On the Gulf

by Elizabeth Spencer

  It was the end of running; that she knew. Like a small planet, she had set.

  Another day, freshly risen, she sat in a newly bought bathing suit on a sandy beach with one leg tucked under her, looking out at the sea. There were huge clouds above her, all the same color as her hair, which made them seem more personal than they might have been to brunettes or redheads.

  There was a boy circling round, a man, really, though younger than Tandy and certainly better to look at. He was all bronze and gold, like a large, well-formed wasp, she thought, as he had the same copper hair on his head, chest, arms and legs. And his drift—the way he spoke to her, looked at her—was something like that of a wasp which might or might not be thinking favorably of you. He asked her if she wanted to swim, and she told him no.

  “You’re getting sunburned,” he said.

  “I’m all right,” she said.

  “Where you staying?”

  “The Hibiscus.”

  “Walk you home?”

  She shook her head, gazing up at the clouds. But he was right. She was getting sunburned. She wished he’d go. She wished he’d leave her alone. Then he did.

  Dottie had told him the truth about the Hibiscus because she had done nothing lately but tell lies. The first night away, for instance, at a bus stop, she had phoned Aunt Hazel so Aunt Hazel wouldn’t call out the F.B.I., or the highway patrol, or whatever you called out, to look for her. She had said:

  “Aunt Hazel, I hope you found the letter I left.”

  What followed was such a volley of words that Dottie felt sorry for Aunt Hazel, who when she got to worrying about things there was no stopping her. “Let me tell you something, honey. It’s just ridiculous for you to go off like that. If Maggie Lee had known you’d be spending all her money at the beach, she never would have left you a dime, let alone five hundred dollars. But there you are throwing it away, five hundred dollars, and with any number of things you really need, and I can’t think of why anybody would be that inconsiderate, as good as Tandy and I have been to you. Why didn’t you at least go see your daddy in Birmingham?”

  “I tried to call him, but he wasn’t there.”

  “You ain’t with anybody?”

  “No’m.”

  “Well, you’d just better mind out,” Aunt Hazel said. And when Dottie didn’t answer she said, “You’ll phone me every night until you get home? I’m going to worry about you every single night.”

  Dottie stayed in the shady little cabin she had rented at Hibiscus Cottages All Conveniences Pool TV. You reached the cabins through winding paved paths bordered by plants and flowering shrubs, shaded by palms. It was a pretty place, and not many people were there. Not that many people came to Key West in the summer, so they said. If you swam in the pool, the water felt like you could just as well take a bath in it. She read some movie magazines, then a paperback mystery book, then made a ham sandwich and ate it, ate a tomato whole with salt, ate some coconut marshmallow cookies, some pink, some white, and drank a glass of milk. Then she lay down and looked at TV and fell asleep with the air conditioner purring. At four o’clock she went walking. It was still hot all over town, hot as an oven, but the clouds had got bigger and from somewhere off she heard a tumble of thunder.

  At the end of a street, she could look at the gulf, and way out there she saw the big clouds piled higher than ever before, the silver color darkening from the top downward. She turned her back on them and walked into town, past houses with plants round them, oleanders, a stubby sort of grass, pale faded green or artificial funeral-parlor bright green, not like the grass up home, and always palms, some bent and low as plants, some real tree-size. The trees she liked the best were—she’d been told by an old lady on the bus coming down—emperor palms. The trunks of the palms were round, swelled out at mid-height but narrow at top and bottom, and looked to be made of stone, with a bunch of thick palm fronds coming out of the top, as though stuck in a too-tall vase. They were pretty trees, Dottie decided, and when the afternoon rain hit Key West and she had no idea which way to go to get back, she went and sat under one of them, at the corner of somebody’s property. It was probably the most dangerous place to be, as the tree was high and would attract a lightning bolt possibly, but its top was waving in such an impressive way she thought she’d rather be here than elsewhere. She crouched there as the rain fell in ropes. Soon she was soaked to the skin.

  When the sun burst out again she started returning by trial and error and so came into the Hibiscus from the back, before she knew it. Standing in the garden, also wet, wearing beige cotton trousers, a tee-shirt and a dripping slicker was the copper-haired boy she had met at the beach. She ran right into him and then seeing it wasn’t just a coincidence, that he was coming toward her, she turned around and started off through the paths. He had to run and catch her arm. She stopped, head down and shuddering, like she’d seen wild animals do in the country the minute some boy would get his hands on them. She drooped like that and didn’t look.

  “What’d you come for?” she said.

  “You’re not from around here, are you?”

  She shook her head.

  “What are you limping about?” he said.

  “Something fell on me.”

  The boy looked around at the maze of paths, the village of cottages spotted out amongst the dripping foliage. “Where’s yours?”

  “Number ten.”

  He was half-holding her up but before he got to the door, he thought it simpler to carry her, and so did. “Give me your key.” She took out the key but, being let down, stood holding herself upright by the door, downcast, still, and tremulous. “Nothing really fell on me,” she said.

  “But you’re hurt, obviously.”

  “I’m crippled.”

  “Is that why you wouldn’t go swimming?”

  “Please,” she said.

  She felt his large warm hand drop from her arm. “Okay.” He drew back, looking at her with a different air altogether. Was she glad or not? She didn’t know. She thought she must have looked terrible after the rain. Like a drowned white rat, she thought, closing the door on him, leaning against it.

  She was still hearing his voice and not answering it. New feeling—fresh, sharp, hurting—had sprung up as though branches of her blood had turned into vines which were determined all by themselves to flourish in her. It was what she thought it would never do any good to look for. She fell face down across the bed. She might have known, but hadn’t. She could have said that in addition to being lame, her mother had died, and that the lawyer Mr. Avery Donelson had sent for her, and that her Aunt Miss Maggie Lee Asquith, well-known in the Delta, had left her a legacy of $10,000, a part of which, in the opinion of Aunt Hazel, she was now throwing away in Florida. She was somebody picked out. Being lame in itself was being picked out. But he wouldn’t see any of that. He wasn’t from where she was. All that travelled with her was a short leg.

  And her white hair, whiter than taffy, born white, said the streak of sun coming through the one slat of blind which had got twisted.

  Late in the afternoon, her hair brushed and combed, face washed, she walked down the main street of Key West, past the big square hotel. She was looking for somewhere to eat and went past a big open bar where a sign said Ernest Hemingway used to sit and drink. Among palms, and near a large spreading tree with red flowers, she saw a brick-red-painted, barn-like building whose sign, also outside, said it was a playhouse. Another sign, of hastily lettered green on white cardboard, said that tryouts for a play were being held. Dottie hobbled to the door and found it open. She went through an empty foyer plastered with posters, and through a second large heavy door into an auditorium with a stage before it and rows of folding chairs, some disarranged, some open and placed in regular lines, others closed and propped against the walls.

  A tall dark woman like the still statue of a goddess, wearing a crumpled linen dress and leather sandals, was standing near the center of the stage, which was lighted artificially, wi
th a large bound sheaf of pages in her hand, open half the way through, back folded on itself. Her hands were long, and tanned, and aware of themselves, her whole self was aware and nurtured, her black hair tumbled the way she wanted it to around her face. She was pointing out to three or four others on the stage with her, younger than she, what they ought to do, what she thought they ought to do, how this, how that. She turned, walked away, leaned back against a table and picked up a half-smoked cigarette from an ashtray, inhaling, pluming smoke; her body gave life to the clinging linen. At the lift of her fingers, the young actors, all about Dottie’s age, holding smaller books, began to read aloud. Dottie hated the large woman of authority in linen and sandals … she was afraid of her by instinct. She turned to go away, but was called to.

  “Hey, blondie!”

  Obedient, not showing what she felt, she turned back and limped forward, down between the raggedly arranged chairs. The woman had come to the footlights, and as Dottie approached, the former went down on one knee, as though kneeling by the edge of a pool to retrieve something. She did it like poetry. Dottie’s face was a mask, looking up at her.

  “You want to try out? What can you do?”

  “Sing,” said Dottie.

  “Sing what?”

  The boys were talking now, over the footlights, the words falling toward her lifted face: “Rock?” “Revival?” “Country Western?”

  “Just sing,” Dottie said. “Popular mostly.”

  “There’s all kinds of popular,” one of the boys said. “But, hey—stick around. We expected more people…. Take a script.”

  “Take mine,” another boy said.

  “You know this play? It’s Picnic. There’s a song in it somewhere, at least I think there is.”

  “Or we’ll put one in,” somebody said, and another: “She looks like Kim Novak.”

  “I’m crippled,” Dottie said, right out. “I can sing, that’s all.”

  There was a quick silence, like a whole orchestra gone dead. Then they reached their arms down and pulled her up over the footlights, out of the dark and onto the bright stage. She hobbled over to the piano and a girl about her age came and sat down to play for her. She sang one of the songs she liked, and they clapped, saying with astonished voices how wonderful she was, and she knew it, too.

  She had bought herself a little cap, like a sailor’s cap, at an open air shop along the way where things were all displayed, and when she sang her song she held this in her small hands and knew it made a good effect. When they shot a spotlight on her face she didn’t mind a bit. A sissy boy at school used to turn his spotlight on her: she was used to it. Her face and voice went floating away from her legs, off from the part they could forget while she sang. She heard them applaud again and she heard what they said and then she sang again and told them that was all.

  The light switched off. The large woman seemed to her to have gone completely, but this was not so; she had gone out of the circle of light to sit on the edge of a table.

  Then they were leaving. Dottie was moving with them, or they with her, as she was not going with them in spirit, but only moving alone though among them, through the disarray of chairs in the big dusky barn-like room, and feeling not so far from home, for it resembled the high school auditorium where she had held many more people for an even longer time. She heard them speaking to her but was not answering; and then the daylight struck through the second door they opened, not glaring as when she had entered, but softened by evening. There was a car freshly pulled up behind the yellow Pontiac which had been parked there when Dottie went in, and the boy was in it, the one from the beach and the storm, just getting out when he saw them come through the door. She saw him get out, turning as he closed the door the way she had seen good basketball players turn without seeming to move at all, the way dancers follow each other. He was there for them, she knew at once: his approach said so. And she knew too why she had been afraid of the dark woman.

  Dottie left the crowd and walked across the street.

  “Hi.” The boy was following her.

  “Hi.” She didn’t stop walking.

  “You’re in the play?”

  “Ask them,” she said and kept limping on.

  The pool was a quiet rectangle with no one swimming in it, and the people who circled, stood, wound, and twined and drank and talked with one another, moved like columns, slowly revolving and changing place, one to another, in long dresses, in white jackets, reflecting in the water. The house was built around this open area, with a balustrade above in white painted wood such as Dottie thought she’d seen in pictures or paintings. There were brick-colored urns of geraniums and a long twining plant with purplish blue blooms as if a head of hair had decked itself that way, and there were others, yellow and pink and white. No one walked on the balustrades, or climbed the stairs. They turned, columnar and decorous, with muted voices, around the still pool. They sipped from glasses that sparkled with amber whisky or white gin on crystal ice.

  “No, thank you,” said Dottie. “Just some water,” she said.

  She refused not from righteousness or inexperience but simply because she was drunk already, having earlier ordered three martinis in a restaurant somewhere near the Hibiscus. Later, she’d been found wandering around the old Spanish fort, jumping off and on the parapet, pretending nothing was the matter with her while all sorts of wild ideas somersaulted through her head—been found by the copper-haired boy and another, his friend.

  In the friend’s car, all of Key West had looped and dived around her like a dolphin. If you got drunk, how long did you have to stay drunk? She was wondering this when the friend stopped before a Spanish-type house and once inside began pulling evening skirts out of a closet.

  “Try any one you want.”

  “You got a sister?” Dottie said.

  “She’s not here. Besides, she wouldn’t mind. She swaps clothes all the time,” he said with a laugh to the boy Dottie knew, the copper-haired boy. Johnny was his name.

  The phone rang and Johnny’s friend went to answer it. Johnny threw his arms around Dottie and tumbled her back on the bed. She lay there a little while with his arms around her. Then they heard the other boy coming back and she got up to try the skirts on. In the long skirt she felt un-crippled. She moved her built-up sandal in a different way, just like her hips were swaying. Pretty, pretty, she thought, looking in the mirror. I can be like magic.

  Then they drove to another house, the big one with the drive. There Dottie saw the dark woman whom in linen she had hated, only she was columnar now, standing by the still pool in a bold drop of yellow with great white wings or fronds and a white binding against the tan of her bare arms and her hair in rich careless coils.

  “They tell me you sing, young lady.”

  The speaker was a man, the host here, with dark thinning hair combed straight back. He smiled at Dottie and showed teeth that looked false.

  “Yes, sir,” she said.

  He asked her where she’d come from, where she went to school, where she wanted to go to college. She must have been saying things back.

  “Can you sing for us?” he said. “Some time this evening, I mean.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, you must,” he said.

  “I got drunk,” Dottie said.

  The beautiful dark head above the bare brown back showed it had heard her and was turning. The carefully painted mask hung perfectly. Dottie wanted to be with people who wouldn’t notice her too much. Nobody would have cared what she said except the dark woman, who was, of course, her enemy, and said nothing.

  Dottie started climbing the flight of stairs. A Cuban-looking man in a white jacket had said she would find the bathroom up there. In passing she saw that a pottery urn filled with bloom was just above the head of the hostess, the dark woman, Pam, the enemy who did not want her to live. Dottie placed her hands, one on either side of the urn, and gazed, calculating, as one might along the barrel of a cousin’s BB gun. She drank up
the possibility of the action as she might another martini. This was what she needed to do, but couldn’t. A door opened off in the shadowy passageway behind her, and she turned, surprised, unable to see anyone.

  Later, coming out of the bathroom, she thought about the urn again but in a distant way. Johnny met her at the foot of the stairs with a banana daiquiri and somebody from above screamed, “Watch out!” They all looked up. An old woman with too-bright blond hair, too scarlet a mouth, was clutching at that same terra cotta urn, and everyone leaped aside as it swung, tottered, slipped past her painted nails and long pink chiffon handkerchief, smashing on the marble paving near the pool.

  “Grandmother!”

  The old woman, like a mad witch entered on a balcony during a play, leaned far out into the velvet air, calling, “I hit it by mistake! It just fell!”

  To Dottie, who could not stop gazing above, it was like seeing herself sixty years from now, a grotesque double. Was it the old lady’s door she had heard a while ago?

  The Cuban, a servant it seemed, was picking up pieces of broken pottery which had scattered near Pam’s skirt. Her husband, whom someone had jerked from the falling urn’s path, mounted the stairs toward the old woman.

  Conversation resumed. There was a drift toward a table of food. Someone remarked that half of Key West was there. Many of them were young, the age of Johnny, more or less.

  I’ll just sneak out, Dottie thought. I’ll go home alone.

  But she didn’t go home alone, because Johnny reappeared to drive her, and not with the boy whose sister’s skirt she wore, but Johnny alone and driving like the wind, racing out from Key West up the long highway that arrowed toward Marathon, then swirling off along back shell roads because he was high on something maybe liquor maybe not and talking a blue streak, and she was piecing it out the best she could, she Dottie Almond, to whom all of life was gradually reducing itself to one single problem: How To Stay Awake Another Minute. The day must have already been sixty-four hours long. She could hear him the way she might hear the sea rustling when asleep by it, or the way you’d hear prayers in church.