Be True to Me

by Adele Griffin

  And he happened to be Carpie Burke’s nephew.

  And he’d be here, oh, any day now.

  Then, while the girls squealed and teased and plied me with questions, I’d unspool every delicious detail—from that first rattle of my heart when he’d clasped my hand and said my name, to the moment we’d kissed good-bye.

  “Here you go. Door-to-door service,” Gil had said when he’d dropped me off at the apartment, his knuckles chucking me lightly under the chin. “What a change from my usual nights, hanging out with other interns. Thanks for a great scene.” He’d hesitated. “Hope I didn’t seem like too much of a hick, around all those prep-school kids.”

  “Oh my gosh, no!” I’d laughed. The idea that Gil could be insecure had seemed outrageous. “You’re not serious, are you?”

  He’d smiled. Then he’d taken my shoulders, tipped me back slightly, stepped forward, and I’d softened into the sudden deep press of his mouth on mine and the glint of his eyes on me when he’d broken away. His voice had been low, for me alone. “But you’ll be my coach, right? You’ll tell me how it all works over there? Uncle Carp’s not the only one relying on you.”

  “Count on me.”

  “I think we’re coming into Sunken Haven a week from tonight.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  There’d been no second kiss. He was too much of a gentleman. I’d watched him amble down the block, his jacket hooked over his shoulder, his stroll unhurried, as if the Upper East Side were merely another country road.

  That was Thursday. Today was Sunday.

  I glanced at Rosamund and Sara.

  No no no. I looked down into the little plastic bucket I’d stuck in the sink. My task today was making a homemade deer repellent—just about the most unromantic chore I could think up. But like tennis, it was one of those mundane tasks that helped me get through the day without spilling a word. Because I couldn’t. I didn’t want the girls to know my heart’s desire. What if Gil got here and had no interest in me, after all? What if he realized that I was nothing special?

  What if I’d misunderstood everything? Too mortifying—it got me dizzy even considering it. I finished unwrapping a bar of lye soap, which I dropped into my bucket along with a few cups of water.

  “Might rain,” Rosamund mentioned in her dreamy voice that didn’t care if it did or didn’t. Her arm cranked the mixing bowl as she strolled past the windows, gazing out at the clouds hanging over the mackerel sea.

  “Can’t you get Mrs. Otis to do that?” Sara asked, without breaking concentration on her pedicure. Her square feet were up on our kitchen island—my mother would have screamed at the sight.

  “Tabasco sauce makes her eyes itch. Deep breath. Here comes the hard part.” I cracked the two rotten eggs.

  The sulfurous stink was immediate—Rosamund, as she layered the cake’s pudding filling, scrunched her nose. “I can’t believe you’re mixing up that dead farts smell while I’m baking a yummy cake!”

  “I’ll be done soon.” Green-onion tops, garlic cloves. A splash of Tabasco so it tasted extra horrible for the rodents. It was darkly funny to watch all the creatures come up to gnaw on the pachysandra—and then scurry off after the first, terrible taste.

  From the hall, the phone rang.

  “I’ll get it, I’ll get it!” I galloped out of the kitchen, through the pantry and dining room, to the front hall.

  Gil hadn’t telephoned, but every time it rang, I hoped.

  Mrs. Otis had beaten me. “No, I’m sorry,” she was saying into the receiver, “Jean’s not in.”

  “I am in, Mrs. Otis!”

  With the flat of her hand, she gestured for me not to interrupt her. Mrs. Otis disapproved of social phone calls in general, for me in particular, and on Sundays most of all. She put a Sunday phone call in the same category as a fire extinguisher: for emergencies only.

  My heart was slamming like I’d already finished a set of tennis warm-ups.

  “Please, Mrs. Otis.” I made a grab for it, caught it, and tugged hard. “Hello?”

  “Jean?”

  Oh, Christmas! That voice. It felt like an eternity since I’d heard Gil’s drawl, with its deep, sleepy hint of Southern magnolia.

  I sank into the hall chair, the receiver clamped under my chin. “Yes. This is she,” I said in my best manners. Gil had seemed to like it when I upheld a certain society style.

  “Gil Burke speaking.” I could hear the chatter-snicks of typewriters in the background. “Sorry to trouble you on a Sunday.”

  I wound the curly phone cord around one finger; with my other hand I nervously rearranged the apple and pear in the bowl of plastic fruit that had sat on our hall console since forever. “No trouble at all!”

  “So here’s what. Uncle Carp wrapped up a case early. We’ve been finishing the paperwork over this weekend, and now he wants to come in Tuesday afternoon. He told me to get hold of Aunt Weeze, but she’s not picking up. I got ahold of this Sunken Haven directory and I found your number and . . .”

  Tuesday! Tuesday was two days away! “Absolutely. We’ll get the message over to her. We see Weeze all the time.”

  “Aw, thanks. Then I’ll cross it off my list. So, how’re you keeping, Princess Funny? How’s the tennis?”

  “Super.” My whole body was trembling. Should I ask Gil if I could meet him dockside Tuesday? It was a tradition, whenever the ferry sailed into harbor, that kids went out to greet the boat—the younger ones even jumped off the dock.

  “See you soon,” Gil spoke, undaunted, into the terrible static. “Sooner’n I’d reckoned, even.”

  “Yes! That’s so nice!”

  “Day after tomorrow.”

  “I’m looking forward to catching up,” I said in a rush.

  “Me, too. Been thinking about you. But I better go, I can’t tie up the line.”

  “Of course, of course. Bye-bye.”

  Next thing I heard was the dial tone. My blood was lighter than air.

  “Who was that, that you were dying to talk to?” Rosamund winked as I reentered the kitchen. “Was it our ever-faithful Bertie, inviting you to Punch Night?”

  “No, it was Coach Hutch,” I lied. Oh, but I’d messed up! I should have mentioned Punch Night to Gil! I ought to have invited him! So there’s this dinner dance at the club this Friday, and since you won’t know anyone . . . My fists clenched as I stared down at the bucket of repellant. I could have poisoned every critter in our garden right then, I was so annoyed with myself.

  “But you and Bertie’ll go, right?” said Sara. “You’re such an old married couple.”

  I looked up. “We are not! We’re more like friends!”

  “Oh, Jean, please! I can’t stand when you take Bertie for granted,” said Sara. “He’s got such beautiful gray eyes.”

  “Plus he’s in love with you,” added Rosamund.

  I could feel my lips press into a line. It really wasn’t my fault that Bertie had beautiful gray eyes and was in love with me.

  “Did either of you girls see that bulldozer come in this morning?” Sara looked up from her toenails. “Which cottage is being renovated?”

  “Snappy Boy, most likely,” said Rosamund. “Isn’t it always being improved?”

  Even mention of the Burkes’ cottage made me feel like a shaken can of soda about to be popped. I frowned, swirling the repellant with a wooden spoon. Maybe on Tuesday, if I was out strolling near but not at the dock—Gil! I almost forgot you were coming in on this ferry! By the way, there’s this thing at the club—would that be all right?

  No! Too forward, too desperate.

  “The bulldozer is here to clear for a helipad near the firehouse,” I told the girls. “Because of what happened to Tracy Gibbons-Kent.”

  “What happened to Tracy?” asked Sara. “Come to think of it, she hasn’t been over once yet. I miss her.” She leaned up to stare out the window, to where the Gibbons-Kent house, Serenity, was visible a little higher up on the shoreline.

  “Tra
cy’s not here this summer,” I said. “She came up with some friends this spring and got into a terrific mess. She did thirteen shots of vodka and passed out. When the Coast Guard finally arrived, she was having toxic seizures.”

  “What?” Rosamund whipped around, her mouth hanging open. “Does anyone else know?”

  “Gosh, no,” I answered. “Only my parents and a few others. If we’d had a helicopter here, it would have dropped Tracy at Mount Sinai in twenty minutes, instead of an hour.” I was parroting everything Mr. Gibbons-Kent had said when he’d come over for an Executive Association dinner our first night here. There were ninety-six private homes here, but only a handful of families truly ran and knew everything. Our family was one of them.

  “Jeez,” said Rosamund. “I can’t imagine summer without Tracy. She makes the scene, you know?”

  “What about Tiger? Is he here?” Sara asked. Tiger was Tracy’s big brother. Just about every girl in Sunken Haven had dated Tiger. This summer, Sara was crossing fingers for her turn. Which would never happen—and it wasn’t only because of her acne. Sara was too rough, too blunt. Boys had been backing away from Sara since kindergarten.

  “Tiger’s coming in tomorrow,” I said over my shoulder, as I sloshed the bucket out to the mudroom to let it sit. “But Tracy’s in a rehab center.”

  “That seems like extreme punishment for getting toasted,” said Rosamund. “Now Tracy has to change her whole life?”

  I shrugged a nonanswer. My parents had figured there was more to the Tracy disaster. They’d decided that it was all about a boy. “You mustn’t tell anyone what I said.” I snapped off my gloves. Tonight, with clothespins on our noses, Mrs. Otis and I would take paintbrushes and coat all the deer favorites—pachysandra, daylilies, and sarsaparilla—with the repellent. It was an old Sunken Haven recipe, and it worked.

  “Tracy’s such fun. Julia Tulliver and Fritz O’Neill will be especially bummed that she’s gone.” Sara leaned forward and blew on her toes.

  “Now if only we could get rid of Fritz Oh-No.” Rosamund popped in the cake with a bang of the oven door. “You should feed her repellent, Jean.”

  The girls burst into laughter.

  “I don’t have a grudge against Fritz,” I said. “She’s nothing to me.”

  “She’s nothing to me, either,” said Sara. “But I don’t know what Julia sees in her. What do you bet by this time next year, Army Girl will have gotten herself pregnant by some soldier in her neighborhood?” She smirked.

  “Fritz wouldn’t do that. She only plays dumb.” My voice was louder than I’d anticipated.

  “True,” said Rosamund. “She’s such a fake happy-go-lucky.”

  “Did you see her and Julia at the clambake last night?” asked Sara.

  “Yes,” I answered. “I saw them. They stopped by before going to Cherry Grove to see Jaws.” It had been nearly a year since I’d seen Fritz. I’d forgotten things about her, and last night had brought it all back into microscopic focus. Her catlike hazel eyes, her freckles, her shaggy, layered hair. Her raspy voice like she chewed gravel instead of gum. How overly, carelessly upbeat she was, and how easily people gathered around her for no other reason, it seemed, than to appreciate her backbends or cartwheels or whatever show-offy thing she was doing, usually in a pair of short-shorts. Fritz often had the effect of making me feel prudish, no matter how hard I worked not to seem so.

  And it struck me as unfair that even during a summer where my sister wouldn’t be around to take up all the attention, here was slinky, scrappy Fritz—who didn’t even really belong at Sunken Haven—to remind me of my shortcomings in a whole different way.

  “I didn’t see her. I must be good at zoning Fritz out,” said Rosamund.

  “She always seems so trampy, without actually being trampy,” said Sara.

  “We’ve never really made a point to get to know her,” I said.

  I could feel the girls exchange a look, and I knew they were remembering about last year. How Fritz had beaten me so brutally at tennis.

  But I wasn’t in any mood to think about that. In fact, with Daphne so far away, I was glad not to be thrust into the heat of any competition, sports or otherwise. The sweaty, frustrated anticipation of a tennis rematch was not nearly as pleasant as imagining walking into Punch Night, my hand slipped through Gil’s.

  “Been thinking about you,” he’d said. I could still hear his voice in my ear.

  Tuesday couldn’t get here quick enough.

  FRITZ

  Sunken Haven, Fire Island

  It wasn’t like I’d been trying for it . . .

  “Incoming!” Julia’s kid sister, Dot, was eleven years and eighty-two pounds of trouble lunging me from behind. Her arms wrapped around my neck.

  “Quit it, you grape nut.” I was sitting with Julia on the deck bench of the dock terminal, a saltbox with a dynamite lookout view. As in, we could see down, but nobody could see up.

  “Whatcha doing?”

  “Come on, Dot.” I shook her off as best I could. Dot loved to follow me everywhere. “You almost choked my lights out.”

  “Why are you two up here?” Dot wedged herself between us on the bench.

  “Go away!” Julia pushed Dot off so that she fell on her butt. I started to laugh.

  “Hey!” Dot sprang right back up. “I was only seeing if you two were jumping.”

  “No, we’re not. But look.” Julia pointed. “Ferry’s coming. Get down there or you’ll miss it.”

  Dot bounced on the balls of her feet. “What are you two doing?”

  “Something secret,” I teased.

  “Come jump, Fritzie! The water’s perfect.” Dot tugged my hand. “I know you want to.”

  “Thirteen years old is the last cool jump year,” I said. “It’s a kid thing.”

  “Liar! You love to jump. And I just guessed what you’re both up to!” Dot whooped. “You’re spying on that guy who Weeze Burke was telling Mom about. Her nephew from Alabama. Am I right or am I right?”

  “For the last time! Get lost!” Julia reached out to smack her.

  “Up your nose with a rubber hose!” Dot squeaked as she ducked Julia’s hand, then pogo-hopped down the steps to the bay.

  “Dot is a goon in a training bra this summer,” muttered Julia. “Sorry.”

  “We were like that once.” I slipped the binoculars from Julia’s knapsack and focused in on the pier. A batch of kids was lined along the lip, flexed to plunge.

  “Do you see him yet?”

  “They haven’t even thrown the line!”

  “My eyes are sharper.” Julia snatched the binoculars from me and stood.

  “Sit! Or everyone’ll know what creepers we’re being.” But then I started cracking up. Julia stuck out in any crowd, since she was so tall, almost six feet though she swore five ten, with hair pale as wheat and long enough that she could sit on it.

  Now Julia was laughing, too. She shooed me off. “You’re the worst spy ever! Go jump!” She ordered. “I can tell you want to! But be careful!”

  I made a break for it. When I caught up with the dozen-plus kids at the dock, they all started up, whooping and cheering.

  “Fritz!”

  “I knew it!” Dot’s eyes shone. “You can’t resist!”

  “Jump from the chair, Fritzie!” someone called, and then a booming cry of a “Jump! Jump! Jump!” was taken up.

  Now I saw. Some joker had stuck a lifeguard chair at the end of the pier. It was stupid high, too high for almost anyone to risk it.

  “Tiger Gibbons-Kent put it there,” called one of the Shreve kids. “So far, he’s the only one who’s been mad dog enough to jump off.”

  “Come on, Fritz!” called Dot. “It’s boys against girls! We’re counting on you!”

  I looked the chair over. Maybe it didn’t scare me that much. I’d been raised on high dives at the YMCA, and I’d done an assisted parachute out of a C-130 when I was twelve years old.

  “Arright, arright. This one’s for
you, Dot.”

  But it wasn’t until I’d climbed all the way up, kids loudly cheering my every step, and my toes were curled tight around the edge of the chair, that I understood the stupid risk of it. I knew I’d have to push out—way out—to avoid hitting the bottom. Tiger must have done this at high tide. Now the watermark was low. I could see the boat crowd leaning over the rail on the fast-approaching Sunken Haven ferry.

  Shoot. They were probably all watching me, too. The other jumpers were lined up at the edge of the dock. It was kind of a perfect moment, and too late to back down.

  “Wooooooo!” I let my lungs carry my confidence as I leaped, leading the group, feeling the collective whoosh as all the kids below followed my cue and jumped off the dock. My splash was mammoth; I’d gone long and out, my feet brushing the soft mud bottom. I resurfaced to cheers and smacking applause from all around, as the ferry blasted its horn and propelled itself up alongside the dock.

  The water felt good. I was in no big rush to leave it. I treaded and floated. It was fun to watch the families come in. First all those Hastys, bouncing down the boarding ramp, led by their brand-new setter puppy. Cute! The Hastys were followed by four generations of Knightleys, from ancient Mr. and Mrs. Knightley, to Chip’s parents, to his married sister, who this summer was pushing a baby stroller, to Chip himself. I had to smile, watching him. Good to know Chip hadn’t changed a bit. He was still a live wire, jumping around all over the deck, making air passes with his lacrosse stick, getting on everyone’s nerves.

  Next, arms linked and giggling, came Porter Todd and Mindy Tingley—best friends, Dot’s age. Dot would be excited to see them.

  Then I saw him. The new guy. Gil Burke. He was tall, in a straw hat, orange T-shirt, and funky gym-teacher shorts, ambling behind Carpie, who’d come strutting off the boat like he was leading the Easter Day Parade.

  I sank lower, blowing bubbles through my nose, my eyes on Gil. I wondered what Julia could see. He cut a nice shape, long and lean. As soon as he was on the dock, he started taking some stuff off the baggage trolley. Item one, a beat-up nylon sports bag. Then a taped guitar case. Then a nice leather suitcase—luggage that had to be Carpie’s.