Beach Trip

by Cathy Holton

  “Hey, Annie, come and join us,” Mel called to her from the edge of the fire.

  Annie raised her arm and waved. “I’ll be there in a minute,” she said.

  Lola, Mel, and Sara clustered around the pit in low beach chairs, their feet stretched toward the fire. Lola was singing a camp song, and Mel and Sara were trying to join in, stopping every few minutes to argue over who was more tone-deaf. They both were, as far as Annie was concerned. She’d sung in the church choir, so she knew a thing or two about tone deafness.

  She put her hands behind her head and stared up at the sky. It was one of the things she liked best about this island, the fact that with no neon lights or high-rise hotels the sky was so clear at night, the stars so visible. You could make your way about the island with little more than the light from the moon and the stars to guide you.

  The sky reminded Annie of the camping trips she had taken with Paul Ballard that last year of college. They couldn’t go anyplace where someone might see them together so they’d backpacked into the wilderness areas of Shining Rock or Linville Gorge, places so remote and isolated they might go days without seeing signs of human habitation. At night, bone weary and sated, they had lain on their backs under a Carolina moon and lied to each other about the future.

  “Hey, Annie, what was the name of that girl who used to pull her hair out? Scooter’s girlfriend?”

  “Lexie. Lexie Cravens.”

  “See,” Sara said to Mel. “I told you.”

  “Buff me,” Mel said.

  Lola sang softly in the background, oblivious to their argument.

  Annie’s parents had sent her to Bedford because she was an only child and they could, even though it meant a second mortgage on the house and a second job for her father. When the guidance counselor at school showed her a brochure of Bedford, and Annie saw its stone and redbricked facade, built to resemble Oxford, she had known immediately where she wanted to go to college. Even though the tuition was more than her father’s annual salary. Even though it was an Episcopal school (she had neglected to mention this to her parents and they, thankfully, had never caught on).

  Bedford had opened her eyes in a way nothing else in her life had. She wondered now if that had been such a good thing, if the seeds of her current discontent might not have been sown so many years before in the liberal soil of Bedford.

  “Annie! Come on!”

  “Tell us a story!”

  The sand was warm under Annie’s back. She could feel herself sinking in, a few granules at a time like sugar through a sieve, like sand through an hourglass. They had stopped drinking forty minutes ago—it was one of the conditions imposed by Captain Mike before he would agree to build the fire—but Annie was still slightly buzzed from the Margaronas. She was so relaxed she couldn’t move, soaking up the sand’s heat like a lizard stretched on a desert rock. It was better than Vicodin, this feeling. It was better than Prozac or clonazepam or any of the other antidepressants or anti-anxiety drugs the women in her garden club took to get them through their long dreary days. Annie had never taken any of those drugs. She didn’t have to take them to know that what she was feeling now was good enough to bottle. She held her hand up to the sky and spread her fingers so that the stars shone through like threads of light. She could understand why native peoples had thought looking into the night sky was like looking into the face of God. The Shuar tribes in Ecuador used mind-altering native plants to induce religious intoxication. It would appear that Margaronas could be used for the same purpose.

  “Anne Louise!” Mel shouted. “Come join us!”

  “I’m coming.”

  It was under a sky such as this that she’d had her first orgasm.

  “Are you okay, Annie?”

  “Yes.”

  She stood up slowly, gingerly, and brushed the sand off her back. She walked along the beach toward the dancing light and when she reached the fire, Mel stuck her foot out and pushed an empty beach chair toward her.

  “Tell us a story, Annie,” she said. “Tell us a story about you and Mitchell that we don’t already know.”

  “Yes, Annie, tell us a story.”

  “Make something up if you have to.”

  The moon rose over the sea, snared in a netting of stars. Annie shook her head. “You know all my stories,” she said. “There’s nothing left to tell.”

  Chapter 17

  BEDFORD UNIVERSITY

  MOUNT CLEMMONS, NORTH CAROLINA

  nnie had been stalking Professor Ballard for several weeks, although if he was aware of it, he gave no sign. He was, after all, accustomed to the attentions of his female students. Annie, waiting outside his office, had on numerous occasions witnessed a young woman exiting from behind the dark oak-paneled door, her eyes bright and her face flushed with color. Annie made up one fraudulent excuse after another to see him. She had several times shown up for office hours only to find him gone and a note taped to his door that read Come on in. Back in a minute. Rather than discouraging her, she found these moments alone in a room where he spent so much of his time exhilarating. She was like a pilgrim on a visit to a holy shrine. The room smelled of mildew, old books, cigarette smoke, and something indistinct but undeniably male. Sex, she supposed. (Although Professor Ballard was careful never to copulate with his students in his office—he was far too cautious for that, as she would eventually learn.)

  She had taken his class her senior year because she was three English credits short and she had thought the class, entitled Romantic Literature: Invention and Transformation of Genres from the French Revolution to the Ascension of Queen Victoria, sounded easy. She wasn’t particularly fond of English lit, although she liked grammar well enough. The diagramming of sentences had always been rather fun for her, as rational and deliberate as the lines of an algebraic equation. She had come to that first lecture class prepared to find nothing more than boredom, so she had been unprepared when the small, ordinary-looking professor broke into the opening lines of “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.” He had a loud theatrical voice, deep and rather pleasant to the ear, and when he read, “O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, alone and palely loitering?” there were very few in the crowded lecture hall who didn’t sit up and take notice.

  Annie sat there stunned and open-eyed while the beautiful words fell around her like fairy dust. By the time he started in on “I met a lady in the meads, Full beautiful—a faery’s child,” she was leaning forward in her seat, her eyes fixed on the professor as he strode back and forth across the lecture stage like a magician. He was a small, only moderately attractive man, but when he stood in front of them and read “and there I shut her wild wild eyes so kiss’d to sleep,” what did it matter? The girls sighed and rested their cheeks against their hands. Byron had been born with a clubfoot and Keats had suffered from tuberculosis but what female heart could resist a poet?

  She went home and practiced reading Keats’s beautiful lines aloud in her room but there was something flat and uninspired about her delivery. There was something in Professor Ballard’s delivery that made the lines exciting, passionate, and Annie could hardly wait for the next class.

  When Sara saw her reading Songs of Innocence and Experience she asked, “What class are you taking?”

  “Romantic Lit with Professor Ballard.”

  “That old letch. Make sure you don’t go into his office without taking a friend along. At the very least, keep the door open.”

  Annie ignored the rumors about him because she didn’t believe they were true and, later, because she didn’t want to believe they were true. By then it was too late anyway.

  Losing her virginity to Mitchell Stites at homecoming of her sophomore year turned out to be, in hindsight, a disaster. Whereas he’d been rather tentative at first, by Thanksgiving break he’d become a bit more enthusiastic, and by Christmas break he was like a ten-year-old with a brand new minibike. By the time she came home for summer vacation she could hardly get him to do anything else. Once he realized Annie
was on the Pill and there’d be no repercussions, no squalling babies or homicidal parents to contend with, Mitchell took to sex like flies to roadkill. His words. There was nothing of the romantic poet about Mitchell Stites.

  She hadn’t realized what a problem the sex thing was until the first semester of her senior year, when she’d begun to moon over Professor Ballard. Having become accustomed to regular sexcapades over the summer, Mitchell saw no reason that he should have to go without once Annie returned to school. So he planned a visit to Bedford every other weekend, a schedule that left Annie exhausted. It wasn’t the act itself that tired her out but the masquerade of pretending that she enjoyed it. Which she did, in a way. It was very sweet the way Mitchell was always coming up with ways to keep her interested. “Hey, honey, let’s try this one,” he’d say, pointing to a well-worn copy of the Kama Sutra he’d picked up in a Memphis porn shop. “It’s called the Congress of a Cow.”

  Despite Mitchell’s best efforts, Annie was finding it harder and harder to maintain any enthusiasm for his weekend visits. She began to make excuses for why he shouldn’t come: I’ve got a big test next week or I’ve got a paper due or, when all else failed, I’ve got my period. Having become obsessed with Professor Ballard, she couldn’t think of Mitchell the same way and she definitely couldn’t think of sex the same way. She couldn’t think of having it with Mitchell although she had no trouble imagining it with Professor Ballard. The positions of the Kama Sutra, which Mitchell had unsuccessfully tried to introduce her to, filled her imagination as she and Professor Ballard moved through the intricate postures like well-trained acrobats. During class, while studying at the library, when walking across campus, it was all she could think of. Sometimes at night the images drove her from her bed and she would wander the dark house like a ghost, looking for something to clean.

  Once during class he said something funny and she laughed loudly, too loudly, drawing his attention. His eyes, dark and liquid, fell on her for a moment, seeking her in the crowd. Returning his gaze, she felt lightheaded and slightly nauseous. After that she began to dress for him (she was pretty and had a small, trim figure) and she would feel his eyes upon her as she entered the lecture hall each Tuesday and Thursday morning. By the first week in October he had learned her name and called upon her often in class, by Halloween he had touched her arm furtively in his office, and by Thanksgiving they were having lunch in some out-of-the-way Mexican restaurant in town and plotting their first rendezvous. It happened so quickly and so effortlessly, Annie was amazed. One minute she was sitting in Professor Ballard’s office blushing furiously as his fingers brushed her arm, and the next they were sitting in a public restaurant discussing their attraction for each other as casually as if they were discussing whether to order the El Cid chili or the fiesta tamale pie. A girl more experienced than Annie might have taken his obvious ease at seduction as a warning sign but all she could think about was the way his dark eyes had flashed when he read “Ozymandias” in class.

  He had her get a room in some shabby, out-of-the way place called the Cherokee Chief Motor Lodge. She paid cash and called him with the room number. When he came in forty minutes later smelling of aftershave and cigarettes, she was suddenly as shy as a virgin bride. He sat on the foot of the bed and pulled her to him, and she allowed him to undress her like a limp marionette. Now that the moment was here, she was uncertain exactly what she should do. All she ever had to do with Mitchell was lie there.

  But Professor Ballard had a few tricks up his sleeve. First he gave her a massage to relax her, and then he kissed her in places that made her blush to think about, and then he did something with his tongue that she had heard about but never actually thought possible (it was). By now she was feeling a whole lot more relaxed and was even beginning to enjoy herself When he came up for air she bit him lightly on the shoulder and moaned.

  “Oh, Professor Ballard,” she said.

  He slid his hand up between her legs. “I think you better call me Paul,” he said.

  Chapter 18

  reaking up with someone she still loved was turning out to be a whole lot more difficult than Mel had originally thought it would be. She had decided they should break up gradually over senior year so that they would both have time to get used to the fact that they’d be heading off in different directions come June. She had imagined it as a slow, painless process. She had pictured them going on as friends but J.T. was having none of that.

  “Don’t expect me to be there for you during one of your little moments of crisis,” he said bitterly. “It’s all or nothing. Either you love me or you don’t.”

  Mel didn’t think it was that simple but she wasn’t about to be blackmailed. She wasn’t sure what he meant by moments of crisis but it probably had something to do with her brother, Junior, whom she never talked about and didn’t want to think about now. “It’s nothing then,” she said, and walked off. It was a cold sunny day in mid-January and there were patches of snow everywhere on the frozen ground. She walked home across the campus, down wide, tree-lined streets where children played behind white picket fences. Melting snowmen decorated the lawns like sentries, and here and there Christmas lights still twinkled behind plate-glass windows. The sky was blue and cloudless.

  Mel plodded across the frozen ground and tried not to think about J.T. It infuriated her that he could be so unreasonable. She had been hinting at this separation for weeks, warning him that she planned to go off to New York the minute she graduated. And he was finishing up his second year of graduate school and would be looking for a job soon (although not in New York, she hoped). They had been together for three long years and it was time for a break. Not a forever separation, just a break. She had been willing to continue their relationship this last year of school just as before, as long as he understood that she would be leaving for New York in June. But he had misunderstood her, or refused to believe her, and had gone on blithely this morning about them “taking some time off this summer after graduation to backpack around Europe.” They had been sitting in the campus coffee shop, The Boot, and Mel had paused with a steaming cup of organic Guatemalan halfway to her lips.

  She put the coffee down and folded her arms on the table. “I’m going to New York this summer,” she said evenly.

  He seemed puzzled at first but then he relaxed and said, “Okay, okay, we’ll go to New York.”

  “Not us. Me.”

  That had started the argument that had raged all morning and into the afternoon, when Mel finally walked off. They had both missed their morning classes, which neither could afford to do (Mel was taking eighteen hours this semester in order to graduate in June), and had sat in The Boot all morning arguing and drinking endless cups of coffee. Finally, at noon, they had risen stiffly and walked to the Duck Pond, where they continued the fight until both sat, drained and weary, on a bench beneath a spreading oak tree. The trees were bare against the winter sky, and the snow here was deeper, drifting in rock crevices and beneath shady stands of mountain laurel. The pond was empty of ducks and vegetation, reflecting the landscape in mirror image.

  It wasn’t that she didn’t love him—she did. But you could love someone and still crave distance from them at the same time. At least she could, although he seemed to be having trouble with the concept. She had hoped they could behave like eighteenth-century courtiers, distant and polite, but the truth of the matter was, their relationship had always been stormy, filled with violent arguments and bitter recriminations. It was a wonder it had lasted this long.

  They had planned their annual Howl at the Moon Party together but Mel hoped, in light of their recent breakup, that J.T. wouldn’t show up. It had been two weeks since their argument at The Boot and he had called twice. The first time Mel refused to talk to him, and the second time she took the call but they argued and she hung up on him. He hadn’t called since. Mel hadn’t seen him on campus although Sara had run into him at one of the local bars, Drunk out of his mind, she’d said, looking at Mel a
s if she was entirely to blame. Mel had already explained the situation to Sara and she didn’t feel like talking about it anymore.

  “I just hope he won’t show up at the party,” she said. They’d originally planned on going as Jack and Wendy Torrance from The Shining, and it was too late to come up with another costume. Besides, Lola and Annie were going as the creepy twins from the same movie, dressed in matching blue dresses with white stockings, black Mary Janes, and white bows in their hair. Sara was going as Danny, complete with a pageboy wig, overalls and a Big Wheel tricycle. The party had started out as a Mardi Gras affair and had quickly evolved over the years into a costume party with an occult theme, kind of like a cross between Mardi Gras, Halloween, and the Voodoo Ball.

  The day of the party Lola, Annie, Sara, and Mel rose early to decorate and make the food. It was something the four of them had always done together, since freshman year anyway, and there was a great deal of chatter and a generally festive atmosphere as they hung fake spiderwebs and Mardi Gras beads, and draped the dining room in black cloth and Bela Lugosi cutouts. Mel made a pitcher of zombies and they spent the afternoon drinking and baking Witches’ Fingers, Spicy Bat Wings, Brain Pâté, Corpse Salsa and Chips, and Green Ghoul Dip. Losing herself in the festivities made it easier for Mel to forget the breakup with J.T, the memory of which closed over her at times like a shroud. She’d be going along happy and contented and suddenly she’d hear his voice in her ear saying, You’ll never find anything like we have, and she’d know with a clear certainty, like a dead weight in her bowels, that he was right.