Shorecliff

by Ursula Deyoung

  The two Delias were fond of building sandcastles. They constructed forts, palaces, villas, once even the Taj Mahal. Proudly they pointed out similarities between their lumpy creations and the sources of their inspirations. Delia Ybarra insisted on using the wettest sand, and so the two of them could usually be found at the edge of the water, piling up bulwarks against the oncoming tide and shouting with happy dismay when the icy waves burst through their walls and flooded the castles’ moats. The rest of us liked the Delias best when they were at the shore. Too often they retreated into their own world of giggles and gossip, but at the beach they played in our midst, and we could run up to tease them or throw water on them, knowing we would receive good-humored smiles in return. Occasionally they even let us dig a trench for them or strengthen a rampart.

  One blustery morning, the day after a storm of near-hurricane proportions had kept us prisoners in the house for an entire afternoon, we trooped to the shore, hoping that the water would calm down after a few hours of sunlight. The older girls lay in decorous poses on the dry sand at the top of the beach, and the boys ran footraces and tossed a ball back and forth. Fisher wandered up onto the dunes, where the grass, tall and coarse, whipped against one’s legs like birch canes. The two Delias, undaunted by the towering waves, headed toward the waterline to begin their latest project, a miniature version of the palace at Versailles. They made a picturesque couple as they trotted down the beach, Delia Ybarra in a bright red bathing suit that tied around her neck and contrasted with her black curls, Delia Robierre in a yellow suit barely distinguishable from her tan skin and light brown hair.

  Versailles did not fare well under the Delias’ hands. The force of the water was too strong for their sloppy walls, and the foundations they kept laying out dissolved with every fresh wave. The girls rapidly became frustrated, and Francesca chose that moment to turn on her matronly manner. It was clear to the rest of us that she acted the mother only for the pleasure of exerting authority. She was too absorbed in her own existence and too blithely confident that everything would turn out all right ever to be genuinely concerned that we might be injured or lost.

  Catching sight of the Delias framed by a menacing wave, she propped herself up on her elbows and called, “Delia and Delia! The waves are too big. Come away from the water.”

  Delia Ybarra, without hesitation, armed herself for war. She stood over the feeble beginnings of Versailles, her hands on her hips, and shouted, “How would you know? You haven’t been near the water, you sissy!” As part of her defiance she took several steps backward, and a wave nearly toppled her. Delia Robierre, remaining faithfully by her side, hung onto her arm and looked nervously behind them. Both of the girls were already shivering.

  The ball game stopped, and the older cousins—with the exception of Fisher, who was still up on the hill—gathered around Francesca. A fight was cause to drop everything and watch.

  “I’m not joking, Delia!” Francesca called, standing up and cupping her hand to her mouth. There was no need to do this—she was just theatrically emphasizing the strength of the wind.

  “Neither am I!” Delia roared.

  “Come here right now, you little brat! Or I’ll come down there and drag you out by force!”

  A mischievous smile crossed Delia’s lips. “I’d like to see you try,” she said, and turned around to splash as fast as she could into the next wave. There was a moment of confusion. Delia Robierre, after a useless lunge after her, retreated to the water’s edge and started jumping up and down, calling, “Delia! Delia, come out!”

  Delia Ybarra’s head surfaced after a few seconds, her black hair dripping onto her forehead. The wave had dazed her. Then the undertow grabbed her legs and whirled her out to sea. Pamela and I, lurking behind the older cousins, were so terrified at the speed with which she rushed into the water that we joined hands and remained linked for the rest of the crisis. Beyond the breaking surf, we could see Delia’s black head bobbing for an instant and a white hand flailing beside it. Then another wave engulfed her.

  For one dull moment no one moved and our minds refused to work. It couldn’t be true, we thought. It wasn’t really happening. But it was, and Delia Robierre proved it by turning around with her face red and crumpled and her hands held out. “Somebody save her!” she sobbed, her teeth chattering. After that, the situation became sickeningly real.

  Cordelia was whisked away so rapidly that within seconds her face was only a white blur, though even from the shore I could see her desperate efforts to swim toward us and then her head swiveling as the next gigantic wave rolled over her. Much of the time, because of these waves, she was lost to view. But Delia Robierre mirrored her panic, and her fear is what remains most vividly in my memory. She was in such agony that she kept dancing in and out of the water, as if she were being pulled by a cord toward her cousin. After her one plea for help, she kept her back to us, crying for Delia over and over again. Her pain was made all the more unbearable by the fact that she was screaming her own name.

  I stared at her and at Cordelia’s tossing hands, my whole body trembling with hysteria. Pamela stood beside me, her fingers digging into mine; later I discovered that she had drawn blood.

  The older cousins had been thrown into confusion by Delia Robierre’s cry. Yvette held her hands to her cheeks and shouted incessantly, “Come back, come back!” Francesca, suddenly plunging into action, took a few determined steps forward. But Isabella grabbed her arm. “You can’t!” she said, her voice wobbly with distress. “You know you’re terrible at swimming through big waves. We’ll lose you too!” Then she turned to her brother. “Tom!” she cried. “Go on out there. You’re our best swimmer. Go now—quickly!”

  But Tom wore the same crumpled red face his sister Delia was wearing. He didn’t show it to us at first. Then he turned his head, and we saw the tears streaming into his mouth. “I can’t go!” he said, his voice cracking. “Somebody else save her. Please, somebody save her!”

  Afterward I remembered this moment with awe—the great, invincible Tom, who had honored us by giving up a walk with Lorelei to spend a day at the beach, collapsed in tears. He was so distraught that no one thought of pressing him further, but his appeal to the others made my terror rise to an intolerable pitch. I was convulsed by sobs when I heard Philip say, “It’s okay, Tom. Don’t worry about it. I’m going.” He had stripped off his shirt and was already knee-deep in the water.

  “But you’re a worse swimmer than Tom!” Isabella exclaimed.

  “Do you think I’m going to let my sister drown?” He spoke over his shoulder, his voice loaded with hostility. She didn’t answer, and he stepped forward and was immediately buffeted by an oncoming wave.

  Philip’s lithe brown body was not built to withstand an ocean stirred up by a storm, and he lost his agility in the water. It made no sense that he, of all the older cousins, was the first to go out to Delia, but he had spoken with such assurance that the rest were temporarily immobilized. Isabella stared at him as he flailed in the waves and then put an arm around her sister, whose voice, hoarse and despairing, was still flying over the water.

  In the end it was Charlie who rescued Cordelia. While Philip battled the surf in front of us, trying to break through into the trough where she was whirling, Charlie took off his shirt and ran down the beach so that he could take advantage of the undertow’s current. Then he plunged in, forging through the water like an elephant shouldering its way through underbrush. He came to Delia, who had exhausted herself by fruitless struggling, and, wrapping one arm around her, dog-paddled to shore.

  When he finally staggered with her onto the beach, we crowded toward them in such a rush that we almost knocked them down. Delia Robierre was the first. Even before Delia Ybarra’s feet left the water, her counterpart had embraced her nearly to the point of suffocation. Charlie tugged them up onto dry sand and then let them fall over each other in earnest. They were soon swamped by the rest of us. Delia, still coughing water, was hugged by Francesc
a, Yvette, even Philip, who had splashed out of the waves with some difficulty. We were giddy from feeling so many emotions in such a short time and hardly knew what we were saying. I hung on to one of Delia’s cold hands, unwilling to push myself forward but also unwilling to let go of my connection with her.

  Through the uproar, however, released at last from the nauseating ache of fear, I kept an eye on Tom and Philip. Neither seemed to be embarrassed by their dramatic failures. After the initial clamor over the rescue, Philip wrapped a towel around his waist and rubbed another through his hair, staring at the sea. Tom, meanwhile, was directing the celebration of Delia’s safety. His tears had disappeared as if they had never been, and the horrible squashed-tomato appearance of his face had vanished. He and Isabella, always the leaders in shows of emotion, were now heading the pack in hilarious joy. The Delias themselves were already laughing, the rush of relief making them all the more exuberant.

  We encountered Fisher halfway to Shorecliff. He called out something about a kingfisher, but his ornithological surprises were lost in the explosion of explanations that greeted him. Unshaken by the emotions we had just lived through, he seemed like an alien creature, strangely calm even after hearing about Delia’s ordeal. His cool blue eyes widened in surprise and sympathy, and he patted her shoulder, but it was nothing to the typhoon of love and relief the rest of us felt.

  The aunts, on the other hand, reacted with a satisfactory amount of panic. They clutched at Delia, who was becoming displeased at so much manhandling, reprimanded Francesca for negligence, and scolded all of us for going to the beach so soon after a storm.

  “It’s a good thing Loretta wasn’t here,” Rose said to my mother over Delia’s head. “She probably would have gone down there with them and been drowned herself.”

  My mother smiled and stroked Delia’s hair. Francesca explained how manfully Charlie had plunged into the water to get Delia, and he stood to one side and blushed. It was odd—before we entered the house, I had been imagining how we would describe Philip’s self-sacrificing efforts or Tom’s flurry of tears. But adults can be disconcertingly concrete. The aunts were concerned with one thing only—Delia’s safety—and they did not care about the other extraordinary events that had accompanied her brush with death. Charlie was the one who had saved her from the sea, and thus, in their eyes, he was the only other cousin who had played an important role. But I was already marshaling the bits and pieces from the shore that had imprinted themselves on my mind: the white smudge of Cordelia’s face in the waves, Delia Robierre’s piercing cries, Tom’s tears, Philip’s struggles—these isolated fragments became my memory of the disaster.

  The aunts were so alarmed by Delia’s near-calamity that they tried to ban us from the shore. The attempt led to a family argument of the type I had encountered on first arriving that summer. Once again the cousins lined themselves along the walls of the kitchen, and once again the aunts ranged themselves around the table. Aunt Edie, luckily for us, was confined to her bed with a headache, and the uncles were on another hunting trip—or maybe they were out visiting Condor.

  Aunt Rose opened the discussion with typical bluntness. “It’s obvious to us,” she said, “that you children are not as responsible as we thought you were. Of course, as the oldest, Francesca ought to have been keeping an eye on you, but we can’t put all the blame on her. You’re all equally guilty—especially you, Cordelia—and none of you are allowed to go down to the shore again unless we’re with you. Is that understood?”

  “That’s not fair!” Isabella cried, staring at her mother with horror in her eyes. “It was an accident—it doesn’t mean we’re not responsible.”

  “Charlie saved me,” said Delia Ybarra. At this point she was enjoying the spotlight cast on her. The terror had worn off, and all that was left was the glamour of nearly dying.

  “Yes, Charlie saved her, which proves that we are responsible,” Francesca said. “Besides, you can’t take the beach away from us. If we can’t go down there and swim, we’ll have absolutely nothing to do and we’ll go insane.”

  “That’s absurd,” Rose snorted. “There are plenty of things to do here. You’re all spoiled and willful, that’s what the problem is. A more disgusting pack of children I never saw. You’re not going.”

  “Now, Rose,” my mother said. She glanced around at us, smiling. “Of course you’re not disgusting, my dears. A little headstrong, perhaps.”

  “Some of us don’t even go in the water,” Yvette said from her corner. In fact Yvette swam often, but she was also skilled in debate and knew that the best tactic was to draw the aunts’ attention away from the water. “I do nothing but sunbathe down there, and there’s nothing dangerous in that.”

  “How about our games?” asked Tom. “The sand is the softest surface around. If we played catch on the grass, we’d get cut up in no time. The shore is the safest place.”

  “And what about Pamela and Richard?” Francesca added, bringing us in without compunction. “You know how they love to go off and collect shells or whatever it is they do. You never go in the water, do you, kids? You’re too scared.”

  “As they should be,” said Aunt Rose.

  “That’s my point,” said Francesca. “They know better than to charge into the ocean. Just because Delia is an idiot doesn’t mean the rest of us should suffer.”

  “I’m not an idiot!” Delia cried. “You were yelling at me, and I was trying to get away from you!”

  “I was telling her not to play so close to the water—wasn’t I? Wasn’t I?” Francesca waved her hands at the other cousins, and they nodded. “If you tell us the beach is forbidden,” she went on, “how are you going to keep us from going?”

  “Let’s not descend to the level of fighting dogs,” Aunt Margery said, frowning at her. “It’s not a question of us keeping you prisoner, Francesca. We’re worried about your safety, as we have to be, being your aunts. You don’t have to snap at us and be rude.”

  “If you don’t want to keep us prisoners, then let us go to the goddamn beach!”

  “Francesca, you are out of line.” Rose stood up and put her hands on the table, looking at us from under lowered eyebrows. “The final word about the shore is that you have betrayed the trust we placed in you. If Loretta were here, she would be taking off her belt right now. Thank God she isn’t and has been spared the terror of hearing that her own daughter nearly drowned.”

  “She wouldn’t be taking off her belt,” Cordelia interrupted.

  Rose, disconcerted, broke off her speech. “What?”

  “I said she wouldn’t be taking off her belt. She never beats us.”

  “That was metaphorical, Delia. The point is I’m glad she’s not here to witness how disgracefully her children are behaving. The final word on the beach—”

  “The final word on the beach,” said my mother, cutting in, “is that you must all give us your solemn words of honor not to go anywhere near the water when there’s an undertow as bad as there was today. Do all of you swear?”

  Aunt Rose was still gaping impotently as we raised our right hands and swore. I don’t think my mother smoothed things over like that simply to gain our adoration, though that was a by-​product of her diplomacy. She realized what Rose on her high ground couldn’t see, which was that if the shore were denied us, a mutiny would not be long in the making. A vision had already sprung up in my head of Francesca sneaking down the stairs at night—or perhaps climbing down a ladder made of sheets from her bedroom window—and loping off to the beach by the light of the moon. The chaos resulting from such a rebellion would be irremediable. My mother the peacemaker had saved the day without allowing Aunt Rose to lose much face. We all admired her for that.

  “Richard,” she added, “it’s especially important that you understand how serious this is. Do you know that if you go in the ocean after a storm, you could drown?”

  I nodded, scowling at her implication that I was young enough to be so abysmally ignorant.

&
nbsp; “Did you see what happened to Delia?”

  “Yes, Mother, I saw it. I’m not a baby. I won’t go near the water unless an older cousin is with me.”

  “The same goes for you, Pamela,” Margery said.

  Pamela nodded. “Richard and I prefer to go crabbing anyway,” she said haughtily. There was something so assured in Pamela’s poise that even though it was preposterously exaggerated, no one laughed when she made statements like that. I was grateful for her dignity because it allowed her to sail through difficult situations with ease, trailing me in her wake.

  The conflict petered out after Pamela’s remark, but I had been struck by my romantic image of Francesca skipping down to the beach in the moonlight. A week or so after the day Delia nearly drowned, I found myself in Tom and Philip’s room, trying ineffectually to impress them. I had covered the topics of my telescope, my books, my position at school (beat-up dreamer, if the truth be known), and my dictionary. They remained unmoved. So I forged ahead: “Do you know what I think would be really neat? If Francesca and a bunch of you snuck out to the beach at night and went swimming in the moonlight. Wouldn’t that be neat, guys? Wouldn’t it?”

  For the first time, Philip raised his head. Tom was more polite about appearing to pay attention to me, but now his eyes focused rather than remaining glazed in thought. “Sneak off to the shore and swim in the moonlight, you young delinquent?” he said. “It takes a criminal mind to think up shenanigans like that at your age.”

  “Sounds good to me,” said Philip shortly.

  “I wonder if Lorelei would come.” Tom murmured this to himself, though both Philip and I heard him.

  “I think that would be a two-person-only venture, then,” Philip said.