by Laura Ruby
“Yes,” says Tate, glancing at the girl in green. “Women are like that.”
Ashleigh is talking. Something about a lifeguard, and dinner, and a party afterward.
“So?” she says. “Can I go?”
“Right now?”
“No, next year,” she says. “Yes, now! Dominic is off duty at five and wants to take me to this restaurant he knows.”
Tate eyes the lifeguard. Instinctively, he sucks in his stomach, then, feeling foolish, releases it. “Which restaurant?”
“How do I know? And who cares?”
Tate waves his hand. “Fine, fine,” he says. “Just tell Dominic the lifeguard that he needs to have you back at the beach house by eleven. Do you know the address?”
Ashleigh recites the address and the house phone number. “Okay?” she says.
“Okay. Just keep your cell phone on.”
She yanks some shorts out of a canvas bag and steps into them, one foot, the other foot. “You’re not going to, like, call me in the middle of my party, are you?”
“I will if you’re late.”
Ashleigh rolls her eyes, her gaze settling on the girl in the lime bikini. “You should probably go back to the beach house now. Renee will probably make you some snail-slime salad or whatever.”
Tate plays it casual, doesn’t look at the girl on her rainbow towel. “I’ll go in a bit. I like the beach in the late afternoon,” he says.
Ashleigh’s lip curls. “Yeah,” she says. “I bet.”
He sends the boys back to the water for one last swim and settles back into the sand chair. Except for Green and for Tate, the beach is empty. It’s safe for whatever might happen to happen. The girl in the green bikini is smiling, smiling, smiling, and untying her bikini top, and he will get another glimpse of something secret and delicious from a girl who isn’t alarmed, who isn’t looking to go anywhere. Except there’s something blocking his view, some boy in his way, some blond boy in blue swim trunks, who is not just blocking his way but is walking toward the girl in the lime bikini, dropping to his knees on the rainbow-striped towel, and grabbing the girl around the waist. They fall to the towel, giggling. The boy pulls an orange blanket over them, the lime bikini top tossed out onto the sand, where it curls like seaweed. There is frantic, frenzied motion under the blanket. The moans carry in the wind.
This is a family beach, Tate thinks. A family beach!
His cell phone saves him. He fishes it out of the canvas bag. “Hello?”
“Hey, you,” Roxie says. “How’s the beach?”
“Fine,” says Tate. We’re all fine. Lime green bikini bottoms fly out from under the blanket.
“You sound a little funny. Are you coming down with a cold?”
“No, no,” he says. More firmly, “No.”
“That’s good. Are you guys having fun?”
The orange blanket moves rhythmically. “Yeah,” Tate says. “We’re having a great time.” He realizes that he is no longer a man, he is a dog. A voyeur dog, the dog next door. He adds, “Wish you were here.”
“Really?” says Roxie. “Too bad you didn’t ask me to come.”
“I should have,” he says.
She’s silent for a moment. “Yeah, you should have. But you didn’t.”
“Next time I will.”
“What are you saying?” she says.
He turns away from the undulating blanket, from the ocean. He doesn’t know what he’s saying. He’s not saying anything. What is there to say? He doesn’t want to marry Roxie. He doesn’t want her to meet his extended family, the high-maintenance, emotionally crippled parade. He likes things the way they are, Roxie in one corner of his life and everyone else in the other. Doesn’t he? Isn’t that what he likes?
“Tate?” She sighs then. “Tate, look. Don’t worry.”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t worry about me getting too serious.”
“I wasn’t—”
“Yeah, you were. I’m not stupid, Tate.”
“I never said you were,” he says stupidly.
“If it makes you feel any better,” she says, “I have a date tomorrow night.”
“You what?”
“I have another date. I figured you wouldn’t mind. I figured you’d be relieved.” Her laughter sounds fuzzy in the cell phone. “You are relieved.”
Relieved? “Uh, I—”
“I finally get it, Tate. I get that this is a casual thing for you. And you know what? I’m okay with that. I’m not ready for anything serious anyway. I already have one failed marriage under my belt, I’m not looking for another one. I’m really not.”
“Oh,” he says. All he can think to say. He risks a glance. The orange blanket is still. That was quick, Tate thinks nastily.
“Well, I didn’t expect to be talking about this today, but I’m glad we did,” Roxie says. “Liv is here, so I should go. But I’ll try to call you tomorrow.”
“Right,” says Tate. “Have fun on your date.”
There’s a pause, and then: “Geez, Tate.”
“Geez yourself,” he says. “Bye.”
“Tate . . . I . . . Okay. Bye.”
He flicks the phone shut and tosses it back into the canvas bag. Then he takes off the sunglasses and throws them into the bag. If he’d had anything else to throw, he would have thrown that, too.
When he finally looks up again, the girl is back in her lime green bikini, a huge grin stretched across her face. The blond boy nods, shouts, “Like the show, old man?”
It’s one A.M., and Ashleigh still isn’t answering her phone. Glynn wants to know why Tate would allow Ashleigh to go out with some strange boy in the first place.
“First you tell me she’s too old, and now you’re telling me she’s too young,” Tate says.
“Too old for a baby-sitter, too young to be out with marauding strangers, yes.”
“Marauding? What do you mean, marauding?”
“Isn’t that what you’re worried about? Isn’t that why you’re upset she’s not home?”
Tate’s father, still up, still swirling amber liquid in a glass, grins at him. “I seem to remember worrying about the same thing when you’d go out.”
“Not now, Dad,” says Tate.
“What? A man can’t worry about his son?” He booms the word son. As a matter of fact, he’s always boomed the word son, as if it were never a sure thing.
“Dad?”
“Yes?”
What comes out of Tate’s mouth is not what he’d intended to say. “Do you know . . . do you have any idea if my father, the biological one, was ever a smoker?” He does not look at Glynn when he says this.
“I think he was. Why?”
Tate licks his lips and notices that they are raw and sore, burned in the sun. “No reason. I just don’t remember him smoking, that’s all. I . . .” He trails off. There’s something about this, the not remembering, that is bothering him, but he doesn’t know what. Why doesn’t he know?
“Your mother was sure it would turn you and Glynn into human smokestacks. Bad early influence and all that. Speaking of your mother, how is she?”
“Don’t worry about Mom,” says Tate. “You have other things to worry about.”
“Like what?”
“Your drinking.”
“Not you too!”
“Okay, then. Your wife,” Tate says, punching in Ashleigh’s number again.
“My wife,” says Tate’s father. “Yes. She can be worrisome. Or she was. Now I just don’t care anymore.”
“Dad, I’d love to talk to you about Renee, but I’m trying to find Ashleigh right now.”
Tate’s dad grunts. “She’ll come home when she’s ready.”
“What if something’s wrong? What if that moronic lifeguard kidnapped her or attacked her?” He’s sure to say “moronic” and not “marauding.”
“I’m sure she’s fine. She’s just trying to scare you.”
“Why would she need to scare me? Why does ev
eryone keep saying that?”
“Who’s everyone?”
Glynn’s face is so full of worry, so full of genuine concern and real feeling, that it hurts to look at her. “Forget it,” Tate says. “I’m going out to look for her.”
“It’s not going to help,” his father says in that same booming voice, echoing throughout the house. “The time you should have paid attention is over, don’t you know that?”
But Tate is already out the door, already down the street. Instinct takes him the few blocks down to the beach. As he walks toward the water, grit fills his shoes and abrades his skin. There are couples dotting the sand, murmuring in the dark. He has no idea if she’s here, if he’ll be able to find her. He moves from couple to couple, dot to dot, looking for her sherbety hair. He’s about to start shouting her name when he sees the X marking the spot: Ashleigh, spread-eagled on the wet sand, the tides licking her toes. He runs over to her, an awkward, broken lope.
“Ashleigh,” he says, shaking her shoulder.
“What?” she says groggily. She frowns. “Dad? Where’s Dominic?”
“I don’t know,” Tate says. “What are you doing? Are you drunk?”
She pushes his arm away and sits up. “Get off.”
The stink of pot and alcohol mix with the tang of the sea. Her clothes and hair are mussed, disheveled. Anger boils in the pit of his stomach. He didn’t think she could be this reckless, this dumb. “It’s past one in the morning. Where the hell have you been? What the hell have you been doing?”
“Oh, chill out, Dad,” she says. “We were here, like, the whole time.” She scans the beach. “Where did Dom go?”
“I told you to be home by eleven.”
She’s not even looking at him, she’s pulling her cell phone from her pocket, she’s trying to focus on the screen. “How many times did you call me? . . . God. There’s like sixteen missed calls.”
He grips her arm again. “Ashleigh, I asked you a question. What have you been doing? Were you smoking? Drinking? Did you lose consciousness?”
“I was just resting my eyes.”
“And he just left you here? You have no idea what he or anyone else could have done to you,” Tate says.
“I know what he did to me.” She yawns. “I’m so tired. I want to go to bed. Is the house far? I hope you brought the car with you, ’cause I don’t feel like walking.”
“Ashleigh,” he says, “Ashleigh,” as if the sound of her own name might clear her head. “Do you have any idea how dangerous this is?”
“What?” She struggles to her feet. “The tide, you mean? I would have moved out of the way.” She laughs. “Anyway, this isn’t a big deal. Dom’s just a little summer fling.”
He stands, too, searching her face. She’s perfectly serious, she’s perfectly oblivious. That’s what does it, the obliviousness, the blindness, the unbelievable stupidity and self-absorption, that’s the thing. He thinks: We should go to family therapy. That’s what we should do. Shouldn’t we?
He grabs her cell phone from her hand and launches it into the ocean. “You’re grounded.”
She rounds on him, incredulous. “You can’t ground me.”
“Yes, I can.” By the elbow, he yanks her across the beach. Several couples unlock lips to watch.
“Let go of me,” Ashleigh says. “Let go!”
“No.”
“You don’t even care about me! You don’t care about anyone! What are you doing? Why are you doing this?”
He doesn’t answer. He knows a thing or two about therapy, knows about acting as if. A caring man would yank his daughter across the sand. A caring man would ground her. A caring man would put a stop to all of this, right here, right now.
Tate makes like a caring man and drags his wayward, shrieking daughter back to the castle by the sea, where her family waits.
HUG MACHINE
He was a junior capitalist, Lu knew that much. He liked to frame himself in doorways, forearms braced in the jambs shoulder level, hands hanging open and relaxed, broad cheeks and wide-set eyes hinting at Slavic ancestry. Kama Sutra scenarios looped relentlessly through her dirty mind, scenarios impossible for so many reasons: Lu was married, he was engaged, Lu was head-butting forty, he was all of twenty-whatever, and Jesus, who could braid themselves like slipknots without pulling something, anyway? Lust, she thought, was ridiculous, and even more ridiculous in middle age, more oral, more aggressive, an absurd flashback to babyhood. When she looked at him, her mouth watered, every golden inch of this boy a place to sink her teeth.
“I like it,” he said. “But I don’t love it.”
“It” being the tenth condo she’d shown him in three weekends. How he could pull off a new condo before a big wedding, Lu didn’t know, but he seemed confident—an investment, he’d told her. He’d live in it himself for the eighteen months of the engagement, and then he and the wifey—a little slip of a thing Lu had met only once—would buy a house and rent out the apartment. That was the plan: Buy up property, rent it out. He wanted lots and lots of property, didn’t believe the rumors of an impending real estate collapse, or perhaps believed he’d outrun it. Sometimes he took stairs and sidewalks at an easy jog, turning back to look at her as if she were the one with the ball and she need only toss it to him and he’d win the game for everyone.
“The lake view is obscured by that other building,” he said, “and that bathroom. What were they thinking?”
“It’s brand new,” Lu said. “New fixtures, tile, tub.”
“The tub is orange. Who ever heard of an orange tub? Looks like a baby aspirin explosion.”
She realized that he had paused, waiting for her to respond, only after she’d been staring at his belt buckle for a long, delicious half minute. If she yanked on it, he’d peel away from the door hips first. “It’s bad,” Lu said, collecting herself, “but not the worst. You should have seen some of the places I’ve been in. Ducks everywhere.”
He blinked at her with eyes the color of the Blue Grotto. “Ducks? Like real ducks?”
“No, I mean country decorating. Duck borders. Duck wallpaper. Ducks carved into the banisters.” She’d never been in a place where there were ducks carved into the banisters, but what do you say to eyes like that, with them blinking at you? A stacked deck if there ever was one.
He hung his head, then glanced up out of the corners of his Grotto-blues. “Sounds pretty nasty.”
“Nasty is right,” she said, feeling the flush bloom on her cheeks. God, Lu, get a grip!
He smirked one of his little smirks, private and sweet, one that had most likely been wielding power and influence over every female he’d encountered since the sixth grade. “So, where to now?”
“Um . . .” She looked at her clipboard, though she knew exactly what was written there. “There’s a new listing over on Farwell. Neighborhood’s a bit dicey, but it’s up-and-coming.” She flushed again. There. He’d reduced her to middle school. All she needed were the pimples and the high bullet breasts, and the transformation would be complete. “But unfortunately we can’t look at it today because the owners are having some work done.”
“Oh,” he said. He dropped his arms from the wall and slipped his hands in his pockets. “How about next Saturday?”
“I won’t be available to show you around next Saturday. Family event. My husband’s family.” She rolled her eyes and made a waving gesture, a “you know about husbands and their crazy events” gesture, except that he probably didn’t, being that he wasn’t even a husband yet, and why was she rolling her eyes at the mention of her own husband?
“So the Saturday after next?” His blond hair was fine, baby’s hair. Lu wondered if a lover had ever shampooed it for him, if he was old enough to have had someone in his life he called “lover.”
“If you really want to see it next Saturday,” said Lu, “I can make arrangements for another agent to show you.”
The smirk fell away, and he shook his leonine head, a single drop of sweat glistenin
g in the chiseled channel over his lip. “No. I want you to show me.”
“I bet you were doing that thing, too,” said her sister, Annika, later, when Lu met her for drinks by her pool. “That preening thing where you toss back your hair and show your neck. You used to do that in high school.”
“I did not show people my neck in high school.”
“Yes, you did. You must have a thing about birds. That’s how birds mate.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. And I’m not mating.”
“What would you call it?”
“Flirting.”
“You don’t know how to flirt. That’s why you went around showing people your neck.” Annika took a sip of low-cal sangria that they’d made from a Weight Watchers recipe. “Listen to that beautiful sound. You know what that is? The sound of naptime.”
Asleep, Annika’s triplets looked like a band of angels. Awake, they were tumblers from the Cirque du Soleil, only more talkative. “Aren’t they a little old to take naps?”
“Who’s too old for a nap?”
“That’s true.”
Annika pointed a finger. “I hope you’re not tempted to do anything stupid.”
“Of course I’m tempted. The Virgin Mary would be tempted. You would be.” The jeweled drop of sweat had thrown her, that and the sudden loss of high school cool. Lu assumed that this lust was her own private experience, but what if it wasn’t? The reciprocity, even the possibility, unnerved her.
Sex reduced, sex plundered, sex mauled, and it massacred—just look at what people would do to do it, what it did to people who did it. Lu used a spoon to dig out some of the fruit at the bottom of the sangria pitcher, secretly eyeing Annika’s body. But the black bathing suit hid the cesarean scar and stretch marks Annika complained about so much, and the spider veins weren’t as obvious as Annie said they were. Even the few extra pounds she carried gave her an attractive kind of plushness, lush goddess curves. I guess it wouldn’t be so bad, thought Lu. Would it?