Bitter Sweet (50 page)

Todd glanced over his shoulder and straightened. ‘Oh, hi.’

Wow, what a build. And magnificent black hair, and a face that probably stopped girls in their tracks all the time.

His bare torso and brow were beaded with sweat and he wore a white headband.

‘Hi. You’re Brookie’s son.’

‘Yeah, and you must be Maggie’s daughter.’

‘My name is Katy.’ She extended her hand.

‘Mine’s Todd.’ He shook it with a hard, dirty hand.

‘I know. Mother told me.’

She held the bag open while he dumped the grass inside.

Standing close to him she caught the scent of tropical suntan lotion mixed with the green scent of the fresh grass cuttings.

‘I saw you come outside before,’ he told her, stealing a glance at her bare midriff.

“I clean for my mother.’

“So you’re going to be here all summer?’

‘Yup. I’ll be going back to Northwestern in the fall, though. My second year there.’

‘I’m going into the Air Force in September. Thanks.’ He took the bag from her and knelt to replace the grass catcher on the mower.

From above, she studied his tan, sweating shoulders, the slope of his vertebrae and the wet black curls at his nape. ‘Sounds like our mothers were pretty good friends.’

‘Yeah. I suppose you heard the same stories I did.’

‘The Senior Scourges, you mean?’

He glanced up and they laughed. She loved the way his face crinkled when he did that. He rose to his full height, wiping his palms on his shorts while they looked each other over and tried to appear as if they were not, then let their interest ricochet toward the lake.

‘Well, I’d better let you get back to work,’ she said reluctantly.

‘Yeah. I’ve got another yard to do this afternoon.’

She turned her head and caught him eyeing her bare midriff again. Abruptly he lifted his eyes and they both spoke at once.

‘I’ll be-’

‘Where do - He flashed her a quick grin and said, ‘You first.’

‘I was just going to ask where the kids hang out around here. ‘

‘And I was going to say that I’ll be done with my afternoon job around five. If you want I could take you out to City Beach and introduce you around. I know just about everyone in Door - everyone but the tourists, that is, and I even know a few of them.’

She flashed him a bright smile. ‘Okay. I’d like that.’

‘After supper we pretty much hang out at the C-C Club down on Main Street. They have live bands in there.’

‘Sounds fun,’ she replied.

‘I could come and pick you up around six.’

‘Sounds great! See you then.’

Maggie noticed the change in Katy immediately. Her temperament mollified; she hummed and talked to her mother; she called a cheery good-bye upon leaving the house with Todd.

But by two . M. Maggie hadn’t heard Katy come in to use the bathroom. The following day Katy slept until ten and arose only under duress. For the next three nights she went out with Todd again, arising later and later each day, and when Sunday came, she grumbled about having to work at all. ‘It’s Todd’s only day off and we wanted to go to the beach early.’

‘You can go as soon as your cleaning is done.’

‘But, Mom . . .’

‘It would have been done already if you’d got up when you should have!’ Maggie snapped.

During the days that followed, while Katy saw more and more of Todd, Maggie burned with indignation, not over her dating - Todd was a pleasant boy, a hard worker, prompt and unfailingly polite - but because of her daughter’s cavalier attitude about work. Maggie resented being put in the position of having to revert to mothering tactics that harked back to Katy’s young teen days. She resented becoming the night watch. She resented Katy’s blithe assumption that she could bend her hours to suit her personal needs.

There was something else that bothered Maggie, too, something she had not expected. She missed her privacy.

After so few months of independence she found she’d grown accustomed to eating - or not eating - when she wished; to finding the bathroom the way she’d left it, her cosmetics where she’d put them; to having the radio on the station of her choice, and the kitchen sink free of dirty glasses. Even though Katy slept in the garage apartment the house was not her own anymore, and many times she felt small and guilty for her reaction. Because she realized that it might all be a subterfuge to disguise the one greatest imposition Katy’s presence had created; it had forced an end to her evenings with Eric.

Maggie wished she could talk to someone about these complex feelings, but her own mother had put herself off limits, and since Todd was involved, Brookie was out.

Then one night eight days after Katy’s arrival, Eric came.

Maggie jolted out of a deep sleep and lay tense, listening.

Some sound had awakened her. She’d been dreaming she was a child, playing Red Rover in the tall grass beside a square yellow-brick schoolhouse when the school bell rang and awakened her. She lay staring at the black ceiling, listening to the midnight chorus of crickets and frogs, until finally it came again - the faint ting not of a school bell, but of a ship’s bell, close enough to be heard, distant enough not to disturb. Intuition told her it was he, calling her with the familiar brass bell hanging above the Mary Deare’s cabin.

With racing heart she leapt from bed and scrambled through a dresser drawer, yanking on the first shorts she found, beneath her hip-length nightshirt. The clock said eleven. Running through the dark house, Maggie felt her heart dubbing in anticipation. She slipped like a wraith down the hall and out the front door, across the deep front porch and down the steps between the fragrant bridal wreaths that hung with great white ropes of flowers; toward the vast blackness of the like where the soft chug of the Mary Deare’s engines rippled the night water and diffused the reflection of the moon; downhill ... barefoot ...across the dewy grass.., beneath the black lace of maple arms until she heard the engines cut, then the hght swash of waves against the dock pilings, then her own bare heels thumping on the wooden platform, feeling it buck as the boat have against it.

He appeared as an apparition in white, as silent and ghostly as the Mary Deare itself, waiting at the rail with arms uplifted as she sailed into them like some lost pigeon homing at last.

‘Oh, darling, I’ve missed you. Hold me, please.., hold ‘Ah, Maggie.. : Maggie...’

He hauled her tight against his bare chest, against the white trousers rolled to mid-calf. Straddle-legged, he braced against the faint roll of the deck, kissing her as if to do so were to heal from some awful abuse.

Like a sudden tropical shower, her tears came, bursting forth without warning.

‘Maggie, what is it?’ He drew back, trying to lift her face, which she, abashed, hid against his shoulder.

‘I don’t know. It’s just silly.’

‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes... no... I don’t know. I’ve been on the verge of this all day, for no good reason. I’m sorry, Eric.’

‘No, no... it’s all right. You go ahead and cry.’ He held her loosely, rubbing her back ‘But I fee} so silly, and I’m getting your chest wet.’ She sniffled against his slick bare skin and gave it two wipes with the butt of her hand.

‘Go ahead, get it wet. It wont shrink.’

‘Oh, Eric...’ After a halfhearted snuffle she began calming and settled comfortably against his widespread thighs. ‘I don’t know what it is with me lately.’

‘Bad week?’

Her nod bumped his chin. ‘Could I unload on you, please?’

‘Of course.’

It felt so good to lean against him and spill out her feelings. ‘It’s not working out, hiring Katy,’ she began. She told him everything - about Katy’s late-night hours and how it affected her work; about the difficulty of supervising one’s own daughter; about being unable to discuss it with Brookie; and her own sense of being trapped in a phase of motherhood she thought she’d outlived. She confessed her own abnormal irritability lately and her heartsoreness at losing even the thinnest line of contact with her own mother. She told him, too, that Katy knew she was seeing him and that they’d had words about it.

‘So I needed you tonight.., very badly.’

‘I needed you, too.’

‘Did you have a bad week, too?’

He told her about the grand hoopla at Mike and Barb’s house this past week, first on Saturday when the whole tribe pitched in to throw a big graduation party for Nicholas; and last night when Barb had had a baby girl - two weeks late, but big and healthy and named Anna after her grandmother,.

‘In one week they send off one child into the world and bring another one into it,’ he reflected sadly.

‘And you have none - that’s what’s bothering you, isn’t it?’

He sighed and shrugged it off, held her by both arms and looked down into her face. ‘Something else happened last weekend.”

‘Tell me.’

‘Nancy came out to Ma’s, begging for a reconciliation, and today my lawyer advised me it won’t set well with the courts ill refuse to at least try a reconciliation when my wife is asking for one.’

Maggie searched his face, consternation on her own.

‘Don’t worry,’ he added quickly, ‘I love you. You’re the only one I love, and I promise I won’t go back to her. Not ever.” He kissed her mouth, tenderly at first, then with growing ardour, his tongue wet and sleek upon hers.

“OIL Maggie, I do, I love you so.’ t-ira voice sounded tortured. ‘I ache to be free so I can marry you, so you don’t have to suffer your daughter’s scorn and your mother’s.’

‘I know.’ She took her turn at comforting him, touching his face, tracing his eyebrows. ‘Someday.’

‘Someday,’ he repeated with an edge of impatience. ‘But when!’

‘Shh...’ She calmed him, kissed his soft mouth, and coerced him into forgetting, for awhile. ‘I love you, too.

Let’s make some new memories.., here.., underneath the stars.’

The moon cast their shadow onto the wooden deck - one long spear against the lighter boards as they drew close and became one unbroken line. He opened his mouth upon hers, drew her hips flush to his, and ran his hands down the slope of her spine, flaring out and catching her buttocks to force her up hard against him. She lifted on tiptoe, running her nails up his skull, then down his naked shoulders. He captured her breasts beneath the loose-fitting T-shirt, caught her beneath the arms and lifted her toward the stars, holding her suspended as he closed his mouth upon her right breast. She winced and he murmured, ‘I’m sorry.., sorry... I get too impatient...’

Softer, he opened his mouth upon her, wetting her shirt, and her skin, and the deepest reaches within her. She put her throat to the sky and felt his arms quivering, and herself quivering, and the night air quivering around them, and she thought, Don’t let me lose him. Don’t let her win.

When she slid down his body, her hand led the way, skimming his chest and body, then cupping him, low.

‘Come on,’ he whispered urgently, catching her hand and leading her fore, where a canopy sliced off the moonlight and the panel lights illuminated their faces with a pale phosphorescence. Starting the engine, he perched on the hip-high stool and settled her between his thighs, facing Green Bay, slipping one hand inside her underwear, caressing her intimately as he took them away from shore.

Reaching back, she stroked him through his trousers, riding over the star-kissed waters, absorbing its slap and lap against the hull, and the smell of his warm hide and the brush of his hair as he lowered his face to the slope of her shoulder.

A mere twenty-five feet offshore he dropped anchor.

They made love on the cool wooden deck, in a lunge and lift that matched the motion of the boat on the pliant night waves, it was as consuming as always, but beneath its wonder was an underlying thread of sadness. For he was not hers, and she was not his, and this above all they desired.

When it was over, he hy above her, his elbows braced on either side of her head. She studied his moon-shadowed face, what she could make out of it, and felt love inundate her once again with an immeasurable force. “Sometimes,’ she whispered, ‘isn’t it hard to express it? In words powerful enough or meaningful enough?’

He touched her moonlit brow, stretched her auburn tresses upon the decking until they lay like a nimbus around her. He searched for ways he might express it, but he was no poet or philosopher.

‘I’m afraid “I love you” will have to do. That says it all.’

‘And I love you.’

They carried the thought back to shore, captured it within for the days of separation ahead, reiterated it with their farewell kiss, clung to it as she bade him good-bye
       
and left him standing on the end of the dock watching her up the hill.

At the top she turned and waved, then resolutely plodded up the front porch steps.

From the shadows came a voice. Hard. Condemning.

‘Hello, Mother.’

Maggie started. ‘Katy!’

‘I’m here, too, Mrs Stearn.’

‘Oh... Todd.’ They’d been necking in the dark. It was obvious even without benefit of light. ‘You two are out rather late, aren’t you?’