Beach Trip

by Cathy Holton

  He reminded Annie of Agnes Grace, a girl she’d met while volunteering out at the Baptist Children’s Home. Agnes Grace had a similar personality, all fire and vinegar.

  “Thank goodness we took that baby swim class at the Club,” Claiborne’s distracted mother said to the crowd that was quickly gathering. “They taught him to hold his breath underwater.” Claiborne squirmed in her arms and tried to get back into the pool.

  “See what I mean?” Mel said.

  Lola watched the baby fondly. His mother was carrying him away from the pool and he was not happy about that. He waved his arms, kicked his feet, and wailed like a banshee. “Don’t y’all miss those days?” Lola said wistfully.

  “Sometimes,” Sara said.

  “Only when I’m drinking,” Annie said. She remembered her own boys as toddlers, remembered their squirming brown bodies, the sweet scent of their sun-bleached hair. Other mothers had warned her, Appreciate these days while you have them. They’ll be gone too soon. And Annie had thought they were crazy—how could anyone find time to appreciate the days when you were always scrambling frantically to keep up with your schedule of feedings, baths, playtime, naps, and more feedings?

  “I’d have had a dozen kids if I’d been able to,” Lola said, smiling wanly at the retreating Claiborne. She’d suffered a series of tragic miscarriages after Henry’s birth and after a while she and Briggs had simply stopped trying. Sara put her arm around Lola and pulled her close.

  A few minutes later they climbed out of the pool and went to lie down. The heat spread over the landscape like a shimmering cloud. Palm trees stirred faintly with the breeze. After a while, Mel closed her eyes and dozed off. When she awoke a short time later, Annie had moved to the shade of a nearby umbrella, and Lola was lying on her stomach on the concrete deck, idly flipping through a magazine. Sara had donned a straw hat and was sitting beside her, reading. She looked up when she saw Mel stirring.

  “You know you snore,” she said.

  “I most certainly do not,” Mel said.

  “Not loud,” Lola said. “Not like Briggs.”

  “Y’all are crazy. I don’t snore.” She peered over the edge of her glasses at Sara, trying to figure out some way to change the subject. “What’s the book?”

  “The Known World.”

  “Still reading the good stuff, I see.”

  Annie held up a brightly colored paperback so they could see the cover. “I’m reading Nice Girls Don’t Wear Stilettos. It’s about a pair of crime-fighting supermodels who take on an evil fashion designer who’s slowly poisoning America’s top models so he can replace them with robots and take over the New York fashion world.”

  Mel stared at her with an expression of disgust and disbelief. “Are you fucking kidding me?” she said. She had written ten moderately successful novels and had somehow thus far (miraculously) managed to stave off the need for a day job, so she figured she had the right to be critical.

  “Hey, it’s a bestseller. The movie rights have been optioned by Paramount.”

  “Let me see that.”

  Annie passed the novel to Mel and she flipped it over, hoping the author’s photo would reveal a cleft palate or slightly crossed eyes, but no, the writer was young and beautiful. Very young. “I can tell you right now, no one this attractive ever wrote a novel,” Mel said glumly.

  “Oh come on, you’re attractive,” Sara said, reaching for the book. She stared down at the photo. “Damn,” she said.

  “That’s probably not even her,” Mel said. “The book was probably written by some desperate ghostwriter who used a supermodel to pose for the author’s photo.”

  “Actually,” Annie said, “she was a model. The author, I mean. She made millions on the catwalk in Paris and New York and then retired. Writing is just her hobby.”

  “You mean she writes for fun?” Lola said.

  “Well, I don’t think she needs the money.”

  Mel snorted. “She’s probably self-published then.”

  “Random House,” Annie said.

  “She probably took a lowball advance just to see her name in print.”

  “Two million,” Annie said. “A three-book deal.”

  Mel gave her a hard look. “Another word out of you and I toss the book in the pool.”

  “What?” Annie said, quickly shoving the novel into her bag. “I thought you’d be happy. I thought all you writers supported one another.”

  “Oh, fuck,” Mel said. She stared bleakly at a young mother struggling to insert her toddler into a pair of overinflated water wings.

  Lola sat up cross-legged on her towel and pulled a thick book out of her beach bag. It showed a large hatchet on the cover, dripping into a pool of congealed blood.

  “Oh, my God, Lola,” Sara said, “what are you reading?”

  “It’s a true-crime story. It’s about this guy who took an axe and murdered his entire family in upstate New York and then faked his own death so he could spend the next twenty years on the lam.”

  “On the lam?”

  “Lola, since when do you read gory crime stories?”

  Lola opened the book on her lap and smoothed the pages with one hand. “It’s all I ever read.”

  Sara and Mel exchanged a long look. Sara said, “I don’t know, Lola, I guess I never imagined you enjoying a book about cold-blooded killers.”

  “A belly-button ring and now a murder-and-mayhem fan. What else do we not know about you, Lola?”

  Lola giggled suddenly. She clamped her hand over her mouth and made a sound like she was choking. Her face turned bright red all around the edges of her sunglasses.

  “Mitchell likes those espionage thrillers,” Annie said. “He likes fast cars, big guns, and things that blow up.” She frowned slightly, and thumped Lola on the back. “Lola, are you okay?”

  “Sorry,” Lola said. “I think I swallowed a bug.”

  • • •

  By three-thirty they’d had all the sun they could take. But by then the espresso martinis had kicked in, and they found themselves with an abundance of sudden energy They decided to stroll over to the croquet field and play a round of croquet.

  The croquet field was a wide manicured lawn that stretched from the front of the Beach Club down to the seaside road. Scattered here and there along the edges of the lawn were brightly colored Adirondack chairs, some sporting striped umbrellas.

  “This looks like something from an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel,” Mel announced, setting her beach bag down on one of the chairs. A family of four was just finishing up a game. The mother wore a long white linen dress and a straw hat and the father a white knit shirt and white slacks. The children were dressed identically to their parents. An elderly couple sat in chairs along the sidelines, calling out encouragement to the players.

  The women walked up to the equipment stand to get their mallets and balls and then took a few practice shots on the green. Mel was trying to hit Sara’s ball out into the marsh and Sara was trying to trip Mel with her mallet when Annie said, “Hey, is that guy talking to us?” She stood with her hands shielding her eyes, gazing toward the Beach Club.

  A stern-faced young man dressed in white was quickly crossing the lawn toward them. “Excuse me!” he shouted, waving his hand. “Excuse me!”

  Sara looked around. “I think he’s talking to us,” she said.

  “Lola, do we need a court time to play? Do we have to sign up for this?”

  Lola stood there with her legs crossed at the ankle, leaning against her mallet. She shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve never played before.”

  “Excuse me, ladies,” the young man said, reaching them. He was tall and angular with a thin blade of a nose that curved over his lips like a beak. His nametag read A. Lincoln, Assistant Manager. “You must wear dress whites on the croquet grounds. It’s a club rule.” He was out of breath and spoke in a nasal whine.

  “Dress whites?” Mel said, lifting her cover to reveal her white bikini. “Does this count?
”

  “No,” he said, turning an ugly mottled red color. The young family dressed in white had stopped playing and stood around looking appalled. “Club guests must dress appropriately to play” he continued.

  “Mrs. Furman here is not a guest,” Mel said. “She’s a member.”

  The young man lifted his chin. His beaked nose quivered slightly. “Mrs. Furman is only an auxiliary member,” he said. “Mr. Furman is the member.” The sun slanted across his freshly starched shirt. Behind his head a long line of frayed clouds drifted across the wide blue sky.

  There was something of Leland about him, something in his tone and demeanor that instantly made the hair rise along the back of Mel’s neck. She rolled her shoulders like a boxer entering the ring and asked, “Are you telling me women are denied membership in the Beach Club?”

  He stared at a point just to the right of Mel’s left ear. His top lip twitched. “Yes,” he said.

  “Now you’re really pissing me off.”

  “Mel,” Sara said in a low voice, laying her hand on Mel’s arm. “We don’t want to do anything that’ll get Lola in trouble.”

  Mel looked at Lola, who was holding her mallet with two fingers and swinging it back and forth like a pendulum, her eyes swiveling from side to side. She was smiling as if her mind was far, far away. She seemed unconcerned by the conversation.

  “Right,” Mel said. She jabbed her thumb at Sara. “This is my lawyer.”

  “Don’t drag me into this.”

  “Rules are rules,” the young manager said.

  “Ever hear of the Equal Rights Amendment?”

  “This is a private club.”

  “I don’t think that’s been ratified yet,” Annie said, frowning doubtfully.

  “Nor will it be,” Mel snapped. “As long as women make up fifty percent of the population but only fifteen percent of Congress.”

  “Fifteen percent?” Annie said. “That high?”

  Mel stared off across the wide flat lawn to the sea. The young family had stopped playing croquet and was sitting now with the grandparents along the sidelines, like spectators at a sporting event. “Okay girls, you heard the Hitler Youth,” Mel said. “Collect your mallets. And your balls.” She looked at him when she said this. “Y’all wait for me at the golf cart. I’ll be right back.”

  She swung around without another word, and walked across the lawn into the Club.

  Mel couldn’t bear to be told that she couldn’t do something. Especially by a male. It was probably why her love affair with J.T. Radford hadn’t worked out. It was most likely the reason she’d been divorced twice and couldn’t seem to keep a relationship longer than a few months. She knew it had to do with her childhood, with being Leland Barclay’s only daughter. Survival of the fittest was the rule in the Barclay household, as poor Junior, God rest his soul, learned too late. Leland could sniff out weakness the way a sow roots out truffles, and she’d had to grow up strong and stubborn, which in many ways was a good thing; she’d learned to appreciate these traits later when she got sick, when she’d had to make the long, dark journey through the pessimistic health-care system, when she’d had to stand up to doctors and say, No, I won’t do that treatment. Strength and stubbornness had proved invaluable then.

  But a strong will and a stubborn nature were not the best prescriptions for a happy love life, at least not in a woman. Mel sometimes wished she could be more like Sara when it came to love. Soft and yielding. Men dated women like Mel but they married women like Sara, women they could build their whole world around without the worry of emotional instability or betrayal. Maybe if she’d had a better childhood, Mel could have been more like Sara. Maybe if she’d had a mother who wasn’t afraid to leave her room or a father who didn’t bully his children into submission, she might have been a different person.

  Mel wasn’t bitter but she often wondered how she might have turned out if she’d had parents like Sara’s, George and Lynnette. George was tall and skinny, and wore dark-rimmed glasses and short-sleeved shirts with three pens neatly lined up in the breast pocket. He called his sons Sport and he called Sara Princess, just like in Father Knows Best. Lynette was tall and thin and beautiful, and she looked like Grace Kelly in Rear Window. Mel fell madly in love with Sara’s mother the first time she ever laid eyes on her. Lynette kept her little house as neat as a pin, she made apple pies from scratch, and she was always asking her children how their days had been just like June Cleaver, Margaret Anderson, and Carol Brady all rolled into one. The first time Lynette’s cool blue eyes fell on Mel, it was as if Mel’s brain had shriveled inside her skull. This was in first grade and she’d walked home from school with Sara. Mel just stood there looking up into that lovely face with her mouth hanging open while her head, empty now of all gray matter, collapsed like a pierced balloon.

  “What’s your name?” Lynnette asked, smiling sweetly.

  “M-M-Mel.” She was horrified to hear her own voice. She’d never stuttered before.

  “Well, Mel, we’re going to carve a pumpkin. Can you help Sara spread that newspaper out on the kitchen table?”

  “Yes, M-M-Mel, help me spread the paper on the table,” Sara said, grinning.

  Mel had never carved a pumpkin before. She’d never made a pumpkin pie or roasted pumpkin seeds in the oven. The next morning when Leland sent one of the boys from the car lot to pick her up, she didn’t want to go home. She wanted to stay forever in that little doll house with the family that was so perfect it was like watching something on a television show.

  Sara always said she liked to go to Mel’s house because there were no rules there. But Mel liked the rules and routines of Sara’s home. She liked holding hands at the table while George Sprague said grace. She liked the way Lynette would tuck them into bed at precisely nine o’clock, no later, no matter what was on TV, stroking their hair off their faces with her cool fingers that smelled of vanilla and oranges.

  Years later, when she was in high school and she realized that Lynnette Sprague didn’t like her anymore, it had been hard on Mel. She knew it had something to do with the fact that Sara spent too much time at the Barclay house and that Mel drove a brand-new Ford Mustang and didn’t have a curfew. She knew it probably had something to do with the fact that Mel was Leland Barclay’s daughter and had a reputation for being a party girl, which was unfair; she didn’t do any more partying than anyone else in Howard’s Mill. Whatever the reason, Mel could feel Lynette’s dislike now like a cold hand laid on the back of her neck.

  Everyone thought being a Barclay was such a grand thing but no one seemed to realize that money couldn’t make up for everything. It couldn’t make up for love that was doled out conditionally or for a father who thought life was nothing more than his own personal game of King of the Castle.

  Inside the tall doors of the Beach Club, it was as hushed and cool as a mausoleum. A wide, high-ceilinged lobby overlooked the golf course. Large overstuffed sofas and chairs were scattered around the room, and a massive reception desk stretched along one wall. Mel went up to the desk and found what she was looking for, a business card holder filled with cards for A. Lincoln, Assistant Manager. She took about twenty of the cards and went along the wide hallway to the Surfside Restaurant. The massive doors were flung open but the restaurant was empty except for a few uniformed employees who scurried around carrying linens and tableware. A sullen-looking young woman in a white blouse and a long black skirt stood at the hostess stand scanning the reservation list.

  “Excuse me,” she said, as Mel walked past. “We’re not open yet. And you can’t come in here dressed in beach attire.”

  “Boy, this place isn’t very big, is it?” Mel said, glancing around the room.

  The woman looked her over carefully. “May I help you?” she said in a tone indicating that she would rather have a root canal.

  “I’d like to make a reservation for seven o’clock.”

  The woman didn’t even bother to check the list. “I’m sorry,” she sa
id. “We’re booked. Tonight is Casino Night. Reservations fill up early.”

  “Oh, that’s too bad.” Mel leaned over the desk and peered at the list. It was indeed filled with reservations. Good. She gave the woman her most brilliant smile. “Who’s the manager on duty tonight?” she asked sweetly.

  The woman sighed. She put her head down and checked the list. “That would be Mr. Lincoln,” she said.

  Mel nodded and put two fingers to her forehead in a kind of casual salute. “Okay then,” she said. “Have a nice evening.”

  She went out into the lobby, sat down at one of the tables, and wrote on the back of all the business cards, Free Dinner for Two! Kids Eat Free! 7:00 Seating at the Surfside compliments of A. Lincoln. Then she went down to the pool and passed the cards out to young mothers she picked out of the crowd. “Tonight only,” she said. “Be there by seven and bring the kids. Ask for Mr. Lincoln if you have any trouble getting seated. He’ll be happy to help you out.”

  Sara, Annie, and Lola turned in their croquet equipment and walked back to the parking lot to wait for Mel. The golf cart was parked in the shade of a laurel oak. To their left, far off in the hazy distance, the sea shimmered in the sunlight. “What do you think she’s doing in there?” Annie asked nervously, looking up at the imposing facade of the Whale Head Beach Club.