Stiltsville

by Susanna Daniel

  While Bette dressed, I found Gloria on a love seat by the front store window, looking at the street. “This isn’t going anywhere,” I said.

  “That is apparent,” she said.

  “She might be happier in something simpler. Something other than a gown.”

  “That’s a good point, dear,” she said. She was placating me. I sat down beside her, exhausted. I felt I should make some admission: I’m sleeping with your son. Or, I love your son. Or, your daughter doesn’t seem to really want to marry Benjamin. She said, “You imagine certain ways of celebrating certain things. But your children have different ideas.”

  “It was very nice of you to take her shopping. I’m not sure she’s ready yet.”

  “She’d better get ready.”

  “She will.”

  She stood and smoothed out her pants suit and walked to a row of dresses in the corner. She pulled a sleeveless beige shift from the bunch and held it up. “Now this, Bette would like. It looks like a burlap bag. Not for the wedding, of course, but maybe a luncheon.” She took it back to the dressing room. After a few minutes Bette brought the dress to the counter and Gloria paid, and then we left the store for the bright afternoon.

  I moved from Bette’s apartment to Dennis’s later that week. Bette sent me off with a joint rolled in a paper bag and a bottle of wine, and the way she repeatedly thanked me for cleaning and cooking convinced me, finally, that I’d been as much a pleasant diversion as a burden to her. I unpacked my suitcases into two of Dennis’s dresser drawers, and we went shopping for groceries and bought a hanging plant for his balcony. In the mornings before he went to school, we ate breakfast and took walks on the beach. At least twice a week, I drove his car downtown to meet Marse for lunch or for drinks, or to pick up Bette from the sailing club and run errands or take her shopping. I’d never known anyone who’d lived with a boy before marriage. If Marse or Bette disapproved, or if Dennis’s parents knew—we took pains to hide our situation—they didn’t show it. Ultimately, I asked myself if I disapproved—and the answer was yes, but not so much that I was willing to change anything. Looking back, I’m proud of my otherwise traditional younger self.

  The weeks passed in a sunny blur. On the weekends, we went to Stiltsville with Dennis’s parents and Bette and Benjamin. The boys slept on the porch, Bette and I slept in the bunk beds, and Grady and Gloria slept in the big bedroom. Sometimes Marse came out in her Boston Whaler, and sometimes Bette took off in her sailboat in the morning and didn’t return until evening. Gloria took naps in the hammock with an open book on her chest, and Grady took long walks on the wide sandbar that stretched between Dennis’s house and the Becks’ stilt house to the east—this area was called the flats. Sometimes I walked the flats with Grady and he pointed out starfish, sea worms, fire coral. One weekend, Marse insisted on teaching me to windsurf, so we took her boat to the Becks’ house to borrow a windsurfer from Marcus Beck—merely a year later, Marcus’s wife, Kathleen, would sponsor me and Marse for the Junior League—and within a couple of hours I managed to surf inelegantly across the flats on my own, my arms shaking and my knees bent. From the dock, Marse cheered me on.

  Each week, new developments emerged in the planning of Bette’s wedding. Gloria found a caterer, and she and Bette and I went to sample cakes at a bakery. We spent an hour taking bites from each sample and eventually chose a lemon cake with vanilla frosting. The following week, Bette and Benjamin arranged for the pastor from Grady and Gloria’s church to perform the wedding. Then a week later Dennis was instructed to make sure his suit was ready and I was asked if I had a dress. Both Bette and Gloria asked me this, on separate occasions, and I had the feeling they’d discussed the question beforehand: Does Frances have anything to wear? What if Frances shows up at the wedding in the same sundress she’s worn every other day for two months? (I’d packed two large suitcases, but they were not nearly enough—I’d been in Miami three months at this point.) Marse and I went to Burdine’s and spent an hour trying on clothes in the same dressing room, until the sales matron told us that our behavior—we were laughing and talking loudly—was disturbing the other customers, and we were asked to quiet down or leave. I ended up with an avocado-green shift and matching sandals from a consignment store, and Marse bought a wide-brimmed straw hat to wear with a white Easter suit she already owned. Instead of going back to Dennis’s that night, we called him from a pay phone and had him meet us at Scotty’s, and the three of us ended up going from one bar to the next, until at dawn we found ourselves at a tavern in Coconut Grove, sitting at a sticky wooden table in front of a dozen empty beer bottles.

  I’d decided to stay in Miami through the wedding. The question of what would happen after was unresolved. I was out of money, of course. Dennis gave me some from time to time; he left twenty-dollar bills on the kitchen counter and joked that I was his courtesan, which I’d let him know I did not care for. I told myself that if Bette’s wedding came and went and no plans had been formalized and still I didn’t care to return to Atlanta, I would get a job and maybe even an apartment. Whether I would make these changes without a ring on my finger was not a question I allowed myself to consider.

  But at this point I was so removed from my previous life that when I called home and my mother inquired about the future, I lied to her. I told her that I’d found a secretarial job at a bank, which I had not, and was looking for an apartment, which I wasn’t. I told her that my supervisor’s name was Millicent (she’d asked if I liked my supervisor, possibly because she suspected that I was fibbing, though I never knew for certain) and that Millicent was very strict. She asked if I could afford an apartment on my wages, and I said I was making almost twice what I’d been making in Atlanta. I told her I saved money by eating lunch in the bank’s cafeteria and keeping half for my dinner. The cafeteria served a very nice meat loaf, I told her. I tried to avoid mentioning Dennis, as if my lies would reflect poorly on him. Every time I hung up the phone after having expanded my story in some way, I cried a little. I didn’t recall ever having lied to my mother about anything more important than whether I was eating well or keeping my apartment clean. When my mother hinted that she thought I might be behaving irresponsibly—if only she’d known the truth—I rushed to reassure her. The fact that I lied to her so easily, with some regret but every intention of continuing, made me feel hardened and sad. When I told Dennis that I was lying to my mother, he took a breath and nodded, as if he understood the toll this exacted. This was the only pressure I ever put on him to move things along.

  The weekend before the wedding, six of us—Dennis and I; Marse and her brother, Kyle; and Benjamin and Bette—packed into Dennis’s station wagon and drove north on Highway 27 toward Lake Okeechobee, to Fisheating Creek. We stopped at Fisheating Creek Inn—a shack in the middle of a freshwater marsh, with a lunch menu that featured frogs’ legs and alligator tail—and rented three canoes, then set off to a campground eight miles down the river. Dennis shared a canoe with Benjamin, Marse shared one with Kyle, and Bette and I canoed together. She sat in front and paddled distractedly. We took our time. The creek was wide and high for the season, and we portaged only twice during the trip. Fisheating Creek was flanked on both sides by bald cypress swamp and hardwood hammock dotted by oak trees and palm trees and ferns. Air plants clung messily to the trunks of the oaks; during the summer red and yellow flowers would sprout from their bellies. Along the edges of the water, between the knees of the knobby cypress roots, bloomed brilliant yellow flowers. “Butterweeds,” Bette said, pointing. The flowers’ bright faces were reflected in the black water. Bette pointed out an ibis, a hawk, an osprey. In the narrowest parts of the creek the forest encroached so heavily that the sunlight reached us in ribbons. Bette said that a century earlier, the creek had functioned as a highway to Lake Okeechobee, which supplied freshwater to all of Florida. She said that in the summer, thousands of swallowtail kites migrated to the creek to gorge themselves on water snakes and fish and rabbits, to prepare for the l
ong flight back to South America. She told me to keep an eye out for panthers, black bears, burrowing owls, and of course alligators. It was like she was listing all that there was to fear around us, and as we passed I peered into the shadows of the swamp, alert for creatures that might strike or swoop. The first to appear was an alligator skulking among the cypress roots, its eyes hovering above the waterline. Once I’d seen one, I saw another, and before we’d gone a mile I’d seen too many to count on both hands, including babies as thin as snakes, sunning themselves on roots. The larger gators slunk into the water when we came close, and I tried not to think of them under the still black surface, swimming inches below my feet.

  The others had already pitched the tents by the time Bette and I arrived at the campground, which was little more than a small island rising from the marsh, enough room for the canoes and tents and a picnic table and a few folding chairs. A tributary ran behind the mound of land, and a stand of cypress trees provided privacy that turned out to be irrelevant: we wouldn’t see another human the entire weekend. Dennis used a machete to lop off the knobs of cypress roots that grew through the island’s flattest parts, and the boys started a fire. We wore jackets over our swimsuits and cooked beans and hot dogs. We’d forgotten to bring bowls, so we ate out of mugs and cans, and once we’d settled in and darkness had fallen, the wildlife closed in around us. Owls made their strange humanlike calls, and every so often the muscular tail of an alligator splashed and a bullfrog croaked. “This place is creepy,” said Marse, “but I can’t seem to go a year without a visit.” Her grandfather owned an old swamp house nearby, in Big Cypress—the government had been trying to buy him out since the preserve had been established twenty years earlier—and she told stories about using the outhouse and listening to panthers scavenging in the trash cans. During a lag in the conversation, I heard a grunt, and when I asked what it was, Bette answered, “Those are swamp pigs, rooting. They only come out at night.” I could barely tell where the sounds were coming from, there were so many, and when finally Dennis and I crawled into our sleeping bags, I lay awake for an hour or more, listening.

  In the morning, the men took off in two canoes to fish and Bette and Marse and I stayed behind. The river’s glassy surface reflected the trees and tall grasses. Marse turned on a transistor radio and found a calypso station that barely came in. I had taken to wearing a swimsuit almost all the time, even when I wasn’t planning on going in the water—this was something Marse and Bette did—and had even bought a new one, an orange-red halter with a zodiac pattern. Over the suit, I wore an old pair of Dennis’s jeans that I’d cut across the thighs without hemming. I was tanner than I’d ever been and several pounds thinner, and had grown comfortable spending time outside in the sun, under a fishing hat Gloria had handed me at Stiltsville. We talked about Bette’s wedding and Marse’s love life—there was a guy from her office, a fling—and they asked me questions about Atlanta. No one asked when I was going home. No one ever asked.

  It was South Floridian spring, which meant bright warm days and few mosquitoes, and nights as crisp as seventy degrees. We drank coffee until noon, then switched to cans of watery, ice-cold beer. After we’d been drinking for an hour or so, Bette wandered off to go to the bathroom, and Marse started cleaning up the campsite. I wanted her to sit down and relax with me, to enjoy the sunshine and the privacy and even the strange hollow calls of the wildlife around us. “We should do this again,” I said to Marse.

  “Sure.”

  “I mean it. We should make it an annual thing.”

  She looked at me strangely and started to speak, then stopped.

  “What?” I said, but she didn’t answer. I couldn’t see any problem with what I’d said, but then it occurred to me: I’d taken to acting as if I was certain of my future in Miami, but at this point there was no ring on my finger. In Marse’s mind, I might have been a placeholder in Dennis’s life. “Marse,” I said. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “I know.”

  “This isn’t a lark. I’m not . . . ” I couldn’t think of the right word. “An affair.”

  “I know you’re not.” She took a breath. “I just wish we could forget what I told you when we met, about Dennis.”

  “Why?”

  She stuffed beer cans into a trash bag. “It was really no big deal. Nothing would have come of it.”

  “I understand.”

  “I wasn’t in love with him or anything.”

  I hadn’t realized all that had gone unsaid between us. I wanted to say to her: I know what a crush is. And I know how difficult it is to look into your future and see nothing real, and how easy it is to conjure excitement out of thin air, just to have something to keep you going. I said, “I behaved badly, I know.” This was something it had taken me a while to admit to myself, though of course I didn’t regret what I’d done. I said, “I was hoping you’d forgiven me.”

  There was a streak of mud across her forehead and another on her shorts. She wiped her brow with her forearm and pulled another beer from the cooler. She handed it to me. “I forgave you a long time ago.” She sat down beside me. After a moment she said, “Maybe we’ll do it again next year. But after that I’ll be living in the south of France with my rich husband, and you two will be having babies and all that nonsense—”

  Bette, returning from the trees, caught the tail end of Marse’s sentence. “Not me,” she said. “No babies.”

  “You don’t think you’ll have them?” said Marse, and Bette said, “No way.”

  Bette rummaged through her bag and Marse and I stood up to finish cleaning the campsite. After I’d filled a trash bag, I turned to say something to Bette—I don’t recall what—and I noticed that she had a pair of silver scissors in one hand, and a good-sized chunk of her blond hair in the other hand. “What are you doing?” I said. She smiled, then closed the scissors. Marse and I gaped at her.

  “You’re crazy,” said Marse. “Benjamin is going to kill you.”

  “Benny doesn’t care about my hair.”

  “Your mother is going to kill you,” I said.

  “I don’t care about my mother.”

  “Why are you doing this?” Marse said.

  “Why not?” said Bette. “Do you have a mirror? I want to make sure it’s even.”

  “I have one,” I said. I went to my tent and fished a compact from my bag. When I returned, Marse caught my eye and shook her head. I handed the compact to Bette. “Much obliged,” she said. She opened the compact and looked at the part of her head where the hair was gone, then tried to resume cutting while holding the mirror in one hand.

  For a moment, Marse and I watched her snip awkwardly behind one ear. Then I sat down on the bench next to her. “Here,” I said, taking the mirror. I held it up, but I couldn’t get the angle right and she kept having to adjust it to keep sight of herself. I said, “Give me the scissors.” She hesitated. “I know what I’m doing,” I said. I’d cut my mother’s hair twice a year for more than a decade. I handed her the mirror and she handed me the scissors. I sat behind her, facing her back.

  “Holy Moses,” said Marse.

  My hands shook a little. “I can’t believe I’m doing this.”

  “Let’s not get sentimental,” said Bette. “It’s just a bit of hair.”

  The scissors were sharp and cut easily. Her hair fell to the ground in feathery blond bits. I spent a long time making sure all the pieces were even before I stopped. Her new do was less than an inch in length, as short as a boy’s. She looked in the mirror. “Much better,” she said. She stood up and walked a few feet away, then turned around to pose like a model in a catalog, touching her head with both hands. “It’s adorable, isn’t it?”

  “It is kind of adorable,” I said.

  “Hell of a job,” said Marse to me.

  “Let’s go for a ride,” said Bette.

  We launched the last canoe and climbed in. Bette sat in front and Marse sat in back, which left me cross-legged in the well between them
. As we made our way down the shadowy creek, I leaned against the yoke of the canoe and looked up at the cypress canopy, at the river of sky that flowed between the trees. It was like paddling down the nave of a cathedral. I closed my eyes. After a few minutes, I was jarred by a wild splashing and the tipping of the canoe to port and back to starboard, and when I opened my eyes Bette was standing at the bow, legs wide, wielding her paddle like a jousting stick against a large alligator a foot away. We had startled it—perhaps Bette had bumped it with her paddle when passing—and its top jaw was open and its teeth bared, its tail curled upward, and its strange pudgy claws spread wide against the marshy bank. Above it, Bette stood brandishing the paddle like a warrior and looking straight into its eyes. Marse gave a quick thrust and Bette pivoted as we passed, keeping the paddle inches from the gator’s jaws. Once we were at a safe distance, she sat down. Slowly, the alligator lowered its jaw and settled deeper into the marsh. “Goddamn it!” said Marse. “What the hell happened?”

  “We got too close,” said Bette.

  “Goddamn,” said Marse again. I’d never been around a woman who swore as freely as Marse did. “That thing looked hungry.”

  “It might be hungry,” said Bette, “but it doesn’t want to eat us.”

  One might assume, given the prevalence of alligators in South Florida, that attacks on humans would be more common. Over the years, there was the occasional anomaly: once a gator chased down and mawed a young boy riding a bike down a boardwalk in Shark Valley, and once one found its way into a private swimming pool in Coral Gables and drowned a full-grown man. But for the most part, alligators eat fish and ducks. Despite their ability to outrun a human, they wait for their prey to come to them. Years after the incident at Fisheating Creek, I saw a photograph of an alligator being swallowed whole by a Burmese python (for some reason, many South Floridians come to own exotic nonnative animals, then release these animals into the wild when they become tiresome, and they multiply) and I remembered that day, when we were inches from an alligator’s open jaw, and I felt sorry for it.