by Cathy Holton
Lola stopped playing with her empty glass. She set it down on the coffee table. “I gave her the morning off,” she said.
“It was the least you could do,” Sara said, nodding at the display of penis-fold napkins that still stood erect in the center of the dining table. “Considering how late we kept her boyfriend up.”
“I don’t think she minded too much,” Mel said, “judging from the giggling coming from the crofter at three o’clock this morning.”
“April? Giggling? I can’t picture that,” Sara said.
“I can’t believe I’m the only one who hears what goes on back there.”
“You’re the only one who cares what goes on back there.”
“Hey, I’m just trying to get some sleep. Between Annie’s snoring and April’s giggling, I’m a little behind.”
Annie flipped her the bird. The gesture was awkward and obviously little used. Mel laughed and yawned, spreading her arms expansively over her head. “Maybe we should stay up all night so y’all can hear what goes on out in the crofter for yourselves.”
Lola coughed lightly and stared pensively at the sea. Watching her, Sara felt a momentary sadness settle around her. It felt sometimes as if there was a tragedy hovering over Lola’s life, a hint of calamity waiting patiently in the wings.
As if to confirm her feelings, Lola stirred suddenly and asked, “Don’t you hate it when you’re traveling on the astral plane and your little silver umbilical cord gets all tangled up and you’re not sure you can get back into your body?”
The room got quiet. Mel broke the silence first, snorting loudly and looking at the ceiling as she laughed. Lola smiled but looked puzzled. “What?” she asked. “What’s so funny?”
“You are,” Mel said. She rose and went into the kitchen to pour herself a cup of coffee. Two boys on boogie boards skimmed along the beach followed by an overweight golden retriever who ran with a stiff rolling gait. Mel stretched out beside Sara across the breakfast bar. Annie and Lola were busy talking astral projection and Ecuadorian tribal practices. Mel prodded Sara with her elbow and pointed at Lola with her coffee cup.
“Whatever she’s on,” Mel said, in a low voice, “I want some.”
It took them about an hour to get dressed and gather their gear, so by the time they headed down to the beach the sun was directly overhead. It was a hot sultry day with very little breeze. Cicadas droned in the heavy air. The sun glared off the surface of the dunes, with their wispy mounds of spartina grass, and glittered along the pale green sea. They walked in single file along the weathered boardwalk, Lola in front, followed by Annie in a wide, floppy hat, then Mel, with Sara bringing up the rear. Sara was carrying a beach chair and a brightly striped umbrella, and she could feel sweat trickling down between her shoulder blades and dampening the small of her back. It was silly to be wearing a cover-up in this heat—she could have simply worn her swimsuit like Mel was doing—but Sara was still self-conscious about the bulge of baby fat around her waist. Not that it was getting any better with this trip, she thought, scowling at Mel’s trim, long-legged figure. Mel was one of those people who could eat and drink whatever she wanted and never put on a pound. And it helped, of course, that she’d never had a child.
The sea rose and fell before them like a giant slumbering beast. A pair of distant pelicans, drawn by a school of bluefish, flattened their wings and dive-bombed into the sparkling water. The beach in front of Lola’s house was empty, and as they came over the last dune and clattered down the boardwalk steps to the beach, Sara was glad they didn’t have much farther to walk. Her arm was numb from the weight of the chair, and the umbrella strap was cutting into the tender flesh of her shoulder.
Mel had suggested that Captain Mike bring the chairs and umbrellas down to the beach for them but Lola, staring out at the sea, had tipped her head and said in a small voice, “He’s not here. He left early this morning for town. He had some errands to run.” Then she added brightly, still staring at the distant water, “He thought we might like to take the boat out tomorrow to the Isle of Pines for a picnic.” She lifted her little hand like a visor so that it hid her eyes and shielded her face from the merciless sun.
If Mel was disappointed that Captain Mike wasn’t here to carry their gear she didn’t show it. She shouldered the umbrella and chair at her feet and headed out across the dunes, stopping when they got to the wide beach. The hot sand burned their bare feet. Mel, cursing, picked up her gear and sprinted to the edge of the water with the umbrella bumping across her shoulder like a rifle. Lola, giggling, followed her but Annie simply stopped, took a pair of flip-flops out of her bag, and slid them on to her feet. Sara did the same, and then they picked up their gear and strolled down to where Mel and Lola were busy setting up their beach umbrella. They had plunged it into the sand and were busy rocking it back and forth. When it was deep enough, Lola opened the top and they arranged their chairs, towels, and bags underneath. Sara slid her umbrella out of its plastic sleeve and began her own valiant attempts to sink it into the coarse gray sand. She had to admit, it would have been nice to have Captain Mike here to set up for them.
“Do you need some help?” Mel said.
“No, I’ve got it.” Sara opened the umbrella and arranged her chair and gear on the sand beneath the canopy, leaving room for Annie. “I just wish Captain Mike was here to wait on us hand and foot like he did last night.”
“You’re preaching to the choir,” Mel said.
“You know, he’s probably hiding out from you.” She shouldn’t have said it; she wasn’t even sure why she had. Sara had a sudden image of Mike fleeing the island under cover of darkness, trying to put as much distance as possible between himself and Mel.
Mel popped the top on a tube of sunscreen and began to apply it carefully to her arms and chest. “What are you talking about?”
“Last night. You were hanging all over him.”
“I was not.”
“Yes, you were, and you don’t even remember.”
Mel grinned. “Well, I remember some of it,” she said. She bent over and rubbed the lotion on her legs. “Besides,” she said, looking up at Sara from beneath the screen of her hair. “What difference does it make to you?”
“I’m just looking out for April.”
“I told you before. April’s a big girl. She can look out for herself.”
“She doesn’t know how devious and underhanded you can be.”
“There’s the pot calling the kettle black.”
Lola clapped her hands. “Oh, look,” she cried. “Dolphins!” They looked where she was pointing and saw several thick gray bodies rolling through the shallow water like wheels. The dolphins passed slowly along the beach, their fins glistening in the sunlight, their gay little snouts lifted playfully. Annie pulled her camera out of her bag and began snapping photos. Lola clapped her hands and jumped up and down on the sand in her striped bikini, with her hair loose and tangled about her shoulders. Looking at her, Sara smiled.
Lola looked good today, childlike and happy, not drugged-out like Mel always claimed she was. Sara was not convinced. Mel had a way of seeing things the way she wanted to see them, regardless of how they really were. She had always been like that.
Sara slumped down in her low-slung beach chair and stretched her legs out in front of her.
Lola stood at the edge of the water with her hand shielding her eyes from the sun, watching as the gray glistening bodies rolled slowly out of sight. There was something slightly melancholy about her small figure outlined against the vast sea and the great arched sky. She was smiling, but a lingering sadness seemed to surface from time to time, passing across her face like a shadow. Her moods seemed to shift as often as the weather, and although she was generally sweet-tempered with a bland and sunny disposition, it was these moments of fleeting darkness that gave Lola her air of vulnerability. She was so childlike in her happiness and despair that you wanted to wrap your arms around her, to keep her safe from the dark thing that s
eemed to lurk at the edge of her consciousness. Still, Lola’s manic mood swings had more to do with temperament, Sara felt, watching her, and less to do with drugs. She had always been vague and scatterbrained, even as a girl.
A few feet away, Annie was trying to wrench something round out of a nylon tote bag.
“What in the hell is that?” Mel said, flinging herself down in her beach chair.
“It’s a sunproof cabana,” Annie said. “I bought it for the boys when they were babies.”
“Sunproof? Doesn’t that kind of defeat the whole purpose of lying on the beach?”
Annie gave Mel a stern look. Her sunglasses were old-fashioned and too large for her face. They gave her a slightly menacing, insect-like appearance. “Melanoma is no laughing matter,” she said. “UV light reflects off the sand. That’s why you’ll get a bad burn if you’re not careful.” She tossed the nylon circle into the air and it sprang open magically into the shape of a small, three-sided tent. Sara got up to help her push the tent stakes into the sand, and when they had finished, Annie took her chair and beach bag and climbed inside the small cave-like interior.
Lola began to walk slowly along the beach, following the trail of the rolling dolphins.
“I hope she’s wearing sunscreen,” Annie said, poking her head out.
“She’s got a pretty good base coat,” Mel said, closing her eyes and leaning her head back against her chair. “I’ve never seen her so tan.” She had her chair pulled close to the circle of bright sunlight so that her legs were fully exposed.
“We better ask her,” Sara said worriedly. “I don’t want her to burn. I don’t want Briggs getting as mad at us as he was after the London trip where you lost Lola.”
Mel opened her eyes and turned her head to Sara. “It was only for a few hours,” she said.
“Only for a few hours? I heard Briggs called the U.S. embassy and Scotland Yard.”
“She just kind of wandered off. You know Lola. One minute we’re standing there looking at shoes in Harrods and the next minute she’s gone. We looked for her everywhere and then called the police. A few hours later I had to call Briggs, and he called Lola’s mother.”
“Is that old battle-ax still alive?”
“Maureen? She lives less than ten minutes from Lola in Birmingham.”
“She must be eighty years old by now.”
“What difference does it make? She’ll live forever. She’s too mean to die.” There were few women who frightened Mel, but Maureen Rutherford was one of them.
Sara began to rub lotion over her legs in long, even strokes.
“We eventually found her,” Mel said. “She was in some pub in Chelsea drinking warm beer and singing ‘God Save the Queen’ with the locals.”
Sara laughed. “That sounds like her.” She finished applying the lotion and put the top back on. She looked at the small figure of Lola disappearing along the beach. If she didn’t turn soon, Sara would get up and follow her. “I’m just glad she seems to be doing better coping with her life. I was afraid Henry’s leaving to go off to college would send her into some kind of downward spiral. But she seems to be handling all that pretty well.”
“I still think her happiness is artificial,” Mel said. “I still think it’s something out of a bottle.”
“Well, you should know.”
“Hey, I don’t take antidepressants. They kill the creative urge.”
“What about alcohol?”
“It doesn’t.”
“I haven’t seen Lola take anything,” Sara said, shaking her head doubtfully. “Nothing besides the martinis, Margaronas, and wheatgrass shakes. And we’ve all taken those. She seems happy to me, for the most part anyway. A little moody, maybe. Ditzy, scatterbrained, but happy.”
“I think you’re just seeing what you want to see.”
“And you’re not?”
Mel looked at her. Her eyes, behind the dark sunglasses, were unreadable. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I mean, we all see things the way we want to see them. It makes us feel better about our own lives. Maybe it’s your own unhappiness you’re projecting onto Lola’s life.”
Mel laughed, a sharp, clear laugh. “Please don’t psychoanalyze me. Don’t even try. I’m very happy with the way my life’s turned out.”
“So if you had it to do over again, you’d make the same choices?”
“Would you?”
“I asked you first.” They had wandered off into dangerous waters, where neither one wanted to be. Sara tried to imagine her life without Tom and the kids. She couldn’t picture it. She’d been such a feminist in college, worse even than Mel was now. How ironic that her whole existence should have come to revolve around one man and two children. “Sometimes you have to settle for the small things,” she said fiercely. “It’s not always fireworks and heart-thumping music.”
Mel seemed surprised. “But it should be fireworks and heart-thumping music,” she said. “Always. You shouldn’t settle for anything less.”
“Annie did. And she seems happy.”
“Does she?”
“I can hear you,” Annie said loudly from inside the cabana. “Please don’t talk about me like I’m not even here.”
A lone gull hung motionless above the beach, floating on an updraft. A few feet away a swarm of fat flies clustered around a dead crab lying on its back in the sand.
Mel put her arms over her head and yawned. “I’m sweating like a whore in church,” she said. “I’m going in.” She stood up and walked a few feet toward the sea, and then turned to look at Sara. “Are you coming?”
“No.” Sara stood up, brushing the sand off her back. “I think I’ll walk along the beach and see if I can find Lola.”
“Annie?”
“No.”
Mel watched Sara until she was just a small figure in the distance. The day was bright and sunny but their conversation had left Mel with a slight chill, a feeling of goose bumps rising along her skin. She turned abruptly and walked toward the sea.
Her life sometimes felt like a badly written movie script: stunningly visual but lacking in any real substance.
Chapter 23
ara had dated her husband, briefly, when she first moved to Charlotte after college. Six months later he left Charlotte to teach at a prep school in Virginia and she went on to law school. They did not see or speak to each other for nearly three years, until he returned to Charlotte to teach at the college and they ran into each other unexpectedly at a downtown movie theater. They were both with other dates, and the shock of seeing each other with someone else had been too much for both of them. He called her the next day and they agreed to start over. Fresh. No baggage or history. She was simply Sara and he was simply Tom, and that was all they agreed to know about each other.
It worked better than they might have expected. He had mellowed over the three years, he was less prone to bouts of moody anger, and she had come into her own. Law school had been good for her; it had given her confidence and taught her self-reliance. And somewhere along the way she had realized that she was attractive, although how she could have gotten through high school and college without knowing that was still a mystery to her. It probably had something to do with the fact that she’d spent the first twenty-two years of her life being overshadowed by the stunning Melanie Barclay Mel was married now to some guy named Richard, and was living the life of a bohemian writer in New York. Although she and Sara still spoke on the phone occasionally (this was shortly before the falling-out that would further strain their friendship over the next twenty years), their lives had begun to move in two very different directions.
“Why do you want to stay in the South?” Mel had asked her the last time they spoke.
“Because I’m a Southerner.”
“There are other parts of the country, you know.”
“Nowhere else I’d want to live.”
Sara was living in a condo in Southpark then, but six months after running into Tom at
the movie theater, she had moved into his house in the Myers Park area of Charlotte. The house was small; it had two bedrooms and one bath, but it had a large fenced yard for Tom’s Akita, Max, and a big oak that spread its branches protectively over the house in the winter and provided cool shade in the summer. They had very little furniture—they both still had large school loans to pay off—but they painted the rooms in deep, rich colors and furnished it with garage sale bargains. Five days a week Sara rose and drove to work and Tom, if the weather was good, rode his bicycle along tree-lined streets to the college. Every afternoon she returned home with a feeling of anticipation fluttering in the pit of her stomach, knowing that he was waiting there for her. She had never been so happy.
She had decided not to go to work for a large firm after graduation, opting instead for a two-man operation in a grubby building not too far from the courthouse. Schultz and McNair. Mike Schultz was a large, friendly man with a beer belly and a big red face. He was married to Laura, who played tennis three days a week and spent the other four shopping. His partner, Dennis McNair, was a loud, moody Irishman prone to episodes of heavy drinking. He was from upstate New York, and still talked with the hard, clipped syllables of his youth, even though he’d come south for college and law school and had lived in North Carolina for nearly thirty years. His wife, the long-suffering Moira, was a quiet little mouse of a woman, the exact opposite of her bullheaded, slope-shouldered husband. Mike and Dennis practiced family law, which was a nice way of saying that they were divorce attorneys, and under the mounting pressure of Reagan’s supply-side economics and the layoffs that followed, business was good. Schultz and McNair needed an associate to help with the overload, and Sara got the job not only because of her law school ranking but also because, as Dennis (speaking of their female clients) so sensitively put it, “the skirts will like having another skirt to spill their guts to.”
As it turned out, the skirts did not like spilling their guts to another skirt. It wasn’t that Sara wasn’t sympathetic; she was. And the clients liked her well enough when they weren’t being forced to give her the sordid details of their damaged lives. It’s just that no woman who’s been replaced by a smart, beautiful, self-assured younger woman wants to open up to a smart, beautiful, self-assured younger woman. It was too painful. Sara reminded the clients too much of the trophy wives their husbands had replaced them with. These were women who’d married soon after graduating from college and never worked outside the home a day in their lives. They’d raised children, kept themselves and their houses in tip-top shape, made dinner every night of the week except Saturday, supported their husbands in their wobbly climb up the treacherous corporate ladder, and yet still managed to be served with divorce papers soon after their last child left for college. Where was the justice in that?