Summer by the Sea

by Susan Wiggs

  She was comfortable right here in the clattering, overcrowded, overheated kitchen with Tony Bennett crooning on the radio, the smells of baking dough and marinara sauce spicing the air.

  There was a spring in her step as she went to the counter to power up the register and credit card machine. Through the front window, its glass painted with—what else?—a winged pizza, she could see the first customers of the day gathered on the sidewalk outside.

  She went to flip the sign on the door from Sorry, We’re Closed to Come In, We’re Open, turned on the neon lights and opened the door. A crowd of half-grown boys, all in green YMCA Day Camp T-shirts, pushed inside, each straining to be first. The kids were all shapes, sizes and colors, probably on a field trip to the shore for the day.

  They were shepherded inside by a tall, broad shouldered camp counselor who wore a baseball cap over his sandy hair. The surging pack of hungry boys streamed toward the counter, and Rosa hurried after them.

  Taking an order pad and pencil from her apron pocket, she said, “Welcome to Mario’s Flying Pizza. What can I get for you?”

  “Man, it smells good in here,” said a boy wearing a stick-on name tag that read Cedric.

  “I could eat a bear,” said another.

  “You look like a bear,” his friend teased.

  “Do not.”

  “Do so.”

  “Got any bear pizza?”

  The conversation disintegrated into boyish banter, and Rosa looked to their camp counselor for help. He took off his baseball cap, and their eyes locked. His were ocean-blue, and they crinkled when he grinned at her.

  She blinked to break the spell, but he was still there.

  Alex.

  A smile started deep inside her somewhere. She felt it rise up through her slowly like a rainbow-colored soap bubble on a breeze and then unfurl on her lips.

  Alex Montgomery. Alex was back, at last. He looked so...different.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Hi,” he said, and his voice nearly laid her out flat. It was a deep, almost musical baritone, the voice of a stranger. “I heard you worked here.”

  “You heard right.” She sounded like a dork.

  The natives were getting restless. And noisy. Clearly this was not the moment to ply each other with questions.

  She burned with curiosity as he ordered four extra-large pizzas, two cheese, one pepperoni, one sausage. Soft drinks all around.

  “For here or to go?” she asked Alex, then waited as though he was about to reveal the meaning of life.

  “Here.” He gestured. “I’ll take them out on the deck.”

  Mario’s deck was set with a few picnic tables shaded by Campari umbrellas. The place didn’t have a beverage license, but Mario’s cousin Rocky had a distributorship which kept him well-supplied with umbrellas and lighted clocks.

  “What do I owe you?” asked Alex.

  An explanation, she thought as she punched buttons. Where have you been for the past four summers?

  She gave him the total and he reached for his wallet.

  “Oh, man,” said one of the kids, “Alex is making googly eyes at the waitress.”

  “Get on outside,” Alex said. “And don’t feed the seagulls.”

  They pushed and shoved toward the side door leading to the deck, and Tony Bennett sang into the ensuing silence.

  “I am, you know,” Alex said as she counted out his change.

  “What?”

  “Making googly eyes at you.”

  God, he was flirting. In a baritone voice. She tried to be cool, hoped he couldn’t tell she was blushing.

  “Where are your glasses?” she asked. “You might be mistaking me for someone else.”

  He winked. “Contact lenses. Now, what time do you get off work?”

  “Seven o’clock.”

  “That’s forever. I’ll be done with the hooligans by five. I’ll come by then.”

  Don’t give in too easy. That was her friend Linda’s motto. “I’ll still be working.”

  “Take off early.”

  Oh, she was tempted. Mario would let her take off if she asked him. But she wouldn’t. Not even for Alex.

  “Seven o’clock,” she reiterated.

  twenty-three

  The day dragged, each minute longer than the last. When the hour lurched to 5:00 p.m., she called herself an idiot for not getting off sooner. It was a weeknight, still early in the season, and business was slow.

  During the long periods when no one was around, she took a paperback novel from her purse, perched behind the counter and indulged herself. If anyone came, she slipped the book under the counter and hoped no one noticed the hot-pink cover emblazoned with an embracing couple. Someone who was going to Brown couldn’t possibly be reading romance novels.

  Several times she reached for the phone, intending to tell her best friend Linda who was back in town. But she wasn’t ready to share Alex’s reappearance with anyone just yet. Instead, she phoned home and left a message on the answering machine, letting her father know she would be late.

  If only she had a mother or a sister, she thought wistfully. There were certain things for which a girl needed her mother. Getting your period or shopping for your first bra, for example. Those just weren’t the sort of issues you wanted to discuss with the nuns at school or your dad. And sometimes you were bursting to tell her everything inside you, like when Alex Montgomery came back to town, having transformed himself from a geek to a Greek god.

  She served a noisy family who had just taken a beach rental on Pocono Road. Then a skinny woman with complicated special instructions about anchovies arrived. Rosa chatted with the retired guy who delivered the Chamber of Commerce papers for the rack by the door, but her mind kept wandering to Alex. She couldn’t believe how much he’d changed. She wondered if he knew he looked like a guy on the cover of a romance novel. Probably not. He was reading Bulfinch’s Mythology at age ten. He was probably reading Proust now. In French.

  The clock somehow dragged toward evening. From her station at the counter, she watched the beachgoers pick up their straw bags and ice chests and head for their cars. In the slanting rays of the setting sun, the water turned to flickering gold. Far down the coast, the lighthouse blinked its signal—two long and two short, nine seconds in between.

  And finally seven o’clock rolled around. A girl named Keisha came on duty to take Rosa’s place because, in the summer, Mario’s was open until midnight, seven days a week.

  “Slow tonight, huh?” asked Keisha.

  “Yes.” Rosa tried not to look hurried as she peeled off her apron and hair net.

  Technically, Keisha was a summer person; her family lived in Hartford during the school year. Her grandfather had been a Black Panther, a fact that seemed to embarrass Keisha. Then he wrote a memoir and got himself elected to Congress, and suddenly they were a middle-class family. Her parents were both lawyers, and, fiercely intellectual, she was headed for Amherst College. Still, she never acted like the summer people who strolled around in their tennis whites. She fit in with the townies just fine.

  “See you tomorrow,” Rosa said.

  “Bye.” Keisha settled herself on a stool behind the counter. It was then that Rosa remembered that she’d left her book under the counter. To her dismay, the girl found it and studied the cover, flipped a few pages and said, “Cool.” Then she settled down to reading it.

  You never knew, thought Rosa. She stepped outside and was hit by sea breeze and salt air. A bonfire burned on the beach, illuminating tall girls with tanned legs and sleek ponytails. They were roasting marshmallows and talking nonstop. A few shirtless boys tossed a football back and forth. Summer people, oblivious to the locals heading home from work.

  Alex was nowhere in sight. She scanned the parkin
g lot and saw only a few cars. A couple strolled past, holding hands and leaning on each other in a way that made her feel wistful.

  Still no Alex. Maybe he’d been a figment of her imagination. The guy who’d come into Mario’s did not look or sound anything like the Alex she remembered.

  The Alex she remembered was skinny, awkward and funny. He had a high-pitched voice and an infectious laugh. This Alex was—

  “Sorry I’m late,” he said, breathless as he jogged across the parking lot toward her. “One of the kids’ mothers never showed up, and I ended up driving him to Pawtucket.”

  “That’s okay.” It was all she could do not to stare. Burnished a deep red-gold by the sunset, he seemed like a figure out of a dream.

  Then she realized something. He was studying her as intently as she was studying him. She felt self-conscious as his gaze touched her hair and eyes and lips, then slipped downward even though he clearly seemed to be trying to play it cool.

  “You’re staring,” she said softly.

  “So are you.”

  She blushed. “You’ve changed a lot.”

  “So have you.”

  The last time they’d been together, he was undersized, pale, often bright-eyed with medication and oxygen deprivation. She had been small and dark, her hair wild, her tomboy physique stick-straight. Now he looked like an Olympic athlete, and she had the kind of figure that drew rude sounds from boys on the beach. She liked it, and she didn’t like it. Sometimes she lay awake at night wondering how to deal with her ultra feminine body. Should she hide it or accentuate it? Feel pride or shame?

  “Well,” he said, “what would you like to do? Do you need to go home first, or...?”

  “No. I called my father and said I was going out after work.” She smiled uncertainly. “So I’m out.”

  “My car’s over here.” He gestured at a shiny two-seater MG convertible. “Unless, um, you have a car you need to—”

  “No.” She gestured at a much-used Schwinn La Tour leaning against the side of the building. “I ride my bike to work. I drive my father’s truck sometimes, but we share it.” Rosa made herself stop babbling. She hated the feeling of embarrassment that crept through her. She didn’t have her own car. With her going away to college, she and Pop had to be careful with money. “Anyway, you can just bring me back here after we...after our...” What? She didn’t dare call it a date.

  “No problem.” He grinned at her.

  She smiled back, feeling a curious sort of relief. She had seen a glimpse of the old Alex, the boy who had been her best friend each summer. He might look like a hunk, but he was still Alex.

  Then, with an unexpected air of gallantry, he held open the passenger side door for her. As she climbed in, she faintly regretted not treating this like a real date. Maybe she should have gone home to primp and try on different outfits and do her hair. Here she was, in her jeans and white shirt with Mario’s stitched on the pocket, the smell of pizza sauce infusing her hair and even the pores of her skin.

  He pulled out of the parking lot and drove along the coast road. It was a clear night, and the breeze felt heavenly as it rippled over her, sweeping away the last vestiges of the pizza joint.

  They both reached for the knob of the radio at the same time and their hands bumped awkwardly.

  “Sorry,” she said, drawing her hand back.

  “It’s okay. Do you have a station you like?” He turned on the radio and The Heights, singing “How Do You Talk to an Angel?” drifted out.

  “I think that’s probably it—92 Pro out of Newport.”

  They drove along, listening to music and feeling the warm summer breeze. She wondered if he was as lost in memories and as full of questions as she was.

  As they headed away from town, he asked, “What’s North Beach like these days?”

  “Exactly the same.”

  “Deserted, you mean.”

  “Usually.”

  “You want to go check it out?”

  She knew then exactly what he was asking. It wasn’t about the beach but about them. He wanted to know if it was time to go back to the past, back to the friendship they’d once shared, and then maybe go forward from there.

  “Yes,” she said. “We should definitely check it out.”

  He drove by his family’s house, and Rosa saw the porch light glowing and lamps brightening the upstairs windows.

  “Your family’s here?” she asked.

  “Just my mother. My father’s in the city and my sister got married in May. She lives in Massachusetts now.”

  “One of my brothers is married, too. Rob married a fellow officer in the navy. I have two nephews and two nieces. A set of twins and two boys.”

  “All in the last four years?”

  “His wife’s Italian, too.”

  He took his eyes off the road for a second to glance at her. “You’re an aunt.”

  “Aunt Rosa. Pretty wild, isn’t it? My other brother Sal is a priest. A navy chaplain.”

  “Tell me where to turn,” he said. “I haven’t been here in a while.”

  “I know.” She cringed, hoping he hadn’t caught the note of wistfulness in her voice. She directed him to the gravel pull-out by the side of the road. On rare occasions she came here to walk and think, sometimes to rake quahogs to surprise Pop with his favorite meal of spaghetti alle vongole.

  The sun was nearly gone as they got out of the car. The tall marsh grasses were painted in deepest black against the fire-colored sky. Out over the water, darkness gathered and melded with the horizon line.

  He led the way along the sandy footpath. Beach grasses nodded as they passed, and wild rose branches snatched at their shirts. Then the path widened, opening to the beach, which spread out before them in splendid isolation.

  A sense of wonder welled up in her the way it always did when she came here. All her life she’d found solace down by the sea where its power and vastness diminished everything. It was a place where the will surrendered. Here was a force that would not—could not—be controlled. She found a strange comfort in that.

  “First time I ever flew a kite was right here,” Alex said.

  “I know,” Rosa said, startled that he would mention it. “I was there.”

  “First time I went wakeboarding, too, and you were there.”

  “And scared to death.”

  “That didn’t stop you from doing it,” he pointed out.

  “Being scared never does,” she said. Then she felt him staring at her, and his look made her blush. “Let’s walk,” she suggested. Her legs were tired from the day’s work, but being with Alex filled her with nervous energy. They headed down to the water’s edge and took off their shoes.

  She sneaked a glance at him and caught him still staring. She gave an embarrassed laugh and tried to smooth down her hair, hopelessly tangled by the ride in the convertible.

  “What?” he asked.

  “This is just so weird, seeing you again.”

  “Good weird or bad weird?”

  “Good. Definitely good.” She moved a little closer to him so their shoulders were nearly touching. “So why haven’t you been back here?”

  “Once I started high school, I finally got to have a life.”

  “What, you didn’t before?”

  “My mother never used to let me out of her sight.”

  “I remember that.”

  “She backed off when my asthma got better.”

  “Better. You mean it went away?”

  “Not exactly. The symptoms went away. The doc said that’s pretty common during a growth spurt. He was hoping for it all through my childhood. I’m still an asthmatic, but I outgrew my asthma. In three years I’ve had just two attacks. I’m on an experimental drug that’s working, so I’m not planning o
n having any more.”

  “Alex, that’s fantastic.” She was amazed and thrilled for him. A miracle had transformed a sickly little boy into...into Brad Pitt.

  “I can’t explain how it felt to suddenly be able to do things like a normal kid,” he said. “I played sports, didn’t have to lug around a breathing apparatus. It was like getting out of jail, finally. I wasn’t keen on spending summers under my mother’s thumb.”

  “It’s great that you’re better, Alex.” She was on the verge of admitting that she’d missed him, that summer wasn’t the same without him, but she kept quiet. Too much information.

  He slowed his pace as though he wanted to prolong their walk. “How about you?” he said. “You’ve changed, too. I mean, I can’t help noticing it.”

  “I haven’t been to Europe or Costa Rica or Egypt,” she said, then blushed because she’d all but admitted she’d been asking about him. “I haven’t been anywhere. Just here.”

  “Here’s fine.”

  She nearly told him about Brown, but changed her mind. Not yet.

  They stopped to look at the water, reflecting the last colors of the sunset. A long way down the beach, the lighthouse beacon swung its beam out into the night. There was no sound except the waves hissing up to their feet, rattling over rocks.

  “I sure missed coming here,” Alex said. “I just didn’t miss my mom watching me like I was a lab rat.”

  “So what did you do with all that freedom?”

  “I went to a very boring high school. Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. My father went there, and his father, and so on, right down to old John Phillips himself, as far as I know.”

  “It’s supposed to be a terrific school,” she said. “I can’t believe you were bored.” He was extremely smart, she remembered. Maybe classes moved too slowly for him.

  “All right, I wasn’t that bored. I was so ready to get out of the house, I would have gone practically anywhere.”

  Rosa could certainly understand that. “Because of being sick?”

  “Yeah. I needed a different life.” He met her gaze and held it steady. “But there was something I missed about spending the summer here.”