City of Boys (30 page)

Florence realizes that there are far too many gulls for the small amount of popcorn in the box, and a faint wind of fear rises in her throat. She tosses handfuls out away from her, into the heap of birds, and as they peck and quarrel, she empties the box and walks quickly away. She stops to drop the empty box into a garbage can, and looks behind her; some of the gulls on the edge of the circle have flown off, but the rest have stayed, in a little bunch that’s moved to cover the ground where she was standing. She is surprised to realize her heart is pounding, and as she walks back over the sand, she tries to think of an amusing way to describe the gulls to Marybeth and Louis, but when she arrives, they are standing, waiting for her.

—We’ve been waiting for you, Marybeth says. —We didn’t want to go in without telling you.

—You don’t mind? Louis says. —Being left alone?

They walk to the water side by side–Louis plodding carefully, Marybeth gliding lightly over the sand–and stop at the water’s edge.

Louis enters first, walking in up to his knees, then looks back at Marybeth, who splashes in and falls over sideways next to him. Florence watches them swim out until they are nothing more than tiny heads, round dark things carried over the surface of the waves.

She lies back on her towel and tries to pick out Louis’s voice
in the rush of sound, and for a sudden shocking moment she can’t remember what his voice is like, if it is deep, or high and reedy. She sits up to look for him. Far out on the water are two little figures, but waves climb and fall stiffly in front of them just before she can make out their features. She closes her eyes and imagines Louis and Marybeth underwater, their faces meeting in a kiss. When she looks out again over the water, she can see no one who looks like Louis. She concentrates on each drifting head until something–the length of the hair, the shape of a jaw, an unfamiliar gesture–reveals it to be someone else, and she gazes out at the sea until all she can see is light; she is sure not one of the heads belongs to Louis. Up and down the beach, people walk or sit or lie, but none of them is Louis, and when Florence looks closely at the waves, she is certain she sees a shadow, something large and dark moving to the surface, gliding back under. She has a sudden image of Louis’s head caught in the jaws of a shark, and she looks around for the lifeguard, who is smiling down at three women who stand around his chair; he laughs as he looks from one to the other, his nose gleaming bright white. Florence wills him to look out at the swimmers; it is possible that Louis and Marybeth have drowned while he has been talking to the women; it is possible that a shark is moving at this moment, unnoticed, just beneath the surface of the water. Florence cannot imagine moving the women aside to talk to the guard, or his face as he looks down at her, and she tries to picture Louis swimming confidently up and down the coast, but all she can see is his fragile head pressed against the floor of the ocean, his skin the color of sand, sand in his eyes, and sand stopping up the back of his throat. As people move in and out of the water, light flashes against their wet skin, so that they look hardly human, glittering in the bright air. The sun blinds
her eyes, and she closes them, lying back against the bumpy sand.

She is aware of something strange and stiff about her skin as she lets herself drift toward sleep. Somewhere, she thinks, a shark is gazing hopefully up through blue water at a green sun; somewhere an alligator lifts its stony head and heaves toward the legs of a child; everywhere there are animals lying in earth and sand and water, dreaming of closing their jaws on something human.

When Florence opens her eyes, Louis and Marybeth are standing above her, two black shadows against the sun. She cannot see their faces, or make out any features at all, but they speak to her as though nothing has happened, and she realizes she has been asleep.

—The water’s great, Louis says. He pats his stomach.

—We didn’t see any sharks. Or even any fish.

—I saw plenty of fish, Marybeth says. —Did you see that skate? Jesus. She sits down beside Florence and holds her hands a foot apart. —That sucker was huge. Florence puts her hand up to block the sun.

—I thought you had drowned, she says. —I couldn’t see you anywhere.

—Why would we have drowned? Louis asks.

—You thought we had drowned and you were taking a nap? Marybeth says. She laughs. —Counting up your pennies?

—I couldn’t see you at all, Florence says. —Anywhere on the beach.

—Well, we were there, Louis says. —Swimming.

As Florence sits up, she feels a rubbery tug at her face; it is her own skin, she realizes, and when she looks down at herself, her arms and legs look like parts of someone else’s body.

—Oh my, Marybeth says, —look at that.

She lays her hand flat across Florence’s thigh, and Florence stares down at it. Marybeth’s fingers are long and narrow, her nails perfectly shaped, and when she lifts her hand, there it is, a long white outline on Florence’s red skin.

—You’re going to pay for that, Marybeth says. —Big time. She shakes her head. —That skin’s going to come off in sheets if you don’t put something on it. Maybe even if you do.

Louis nods. —You’d better get out of the sun, he says. —That’s going to be a bad burn. Do you want me to walk you home?

Tiny spots float in front of his face, and even though Florence knows it’s an effect of the sun, it is distracting nonetheless. He rubs sand from his mouth, and she tries to imagine the feel of his sandy face against hers. She closes her eyes, but all she can feel is heat rising in her bones, firing her skin into a fine powder that will be swept across the wide stretch of white sand.

—Florence? Louis says.

—No, she says, —I’ll just go by myself.

As she stands, she feels nothing, just the stiff mechanical workings of her bones and muscles. She knows this will hurt later, but for now she feels nothing, not the sand beneath her feet, nor the hot pavement, nor the sun beating down on her as she walks home, half in a dream.

She stops to look at the flamingos in front of the hotel; if they didn’t move, they could pass for plastic, as stiff and as pink as those she saw occasionally on some of the more adventurous lawns back in Indiana. She waits now until she’s seen each bird move before she turns toward her house.

Before she can get inside, Mrs. Walker calls out to her, and
as Florence walks across the yard, she feels as though she is skimming lightly over the surface of the gravel, though she knows it must be sharp and hard.

—Look, Mrs. Walker says. She holds her palms up to Florence. —It’s a sign. God sent me a sign. After all these years. She looks up into the blazing sky, then at Florence. —What does it mean? she says. —Who do I call?

Florence looks at her hands; they are covered by deep spidery creases and dry age.

—There’s nothing there, Florence says, and Mrs. Walker looks down at her palms, then leans forward in her chair and rubs them in the gravel.

—Look, she says. —Look again. It’s a miracle.

When she lifts her hands, blood stains the white rocks, and Florence can feel something rising inside her. Across the ocean, saints are stirring, and the Pope gazes idly at the feet of his prelate, noticing for the first time how soft they are, how white the skin; his mind moves against the thought and blood stains the delicate white toes. A miracle. Florence closes her eyes.

—There’s nothing there, she says, and turns toward her house.

—Wait, Mrs. Walker says. —Wait. Florence looks back at her; she is gazing down at her hands, but the rocks around her are perfectly white, perfectly raked but for the deep furrows of the rocker.

Florence wakes to what she is sure are the sounds of Marybeth and Louis making love. She can hear his hand stroke Marybeth’s skin, the soft whisper of her hair. She feels as if she is lying in flames, except for a cold weight on her stomach, and she is surprised to find that it is her own hand. She moves it to her face, to touch the dry burning skin, and imagines Marybeth holding her arms out to Louis, the
scrape of her thin fingers along his back; she can see the pulse beat in his neck as he bends to kiss her, and he is thinking about nothing at all, nothing but a wide stretch of sand, and beyond that the glittering sea.

She rises and stands at the door, listening for their voices, but when she walks into the kitchen, their heads are bent over a game of cards; Louis is staring at Marybeth as he slaps down a card, and she snatches it up.

—Ha, she says. —I knew you were going to do that.

She spreads her cards out across the table. —Gin, she says, and begins to count up her points. Florence rustles forward, and they turn to look at her with big empty eyes.

—You look terrible, Marybeth says. —You must be burning up. You should draw her a cold bath, she says to Louis. —With vinegar. She closes her eyes a moment. —Or maybe it’s tomato juice. I don’t know. She goes back to her cards, then looks up at Louis. —You really should, she says, and he pushes his chair back.

—I think I just need some air, Florence says, and walks past them.

Louis looks up at her helplessly, and Marybeth adds her points to the total score on a piece of paper. Louis’s cards are all low, threes and fives and sixes, while Marybeth’s hand is full of jacks and queens.

Outside, it has grown almost dark; the little houses cast shadows that turn the gravel gray and dirty. Florence tries again to remember what it was she read about the evening sun, the quality of the light; but except for the shadows, it seems no different from the light at any other time of day. Inside, Marybeth and Louis lay out cards, pick them up, lay them out again, and do not think of her. All the lights are lit in Mrs. Walker’s house. Soon, perhaps tomorrow, her husband’s children will come for her, but for now she moves
from room to room in a frenzy of faith, her face changing and changing back again. Florence sits in Mrs. Walker’s chair and rocks gently; underneath the crackling gravel, earth and ashes stir, and she closes her eyes to wait, breathing in the dark sulphur of the air.

Anne leans her head out the car window into the rush of hot air and tries to remember just exactly where it was that she decided to leave David. Cincinnati, she thinks it was, or perhaps Cleveland. It was on the edge of some large Ohio city beginning with
C
, and she wants to be sure which one;
she wants to be able always to think back on this decision and remember it exactly, to have a place and a name to attach to it. Oh that’s right, she will be able to say, it was in Cincinnati that I finally decided to end it; then, for the rest of her life, Cincinnati will have gained this relevance, and every time she hears the name or sees it, she will be reminded of David, and it will keep her from going back to him, or to someone like him. It will be like a charm whose magic is clear only to her, and now she can’t remember where it was.

She closes her eyes and tries to recall a landmark of some kind, a sign or a water tower. There are so many cities in Ohio and so many of them begin with
C
. All she can really remember is that they had just left the rest stop where David bought the peanuts, but that’s of little help, since that stop was like every other rest stop on the highway, each of them laid out in the same configuration of snack bar, bathroom, and gift shop, all selling the same newspapers, gifts, and food. Even the people who work in them resemble each other slightly, like distant relations.

Anne and David have stopped at every rest stop they’ve come to. David takes great pleasure, Anne can tell, in the sameness of the places; he walks right in and heads, without even a moment’s orientation, toward the bathroom, or when he gets coffee, he reaches around behind him, without looking, to the little islands that hold cream and sugar. Anne always goes to the bathroom, whether she needs to or not.

—You’d better go now, David says at each stop, —you never know when you’ll get another chance, though she knows they’ll pull in to the next one down the road. In every bathroom she splashes water on her face, blots it off with toilet paper, and leans for a few moments against the cool tile walls, then goes to wait for David by the glass entryway to the rest stop, where she watches the steady flow of families.
It is late August, and the families are rushing to accomplish their vacations before the summer ends; their faces show the strain of driving relentlessly across the country, only to return home by the same road, dazed and drained, a week later. They all look so familiar that Anne wonders if maybe some of them
are
the same, if some of these families might be following David’s pattern of stopping at every opportunity, regardless of need.

It was at the last stop, or the one before, that David bought the peanuts; Anne looked up from the newspaper box by the doors, in the middle of an article she had started reading three or four stops earlier, and was surprised to see David actually buying something in the gift shop. Usually he only browsed, but this time he was handing the clerk money, and through the glass wall of the store his plain pleasant face was happy and a little flushed as he chatted with her.

—Look, David said when he joined Anne. He held out a can with a bright yellow label and an inartistic drawing of something that looked both foreign and oddly familiar. Only after a moment did she realize it was a picture of a bowl of peanuts, heaped up in their shells; they were boiled, the label said, and preserved in brine. It was cracker food, food eaten by Kentuckians and Southerners. She looked up at David’s pleased, expectant face.

—Boiled peanuts? she said.

—I thought it would make a nice housewarming gift.

—It’s not a new house, she said, handing the can back.

—You know what I mean. A guest gift. Whatever they call it.

—A hostess gift. She’s my sister. You don’t have to bring a gift.

—Well, I’ve never met her. I should bring something.

Anne could see that David was disappointed in her reaction, but she felt suddenly annoyed by it all—the picture, the
peanuts, the kind of cheap little store that would sell such things.