Beach Trip (12 page)

“Okay, slave,” Charlotte said, sliding the bolt back so that the door swung open on creaky hinges. “Time for you to go to the dungeon.”

Lola took a step back. “No,” she said.

Charlotte gave the belt a little jerk. “Bad slaves go to the dungeon,” she said.

“No.” Lola’s heart leapt up into her throat. She could feel it beating there, flittering around in circles like a bird with a broken wing.

“Get in, slave.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Now.”

“What’s that?” Lola said, pointing with her chin.

Charlotte leaned over with her pudgy hands resting on her dimpled knees, and stared into the darkness. “What?” she said. “I don’t see anything.”

Lola shoved her into the space and slammed the door, holding it closed with her shoulder until she had managed to free her hands and slide the bolt into place.

When Mrs. Hampton came up later carrying two slices of cake on a little silver tray, Lola was sitting on the bed softly crooning to Esmerelda. She had bathed her and dressed her and gently smoothed her torn hair off her face.

“Where’s Charlotte?” Mrs. Hampton said vaguely, looking around the airy room.

The racket from the crawl space, which had long ago ceased, began again with a furious staccato of hands and feet, followed by a loud, piercing wail.

“Oh, my God,” Mrs. Hampton cried, dropping the tray. “My poor baby!”

All the way home Lola sat with her face pressed against the car window. Rain fell in sheets, drumming against the roof of the car and filling the streets with a rushing torrent of gray water. They passed through Hueytown, past rows and rows of little cookie-cutter houses with the lights just coming on and families sitting down to dinner. They passed a house where an old woman in an apron stood looking out at the rain and another
where a large family, illuminated behind a plate-glass window like actors on a movie screen, gathered around a long table. The father sat at one end, the mother at the other, and the children were lined up in between. They seemed happy and complete behind their illuminated window, and Lola wondered what it would be like to grow up in a little house no larger than a stable with a father at one end of the table and a mother at the other. If she had been older, she would have told the driver to stop. But she was still a child, vacuous and ignorant, so she said nothing, watching the family until they were nothing more than a twinkling in the darkness behind a curtain of steadily falling rain.

Her mother was standing on the portico when the car pulled up in the circular drive. The headlights illuminated her grim face and the dazzling whiteness of the large columns she stood between. Savannah hurried down the steps beneath an umbrella and opened the door for her, saying nothing but taking Lola’s hand and giving her a little squeeze of encouragement. They went up the wide steps together and followed Maureen into the house.

Maureen switched on a table lamp. A circle of light sprang up around her, glistening on the dark wood floors. She thought of her friends in the UDC and the Junior League snickering behind their hands when they heard what Lola had done to Charlotte Hampton. She thought of Amanda Logsdon and Celia Shanks giggling and rolling their eyes. She leaned over and struck Lola twice on the back of her thighs with an open hand. The child made no sound but Savannah moaned deep in her throat as if Maureen had struck her instead.

“Go to your room,” Maureen said. “There’ll be no supper for you. You’ve misbehaved in a home where you were a guest, and I’m very, very disappointed in you.”

Later, fearing she had been too hard on the child, Maureen climbed the stairs with a peanut butter sandwich and a glass of milk on a tray. Savannah had bathed Lola and dressed her in a clean nightgown, and the two were snuggled on Lola’s bed, reading
Winnie-the-Pooh.
The rain had stopped but an occasional rumble of thunder rattled the windows. Maureen set the tray down on a bedside table. “I’ll finish the story,” she said to Savannah.

The child sat stiffly beside her while she read, slowly chewing her sandwich. When Maureen had finished, she stroked Lola’s cheek softly and
said, “Do you understand why Mommy was so angry earlier?” When she didn’t answer, Maureen laid her down on the bed and pulled the covers to her chin. “I’ll expect you to call Mrs. Hampton and Charlotte in the morning and apologize for your behavior,” she said. “Do you understand? Is there something you have to say?”

Her mother’s face was soft in the lamplight. Her voice was gentle. Lola thought of the family in the little house shut up behind their plate-glass window and she began to talk, slowly at first, hesitantly, but then with more conviction. She told her mother of the things Charlotte had done to her, of the slaps, bites, bruises she had suffered at Charlotte’s hands, of the Indian burns the girl had given her whenever her mother was out of the room.

When she was finished Maureen stared at her for several minutes. Then she rose, vigorously smoothing the covers and fluffing the pillow behind her daughter’s head. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said, leaning to turn off the lamp. “Louise Hampton is one of my oldest and dearest friends. She and I were Scotties together. You’ll call Charlotte tomorrow and apologize and then we’ll hear no more of this ridiculous nonsense.”

She turned, and without another word she went out, closing the door firmly behind her.

y two-thirty the women had succumbed to the heat and gone in for a swim. A swollen orange sun hung from a colorless sky Cicadas sang in the trees. The heat was unusually oppressive for the middle of May. They swam slowly through the tepid water, making their way through the splashing, squirming toddlers, who bobbed across the surface of the water in their swim vests and water wings like so many brightly colored fishing buoys. Their mothers sat along the edges of the pool in twos and threes, dangling their lean brown legs in the water and keeping a wary eye on their undulating offspring.

It was less crowded in the deep end of the pool, although some of the more adventuresome children followed them there, kicking their legs and squirming their bodies like fat tadpoles.

“Jesus,” Mel said. “This is ridiculous.” They were huddled in a corner with their elbows resting behind them on the lip of the pool and their feet floating up in front of them.

“There’s so many of them,” Annie said.

“They’re all adorable,” Lola said.

“I think those floaty devices are the worst things that ever happened to kids,” Mel said. “I mean, think about it. When we were kids we
knew
not to go into the water until we could swim. We were afraid of it. We respected its dangers. Nowadays kids are strapped into those things before they’re even weaned and dropped into the water. They can’t swim. All they can do is bob around helplessly but they lose their fear of the water, and there’s the danger.” As if to prove her point, a naked baby staggered to the edge of the pool and, without slowing his pace, stepped off into the water. He sank like a stone. The frantic mother ran after him and jumped in, screaming, “Claiborne, Claiborne!” until the water closed over her head. The lifeguard stood up on his chair and blew his whistle sharply but he was unable to dive into the soup of floating toddlers for fear of injuring one. He scurried down the chair and ran to the edge of the pool but by then the mother had surfaced with the baby in her arms. The child seemed oblivious to his near-death encounter. He grinned and blew bubbles while water streamed down his face.

He reminded Annie of Agnes Grace, a girl she’d met while volunteering out at the Baptist Children’s Home. Agnes Grace had a similar personality, all fire and vinegar.

“Thank goodness we took that baby swim class at the Club,” Claiborne’s distracted mother said to the crowd that was quickly gathering. “They taught him to hold his breath underwater.” Claiborne squirmed in her arms and tried to get back into the pool.

“See what I mean?” Mel said.

Lola watched the baby fondly. His mother was carrying him away from the pool and he was not happy about that. He waved his arms, kicked his feet, and wailed like a banshee. “Don’t y’all miss those days?” Lola said wistfully.

“Sometimes,” Sara said.

“Only when I’m drinking,” Annie said. She remembered her own boys as toddlers, remembered their squirming brown bodies, the sweet scent of their sun-bleached hair. Other mothers had warned her,
Appreciate these days while you have them. They’ll be gone too soon.
And Annie had thought they were crazy—how could anyone find time to appreciate the days when you were always scrambling frantically to keep up with your schedule of feedings, baths, playtime, naps, and more feedings?

“I’d have had a dozen kids if I’d been able to,” Lola said, smiling wanly at the retreating Claiborne. She’d suffered a series of tragic miscarriages
after Henry’s birth and after a while she and Briggs had simply stopped trying. Sara put her arm around Lola and pulled her close.

A few minutes later they climbed out of the pool and went to lie down. The heat spread over the landscape like a shimmering cloud. Palm trees stirred faintly with the breeze. After a while, Mel closed her eyes and dozed off. When she awoke a short time later, Annie had moved to the shade of a nearby umbrella, and Lola was lying on her stomach on the concrete deck, idly flipping through a magazine. Sara had donned a straw hat and was sitting beside her, reading. She looked up when she saw Mel stirring.

“You know you snore,” she said.

“I most certainly do not,” Mel said.

“Not loud,” Lola said. “Not like Briggs.”

“Y’all are crazy. I don’t snore.” She peered over the edge of her glasses at Sara, trying to figure out some way to change the subject. “What’s the book?”

“The Known World.”

“Still reading the good stuff, I see.”

Annie held up a brightly colored paperback so they could see the cover. “I’m reading
Nice Girls Don’t Wear Stilettos.
It’s about a pair of crime-fighting supermodels who take on an evil fashion designer who’s slowly poisoning America’s top models so he can replace them with robots and take over the New York fashion world.”

Mel stared at her with an expression of disgust and disbelief. “Are you fucking kidding me?” she said. She had written ten moderately successful novels and had somehow thus far (miraculously) managed to stave off the need for a day job, so she figured she had the right to be critical.

“Hey, it’s a bestseller. The movie rights have been optioned by Paramount.”

“Let me see that.”

Annie passed the novel to Mel and she flipped it over, hoping the author’s photo would reveal a cleft palate or slightly crossed eyes, but no, the writer was young and beautiful. Very young. “I can tell you right now, no one this attractive ever wrote a novel,” Mel said glumly.

“Oh come on, you’re attractive,” Sara said, reaching for the book. She stared down at the photo. “Damn,” she said.

“That’s probably not even her,” Mel said. “The book was probably written by some desperate ghostwriter who used a supermodel to pose for the author’s photo.”

“Actually,” Annie said, “she
was
a model. The author, I mean. She made millions on the catwalk in Paris and New York and then retired. Writing is just her hobby.”

“You mean she writes for fun?” Lola said.

“Well, I don’t think she needs the money.”

Mel snorted. “She’s probably self-published then.”

“Random House,” Annie said.

“She probably took a lowball advance just to see her name in print.”

“Two million,” Annie said. “A three-book deal.”

Mel gave her a hard look. “Another word out of you and I toss the book in the pool.”

“What?” Annie said, quickly shoving the novel into her bag. “I thought you’d be happy. I thought all you writers supported one another.”

“Oh, fuck,” Mel said. She stared bleakly at a young mother struggling to insert her toddler into a pair of overinflated water wings.

Lola sat up cross-legged on her towel and pulled a thick book out of her beach bag. It showed a large hatchet on the cover, dripping into a pool of congealed blood.