Beach Trip (21 page)

Lola smiled apologetically and dabbed her cheeks with the backs of her hands. “One day you’re standing on the beach with your child,” she sobbed, “and the next it’s your child standing there with his own son. Where does the time go?” Annie took a Kleenex out of her purse and gave it to Lola, and she took it and blew her nose softly.

It occurred suddenly to Mel that Lola was lonely. And Mel knew a thing or two about loneliness, although with her it was a condition she had chosen. Her career as a writer made a solitary life necessary but it was a choice she’d never really regretted. Well, most of the time, anyway. But with Lola the loneliness was forced, and that was different. Briggs had his money, Mel had her writing, Sara and Annie had their own families, but all Lola had ever had was Henry. And now Henry had found someone else.

“Lola, you and I need to see more of each other,” Mel said suddenly.
She put her chin up and stared at Lola in the rearview mirror. Sara put her hand out as if to take the wheel but Mel pushed it away. “Why don’t you come up to New York in the fall? We can do the museums, take in a few shows, shop until Briggs cuts you off, and eat in a different restaurant every meal.”

The cart whirred through the cool green tunnel of the maritime forest. Insects floated in the still blue air. Lola sniffed and stuck her nose in the Kleenex. “That would be nice,” she said, blowing gently.

The village was bustling with noontime shoppers and diners who crowded the island’s only two restaurants, Sophie’s Seafood and the Oyster Bar. Both restaurants fronted the harbor and faced each other at right angles. Sandwiched in between was the marina, and across the harbor was the ferry dock, where the big ferries ran every thirty minutes between the island and the mainland, carrying happy or depressed tourists (depending on whether they were just beginning their vacation or going home). Clustered along the perimeter of the harbor stood tall, cedar-shingled houses and shops weathered to a soft gray. The boats in the marina bobbed gently on the tide, their canvas rigging snapping in the steady breeze that blew in from the sound and the open sea beyond. Golf carts trundled along the narrow roadways, and children played on the village green under the watchful eyes of their parents, who sat on the deck outside Sophie’s sipping frozen margaritas out of wide-mouthed glasses.

Mel pulled the cart into an open bay in front of the cluster of village shops. She got out and plugged the cart into an outlet while the others stood up and stretched.

“Where should we start?” Sara asked, yawning. The sun was hot but the breeze was pleasant and fragrant with the scent of cape jasmine and fried fish.

“There’s a really cute dress shop over there,” Lola said, pointing. She seemed happy again, which was just like Lola, sad one moment and cheerful the next. “And right next to it is a store that sells little gifts and collectibles for the home.”

“I need to go in there first,” Mel said, pointing to the Village Market, an upscale grocery store that also sold beach products, cosmetics, and various drugstore items. The building was small and gray-shingled, and looked like an old-fashioned country store complete with a bay window and some type of trailing, pink-blossomed vine running across the facade
and up into the eaves. A series of stone steps led from the sidewalk up to the front door. Mel put her arm around Lola’s shoulders and they went up the steps together. A little bell tinkled as they walked in. The room was cool and musty with the scent of cinnamon and cloves. Wide planked floors gleamed beneath the overhead lights, and rows of tall shelves ran from the front of the store to the back. A bored-looking youth lounged across a counter reading a magazine. Behind his right shoulder hung a Boar’s Head meat sign. “Can I help you?” he said in a thick Ukrainian accent. A good portion of Ukraine seemed to be congregated here on this small North Carolina island. Fresh-faced waitresses, shopgirls, and deckhands all spoke with Ukrainian accents.

“Do you carry Corona?” Mel asked.

“Corona?” he said, looking puzzled.

“It’s a beer.”

“Oh. All beer is in cooler in back. You must be twenty-one to buy.” He grinned at Mel. She grinned back, a slow, lazy smile that showed her dimples to their best advantage.

“Oh, please,” Sara said.

She followed Mel back to the coolers, wondering what she was up to. Mel had that look on her face that she always had right before she did something wrong. Sara had spent most of her childhood anticipating that look. “Why are you buying beer?” she asked suspiciously. She was the oldest child in her family, and she had been raised to be the responsible one. It was a hard habit to break.

“It’s for tonight. I’m pulling out the big guns.”

“Big guns?”

“Corona,” Mel said, lifting a six-pack from the cooler.

“I told you I’m not drinking.”

“I’m not drinking either,” Annie said, appearing behind Sara like a disconsolate ghost. She had bought a kite for Agnes Grace, the girl she visited out at the Baptist Children’s Home, and was trying, unsuccessfully, to slide it into a plastic bag.

Mel ignored them both. “Where’s Lola?” she asked.

“I’m over here!” They heard her delicate little laugh one aisle over, followed by the sound of something metallic hitting the floor.

Mel checked her reflection in the glass-fronted cooler. “Since we’re not going out tonight, I thought I’d make something really special,” she said, fluffing her hair with her fingers.

“No,” Annie said belligerently.

“What?” Sara asked, unable to stop herself.

“Margaronas.”

“Margaronas?” Annie and Sara exchanged puzzled looks.

Mel continued on down the aisle toward the frozen foods. “Since we’re not going out. Since we won’t be doing any driving. When I serve them at home, I make everyone spend the night. A couple of pitchers of Margaronas and you’re out for the count. These things are deadly. Hey, do either one of you have a heart condition?”

“Not that I know of,” Annie said, looking worried. “But I haven’t had a physical in a couple of years.”

“You’ll probably be all right then.” Mel stopped in front of the frozen foods and scanned the frosty shelves.

“Assuming I was going to drink tonight, which I’m
not”
Sara said, “what exactly is a Margarona?”

“Okay,” Mel said, opening the freezer door and reaching in to grab a family-size can of frozen limeade. She shut the door and held the can up. “You put the frozen limeade in the bottom of a pitcher. Then you fill the empty can with tequila.”

Sara looked stunned. “Are you kidding me?” she said. “You fill that big can with tequila? That’s crazy.”

“Right,” Mel said. “Blend the tequila and the limeade. Then you pour in two Coronas, stir gently, and serve.”

“That sounds vile,” Annie said.

“Nectar of the gods,” Mel said, turning and wandering slowly down the aisle. They found Lola on the next aisle, standing in front of a magazine display. “Don’t read any more of those trashy magazines,” Mel told her. “They’ll rot your brain.”

Lola was thumbing through one of the more lurid rags. She looked up, puzzled, and asked earnestly, “Do y’all think Tom Cruise is gay?”

“Yes,” Mel said.

“Who cares?” Sara asked.

Annie was quiet. Like so much else in her life, she was still wrestling with the concept of homosexuality. Reverend Reeves maintained that it was a sin but Annie had begun to question that, too. Her friend Louise Ledford had a son named Roy who’d changed his name to Roi and moved to Chicago to open a bed-and-breakfast with his “friend” Mikhail. Even as a small child, Roi had been different. While other boys played Nintendo
or paintball or drove their four-wheelers through the park, Roi had contented himself with giving his mother facials. He also did her makeup and dressed her so that when she went out of the house, she looked like a million bucks.
(I love your purse
, he’d told Annie once at a church function,
but next time try a Baguette.)
Everyone knew Roi was “funny” even before he changed his name and danced the Dance of the Seven Veils at the eighth-grade talent show.

Still, Annie couldn’t see any real harm in Roi. It wasn’t like he was a serial killer or an alcoholic or a drug addict. And he was sweet to his mother; he called her twice a week and never forgot her birthday, sending her designer dresses and Fendi bags so that she always looked like a fashion plate at the Women of God meetings.

Lola closed the magazine and put it back on the shelf, and they followed Mel down the aisle to a small cosmetics display.

Mel stopped, picked up a box of Miss Clairol, and began to read the back. “Hey, I know,” she said. “Let’s get drunk and give ourselves makeovers.”

“Oh, now, that sounds like a good idea,” Sara said.

“At the very least, let’s dye Annie’s hair.” She held up the box of Miss Clairol and grinned.

Annie gave her a steady sullen look. “No one touches my hair,” she said.

“Oh, come on, live a little.”

“No,” Annie said, wishing she could give in to spontaneity but knowing it was impossible. She felt brittle sometimes, as if she was slowly ossifying beneath her flesh, but she had never been a spontaneous person, with the exception of that brief, heady period twenty-three years ago.

And look how well that had turned out.

nnie had not been a good mother. Age and experience had taught her this. She had been a competent mother. Her sons never went without clean clothes or a good meal or expensive medical or dental care. They were provided with all the material possessions a late-twentieth-century child could possibly want. They attended church and good private schools and had grown up in a stable, conservative, two-parent family. They had been raised in the structured environment so often touted by educators and television child psychologists. And that’s where Annie had gone wrong.

She had lived her life, their lives, by schedules. Most mothers kept dry erase or bulletin boards hanging in the kitchen by the phone but Annie’s schedules had taken up the entire back of the pantry door. Six sheets of neatly typed and numbered pages taped up like Martin Luther’s
Ninety-Five Theses
nailed to the door of the
Schlosskirche.
And the schedules had an almost religious significance for Annie; they were studied by her faithfully every morning, followed with unswerving devotion every day, and were the last things she consulted
every evening before laying her weary head down upon her goosedown pillow. Meal schedules, nap schedules, doctors’ appointments, reading enrichment, fun with mathematics, supervised television viewing, art lessons, soccer lessons, and piano lessons were all listed and sublisted in outline form down to the most trivial of details. Even playtime was scheduled. An anthropologist studying child-rearing customs and preadolescent development in the late twentieth century could see the whole of her children’s sad and dreary childhoods outlined on the back of her pantry door.

The problem with scheduling, Annie now realized, was that in your rush to meet the deadlines set forth in front of you in black and white, you missed the more important things. Things like lazy summer afternoons spent lying in a hammock reading, or fishing for crawdads in the creek, or water gun fights on the lawn, or impromptu games of tag or blind man’s bluff or Hi-Ho Cherry O! Annie never
played
with her sons. She wasn’t that kind of mother. Lola had once told her that she and Henry had built an entire castle out of refrigerator boxes they painted and taped together, cutting out doors and windows with serrated knives.
(Serrated knives!)
The idea of wild-child Henry Furman wielding a sharp and dangerous instrument had been enough to fill Annie with a sense of doom and impending disaster.
What had Lola been thinking?

She repeated the story that night for Mitchell as they got ready for bed. “What was Lola thinking?” she said sharply. “Henry could have stabbed himself in the heart! He could have put out an eye!”

“Now, honey, boys need to be boys,” Mitchell said and something in his tone made Annie think he was criticizing her.

“Yes, well, boys given sharp instruments to play with are often
dead
boys!” she said, astonished at her own outburst. Why should she care that Lola gave her son knives to play with? Or that she played with him at all?