Summer by the Sea

by Susan Wiggs

  “Here, you eat that, you’re too skinny,” said Nona Fiore, Mario’s elderly mother-in-law. Rosa turned to see her give Alex a big piece of trippa marinata on a toothpick. Before Rosa could warn him, he thanked the old lady and ate it.

  “It’s delicious,” he said, holding a napkin to his mouth because he was still chewing. He would be chewing for a very long time, Rosa knew. When Nona smiled, then nodded and moved away, he asked Rosa, “What am I eating?”

  “Pickled tripe. Made from cow’s stomach.”

  He swayed a little and chewed faster, his eyes bugging out.

  “Chewing doesn’t help,” she explained. “You chew and chew and chew, but it doesn’t get you anywhere. Just swallow.”

  He made a loud gulping sound. “Let’s go get something to drink.”

  He went to an ice-filled chest and pulled out two Cokes. Mario and his brother-in-law Theo tried to include them in a conversation. Alex seemed stiff and unnatural as he spoke with them, and he ducked away as soon as he could. There were lots of moments like that throughout the day. Rosa didn’t want it to be so, but as the day progressed, the truth emerged like a storm cloud. He didn’t fit in with the people she loved any more than she fit into his world. He sampled the hot, rich food, laughed politely at incomprehensible jokes, gave his undivided attention to grandmothers who barely spoke English. The harder he tried, the more foreign he seemed. And the more she loved him for trying.

  She loved him for accepting a plate of pasta so big it took two hands to hold it, for pushing child after child on the swings, for trying to win her father’s approval even though Pop made it clear he didn’t approve of anything about Alex. Rosa could think of only one reason for Alex’s efforts—her.

  Afternoon stretched into evening, and fireflies spangled the darkness while someone gathered the kids to roast marshmallows over the grill. Rosa looked at the glow upon the faces of her friends and neighbors and then at Alex beside her, and she felt another wave of contentment, shutting her eyes to keep it in. To be surrounded by such things, she thought, boldly leaning her shoulder against Alex’s, was the very essence of happiness.

  Mamma would love this, she thought, listening to the women chatting in Italian. Then it occurred to her that perhaps her mother wouldn’t be thrilled with Rosa falling in love with a rich Protestant boy from the city.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Alex whispered to her.

  “All right.”

  Parents trundled their sleepy little ones into station wagons. Men dumped the ice from coolers while women packed away empty Pyrex dishes and pasta bowls. Rosa and Alex found Pop smoking his pipe and gossiping with the older men.

  “Good night, sir,” Alex said. “Thank you for including me.”

  “That was Rosa’s idea,” Pop said.

  Rosa bridled. “What my father means is you’re welcome,” she said. “You’re very, very welcome. Right, Pop?”

  The darkness masked his features, but his posture was stiff, formal. Anything but welcoming. “Yeah, okay,” he said. “You be careful driving.”

  Rosa and Alex exchanged a glance. “We’re going to the movies in Wakefield.”

  “Now?” asked her father. “It’s late.”

  “No, it isn’t. It’s not even nine o’clock.” She didn’t want to fight with him about it, not now. Not in front of Alex. But the expression on Pop’s face tore at her heart. She was leaving home and her father would soon be completely by himself. The prospect sat uneasily inside her.

  Don’t do this, an inner voice whispered. And yet she must. She had to go out into the world and find her life, and leaving Pop was part of the process. People did it every day. They left home and they were fine, and their families were fine, and that was exactly how it would be—fine.

  twenty-eight

  Rosa and Alex escaped the picnic, exiting through a gauntlet of people before making it to his car.

  “That was awful for you,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  “It was fine.”

  “Liar. You’re a terrible liar, you know,” she pointed out.

  “I know. That’s why I always tell you the truth, Rosa. I was going to say today was no picnic, but it was. Just not my kind of picnic.”

  It was my kind, she thought.

  “I’m sorry about Paulie diCarlo,” she said.

  “Don’t be. Open hostility I can handle. Just...” He turned up the radio, which was playing “Walking on Broken Glass.”

  “Just what?”

  He pulled slowly out of the parking lot. “I can’t wait until we’re away from both our families.”

  Again that wave of unease rolled over her. He probably wasn’t used to the intimacy and openness of the familial atmosphere at the picnic; maybe it made him uncomfortable. She wasn’t sure she felt the same way, but she said, “Yeah. Me, too.”

  She leaned back against the headrest and watched the night flow past. She saw the long, thoughtful wink of the lighthouse beacon and wondered what it would be like to live surrounded by city lights. She’d never spent a single night away from this place, and though she knew she wanted to, the idea still unsettled her.

  “What?” asked Alex.

  She looked over at him and smiled. He was so good at reading her moods. “I’m not like you,” she confessed. “I’ve never been anywhere.”

  “Are you saying you don’t want to leave here?” He sounded incredulous as he turned the volume down on the radio.

  She winced. “What’s so bad about this place?”

  “Nothing, except that there’s a whole world out there.”

  There’s a whole world right here, she thought, watching shadows flicker in and out of the big salt marsh as they passed. “It’s different for you,” she said. “After you’re gone, your parents will still have each other, but my father will be all alone.”

  He stared straight ahead, his wrist balanced on the top of the steering wheel. “That’s not exactly right, about my parents.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They won’t have each other. They never have.”

  A chill licked down her spine. Were they getting a divorce? Plenty of her friends’ parents got divorced. Everyone always said it was for the best, and maybe they were right. But things were never the same, no matter what. Vince, whose parents had divorced a few years earlier, said it was like trying to rebuild a house after a fire. In a way, the family was as disrupted as Rosa’s own had been after her mother died.

  “Are they splitting up?” she asked.

  “No way. She’d never leave him, not in a million years.” He pulled off the road at a gravel turnout and cut the engine.

  “Then that’s good, right?”

  He shifted sideways to face her. “It’s not good or bad. It’s just...it’s the way things are.”

  “So they’re not happy together,” she said.

  “They’re happy apart. My father spent one weekend here this summer. He came down for the Rosemoor ball.”

  “I assumed he stayed in the city because he had to work.”

  Alex gave a short, unamused laugh. “Ha ha.” He rubbed his chest in an unconscious gesture, the way he’d done when he was little and felt an asthma attack coming on. “I used to think their marriage was normal. Every kid thinks his situation at home is normal. They’re incredibly civil, but they don’t really have conversations. Just planning sessions about business or travel or my mother’s charity work.”

  “Why did they marry in the first place?”

  “No one ever said anything, but Madison was born seven months after they got married.”

  It sounded so bleak that she ached for him. Rosa wished he’d had parents like hers, who were utterly at ease with one another, laughing or simply sitting together in the garden in the evening. “I’m sorry, Al
ex.” She leaned across the seat and kissed him. “They did something right,” she added. “Somebody must have taught you about love.”

  He held her by the shoulders and looked deep into her eyes. “You did that.”

  She felt a shiver of emotion. “My mother used to always say we only get one shot at life, and it’s a shame to spend it being unhappy.”

  “I guess my father gets his kicks from the family firm, and my mother from doing her good works. And from drinking. Mustn’t forget that.”

  It was the closest he’d ever come to talking about the fact that his mother was probably an alcoholic. She sensed his mood darkening like a cloud moving in front of the moon. “What is it, Alex? You’re really down on your mother.”

  “It’s not...ah, shit. Right before I picked you up, she and I kind of had words.”

  “Words about me,” Rosa said, knowing it in the pit of her stomach. She pulled away and stared straight out the windshield. “About us.”

  He made a fist around the steering wheel. “She’d had a few too many mint juleps or whatever was being served on the lawn today. Sometimes when she drinks, she says stuff....”

  “Stuff she doesn’t mean?”

  He shook his head. “No, but things she wouldn’t ordinarily say.”

  Finally she said it aloud. “Like the fact that your mother doesn’t think we should be together.” Rosa thought about the phone call to Pop earlier. Maybe it didn’t have anything to do with gardening.

  “It’s all such bullshit,” he said. “And I told her so. I’m tired of her nagging me.”

  Rosa suspected it was a bigger fight than Alex was admitting, and that it had been going on all summer long. She also suspected he would never tell her everything, like the precise details of his mother’s opinion of her.

  She hated the idea of them fighting because of her. “You should apologize.”

  “No way. She’s completely wrong about us. She doesn’t understand. Rosa, I told her I’m in love with you, and I told her I wasn’t ever going to stop. And she freaked, completely freaked.”

  His fierce declaration was both thrilling and vaguely frightening. “I still think you should apologize for upsetting her. It’s horrible having your mother mad at you.”

  He got out of the car and went around to open her door for her. “I am officially changing the subject.”

  She stepped out of the car. “To what?”

  He slipped his arms around her and leaned down to whisper in her ear. “Let’s not go to the movies tonight.”

  She pressed her cheek against his chest. “Let’s not. Let’s just be together.” When she was alone with him like this the whole world fell away. Their rival groups of friends, their totally different families, ceased to matter.

  She pulled back momentarily to study the deserted road, a black ribbon that disappeared into the night. Then she looked up at Alex and saw the moon reflected in his eyes. And finally, she opened the trunk of the car and took out the thick Tattersall blanket she knew he always kept there. “Let’s go,” she said, and led the way to the beach.

  They didn’t speak as they walked along the moonlit path, but Rosa suspected they were each thinking about the same thing. Their hands were clasped tight—in desperation, anticipation—and their footfalls barely made a sound on the sandy track.

  The deserted beach welcomed them. The Montgomery house was within shouting distance but lay around the curve and out of sight. Stars created a thin, misty sweep of light across the sky, and the waves held the glow of the moon in their restless, foamy crests.

  Rosa stopped walking. “Right here is fine.”

  “Are you sure?” he asked her.

  “Yes, absolutely. One hundred percent.” She pushed every misgiving from her mind as she turned to look at him. How tall he was. Limned by moonlight, he was as handsome and sincere as a prince in a fairy tale.

  He cupped her cheek in his hand and leaned down to kiss her lips. She felt...peculiar, feverish, as though he had somehow magically slipped inside her and turned up the heat.

  She couldn’t bear it. She needed him, all of him. She needed the mysteries and dreams and fantasies she had woven about him, about them both. Making a wordless sound of yearning, she stepped back and disengaged herself from his arms.

  “Rosa?” He stood still, though she could see the rapid pulse in his neck and the quick rise and fall of his chest.

  “It’s okay.” She studied his face and detected a flicker of uncertainty in his eyes. Then, before she could change her mind, she unbuttoned her sleeveless blouse and let it slip to the ground.

  His eyes widened briefly as he recognized the blatant invitation. In one swift movement, he took off his shirt. But when she reached behind to unhook her bra, he said, “Don’t.”

  Rosa froze, mortified. Had she made a mistake then? Read him wrong?

  He smiled gently at her confusion. “I’ve always wanted to do this.” His arms slipped around her. She felt his fingers unhooking the bra, and even that light touch caused a wild leap of fire inside her. She shut her eyes and pressed her lips to his bare skin, and slowly, deliciously, her hesitation slipped away. She was a woman now; this was what she was made for. She trusted Alex, and this felt right. She was exactly where she was supposed to be, safe in his arms.

  He stepped back a little and looked at her, and the expression on his face gave her a keen sense of...she wasn’t sure what. Power and gratification, perhaps.

  He drew her down on the blanket and lay beside her. She trailed her fingers over his chest. A shiver passed through her because he was so different from the Alex she had once known, and those differences were never more apparent. In childhood, he had been open and funny and fragile. He cherished their friendship and made no secret of it. The new Alex was still funny, but sometimes he was completely unfathomable and not fragile at all.

  Yet when she looked up at him and saw him gazing in awe at her, she recognized the Alex she knew, even though his frank stare made her blush.

  When he realized he’d been caught staring, he seemed to blush, too, though in the dark she couldn’t be sure. With slow deliberation, he took a condom from his pocket and set the packet on the blanket, a wordless declaration of intent. There in the moonlight they shed the rest of their clothes and came together in a fierce clash of wanting. They kissed again, long and hungrily, and she felt his hands on her everywhere. A storm swept through her body.

  All the times she had daydreamed about this could not have prepared her for what it was really like. It was awkward and wonderful and mysterious. She surrendered her free will, and gladly. She disappeared into the moment and lost herself. She made a sound in her throat as though she was about to explode. A pounding surge, a force she didn’t want to resist, pushed her toward him. She touched him in ways no one had ever taught her, but she seemed to know with mysterious instinct, and so did he. She felt pressure build and then a flash of pain and then nothing but the exhilarating upsweep of intensity. She heard herself cry out, and then at last Alex went rigid, let out his breath in a long, groaning rush and held her so close she could scarcely breathe.

  Everything slowed down—their breathing and heartbeats, the sigh of the night wind and maybe even the shush of the waves licking up on the sand. She wished she could freeze this moment forever. She wanted to hold it in her heart, to cherish this feeling of wonder and joy, to savor this burn of love so pure and true that it changed the very color of the world.

  She had no idea what was going through Alex’s head. He sat up and handed Rosa her shirt, then tugged on his shorts. “Are you all right?” he whispered.

  “Yes,” she said. “Shouldn’t I be?”

  “Well, sure, but...I thought I should ask.”

  “I’m fine,” she said. “What about you?”

  He laughed.

  “What�
��s funny?”

  “I’ve been asked that before but never in this situation.”

  She bit her lip. “Meaning...you’ve been in this situation before.”

  “I went to boarding school. Well, but not like—wait a minute.” He pulled back and the night breeze chilled her skin. “You mean you haven’t—you’ve never—”

  “No.” She rescued him from having to complete the question.

  He pulled the edge of the blanket over them. “God, Rosa. I swear I didn’t know.”

  She turned and lay sideways to face him. “Does that mean you assumed I wasn’t a virgin?”

  “Nobody is.” He brushed his hand in the sand. “You should have told me. Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “Shouldn’t I be?”

  “I don’t know. God, I’m sorry.” A worried frown creased his brow.

  “Sorry for what?”

  “Well, that I...you know.” He held her closer, stroked her hair.

  She smiled at his awkward tenderness toward her. “Don’t apologize. I’m glad you were the first.”

  “Honest?”

  “I’m always honest with you. And I thought you were with me, but apparently that’s not the case.”

  He looked away, resting on his elbows and staring at the open water.

  “Come on, Alex,” she said. “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me.”

  “It’s private.”

  “I thought we told each other everything.”

  “Maybe you did.”

  She pushed away from him and hurried into her clothes, suddenly eager to cover up. “No maybe about it. I just never considered the idea that you’ve kept secrets from me.”

  He sat up and pulled his shirt on. “We’ve only ever been together in the summer. I have a whole life separate from you.”