Through the back window, I watched Dennis and his father, Grady, cross the lawn toward the canal that snaked along the back rim of the property. Dennis, slim in faded blue jeans, loped alongside his father in a way that drew attention to his joints. When they reached the short pier where Grady’s boat was moored, Dennis reached across his torso to scratch under his shirtsleeve. Grady was doughy where Dennis was lean; for every step Dennis took, Grady took a step and a half. Grady’s corkscrew sandy orange hair thinned at the crown of his skull; his gestures when he spoke were controlled and deliberate. Grady stood with his hands in his pockets, and after a few minutes—though they faced away from the house, I could tell they were talking by the way their heads moved—he stooped to wipe debris from the pier’s planks with the flat of his hand. Dennis reached down and without bending touched his father’s shoulder blade with his fingertips. When Grady stood again, Dennis’s hand briefly rested at his father’s waist.
Gloria whistled a long, low note and pulled a tea towel from her shoulder, where it had perched all afternoon. She dangled it over the sink and let it drop. “They’re like women, aren’t they?” she said. “The way they chatter.”
I smiled politely. Gloria had given Dennis his slender frame and light eyes. She was two inches taller than I was, at least an inch taller than her husband. I glanced her way and caught her staring: the blunt tip of her nose was pink and her eyes were damp. Unlike my own mother’s face, whose features were broad and suntanned and matted with freckles, Gloria’s face was delicate and pale. Her chin came to a point. Earlier, she’d served coleslaw and chicken salad on the back deck, then filled our glasses with fruity rum punch and returned to the kitchen. In the months I’d known her, I’d learned that she rarely ate a meal during the daytime. She ate breakfast and might nibble on a salad at lunchtime, but eating an entire meal in the afternoon nauseated her. I’d also learned that she thought eating outdoors was distasteful, but agreed to it because she knew other people found it appealing. She took a nap every day and always had, even when Dennis and his younger sister Bette were children. “She just lay down in the playroom while we horsed around,” Dennis had told me, “and a half hour later she got up again.”
Gloria said, “If you were expecting a quiet house, you were mistaken. My men are talkers.” She smiled weakly and turned away, and not for the first time I found myself unable to answer her. She had a dead-end way of conversing; no obvious next step presented itself. But as I watched her walk out of the room, then turned back to the window through which I could see Grady and Dennis standing together on the pier, separated from me by a wide expanse of unmowed green lawn, two thoughts crystallized in my mind. One thought was that, in spite of the fact that she considered it in bad taste to travel hundreds of miles to visit a boy one barely knew, Gloria liked me. The second thought was that Dennis was planning to propose marriage, and soon. This was the topic being discussed outside at that moment, under a sky dimmed by clouds. Dennis and Grady stood looking down into the well of Grady’s lapstrake boat—still the most impressive boat I’ve ever seen, with its polished teak hull and gleaming brass railings—which rested in its slip, laced by bright white mooring lines. Then Dennis stepped toward the house and Grady followed, and as they walked Dennis kept his eyes on the kitchen window—on me—and Grady continued talking, his hands in his pockets. By the time they reached the swimming pool, brief droplets had erupted into a rare winter thunderstorm. I swiped two towels from the laundry room, then greeted them at the back door and ushered them inside.
I’d been fired that week from my job at the bank. I’d missed so much work since meeting Dennis that the manager had called me into his office and asked me, not unkindly, to rearrange my priorities, which I’d promised I would. When I used the shared line in my apartment house to call Dennis and tell him I couldn’t visit for a while, he’d said, “Just come one more time, this weekend.” I suppose I knew then how it would go for us. Before I’d met Dennis, I’d liked my job well enough. I’d liked my small apartment and quiet neighbors and weekly dinners with friends and their husbands. I’d taken long walks on Sundays and spent weekend afternoons helping my mother in her garden. Some nights I opened a bottle of wine and cooked pasta for myself over a burner in the communal kitchen. But when I’d considered where my life was headed, I had not particularly liked the prospects. The men I dated did not woo me, the girls I knew who’d started families did not inspire me. My job, although wholly adequate, did not light anything akin to a fire in my gut. I was not yet sad, but I believed I was headed for sadness, and I blamed myself for having waited to be swept into a more thrilling life. For the first time, after meeting Dennis, I saw in my own future bright, unknowable possibilities. I’m a bit ashamed to have been a person without much agency in life, but I credit myself with knowing something special when I saw it.
In a period of six months, I’d visited Miami five times. I’d taken the train down twice, and three times Dennis had driven up to get me and stayed a night at the motel near my apartment house, then we had driven down to Miami together. During every visit, I saw Marse at least once or twice, for an afternoon shopping or on the boat. There are seven hundred miles of gray highway between Miami and Atlanta. The Sunshine State Parkway was barely a decade old, and it took more than twelve hours to drive each way. When I recall our courtship, I recall as much as anything else the landscape outside the windows of Dennis’s station wagon: the asphalt of the turnpike and the drone of the headlights and the stuttering orange groves. I’d fallen in love in Dennis’s car and under the fluorescent lights of truck stops. We’d spent so much of those six months in car seats that I knew his body as well seated as standing—the hard round caps of his knees, dimpled at the joint, and the bony elbows with which he jabbed me while shifting in his seat, unaware of his breadth.
Between visits, we’d had phone calls. The telephone I shared with the other tenants of my building sat on a wicker table in the hallway outside my room. The phone was butter-yellow in color, the handset heavy as a dumbbell, and when it rang the whole unit rattled as if mocking my heart, which lurched every time. He called most mornings before I left for work, and he would list for me everything he could see from his apartment balcony: two girls surfing, three men standing on the corner smoking cigars in the heat, an old woman wearing a housedress walking a poodle. Or he’d call in the evenings from the pay phone at the law library. “It’s a hundred degrees in the shade here,” he’d said once, “and everyone is studying without shirts on. Will you please tell me why I’m working so hard?” When Dennis spoke of school, he sounded drained.
“Even the girls?” I’d said. “No blouses?”
“Some.”
“Cover your eyes.”
“I’m wearing blinders, so I can see the books.”
He called late at night sometimes, too, and I dragged the telephone out to the porch so as not to disturb my neighbors. When we were together we spoke casually, about whatever happened to cross our minds, but on the phone he asked solemn, mining questions: What was my earliest memory? Did I prefer cats or dogs? Could I imagine myself living on a boat? What if it was a nice, big, clean boat? What was my favorite thing about my family? What was my favorite thing about him? Every thread of conversation stitched back to the topic of us.
I told him I remembered taking my father’s cigarettes from the countertop in my parents’ bathroom and bringing them to my nose—I liked the smell, even at age three. My mother found me and slapped my hand. Dennis remembered being carried on his grandfather’s shoulders through orange groves down south. His grandfather—Grady’s father—sang cowboy songs and whistled. Dennis remembered the smell of the fruit and the feel of the pomade in his grandfather’s hair.
I said I preferred dogs, and Dennis said he did, too. I said, “I would live on a boat for six months, no longer.” He said he would live on a boat for the rest of his life. “I’d like to fish for my dinner,” he said. “I’d bake in the sun until my skin looked like leath
er.” I told him that when I was a little girl, my father used to cook up reasons to take us for drives in the country, and my mother would let me wear some of her red lipstick, and my father would wave with one hand out the window at every car we passed. I told Dennis that I liked my father’s sense of leisure.
“I like my father’s patience,” said Dennis. “He’ll wait on the fish for hours. I don’t have the heart for it.” He said his father would come home from a day of fishing with small, exciting stories: He’d seen a barracuda jump across the surface of the water, its scales flashing in the sunlight. He’d felt a bump against the side of the boat, and looked down to see the domed back of a manatee. He’d seen a family of dolphins, the smallest no larger than his forearm. “My mother thinks he’s a bit simple, I think,” said Dennis, and I said, “He is simple.” I knew very little of Grady other than what I’d been told. Dennis knew I meant it kindly.
Dennis told me that his sister, Bette, younger by three years, used to sleep in the backyard in the summer. He’d come downstairs in the morning and find his sister and mother sitting outside on Bette’s sleeping bag in their pajamas, eating pancakes off Chinet.
“My favorite thing about you?” I said, thinking: You call me every day! You don’t worry about what it costs. You kissed me mere hours after meeting me. “You’re kind,” I said.
“That’s it?”
“I don’t know you all that well.”
“Yes, you do.”
“You have great legs.”
“I’m going to marry you.”
I’d known a few men pretty well, and something I’d noticed about many of them was that for some reason they didn’t like to give you what you want, whatever it happened to be—reassurance or approval or attention. This seemingly was not because they couldn’t spare it, but because they wanted to teach you not to want it. But in my mind, people weren’t needy or independent—they were a swirl of both. I wondered if these men thought they never needed. I knew they did, but then their needs were sated so fully and with such generosity by the women in their lives that they didn’t recognize needing something in the first place. As I grew to know Dennis, it struck me that he was not one of these men. From the beginning, he did not withhold. This, ultimately, was the answer to his question, though I could not have formulated it at the time.
It would be disingenuous to say, however, that I had no doubts about Dennis. Once he’d snapped at me when we’d been driving for hours and I’d taken too long to choose a radio station, and one night he’d bagged a dozen fireflies in the woods behind my apartment house and let them go in my darkened living room, as if this would charm rather than irritate me. More important, I wasn’t certain I had the mettle to live in Miami, with its flash and heat and vanity. But still, Dennis seemed, from the start, inevitable. It hadn’t taken long for me to succumb, but I’d faked it for a while. Sometimes I’d hemmed and hawed about taking time off work for another visit. But from the beginning, the sight of him yawning in the television’s blue light, or running a fingertip across his eyebrow, or blowing on his coffee to cool it off, made me shiver with want for him.
Once when we were on the road, I woke up in the passenger seat and sat watching him while he drove, and it dawned on me that I could watch him for minutes before he noticed, because he was a man who lived inside his own head. I snapped my fingers and he looked over at me. “Awake?” he said. He reached into the backseat and rooted around. “Have an apple,” he said. I ate what he gave me, and fell back to sleep.
After I lost my job, my mother drove me to the train station, drumming her short, strong fingernails on the steering wheel. Since I had nothing to return for, this particular visit to Miami would have no scheduled end date. I’d packed two large suitcases. “I’m going to play it by ear,” I told her, and she raised her eyebrows at me. “I’d prefer you had a plan,” she said, but she offered to drive me anyway. Her muddied canvas gardening gloves lay on the seat between us. When we arrived, she loaded me down with pimiento cheese sandwiches and a brown bag of peaches for Dennis’s family. My mother was a tall, strong-backed woman with wide hips and a handsome face, and she spoke quietly and not often. She had been somewhat old-fashioned throughout my childhood and teenage years, but when my father moved out—I’d been in college at the time—she’d seemed to reorder her notions. She’d stopped going to church and started gardening. She’d let go of most of her old friends, one by one, and took up with a few single women, divorcees who drank and told bawdy jokes. I would stop by her house, the house where I’d grown up, to find a group of them sitting in lawn chairs in the backyard, drinking Bloody Marys at noon. She’d stopped wearing makeup altogether—this might have meant something or nothing; I never understood it. The changes she made seemed to me like the ones a widow would make. She wasn’t happy about the new arrangement, I would say, but she was willing to squeeze some advantages from it.
The girl who came to share my father’s downtown apartment was named Luanne. Although she was young—twenty-seven years old when they met, compared with his forty-five—she had a child from a previous relationship who lived with Luanne’s mother. When I called their apartment, she gave me a polite hello and handed the telephone to my father, and it seemed to me that she was keeping him close at her side at all times, though maybe the situation was reversed. When Dennis met them, he said he thought Luanne looked like a doll, and I shushed him. He said, “There’s appeal, to some men, with that kind of woman.” He swatted me playfully on the rear end. “But it’s not for me.” As a child I’d loved my father very much—he spoke enthusiastically about the physics of space flight and roller coasters, he liked to read about places he’d never been, he called in sick to work when I was five so he could finish building my tree house—but I never grew accustomed to thinking of him as the spoils in a battle between women.
My mother and I had more or less avoided the topic of what exactly I thought I was doing, disposing of my job and disrupting my life to visit a boy in Miami, of all places. But while we waited together on the train platform, she pursed her lips and turned to me. “Miami seems so . . . ” she said, “I don’t know. Far.” She wasn’t one to hold tight, but moving a plane ride away was another story. “It seems decadent.”
“I guess maybe it is.” I thought of the elaborate wedding I’d been to when I first visited, the giant water fountain a few blocks from the cathedral, the sprawling banyan trees lining the streets. I thought of the young girls I’d seen posing for photographs at the Spanish-style arches in Coral Gables, all gussied up for their quinceañeras in hoop skirts and capes. Atlanta was lovely—there were lacy white dogwood and redbud trees and dirt roads and orchards, and in the autumn the leaves turned and fell and were raked into colorful piles—but Atlanta was not decadent. “You’ll like Dennis,” I said.
“What will I like about him?”
“I don’t know. Everything.”
“Does he remind you of your father?”
I thought about this. “No.”
“That’s better,” she said. She smoothed her chambray skirt and looked around, as if she’d forgotten something. My mother wore a ponytail every day of her life, even into her seventies. “Be nice to his mom, no matter what.”
“I will be.”
“Stay out of his bedroom.”
“Mother.”
“It won’t be easy, but you’ll be glad you did.”
“Mother!”
She sighed. “Maybe I shouldn’t be giving advice,” she said, and then a whistle sounded, and the white light of my train appeared in the middle distance, as if gunning for me.
In the six months since we’d met, Dennis and I had not slept together. When I visited Miami, I stayed with his sister, Bette, who rented a two-room apartment above a shoe store on Main Highway in Coconut Grove. The apartment had a small cement deck that overlooked the street, and a screen door on squeaky hinges, and at night we could hear the traffic and the people on the street below. Bette had a couch with a cre
aky, shifting bamboo frame and flat square cushions printed with hibiscus blossoms—an uncomfortable place to sleep, made slightly less uncomfortable by layers of mildewy sleeping bags. She was tall like her brother and very thin, with white-blond hair and sharp, tan shoulders. She tended to slouch. She was not beautiful, exactly, but she had memorable, sharp features and lovely skin. She wore huarache sandals—I would wear them, too, after a year or so of being around her—and sleeveless shirts and culottes, and she carried a large crocheted handbag. She walked everywhere; she didn’t have a car. After she’d graduated from high school, Grady and Gloria had offered her their old hatchback if she would go to college and stay in all four years; but she was an indifferent student and the most she’d been able to commit to was a couple of classes per semester. Three times a week after work she walked four miles to the University of Miami, then took the bus home. She took botany and biology and political science and comparative literature. She spoke German—she’d spent a year in Munich during high school, as an exchange student—and she could name every flower, bird, and tree in South Florida. She had never traveled north of North Carolina. She was at that time engaged to her high school sweetheart, Benjamin O’Dell. They’d been engaged for five years, since her senior year of high school, but they had yet to set a date.
Though Bette never said or did anything to make me feel unwelcome, I could tell by the way she lived that she was a private person, and probably didn’t revel in having a regular houseguest. I had the sense that she could snap shut at any time, that any bridge to her could collapse. To make myself useful while staying with her, I cleaned the apartment and left sandwiches in the refrigerator for when she came home for lunch. The apartment was across the street from Bette’s work. She was the groundskeeper for a private home called the Barnacle, which was owned by the family of the original owner, Commodore Ralph Middleton Monroe. Commodore Monroe had founded the first organization in the area—Biscayne Bay Yacht Club—in 1891, when Miami was little more than a fort. The Barnacle was nestled on the bay among ten acres of tropical hardwood hammock. No one lived there, but the family wanted someone on the property during the day, to make sure vagrants stayed out and the lawn was mowed and—most important—that the Egret, a schooner docked at the Barnacle’s pier, was kept free of growth and rust. The Egret was Bette’s main task, and the only one for which she truly was qualified—she had been sailing competitively since she was ten years old. There was a rumor that the family planned in the future to deed the Barnacle to the state and open the house for tours, and Bette hoped to continue to look after the Egret part-time and spend the rest of her time doing what she loved: scuba diving. Nights, she sometimes went into her room and closed the door, and I could hear music through the wall and the low tones of hushed speech as she talked on the phone. Two or three times, she’d stayed out all night—where, I didn’t yet guess—and had come home at dawn, tiptoeing into the living room where I slept. Once, she’d made so much noise coming in that I couldn’t reasonably pretend to sleep through it, and when I opened my eyes, I saw that she had dropped a large canvas bag filled with green and blue glass bottles. I helped her collect them—none broke—and the next day when I glanced into her bedroom from the kitchenette, I saw those bottles lined up on the windowsill, refracting the sunlight.
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