Beach Trip

by Cathy Holton

  She thought, Don’t do this. She said, “My number’s in the book.”

  Why had she told him that? Why had she said she’d go out with him when the last thing she wanted to do was hear him talk about Mel? (The good old days.) And why had she acted like a fucking robot when she saw him, like the old Sara, not like the new persona she had tried so carefully and meticulously to invent?

  She spent the next week in a panic that he would call, jumping each time the phone rang. But by the middle of the second week, when she still hadn’t heard from him, she’d begun to feel jilted, and by the end of the second week she’d decided that she wouldn’t take his call even if it came.

  But of course she did take it. “Sorry,” he said. “My dad’s been sick. I’ve been out of town.”

  He took her to a restaurant down on South Tryon. It was a beautiful evening, warm and balmy. A thin sliver of moon hung over the city, and the trees along the street had been strung with strings of white lights. They sat in a bricked courtyard drinking Coronas under the stars. J.T told her about his job teaching well-heeled prep school boys and she told him about her job as a paralegal, and how she’d been accepted into law school in the fall. Neither one mentioned Mel.

  Afterward, they walked to Amos Music Hall. J.T. held her hand and she walked beside him feeling like an actress in a stage play This couldn’t be her. This couldn’t be her life. Every time he touched her, she felt her heart flutter inside her chest like a flock of birds taking flight.

  They danced until one o’clock in the morning, and then he took her home. Despite her body’s traitorous reactions, she tried not to believe that this was anything more than a casual date. Two friends getting together after a long absence. She told herself she didn’t care if she ever saw him again. She steeled herself not to feel anything for him. At the door, he kissed her.

  “I’d like to see you again,” he said.

  “I can’t,” she said, feeling as if the ground had opened up and she was falling, floating like a feather. “I’m seeing someone.”

  “Oh, really? What’s his name?”

  She stood there for a moment, trying to think of someone, and when she couldn’t, he grinned and kissed her again.

  Their second date was to a movie, their third was a picnic, and their fourth was a pool party at one of the partner’s houses. Sara hadn’t really wanted to go, but she’d mentioned it to J.T. on the phone and he’d said, “Oh, come on, it’ll be fun.”

  He stayed close to her side the whole evening except for when he went up to the bar to get their drinks. It was hard not to notice him. All the other men were dressed in polo shirts and madras plaid slacks, as if they’d been produced in the same bright, shiny factory, but he was dressed in jeans and flip-flops. When he went up to the bar, all the women from work flocked around her.

  “Who in the world is that gorgeous guy?”

  “Where have you been keeping him?”

  “Does he have a brother?”

  Across the yard, J.T. saw her and waved. She smiled and waved back.

  Later, as the sun began to set and the party got more raucous, they went for a swim. The Beach Boys sang on the stereo. The water was cool and silky. Sara liked the feel of it against her skin. Someone turned the pool lights on and she dived and followed J.T. down to the deep end, where the shadows were longer. He surfaced under the diving board, putting his arms up to grab the board so that he hung there with his torso above the water. She surfaced beside him, clinging to the edge of the pool.

  “You like most of these people, do you?” he asked.

  “They’re okay.” She liked the way the muscles in his arms tensed as he held the board.

  “What are you thinking?” he asked, and she blushed suddenly and said, “Nothing.”

  “Oh, I think you are.” He let go of the board and slid into the water, moving toward her with the lower part of his face submerged. Water beaded and glistened in his hair. She turned and rested both elbows on the lip of the pool, letting her feet trail behind her. He slid up beside her and gently disengaged her from the side of the pool, pulling her into his arms. He put his knee up and she rested there like a child, her arms around his neck while he kissed her, slowly and deeply.

  So far they hadn’t slept together but Sara knew it was coming, not because he wanted it but because she did. Her desire was a hollow feeling beneath her heart. When he touched her she trembled as if she might break, because despite the boys she had dated in high school and the bad reputation she’d gained from running with Mel Barclay, despite the fact that she was pretty and modern and had dated a fair number of boys in college and out, she still felt inexperienced in the ways of love.

  She had been saving herself all along, it would seem, for him.

  It was a summer of perfect love. That’s how she would remember it in the years to come. She had never been in love before, and now she was, and it was perfect. By the middle of July she had moved in with him. She kept her apartment, but it was more or less a storage facility now, a place where she kept furniture, and kitchen utensils, and out-of-season clothes. Her toothbrush, her cosmetics, her hair dryer she took to J.T.’s house along with some of her clothes. He never told her he loved her, but he made her happy and that was enough for her.

  Or at least she told herself it was.

  • • •

  She was there with him the morning Mel called from New York. It was a cold, rainy day in early September. The phone rang and he answered it. She rolled over in bed, struggling toward consciousness, but by then he had already risen, the phone clutched in his hands. She heard his voice change, heard him say “Rough night,” as he went into the bathroom and closed the door, and she knew he was talking to Mel.

  When she asked him later who he was talking to he’d said, “Nobody,” and when Mel called her at home, Sara had asked innocently, “How long since you spoke to J.T.?” and Mel had lied. She knew then that they still loved each other. It was only a matter of time before they reconciled. She had been a fool to think he could ever love her, to think he could ever love anyone but Mel.

  She carried this knowledge around inside her until she couldn’t bear the weight of it any longer. Then she sat down and wrote J.T. a note explaining why she couldn’t see him again, and, packing up the few possessions she had kept at his house, she left the note on the bed, got into her car, and drove out of his life.

  Chapter 37

  FRIDAY

  nnie’s attempt to keep her lips moist and youthful using Vaseline backfired big time. As it turned out, slathering her lips with petroleum jelly before undergoing five hours of ultraviolet light was akin to basting a roasting turkey with butter. She awoke to lips that were sunburned and swollen to twice their normal size.

  “You look like a porn star,” Mel said, when she saw her. Sara raised her eyebrows in alarm and Lola laughed and clamped her hand over her mouth. They were sitting on the porch drinking their coffee. It was late morning, and the sunlight falling across the back deck was so fierce it had driven them beneath the porch roof.

  “You poor thing,” Lola said. “Does it hurt?”

  As a matter of fact, it did hurt. Annie did her best to sip her lukewarm coffee and finally gave up. They watched her with varying degrees of concern and amusement on their faces. “What?” she asked finally.

  “It’s just that you look so different” Sara said. “And in a strange way, attractive.”

  Annie thought so, too. She’d stood in front of the bathroom mirror turning her head back and forth. She’d always had thin lips as a girl, and they’d become wafer-thin as she aged. But now she looked like a different woman, someone she didn’t recognize. The effect was both thrilling and terrifying.

  “We’re trying to decide what to do tonight,” Mel said, pushing a chair out for Annie. “What about you, Kitten with a Whip? Any ideas?”

  “Don’t call me that.” She wondered what Mitchell would say if he could see her now. She thought, for the first time in a long time,
of the girl she had once been, small and slim and full of self-confidence. She would give anything if she could be that girl again, if she could go back and undo all the mistakes she’d made.

  “Have you ever thought what your name would be if you were a porn star?” Lola asked dreamily.

  “No, Lola, that’s something I’ve never honestly thought about,” Sara said.

  “I’d be Luscious Lola.”

  “I’m kind of partial to Kitty LaFox,” Mel said. “Or maybe Kandy Kleevage.”

  “Y’all are disgusting.”

  Cicadas hummed in the trees. A sultry breeze blew from the sea, bringing with it the scent of fish and mudflats. Along the low cedar fence separating the house from the dunes, a riotous mass of wild grape grew.

  “What are our options?” Annie asked. They all looked at her. “For tonight.”

  “It’s our next to the last night on the island,” Mel said. “Let’s do something crazy.”

  “Somehow I knew you’d say that.”

  “We could take the boat across to Wilmington,” Lola said. “There’s this bar called the Pirate Shack.”

  “That sounds perfect,” Mel said.

  “It’s usually pretty crowded, but I know the doorman, Dark Steven.”

  “Now, Lola, that doesn’t sound very politically correct.”

  “No, silly, I call him Dark Steven because he’s prone to depression. His aura’s pretty dark.”

  Annie scratched irritably at her leg. She’d been listening to Lola’s weird pronouncements all week and it was getting more and more frustrating. She sometimes felt like she was doing a field study of some strange, primitive person, someone who didn’t speak her language. It was as if Lola was trying to tell them something, but she wasn’t sure what. Annie liked things set forth in black and white, while Lola seemed to prefer the swirling colors of the rainbow. “Ridiculous,” Annie said.

  Lola stared at her sadly, as if she was reading Annie’s aura and found it defective.

  Annie put her leg down. “Let’s go to the beach.”

  “I think you’d better keep your lips out of the sand today, Cherry Poppins,” Mel said.

  “Don’t call me that,” Annie said.

  “She’s right,” Sara said. “Any more sun on those lips and they might explode.”

  “Y’all are real funny,” Annie said. “You two should start a comedy routine.” Why hadn’t she ever considered collagen or Botox? she wondered, fingering her swollen lips. Maybe she could make herself over from head to foot, turn back the hands of time until she was once more a girl, shiny-new and full of promise.

  “I think you look pretty,” Lola said.

  “Thanks.” Annie touched her swollen lips gently. Unfortunately, it wasn’t that simple. No matter what she did to her face, no matter how many surgical enhancements she underwent, she could never go back to being a girl. She could never be innocent again. Paul Ballard had seen to that. She had seen to that.

  “I say we go over to the mainland and drink with the locals,” Mel said.

  “Why does everything you propose always involve alcohol?” Annie asked irritably. No matter how hard she tried, no matter how many lists she wrote, how many rules she followed, how many times she went to church, she couldn’t get it back. How do you believe, in goodness and mercy, when you’d done what she’d done?

  “Because we’re on vacation, Little Oral Annie. You got any better ideas?”

  Annie gave her a hard look. She wondered if she would have liked herself better if she’d gone off with Paul Ballard her senior year of college, if she’d stayed the spontaneous, devil-may-care girl she’d pretended to be for him. And what would Mel, Sara, and Lola say if they knew about Paul Ballard—would they use the same condescending manner they used with her now? Maybe she’d tell them just to see the looks on their faces. Just to teach them that you can’t always judge a book by its cover. She fingered her swollen lips and imagined the words rolling around on her tongue like something cool and sweet.

  But she couldn’t tell them; she couldn’t pull her finger out of the dyke because if she told them even one small thing the rest might come flooding out. Everything.

  She pushed herself up suddenly and looked around the table. “I want to do something,” she said. “Something I’ve never done before. That’s what I wrote on my note. The one we put in the little box and buried under the deck. Do something I’ve never done before.”

  “Hey, we need to dig those up,” Mel said. She sipped her coffee and stretched her feet out on an empty chaise longue, watching Annie with an amused look. “So I’m curious, Annie. What’s your idea of doing something you’ve never done before?”

  “I know you think I’m just an old stick-in-the-mud, Mel, but I’ve done lots of wild and crazy things in my life. I’ve done all sorts of spontaneous things.”

  “Oh, really, Wendy Whoppers? Name one.”

  “Don’t call me that.” Annie gave her a severe look and then said, “Once I took the boys to school in my pajamas.”

  “Shocking!”

  Sara frowned, running her finger along the rim of her coffee cup. “Did you actually get out of the car and go in or just drive there and let them out? Because I’ve done that a hundred times.”

  It was a stupid example. Annie didn’t know why she’d used it. She could see that they weren’t impressed. “I was wearing leopard-print pajamas and I got into a car accident and had to stand along the side of the road while everyone I knew drove slowly past. It was humiliating. It was the first and only time I ever wore leopard-print pajamas. Mitchell gave them to me for Christmas.”

  “Now that’s funny,” Mel said.

  Annie didn’t tell them that she was hit from behind by a guy in an old van hand-painted with strange quotes that read like Bible verses. It looked like a hippie van from the ’60s, only instead of peace signs there were crude drawings of what appeared to be the devil, loading people into hell on the prongs of a pitchfork. The driver of the van was tall and thin with matted hair and a long beard. He wore a purple jumpsuit with “Save Jesus” emblazoned across the back. Not “Jesus Saves,” but “Save Jesus.” That should have been a tip-off to his mental state, Annie realized later. “Jesus Saves” was comforting, whereas “Save Jesus” implied a bound and gagged Savior with a gun to his temple. Annie found the image disturbing.

  What was more disturbing was the way the crazy guy looked at her as if he knew her. He stood there beside the strange van while she checked her car for damage. He lifted a crooked finger and pointed at her while behind his head a line of utility poles stood against the sky like crucifixes on Golgotha. “Blessed are those whose sins the Lord will never count against them,” he said in a nasal, high-pitched voice.

  Annie had stared at him uneasily, then shivered and climbed back into her car. Later, she tried not to take the whole incident as an omen. Moses at the burning bush. Saul on the road to Damascus.

  “So you were spontaneous once and it didn’t work out,” Mel said. “You shouldn’t give up. Wild and crazy didn’t work the first time, so try it again.”

  Annie gave her a sullen look. “What do you have in mind?”

  “Let’s dye your hair.”

  Annie sighed. “Fine,” she said.

  Mel paused for a moment, as if she hadn’t heard her clearly. Then she leaned forward and slapped the table. “Now you’re talking.”

  “Are you sure?” Sara asked doubtfully.

  “And I’ll do your makeup,” Lola said, clapping her hands in excitement.

  Mel said, “When we’re through with you, even your own mother won’t recognize you.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” Annie said.

  “Hey, Lola, where’d you bury that box?”

  Lola got up and walked around to the deck. While she was gone, Mel said, “So it’s settled then? We’ll stay in tonight, get drunk, and give Annie a makeover. Well, maybe not in that order.”

  “Definitely not in that order,” Annie said.<
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  When Lola came back a few minutes later she was carrying the box in her hands. It was covered in damp sand, and as she opened the lid, the little strips of paper fluttered gaily in the breeze. She picked one up and read it.

  “This one says Do something I’ve never done before. Okay, we know who wrote that. This one says Renew our friendship.” They looked at one another and grinned. Lola smiled shyly and held a strip above her head. “This one says Smoke some weed.”

  They all looked at Mel.

  “I did not write that,” she said.

  “I did,” Lola said.

  Annie’s eyes widened above her porn-star lips. Mel wagged one finger back and forth. “You’re a very naughty girl, Luscious Lola.”

  “You’re kidding,” Sara said. “Right?”

  “I never did it in college,” Lola said, “and I always wanted to. At least once.”

  “I’m not doing something illegal just so you can relive the youth you never had,” Sara said.

  “That’s not very generous of you,” Mel said.

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “Where would we even get some? How do you go about getting it these days?”

  Sara said, “Like I said, I’m not doing anything illegal.”

  “How about if we do it offshore? How about if we take the boat out into international waters?”

  “I’m not boating two hundred miles out to sea to smoke a doobie.”

  “I’ll take my chances with maritime law. It’s bound to be less stringent.”

  Sara hooted. “Oh, so you’re a lawyer now?”

  “Stop being so paranoid. No one’s going to catch us.”

  “I’ll bet the Coast Guard hears that a lot.”

  The fact that Sara was so against it made it irresistible to Mel. She turned her head and looked at Lola. “Seriously, Lo, where can we get some?”

  Lola tapped her nose with one finger. “Leave that to me,” she said. She smiled mysteriously and picked up the last slip of paper. “This one says Fuck Captain Mike.”