Clothed, Female Figure

by Kirstin Allio

  “Anyway, if it’s a girl,” said Diana, taking Margaret’s hands (Diana had never blushed so much as those months she spent with Margaret), “I’m going to name her after you, Margaret.”

  “James if it’s a boy?” Margaret said quickly.

  Suddenly Diana grew very quiet. She closed her eyes on her companion, the darkly draped library where they sat on mahogany benches, the low drum of the full-length grandfather clock inside its mirrored case.

  “Di?” There was Margaret. “God, Di. I didn’t offend you—”

  “No,” Diana whispered. She knew her loose hair looked especially sumptuous in the cherry light of the Webb library.

  The beach club is a cove of fine white sand bookended by cliffs topped with twin white mansions from the Roaring Twenties. One is a museum with extremely elusive hours, and the other belongs to the Cousin Charles Webbs, who’ve broken it up into apartments for the various family factions.

  The crescent cove is walled by a continuous row of bunkers called cabanas. “Cabonyas,” say the clubbies, although as a group, they’re utterly unmusical. The doors are painted Chardonnay yellow with wood trim like meringue, browning with sea mold.

  The children play up and down the cement boardwalk or in the pool that’s invisible to the ocean (as if the ocean would be offended), and at lunch the mothers bend their elbows or shake out aspirins and duck behind sunglasses. There’s a formal dining room that requires sweaters the color of lemonade, geranium, mint julep, but the children take grilled cheese or chopped salad boarding school style at outdoor rattan tables.

  The spring Marguerite was eleven—lofting quickly into summer, linden trees all papery seed wings and brushy greenish flowers—her aunt Margaret came up from New York City. It was the first time Marguerite had met her. Six feet tall, knock-kneed like a colt, slanted like a sketch drawing of a fashion plate. Gin had melted the fat from her frame and distended her stomach like a rosehip. She wrote for a magazine and she smelled like the chrome pages of ads for perfume and lipstick. She had a bedroom voice—sultry, throaty—with which she dispensed decadent, intimate presents a mother would be too shy to give and so would haughtily deem inappropriate. Marguerite and her cousins hid them away like love notes.

  All the little girls flirted with her shamelessly, dropping their white towels on the beach when she approached, flouncing by her table at lunch with their naked salads balanced on one hand, soft-knuckled, dripping with a charm bracelet, but it was clear Diana was her real project. Marguerite watched her draw a single eyebrow across her own forehead. “Is it Diana Kahlo now, darling?”

  What did it mean? Marguerite wondered. “Are you going native?” teased Aunt Margaret.

  Another time Marguerite heard her say archly: “Charming, the way you wear Marguerite on your sleeve like an extra heart, Diana.” But she pronounced Diana’s name like a bauble.

  “Hey Marguerite!” she would summon. “Did you know Mummy used to pick avocados and oranges off the vine in Los Angeles?” She turned her huge square smile upon Diana, but there was something grating in her laughter. And if a Gentleman of the Last Generation—that is, the last generation that would not be required to work—came tacking toward them, varicose veins like nests of worms in his bare legs, his hairless forearms a cannibal pink, Aunt Margaret would grin slyly and whisper, “That one wouldn’t even ask for a dry smooch at bedtime, Diana.” It didn’t take Marguerite long to figure out that her aunt was trying to marry her widowed mother back into society.

  One evening before supper Marguerite and her mother went down to the water. Diana was the only female member of the beach club who would swim in the ocean, and there was always a little dent of shyness in Marguerite’s pleasure: were people watching? Red tide made a slurry of the shallows, a thick fur of blood-colored seaweed that would coat them after swimming.

  Diana wasn’t a skeleton like Aunt Margaret, and she didn’t have Margaret’s height, but she was only thirty-one that summer and she looked fit and lovely in her dark blue swimsuit. She had a generally serious temperament, but on the beach she turned playful and silly. She skipped and splashed and patted the wet sand as if it were the sleek hip of a dolphin.

  The Cousin Charles Webb mansion was pearled in the early evening light and the sunset divided the sky into upside-down cliffs over the water. Out a ways, Seagull Rock was plastered white with frost-like bird droppings. Birds circled and plunged and exploded in separate dark droplets. Marguerite danced around her mother, even tugging the ribbon that hung from her hat as if she were a much younger child, chatting aimlessly, happily about the evening’s clambake.

  But all of a sudden, like a wind change, Marguerite noticed that someone was coming swiftly, deliberately across the beach, straight toward them. Not down from the cabanas, or from the fire pit where caterers swarmed to prepare the clambake, but Neptunish from the water. He was waving urgently, and his unbuttoned white dress shirt knocked about his bare chest like the broken wing of a seagull. He was tall and held himself unnaturally straight from the waist up. His hands began jerking wildly as he approached them.

  Diana pulled up short, and Marguerite, of course, halted with her. She looked up at her mother. Well, were they meeting him? Diana had stopped but Marguerite had the strange sense that her mother’s whole being was in motion.

  “You’re—you’re a beautiful pair!” shouted the man with the flapping shirt. He was jogging to meet them, then faster, as if he would lose them if he didn’t.

  Up close, his face was waxy and his hair was gray, but he seemed almost childish, unguarded. His loose pants were rolled up to the knees and his eyes were pink as if he’d been swimming with them open underwater. Diana took her hat off. Her long hair uncoiled slowly, plum-colored in the sunset.

  “I saw you swim out to the rock,” he said. Diana shook her head but it was true. Marguerite had also watched her.

  He patted his shirt pocket and drew out cigarettes. He held the pack suspended, staring openly at Diana. Then, with a half smile, and half embarrassed, “Won’t you take me to California?” There was the tiniest bit of singsong to it.

  Diana looked out to sea. The wrong sea, the Atlantic. “This is Marguerite.” She put a hand lightly on Marguerite’s shoulder.

  When he bent down stiffly, the blood in his eyes startled Marguerite just a little. “Do you like my beach?”

  Her mother gave a short laugh. He jerked his hand through his hair, flinching. He looked out over Diana’s head. “Are you by any chance named after our cousin Margaret?” It took Marguerite a moment to realize he was addressing her.

  She said, “I’m named after my aunt.” The only thing she ever said to him.

  She found Aunt Margaret and a gin and tonic at one of the alcove bars between the pool and the dining room. “The spinster aunt!” cried Margaret. “Of course, I’m required to babysit. Who needs a fucking clambake?”

  “Who?” Great Aunt Taffy was with her, at once muddled and adamant.

  “I don’t need any more mollusks or blue cheese dressing,” said Aunt Margaret.

  The bartender set down a Shirley Temple. Marguerite felt her aunt eyeing the drink lewdly. “Just the two of us without Mummy—won’t we manage?”

  For a cover-up Aunt Margaret wore an oversized Oxford shirt, not unlike the white dress shirt the man on the beach had been wearing.

  “Why aren’t these clambakes ever rained out?” said Taffy.

  They heard a car peel out of the parking lot behind the cabanas. Margaret cocked her narrow head. Marguerite stood up quickly.

  “Well that sounds fun,” said Margaret.

  Aunt Margaret had promised her a subscription. “At least my namesake should appreciate beauty’s contrivances,” she said. “What does Diana know, with her natural beauty?” Now she took Marguerite’s face in her hands and squinted. “We’ll leave hair and makeup for another day, sweetheart.”

  A handful of clubbies were idling around the fire pit. Outside their circle stood a short, dumpy man in s
wim trunks and a yellowing T-shirt. His beard clung to his rounded chin like lichen. His round nose was inflamed with sunburn as if prior to this day he’d been living underground as a potato. He had a bright red line of sunburn, too, just above his eyebrows. Margaret stretched her lips as they approached him.

  He tried to angle away from them, but Margaret bore down, and she was a full head taller. The interloper had to stumble backward to look up at her.

  “Believe me,” he said. “I’m aware I’m not invited.”

  But Margaret held out her long hand to arrest the little paw in a handshake. At least she meant to smile. “From here on out, you’re a guest of ours,” she said. She looked at her niece. “The Two Margarets.” She kept his hand as she waited for him to say something. He would rather have been shunned and silent.

  “It’s a real embarrassment,” he gave up finally.

  “Oh?” said Margaret, releasing the handshake.

  “One of your members took my car, I’m afraid. I’m stranded.” He paused, hoping his confession was finished.

  “One of our members.”

  “And on a Saturday night,” he continued, changing tacks, feeling sorry for himself. He looked out at the ocean.

  “Well.” Now she was all business. “I’m sure we can find you a cocktail.” She broke into a real smile and waved to attract the attention of a waiter. “They don’t really see you till they know you,” winked Margaret.

  When the man had his drink he was ready to laugh with her. “Jeez it’s awkward,” he confided. “You know, I’m not a doctor or anything. Just the chaperone.”

  “Ah,” said Margaret knowingly. Marguerite understood she would have to wait for an explanation.

  “They like to get out once in a while. Just like the rest of us.” He said it in a kind of generous spirit, to his credit.

  Margaret merely nodded.

  “To top it off.” He drank. “Sunstroke.”

  Aunt Margaret lifted her glass. “Well here’s to sunstroke.” She drank. “And a night off for Diana.”

  Jonathan leans forward. “You asked me what I write.”

  She nods, she’s soberly drunk, drunkenly sober, omniscient as God, vague as God also. She feels as if she’s been crying for hours. At this moment all she sort of needs is for him to like her. Squishy, egoless little life forms become mouths and sharp elbows. Self-sabotaging, hard-drinking Marguerite: no wonder her mother left her.

  She places her fingertips on her shoulders, an inane and invented gesture that will never be repeated. She can tell he likes it.

  He leans back a little. Now Marguerite crosses her legs under the table and tries crossing her fingers on command: she can still do it, but any inkling of where she left her car is eclipsed by vodka.

  A small flock of girls in saggy jeans, down vests, and lumpy backpacks circles the table next to theirs, which all this time has been empty. The backpacks seem to tumble off the girls’ shoulders of their own accord, as if this is the very thing that backpacks are made for. A girl with an emaciated white ponytail and white lashes locks her mittened hands on their extra chair. “May I?”

  Her mittens are the red of Christmas. Her white eyebrows take over the world, Jonathan and Marguerite are completely wiped out. Then she settles into her group and her voice is common, indistinguishable.

  Jonathan digs his elbows into the table and Marguerite leans in to close out the intruders. She concentrates on keeping her face open. He moves in too, and his intent makes him startlingly handsome.

  “So,” she says. “You didn’t really end up in the same apartment as your mother.”

  “The O. Henry?” says Jonathan. Before she knows it they’re both laughing. He takes his glasses off and wipes his eyes. The unexpected irreverence of it! She gulps and almost chokes with laughter, which sets him laughing all over again. Finally he pushes his drink away and the glass skates a little on some liquid. Have they been spilling their drinks all evening?

  They float from the room. The security guard is reading a cheap paperback, a cover like black nail polish. Marguerite could easily forget how to exit this tower.

  She follows Jonathan down a dim hallway that becomes another dim hallway. They come to a fire door with a low red light and Jonathan pushes it open. Time is so screwy she’s half expecting daylight. She imagines herself craning around, looking for that star of sunshine.

  They’re outside, and it’s dark. They’re outside, but they’re not out of the Grad Towers. They’re on a high bridge somewhere in the middle of all that Godforsaken architecture and it’s cold and the giant concrete pillars are radiating an even more intense coldness. There are three-foot-high planters with dried-up boxwoods a corpse shade of yellow and flurries of frozen cigarette butts. It’s like being inside a concrete basket. The light comes from a buzzing streetlight and Marguerite realizes she has no idea which street they’re facing. Benevolent, Thayer, Charlesfield?

  “I can’t believe I found you,” she hears Jonathan saying.

  For a moment it makes sense, and then it doesn’t. He paws one foot up on the edge of a planter.

  One dinosaur, thinks Marguerite, represented many. One set of bones came from many skeletons. As if a thousand Quetzalcoatluses contributed. Their taut-skinned wings reconstituted in the imaginations of a thousand scientists: maybe they looked like enormous egrets.

  Suddenly Jonathan loses his balance and his foot skids off the edge of the planter. He wobbles, puts his arm around her waist for stabilization. His coat is open and she slides her hand around his waist underneath it.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  With great thanks to the folks at Dzanc.

  I’ve been lucky to have crossed paths with fine editors at intrepid literary magazines that continue to publish unusual work—thanks especially to Ronald Spatz, Carolyn Kuebler, Lynne Nugent, Laura Furman, Rebekah Hall, Minna Proctor, and the poet Sarah Gambito, who’s been there since the beginning of writing time.

  And in memory of Hedy Dowd Suraski, 1975-2012.

  Stephanie Alvarez Ewens

  KIRSTIN ALLIO’s novel, Garner, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction. She is a recipient of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 award, a PEN/O. Henry prize, and other honors for her short stories and essays. She’s currently a Howard Foundation Fellow at Brown University, and she lives in Providence, RI with her husband and sons.