The Summer Bed

by Ann Brashares

  Meanly, Sasha was happy to hear this. “Is that right?” She craved more.

  “Violet’s been hanging around Ray since they were in middle school. She goes to Nightingale, I think, where no boy has ever stepped, so Ray’s like the white rhino. You know how that is. She’s your classic bratty East Hampton kid who hangs around Main Street wearing a lot of makeup and trying to spot celebrities.” Mattie raised an eyebrow like she was a justice of the Supreme Court or something.

  The pleasure of that damnation was short-lived. Now Sasha was on to the next worry. Was Ray like that? Was that really the kind of girl he went for? That didn’t square with what she imagined. But then again, when it came to Ray, imagination was mostly all she had. “And Ray is into that?” She didn’t even try to stop herself from asking.

  Mattie waved the bottle of nail polish around. “I don’t know how much of it is Ray being into her and how much is Ray putting up with her.”

  That didn’t sound very romantic, did it?

  “Emma calls her ‘Just Violet.’ ”

  “Why?” Sasha asked, perhaps a little too eagerly.

  “Because whenever she turns up at the house, we all go, ‘Oh, it’s just Violet.’ ”

  Sasha laughed. She wondered if it sounded as diabolical outside her brain as it did inside.

  Mattie finished the second and final coat on her second and final pinky toe and finally came out with the inevitable. “Anyway, what does it matter to you?”

  I still surf every Saturday out at Ditch Plains.

  Had he somehow known Mattie would come to this?

  At the time it had struck her as a laughably extraneous piece of information. And yet she’d remembered it. And here she was driving Adam’s crummy Honda out to Ditch Plains early on a Saturday morning.

  Mattie’s mother did not want to talk. Her father most certainly did not want to talk, but she somehow got the sense that Jonathan Dawes did.

  The towel and the book felt like props to her as she picked along the sand. This beach was only a few miles down from Georgica but belonged to a wilder world. The break was long and rugged and already dotted with surfers. The height of the cliffs and the speed of the wind gave it an edge-of-the earth quality. Jonathan Dawes must have come over to their world, to the flat water of Georgica Pond, when he balanced little girls on the water.

  Mattie felt self-conscious as she made her way toward the water. This beach was run by notoriously cranky locals. If you hadn’t surfed here for a decade or two, if you couldn’t acquit yourself on a board, you were not welcome. And yet she noticed more nods than scowls. Maybe blond girls in bikinis got a pass here, just as they did in most circumstances.

  She recognized him from the back a couple hundred yards down the beach. He was wearing wetsuit pants so supremely faded they might have been the same ones from the picture seventeen years ago. His hair had a strawlike texture from years of salt and sun. He was holding a respectably beat-up longboard, standing with two other surfers. He was one of the locals, not cranky, maybe; if anything, he was the kind of institution the cranky ones were protecting.

  She was moved by him, in a strange way. How well he belonged, how relaxed his body looked. How much he was part of this exact place. And how he was still part of that old time, when nothing else from then felt the same.

  It seemed a credit to her that her life might overlap with his. This was an intoxicating thought and a treasonous one.

  She was frozen there, clutching her book and towel, when he turned and saw her. He cocked his head, and then smiled and came toward her.

  She was almost surprised that he registered her. She forgot she was visible and part of this scene. She had lulled herself into the idea that she was watching him as though on a screen, a pair of abstract eyes gazing at him in his natural environment. She’d forgotten she’d come here to interact. She wasn’t sure she wanted to anymore.

  There was something momentous about his walking toward her. Because of the raking sunlight and shadows and his look of question and expectation. Now she knew she was choosing something.

  Had she meant to?

  She must have meant to. She didn’t get here by accident.

  He got close and put his arms out to give her a hug. She was awkward, clutching her things. He was not awkward, sort of hugging around them.

  “Nice to see you, Mattie. I was hoping you would come.”

  That spooked her. Her mind ran back over the things he’d said, the things she’d said. She was another stupid Hamptons kid at the Black Horse. What was he hoping for?

  I look like my mom. That was why he was looking at her like that. By this she reoriented herself.

  “I wanted to ask you something,” she said boldly.

  He nodded as though this, too, was what he expected.

  Now that she was here she wasn’t sure how to put it.

  Was she mad at her mom? Did she want to catch her? Prove something? What good would that do?

  No good. And yet she wouldn’t let it go.

  “Did you…” She trailed off.

  He didn’t prompt her or seem to want to rush her.

  “Were you and my mom…”

  He cocked his head again. He didn’t seem nervous at all. Not in the way she was nervous.

  “…involved with each other?”

  He didn’t look surprised or mad. He didn’t say anything.

  But already she was wanting to retreat. “I know it’s not my business to ask personal questions. You don’t know me.”

  At this he laughed.

  “What?” she said, self-conscious, embarrassed.

  “You’re right. I don’t know you.” She could tell he wanted to put her at ease. He laughed again, less joyful this time. “I almost feel like I do.” He caught her eye for less than a second. Was it she who looked away or was it him?

  “Because I look like my mom.”

  He shrugged. “You do.”

  “Everyone says that.”

  He nodded. “Right. I can imagine.”

  She regrouped again. “Did you know her well back then?”

  “For a time.” He was strangely peaceful.

  She waited for him to say more, but he didn’t. “We have some pictures. With you. From then.”

  He didn’t look skittish or scared, like her mother did. “I have a few too,” he said.

  He’d been in love with her mom. That seemed almost certain to her now.

  He walked a little way up the beach to where the sand perched over the surf and sat down. He gestured for her to join him. They were quiet for a while. “Have you asked your mother about this?”

  “I tried.”

  “She didn’t want to talk.”

  Mattie snorted a little. “At the sound of your name she shut down. I think she’s pretty much been avoiding me since.”

  He looked wistful, but he didn’t look hurt. “It was a complicated time. You probably know that.”

  “The divorce, you mean?” This was territory where she got reckless.

  For the first time a look of trouble passed over his face. He sighed again. “I respectfully defer to your mom in this case.”

  Was he the reason for the divorce? Was it that obvious? Her mom cheated and her dad threw her out? Was it as simple and tawdry as that?

  He pushed the sand around with his hands. “I am delighted to see you here, Mattie. I really would enjoy getting to know you again. If you ever want to take up surfing, please look no further. I am available almost any time and my rates are quite reasonable.” He smiled at her. She figured he was probably joking about the rates part.

  “But if your mom doesn’t want to talk to you about this, then I don’t feel comfortable talking to you about it.”

  About it. So there was an “it.” He wasn’t denying that. “About you an
d my mom?” she asked, wanting to eke out a little more.

  His voice was less certain, more measured when he spoke again. “About me and her. And you.”

  “And me?” she fired back indignantly without even thinking. “What does it have to do with me?”

  She wished she’d stopped herself from saying this, especially thinking on it so many times afterward. She would probably feel this memory like a kick in the neck for the rest of her life.

  She’d fired back without listening or understanding because of the old child-of-divorce catechism: It has nothing to do with you. Never blame yourself for what happened. She’d heard that from every adult in the land—even virtual strangers—and recited it to herself on a thousand different occasions. It was a reflex in her child-brain. It flared in her eyes and blinded her from seeing what he was really getting at.

  He didn’t answer. He couldn’t, it seemed, and that gave her a dizzying and painful stretch of time to think.

  And you. She couldn’t let it in. But it came in anyway, in sharp little jabs, each one injuring and disorienting.

  She was just a baby back then. The jabs got, slower, duller, more bruising. What could a baby have done? Thud. Except the notorious thing a baby can do to wreck a marriage.

  But that couldn’t be her. She couldn’t be that. She found herself looking down at his feet.

  When she looked back at his face she saw deep discomfort. He thought she knew. Or at least suspected. He thought that was what she had come here to investigate, maybe something she was open to. Now she felt bad for him. She felt worse for herself.

  He pressed sand down under both hands, hard. He looked up at her and dusted them together. “I’m sorry, Mattie.” He looked genuinely sorry. “You need to talk to your mom.”

  —

  Half the time, when Evie went to Wainscott early for the weekend, Robert arranged for the firm’s car service to drive him out so he could get work done. Usually Sasha went with her mom, but now and then she went with her dad.

  Here was a conversation Sasha had heard before: Back of a spotless black car, maybe a Mercedes or a Town Car. Today it was a Suburban. Her dad tapping on his phone. And then the driver, usually polite and well-meaning: “If I may ask, where are you from, sir?”

  Her dad looks up, already impatient. “Canada. Outside Toronto.” Back to his phone.

  “Before that? Your family?”

  When this happens, they all know what the driver means. The driver himself is Indian or Pakistani or Southeast Asian. He sees potential kinship here. You’re not one of them, the driver is thinking, maybe with some pride. You are one of us, aren’t you? Who are you really?

  Her dad will have none of it. “All Southern Ontario. That’s it.” Nothing to see here, folks. Keep moving.

  The driver invariably looks skeptical, maybe even hurt. Maybe he looks to Sasha’s Bengali eyes for help. If so, she gives a fleeting look of compassion mixed with warning.

  She’s always tempted to say more: My dad is Bangladeshi. You can tell, can’t you? His biological mother was, in any case. He never talks about it, but something terrible happened to her in the war in ’71. He’s a war baby, but he’ll never say that. He was sent to Canada at two years old to be raised by white parents. He’s tall now. They fed him milk.

  Her dad grew up skating on homemade ice rinks in backyards, just like all the other kids in Ontario. From what she could understand, he wasn’t particularly sensitive about the fact that he looked different from the other kids—that he was visibly a different race. He wasn’t defiant about it. He wasn’t very interested in it. “I like to stay busy with the things I can do something about,” he’d told her once.

  To hear her dad tell it, he’s Canadian through and through. He had the best parents in the world. He’d sing you all four verses of “O Canada” and a dozen Anglican hymns before he’d tell you he was the unwanted baby of a teenage rape victim born in a refugee camp in Bangladesh. He played ice hockey at Princeton. He’s the founder of Califax Capital. He has four beautiful daughters. That’s all you or anyone needs to know.

  Her dad was back giving orders on his phone. Nobody, not even strangers, could tell anything about him on the phone.

  —

  Quinn had passed the Body Arts tattoo and piercing store in Hampton Bays dozens of times and never thought of going in. A few of those times she’d noticed the middle-aged woman with the black-red hair and the many tattoos smoking out front. Impulsively Quinn pulled her bike into the parking lot.

  The woman was inside. She introduced herself as Raven.

  “Do you pierce noses?” Quinn asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Can you pierce my nose?”

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-one.”

  Raven made a face. “Are you really? I would have guessed sixteen. Who rides their bike along Montauk Highway? You have ID?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sure thing. You want to do it now?”

  “Can you?”

  Raven looked around. “I don’t see any other customers, do you?”

  Quinn shook her head. The place was darkly lit and the walls were covered with potential tattoo designs. There were a lot of serpents and dragons on first glance.

  “You’ll need to fill out a form and pick your jewelry, and we’re good to go.”

  “Okay.” It seemed that Raven favored tattoos involving wings. Butterflies, angels, dark birds of prey, an owl, a winged lion, a dragon, a bat or two.

  Quinn filled out the paper, gave her ID, and picked a tiny titanium half circle to start with.

  “Is your name really Quinn?” Raven led her to the room in the back, where the atmosphere was less mystical but the light was better for piercing holes in people.

  “Yes. It was my father’s mother’s maiden name.” Raven pointed to a reclining chair like at the dentist’s. “Is your name really Raven?”

  “No. My mother named me Barbara.”

  “Oh.”

  Raven had a leather corset kind of thing strapped tightly across her wide bosom, stretchy pants, and high-heeled black boots. Under all the wings, her skin looked crepey and tired. She had many rings jammed onto her short fingers. It was hard to tell if any one of them meant she was married. She had a scar on her neck and another on her forearm. Quinn’s mind floated over, beginning to imagine her as the girl her mother named Barbara.

  Everyone had a mother. That was the thing. The week before, Emma had dragged her to a movie set during World War I. Quinn sat balled up in her seat as soldiers fell in droves, and for every one, Quinn thought of his mother. Mr. Reese had a mother once. It was one of nature’s many mercies that people didn’t usually get old enough to watch their kids get old.

  Quinn sat back in the piercing chair.

  Was Raven someone’s mother? Quinn floated out a bit further. For some reason she didn’t think so.

  “Which was your first tattoo?” Quinn asked.

  Pop went the piercing gun, and for that moment Quinn was entirely in her own body.

  An hour and a half later, the redness had gone down, and Quinn had a jot of titanium in her left nostril. She also knew the story of every one of Raven’s thirty-one tattoos, and thus had a nearly complete story of her life, from the first at fourteen to the most recent (“not the last”) for her sixtieth birthday in April. Her first boyfriend chose the first, a lamb sitting nestled in her cleavage, and she’d chosen herself wings for every one after.

  Quinn hugged Raven after she’d given her fifty-eight dollars, including tip, and also a bag of sweet yellow Shiro plums she’d retrieved from her bike basket. Raven squeezed her for a few extra seconds. “You’re a soul gazer, you know that?”

  “What does that mean?” Quinn asked into her shoulder.

  “You’ve got those eyes—you take in a p
erson’s soul.”

  Quinn thought this was only partly true. She did take people in, but it was her own soul that did most of the traveling.

  —

  Riding home on her bike in the dark, Quinn wondered why she didn’t stick in her own body more. It was a perfectly fine body; she had no complaints about it. It actually worked quite well—people used to say she was the most gifted athlete in the family, but that unlike Emma, she had no feeling for hierarchy or competition. So why did she slip out of it so easily? Why wasn’t her obligation to it more binding?

  What if she slipped out of her body one time and forgot to come back? Like Ping the duckling, when the door of the wise-eyed boat closed, and he was left to bob down the Yangtze River. Would that be a tragedy, really, or some kind of apotheosis?

  Quinn pedaled past the Reeses’ farm and got the itchy feeling of the lettuces being dry, so she stopped and leaned her bike quietly against the side of the barn. The moon rose as she tended to the greens.

  Quinn knew time passed differently for her. That was another thing. She didn’t orient herself to hours of the day or days of the week. She’d tried to for a long time to honor the units, but they didn’t hold for her, didn’t feel consistent or sequential as they did for most other people. Time tightened or bagged, ambled forward or doubled back, depending on the light and the season and her mood.

  Sometimes she imagined the days of the calendar were a series of doorframes leading from one chamber to the next. Quinn wasn’t walking through the doorframes. She wasn’t even in the building.

  In the care of plants, the work was her clock. The plants set the time.

  So she realized when she got home that dinner was well under way, and she was meant to be there at the beginning of it.

  Her father stood up to greet her. She’d forgotten about her nose, but he noticed it instantly.

  “What in the world have you done to your beautiful nose?”

  He wasn’t kidding around. He was pained, she could see.

  She touched it, remembering. “I think it makes my ordinary nose look more beautiful,” she answered honestly.