for ‘practicing’?”

  He shook his head. “Maura, I’m sure I said something stupid, and the idea of you dating makes me sick, but I never meant to imply you shouldn’t be dating at all.”

  His answer almost made things worse. I buried my face in my hands again, weeping, needing him to comfort me and to leave me alone all at the same time.

  He leaned his forehead against my knees in supplication. “I’m so, so sorry,” he pled. “Please don’t be mad.”

  Even at that moment I knew I would forgive him. As much as it hurt, this wasn’t entirely his fault. Aside from the one time he’d gotten upset at me for “practicing” so long ago we’d never had a single conversation about how things should be when we were apart. But at the same time what hurt most was that I loved him so much I hadn’t wanted to be with anyone else. And he had.

  “Take me home,” I told him. The words felt as if they came from far away, resting beneath a large weight I might never dislodge.

  We walked home and I said nothing in response to his apologies and his pleading. I put my hands in my pockets to avoid holding his.

  We got to my grandmother’s steps, and I didn’t turn back toward him as I unlocked the door.

  “Maura … ” he began. I walked in the house and latched the door behind me. I felt ill as I did it, my anger at him already morphing into anger at myself. I hated that he’d slept with other girls, but I hated even more that I hadn’t been better at these things, that I’d been too young and stupid to understand the things he wanted.

  CHAPTER 14

  Ethan drives up the night before graduation.

  “You’re tense,” he comments that night, laying on my bed and watching me pack.

  I shrug. “Maybe a little. A lot is happening at once.”

  “What do you mean?” he asks.

  “You know,” I say, not entirely sure myself. “I’m graduating, I’m moving, I’m saying goodbye to my friends … ”

  “So you’re not nervous about your parents seeing us together?” he asks, grinning.

  I laugh. “Yes, although I don’t know why. They’ve met other guys I’ve dated, and anyway, they already know you and they’re totally thrilled.”

  “I’m not just ‘other
guys’, Maura,” he replied. “So this is kind of a big deal.”

  I sigh, because that’s precisely the problem: I don’t want this to be a big deal, and it is. Tomorrow, being together with my family, makes it official.

  **

  My parents arrive at almost the same moment as Jordan, Mia and the baby. It’s a relief to have the baby to focus on instead of the little portentous looks my parents throw back and forth watching me and Ethan.

  “Come here, Catherine,” I say, plucking my little niece out of her carseat. “Look at how big you are!” I coo. “Mia, she’s so cute I could just eat her up!”

  Mia offers me a tired half-smile. She’s been wan since she had Catherine last September, as if something vital departed with the baby’s birth. I keep waiting for the Mia I knew to return, with her little-girl giggle and her happy innocence but every time I see her she looks a little worse, a little quieter, a little more … resigned.

  I tuck the thought away and return to my niece, extending a pinkie for her to grab. She immediately pulls herself to standing with that one small grip, and I laugh. “Look at her! She’s like a superhero baby!”

  “Babies do stand, moron,” says Jordan.

  “But she pulled herself to standing only holding one of my pinkies, asshole. Let’s see you do that,” I argue, my attention focused entirely on my gorgeous niece.

  “Looks like you’re next, dude,” Jordan tells Ethan. I focus on Catherine, my stomach clenching as I wait for Ethan to rebut it. But of course he doesn’t, and all I can do is scold myself for making a big deal out of nothing. Jordan was just joking and Ethan was in an awkward position – he can hardly act dismissive about our relationship in front of my family.

  But all through the afternoon and evening the comments continue to flow, both subtle and not at all subtle, and Ethan seems to welcome them. He doesn’t act like someone who’s just being polite.

  Over dinner Jordan glares at Ethan. “So we haven’t discussed this, but I’m pretty sure I forbid you to ask my sister out until after graduation.”