The Lifeguard

by Mary Morris

  BY MARY MORRIS

  Vanishing Animals and Other Stories

  Crossroads

  The Bus of Dreams

  Nothing to Declare: Memoirs of a Woman Traveling Alone

  The Waiting Room

  Wall to Wall: From Beijing to Berlin by Rail

  The Night Sky

  House Arrest

  The Lifeguard

  PUBLISHED BY NAN A. TALESE

  an imprint of Doubleday

  a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

  1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036

  DOUBLEDAY is a trademark of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

  All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Some of the stories in this collection have appeared, in slightly different form, in the following publications: “The Lifeguard” and “Losing Track” in the Boston Globe; “The Lure” in The Breadloaf Anthology of Contemporary American Short Stories; “Slice of Life” in Listening to Ourselves; “The Wall” in Vogue; “Souvenirs” in Epoch; “Around the World” in Crosscurrents and Best of the West; “The Moon Garden” in McCall’s (as “A Season for Growth”); “The Glass-Bottom Boat” in the Midwesterner.

  With special thanks to Sloan Harris and Jessica Green at ICM who helped these stories find homes.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Morris, Mary

  The Lifeguard / Mary Morris.

  p. cm.

  I. Title.

  PS3563.O87445L54 1997

  813′.54—dc21 96–49444

  eISBN: 978-0-307-80997-1

  Copyright © 1987, 1988, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1994, 1996, 1997 by Mary Morris

  All Rights Reserved

  v3.1

  This book of stories is dedicated to the

  memory of Peter St. John, in whose house

  many of them were written.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1. The Lifeguard

  2. The Wall

  3. Slice of Life

  4. The Lure

  5. Souvenirs

  6. The Snowmaker’s Wife

  7. Around the World

  8. Losing Track

  9. The Moon Garden

  10. The Glass-Bottom Boat

  About the Author

  The summer before I left for college, I was head lifeguard on the beach at Pirate’s Point. I don’t think real pirates ever landed there, but the name made me think that strange and mysterious things could happen right where I lived. I grew up on that peninsula, and it was my home. I never found it monotonous, staring across the sea, but instead I liked to think of what lay beyond, how someday perhaps I’d sail to the other side.

  The beach was a long strip of what had once been white sand but was now beginning to turn darker and less pristine. It was lined with striped umbrellas and beach chairs. I loved the gentle easing of the beach umbrellas into the sand, the smell of Coppertone on my skin, the way people looked up when I blew my whistle, their faces always with a slight look of terror that one of theirs had been swept up, ever since the drowning of Billy Mandel.

  For four years of my youth I was the lifeguard there. I’d watched this beach, where I’d spent my summers as a boy, red bucket and shovel in hand, fill with more and more umbrellas. I had watched the boys who were lifeguards turn flabby. I had seen Ric Spencer, who had ruled this beach before me for half a decade, lose his hair, and I’d seen the slim bodies of women stretch with childbearing. I’d seen it all and it had not impressed me, but rather it flowed through me like a river, not stopping here.

  I was eighteen then. I wore zinc oxide on my nose, a whistle around my neck. No. 4 Coppertone covered my body. I could lift a girl into the air with each arm, and I loved to walk the beach, a girl dangling from each bicep. Girls clung to my stand, like the shipwrecked to their raft, and I could do no wrong.

  It would have been a perfect summer for me, were it not for Mrs. Lovenheim. Every day at the same time, about ten in the morning, Mrs. Lovenheim came. She never had to ask me to set up her red-and-white umbrella because she always came at the same time each day, so I was ready for her. Mrs. Lovenheim stretched out like a cat, opened a book, which she held open at almost the same page every day, and stayed like that for hours, then went away. She never went near the water or sat in the sun. She never walked to the hot-dog stand but instead just stayed beneath her umbrella, straw hat on her head. That was all she did, except it seemed as though Mrs. Lovenheim never took her eyes off of me.

  She was perhaps only thirty then but seemed very old. She had flaming red hair and a small, compact body. She’d been married to a real estate broker who’d dropped her, my mother told me, after she’d miscarried two babies. She could not hold them, my mother whispered to me one evening in a darkened corner of the den where my own father had drunk beer and watched TV sports, until he died suddenly during a winter storm, and this secret world of women seemed ever closed to me.

  I did not care for such things—for women who could and could not hold babies, for women who had been left in the middle of their lives, alone. I had girls who loved me—the girls of summer, with their bronzed skin and naked unblemished bellies, and it would have been a perfect summer for me, this last summer of my youth, if I had not felt that at each moment my every move was being watched by Mrs. Lovenheim, who never spoke unless she wanted something or rose until it was time to go home. If I had not felt that while my eyes were on the water Mrs. Lovenheim’s were on me.

  Ric Spencer came on weekends with his wife, Sally, and their daughter, Becky. Sally used to babysit for me when I was a boy, and she’d make big vats of hot chocolate, which we’d sip in front of late movies. She liked the really scary movies in which giant pods swallowed people or where something came out of the muck, terrorizing a neighborhood, and Sally clutched my hand whenever the frightening thing appeared, making me feel, even though she was taking care of me, as if I were the one who was taking care of her.

  Then she married Ric Spencer, and some say she had to. Becky was born not long after their marriage, and Sally’s days in bikinis were done. On weekdays Sally and her mother, Mrs. Winston, who used to be our neighbor, came alone to the beach. But on the weekend Ric came as well, and I could see him, lying listlessly on the sand, bored within the confines of his family. And when he could get away from them, he’d plant himself beneath my stand.

  He’d been on duty when the Mandel boy disappeared, and it was a story he liked to tell. The drowning of Billy Mandel was the only recorded drowning in the history of Pirate’s Point, and the first time Ric told me about the Mandel boy it was like a warning to me, not that the drowning had been Ric’s fault. But then over many Saturdays beneath my stand, the story grew and improved. “It was like this,” Ric said, beads of sweat shimmering on the place where his hair used to be. In his glory Ric had had a taut swimmer’s body and thick blond curls. “It was this quick thing.” A split second when a child is playing with a bucket by the shore and the father looks up, distracted, by the call of a friend. Ric would make up dialogue for me. “Hey, Joe, how’ya doing? How about dinner with us next Saturday?” Or, “I see the wife’s got you working.”

  Innocuous words like that, and when the father looked back, when he let his gaze turn to the place where the sea met the shore, where Billy had been digging just moments before, there was a blank space, a void where he’d been taken by a wave, not a very big wave, but big enough to pull him under. While my own eyes scanned the water, Ric loved to describe the search of the b
each, the lifeguards’ patrol. He’d describe himself, swimming endlessly along the shoreline, until the sea brought Billy Mandel back hours later, bloated and having strangely taken on the color of the sea.

  That summer the girls would not stay away, and I’d have to hold them at bay. They’d offer to buy me things—Cokes, hot dogs—and rub cream on my back while I sat like an idol perched in my chair. I liked being above them because I could see down the front of their bathing suits, and even though they knew I was looking at their breasts, they did nothing to hide.

  There was Cindy Hartwick, with her thick black hair, whom I dated sometimes on Saturday nights when my mom gave me the car. And Sara Clarkson, who would be beautiful as soon as her braces came off. And there was Peggy Mandel. Sometimes I’d look across the beach and see Mr. and Mrs. Mandel with their daughter, a girl almost my age now, their only child. Peggy, who was a sophomore and known to be fast, used to shout at her parents, who sat motionless, reading endless newspapers unless Peggy went for a swim. And then Mr. Mandel would stand in his sneakers, waves lapping at his feet, as if somehow, through his attentiveness, he could bring back what was gone.

  I was above them all from my stand, where my eyes scanned the beach like a beacon. I could see the Spencers under their blue-and-yellow umbrella and watch Becky go toddling away. When Ric was there, Becky went naked and got to eat sand, but when it was just the women, Becky stayed dressed. And there was Mr. Potter, who’d had a heart attack and walked with small weights in his hands, up and down the shoreline. And there was Mrs. Lovenheim, always there watching my every move whenever the girls came around.

  My dreams at night were like the dreams of other boys—I dreamed of the bodies of girls, dreams that woke me from my sleep, leaving me sweaty, the sheets twisted around me. Dreams that made me rise in the middle of the night and throw the window open, until my mother, who never slept well in the big bed after my father died, shouted, “Are you all right? Is anything wrong?” Those were most of my dreams, but there were others, dreams of water, and sometimes there was a nightmare that came to me. In it I see myself from a perspective that is high. I am a boy with a bucket in my hand playing in the setting of parents, umbrellas, buckets, and shovels. And then from behind me, always behind me, as I dig a hole in the sand, the sea is rising, black and surging against the sky.

  All summer long, when he could sneak away, Ric Spencer came and sat at the base of my lifeguard stand and talked about the old days. Ric had been my teacher for Red Cross training and taught me what I know about riptides and undertows and sudden changes on the surface of the sea. He was only twenty-six that summer when I became head lifeguard, but he used to say, as bronzed girls handed me Cokes or asked if I needed more oil on my back, “Man, you don’t know what it is. You don’t know what you’ve got.” He’d always say it in the same way, so finally one day I said to him, “What is it, Ric? What’ve I got?”

  He extended his arms as if to encompass the beach. “You’ve got all this. It’s yours.”

  I laughed, not understanding what he meant. “You know,” he went on, “I’ve got this job, I sell computer parts. I go to these retail stores all over New England, even in the winter, when it’s freezing cold, and I think to myself how I wish I were anywhere else doing anything else, but what can I do?”

  He pointed over to Mrs. Lovenheim, who was looking our way, her novel lying flat on her blanket. “You know, I knew her when. Before she married that guy who dumped her.” I looked over at Mrs. Lovenheim, and she did not look away. I couldn’t imagine that anyone could have known her “when,” whenever that was. “She was something,” Ric said. He whistled between his teeth.

  Just then Cindy Hartwick appeared, with a hot dog for me with everything on it, one I hadn’t even asked for, and she handed it up. Then Peggy Mandel strutted by in a bikini, to her father’s dismay. I tipped my visor, then Ric went on. “You don’t know,” he said, “how lucky you are.”

  ———

  I loved my body that summer. I loved its firmness and its bronzed skin. But mostly I loved the way it was admired. Girls I didn’t know would come up and squeeze parts of me. Old people looked at me, their bodies covered with chicken skin and blue veins, as if I were an object in the museum that had become their lives. So I loved to stroll the beach among the girls who wanted to have me, old men who wanted to be me.

  Sitting in my chair was harder, because the thing about being a lifeguard is that your eyes should be set on the sea. You watch for nothing, really, and sometimes you begin to see things. I’ve seen what I thought were the tidal waves of my dreams, heading straight for me, but it was only the meeting of a cloud and the sea. I’ve seen monsters rise from the belly of the deep when it’s only a big fish leaping into the air. And then I’ve seen things that aren’t there at all. I’ve seen people before my eyes disappear. And sometimes I’ve even heard cries for help from behind the waves. But these are all lifeguard mirages, and they happen to anyone who looks at one thing too long.

  But at times it was hard for me to keep looking out, and so I welcomed the company of girls. Though I’d never intended to do this, one day I asked out Peggy Mandel. She had come to hand me a Coke, and I’d gazed down at her. Then I said, quite simply, “Would you like to go to a movie Saturday night?”

  On Saturday night I picked up Peggy. She wore a pink cotton dress with spaghetti straps, and her parents stood at the door, despondent, as if I were taking her to live in another country, saying useless things like “Come back soon.” I watched them curiously, these people whose life had been irrevocably altered with the sweep of a wave.

  We went to a drive-in, where I let my arm dangle against the seat. She leaned her head into my arm, and I felt her breath against my chest. I pulled her closer to me, and she raised her head toward mine, bringing her lips to my lips. She was warm and alive, and I knew I could have almost anything I wanted with her. I leaned my own face close to hers. “Tell me about Billy,” I heard myself say.

  She pulled away slightly at first. “What?” she said. She was flushed and drowsy, like someone who has been asleep.

  “About Billy. I want to know.”

  She sat back, tossing her dark brown hair. “Billy?”

  “Your brother, the one who drowned,” as if she didn’t know. “Tell me about it.”

  Her face looked the way I’ve seen girls look, amazed and sickened, in biology labs when a rodent is about to be splayed. “You want to know about Billy? Why do you want to know about Billy? Why do you want to know about Billy?”

  “I don’t know. Tell me what happened.” I couldn’t explain why, but I wanted to know what it is like when you look at a patch of sand and a part of your life is gone. What does she imagine it felt like to be deep in the sea? Maybe it was because Ric Spencer had talked about it so much, but I wanted her to tell me what no one else could.

  “What happened? You want to know what happened?”

  I realized she thought my request was odd. “I’m the lifeguard,” I said. “I don’t want to make any mistakes.”

  “Okay, I’ll tell you what happened.” She was furious now and looked old for her years. “My dad looked away, and Billy drowned, and nobody’s ever been the same. Is that what you want to know?”

  “I want to know what he was like. Did you play with him when he was small?”

  “I was four years old and my brother drowned.” She flung her body to the opposite side of the car so that the door made a jangling sound, as if someone were trying to get in. “You’re sick,” she said under her breath. “Now take me home.”

  The day it happened was a day of particular calm. A Saturday when a gentle southwest wind blew. A day when the waves hardly lapped and it was almost hypnotic for me to keep my eyes fixed on the sea. It is easier to look at roughness and fast-breaking waves, and that day I was having trouble staying awake.

  Ric Spencer stood beneath my lifeguard stand that morning. He stood there and said, “You know what, man, I’ve been thinking. I
could do something else with my life. I mean, I could go to night school. Maybe become a coach. I don’t have to do this door-to-door crap.”

  “Hey,” I told him, “there’s plenty you could do.”

  “That’s just what I’ve been thinking. I’ve been thinking about opening a little retail store, maybe software. What d’ya think?” He seemed happy just having said this when Cindy Hartwick came by with a Coke; Ric winked and drifted away. “Catch you later,” he said, heading back to his umbrella.

  “Hey,” Cindy said. “What’re you doing after work?” I gazed down for a moment. Cindy wore a turquoise two-piece, and she had straight black hair and black eyes. She began climbing up my stand like a monkey, laughing, “Hey, so what are you doing?”

  Then Peggy Mandel walked by. “He’s a sicko,” she shouted. “He’s weird.”

  “Not as weird as you, Mandel,” I called back. “Not like you.”

  “Oh, yeah? Go to a drive-in with him. You’ll see.”

  “What’s she talking about?” Cindy asked.

  “Oh, it’s nothing,” I said. But Peggy had disturbed me. Now Cindy was reaching up, and I thought I’d take her out on Saturday night. I didn’t have to look; I could feel Mrs. Lovenheim’s eyes on me. Cindy kept reaching for me, and, as if I thought it would drive Mrs. Lovenheim wild, I pretended to pull Cindy up to my stand.

  It was perhaps only an instant that I was distracted, but suddenly I was aware of the shouting, and it took me by surprise. At first I thought I was hearing things, but it was too loud and clear. Perhaps I’d had my eyes off the sea for one minute, maybe two. No more than that. Perhaps for the first time all summer I’d completely forgotten where I was. Now my instincts took over. I let go of Cindy and stood up straight in my chair. Grabbing my binoculars, I scanned the water for signs—the flailing arms, a bobbing head, the gathering of crowds, parents diving—but there was nothing, nothing at all. But still I heard the shouting, so I leaped to the sand and began to race up and down the shore.