Barefoot Beach

by Toby Devens

  “OMG!”

  “But,” I said, “does ‘see you Tuesday’ mean just in class or is he reminding me of the Thai place on Patuxent Point he mentioned at dinner?”

  “OMG, we’re going to be late for third-period algebra. Don’t you dare tell Scotty I have a crush on him.”

  “Well”—Margo handed me back the phone—“I’m not a Talmudic scholar, and even they spend centuries interpreting the word of God or some medieval rabbi, and he didn’t give us much to work with, so it could go either way. I would have felt more confident if he’d phoned. Maybe he was afraid Jack would pick up.”

  “It’s my cell number. Who picks up other people’s cell calls?”

  She ducked her head in mock shame.

  “You pick up Pete’s calls?”

  “Sometimes. Sometimes I just check out the ID. Don’t give me that look. It could be an emergency. I do it as a service when he and the phone are separated. He doesn’t carry it with him everywhere.”

  “Which means he’s not cheating on you or he’d be glued to it. It’s impossible to conduct an illicit affair without electronic devices.”

  “Oh, please. Fred was cheating on Wilma with Betty back in the cave. It’s gone on forever.”

  “I assume you check the previous phone numbers and names as well.”

  “Which he obviously deletes as soon as he hangs up. Along with any incriminating emails and texts. The girlfriend must have taught him how.”

  Incredulous, all I could do was shake my head.

  “Hey, I’m trying to save my marriage here.”

  She took a sip of her iced tea and stared at her garden. The day was overcast and the winds were rough, the way I felt. Daylilies swayed on their stalks and hydrangeas shivered in the gusts. She put down the glass and stared at her hands, which she smeared before bedtime with age-spot-fading cream. Even back in college, she’d worried about growing old. “With men, it’s all about fresh and new. And young.”

  “Not all men,” I said. “Scott and I are only a year apart in age.”

  “Another thing that makes him a hero in my book. So he’s a good kisser, huh?” Margo tossed off the question casually, but it was the only casual thing about her and it was false. The diamond stud earrings were real. The taupe silk slacks and cream-colored eyelet blouse were designer. That she could weave her fingers, with the six-carat engagement ring, the endless diamond wedding band, and two jeweled pinkie rings, into an expectant clasp defied anatomical limitations.

  When I hesitated, staring at his text message on my phone, she snapped her fingers. “In the moment, please. Kiss. Tongue?”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sakes.” I looked up. “Do I ask you about your sex life?”

  “No, but that’s different. Marriage is a sacrament. Isn’t that what Catholics believe? So what goes on between a husband and wife in the bedroom is protected by the . . . I don’t know, the pope or something. But dating is fair game. Besides, I’d tell you if I thought you were interested. In fact, I’ll tell you anyway.”

  I cast a glance toward the house behind us.

  “He’s not home. As I was saying, my husband—who has not been performing his conjugal duties with the appropriate frequency, enthusiasm, or—what’s a fancy word for hardness?—that same man actually woke up with a major woody and proceeded to ravish me this morning. I always wondered what ‘ravish’ meant, and, girl, did I find out.”

  I shot her a TMI look and tried to stop the torrent of images leaping like horny salmon over the privacy dams in my brain.

  Margo had no brakes. “The man actually climbed on top of—”

  “So now you know he’s not getting it on with this imaginary girlfriend you’ve fixed him up with.”

  “Au contraire, mon amie. I don’t remember the last time he’s been that sturdy for that long. And this morning he did stuff he never . . .” She ignored the hands I clapped over my ears and raised her voice to get through. “Stuff he’s never done before. Very acrobatic. Incredibly creative, and”—she sniffed—“highly incriminating. I didn’t teach him those moves. She must have. And he was practicing on me. Picturing her while practicing on me.” Her eyes welled with tears.

  “Oh, Margo,” I said. She laid her head against my shoulder and I stroked her hair for comfort, the way her mother hadn’t in her childhood. After a while, she shook herself to her feet.

  She had a charity meeting to chair and I had a phone call to make to the NADMT to see if my professional association knew of any job openings in Baltimore.

  Margo’s words at the door: “Respond to his text. Pay no attention to what your mother told you about playing hard to get. Play hard, get nothing. This is like dealing with royalty. You don’t initiate contact, but you should answer. Keep it light, bright, and breezy. You’ll see him at the parade Monday, but he’ll be on a float, so probably only from a distance. Definitely add good wishes for the holiday. Better run it by me before you send it.”

  The thought of Margo Wirth Manolis vetting my texts to Scott Goddard made me laugh. My conversation later with the receptionist at the National Association of Dance Movement Therapists, however, made me want to cry. She’d send me a list of opportunities in the area, she said, but the pickings were lean for part-timers. Good-bye and good luck.

  The next mention of Lieutenant Colonel Goddard came from an unlikely source. After my Friday morning Zumba class, I hung around in my office making sure accounts were up-to-date and entering personnel scheduling. I was nearly finished when Sal Zito sauntered in and planted his hard ass—his glutes, he bragged, were like two raw potatoes, which was not an appetizing thought—on a corner of my desk to announce that a fifteen percent increase in rent for studio space was kicking in September first.

  “Sal, my finances aren’t in great shape right now. I’m not sure I can swing that.”

  “Gimme a break.” He leaned in and I backed up. After his weekday schedule of two spinning classes, two lifting sessions, and no shower yet, he smelled more than ripe.

  “I mean, really, come on.” He splayed his fingers. “Your husband was a famous writer. I even read his books and I’m not a reader. And there’s always some story on TV about Stephen King or Grisham getting multimillion-dollar contracts. Then they sell the book to the movies and more dough rolls in. You can’t be hurting all that much with that mansion you got on the ocean.”

  “It’s not a mansion. Lon bought it thirty years ago when Tuckahoe was a backwater, literally. Even when his books were selling, and they’re not now, he never got those kinds of advances.”

  “Yeah, the poor widow. My heart bleeds. Hey, take it or leave it. I got two waiting on line. A Vietnamese massage lady, strictly on the up-and-up, no funny business; she’s got a degree. And a kids’ ballet school. Listen, you’re a dependable pay and Carmela thinks you’re okay and I trust her vibes, so I don’t want to lose you, but there’s no one that can’t be replaced. You think about it. I gotta know mid-August and that’s cutting you slack.”

  My mood, as I made my way out, was as sour as the odor of Sal’s sweat. But as I passed the dance studio I got stopped by the lure of the recorded darbuka music, wild drum rhythms, spilling out of Emine’s belly-dancing class. So I stopped in because her sessions always gave me a lift.

  Margo once punned that in Em’s classes the bulk of the women were really big. She was right, and even Margo, whose body dysmorphia was legend, admitted that the more zaftig bodies looked better than the skinny ones when doing the Turkish dances. “They’ve got a lot to shimmy. Plenty of belly to roll, and their cleavage looks fantastic in the tasseled bras. More bounce to the ounce.”

  Some of the women wore leotards with jingly hip scarves, but many had taken a cue from their teacher and suited up in authentic belly-dancing costumes, which Em bought wholesale from a manufacturer in Istanbul and sold at a small profit. The outfit she wore that day had been design
ed especially for her, a confection in lavender, the bra set with stones and hemmed with beaded fringe. In Western mode, Emine was pretty, but dressed and made up to dance, she was stunning. Her geography had all the right hills and valleys so that when she undulated or shimmied or hip snapped, everything came together to convey exotic and sensual. With her flat belly and her breasts pushed high, she definitely didn’t come off as the mother of two kids, one a fifteen-year-old who kept her up at night worrying. She loved to dance and she loved to teach. She’d told me once, “The café, the baking, the catering, that I do for our bank account. The dance I do for my soul.” The message came back to me now with Sal Zito’s timeline ultimatum still fresh, and it tightened my chest. If I allowed We Got Rhythm to go under, what would I be doing to Emine’s soul?

  As I watched from my seat on the ledge of the studio’s panoramic window, shades drawn to keep out the stares of the curious, I realized this class would be an especially painful loss if the studio went under. My Zumba and ballroom students could find other schools up and down the coast, but there wasn’t a class like Emine’s for fifty miles. And these women, yes, they benefited from the exercise—belly dancing burned a lot of calories. More important, I suspected, was their feeling beautiful because of, not despite, their extra pounds.

  “And that is it, ladies,” Emine was saying, winding down with a sinuous inward figure eight. “Good job. Thank you.” She clapped for them and they applauded her and one another. A gloss of perspiration glowed on her cheeks. She swabbed her neck with a towel and sat down on the ledge next to me.

  She said, “You know this is the biggest turnout we’ve had so far. Five more than last session.”

  “Word of mouth. Which says something about you.” At that moment, I wished with all my heart I could offer her a raise.

  “You look—I don’t know—sad? Depressed? What is bothering you?” she asked.

  Margo claimed Em had a third eye, like one of the Turkish anti-hex symbols, the nazar boncuğu, but planted in the middle of her forehead. “She knows when I’m constipated, for God’s sake. I think she can read my entrails, like the witches in Macbeth.”

  Over the years, I’d been taught by experience that one person can’t provide everything you need or want from a friendship. That people have different strengths, and if you’re lucky they share them with you. For example, Margo was a cheerleader. Not in her own life. For herself, the score was usually 20–0, their favor, whoever they were. And if things happened to be going well, she was sure she’d strike out next time at bat. But for my games, she shook her pom-poms and rooted for me to hang in there because everything would turn out fine.

  Em was my analyst. She liked to think problems through, slowly, methodically, usually aloud, and then suggest solutions. That worked sometimes, but I didn’t think I could handle it today. I was juggling way too much: my work or lack of it now; my love life, probably ditto; my son, who was getting away from me; my perilous financial situation. Everything seemed ready to crash, and talking about it was only going to make it worse. Sometimes you simply had to focus on keeping it all up and in motion.

  Except Em was waiting, her knowing eyes fixed on mine. I blinked first.

  She worked for me, but she also worked with me and she deserved to know what was going on. It would affect her future. I told her about Sal’s rent increase, my financial shortfall, and the reason for it.

  “The loss of your job with the Vintage company, I’m sorry for that,” she said. “But you will get another, I’m sure. Even so, you know I have thought for a while that the studio should be earning more money. We talked about it a year ago, remember? I had some ideas for increasing business, but you were in the middle of fixing up the house with Margo and you said one thing at a time and you weren’t ready to hear them then.”

  That sounded like me. “I’m ready now,” I said.

  We batted possibilities around for the next fifteen minutes. I suggested more newspaper ads. Perhaps a radio campaign. A plane flying over the beach trailing an advertising banner.

  Em had let me talk, but now she shook her head. “No, no. All that costs money. The trick is to make money without spending more to make it.”

  Her suggestions were much better than mine. Belly-dance demonstrations at the Gold Coast Mall that would lure whole families to watch. The Powells and the Felchers on the Tuckahoe bandstand to show off their ballroom skills. “We could schedule more classes for our present customers, and extra classes in the new dances. Like the hip-hop. I’ll ask Larissa. She goes to the clubs and she can teach them. Very sexy for the younger clients.”

  “You’re good at this,” I said as I felt the stirrings of hope.

  “Let’s think up other ideas,” Em said. “We can draw up a business plan over the winter and try them next summer. It will take time for these efforts to turn into more profit, but eventually . . .”

  I didn’t have eventually. Decisions were waiting to be made.

  “Ah, your mouth is glum again.” Em tugged down the edges of her lips to make a sad face. “There is a saying my father used to repeat. Ağacı kurt, insanı dert yer. Worry destroys a person the way that worms destroy a tree. Worry is not the answer, arkadaşım. Work is.”

  Dear friend, she’d called me. She was mine as well, so I nodded to make her believe that I believed, which I did a little. Then I did what good friends do. I switched the focus to her life, her problems. All of them starred Merry, of course.

  Adnan had appealed to the owner of Clean on Board to reinstate his daughter after the scuffle last week, but the decision was firm. So no job and no references either. But to let her languish through the summer wasn’t an option, Em said. Merry would fill empty time hanging out with her equally bored friends, a recipe for trouble. So Em made sure she was busy first thing in the morning, helping to make cupcakes and pastries and package the coffee and cakes for the café’s takeaway. Two hours of that and the girl was off to the food bank, where she stocked shelves and assisted in preparing lunch for the homeless and destitute in the area.

  “It’s important for her to see that a reward for work is not always pay. She has great compassion for animals, the cats especially, but not so much for people.” Em sighed as she slipped her bare feet into sandals. “And then, I think, she has started to go to the playhouse some afternoons.” She gave me a slitted glance made narrower by the heavy black eyeliner. “Did Margo talk to you about this?”

  She hadn’t. Interesting how our triangular friendship sorted out. There were subjects we split among the three of us. Others never made their way beyond two. Still others took circumlocutious routes so eventually everyone was in the loop.

  “Merry came home with paint on her T-shirt the other day. That shiny gold they used on the set of The King and I. And I found the script for the play in the hall bathroom along with a to-do list for a show called The Gin Game.”

  The theater put on three plays a season. While rehearsals for the elaborate musical took over the stage weekday afternoons, the Driftwood drew audiences weekend evenings with a simple-to-mount drama or a singer or comic in concert.

  I said, “Margo is playing the female lead in The Gin Game.” A two-act, two-actor play. “I guess Merry is helping her out over there.” I shrugged. “If you’re concerned, ask Margo.”

  “I’m not concerned, only curious. But perhaps this is better as a secret between them. Margo loves such things. The drama. Merry too.” She laughed. “In some ways they are both teenagers. Secrets, secrets.”

  Then she said, “Adnan saw you Tuesday night. At the restaurant, the Flying Jib. With Scott.”

  That took a moment to sink in.

  “We went out for a drink after class,” I said, trying to keep my voice feathery. We were up and walking now toward the women’s changing room. “What was Adnan doing at the Flying Jib so late on a weeknight?”

  “Ah, making a delivery. They have
my chocolate baklava and the Turkish Delight Torte on the dessert menu. The café slows down by eleven, so a night delivery doesn’t interrupt the flow. On his way back to the van, he saw you coming out the front door and then walking outside. He said you two were very romantic. He wasn’t spying. But he saw you kissing.” She whirled, not the full barrel turn she’d taught in class, but a half turn that ended with a hug. “I’m happy for you, Nora.”

  The perfume Em ordered from Turkey that mixed patchouli with lemon flower was close up and calming. I needed calming.

  I detached myself, forced a smile, and said, “You’re a little premature. The kiss was a surprise, but no big deal. I don’t think it will happen again.” It had, on the path, but Adnan hadn’t been lurking behind the cypress trees on my lawn, so I saw no need to mention it. And after the second kiss and the reaction from the window above, I had no expectations of another one.

  “Oh, I hope it will happen. He is such a nice man. A true gentleman. You are two good people. I think you would be a fine match.”

  Me too. I just wished Jack thought so.

  chapter nineteen

  July Fourth is the make-it-or-break-it weekend for retail businesses in resort towns, and a year when Independence Day fell on a Monday brought record-breaking crowds to Tuckahoe.

  Visitors began to trickle in late Wednesday and streamed in on Thursday. By Friday there was a gush of them. Up where the hotels clustered, the beach was chair to chair, blanket to blanket. On Friday night, Tuckahoe was one giant party, and the next morning those who didn’t sleep in took a beach breather and wandered through the downtown, jamming the narrow alleys of the Mews. Merchants had added extra staff for the busiest days of the season, and Em had doubled her baking output at the Turquoise Café.

  I started Saturday early, up at five forty-five, scanning the scene from my widow’s walk. A yolk of sun skimmed an eggshell horizon, smooth and creamy. High above, ruffles of clouds were beginning to go sheer. Below, the water was a calm pale blue. The muted pastels that soothed my soul would last only a short time before the vivid colors, the primaries and the hots, took over. This early, the beach music was still pianissimo—the soft cawings and cooings of seabirds, the wind tickling arpeggios. In an hour, the stretch of sand I loved most—Barefoot Beach—would start to fill, not with the armies of tourists that invaded farther up, but with scattered sunbathers. Until then, I reckoned I could own a parcel of the finest sand on the Delmarva shore in relative solitude. That was a luxury, an irresistible one.