When the Crickets Stopped Singing

by Marilyn Cram-Donahue

  A wave broke and swept up the shoreline, splashing our feet with cool water and white foam. Hundreds of tiny sand crabs dug headfirst into the wet sand, leaving little holes that bubbled and popped, then turned smooth and disappeared.

  Geraldine, Reba Lu, and I fell to our knees and scooped out handfuls of sand, laughing as the crabs scurried around our fingers. I caught one and put it in Dodie’s palm. She watched it a few seconds, then set it gently on the sand.

  “Its shell is pearly pink,” she said. She smiled at me, making me feel I had just given her a gift—like she had opened a package and seen something she had always wanted.

  “I never noticed that before,” Geraldine said. She waited for another wave to wash the sand, then began to dig. She came up with a dozen or more crabs, and each one did have a shiny pink tone to its delicate shell.

  “Pearly pink,” I said. “That’s like the name of a fingernail polish.”

  The three of us looked at Dodie awkwardly. The person we knew who picked her nose and had sore hands from doing other people’s washing didn’t seem like this Dodie at the beach who could see a pearl in a crab’s shell. It was like she was starting to be somebody we didn’t know at all. Or maybe she had always been like this, and we didn’t take time to notice. I didn’t know what to say.

  “What do we do now?” Dodie asked.

  “Get wet!” I shouted. I grabbed her hand and started to run across the wet sand to the water’s edge. We didn’t get far because she dug her heels in, making deep wet holes.

  “Wait a minute,” she panted. “I’m not going no farther.” She squinted at the ocean. “That’s a lot of water out there,” she said. And I remembered this was Dodie’s first trip to the beach.

  “At least you can wade,” I urged. I tugged at her hand, pulling her, a few steps at a time, closer to the white foam at the edge of the breaking waves.

  “Cut it out! Stop!” she cried. But she kept taking little steps until the water washed over her ankles. “Hey, that’s nice and cool, Angie.”

  A big wave came then and splashed us. “Look, Dodie,” I yelled. “We’re up to our knees in saltwater!”

  She gripped both my hands. “That’s good,” she said. “But I’ve gone as far as I’m gonna go.”

  Geraldine and Reba Lu were already holding hands and jumping waves that rolled and swelled and touched their waists. “Look at them,” I said. “They’re out farther than we are, and they can still stand up!”

  “I don’t care,” Dodie squealed. “I don’t like this one bit.”

  But little by little she stopped pulling against me and began making tiny jumps up and down in the water, saying things like, “Oooh, this is a big one,” when a gentle swell went higher than her knees.

  I motioned to Geraldine and Reba Lu, and they sloshed toward us. “What?” Geraldine asked.

  “Dodie’s never jumped waves before,” I said. I looked hard at Reba Lu. “We can show her how.”

  “Of course we can,” Reba Lu said in her missionary voice. “Everybody take hands.”

  We made a circle around Dodie. She reached out and put her hands on my shoulders just as a larger wave rose up and crashed on us. It reached all the way to our chests. “Aghhh!” Dodie yelled, but she hung on. “Whoa!” she exclaimed. “I thought I was a goner.”

  We didn’t have time to answer. The tide was coming in, and another wave was on top of us, pounding and crashing, pushing and pulling. We three held tight to each other’s hands, with Dodie still in the middle holding on to me.

  Her face was flushed, but she was grinning. She jumped up and down, letting the water buoy her. “I’m ready for the next one,” she said. And she was. We jumped high before it hit us, and I saw Dodie rising above the foam, floating for a second, then sinking to her neck into swirling, salty water, laughing and hollering.

  “By the sea, by the sea, by the beautiful sea,” Geraldine began singing, shouting the words out so the splashing waves couldn’t drown the melody.

  “You and me, you and me, oh how happy we’ll be,” she went on.

  “That’s you and I,” Reba Lu yelled. “You and I are the correct words.”

  “Who cares!” Geraldine yelled back. “It sounds better my way.”

  “Yeah,” put in Dodie, grinning at me. “You and me makes me feel real good.”

  So that’s the way we sang it. You and me … you and me … you and me.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  We had plopped down on our beach towels to dry off on the warm sand when Charles appeared. He stood in front of me, blocking the sun, and said, “Come on, Angie. I want to show you something.”

  He reached out a hand. I put my hand in his and let him pull me to my feet.

  Geraldine made a snickering sound behind me, and I heard Reba Lu shush her. I glanced at Dodie, but she was looking out at the sea.

  “Where are we going?” I asked, but Charles wouldn’t tell me. We walked together to the water’s edge. Sometimes his hand brushed mine as we swung our arms along. We turned toward the pier, splashing in the shallow waves and leaving watery footprints in the wet sand.

  Miss Emma and Dr. Thomas were climbing on the breakwater. Charles told me that all those huge rocks reaching out into the sea were put there to break the force of the waves near the pier. Miss Emma’s arms flapped as she tried to keep her balance and peer into a tide pool. Closer to shore, Lucy Clement and Gisele Martin were collecting blue mussels and putting them into a straw bag.

  The wet brown sand beneath our feet was flecked with small stones. As we neared the underside of the pier, they covered the sand thickly, washed up by the tides and piled in layers of different colors and textures and shapes.

  Charles bent over and scooped up a handful. “There was a storm in the Pacific a few weeks ago,” he told me. “That’s why there are so many. Nice, aren’t they?”

  The beauty of wet stones always surprised me. Saltwater seemed to make the colors brighter, more vivid. Those farther up the shore looked sun-dried and dull.

  Charles sifted them through his fingers, letting some fall and bending over to rinse others in the lapping water.

  I thought of the moonstone in my cigar box at home and remembered that I had found it after a storm. Could I find another one today? I dropped to my knees and cupped my hands around as many wet stones as I could hold. They felt sea-scrubbed, as smooth as glass.

  We were hunting and picking, sorting out the prettiest ones, when Dr. Thomas and Miss Emma joined us. Miss Emma kicked off her shoes, tucked up her skirt, and squatted down beside us. She lifted a handful of stones to her face and sniffed them. Then she touched the tip of her tongue to one. “Salty,” she said, and smiled.

  She offered me a smooth brown one with white flecks. I took it and thanked her. “Put it in your pocket,” she said. So I did. Dr. Thomas nodded his head at me and smiled.

  “Hello!” Miss Emma cried out, grasping a piece of polished blue glass between two fingers before the tide could wash it out of reach. She held it up to the sun, turning it slowly to catch the light. “Look, Papa,” she said. “See what Emmy found. It’s bluer than the sky. It’s as blue as Angie’s bathing suit.”

  “You’re right, Emmy,” he said. “You hold tight to it so you don’t lose it.” He took her hand and led her like a child along the beach. She kicked her feet, splashing water into the air. Then she stopped and began waving to a seagull.

  “Miss Emma is happy today,” Charles said. I thought how nice he looked with his hair mussed by the breeze. His nose was white with zinc oxide, just like mine.

  I smiled up at him. “I’m glad,” I said, but I was thinking, Poor Miss Emma. Life is good one minute and bad the next. She had been happy the day we visited her until she looked out the window. What could Jefferson Clement have done to frighten her so? He was a menace, a dark cloud hanging over our town. I made up my mind not to think about him today.

  But I wasn’t through with him. I had a plan to find out more. The first chance I got,
I was going to go visit Miss Emma by myself. I thought she might do better if just one person came to visit her. I’d talk to her about her animals. Then I’d say something about the wonderful view from her bedroom window. I would ask her questions about Messina when she was young. I hadn’t planned what else I’d say, but I hoped I could find out why she had been so scared that day we went to visit her.

  Of course, Miss Emma wasn’t quite right, so I couldn’t depend a whole lot on what she said. But I was going to visit her just the same.

  “I’ll bet Miss Emma would like to catch that seagull and take it home to be company for Henry,” I told Charles.

  “Henry?”

  “That’s her parrot. She also has a monkey called Joseph and a snake named Cleopatra. Lily-Poo is that ugly little pug dog that’s always looking out the upstairs window.”

  He grinned at me. “You’re kidding, aren’t you?”

  “No, I’m telling the truth! We saw all her animals when Reba Lu, Geraldine, Dodie, and I went to visit her. I’ll take you there sometime, if you like. Miss Emma enjoys company.”

  Charles’s eyes were wide. “It’s a date!” he exclaimed, then turned red in the face and went back to sifting stones.

  A date. Charles had said a date! Of course, I had started it by offering to take him to visit Miss Emma. But he could simply have said, “I’d like to do that,” or “Sounds like a good idea.” Instead he called it a date. And he blushed when he said it.

  I felt myself starting to blush, too, and went back to hunting pretty stones, keeping my head down so he couldn’t see my face. Just then, I spotted a bluish-white stone, about the size of a quarter, with chalky marks on it. I plunged my hand into the water, but the outgoing wave pulled it away from me, rolling it over and over until it disappeared.

  I kept my eye on the spot where I had seen it last and waded out almost to my knees, then bent over and scooped up a double handful of stones. I let the seawater flow through and dropped them a few at a time. When I saw the white stone again. I nudged it away from the others with my thumb, pushing it into the palm of one hand.

  I had it between my fingers when a big wave came, rising from the ocean floor in a blue-green surge, creeping toward the shore like a hungry sea creature with foam where its teeth should be. It crashed a few feet away and rushed toward us with a force that made me stagger. I dug my heels into the pebbly sand, but a broken shell stabbed into the sole of my left foot.

  “Oh, ouch!” I cried and hopped on my right foot. The undertow pulled at me, and I lost my balance. Charles reached for my arm, but I fell, pulling him down with me. The stone flew out of my hand, sailed in a perfect curve, and sank into the water without even a splash.

  Charles got to his feet. “I’ll get it for you, Angie.”

  He fell to his knees where the stone had disappeared. The sea seemed to hold its breath in that silent pause between wave-in and wave-out. Charles reached into the water and came up with a double handful of stones.

  He laughed. “I just scooped up as many as I could hold.”

  We walked up the shore a few steps, and he dumped them on dry sand. We began searching. Round stones, oblong stones, irregular stones …

  “There it is!” We said the words at the same time.

  Charles picked it up and handed it to me. “Here’s your white stone, Angie. But are you sure you really want that one? It’s got chalky spots on it. Look, here’s a blue-green one and another the color of your hair, kind of sunny brown.” He looked at me like he was seeing my hair for the first time.

  Nobody had ever called my hair sunny brown before. I avoided his eyes and looked down at the colored stones.

  “Those are real nice,” I told him, “but this is the one I want.”

  I held it up to the light and saw the glow of the inner stone. “It’s a moonstone,” I said. “Here, see for yourself.”

  I handed him the stone. “Hold it up to the sunlight and see what’s behind those chalky places.”

  He held it up, turning it slowly between his fingers, looking at it from every angle. “Amazing,” he finally said. “It’s like the chalky spots are clouds, and the moon is shining through from behind them. I can see the ball of light inside.”

  It felt good to know that Charles looked at moonstones the same way I did. He wasn’t at all like Reba Lu, even if he was her brother. She would probably look at a moonstone and say something like, “It’s all splotchy white on the outside, like a pigeon pooped on it.” Even though she was into loving sinners, I didn’t think she looked very far beneath their surface.

  That made me wonder about the people in our town. How many would pick up a moonstone and throw it away because it looked ordinary on the surface? Miss Hattie Harper would. So would Mrs. Mildred Hewitt. But Willie Jack would sit by the Bank of America and hold it up to the sun, turning it slowly so he didn’t miss a thing. It came to me that the way people looked at things told an awful lot about them.

  I moved my feet in the water, feeling all the different stones shift and slide. I wished I could scoop up bucketfuls and take them home with me. But I remembered how dull they looked when we tossed them up on the shore. They belonged here, where the sea would reveal their hidden beauty.

  I felt older all of a sudden. I was starting to understand things I had hardly thought of before. Things I couldn’t talk about with Geraldine or Reba Lu. They would laugh and say, “Oh, Angie!”

  Dodie wouldn’t laugh though. She would probably sit right down among the stones and feel right at home.

  I realized Charles was looking at me, a kind of question in his eyes. “You can keep it if you want to,” I offered. “After all, you’re the one who rescued it.”

  He held it up to the sun, then reached out and caught my hand. He placed the moonstone in my palm and pressed my fingers around it. “This is yours,” he said.

  Then he grinned. “Race you to the top of the pier,” he challenged.

  We took the stone steps two at a time. Charles won. “But not by much,” he admitted.

  He dug into a buttoned pocket in his swim trunks and brought out a nickel to buy an extra-big pink cotton candy for us to share.

  “I love this stuff,” I said and pulled a sticky handful of sugary fluff away from the paper cone.

  “Me, too. It’s pure sugar. Supposed to rot our teeth.”

  “Who cares?” I asked. We each took another handful. We walked along the pier, high above the water, watching fishermen pulling in their catch: perch, halibut, sole. It was nice to walk along together, eating cotton candy and not talking unless we had something to say.

  Then we heard the carefree sound of the organ grinder’s music. A crowd was forming around a man with a black moustache and a big smile. His little monkey wrinkled his nose like he was sniffing the corn dogs and popcorn from Molly’s Snack Shop behind him. He took off his tiny hat and began collecting pennies from the crowd. Dodie was there, grinning at him and holding out a penny. But when Charles and I broke away and walked toward the merry-go-round at the shore end of the pier, she came with us. Geraldine and Reba Lu were walking ahead, paired up like best friends.

  For a second, it felt like I’d lost my place. After all, I was the one who had introduced them. I had known both of them before they knew each other. Now it seemed I wasn’t Reba Lu’s top choice, or Geraldine’s either. They leaned their heads close together, whispering and laughing, then whispering some more.

  So let them, I thought. A little while ago, I would have said it wasn’t fair that I was stuck with Dodie. But now she was walking along with Charles and me, and I really didn’t mind.

  Except that she was talking a mile a minute, and I wished she would shut up so Charles and I could talk.

  “That was a cute little monkey,” she said. “Did you see how smart he was? No wonder Miss Emma has a pet monkey.” It seemed like she’d never stop talking.

  She finally paused for a breath, and it came to me that Geraldine, Reba Lu, and I had been trying to love Do
die because we wanted to get on God’s good side. But we hadn’t really gotten to know her. Not the things she liked, or didn’t like.

  We hadn’t tried.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The ticket booth for the carousel was painted bright red with a yellow sunburst across the front and orange lion heads in the four corners. Green starfish danced in the bursting rays of the sun. A large glass dome fit on top of the booth, and a man in a red-and-white striped shirt stood inside it selling tickets.

  We started to get in line when I remembered I didn’t have any money with me. I poked Geraldine. She looked a little put out that I had interrupted whatever she was telling Reba Lu, but I got her attention when I asked, “What are we going to use for money?”

  She felt around for a pocket until she remembered she wasn’t wearing anything but skin and latex.

  “You got any money on you?” she asked Reba Lu, who stared at her for asking such a rude question, then shook her head. I shook mine, too. Geraldine turned to Dodie and didn’t even ask. When she looked at Charles, he held up a dime.

  “Only enough for two rides,” he said. “I left the rest of my money with my dad.”

  “We’ll have to go down to the sand,” Reba Lu said.

  We three had been saving our allowances and had about fifty cents each. Ordinarily that would buy a hamburger, fries, and a soda and still leave enough for ice cream and five rides. But since we were eating at the picnic where the food was free, we could spend all our money on having fun.

  We had put our coins in little cotton drawstring bags that Reba Lu made from material in her mother’s scrap bag. But when we arrived at the beach, we had taken them out of our pockets and tied them to our shoes.

  All but Dodie. None of us had wanted to ask her if she wanted a drawstring bag for her money because we weren’t sure she had enough for a day at the beach. So we had put it to a vote and agreed to share what we had. At first it had been two to one, with Geraldine holding out, but Reba Lu told her she had a sinful attitude, and she backed down.