by Lily King
She wants me to reach in the pail and get one. “You’re going to have to pull them apart first.”
“Easier said than done,” I say.
“I know!” Her laugh is just like Mallory’s. I feel like I’m playing with Mallory again, only I’ve grown up and she hasn’t yet.
I stick my hand in the cold water and grab one by the sides of its body and shake but they all stay stuck together.
“Here,” she says, and her little fingers go in and all the crabs shoot apart. I don’t even know how she did it.
We place each crab in different parts of the pool.
“Off you go,” she says quietly each time. We watch them float to the bottom, then scramble furiously beneath the sand to hide.
Before she puts the snails back, she puts one hole-side-up in her palm. “Did you know they come out of their shells when you hum to them?”
“What?’
“It’s true. Watch carefully.”
She hums one note over and over but the hole stays dark. Then she hums the first few bars of “Edelweiss” and a little bit of water seeps out and then a brown tube inches out of the shell like a periscope.
Up on the beach, Mallory is putting the baby back in his carrier. They have to go. “I’ll call you when we come down again. Will you still be here?”
“Maybe.”
Gracie is swinging her empty bucket around in a wide circle. “Will you come here tomorrow, Daley?”
“I will, but I don’t think I’ll see you.”
“I know. I’ll be in my home. But will you come say hi to everyone for me? You don’t have to take them out of the water. You can just wave.”
“I can do that.”
“Thanks.”
I stroke the little patch of fine hairs on the baby’s head. They are light and soft as milkweed. And the skull beneath feels spongy, like it hasn’t hardened all the way yet. I stand on the rocks and watch them move slowly around the cove, Mallory’s shoulders weighed down by the beach bags, the tent, and the cooler, and Gracie skipping through the water, and Mallory telling her she is going too deep. I should have offered to help them back home. I never learned the baby’s name, or how old he is. My chest is burning for all three of them.
In my notebook I write: Mallory. Gracie. Baby with fat legs kicking in his pouch. I want that. I do want that, J.
He gave me a blue silk robe for my birthday. We were on his bed, and he’d brought me breakfast and a wrapped box.
“My first choice of outfit is this, of course.” He pulled the sheet all the way off me and kissed my bare belly. “But short of that, here you go.”
I opened it. He knew it was my favorite color, and my favorite fabric. I slid my arms through the sleeves and tied the sash. It was scandalously short.
“Now you are one sexy white girl.”
“Woman.”
“Sorry, but if I’m using the modifier white, it’s got to be girl. When I say white woman it makes me think of Edith Bunker or Maude.”
“I learned about menopause from Maude,” I said. “I’d never heard of it before.” Jonathan was one of the few boyfriends I’d had who’d watched as much TV in the seventies as I had.
“Please, please let’s not talk about white women in menopause.”
“Another twenty years and that’s me.”
“Really? Only twenty? We better get going.”
I shook my head.
“You don’t want babies?”
I’d never been asked by a guy about babies before. I’d never wanted to be asked about babies. It was like being asked if I wanted a polar bear.
He undid the sash of my new robe and traced his finger along a hip. “You’ve got some good baby-making hips.”
“Yeah, right.”
“You really don’t want kids?”
“Not anytime soon,” I said finally.
“Ever?
“I don’t know.”
“Two years, four years?”
“I’m not really a long-range planner.”
“Just tell me. When are you going to have your white babies?”
“Oh, so that’s what this is about.”
“What?
“My white babies.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You did. You said, When are you going to have your white babies?”
He grinned. “I didn’t mean to say that.”
“It’s all very loaded, this topic.”
“Everything’s going to be with us. Black and white is loaded.”
“I mean the whole baby thing. I don’t know if you’re trying to tease out some maternal desire in me and then get freaked out by it. Or if you’re insinuating that I’m nonmaternal. Or if you’re testing to see if I’m averse to having a brown baby come out of my white vagina.”
He raised his eyebrows with his eyes shut. “Okay, easy now, Miss A, B, and C. We don’t need to be quite so graphic at this moment. Or suspicious. I think I’ve made it clear that this is a big serious deal to me. I had to rewire my mind to go out with a white girl.”
“Woman.”
“Maude. So I want to know if said girl-woman wants babies. Because I do. I want kids, and it’s not complicated for me to say it.”
“So many things are less complicated for a guy to say.”
“True.”
“I need think about it. Maybe you can ask me again in California.”
“All right.”
“Don’t forget.”
“Won’t.”
I can’t sleep. I keep seeing Gracie, her small fat hands, her untied bows. She’s like an infatuation, a song you can’t shake.
I get up and put my clothes back on. My father sounds like someone heaving up a chicken bone when he snores. It’s so loud in the hallway, loud enough that the dogs in his room don’t hear me pass by. I get into my car and drive. I drive past the lobster shack, over the tracks, past Neal’s, which is dark upstairs and down, and through town. There is a cluster of Fords and Chevys outside Mel’s Tavern, and a few sporty foreign cars outside the Captain’s Table. Town and gown, the way it has always been in Ashing. I pass the apartment on Water Street and wave. There are lights on behind the curtains in my mother’s room. I sometimes slept in her bed when we first moved in there and I couldn’t fall asleep. I’d watch how she rocked herself to sleep, one hand around her waist, the other around her neck, a close embrace, the rocking short and shallow, a little rowboat. And then I’m on the highway. There are only trucks. I turn off when I see Howard Johnson’s orange roof.
As I cross the parking lot there is a great clamor above me. I look up and a long thin slanting V of birds is moving just above the restaurant’s cupola, talking all at once. Canada geese. Jonathan and I taking turns with the binoculars. They pass directly over me, their voices raucous, deep and certain, excited for the trip. The sound is still thundering in my chest long after they’ve flown behind the trees.
Inside the Howard Johnson’s, a few people are at the counter, ordering ice cream. The older woman at the register glances up and tells me to sit anywhere I like. She wears the orange and turquoise sailor cap pinned to her hair. I take the booth at the back on the right. This is where we sat. We ordered fried clams and a club sandwich. She wore her kerchief and her nervous smile. We had my bike and eight-tracks and the television in the car.
A waitress comes and takes my menu and brings me french fries and a garden salad. Four cops come through the door. The woman behind the counter greets them easily. The people getting ice cream give them more room than they need. They drink their coffees standing up. Their walkie-talkies beep and hiss at the same time. And then one of them puts his cup on the counter and walks over to my table.
I panic. Registration? Inspection sticker? Unpaid fine? I hate cops, hate being stopped by them, can never be natural or easy around them like the waitresses are. I have no idea how people charm their way out of a ticket. I can never be anything but sullen and humiliated when a cop appears at my car window.
“Daley?”
I manage to raise my head and nod.
He laughs at my guilt, my deep blush. “You don’t have any idea who I am, do you?”
It never occurred to me that I could know him personally, an armed, barrel-chested, meaty-faced man in full uniform. There were two Ashing cops when I was little: the rangy one who looked a little like Gilligan and dated the girl at the Mug, and the redheaded one who came to the house whenever the alarm system was set off accidentally. This guy is neither. He is amused by my complete bewilderment.
“Jason Mullens,” he says finally. “Patrick’s buddy.”
“Damn.” While I remained in school, other people were going out and growing up and getting real jobs and wearing uniforms, for chrissake. “I cannot believe I know a cop.”
He laughs again, and I stand and give him a hug. He is very hard and bumpy with his oblong chest and badge and buttons and buckles. I am used to slender, unshaven, underexercised men in flannel shirts. It’s like being introduced to a different species.
He slides into the seat across from mine and puts his thick forearms on the table. My waitress brings him a coffee cup and fills it.
“Thanks, Amy,” he says quietly, as if he is aware that he’s a cliché, like something out of the Andy Griffith Show, but can’t help his good manners.
“I’m stunned. You became a cop. I am sitting here across from a cop.” It is so preposterous that wily little Jason Mullens has grown up into this that I feel completely comfortable, as if it isn’t really happening. “Why on earth are you a cop?”
“It’s kind of a long story.” He glances over at his buddies. They’re talking to an older couple, their backs to us. “I was planning to be a lawyer but then my dad’s friend got me this job in a law firm for a summer during college and I watched these guys spend their time trying to get around the law for their clients. It really bugged me.” He looks down at his hands; then he looks up, surprised that I’m waiting for him to say more. “I realized I wanted to uphold the law, not try to bend it.”
“But you were such a rule-breaking hellion.”
He lifts his eyes to the ceiling, smiling. “Especially at your house.” His perfectly shaven cheeks are round and shiny.
“How is Patrick? I’ve been wanting to get in touch with him, but—” I don’t know how to finish.
“Yeah, I heard about your dad and Catherine. I’m sorry. Patrick was here a couple of weeks ago, helping her move into her new place.”
I heard she’d rented a carriage house north of town. But Patrick was here in Ashing and I didn’t see him? Why hadn’t I called him months ago?
“I didn’t see him either,” he says, seeing my disappointment. “I was away that weekend.”
One of the other policemen is at the door, the other two already on the sidewalk outside. Jason holds up a finger and the last cop gives him an indulgent smile.
I can’t believe he actually thinks Jason is trying to hit on me.
Then Jason says, “I’m off at midnight. You wanna do something?”
“At midnight?”
“Mel’s is open until two.”
So we meet at Mel’s. I wait in my car until I see him pull up. He looks even broader in civilian clothes. He smells clean, his thick hair damp and combed straight down. Everyone knows him at the bar. He introduces me around. I watch Jason joust and parry reluctantly with the crowd. He’s in his element but he worries about me. He tries to include me. He doesn’t understand that it feels good to hold a beer bottle in a bar with people my age who are all a little too buzzed to care what I’m saying. It’s been so long since I’ve had any alcohol that the beer takes full effect and pulls me away from myself just a little. Normally I don’t like the feeling, but right now it’s a relief. People crowd around Jason. Someone offers him a shot and he looks at me and turns it down. Someone says something quietly to him and he laughs until his face gets red. “I’ll explain that one later,” he says to me. Like Garvey, Jason has changed socioeconomic groups, and I’m interested in this. I hope we’ll stay till closing, but instead of ordering another round he steers me out the door.
We go to his apartment, the second floor of a house on South Street. It smells like a gym. He runs around picking up the balled-up clothes and dirty glasses. He opens the windows and turns on a fan and hands me a beer. We sit on a red velour couch and he pulls off his shirt as if wearing it was causing him pain. It is truly a rippling torso, wide and deep, with very little hair and tiny tight nipples, tapering down into a narrow taut stomach with a deep clean belly button. He takes my hand and lays it on his chest and I cannot pull away. I have to know how it all feels. My fingers trace the skin across his chest, pausing at the dip in the center, then moving to the far side and over to his right arm which he is not flexing but is solid as steel, wrapped in veins. And then I am kissing his hard warm stomach, pressing my tongue in the taut belly button, and he is hard immediately and sighing and I feel his lips on my neck before he lifts me in one quick motion right on top of him and we kiss, hard, our teeth knocking, and then I hear Jonathan, slightly bemused, taking everything in, the gun he surely has in the house, the uniforms, the absurdly inflated pale chest, saying, “What do you think you are doing, tweet?” Jonathan, tracing my hip with his beautiful finger, talking about babies. I stop kissing and rest my head on his shoulder.
“I’m sorry, Jason. I’m so sorry.”
His hands are moving all over me. “It’s okay.”
On one vacation, when I was in high school, I had a room right next to my father and Catherine, separated by a very thin wall. “So now you don’t want it,” I heard him say to her in the middle of the night. “I thought you wanted it, but now you don’t want it.”
A vast heaviness weighs down my body.
“Really, it’s okay, Daley.”
He helps me find my shirt and shoes.
“It’s my fault,” he says when I’m at the door. “I took it too fast. I misinterpreted the signals.” It sounds like a line from some educational video on sexual communication. “I always had a little thing for you.” He’s lying now, poor guy. No one had a thing for me back then, not even a little one. He tries to hold my face in his hand to gauge my distress, but I turn and get out the door.
20
I didn’t have a boyfriend until college. Before that, the only time I can remember even the possibility of one was when Patrick came home from boarding school one weekend with a friend, After dinner that first night, Patrick asked me if I liked Cole. I said I thought so. He told me that Cole liked me, then teased me about how fast my face turned red. I waited for something to happen, but it never did, even though I liked him more and more. He was very funny and smart, quick but not mean. The three of us played Ping-Pong, saw a movie, went to the Peking Garden. I laughed at Cole’s jokes and he laughed at mine, but nothing else happened. They took the train back to school on Sunday. The next time Patrick came home I asked him, jokingly, trying to hide the hours I’d agonized over it, what had made Cole change his mind about me, and Patrick looked at me oddly.
“It’s like you don’t get it,” he said.
“Get what?”
“After I told you he liked you, everything you did said stay away.”
I was stung and stunned by this. Stay away. I somehow said stay away with my outside while my inside was yelling come here.
“I cannot believe you made out with a cop. You really do have a thing for uniforms,” Julie says.
“Please don’t tell anyone.” I mean Jonathan. If she is in touch with him. Which is a question I never ask. It’s better for me not to know.
“So what are you doing on the Thursday before Columbus Day weekend?” she says.
“Not much. No, actually,” I say, pretending to look at a calendar, “it’s a very hectic day. The dogs are going in to have their toenails clipped.”
“I cannot get there too soon.”
“What?”
“My father’s birthday pre
sent. A night in New York to celebrate my grandparents’ fifty-fifth wedding anniversary, then a trip up the New England coast. Give me directions to your house.”
“Whoever that was put a smile on your face,” my father says.
“My friend Julie. She and her father are coming here next Thursday.”
“To stay with us?”
“No, just for lunch. I think we should take them to the Lobster Shack.”
“What’s this we shit?”
“Oh, Dad, please join us. I want you to meet her. She’s my very best friend.”
“Is she your vewy vewy bestest fwiend? Bester than me and Maybelle?”
“It’s a three-way tie,” I say, rubbing Maybelle’s little head.
“Where’re they from?”
“Brooklyn. But he lives in San Francisco now and she lives in Albuquerque.”
“San Francisco. He a fag?”
“Dad.”
“I’m just wondering.”
“He’s had three wives.”
“Jesus.”
I don’t bother to remind him that he is not far behind.
“What’s he do?”
“He’s a doctor.” I didn’t want to tell him that, either. He doesn’t like being around strangers with successful careers. At least I was careful not to say Jewish psychiatrist.
On Thursday he is cranky all morning. The tractor isn’t working properly. The new guy at the hardware store is useless. He screams at the dogs. I see him glance at the clock, like he used to, waiting for it to be drinking hour. I think he does it to get a rise out of me, but I don’t react.
And then they are here, Julie leaping out of the car even before her father cuts the engine, dodging the dogs up the path, reaching me at the bottom of the porch stairs. She’s cut her hair straight across at the jawline. She told me but I forgot. She’s wearing new clothes. She looks different, older. She’s a full professor now. It’s disorienting, seeing her here in my yard. She is Michigan and card games and all-nighters and Jonathan on the floor with us because we never did get a kitchen table, all of us eating his $3 spaghetti. Her hug is tight. There are so many things I can’t have back.