by Toby Olson
She said she liked my eagerness, my little sounds, when I kissed her. She gave me anemones that she had saved up for. I gave her a black, domed pearl button she had admired on a frock of mine. I liked to put my knee between her thighs when we were sleeping. I liked the narrowness of the bed. She told me stories about her childhood in great detail while we were drifting off.
I dabbed her tears away with Kleenex and kissed the places where the drops had rested. I liked the way her breath smelled when we awakened. She gave me her wedding ring to wear on my thumb. I gave her salted peanuts in small packages. I opened the packages with my teeth and handed them to her. I liked her smile, a little cockeyed, and her even teeth. She told me she liked my toes, and she did the little piggie game for me. I gave her some peace of mind, I think. She liked to comb my hair out by the window. We liked to walk together in the courtyard, making no show of affection but enjoying the looks of the others who knew about us. We liked it that they really didn’t know anything at all. She gave me kisses in the palms of my hands.
I gave her a picture of myself to carry in her pocket. I cut the man out of it with scissors. She liked to brush against me secretly in public. I enjoyed it when she lifted me off the bed and sat me up. I rocked her in my arms when she got sick and fearful. We had secret names for each other, different ones we didn’t think were silly. I gave her pieces of hard candy. She told me she was in love with me and made a small occasion out of saying it. I liked the feel of the thickness of her ankles, holding them when I rubbed her feet. We liked to stand together at the window. She gave me a hanky she had embroidered: a crewelwork crown of red vines and a small blue flower in the corner. I gave her a peach when I got it. She said she liked the way my teeth felt under my tongue. She gave me a felt bookmark with a prayer on it. I liked to look up and see her listening hard when I read to her. She mouthed the words of repeated passages. She fluffed the pillows for me.
She said she wasn’t afraid of dying anymore, when she got close to it, because she had known me. We cried together when she said that. I gave her wet washcloths for her forehead when she started to get fevers. We liked to hold hands in bed like schoolgirls and giggle. She liked to cradle me in her arms. We chewed the same pieces of gum; I used her toothbrush, and she used mine. There were times we washed each other with our tongues, wiping each other down with a dry towel afterward. I put a wet towel, heavy with water, on her stomach sometimes to ease her pain. I liked to call her Little Baby, though she was bigger than I was. She called me Honey and Sweetheart in very natural ways and without blushing. I gave her a bar of soap, lavender and hard milled. She gave me serious God-bless-yous when I sneezed. She liked to wear my underwear tight against her body and walk around. I slept with pieces of her underwear between my thighs. I wiped her after she had relieved herself when she got weak and sick. I took nothing from her that she did not wish to give.
She gave me a pretty garter she had made from a broken bra strap and a piece of lace. I gave her warm milk laced with nutmeg when she woke in the night in pain. I liked the way she smiled up from under her half-closed lids. She said she wished things had been otherwise, and I needed to hear it. We liked to talk about imagining cooking for each other, whole meals eaten by candlelight, with fresh fruit and cheese for dessert and cool white wine. She tore a fingernail, and I sucked the blood away. She gave me a barrette with a small enameled bird on it. We sang each other to sleep. I gave her whatever I could bear to give to her, which was everything. She asked for nothing. And she opened the floodgates of my heart.
Seaview
THEY CAME UP FROM BEHIND THE CLUBHOUSE IN THEIR two motorized carts. There was a brief line up in front of them. Eddie Costa, who was their fourth and carried his sticks, had made it through, and they could see him above the crowd now as he trudged up past the putting green and toward the first tee. When the Chair reached the cart in front of him, he locked his brake and got out, leaving Campbell sitting in the passenger seat. He went to the back and got a seven-iron out.
The thick and ragged line of beachgoers numbered in the hundreds. Some carried signs and the makings for signs: free beach, free the skin beach, freedom now, etc. Men, women, and children, some in swimming suits, others in street clothes, young women in long colorful gowns, men in old army fatigue jackets. None seemed aggressive, but there was no break in their mass, and the carts couldn’t get through. A Seaview Township police cruiser was parked along the clubhouse side of the road, and a young officer stood beside it, involved with a group of golfers. They were talking about the look of some of the women passing by. When the Chair got to the side of the front cart, he rapped his seven-iron against the tire.
“Let’s get the hell on with this,” he said, and he walked over to the cruiser and began talking heatedly with the young officer, pointing over at the crowd with his golf club as he talked. After a few moments, the officer nodded, pushed off the side of the cruiser where he was leaning, and walked over to the crowd. The Chair walked over with him, but halfway there the officer stopped and motioned for the Chair to move away. He returned to his cart, jammed his seven-iron into his bag, and got in. In the cart behind him, Allen could hear him speak.
“This is some damn business; this is some crap!” Allen turned to Melinda and smiled, and she smiled also.
The officer stopped the line briefly, and the four carts started up and then moved their way through to the other side. The first two turned off and headed for the fifth tee. The Chair and Allen steered theirs over to the first. Eddie Costa was waiting for them, sitting with legs crossed on the park bench to the side of the tee.
“What kept you,” he said. He said it dryly, and he was not smiling.
“Some crap,” the Chair said. “Okay, okay, let’s get going boys, let’s go.”
The tournament was a metopolitan scramble, and the Chair had selected the teams the night before. He had needed an A, B, C, and D player for each. He’d figured himself for B, and he had put Commander Wall down for his C. But Wall had called in the morning, something had come up about hang-gliders and motorcycle gangs. Allen had come in and signed up on the previous morning, listing himself as a scratch player. The Chair had liked the way he looked and had selected him for his team. Art Campbell was a tourist who had not played at Seaview before either. He’d said he wasn’t very good. The Chair had figured him for a twenty-three handicap. Eddie Costa had been his substitute for Wall. The rules for the metropolitan were simple. Each player drove from the tee, and then the team selected the best drive of the four. The other three players then picked up their balls and brought them to the place of the drive they had selected. Then all four hit second shots from that place and again selected the best ball. This way of playing continued right through the putting that finished each hole.
Melinda stayed in the cart when the others got out and began organizing their gear for play. The sun was hard and bright, but there were a few heavy dark clouds coming in, and large shadows were falling in various places down the fairway. The sun hit Melinda’s face, and it was clear, both because of her posture and the chalk whiteness of her skin, that she was not well. Only Allen looked at her. The others were embarrassed by her presence, because of her ill look and the fact of the oddness of her being there at all. This was the way men had behaved toward her when she had started to work on her father’s boat. But she had no urge to somehow go below and write or draw now, and she just sat in the cart. When the Chair had first seen her in the cart with Allen, he had started to object, thinking that to bring one’s wife along was unprofessional, but her look had prevented him from speaking out.
From where she sat she could see across the golf course toward the lighthouse and the cliff. She felt in the way the men excluded her a kind of comfort and freedom from them, and she gave her attention to those things in the distance.
The line of beachgoers had turned at the lighthouse and were moving in the seaside rough of the sixth fairway, down over the edge of the cliff, heading for the beach below
, halfway between the lighthouse and the Air Station property. Their line had thinned out, but it was long and continuous, and there didn’t seem to be any end to it. The women in the line stood out sharply in their colorful clothing, and those who wore only swimming suits had bodies that were tanned, hard, and shapely, and the men in the line tended to recede and pale in the comparison.
As women in the line reached the cliff’s edge, some would pick up small children, holding them in their arms as they started down. The hair of some of them lifted and caught the light as they stepped over and descended. The signs and the sign makings that were carried flapped like injured birds might, and the line seemed to get slightly frenetic just before it dipped over the edge. There were men carrying outdoor cooking implements, and some carried long objects wrapped in tarps. The people wearing street clothes (she could see four of them, three men along the line, one woman now stepping over the edge) seemed as if they had been transported here from another activity. They were not wearing skuff-arounds but garments they might have used for business. Three men, it looked like in slacks and jackets. One wore a snap-brimmed hat. The woman stepping over the edge was dressed in a tailored suit. Details from old post cards from a time when people dressed up even for the beach.
As the players organized their clubs and balls, they were all watching. Four figures appeared along the line carrying a large boxlike object, two on either side at the rear, two in the front. It looked like a casket, and the four stumbled, holding the line up behind them, and pulled back and forth against the smooth possible rhythm of carrying the object gracefully, the box bobbing and tilting. At the edge, they got some help in going over, but the object tilted up precariously anyway, and sunlight flashed momentarily off what seemed to be the object’s black-lacquered underside before it slipped and disappeared, the front end halfway over and held back from crashing down by the rear men before it went out of sight. The four players around the carts had gotten fixed in their looking, their hands coming to rest on club heads and golf bags, but a slight cough from Melinda broke the concentrated effort, and they began to move again, back into their efforts.
“Better hit off now,” the Chair said quietly, and Campbell moved up to the markers, stuck his tee in the ground, and put his ball on it. He hit and dubbed his shot, squirting the ball out low so that it struck the hill about forty yards from the tee, bounced high, and disappeared over the rise and into the beginning of the hard-edged shadows that stained the fairway, to where the green sat, higher than the tee, still alive and shining bright in the sun, its red flag limp along the flagstick. Not even the Chair had energy to say an appropriate thing, and as Campbell shook his head and picked up his broken tee, they avoided looking at him. Eddie Costa moved to the markers, teed up, and hit and sent his ball, straight but short, thudding it into the side hill, a good seventy-five yards from the apron. They all saw the ball hit and stick, imbed and make a wound at the sharp edge of a shadow in the sunlight. The Chair hit a fair shot also, but his was a little high, and it suffered in distance, winding up only a few yards in front of Costa’s. He rapped his club on the tee, driving the head into the grass, almost imbedding it, but he did not speak, and he moved back, offering the area to Allen.
The closer Allen got to the markers to get ready to hit, the more vertigo he felt. It was something about angles. The tee was a little cockeyed and was not perfectly flat. Instead of its rectangle pointing directly at the green, it was wrenched off at a slight angle, and a ball hit straight from it would go into the heavy rough to the right. The markers pointed that way, and the one on the left was perceptibly lower than the one on the right. The hills in the fairway, and the green too, seemed slightly tilted; the flagstick did not stand straight, and under the large geometric shadows, though they seemed to try hard to right the tilting, could be seen into with concentrated effort, and under them the ground bent in wrong ways. He tried to shake it off by figuring it, judging the last hill before the flag against the green’s surface, but he was not sure of his judgment, and when he hit his three-wood he could not be certain of sending the ball out correctly. He hit it straight, but he had overcompensated, and the ball landed to the left of the green, rolled past the maw of the trap on that side, and pulled up, he thought, a little short.
“A very good hit, we’ll play that one,” the Chair said, but without much enthusiasm in his voice.
Allen replaced his three-wood in the bag and got into the cart next to Melinda.
“Was that a good shot?” she said.
“Not particularly,” he said. The cart’s foot pedal was jumpy; it lurched off, sending Melinda’s head and shoulders back, and he stopped the cart and looked over at her, putting his hand on her shoulder. She said she was okay, and he helped her settle in better. He eased the pedal down, and the cart moved off more smoothly. The other cart was halfway down the path to the green. Eddie Costa had walked to his ball and dug it out of the embankment with his pocket knife. The sky was darkening. It looked like it might rain, and where the sun came through it was as if through incisions in the sky, throwing the dark shadows down even sharper.
He cut from the cart path, heading off toward the left of the green where the other cart now waited, the two men still sitting in it. Costa was looking over the line from Allen’s ball to the hole. He pulled up and saw that he had, indeed, passed the trap, and that there was an open and flat chip to the hole, the ball back about ten yards on the short apron. There was a good twenty yards of green to work with, the pin cut back and right, and beyond the pin about ten more yards of flat green. On the other side of the green there was some rough, and then the cart path, and beyond that and slightly elevated from where they were, the tee for the second hole. The Chair put a marker beside Allen’s ball, lifted it, and handed it to him. Campbell hit his chip too strongly, blading it slightly, and it scooted past the pin to the left and rolled over the jagged lip and into the rough backing the green. Costa, with his odd stance, struck the ball cleanly, rolling it up to within three feet of the pin on the near side. The Chair chipped close also. Allen figured that they were close enough, and he missed his shot, hitting it fat, and wound up short of the other two. They selected Costa’s ball to putt. Campbell missed the putt. Costa sank it. They took a birdie three on the first hole.
Now the darkness was getting serious. Rain threatened but seemed to tease and hold back. There was very little breeze, but what there was was chilling, and Allen got his slicker out of his golf bag and put it around Melinda’s shoulders. She hunched her body slightly, sliding down deeper in the seat. She seemed smaller. Allen was careful to avoid bumps on his way over to where the cart path paused beside the second tee. He got out, looked questioningly at her; she nodded to reassure him, slumped down further in the cart, and he went to the back to get his driver and walked with the three men to the surface of the tee. When he got there he saw the way the par five dropped off in the distance, noted the slight dog leg and the green off to the left and far away. He saw the Jenny Lind tower and the three domes of the Air Force Station. A little up the hill in the right rough, about halfway between it and the tower, he saw a strange, wooden-looking object. It was nothing he could place, and he squinted but could not make it out. When Campbell hit a fair shot, a little high with a slice in it, but far enough to get over the downslope of the rough and make the edge of the fairway, Costa and the Chair watched the ball, and when it landed it was on a line with the tower and the strange object below it.
“What the hell is that thing?” Costa said, pointing in the direction of the tower. “What is that?”
“That was never there,” the Chair said. “I can’t quite make it out, Eddie. Let’s hit and go down and check it.”
When Allen hit, he picked the line of the object and the tower above it. They were very high up, and he knew that he could get past the dog leg with what looked from here as no more than a nine-iron to the green. Such an easy hole, he thought. He clicked smoothly through the ball, jumping it out and up. It mo
ved straight off the screws, and when it landed it rolled only a few feet up the embankment toward the rough, stopping in the fairway near the red one-fifty marker, on a line with the object and the tower above it.
“That was one hell of a shot,” Costa said and smiled at him. Then they got in their carts and headed down, Costa trailing on foot behind them. Allen noticed that Costa was limping slightly when he and Melinda passed him.
As they descended, it was as if they were entering an inverted, groined dome. The trees and the hills on either side seemed to climb up around them. There was no sunlight in the fairway they headed for. It got colder as they descended, but the trees and the configuration of the land were natural protections against the breeze, and what they entered felt like a damp cavern.