Stiltsville

by Susanna Daniel

  From time to time I kept Bette company while she did her chores at the Barnacle. This is how I ended up lying on the Barnacle’s pier one Tuesday afternoon during that last long visit, after losing my job in Atlanta. I’d been in Miami for almost four weeks straight. It was January, but still we wore swimsuits without covering up, and the heat on the wooden pier spread through my skin like a warm blanket. Dennis was at class. That morning, he’d stopped by the apartment after Bette went to work, and we’d necked on the couch until the cushions stuck to our skin. This is what I returned to, all day: the rushing, splitting-open feeling of touching Dennis, of being touched by him. My mother was right: it was not easy, staying out of his bedroom.

  Bette wore a scarf over her hair and a neon orange bikini top and cutoffs with a red velvet patch on the thigh. She squinted while she polished the brass fittings of the Egret’s teak railing. I mistook the squinting for concentration—later I would learn that this was a side effect of her nearsightedness, which, in an uncharacteristic fit of vanity, she had not corrected with eyeglasses. “Those bottles,” she said. “I’ve been dying to tell you.”

  I put aside the law journal I’d been reading, an article Dennis had published earlier that year. “Tell me,” I said.

  She squatted on the gunwale of the boat. I shaded my eyes to look up at her. She said, “I found them on a wreck. A shipwreck.”

  “Where?”

  She pointed south across the bay. “Out there.”

  My first thought was that surely it was not legal to remove items from a shipwreck. “Can you get in trouble for that?” I said.

  She laughed. “I don’t imagine they’re worth much. But they’re beautiful. I found them in the forward cabin the other night. It took me two trips to get them all up.”

  “You dove at night?” It seemed impossible that on those nights when she’d been out until dawn, she’d been scuba diving. I’d seen Bette’s boat—it was a seventeen-foot sailfish, a toddler of a boat. Surely it wasn’t fitted with dive lights. This meant she’d been diving with someone else, from that person’s boat.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “I go with a friend. It’s safe.”

  I thought of Benjamin, a ruddy-faced bear of a man who spoke softly and had the habit, I’d witnessed, of lifting Bette over his shoulder until she battered him into letting her down. I stood up and stepped over the railing of the Egret, and maneuvered until I was straddling the gunwale, facing her. “OK, tell me,” I said. It was a little awkward, I admit. She hadn’t ever invited this kind of gabfest, and I wasn’t sure we were suited to it.

  For whatever reason, though—she was excited, bursting—this was not a secret she wanted to keep. “I met this woman,” she said, throwing me for a loop. “Her name is Jane. She’s a professional salvor. You know what that is?” I shook my head. “She has an engineering degree or something, and she works with dive teams to raise shipwrecks. They have to do it without hurting anything, inside the wreck or outside it. It’s very complicated work. Anyway, I met her at the club.” The club was the Coconut Grove Sailing Club, where Bette taught sailing lessons on the weekends in exchange for a discount on her boat slip. “I’m teaching her to sail.”

  “And she’s teaching you to—salve?”

  “Salvage,” she said. She looked off, as if remembering. “No, we just dive together. She knows the best spots. There’s a wreck she’s bringing up soon, and sometimes we just go there to hunt around, see what we see. It’s an old hull freighter that sank on its way from Venezuela. Nothing valuable aboard, just trinkets. Memories.”

  I couldn’t think of anything I’d ever done that was nearly as exciting as scuba diving in a sunken ship. “Does Dennis know?” I said.

  “Of course not. Are you going to tell him?”

  “Not if you’d rather I didn’t.”

  “Jane said we should keep quiet about it. I guess the state wouldn’t be too happy that she was diving the wreck before bringing it up.”

  “When are you going out next?” I said.

  “Tonight, probably. I don’t know why I told you.”

  “I’m glad you did.” We sat quietly for a moment, and Bette returned to polishing the railing. “Are you ready to get married?” I said.

  She dropped the polishing cloth onto the pier and stepped over the railing. “I guess not,” she said. “Are you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. But I believed I was.

  She dropped her shorts to the pier, pulled neon snorkeling gear from a bag, and put it on—first the flippers and then the mask. She held the snorkel in one hand and a flat metal tool—for shucking snails and barnacles off the boat’s hull—in the other. “It’s not as simple as it always seemed, is it?” she said. Her voice was nasal from the mask, but she was unself-conscious. She walked to the end of the pier and turned her back to the water, then put her hand over her nose and mouth and stepped backward into the air. Once I’d heard her resurface and begin knocking around the hull, I relaxed. I felt we’d just had our first real—albeit stilted—conversation, and now could become friends. With no end to my visit in sight, this was fiercely important to me. To have a few friends in Miami—Marse and Bette, plus Dennis—felt like the start of a real collection, a treasure trove of my own.

  That evening, rather than wait for Dennis to pick me up after work, I dressed in a linen sundress and walked half a mile to the bus stop, where I caught a bus to the University of Miami. There, I waited on a low cement wall under the wide canopy of a poinciana tree outside the law school until Dennis emerged, carrying a satchel in one hand and combing his hair with his fingers. I could not reconcile the disheveled student, sunburned nose and shaving nicks, with the suited lawyer he was working to become. Dennis saw me and waved, and as he walked toward me, in the moment between being alone and being with him, I experienced the sensation of being stunned by the instant. The breath left my lungs. I looked at the boy coming toward me, who in my arms, by my side, seemed familiar, but in those baffling seconds revealed himself to be a stranger, essentially. It was like moving too quickly toward a painting, such that it distorts in proximity. Was this person my boyfriend? This lanky gait, this lazy posture, this wide smile? He reached me finally, and swept me into a hug that seemed to start before he was even beside me, and the moment of disorientation I’d experienced dissolved, the painting snapped back into perspective.

  That evening, we made our way not to Bette’s bamboo couch but to Dennis’s apartment on Miami Beach. The pretext was that Dennis would cook us supper—a noodle dish he was fond of, a bachelor recipe with too much soy sauce—but I suppose during the long, windy ride down the palm-lined highway, I knew we had both signed up for something more, and I was nervous as we drove. We had both slept with other people: I with a boy in college, a close friend, just three times after we’d studied together and opened a bottle of wine, and Dennis with his ex, with whom he’d lived for three months.

  Inside Dennis’s apartment, it was quiet and dark. He dropped his keys on the kitchen table and went to open the balcony doors. In blew a salty breeze that smelled of warm sand. He offered to make margaritas—this was a drink he knew I was fond of—and started rooting through the refrigerator. After a moment, he declared he was out of limes and would run to the market on the corner. He kissed me quickly and left. I went to the balcony and leaned against the metal railing. The sunset had started. Below, two Cuban men stood at the entrance to the café downstairs, talking animatedly in Spanish, and when they parted to let a third man by, I saw that the third man was Dennis, coming out of the building. He greeted the men and one of them raised a hand, and then Dennis walked a bit, tossing his keys into the air every few steps. He was happy. Any outsider could have seen it. He was happy because of me. After he went into the store on the corner—he called it the bodega—I watched the ocean, its rolling persistence, its calm fortitude. There were a few people still scattered along the beach. The sky was the color of bruised peaches, the sand bluish in the fading sunlight. Dennis
emerged from the store with a brown bag under one arm. He came closer, then looked up and gestured toward the beach and the sunset. “Isn’t it beautiful?” he called up to me. “Isn’t it paradise?”

  “Yes!” I called.

  I cut the limes and he squeezed each half into a small glass pitcher. He dipped a finger in the juice and brought it to my lips. I tasted it and made a face, and he laughed. “We’ll improve on it, I promise,” he said. “There’s nothing like fresh margaritas.” As he spoke, I brought the knife down through a lime and felt it slice through my fingertip. I yelped and Dennis grabbed a dish towel from a drawer and pulled me into the bathroom, holding my bloody finger as we went. He sat me down on the toilet and rummaged through the medicine cabinet.

  “It’s not that bad,” I said.

  “It’s a geyser,” he said. He held my finger under the faucet while the cold water ran. Blood billowed and dissipated. “This is why I should never sharpen my knives,” he said. “Clumsy female visitors, bleeding all over my kitchen.” He smiled and I laughed. He toweled off my hand and spread a little ointment on my finger, then wrapped it in a small bandage. “Too tight?” I shook my head. He kissed my finger. “I don’t like seeing you bleed, lady,” he said. “I love you so much.”

  This was only the second or third time the word had been said. I’d said it, too, of course, but he’d always said it first. I kissed him. After a few minutes, we went together into the bedroom, where the bed was unmade and discarded sneakers lay in front of the dresser. The sun was almost gone. Before we even lay down, I thought about afterward, when we would sip margaritas on the balcony. Dennis would be sweet. He would make the dinner he’d planned and rub my back and with every glance in my direction check subtly to see if I was happy. He didn’t know I’d already done my reckoning. As we made our way to the bed, I had no doubts.

  He started slow but that didn’t last. Dennis made a joke about it having been a while, and I said it was like riding a bike, and he said not exactly, from what he recalled. Up to this point, we’d done some heavy petting on Bette’s couch and in Dennis’s car, but we had never been naked together. Still, his body was familiar to me, even the red hair between his legs and the warm, probing penis. What was most unfamiliar was my own body, the greediness of it, my eager response to his hands, his fingers. I was a me I’d never known before, a person who wanted baldly. Looking back, I realize that it was all relative, the sacrifices I believed I was making, the risks I believed I was taking. Many people do much more for love than travel to another state and ignore their mother’s advice. But you have to understand that to me, it was like falling with no net. It felt good, but it did not feel wise.

  I returned to Bette’s the next day, with Dennis, to change clothes. We found her sitting on the couch in the living room, smoking a joint with an ashtray balanced on her bare, bony knees. By this time, I’d seen Bette smoke several times and had even tried it with her twice—where Bette became calm and wide-eyed, I became silly and had difficulty finishing a sentence. For this reason, I’d decided marijuana was not, for me, a dignified option. The apartment smelled of bacon. “You’re alive,” she said. “Good to know.”

  “I should have called,” I said. This was not something I’d even considered.

  There was rustling in Bette’s bedroom, and Benjamin emerged into the small open kitchen, wearing only slacks. “Want some bacon?”

  He held out a plate, and Dennis stepped forward to take a piece. Benjamin cracked eggs into a bowl and whipped them with a fork. I sat down next to Bette on the couch. “Did you go back to the wreck?” I said quietly, so only she heard.

  She shook her head. “Jane backed out. Something about her husband.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “I got excited over nothing. They’re bringing it up next week.”

  “Won’t there be another one?”

  “We’ll see,” she said.

  It was clear that something had changed. Benjamin stepped into the living room from the kitchen, holding a spatula. “Did you tell her?” he said to Bette.

  “Tell me what?”

  “The first of April,” he said. “Springtime.”

  “We set a date,” said Bette. “My mother’s on her way over.” As if realizing this fact for the first time, she put out her joint and sat up straight.

  “Congratulations!” said Dennis. He shook Benjamin’s hand, then leaned down to kiss Bette’s cheek. She stretched to meet him, but her eyes were dull, her mouth still. Her cheeks were pink, probably from the marijuana.

  “We don’t have much time,” said Benjamin. “Less time to get caught up in the details, said this one.” He gestured to Bette.

  She squeezed my arm. “My mother is making me shop for dresses. You have to come.”

  “Of course,” I said, thinking that I wanted nothing less than to spend a day shopping with Dennis’s mother. “Wash your face before she gets here,” I said, and Bette nodded and got up, but Benjamin swung her into a bear hug and carried her into the bedroom. Her laughter was high and reluctant and his was baritone and booming. Dennis stepped out onto the little patio to try to fix the squeak in Bette’s screen door, and I went to change my clothes and brush my hair in the apartment’s small bathroom. When I joined him outside, Dennis said, “Good for them.”

  I wondered if this would change the timeline of our own engagement, then decided it didn’t matter. “I guess I’m going shopping.”

  He took my hand. He was squatting and there was sweat along his brow and under his arms. We’d decided, during the ride from the beach, that I would stay at his apartment from that time forward. “I’ll pick you up here, after. We’ll go to Scotty’s for fish, and then you can help me study for my exam.”

  “How do I do that?”

  “Keep me from drinking too many margaritas.”

  “What about your mother?”

  “My mother isn’t invited.”

  “Be serious. What do I tell her?”

  “Tell her about what?”

  “About where I’m staying.”

  “Frances, my mother doesn’t care.”

  “Of course she does.”

  “Well, she won’t tell you if she does. And she won’t ask.” He stood up, and I heard his knees creak. We are not so young, I thought. Most people our age were married with children. He said, “Call me when you’re all done with the ladies.” Below us a car horn sounded, and we looked down over the porch railing to see Gloria in her shiny sedan, waving through the windshield. I called for Bette, and she came out looking freshly scrubbed, and we went downstairs together.

  At a bridal shop on Miracle Mile—one in a row of them—Bette ended up in the dressing room with half a dozen gowns, sobbing while her mother snapped at the saleswoman to bring more options. Gloria tried in her own way to soothe Bette through the dressing room curtain. She told Bette it didn’t matter what she wore, of course, she would look lovely, and all she was saying was that it would have been nice to have enough time to plan a real ceremony that would have some gravitas instead of rushing to throw a backyard barbecue. The saleswoman didn’t seem surprised at this turn of events—apparently brides sobbing in dressing rooms were not uncommon—but she did align herself with Gloria. “April?” she said. “How do they expect you to find a caterer?” After half an hour of listening to Bette reject every dress handed to her, hearing her sobs turn to sniffles and back to sobs again, I opened the curtain and stepped into the room. Bette wore only a slip and a brassiere, and her face was a mess. The walls of the dressing room were cushioned with satiny white dresses on hangers. One of them was a simple silk gown, off the shoulder, with no lace or gems. I touched its hem. “I think this is rather pretty,” I said.

  “Then you should buy it,” she said.

  “Maybe I will,” I said, ignoring her tone. I checked the price tag. The dress was $450. It all seemed a bit much all of a sudden, a bit quick. I could see how a person could become overwhelmed. I said, “Bette, do you have an id
ea of what you want?”

  She seemed stymied by this question. “I guess not.”

  “Then you’re not going to find it today,” I said. “Get dressed.”

  She looked at me for a moment, then nodded and reached for her blouse.

  Over time, I’d gotten a good idea of the role Bette and Benjamin’s engagement had taken in the family—Grady teasingly called Benjamin “my son-in-law-to-be” or referred to their relationship as “timeless.” Gloria fussed over Benjamin when he was around, and chastised Bette whenever she was glib or cross—Gloria was afraid, I assumed, that Benjamin might set off in the dead of night and never be heard from again. I had seen enough to know that this was not going to happen. When I’d met Benjamin over cocktails at Dennis’s parents’ house, I hadn’t realized how long they’d been engaged and had asked him, stupidly, if he was looking forward to the wedding. He’d shrugged and looked sheepish. “I’m a regular guy,” he said. “She knows that here.” He touched his forehead. “As for here”—he touched his chest with a meaty hand—“I’m not sure.” He seemed to me like the sort of person who might stroll headlong into his own broken heart.