A Hundred Summers (10 page)

Worse, Budgie herself sat waiting for me on the rocks when I emerged from the water, in full-body shiver. “Hello there,” she said. “Towel?”

I flung myself back into the Atlantic. “What are you doing here?”

“Nick was up at dawn, leaving for the city. Rather than go back to bed, I thought I’d find you here. Industrious of me, wasn’t it? Aren’t you cold?”

Water sloshed against my bare chest. Cold? I was numb all the way through, trying to banish the image of Nick in bed with Budgie, Nick rising at dawn and Budgie rising with him. Straightening his tie, smoothing his hair. Kissing him good-bye.

“It’s bracing,” I said.

She held up my towel and shook it. “Don’t be shy. We were housemates once, weren’t we?”

I waved my arms, treading water, trying to come up with an excuse.

“Oh, never mind. I’ll join you.” Budgie rose and pulled off her hat, pulled off her striped blue-and-white sweater and her shirt. I stared in astonishment as her body unwrapped itself before me, exposing her pale skin to the cool morning. She wore a peach silk envelope chemise underneath, edged with lace, without girdle or stockings. She leaned down, grasping the hem, and I whirled around to face the open ocean and the waves rolling along the horizon in long white lines.

Budgie was laughing behind me. “Look out below!” she called, and I turned my head just in time to see her long, narrow body slice like a knife into the water nearby.

She came up shrieking. “Oh, it’s murder! Oh, my God!”

“You’ll get used to it.”

Budgie tilted her head back, soaking her hair until it emerged dark and shining against her skull. The absence of a hairstyle emphasized the symmetrical arrangement of her features, the high angles and pointed tips; the startling size of her Betty Boop eyes, which lent such an incongruous innocence to her otherwise sharp face. She was always slender, but her slenderness had now reached undreamt-of heights and lengths, an impossible skeletal elegance. Next to her, I felt rounded and overfull, my edges blurry.

“How do you stand it, every morning?” she asked me, smiling, waving her arms next to her sides. Her small breasts bobbed atop the surface of the water like new apricots.

“Don’t you remember?” I said. “You used to do it with me, when we were little.”

“Not every morning. Only when I had to get away or go mad. Let’s race.” Without warning, she spun her body around and began to stroke across the cove, her long arms reaching and plunging through the waves, her pink feet kicking up spouts of water.

I hesitated, hypnotized for an instant by her rhythmic limbs, and followed her.

For all her flurry of activity, splashing water in every direction, Budgie wasn’t moving fast. I caught up with her in less than a minute and passed her; I reached the opposite side of the cove and touched off the rocks for the return journey.

By the time I coasted past our starting point, Budgie was no longer behind me. I looked around and saw her running naked from the rocks on the opposite side, along the narrow spit of beach to where my towel lay folded on a boulder. For a second or two, her body was silhouetted against the stark gray stone of the abandoned battery, while the sunrise cradled her bones in radiance.

Then the towel covered her. She rubbed herself dry from head to each individual sand-covered toe, finishing with a thorough scrubbing of her hair, and held out the towel in my direction. “Your turn,” she said, giving it a jiggle.

I had no choice. I found the rocky bottom with my toes and pushed through the surging water, feeling with painful exactitude the inch-by-inch exposure of my skin to the cool air and to Budgie’s gaze, from breasts to waist to legs to feet, traced in foam.

“Well, well.” She handed me the towel. “You’ve kept your figure well, all things considered. Of course, the cold water helps.”

I averted my eyes, but there was no missing the pucker of her nipples, or the shocking absence of anything but Budgie between her legs.

She must have caught my horrified expression. She looked down and laughed. “Oh, that. I picked it up in South America, the winter before last. Everybody sugars there, all over. You do know about sugaring, haven’t you? All that nasty hair?”

“I’ve heard of it.”

“You can’t imagine the pain. But the men just love it to death, the little dears.” She laughed again, her bright brittle laugh. “You should have seen Nick’s face.”

The towel was wet and sandy, but I covered myself anyway, dried myself as best I could, shaking with cold. When I could no longer disguise the distress on my face, I turned away from Budgie, found my robe, and belted it around my waist.

“You’re such an hourglass, Lily, with your itsy waist and your hips and chest. Just like our mothers in their corsets, before the war. Do you remember?” Behind me, Budgie was putting on her own clothes. I heard the slide of fabric against her skin, the little grunts and sighs she made as she pushed her arms and legs into their slots.

“I remember.”

“I can’t think why it’s gone out of fashion. But there it is. There’s no accounting for men’s tastes. Let’s lie in the sand together, like we used to.” She jumped down from the rocks in a thump of displaced sand.

She looked so curiously alone, lying blue-lipped and shivering on the beach, with the sand sticking to her dark hair and her bones sticking up from her pale skin, that for reasons unknown I lay down next to her, a few feet away, and stared up at the lightening sky without speaking. A few lacy clouds streaked across, tinged with gold, the same way they had when we were children, lying on this precise patch of sand.

Budgie broke the silence first. “You don’t mind me talking about Nick, do you? After all these years?”

“No, of course not. That was ages ago. He’s your husband.”

She giggled softly. “I still can’t believe it. Mrs. Nicholson Greenwald. I never thought.”

“Neither did I.”

“Oh, you’re remembering what I said before, aren’t you? What a child I was, thinking
that
was important. Of course it’s a nuisance, the way those old cats treated us last night at the club. I’d forgotten people still thought that way.”

I pressed my numb fingers against my neck to warm them. “You do read the newspapers, don’t you, Budgie?”

She flicked away newspapers with her hand. “Oh, that’s just crazy old Hitler. Who takes him seriously, with that mustache? I mean
here,
at Seaview. People refusing to dine with us.” She turned on her side and faced me. “But
you
wouldn’t do that, would you, Lily?”

“No, of course not. You know I never cared about it.”

She laughed. “Of course you didn’t. Sweet, noble-minded Lily. I still remember you in the football stadium, with that stubborn look on your face. I can count on you, right, Lily? You’ll visit us at the house and join our table at the club, won’t you? Show them all up?”

“It shouldn’t matter, should it? You shouldn’t care.”
If you really loved him
.

“Says the noble-minded Lily. You don’t know what it’s like, though, do you? Having doors slammed in your face.” Her voice thinned out, and she turned onto her back again.

I rolled my head to look at her. She was staring straight up at the clouds, without blinking. “Have they really?”

“Nick’s used to it, of course, so he doesn’t say anything. But I used to be invited everywhere, and now . . .” She turned back to me and grasped my hand in the sand. “Come have lunch with me today. Please. Or tennis, or something. I’m so lonely when Nick’s gone.”

“When is he back?”

“The weekend. He only came up to settle me in. It’s so hard for him to get away, even in summer. Everyone at the firm depends on him for every little decision. He works such tremendous hours, it’s barbaric.” Her huge eyes fixed on me. “Please see me, Lily.”

I stood up and dusted off the sand from the back of my robe. “All right. I’ll come by for lunch, how’s that? I’ll have to bring Kiki, if you don’t mind. Mother and Aunt Julie are hopeless with her.”

Budgie jumped up and threw her arms around me. “Oh, I knew you would, you darling. I
told
Nick you’d stand by us.” She leaned back and kissed my cheek. “Now I’ve got to go. The workmen will be arriving any minute. The old place is almost uninhabitable. I hope my housekeeper’s managed to light the stove by now.”

She put her arm through mine and we scrambled up the beach and around the edge of the cove, where the rising sun had lit the gray shingles of the Dane cottage into a radiant yellow-pink. She turned to me and kissed me again. “It was so lovely seeing you last night, darling. Nick and I talked about it all the way home, how nice it was to see you again. Just like old times. Do you remember?”

“I remember.” I kissed her back. The skin of her cheek was like satin, and just as thin.

EVEN WHEN WE WERE LITTLE,
I never spent much time at Budgie’s house. She never invited me. We were always outside, playing tennis or out on the water. What little time we spent indoors unraveled mainly in the kitchen of my house, or else upstairs in my bedroom, and then only when the summer rain became too drenching to ignore.

When I marched up Neck Lane at noon, holding Kiki’s hand, I recognized Budgie’s house only because I knew it sat next to the Palmers’ place, about halfway along Seaview Neck. For years, I had been averting my eyes as I went by, as I would from a scar. I stood outside now and gazed down the narrow path, overgrown with tough seaworthy grass and weeds, to Budgie’s peeling front door. A pair of trucks had parked outside,
L. H. Menzoes, General Contracting
lettered on the doors; the air rang with invisible shouts and hammering from the interior. Every window and door had been thrown open to the salt breeze, and Budgie’s familiar voice carried above it all, issuing orders.

The Greenwalds’ house, I reminded myself. It belonged to both of them now.

Kiki tugged on my hand. “What are you waiting for, Lily?”

“Nothing. Come along.” I led Kiki up the path and knocked on the half-open door. The hinge creaked beneath the strain.

Budgie’s head appeared from a second-floor window. Her hair was bound up in an incongruous red polka-dot scarf. “Come on in! It’s open!” she called.

Kiki stepped first into the foyer and wrinkled her nose. “It’s awfully musty in here.”

“They haven’t lived in it for years,” I said.

Budgie was bounding down the stairs, tearing off the scarf from her head. The hair beneath fell into perfect lacquer-smooth waves. “Years and years! We were ruined, you see, Koko—”

“Kiki.”

“Kiki. I’m so dreadfully sorry. We were ruined, all smashed up in the markets, and I don’t recommend it to anyone. Lemonade? Something stronger? Mrs. Ridge just got back from the market, and not a moment too soon.” Budgie turned and waved her hand at a door to the right. “That’s the living room, completely shot with mildew, they tell me. You remember the living room, don’t you, Lily?”

“I don’t. I remember almost nothing. I don’t think I came in here more than once or twice.” I looked about me. The Byrne house was relatively imposing from the outside, three stories high, with large bay windows on the first floor and gables on the third. Inside, it had the feeling of a barn, and roughly the same dusty outdoorsy smell, except laced with salt instead of manure. The rooms were airy and spacious, the walls covered with chipped paint and peeling floral paper. To the left, a door stood ajar to reveal a dining room, its corner cupboards thick with dust and its chandelier hanging a good three feet too low.

“Oh, look,” said Kiki, bending down at the side of the stairwell. “I think there’s a family of mice under here.”

“I’ve ordered furniture,” said Budgie, “but it won’t arrive for another month or so, not until they’ve fixed things up. I’d like to take out a wall or two and all these wretched
doors
everywhere, all these crumbling old moldings, and paint everything bright and white. I want everything
gone
.” She gestured grandly with her arms, left and right, leading us toward the back of the house.

“It sounds like a lot of work.” I tore at a cobweb in the corner of the foyer. Frayed and empty, as if even the spiders had abandoned the place.

“They’re hiring an army of people to get it done quickly. I told them to spare no thought for expense. Nick and I are staying in the guest bedroom while they fix up ours. That’s first on the list, of course. I want a modern bathroom, I absolutely insist on it. Out we go, now. I thought we’d have lunch on the terrace. I’ve been watching the sailboats on Seaview Bay and feeling terribly nostalgic.”

Budgie ushered us through a badly hung French door at the back of the house and onto the terrace, which was made of good New England bluestone and fully intact, despite the years of neglect; only a few tufts of weed and grass sprang between the cracks. The sun poured down unchecked, making the waters of Seaview Bay flash and glitter as if alive. A small sailboat stood off nearby, trying to catch a decent wind.

“Lemonade, did you say?” Budgie strode across the granite to an idyllic arrangement of table and four chairs beneath a large green umbrella. A pitcher sat sweating on a tray, surrounded by tall glasses, along with a bottle of gin, a pack of Parliaments, and a slim gold lighter.