A Short Move

by Katherine Hill

  Caryn had been tested a hundred times already. They’d had, what, six months together, before Mitch started cheating? When they were babies still, in college, and the discovery came as a genuine shock. She’d cried, assumed it was over, but he’d done the strangest thing: he’d apologized. Eventually she came to realize that apologies did not equal change. She could smell it in his hair, all those other girls’ perfumes. She could see in his ears how they occupied his mind. Occasionally, someone even told her. She put up with it because they were young, because he just had to get it out of his system. And because he stayed, unlike everyone else. For some reason, he didn’t want to leave her.

  Vicki was a good confidant. With her big blonde hair and her joy in baking, she’d been destined to marry a football player; she knew them inside and out. Caryn doubted her brain even registered other males, certainly not the noodly guitar players Caryn had concerned herself with before Mitch. At fourteen and fifteen, she had given herself to one warbling Romeo after another. Each time it began like a movie in which she at last found herself in the arms of a worthy boy, one she could actually love. Yet each time something went wrong. They were fickle, those skinny boys, they quickly lost interest, a slouched back retreating to a junky car outside her house, a phone call that never came. Those deceptive boys! They were skinny and pale and full of deep thoughts, and by all rights ought to be tender. Humiliated, she withdrew. She took more dance classes; she read. She seemed to have overvalued the best thing she had to offer, which was only everything, herself.

  But as high school yawned on, she found herself inadvertently, almost without her own consent, catching other eyes: boys in Umbro shorts and Nikes, carrying cleats and various balls. Athletes. They looked at her with confidence, and not only in themselves. They seemed to see her, and judge her favorably. They asked her out loudly, publicly, in front of their equally vigorous, popular friends in the hall. It was strange that boys with their power should seem to want, or need, something from her.

  Anyway, she went out with them, and she liked them. The way they held doors for her and gratuitously offered her their varsity jackets, even when it wasn’t cold. The way they laughed at their own jokes, which invited her to laugh, too. She’d become a girl the athletes liked, a development that required a few adjustments to her erratic sense of self, but to which, once made, she gratefully adhered.

  Her school being of the preppy, university-town variety, soccer players were her gateway drug. Next came the lacrosse players, one prima donna attacker in particular, who, if you liked menacing Nordic blonds, was far and away the best-looking boy at school. Contra his cheekbones and playing style, Dirk turned out to be a nice boy, with intriguing ties to Washington DC, and although she wasn’t flinging herself into romance the way she’d done with the tortured artists, she was at the very least beginning to relax into it, allowing herself to have sex with him, and afterwards resting the side of her face on his chest, cooing over the corsage he’d bought to match her dress for prom, befriending the high school Vickis, even regarding them as comrades-in-arms. She could see where things were going, and it all seemed too easy, this gentle drive into magazine life.

  But Dirk proved fickle, too, breaking it off when he went to Dartmouth, leaving her feeling abandoned and personality-less at the start of her senior year.

  “Pull it together,” her sister Ellen told her bitterly, when she came home from college to wash her clothes. “The guy wasn’t exactly destined for the NFL.”

  “You’re heartless, you know that?” Caryn wailed. Ellen hated sports so it wasn’t a surprise she didn’t know which one Dirk played, not to mention that he was actually very good, recruited by the Ivy League. Her sister was a mousy, incorrigible cynic, thumbing her nose at popularity and money whenever she got the chance, and never wasting an opportunity to make Caryn feel guilty for wanting something nice. She was still pining for tortured artists herself, and Caryn could tell it wasn’t exactly lifting her up.

  And yet, somewhere, beneath her disdain, Ellen sort of had a point. The football players at her school were not destined for the NFL either—unlike the lacrosse boys, they routinely lost most of their games—but they did walk with a lumbering swagger that suggested a certain importance. She knew them through Dirk and the rest of the athletic cabal, and in a generous moment, she let one of them take her to Homecoming. By spring, she had cast her eye a few miles farther, to the University of Virginia, where Ellen was enrolled. There the football players were a different breed, stacked to the shoulders and round in the leg, even in the off-season, stalking the campus paths and hangouts she’d begun to brave with a few of her friends. There were whispers of pro scouts and signing bonuses, a different breed for sure. Yet they looked at her with the same encouraging, flirtatious smiles she’d won from the high school boys. Some of them even chatted her up.

  She didn’t know what she was looking for exactly. She was observing, taking notes she’d take with her to Miami, a university she’d picked for all the reasons an eighteen-year-old picks a beach with performing arts. It was in the midst of this epoch, this period of great uncertainty, that Caryn’s parents threw her a backyard graduation party, a gathering of friends and family from across the Old Dominion, where she got to talking with her scrawny cousin Jeff about his good friend Mitch.

  Mitch, the linebacker, who was going to play at Miami.

  How quickly it all happened after that, like fate, though after the Romeos she’d stopped believing in that sort of thing. By the second week of college, they were dating, and fickle he was not. He was an animal on the field and with his friends, but in private he clung to her, even when he wasn’t faithful. Her big, thuggish baby, full of needs only she could meet.

  And now, here she was, a Hawaii regular, best friends with Vicki Mulligan. For four years now they’d been inseparable, inviting lesbian jokes and questions regarding Vicki’s whereabouts, the few times they weren’t standing side by side. If her marriage to Mitch was tanking at least her marriage to Vicki still bloomed.

  She settled into the adjacent lounger with a Mai Tai of her own. She didn’t even like Mai Tais—too sweet—but she felt ungrateful ordering anything else. “You think I’m a bitch for taking an extra week without them?” She nodded at Cindy and Alyssa in the pool. They’d head home together at the end of the week, while Caryn and Mitch went on to Kauai.

  Vicki’s head snapped her way. “Are you kidding, you’re an inspiration! If I could figure out how to ditch my gang, I’d do it.”

  “Mitch says it’s mean. He doesn’t see Alyssa much during the season. He’s missed her.”

  “Sure.”

  “And she’s missed him.”

  Vicki sipped meditatively, releasing her straw when she’d drawn enough juice to speak wisdom. “She’ll miss him forever if you don’t fix your marriage. You are definitely doing the right thing.”

  Caryn appreciated Vicki’s confidence in her decision, but it was only the confidence of a friend, who didn’t have to face her life as she did. “Mitch has to do his part, though,” Caryn said. “Takes two to tango.”

  “Amen.” Vicki clasped her hand. “You know I’m here for you. But tell me: Cindy really doesn’t mind?”

  Caryn returned the squeeze and glanced at Cindy half-submerged in the pool, with Alyssa clinging to her back. “She might. But I have to go by what she says, and she told me a week in Hawaii was long enough for her. I think she really just wants us to work things out. I mean, I haven’t told her everything, but she knows. She’s at the house every day. She’s not blind.”

  “A saint! Should’ve married the mother instead of the son.”

  “Or finished college instead.” She’d been just two semesters short when Alyssa was born, and there were days when she felt bitter about that. But Caryn no longer felt bitter. Hawaii, with its freshly squeezed drinks and lotion-scented air, had a way of washing stale bitterness away. Even her worries seemed to have drunk themselves down to indifference. She and Mitch might not
make it to another Pro Bowl, but what did that matter when she was at the Pro Bowl now? She was by the pool now, releasing Vicki’s hand. She was watching the sunset now with Alyssa. She was awaking in the middle of the night now to find Mitch upon her like an incubus, inside her now, crushing her with his own breath, blind together now in tropic darkness.

  The next day the network cameras were rolling as the men headed off to practice. Caryn and Vicki took their brood to Waikiki, scoping out cheap jewelry and Magnum P.I. shirts trimmed with certificates of authenticity. With the memory of Mitch’s body still on her like a weight, Caryn bought a shell string necklace for Alyssa, while Vicki, being the corny person that she was, bought the one her daughter Brittany wanted, and the grown-up version for herself.

  Back at the hotel, they moved along the curving stone paths bisecting the saltwater ponds where manta rays and small hammerheads circled separately. She received a kiss from Mitch’s coach, caught up with Gaines, from Miami, now in Tampa. Two famous quarterbacks conferenced at the bar as though they were the only two people in the world who understood whatever it was they understood. They were not much older than Mitch, but with their thinning hair and thickened necks, they already looked middle-aged.

  At the luau dinner, everyone was in good spirits, including Mitch, who finally seemed to have forgotten about the Super Bowl. He swung Alyssa toward a tiki torch and she shrieked with fearful joy, her small braided head flopped back in a way that reminded Caryn of the happy trust of pregnancy. How safe it had made her feel, how connected to the world in all sorts of ways she even hadn’t known she’d been missing.

  Had he really latched onto her the night before? She had the memory, but it was fading, flickering out now with dim uncertainty, and there was no way to tell from his public behavior. There was no way to tell if anything in the past was real. All she had was the present moment. And so she waited for the next one with him. When it came, again, that very night, she grasped it. She gave it her full attention.

  “Listen,” Vicki said. They were standing to their waists with their kids in the pool. The men were having media day at the practice field. “Here’s what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna go to the spa tomorrow.”

  Two nights in a row now he’d come after her, and though it was dark both times and she’d hardly seen him, she’d felt the intensity of their engagement for sure. The force. How could he still be doing it with the publicity girl if he was doing it so desperately with her? She looked over at Cindy, who was reclining on one of the blue-padded loungers with a mystery novel, her long feet hanging over the edge. A plane flew in low overhead, descending for the airport.

  “Six!” cried Alyssa, who’d been counting them.

  “We’ll get treatment after treatment,” Vicki was saying. “They’ll strip us clean. We won’t have muscles any more. Or skin.”

  Caryn smiled. “I like this idea.”

  “I know you do.” Vicki took a big sister approach to friendship. She was the one who made their plans, who knew where things were, what they should do. For the most part, this suited Caryn, a little sister, who was happy to just go along. “And we’re not charging it to a rookie’s room, either. We’re charging it to our very own husbands, who are the reason we need it in the first place.” She glided away from the wall to give Brittany room to jump.

  Cindy was conferring now with one of the waitresses, a girl in a visor and khaki shorts. She looked at Caryn eagerly as the girl bent down and gestured with her hands.

  “Seven!” Alyssa announced, as another plane swept low.

  “What’s going on?” Caryn called through cupped hands.

  “Alyssa!” Cindy cried. “Brittany! You want to see a baby seal?”

  In flip-flops and towels they all clambered down the short stony path to the second lagoon, which was not a part of the hotel property, and sternly marked as such, Vicki hoisting eighteen-month-old Mason on her hip, Caryn and Cindy holding the hands of the girls. This lagoon was shelved with lava rocks of varying degrees of natural roughness, and to the edge of a particularly angular outcropping camped a smoother, darker mass, nearly edgeless, and demurely ringed by a set of white protective flags. This was the seal calf.

  It snoozed on its side, a blubbery bulk drying in the sand. They stood watching, trying to make sense of its apparent shapelessness. Only when a wave lapped its tail, and it gave a wild, jiggly shudder several feet up the beach, did its face emerge, squinty, whiskered, and puckered like a kiss. Yet after this brief, ecstatic motion, it fell still again, and lay as it had lain before, neckless, its top flipper tucked like a cocktail napkin on a linebacker eating ribs.

  “That’s a baby?” Alyssa breathed.

  “More like a kid, probably,” Caryn said. “A special one. See these signs? ‘The Hawaiian monk seal is an endangered species protected under Federal and State Law.’ We have to respect him.”

  Vicki was busying herself in her beach bag, having set Mason down in the sand. “Come on,” she said, scooping him up again. “Let’s get a picture. Would you mind?” She handed her camera to Cindy and beckoned for Brittany to join them. “Brittany loves seals. They’re your favorite, aren’t they, sweetie?”

  Brittany came, but her doubtful face suggested more fear than love. “Are you sure he’s not dead?”

  “Oh, sweetie, no, he’s sleeping! That’s why they’re guarding him!” She crouched down and pointed to a woman in a black visor and inscrutable sunglasses who was sitting near one of the signs. Then she swiveled back to Cindy. “Can you get it?”

  “Hold on.” Cindy adjusted her knees to crouch down, too. “I just want to make sure I get the whole thing.” She squinted exaggeratedly through the viewfinder. “It looks pretty blobby from this angle. I’m not sure you can tell it’s a seal.”

  “You’ll know,” Caryn said. Alyssa had gone closer to the shore get a better look at his face. “Stay back, Alyssa!” Caryn called. She shielded her face against the brightening sun.

  “I am! I’m on the rock!”

  “Well, I got a few,” Cindy said, straightening up. “I’m sure one of them will come out.”

  Vicki looked over at the woman they all presumed by now was some sort of government official. “What if we just—?” She made some gestures of harmless advancement.

  “Come on, Vicki,” Caryn said. “It’s enough.”

  “Okay?” Vicki persisted, waving, looking directly at the woman, who stared back, all sunglasses. After a moment she looked the other way, which Vicki took as her hoped-for cue. She scuttled back several feet, pulling the kids with her.

  Cindy sighed and crouched down again with the camera.

  “Cheese,” Vicki said. She flashed her practiced smile, and Brittany and Mason, in their way, followed suit. Vicki’s hair billowed spongily as she tilted her head towards her daughter’s, and Caryn could feel how much Vicki wanted this, a magical moment she could relive and embellish with her kids for years to come. Remember that time in Hawaii when we saw the baby seal?

  “Hey! Hey you!” The visored woman was marching toward them now. “You think these signs aren’t for you?” Vicki stood as Alyssa jumped down from the rock and came running to Caryn’s side.

  “I thought you said—”

  “This is an endangered species!” She stood purposefully outside the perimeter, like a heckler at a boxing match. Inside the ring, Vicki froze, her children padding her sides.

  “I know, but—”

  “Get OUT!”

  Vicki bolted for the nearest sign, pulling Brittany and kicking up sand in their wake. Mason let out a troubled yelp. Behind them, the seal dozed on, unfazed. His defender met Vicki at the perimeter. “He is a native Hawaiian,” the woman said. “And he’s endangered because of people like you.”

  “I know and I’m sorry, but we didn’t touch him. We were being very respectful.”

  “You think other people don’t want a better picture, too?” She pointed at the smattering of people with cameras who were obediently standing ba
ck. “This is not just your vacation. This is his home.” She was extremely short and extremely terrifying. Caryn found herself holding her breath.

  “I know,” Vicki said. “I’m sorry. I just thought you said it was okay.”

  “I don’t know you. When did I say that?”

  “When I called out to you. Just now.”

  The woman stared and it was impossible to know what she was thinking. “Observe the signs. And you.” She turned to Cindy. “You shouldn’t encourage her.”

  Cindy, who was rarely the object of rebuke, bowed her head. “I’m truly sorry,” she said to her chest.

  “Now you know why I have to sit here.” With that, the woman about-faced and reinstated herself at her post.

  Back at the hotel, Vicki was all wound up, burning with humiliation. “Didn’t she sort of nod, though?” She tossed their beach towels in the bathroom and began settling Mason in his seat for lunch. The maid had been through while they were out, snapping covers at perhaps the very same moment the seal’s guardian had been snapping at them, and already the crisp white order she’d created was being undone and Mulliganized. Vicki was a perfect slob on vacation; it was difficult to be in her room.

  “You’re sure you don’t just want to eat at the bar with Cindy?” Caryn asked.

  “Positive. What if that woman tracks us down? She did sort of give me permission, though, right? I mean, God, I knew it was technically against the rules, but we weren’t hurting him, were we?”

  “I would never hurt a seal,” Brittany vowed solemnly.

  “I’m just so mortified. I always do the right thing. Okay, most of the time, don’t I?”

  “Of course you do. Listen, I feel bad about Cindy. I’m going back down there. You’ll be okay, right?”

  “Oh, don’t worry about me. Just don’t tell people, okay? It’s too embarrassing.” She was close to crying, her homecoming cheeks bright pink. “I can’t believe I was so stupid.”