“It’s fine,” Lorraine insisted, not bothering to turn away from the ocean. Shifting from side to side as if she were contemplating something. Or maybe she was just practicing her tennis stance. Nela looking at me for my input.
“I insisted we were on the wrong boat!” I admitted, hopeful that Nela could take the gentle ribbing.
“You did not!” Nela said, tsking and shaking her head from side to side, but smiling.
“Well, when I saw the other ship docked next door I was certain we were meant to be on that one instead,” I said, jerking my head toward the larger and seemingly statelier ship in the next berth over, embarrassed now by how uptight I’d been. I’d literally been shouting at the steward to double-check our tickets.
“Well, what does Paige think?” Lorraine asked, turning in search of the Edwardses, who hadn’t yet appeared. And then, as if on cue, there was Paige, rounding the Twister board with Cameron. Winnie not with her. Winnie no doubt taking a nap. This despite it being only eleven o’clock. This despite the fact that Winnie was five years old and too old for naps already! Paige still insisting Winnie had sleep issues. Even though I feared she was lying. Or at least exaggerating. Paige just wanting a break from her. Who took a nap on the first day of vacation?
“Do you hate it?” Nela shouted toward Paige, the wind pressing Paige’s face into distorted relief. Her silver-white hair blowing messily around her face.
“It’s terrible!” Paige said, laughing.
“There were used, dirty glasses in our bathroom!” Lorraine admitted, turning to face us. We all moaned, cringing. I tried to picture it. Worried that the same dirty conditions existed in my room that I just hadn’t discovered yet.
“Not like we’re going to be in the rooms that much,” Lorraine added, shrugging and trying to make the best of things. Which I appreciated.
“Whatever—we’ll be fine,” Paige said gamely, more gamely than I’d ever seen her act. I wondered, was she on something?
“I want a picture,” Lorraine said, obviously pleased that Paige was pleased, gathering us together and motioning Drew to come over with his camera. All of us near the deck railing, our faces tilted inward, our bodies blocking the long, precipitous drop behind us.
* * *
In the morning Drew organized our pool chairs in a circle, laying out the ship’s thin white towels to save a spot near the shade, paying a deckhand twenty bucks to stand close to the pool and keep an extra eye on our children. All of us amused by his ingenuity. All of us astounded when he insisted on a round of piña coladas. The drinks cold and refreshing. The drink making me feel like a torpedo had lodged itself between my eyeballs. It was only ten o’clock in the morning! We’d all just gotten up. Not that any of us slept. The beds lumpy. The ship’s nighttime rocking causing us to complain that we felt hungover already.
Meanwhile, all around us, groups of revelers were also saving lounge chairs, also drinking, a few men with large, greased bellies settling across from us with plates of food resting on their mounded stomachs. Which was rather embarrassing. To be here among them with our morning cocktails. To be acting just like them! But I sensed that we liked it, too. All of us more relaxed than we’d ever been with each other. All of us teasing Drew and Gene about how quickly they finished their drinks, laughing as they made their way to the buffet. Jay and Jeffrey getting up to join them while the women proceeded to take off our cover-ups and subtly check out each other’s bodies. Me in my navy one-piece with strategically placed shirring. Nela in a simple black bikini that looked better than it had any right to, given that she worked in an office all week. Lorraine in her typical sports attire, a high-neck racing suit that accentuated her muscled biceps and was no doubt ideal for distance swimming. Was she actually planning on swimming amid the waterslides and flapping banners? Or was there a lap pool somewhere, away from this madness?
Before I could ask, Paige announced, “I love how much fun the kids are having!” adjusting her yellow-striped bikini and checking that her rear was covered. Paige thin but lacking any muscle tone, the result of good genes and never working out. Even if she’d gotten too thin in the months since she’d adopted Winnie. Her face increasingly ferret-like.
“I’ve heard Bermuda’s gorgeous,” Paige added, beginning to slather herself with sunscreen, oblivious to me sizing her up.
A conversation ensued about which islands were prettiest. Where we’d traveled when we were younger. A comparison of romantic weekends with our husbands. Lorraine had been to Bali. Also Seychelles. We listened to her recite descriptions of hotel rooms she’d stayed in. A certain elaborate suite with its own plunge pool on some island in Greece that she’d secured last minute using membership rewards points. Lorraine famous for her travel savvy. Lorraine dispensing her travel advice as freely as her career tips.
Nela was silent. Listening. Not commenting. Was she judging? She waited until Lorraine had finished and then told us a story about visiting family in Puerto Rico. Something about being left there for the summer with her two brothers and no real supervision. An uncle who may have been a pervert. Spying on him through the keyhole as he talked intimately with the maids. I suspected there were things she wasn’t saying. The story not exactly funny. The story sad and a little forlorn. But it was funny the way she told it. Wistful. For a certain lost innocence. Or innocence she’d never been able to have. And the shrewdness it had left her with.
“My sister and I once got left in a hotel room when I was fourteen and she was sixteen,” I finally said. More for Nela than for Paige or for Lorraine. Because I wanted Nela to understand something about me, too. Even though I was nervous that Paige and Lorraine wouldn’t get the point exactly.
“You have a sister?” Lorraine asked.
“Yes, I have a sister,” I said, annoyed and nervous that now Lorraine would feel the need to ask me a lot of personal questions. Already anticipating the short and half-truthful answers I would give her. Willing to dole out information when I was ready to, not on an as-asked-for basis.
“Let the girl finish,” Nela said, looking at me with mirth in her eyes, which I appreciated.
“So anyway, we went to this wedding with my dad. And the next day my dad must have forgotten he’d taken us to the wedding because he checked out of the hotel and drove back to Pepper Pike without us.”
Everyone nodding. Their faces sufficiently bland to convince me they weren’t judging me. Or that I wasn’t saying anything outlandish. Even though I knew it was outlandish. What father left you in a hotel room?
“So anyway, we called the front desk, and my dad had indeed checked out. We thought about calling my mom, but we knew that she’d do something nutty like try to have my father arrested. So we sort of walked around downtown Akron for a little while and met these two guys, boys really, maybe around our ages, I guess. They were skeevy in that skinny, shifty-eyed way. But they were sort of interested in us, and we had nothing better to do than talk to them. After a little while, they asked us if we wanted to get high. So we invited them back to our hotel room. Which was sort of stupid, in hindsight.”
“I’ll say!” Lorraine interjected, laughing.
“So we went back to our hotel room and smoked a couple of bowls, and afterward things got weird. I realized that the guys were sort of menacing. Not toward Penny and me, exactly. It was more like they thought we were rich and were casing the room, looking for stuff to steal.”
At this Nela laughed out loud and said, “Word!”, an expression I hadn’t heard since I was about the age I was in the story. The expression causing me to smile, to meet Nela’s eyes. To feel brave about the rest of my anecdote.
“So just when I’m trying to figure out how to get rid of these two greasers, there’s a knock on the door and guess who it is? My dad! We hid the pipe but he knew something wasn’t right. He sort of looked around laughing and then reached out his hand to shake with the boys in this really faux formal way that made me laugh and that the boys didn’t get and that made them
nervous. They left pretty quickly after that, and my dad told us that he’d just gone to run some errands, which was obviously a lie—it was two in the afternoon, well past checkout—but he didn’t question what we’d been up to, so that seemed like a fair trade-off.”
When I had finished, I took a deep breath and then quickly flagged down a waitress, anxious for another drink. The drink suddenly essential for maintaining my equilibrium. My memory of the story funnier than it was in the retelling. The idea that I could have been raped or killed by the two teenage boys suddenly occurring to me more powerfully than when the story had been a distant, untold memory. The idea that my dad hadn’t been disturbed by that so unsettling to me that I gulped some of Lorraine’s drink before saying cheerily, “Anyone else got anything?” as if I weren’t upset. As if I hadn’t just told them the whole of my childhood in one small snapshot.
Nela looked at me, raising her eyebrows and giving me a sly smile. Which made me happy, glad to have an ally. Even if I wasn’t convinced she could be fully trusted yet. Hadn’t she seemed supportive of Paige when she’d announced she was adopting? Her support unfounded and then withdrawn suddenly and without warning?
Lorraine said, “I got caught after hours on a golf course once,” and proceeded to tell us about senior prom and sneaking into her country club with a case of beer and some boys. Which was really nothing at all like my story but more a story about being a certain kind of upper-middle-class kid who was a certain kind of popular. Paige jumping in with a story about how she’d almost gotten kicked out of Catholic school because she was caught smoking in the girl’s room repeatedly.
The conversation now turning fully to bad teenage behavior: pool hopping and shoplifting, stealing from our parents’ liquor cabinets. Stories that I suspected were meant to convince one another that we weren’t always the good girls we now seemed to be. Even though I knew this was false. All of us patently good girls who merely did a few bad things to test the waters. Even Nela and me. Especially Nela and me. Being good the fastest way out of a bad situation. Which Lorraine couldn’t possibly understand. What rebellion could cost you. Paige neither a good girl nor a bad one, but rather in a bubble of her own making. Paige not like any friend I’d ever had before, and yet more familiar to me than anyone else in our beach chair circle. A fact I tried to forget about as she launched into an unrelated story about traveling through Canada with her mother and three sisters in an old silver Airstream. The story seemingly invented on the spot, as I suspected a lot of Paige’s stories were: bits and pieces of fact woven together with imagination and exaggeration to create an image she wanted us to have of her. Of someone who had had a happier and more carefree childhood than the one she’d hinted at on other, less guarded occasions. The light and the sun seeming to stream right through Paige’s thin, delicate frame, illuminating for me what I’d known all along about her and had handily chosen to ignore: namely, that I hardly trusted a word that she said.
* * *
In Bermuda, the sand was pink, the water warm and translucent. The kids wading in the shallows, or else playing in the sand, digging for treasure and seashells. They wove in and out of our field of vision, asked anyone’s mother for money, permission, towels, more sunscreen. Gene tan and a little bit handsome again. Even if he was still too skinny. Paige happy, or at least not uptight and yelling.
All of us shopping for trinkets in the boutiques that lined the harbor, eating out in a restaurant that was too fancy for children. Waiters forced to bring extra baskets of bread. More butter. Round after round of Shirley Temples even though we knew so much sugar was dangerous. The children running around the town square as soon as they’d finished eating—red sauce dotting their lips and chins from their child-size ravioli. The kids playing freeze tag while the adults drank vodka and made toasts to each other. Certain that our kids were having the time of their lives. Convincing us with their smiles and their laughter that this was the best vacation ever.
And then, all at once, it was Wednesday night, the final night and the fireworks night. The ship announcing there would be a beach party on their own private island before we sailed for Boston Harbor. Paige eager for us to gather on the Verandah Deck before heading to the party. Paige surprising the children with goody bags: star-shaped sunglasses, sailor hats, and beaded necklaces.
“When did you do this?” I asked.
“From the gift shop,” she admitted, sticking her hands in the pockets of her maxi dress and leaning back slightly.
I couldn’t believe it. That in the midst of the swimming and shore excursions, the mealtimes and the chaos, she’d thought to buy all of the kids presents. To make the vacation a little more festive. A little more memorable. Which reminded me of why I liked her to begin with. Because she cared so much. Because she really did try. Even though I thought goody bags were completely wasteful. The ridiculous piles of junk they generated. One whole drawer in my playroom devoted to balsa wood airplanes, purple stretchy men, candy-colored noisemakers.
As soon as the bags were distributed—the contents spilled clumsily on the tables and the carpet—the children grew clamorous, running up and down the long glassed-in lounge area, shouting to each other, begging to make their way to the party or whatever occasion it was for which they’d been given the presents. The goody bags like a signal, a Pavlovian command, to start running, shouting, anticipating fun.
We told them to be quiet! We told them to calm down! We told them, “Walk slowly toward the elevators.” The children flinging themselves at the double glass doors that separated the lounge from the open-air deck, waving their flags, shouting too loudly to be considered acceptable, even here on this tacky ship, at least for our standards. Our standards having fallen with each day of the trip. The children barefoot, still in wet bathing suits, not even changed after a day in the sun. All of us trailing after them with armfuls of sweatshirts, bug spray, and water.
We neared the gangway and descended to the pier. Already there were dozens of families gathered on the beach, Chinese fire lanterns with the ship’s insignia bobbing from brightly colored beach chairs, kids running wildly between groups of bonfires. I stood for a long moment on the pier, taking in the calls of laughter and obvious displays of happiness. The sheer volume of the revelers. It was like a dream. An act of imagination of what a vacation could be. Pure joy. Innocence.
But when we got closer, it was nothing like it seemed from above. There was too much smoke! There were too many kids! The fires dangerously close and unprotected. Jay and I standing up and down like prairie dogs trying to find our children, to warn them to be careful. I was so engrossed in the action that I didn’t notice her at first. Paige, standing a few feet in front of us, berating Winnie. Jay nudged me.
“Where’s your goody bag?” Paige asked sternly. More than sternly. With a hint of malice. Winnie seemed to not understand the question. She stood staring up at Paige, a look of worry crossing her face.
“Where?” Paige demanded, jutting her jaw out a little so that her face looked contorted with, what, rage? Or was it power?
Winnie hung her head, her dark hair blowing in the wind, and Paige pointed to a spot on the sand. “Sit!” Paige commanded.
“If you can’t keep track of your things, we won’t give them to you, do you understand me?” Paige asked, still standing, her body towering over Winnie. I couldn’t see Winnie’s face. I hoped she wasn’t crying. I feared that she was.
“Where do you think you lost the other items?” Paige was demanding. The question impossible to answer.
“Since you can’t answer me and you don’t have the things that you were given, I think you know what’s going to happen to you,” Paige continued, folding her thin, papery arms over her chest and shaking her head like she was disgusted with Winnie.
After a minute, Winnie reached inside her shorts pocket and pulled out a bouncy ball and some red tinsel pieces that had obviously fallen off something else, showing them to Paige as if they were proof of something.
That she wasn’t careless? That she had some toys that she hadn’t lost or broken?
Paige took the ball and the tinsel from Winnie’s hand and then yanked her to her feet in a sharp, jerky motion.
“Apologize,” she commanded.
I heard Winnie say something, her voice slurred and whiny.
“Stand up straight and speak clearly!” Paige commanded. “No baby talk.”
I hung my head away, desperate not to witness Winnie’s humiliation. Straining to hear Winnie say “Sorry” more clearly. Her voice barely reaching me and not reaching Paige, at least not in the timbre and tone that she wanted.
“You’re out of here!” Paige said angrily, pulling Winnie to a standing position as she marched her toward the pier, shouting, “Gene!” into the wind. “Gene!” The words harsh and demanding. The words getting washed away almost before they reached us. My ears straining to hear them long after she was gone. Hoping she would find him. Hoping Gene could help them.
When they were gone, Jay and I stood up silently. Eager to get away from the smoke, which had made its way over to us. Eager to get away from the acrid residue of Paige’s anger. Not talking about it. Both of us no doubt considering what we might say about it. But before we could decide how to begin, we heard it. The booming, cannonlike sound, the sky suddenly brilliant with beaded pellets. Everyone shouting, pointing, dropping to the sand to stare up at the starbursts and glittering, flowerlike patterns of fireworks. In another moment, Paige was forgotten. The sky dazzling with color, grabbing our attention with its audacity and boldness. It never failed to amaze me. The beauty and the pageantry. The sense that everyone on the beach was in on it together. This was what mattered. This was why I’d come. For the magic and the mystery. For the memories and the happiness. I hoped my kids would always remember this. Already I was remembering it for them.
Good Neighbors Page 13