by Daniel Riley
Vassar meant closer to Grace, too. Not that it was much of a contributing factor. Grace was in New York by then. She lived in the Village with a girl named Tess and then a girl named Rose. Or at least that’s what she told Suzy and their folks. For money she served coffee and sandwiches at a diner on lower Sixth Avenue, and for fun she smoked grass with guitarists. She followed Creedence through the South for a couple weeks. She sent a Polaroid from Florida of her head between the jaws of a stuffed gator. She sent a postcard of Charlotte Motor Speedway with an arrow pointing from a ballpoint-scripted “Suzy” to Richard Petty’s car. Grace was good at staying brightly in the periphery without requiring of Suzy any real time or attention.
The Christmas of Suzy’s sophomore year at Vassar, Grace mentioned that she was thinking about becoming a stewardess. That she’d applied and might be hearing in the spring. Until then she’d keep waitressing—“doing basically all the shit I’d do on an airplane, only without getting to go anywhere.” Suzy couldn’t really imagine her sister in a Roman café or on a Tokyo city street but had no trouble picturing her in the uniform.
That spring, while she was interviewing with recruiters, Grace met a guy in a bar in New York. Grace has this big, sticky red mouth—all through growing up, it looked as though she’d been sneaking time with a lollipop—and Mike Singer had watched it move for hours one night. Grace talked to a couple of Mike’s friends while he tried some lines on a couple of hers. When the pairings in the bar broke down and someone moved to the bathroom, Mike mentioned to Grace that there was a secret Gram Parsons show that night. A solo thing of the new Flying Burrito Brothers record straight through at this art guy’s loft. Would she maybe…? This was the right thing for Mike Singer to say, even though he couldn’t find the show in the end.
He’d heard about it—the rumor, at least—because he was a magazine guy. Wrote for New York and Esquire. Small things—but stuff that put him on their lists. If Wolfe or Mailer or Halberstam couldn’t make it, and the twenty guys after them were tied up, then Mike Singer might get a call. It didn’t kill Mike, being number twenty-four. Limited work meant more time to write his novels. There were three when Grace met him. He’d rotate around: when he felt hopeless about one, he’d comfort himself with the presence of two and three, especially three, the real deal—the haymaker-in-waiting.
Mike was from a Big Ten town—Madison, Bloomington, Ann Arbor (Grace used them interchangeably at first)—and he’d come to New York for college at Columbia. He felt in New York that it was possible to project his whole life forward, to see the full picture, the wunderkind spoils, the humble deflection of praise, the Village loft with its modern furniture pieces, the way the elegant lines might look with a fancy-blooded graduate student pressed against them. He pictured his books along the shelves, his magazines stacked in boxes, gray coming at the temples like a sign of ascension. He’d look like his father, the economics professor, who’d died of a heart attack when Mike was twenty-two. By then there was no one left: Mike was an only child and his mother had abandoned him when he was a boy. Mike might return to the Big Ten town, but only in body, never in spirit. He planned not to have a reason to live anywhere but New York ever again.
Mike was a little older than Grace and off on what might be called a trajectory. The sort of early calculations where small ticks upward presumed large dividends down the road. The summer before Suzy’s senior year, Mike came into a pipeline of assignments, writing extensively about the upstart candidate Shirley Chisholm for New York. Mike wrote the straight stuff; Gloria Steinem said what it meant. Mike had a little money and wanted to trade up to a bigger apartment. By that time he and Grace had moved in together. They were all wrong on paper but seemed to fill in each other’s gaps, to double their strength in composite. He was locked in, reliant upon her. She, less so. She’d been picked up by a new airline called Grand Pacific. She worked out of Kennedy, one of just a few, flying New York–L.A. a couple times a week. But after the first year the opportunities for Grace were growing limited, both professionally and socially. Mike wanted to move into that larger apartment. Grace wanted to move to Southern California. There was this little beach town she’d heard about during stew school, a place where half the girls ended up. It was her intention to get there. That Mike come was requested but not required.
At the start of Suzy’s final year at Vassar, Mike and Grace agreed that they’d move out to Sela del Mar. This was Mike’s sacrifice, his proof of commitment. In exchange he wanted Grace to marry him. This was tricky: Grace would have to quit her job with Grand Pacific if she said yes—it was a cardinal rule of the airline that stews be single. There was no way she would, but Grace was committed to fairness. So when they got hitched at Christmas in Schuyler Glen, they swore the family to secrecy. Suzy thought it was all pretty dumb, but she did duties as the maid of honor, gave a toast about sharing a bathroom, about fistfights and psychological warfare. About the warmth and closeness they’d feel in the dial-down after a good tilt, how they’d fall asleep together in one or the other’s bed. When they got out to Sela, Mike and Grace installed a second, secret phone in their kitchen to take the airline’s calls.
“I saw that!” It is a voice in the present. It is a voice at the Fourth of July Drunk ’n’ Draw. It is a voice that floats in distorted, piercing and low. And then a laugh that is an even lower roll, so self-amused, so illiterate sounding, it makes Suzy laugh, too. Her beer is finished all over again. Grace is late and somehow it is exactly the right timing.
“I didn’t know you played back row!” The voice grows deeper as she gets closer. Like every woman but Suzy, Grace has color. Raw-sugar skin, lemon-meringue hair, plus a peach dress and pearls. “We saw you from the top of the hill, we saw you block that shot.”
“That was thirty minutes ago,” Suzy says.
“We bumped into some friends.”
“You’ve been around for thirty minutes?”
“No,” she says. “I dunno. It’s gonna be a long day. Speaking of, we have to go.”
“You two aren’t signed up for the Drunk ’n’ Draw?” Suzy says.
It’s a joke, but Mike is eyeing the scene with a thin grimace: “I thought Updike’s cuckolds were the only men who played volleyball.”
It’s something Mike would say to Suzy and not Grace, but Grace says, “I even know what that means,” before quickly getting to business: “Let’s go, we’re late, we’re meeting people and heading to a party.”
Suzy grabs her board and follows Grace and Mike to the Strand, the walkway that stretches for miles along the beach. She watches her sister clop along. How does she take up so much space? She moves in and around an entire little zone of her own, Grace in three fully occupied dimensions—her steps, whether in sandals or heels, walking this elegant fine line between high composure and a drunk stumble.
“Mom called again,” Grace says, smiling over her shoulder. “Left another message.”
“Hiiiii, guuyyys, it’s meeee.…”
“We’d reeeally like to heeeear your voiiiices, pleeease. Or even beeetter—see your faaaaces.…”
They both smile at their shared skill.
“I just…,” Suzy says, warm with the attention of her mother but irritated, too, “I’ve been here a month. We each call once a week.”
“That’s a message a day for the past four days,” Grace says.
“This is probably just a holiday call—before heading to the lake or whatever.”
“Maybe we really should try to go home soon. I mean, if we’re going anyway.”
“I just got here! They can wait a little longer.”
“And how is it, then, that I’m still the only one catching flack for being a deserter?” Grace says.
“You were first to the reputation,” Suzy says. “Reputations are tough to transfer.”
When they reach Twelfth Street, they ninety up the hill and hit a set of concrete terraces, where a restaurant called Huevos sits on the corner. It’s a stucco-and-tile shoe
box that brings to mind the adobe outhouse of a Spanish mission. On the sidewalk out front they hitch up with a train of strangers Grace and Mike evidently just ate brunch with.
As they pass through town, Suzy’s pulled by the pack of the shirtless and champagne-high as though strapped to someone else’s legs. She’s near the fat part of the pack’s tail, right beside Mike and Grace, and she keeps her board tucked tightly under her arm. The route is an easy one—down a lolling decline into the center of town, the water to the right, the steeper amphitheater seating of the hillside houses on their left.
The sidewalks are crowded with men and women who love America. Cars roll by with flags pinned to the windows. Old people shout patriotic non sequiturs from balconies. They move through downtown—an all-night diner and a pair of competing sunglasses shops, an Italian restaurant and a French restaurant for birthdays and anniversaries. The buildings are cream stucco and the roofs are Spanish-tile orange. Every now and then there’s a building with a second floor, a bed and a toilet for a shopkeeper. It’s warming up. The ocean blows rotting seaweed up the hill. On typical summer weekends the downtown is crowded, bright and erect. But today it sags even heavier, oversaturated, a fallen cake.
They track up the hill and onto a carless, roadless pedestrian walkstreet. A strip of communal concrete yards sprawled from picket fence to picket fence. Spillover planters, tricycles, and abandoned lemonade stands chime sweetly. It feels the way a street does in the aftermath of a block party, only one run by children.
Halfway down the block they hear the three-note bass progression of a Who chorus. A shirtless hulk with a beard to his Adam’s apple waves a long wooden rod with an American flag on the end. He shouts, “A-mer-i-ca!” and, “Fuck Canada!” A pair of dark men with mirror-image mustaches are doubled over, laughing, tearing from beneath their shades, and they’re still laughing as the first of the pack unlatches the little white gate to the tiny bricked yard and heads into the house.
“There’s Bethany,” Grace says when they reach the property line. Suzy notices an unexpected quiver, a vocal reluctance. Most of the girls here are sitting out in bikini tops and shorts. Grace, in even a casual peach dress, is dressed like someone’s aunt.
Bethany titters over like a windup toy and throws her arms around Grace, hinging a lower leg so that her heel presses against her ass. Grace introduces her to Suzy and Mike, and Bethany hugs them, too.
“The boyfriend and the sister—it’s all making sense!” Bethany says. And then she leads them into the party and gives a speedy roll call. The names sound friendly to Suzy but drift away on the breeze, unhitched to faces. Each person is kinder than the last, adamant that Suzy’s time at the party be the greatest time ever. During her month in town they’ve worked collectively to make sure her opinion of Sela is as faultless as their own. They make sure she never has two empty hands.
In the corner there is a half-length vanity mirror laid on its back, dusted in a light snowfall. She hasn’t seen coke since Vassar—and even then it was rare. She figures she’s closer to South America now. The kids around the table, younger than Suzy, siblings of someone probably, take turns leaning in. After nosing up the lines, they take a rapid second lap and sniff at the crumbs. Then they stretch their arms above their heads, lean back—each makes the identical move—and sink into the understuffed couch.
What the girls party-wide seem to have most in common is interest in cheap champagne, the sort they’ve apparently not stopped drinking since the night before. They tell jokes punctuated by nicknames, the intimacy impenetrable. Grace stands with some of Bethany’s friends, whose hair and teeth and pinched waists Suzy recognizes as belonging to stews. But most of the others seem to have been friends since elementary school—and friends all over again at the post–high school, post-college beach. These women of Sela: half stews, half homegrown. Suzy gets rolled by a wave of skin-prickling curiosity. What were her high school friends doing just now? The boys from swimming? The girls from newspaper? When did she even see them last? Were they still technically friends, with all the time and distance? And what about the Vassar girls—that last class to miss the liberation parade? Does the ocean look different from their parties on Martha’s Vineyard and Block Island? How does she not know the answer to that—how has she never been invited?
No matter, this is it now: Look around, Suzy, you’re home. What she sees is hair. Hair and sunglasses. Uncountable center parts and golden frames. Hair and sunglasses, and in deep, dark, grotesque slo-mo, wide mouths and heavy chests of uncomplicated laughter, the big knee-slapper of the in-joke, tan tits heaving with the fun, a part of Suzy’s body she’s never desired to turn another color until this very moment. Some better shade of translucence.
Suzy finds Mike standing in line for the keg, nodding politely to a conversation about the waves that morning. Suzy wonders where his head’s at, whether he’s back in a life left behind in New York. She taps him on the shoulder and he gives her flirty eyebrows, which she’s never misunderstood to be anything more than This, huh?
“Thing is,” Mike says to her as they pair off together, “I even know my sports. That’s what I talk about with guys I’ve just met. ‘Hey, Lakers, Knicks, blah, blah, blah.’ I’ve got the language, the passion for my teams.…” He pauses, then moves to a place of greater frustration. “But here we are, in July, and they don’t even know baseball.”
Suzy thinks this is a very funny thing to say and starts laughing and clapping her hands. But it’s not so funny, and she realizes that she’s teetering. She does the fingertips test—thumb to index, middle, ring, pinkie, and back—with both hands, quicker in each succession. But she still hasn’t said anything, and Mike keeps moving his head around, trying to find her eyes, peering into a window whose curtains keep shifting.
“Hey,” he says, “you’re starting to make me think I’m not the only one who can’t quite piece together how I got here.”
Suzy rode the bus to New Haven the day after Mike and Grace’s wedding. She’d been offered a chance to do her final semester at Yale. Not a full transfer but an experimental step toward a better exchange between brother and sister schools. Suzy had taken a course that fall with a visiting graduate student from Yale who’d advocated for the experiment. The grad student, Camille, had been pushing to thread older coeds into the campus fabric now that Yale had younger female students of its own. Yale, after all, had opened itself to women the year after Suzy graduated from high school. It hadn’t bothered Suzy then, but the longer she spent at Vassar in the sea of two thousand girls, the more she simmered beneath the surface. She’d visited Yale’s libraries to borrow books on several occasions and, while in New Haven, watched the female admits float on the privilege. The experiment hadn’t been her idea, but she didn’t hesitate to accept the offer, either. It was something she needed without knowing why.
Suzy thought about just driving back and forth but instead arranged last-minute for an apartment nearest to the library as she could find. Rather than grip tighter as the world came knocking, she felt that an exit—graduation, like death (she’d read the confessional poets with Camille)—was that much more welcome. Before Christmas, she packed up most of her belongings in Poughkeepsie, ready for New Haven and the strange island of unbelonging.
That first Monday in January, HAPPY 1972 hats still gumming up the gutters on York Street, Suzy left Sterling Library with a couple slim volumes of poetry tucked under her arm and a dramatic angle of attack on the headwind. Her apartment was on Lake, on the other side of the gym. She’d taken a step over a bank of slush onto the sidewalk beside Mory’s when she saw a young man in a jacket and pom hat failing to turn over the engine of a ’68 Camaro. She almost missed it. Silver, it didn’t pop much off the filthy snow. She’d never seen one up close before. She’d have to call Wayne.
He pushed it again and again—it gargled at that high register without a release. She could make out his shape through the frosty windshield, could hear Badfinger on the radio. She watc
hed his body slide down in his seat. Suzy knocked at the glass. He flashed her his eyes and sat tall, as though embarrassed to have been caught giving up. He rolled down the window.
“Yeah?” he said.
“You good?” she said.
“Good, not great.”
“I can help you start it if you want,” she said.
“How’s that?”
“I know a few things to try.”
He was disarmingly handsome. She recognized him from her previous visits to campus—not the libraries but a sandwich shop or something. She’d never met him, but she’d seen him, as in really seen him, remembered the contour lines of his face. He had a big head with thick hair pouring out from under his hat. He had a long, scalene nose and stubble and a Christmas-in-the-Caribbean tan. He had gray eyes that were wet from the wind, lashes that were longer and curlier than hers.