Beach Trip

by Cathy Holton

  “I need to go in there first,” Mel said, pointing to the Village Market, an upscale grocery store that also sold beach products, cosmetics, and various drugstore items. The building was small and gray-shingled, and looked like an old-fashioned country store complete with a bay window and some type of trailing, pink-blossomed vine running across the facade and up into the eaves. A series of stone steps led from the sidewalk up to the front door. Mel put her arm around Lola’s shoulders and they went up the steps together. A little bell tinkled as they walked in. The room was cool and musty with the scent of cinnamon and cloves. Wide planked floors gleamed beneath the overhead lights, and rows of tall shelves ran from the front of the store to the back. A bored-looking youth lounged across a counter reading a magazine. Behind his right shoulder hung a Boar’s Head meat sign. “Can I help you?” he said in a thick Ukrainian accent. A good portion of Ukraine seemed to be congregated here on this small North Carolina island. Fresh-faced waitresses, shopgirls, and deckhands all spoke with Ukrainian accents.

  “Do you carry Corona?” Mel asked.

  “Corona?” he said, looking puzzled.

  “It’s a beer.”

  “Oh. All beer is in cooler in back. You must be twenty-one to buy.” He grinned at Mel. She grinned back, a slow, lazy smile that showed her dimples to their best advantage.

  “Oh, please,” Sara said.

  She followed Mel back to the coolers, wondering what she was up to. Mel had that look on her face that she always had right before she did something wrong. Sara had spent most of her childhood anticipating that look. “Why are you buying beer?” she asked suspiciously. She was the oldest child in her family, and she had been raised to be the responsible one. It was a hard habit to break.

  “It’s for tonight. I’m pulling out the big guns.”

  “Big guns?”

  “Corona,” Mel said, lifting a six-pack from the cooler.

  “I told you I’m not drinking.”

  “I’m not drinking either,” Annie said, appearing behind Sara like a disconsolate ghost. She had bought a kite for Agnes Grace, the girl she visited out at the Baptist Children’s Home, and was trying, unsuccessfully, to slide it into a plastic bag.

  Mel ignored them both. “Where’s Lola?” she asked.

  “I’m over here!” They heard her delicate little laugh one aisle over, followed by the sound of something metallic hitting the floor.

  Mel checked her reflection in the glass-fronted cooler. “Since we’re not going out tonight, I thought I’d make something really special,” she said, fluffing her hair with her fingers.

  “No,” Annie said belligerently.

  “What?” Sara asked, unable to stop herself.

  “Margaronas.”

  “Margaronas?” Annie and Sara exchanged puzzled looks.

  Mel continued on down the aisle toward the frozen foods. “Since we’re not going out. Since we won’t be doing any driving. When I serve them at home, I make everyone spend the night. A couple of pitchers of Margaronas and you’re out for the count. These things are deadly. Hey, do either one of you have a heart condition?”

  “Not that I know of,” Annie said, looking worried. “But I haven’t had a physical in a couple of years.”

  “You’ll probably be all right then.” Mel stopped in front of the frozen foods and scanned the frosty shelves.

  “Assuming I was going to drink tonight, which I’m not” Sara said, “what exactly is a Margarona?”

  “Okay,” Mel said, opening the freezer door and reaching in to grab a family-size can of frozen limeade. She shut the door and held the can up. “You put the frozen limeade in the bottom of a pitcher. Then you fill the empty can with tequila.”

  Sara looked stunned. “Are you kidding me?” she said. “You fill that big can with tequila? That’s crazy.”

  “Right,” Mel said. “Blend the tequila and the limeade. Then you pour in two Coronas, stir gently, and serve.”

  “That sounds vile,” Annie said.

  “Nectar of the gods,” Mel said, turning and wandering slowly down the aisle. They found Lola on the next aisle, standing in front of a magazine display. “Don’t read any more of those trashy magazines,” Mel told her. “They’ll rot your brain.”

  Lola was thumbing through one of the more lurid rags. She looked up, puzzled, and asked earnestly, “Do y’all think Tom Cruise is gay?”

  “Yes,” Mel said.

  “Who cares?” Sara asked.

  Annie was quiet. Like so much else in her life, she was still wrestling with the concept of homosexuality. Reverend Reeves maintained that it was a sin but Annie had begun to question that, too. Her friend Louise Ledford had a son named Roy who’d changed his name to Roi and moved to Chicago to open a bed-and-breakfast with his “friend” Mikhail. Even as a small child, Roi had been different. While other boys played Nintendo or paintball or drove their four-wheelers through the park, Roi had contented himself with giving his mother facials. He also did her makeup and dressed her so that when she went out of the house, she looked like a million bucks. (I love your purse, he’d told Annie once at a church function, but next time try a Baguette.) Everyone knew Roi was “funny” even before he changed his name and danced the Dance of the Seven Veils at the eighth-grade talent show.

  Still, Annie couldn’t see any real harm in Roi. It wasn’t like he was a serial killer or an alcoholic or a drug addict. And he was sweet to his mother; he called her twice a week and never forgot her birthday, sending her designer dresses and Fendi bags so that she always looked like a fashion plate at the Women of God meetings.

  Lola closed the magazine and put it back on the shelf, and they followed Mel down the aisle to a small cosmetics display.

  Mel stopped, picked up a box of Miss Clairol, and began to read the back. “Hey, I know,” she said. “Let’s get drunk and give ourselves makeovers.”

  “Oh, now, that sounds like a good idea,” Sara said.

  “At the very least, let’s dye Annie’s hair.” She held up the box of Miss Clairol and grinned.

  Annie gave her a steady sullen look. “No one touches my hair,” she said.

  “Oh, come on, live a little.”

  “No,” Annie said, wishing she could give in to spontaneity but knowing it was impossible. She felt brittle sometimes, as if she was slowly ossifying beneath her flesh, but she had never been a spontaneous person, with the exception of that brief, heady period twenty-three years ago.

  And look how well that had turned out.

  Chapter 15

  nnie had not been a good mother. Age and experience had taught her this. She had been a competent mother. Her sons never went without clean clothes or a good meal or expensive medical or dental care. They were provided with all the material possessions a late-twentieth-century child could possibly want. They attended church and good private schools and had grown up in a stable, conservative, two-parent family. They had been raised in the structured environment so often touted by educators and television child psychologists. And that’s where Annie had gone wrong.

  She had lived her life, their lives, by schedules. Most mothers kept dry erase or bulletin boards hanging in the kitchen by the phone but Annie’s schedules had taken up the entire back of the pantry door. Six sheets of neatly typed and numbered pages taped up like Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses nailed to the door of the Schlosskirche. And the schedules had an almost religious significance for Annie; they were studied by her faithfully every morning, followed with unswerving devotion every day, and were the last things she consulted every evening before laying her weary head down upon her goosedown pillow. Meal schedules, nap schedules, doctors’ appointments, reading enrichment, fun with mathematics, supervised television viewing, art lessons, soccer lessons, and piano lessons were all listed and sublisted in outline form down to the most trivial of details. Even playtime was scheduled. An anthropologist studying child-rearing customs and preadolescent development in the late twentieth century could see the whol
e of her children’s sad and dreary childhoods outlined on the back of her pantry door.

  The problem with scheduling, Annie now realized, was that in your rush to meet the deadlines set forth in front of you in black and white, you missed the more important things. Things like lazy summer afternoons spent lying in a hammock reading, or fishing for crawdads in the creek, or water gun fights on the lawn, or impromptu games of tag or blind man’s bluff or Hi-Ho Cherry O! Annie never played with her sons. She wasn’t that kind of mother. Lola had once told her that she and Henry had built an entire castle out of refrigerator boxes they painted and taped together, cutting out doors and windows with serrated knives. (Serrated knives!) The idea of wild-child Henry Furman wielding a sharp and dangerous instrument had been enough to fill Annie with a sense of doom and impending disaster. What had Lola been thinking?

  She repeated the story that night for Mitchell as they got ready for bed. “What was Lola thinking?” she said sharply. “Henry could have stabbed himself in the heart! He could have put out an eye!”

  “Now, honey, boys need to be boys,” Mitchell said and something in his tone made Annie think he was criticizing her.

  “Yes, well, boys given sharp instruments to play with are often dead boys!” she said, astonished at her own outburst. Why should she care that Lola gave her son knives to play with? Or that she played with him at all?

  “Oh, now, Henry’s a good boy,” Mitchell said, as if to confirm her suspicions that she was being unreasonable.

  She gave him an indignant look. “I never said he wasn’t.”

  “Now, honey, don’t go getting your shorts in a knot,” Mitchell said, reaching for her. “And speaking of shorts, why don’t you put on that little black lace bikini thing I bought you for Valentine’s Day?”

  Now that she was older she could see it. Henry Furman was a good boy. He’d turned out fine, despite the fact that he’d never been on a schedule his entire childhood. Despite the fact that Lola had let him go to bed whenever or wherever he wanted to, just dropping wherever he was when he got tired, on the sofa in the den, at the foot of Lola’s bed, on the floor in the upstairs hallway. Annie had been appalled at Lola’s lack of routine and had on more than one occasion offered to help her make up a schedule.

  “A schedule?” Lola had laughed in her silvery little voice. “Oh, Henry wouldn’t like that at all.”

  And now Lola had had the last laugh, although she wasn’t laughing, of course; there wasn’t a mean bone in her frail little body, and Annie was left with the feeling that she had cheated her boys out of something important in their childhoods.

  Not that they blamed her, of course. They were always calling her and teasing her about one little thing or another. William, the eldest, had gone off to UVA first, and Annie had worried that he wasn’t being fed right in the school cafeteria. When he called she would always ask him, “What’d you have for dinner?”

  The first time he said, “filet mignon au poivre” and the second “trout amandine,” but it wasn’t until he said, “oysters Rockefeller” that she began to get suspicious. But by then she’d already bragged to the women in her garden club about the gourmet meals served in the UVA cafeteria. When Carleton went off to Duke two years later, he’d done the same thing.

  “What’d you have for dinner?”

  “Lobster with truffle butter.”

  It had been a big joke among the three of them, William, Carleton, and Mitchell (because he’d been in on it, of course) and now whenever they were home they teased Annie about how her home-cooked meals didn’t come close to the gourmet fare they were accustomed to at college.

  She was proud of them, proud of the tall, sturdy young men they had grown up to be. And despite her constant interference in their lives and fretting over them (what was it some pundit had called her generation—helicopter parents?) they still managed to come across as contented and well-adjusted young men.

  Still, if Annie had it to do all over again, she’d throw away the schedules and spend each day just enjoying it as it came. She’d ride bikes, and play board games, and build castles in the backyard out of refrigerator boxes and she wouldn’t listen to anyone who tried to tell her how to be a better mom. She wouldn’t listen to pastors or television child psychologists or well-meaning but misinformed neighbors who tried to give her parenting advice.

  When William was four years old she’d let a neighbor convince her to paint his thumb with Mavala to break him of his thumb-sucking habit. And when he’d started kindergarten and was still sleeping at night with a blanket she’d let that same neighbor, who had read every child-rearing book ever written and therefore considered herself an expert, advise her to tie the “bankie” to helium balloons and let William release them into the sky in a kind of symbolic goodbye-to-babyhood ritual. With this in mind, Annie had gathered the neighborhood children for a festive affair complete with streamers, party games, and ice-cream cake, and had allowed the stoic but trembling William to “free” his bankie before the assembled guests. Unfortunately, the balloons carrying the blanket became entangled in the top of a tall pecan tree, where they exploded one by one like firecrackers to the accompanying screams of the watching children. The tethered bankie, rather than continuing its symbolic ascent, became snagged in the branches at the top of the tree, where it hung forlornly above the yard for several weeks like a rotting corpse dangling from a gallows. Every time William went outside he would look up into the branches of the tree and scream. Annie finally paid a tree service to come into the yard with a crane to take it down.

  Given that experience she should have known better than to listen to this same neighbor, who advised her that, according to a new book written by the eminent child psychologist Dr. Ernest Witherspoon, a toddler could now be potty trained in less than one day. Dr. Witherspoon’s technique involved locking the child and mother in a bathroom together for twelve hours. The trauma of this experience was so great that Annie came into Carleton’s room several weeks later to find him squatting in a corner, furtively reaching into his pants to pinch off pieces of a giant turd that he rolled into pellets the size of BBs and dropped surreptitiously into the heating register.

  Both her sons had managed to survive her mothering, although there were times when Annie wondered how. With the clear-sighted advantage of age and experience, she was now able to see how woefully inadequate she had truly been. Although William and Carleton seemed mentally healthy now she was sure the failures of her parenting would come to light years from now during some long, gloomy period of middle-aged psychotherapy.

  With any luck at all, it would happen long after she was dead.

  Chapter 16

  el was serious about the Margaronas. It was close to four o’clock by the time they got back from their shopping spree in the village, and she set about making up a pitcher of something she promised “would take the edge off.”

  “What edge?” Sara said. “I haven’t felt this relaxed in years.” And it was true. She hadn’t even wanted to come on this trip and now after only two days she was feeling better than she had in a long time. Maybe it was the lack of routine, maybe it was the sun or the food or the friendship, or sitting around in their pajamas until one o’clock talking about everything and nothing at all. Maybe it was the alcohol. Whatever it was, it felt better than a one-hour deep-tissue massage. She had come to the island dreading an altercation and instead she had found fun and companionship. It made her feel guilty about Tom. When she got home she would insist that he take a boys’ trip somewhere with a group of his friends. Not that he had that many friends. Neither one of them had done much socializing since Adam’s diagnosis.

  Annie, always ready to be a spoilsport, said, “I didn’t think we were drinking tonight.” They were standing at the breakfast bar watching Mel mix the drinks. Behind her, at the sink, April deveined shrimp.

  “No one’s forcing you to drink, señorita,” Mel said, pouring a Margarona and handing it to Lola. She poured Sara one. “I can pu
t salt on the rim if you like.”

  Sara hesitated and then took it. “This isn’t going to take the enamel off my teeth, is it?”

  “I make no guarantees one way or the other. I take no legal responsibility for what may occur,” Mel said, lifting her glass. “Cheers.”

  They tapped their glasses and drank slowly.

  “Yow-sa,” Lola said, her eyes shining merrily.

  Sara looked pleasantly surprised. “Not bad,” she said. “You hardly taste the tequila.”

  “I told you,” Mel said.

  “Okay, okay, pour me one,” Annie said glumly. It was no use being a teetotaler when everyone else seemed willing to drink themselves into a stupor. If she stayed sober she’d just have to be the responsible one later on and she was tired of that role.

  Mel poured another glass and they drank steadily for a while, watching April work. By the time Mel got up to pour a second round, Annie and Sara were slouched against the breakfast bar and Lola was sitting upright with two bright spots of color on her cheeks. Mel held the pitcher up. “More toxins, Bimbette?” she said to Sara.

  “Sure, Homeslice, fill it up.”

  Annie asked, “What’s a Bimbette?” and held her glass up for a refill.

  “It’s a slutty girl.”

  “Oh, thank you very much,” Sara said.

  “One who isn’t too smart. You know, an airhead, a ditz, a space cadet.” She smirked at Sara and made a vague gesture with her glass.

  “The English always say ‘silly cow,’” Sara said, ignoring her. She loved English literature and English movies. Beneath her East Tennessee exterior beat the heart of a true Anglophile.

  “Or silly wanker,” Mel said.

  “That bartender at the Black Friar Pub in London used to say that,” Lola said. “Silly wanker.”