“Was it tough for you, being a couple?”
“Not so much. We both knew what the world was like. So we were discreet. For a while we had separate apartments. It’s not like we went parading around naked in the park yelling, ‘We’re glad we’re gay!’ like some people do now. We were especially careful in the bank, and so both of us kept getting promoted. We were making pretty good money. And we discovered Bay St. Lucy on a vacation trip. Jenny had always dreamed of running a boutique. I had always been a jock, and had a degree in physical education. So I got the coaching job here, and Jenny bought her place. It’s been good ever since. Despite April van Whatshername.”
“Don’t worry about her, Meg. We’ll find a way around her. She’s not going to torment Bay St. Lucy forever. The town won’t stand for it. By the way, where in New Mexico did you get married?”
“The county courthouse in Roswell. We wrote our own vows. I suppose we’ve been writing them for a long time, living them really. But it means a lot to do this. It means an awful lot.”
There was, of course, no silence, for the cacophony of the rising winds and the caws squawks and rattles of the wilderness prevented that; but there was a lull in the tumult that was Wilderness Mississippi, and in the middle of it, Meg said, smiling:
“It’s funny. When we had the wonderful shower at Margot’s place…”
“Yes?”
“We laughed because she almost missed it. She was off chasing ghosts.”
“Yes. I remember that.”
“It’s just that, for so many years that seemed exactly what Jenn and I were doing.”
Then the sounds of the forests resumed, and the two women simply sat and listened.
CHAPTER 18: PROPOSALS
The afternoon cleared gradually, so that by six o’clock, when Meg’s van pulled onto Breakers Boulevard and then onto the small lane leading down to Nina’s shack, Bay St. Lucy had turned golden and shimmered like a painting done in luminescent colors. The sun, almost ready to dip its solar toe into the ocean down shore and to her right as she made her way up the staircase, looked as big as a basketball. She’d have been surprised that it reminded her of a basketball, except that now everything in the world—ball point pens, cattle, love poems, dishwashing detergent—reminded her of some aspect of basketball, so she simply made herself ignore the phenomenon.
The stairs rocked and groaned with her weight as she made her way up them.
Her calves were already sore from the afternoon’s kayaking.
Sunlight shone on the window panes, and made it look as if her living room had burst into flame.
She was high enough now to see out over Bay St. Lucy. The tops of waving palm trees looked as though some careless celestial chef had over-plopped an egg on each one, the yokes breaking and spilling out over the town, which had thus been transformed from seaside hamlet to seaside omelet and was ready to be eaten, along with the green salad that was its treescape.
“Oh, come on. Not again.”
A sheet of paper had been stuck between the screen door and its facing.
“Why can’t I just come and go inside? Why is everybody always writing me letters and sticking them in my door?”
The door did not answer.
The letter though, after she opened it, did:
“Nina,
Thanks so much for the lovely pot roast dinner. Goldmann and I are driving back up to The Candles tomorrow, but we wanted to see you one more time before we left.
We have a proposal to make to you. We think it’s a very interesting notion, and we’d like to discuss it with you.
We’re going to walk along the beach for a while and then go out on the pier. It’s five thirty now; we should be somewhere on the pier, or near it, for the next hour or so. If you don’t find us there, come on over to Elementals.
Hope to see you soon!”
Margot.
Well. Good news.
She put the sheet of paper in her pocket and walked back down the stairway, cursing at the pain in her calves, and wondering if a similar affliction was starting to affect her shoulders.
Damned exercise.
But, she remembered, the feeling of flying down the river!
Maybe it was worth it.
She straddled the Vespa, started it, and puttered off toward the setting sun, which had now turned blood red and appeared as romantic and beautiful as a nuclear device exploding.
Within a mile, she could see the pier, and shortly thereafter she was walking toward it.
The ocean pier was a new feature to Bay St. Lucy, constructed with funds the town had recovered from the Robinson estate. For decades there had been no access to the ocean except for the flat and frothy beachfront, and the stone jetty that was constantly wave-splashed and crabclaw spattered. But now, here, stretching before her and a quarter of a mile into the Gulf of Mexico, was this twenty foot high elongated platform, with solid belt high stair bannisters that led not upward but outward, along which the infirm could steady themselves, and on top of which children could terrify their parents by preparing to fall into the ocean.
The air was fresh and cool; two stars could be seen in the twilight sky, and the waves frothed and billowed, churning around the long pier posts and scudding a miniature storm surge that could just be seen through cracks in the pier’s flooring.
Few people were out here: a fisherman, lone and desolate, his baseball cap pulled low over beetling eyebrows, a cigar stub sticking cold and forgotten from his lips, which also seemed cold and forgotten, having nothing to do with the fishing process.
A young couple.
A father with two children.
The wave surge was changing now, more majestic, deeper, roaring as it crested and spread and shallowed and rebuilt itself, the grand sweep of the thing stunning in both its simplicity and inscrutability.
“Hey! Nina!”
There they were. All the way at the end.
“Margot! Goldmann!”
“Come on out! It’s marvelous out here!”
“I’m coming!”
Within a minute, she’d reached the end of the pier, beyond which lay the string of yellow lights that was the offshore drilling rig, beyond which lay The Great Gulf of Mexico, beyond which lay the Great Atlantic Ocean, beyond which lay if one were to believe all one reads some other continents and other people but if one really thought about it and used common sense nothing at all except The Great Eternal Universe and The Never Changing Mind of God.
“Good to see you guys!”
“Yeah! We couldn’t go,” said Margot, now embracing Nina, “without saying good bye!”
“I should hope not.”
The two of them, Margot and Goldmann, were dressed almost identically in London Fog trench coats and floppy Rex Harrison My Fair Lady hounds tooth hats.
Goldmann Bristow spread his arms and shouted:
“Look at all this! Isn’t it wonderful?”
Nina, who’d always thought that, nodded.
“It is.”
Nothing more to say.
Bristow took a step toward her and said:
“We heard about you!”
Oh God.
“Yeah.”
“Nina,” said Margot, leaning down just a bit so that she was closer to the two five feet four people she had to address:
“Nina, is it true?”
“It’s true.”
“How could you get thrown out of the game?”
“It’s easier than you might think.”
“It’s just so…not you!”
“It was me. All me.”
“What did you say to the referee to make him do that?”
Nina thought for a time and answered:
“I told him I felt his decision making, while evincing perspicacity and aplomb, and certainly demonstrating an impressive knowledge of detail, might have been lacking in balance, sensitivity, and—well, the kind of ‘panache’ and ebullience that would have lifted his performance even beyond those st
andards that the community had come to expect from him.”
“And what did he say?”
“Oh, he said ‘Get the…….out of the game.”
Goldmann Bristow roared.
“Marvelous!”
“Everyone,” Nina said, quietly, “seems to like that part.”
The waves laughed.
So did the klatch of seagulls screeching low overhead, and so did a giant manta ray, which, like a brown dishcloth, was floating some fifty yards out in the ocean.
All of this laughter continued until Creation sobered itself up, and, between deep breaths and sighs and smiles and whatever, Margot said:
“Nina, Goldmann and I have had an idea.”
Aha.
So this was the proposal.
“What idea, Margot?”
“How would you like to work full time at Elementals?”
This was a bit of a shock.
“I don’t understand.”
Margot leaned forward:
“Nina, do you really want to keep being principal…I mean, after this year?”
“I don’t know. Probably not.”
Because that was true.
She would fight the battles that she now perceived were raging around her.
But more? Another year? Another five years?
No.
“Probably not.”
“Well…Goldmann and I are going to be at Candles a good bit of the time. But Elementals is such a joyous place. And I have such lovely memories of our cups of coffee or tea or brandy or whatever there, while people shopped and puttered and perhaps bought a seascape or a bit of earthenware…”
“I have those memories too, Margot.”
“Then let’s not give them up entirely. We can easily find someone to run the shop until May, perhaps cutting back on hours open—say from ten until two, a little more on weekends. But starting in June, you could manage it full time. You have marvelous taste, and we would, of course, trust you to find things to be sold on consignment. Either I, or Goldmann and I together, could drive back down to Bay St. Lucy every weekend or so, and we could all hang out together in the shop. You wouldn’t have to worry about living on commission, or such things. We could pay you quite a decent salary.”
“Wow.”
The sun, not wishing to deal with such problems, disappeared below the horizon.
A pelican swooped low and defecated on the pier.
“You don’t have to answer now, of course.”
“That’s very interesting, you guys. It really is.”
“We know you’re caught up in a great many matters at the school now. But––well, if you would just think about it.”
“I will. I truly will. And as for school now––I can’t tell you how much I wish I could just quit tomorrow. Not the basketball, of course; but everything else.”
“I’m sure,” said Goldmann Bristow, “it must all be terribly difficult.”
Nina nodded:
“It would all be ok. I could do it. But this woman. This van Osdale.”
Silence for a time.
A speedboat cut across the water, roared its way west, and finally disappeared, falling into the hole left by the setting sun.
“Goldmann…”
It seemed strange calling him that.
But she would get used to it.
“Yes?”
“I just wanted––well, now that we’re out here––”
“Go on, Nina.”
“The other night, when you met her. You said those things about her.”
“I shouldn’t say a great deal. After all, I was around the woman for no more than five minutes.”
“But you formed an opinion.”
He paused, then nodded:
“Yes. I formed an opinion.”
“Could you tell it to me again?”
He shook his head:
“Like I say; perhaps it would be wrong of me.”
“Please. I have to deal with this woman. Bay St. Lucy has to deal with her.”
Silence.
Margot spoke quietly to her fiancé:
“Go ahead, dear.”
To which Goldmann Bristow shrugged:
“She has all the symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia. She impresses me as a woman who has been, well, ‘driven,’ for a great deal of her life.”
“Yes. That’s April.”
“Such a desire for perfection is, on the one hand, laudable. On the other, though, it can be quite destructive.”
“In what way?”
“In the way that perfection is simply impossible. In neither ourselves nor in others.”
“We can’t all,” Nina heard herself whispering, “be exemplary.”
“Pardon?”
“Nothing. People who develop this trait––they like measuring things, don’t they?”
“Oh, immensely. They are ‘quantitative’ people, not ‘qualitative.’ Deeply distrustful of themselves, of their identities, they require mathematical proofs of their excellence.”
“Without which,” Nina continued, “they wouldn’t exist at all.”
Bristow nodded.
“You might say that. The middle stages of such paranoia result in intense self loathing.”
“And the advanced stages?”
“Self denial. Not self discipline, but the denial of one’s own existence.”
“Suicide?”
“That is one possible outcome. There are others, many entirely unpredictable. It’s like, out there, in the gulf, if one went deep enough or far enough.”
“How do you mean?”
“Uncharted waters.”
The waves continued to pound.
The night continued to deepen.
Nina said that she would think about Margot’s proposal.
They walked back to shore.
Uncharted waters.
She went back home and tried to think about something other than April van Osdale.
This was basketball of course, her new passion.
She had a small cave made in her bedroom: chairs, end tables, bookshelves––all of these had been pulled into a tight circle. She had pasted play diagrams on every available space.
The lights were turned out.
A cup of hot chocolate steamed in front of her as she watched again and again the tapes of two Hattiesburg games. There they were, always. Therese and Nicki McNulty.
No one could stop them.
Each of them six foot four.
Long, blonde hair, broad shoulders.
Identical twins.
And no one could stop them.
Ball down low, Theresa goes for basket, slips ball to sister.
Layup.
Ball over the top.
Layup.
What to do? What to do?
And then…
And then…
Tara’s theme. The Civil War.
She kept thinking about the Civil War. And Pickett’s Charge.
No sense, but there it was.
And what had Meg forgotten to do?
Why did Meg lose to Hattiesburg?
And then…
And then…
“She didn’t use her whole army,” Nina whispered, her breath making small ripples in the hot chocolate.
The wind outside grew stronger, rattling the shack’s windows. Saturday night faded into Sunday morning.
“She didn’t use her whole army.”
And we will.
We will use the entire army
Some of us will be sacrificed.
Half of us will be sacrificed.
But we will use our whole army.
By Monday afternoon’s practice, the plan had been perfected.
She called the team around her:
“Ladies, we’re going to win this game that’s coming up on Friday night. We’re going to beat Hattiesburg.”
No answer.
No cheers.
Everyone remembered the McNulty sisters.
It
was easy for a coach to talk about victory, but…
“I’m going to tell you right now just how we plan to do it.”
“How, Coach? We’ve never been able to stop those two girls.”
“I know, but we will this time.”
“How?”
Nina shook her head:
“When you met them before, you failed to weaken their center. You didn’t put enough infantry fire on Hancock’s men.”
Blank stares.
“Well, we’re going to weaken that center. We’ll have to sacrifice half our team to do it. But it will get done. We will weaken their center; and then we’ll hit them with Pickett’s Charge. Only this time, it will work.”
Two girls at once:
“Pickett’s Charge?”
Nina:
“Yes. Pickett’s Charge.”
Pause, pause, and then:
“Is that going to be on the MACE?”
Nina shook her head:
“No. Thank God.”
And then:
“Now, let’s get to work.”
And they did.
CHAPTER 19: WHAT IS TESTED IS TAUGHT
The first part of Tuesday morning Nina spent in limbo. She had in her desk the results of the first MOCKMACE examinations given the previous Friday morning. These were results that she’d been expected to share with April van Osdale on Friday evening, at dinner.
Except that April van Osdale had not been present for dinner; present had been only a well decorated house on a golf course.
An empty house.
April had also not answered her phone on Monday morning or Monday afternoon.
“Dr. van Osdale is not in the office,” the secretary had said.
Twice.
She could have been in Jacksonville, with the senator.
Or she could have been at her alternate office in Hattiesburg.
At any rate, she was not reachable, and Nina did not know what to do about the test results.
Make careful notes of all missed questions and re-test?
Forget these tests and order new ones?
Why could she not simply coach the basketball team? In that area, things were at least beginning to make sense.
And it was in this state of mind, asking herself these questions, that she spent Tuesday morning running around like a chicken with its head cut off, doing this errand and that errand, dealing with a milk money crisis in the lunchroom and fifteen lost volumes in the book depository.
Game Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries Book 3) Page 20