On the Gulf

by Elizabeth Spencer

  Then, it was last night, just the night before, that her father had got drunk and made speeches beginning, “To think that a daughter of mine…” Nancy had sat through it all crouched in the shadows on the stair landing, in the very spot where the moss or old seaweed back of the paneling smelled the strongest and dankest, and thought of her mother upstairs, lying, clothed, straight out on the bed in the dark, with a headache and no cover on and maybe the roof above her melted away. Nancy looked down to where her father was marching up to the donkey that said, “If you really want to look like me—Just keep right on talking,” and was picking it up and throwing it down, right on the floor. She cried out, before she knew it—“Oh!”—seeing him do the very thing she had so often meant to do herself. Why had he? Why? Because the whiskey had run out on him? Or because he had got too much of it again? Or from trying to get in one good lick at everything there was? Or because the advice he loved so much seemed now being offered to him?

  But the donkey did not break. It lay there, far down in the tricky shadows; Nancy could see it lying there, looking back over its shoulder with its big red grinning mouth, and teeth like piano keys, still saying the same thing, naturally. Her father was tilting uncertainly down toward it, unable, without falling flat on his face, to reach it. This made a problem for him, and he stood thinking it all over, taking every aspect of it well into account, even though the donkey gave the impression that not even with a sledgehammer would it be broken, and lay as if on some deep distant sea floor, toward which all the sediment of life was drifting, drifting, forever slowly down….

  Beirut! It was the first time she had remembered it. They had said they would take her there, Dennis and Bub, and then she had forgotten to ask, so why think of it right now, on the street uptown, just when she saw Rob Acklen coming along? She would have to see him sometime, she guessed, but what did Beirut have to do with it?

  “Nancy Lewis,” he said pleasantly, “you ran out on me. Why did you act like that? I was always nice to you.”

  “I told them to tell you,” she said. “I just went to ride around for a while.”

  “Oh, I got the word, all right. About fifty different people saw you drive off in that Cadillac. Now about a hundred claim to have. Seems like everybody saw those two characters but me. What did you do it for?”

  “I didn’t like those Skeltons, all those people you know. I didn’t like those sorority girls, that Teenie and Cootie. You knew I didn’t, but you always took me where they were just the same.”

  “But the point is,” said Rob Acklen, “I thought you liked me.”

  “Well, I did,” said Nancy Lewis, as though it all had happened a hundred years ago. “Well, I did like you just fine.”

  They were still talking on the street. There had been the tail of a storm that morning, and the palms were blowing. There was a sense of them streaming like green flags above the low town.

  Rob took Nancy to the drugstore and sat at a booth with her. He ordered her a fountain Coke and himself a cup of coffee. “What’s happened to you?” he asked her.

  She realized then, from what he was looking at, that something she had only half noticed was certainly there to be seen—her skin, all around the edges of her white blouse, was badly bruised and marked, and there was the purplish mark on her cheekbone she had more or less powdered over, along with the angry streak on her neck.

  “You look like you fell through a cotton gin,” Rob Acklen continued, in his friendly way. “You’re not going to say the rain over in New Orleans is just scalding hot, are you?”

  “I didn’t say anything,” she returned.

  “Maybe the mosquitoes come pretty big over there,” he suggested. “They wear boxing gloves, for one thing, and, for another—”

  “Oh, stop it, Rob,” she said, and wished she was anywhere else.

  It had all stemmed from the moment down in the French Quarter, over late drinks somewhere, when Dennis had got nasty enough with Bub to get rid of him, so that all of Dennis’s attention from that point onward had gone exclusively to Nancy. This particular attention was relentless and direct, for Dennis was about as removed from any sort of affection and kindness as a human could be. Maybe it had all got boiled out of him; maybe he had never had much to get rid of. What he had to say to her was nothing she hadn’t heard before, nothing she hadn’t already been given more or less to understand from mosquitoes, people, life-in-general, and the rain out of the sky. It was just that he said it in a final sort of way—that was all.

  “I was in a wreck,” said Nancy.

  “Nobody killed, I hope,” said Rob.

  She looked vaguely across at Rob Acklen with pretty, dark blue eyes that seemed to be squinting to see through shifting lights down in the deep sea; for in looking at him, in spite of all he could do, she caught a glimmering impression of herself, of what he thought of her, of how soft her voice always was, her face like a warm flower.

  “I was doing my best to be nice to you. Why wasn’t that enough?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “None of those people you didn’t like were out to get you. They were all my friends.”

  When he spoke in this handsome, sincere, and democratic way, she had to agree; she had to say she guessed that was right.

  Then he said, “I was having such a good summer. I imagined you were, too,” and she thought, He’s coming down deeper and deeper, but one thing is certain—if he gets down as far as I am, he’ll drown.

  “You better go,” she told him, because he had said he was on his way up to Shreveport on business for his father. And because Bub and Dennis were back; she’d seen them drift by in the car twice, once on the boulevard and once in town, silenter than cloud, Bub in the back, with his knees propped up, reading a magazine.

  “I’ll be going in a minute,” he said.

  “You just didn’t realize I’d ever go running off like that,” Nancy said, winding a damp Coca-Cola straw around her finger.

  “Was it the party, the one you said you wanted to give? You didn’t have to feel—”

  “I don’t remember any party,” she said quickly.

  Her mother lay with the roof gone, hands folded. Nancy felt that people’s mothers, like wallpapered walls after a hurricane, should not be exposed. Her father at last successfully reached the donkey, but he fell in the middle of the rug, while Nancy, on the stair landing, smelling seaweed, asked herself how a murderous child with swollen jaws happened to mention love, if love is not a fever, and the storm-driven sea struck the open reef and went roaring skyward, splashing a tattered gull that clutched at the blast—but if we will all go there immediately it is safe in the Dupré house, because they have this holy candle. There are hidden bone-cold lairs no one knows of, in rock beneath the sea. She shook her bone-white hair.

  Rob’s whole sensitive face tightened harshly for saying what had to come next, and she thought for a while he wasn’t going to make it, but he did. “To hell with it. To absolute hell with it then.” He looked stricken, as though he had managed nothing but damaging himself.

  “I guess it’s just the way I am,” Nancy murmured. “I just run off sometimes.”

  Her voice faded in a deepening glimmer where the human breath is snatched clean away and there are only bubbles, iridescent and pure. When she dove again, they rose in a curving track behind her.