Moon Shell Beach: A Novel
Read Moon Shell Beach: A Novel Online
Authors: Nancy Thayer
CONTENTS
For My Beloved
Charles Walters
Joshua Thayer
David Raymond Gillum
Sam Wilde Forbes
and
Ellias Samuel Steep Forbes
One morning when I was six years old, my father said to me, “Son, today Charles Lindbergh is going to try to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. Let’s hope he makes it.” My father left for work. I wanted to do as he said, but I realized my father hadn’t told me how to hope. So all day long, I thought, over and over again, “I hope he makes it. I hope he makes it. I hope he makes it.”
—U.S. A
MBASSADOR
W
ILLIAM
B
UTTS
M
ACOMBER,
speaking at the Nantucket Atheneum, 1990
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My thanks to John West, brilliant chocolatier of Sweet Inspirations, and beautiful Cheryl Fudge of Cheryl Fudge Designs. Thanks to the glamorous Anastassia Izioumova and the gorgeous Viktoriya Krivonosova. I’m so glad you’re on Nantucket. Thank you, Josh Thayer, for your swift, precise information about business matters. Thanks to Libby McGuire for her insight. Thanks to the very cool Dan Mallory. Enormous gratitude to my virtuoso agent and friend, Meg Ruley.
And to my editor Linda Marrow, genuine on-my-knees idolatry for her genius, inspiration, and editing.
1987
C
lare and Lexi discovered the beach when they were ten. Hidden away off a country road, it was a small crescent of sand at the creek end of the harbor, so concealed by a tangle of beach grass, cattails, and wild rosebushes that no one would ever find it unless they were young and supple and small, creeping low to the ground, pretending to be Wampanoag Indian scouts.
Spider crabs scuttled along the sand, which was speckled with scallop shells and mussels and coiled moon shells, each shell spotted or banded, the far ends peaked like a woman’s breasts. Gulls cruised low over the beach and elegant white herons occasionally stalked in the gleaming waters. They could see the long town pier and, in the distance, the arrival and departure of stately ferries and sailboat races and regattas, but no boats, not even rustic wooden rowboats, came close to their beach. It was far too shallow.
They never saw signs of other people—no footprints in the sand, no discarded bits of paper. On the hottest days they swam far out in the cool, translucent water, looking for mermaids, sometimes pretending they were mermaids themselves, as their long hair waved around their faces like fronds and their skin took on a greenish underwater hue. They collected shells to make jewelry, carved designs in driftwood as secret codes, sent messages off in bottles, hid treasures in the woods around the marsh.
It was their own fairy-tale thicket, their fantasy world. Best friends since they were five, they told no one else about the place, not other girls, not Lexi’s brother, Adam, nor their parents. It was not just a place to them, it was a kind of reality, and a possession of a bond deeper than words could say.
They met at the beach almost every day, biking out from their homes, hiding their bikes behind trees. They wore bathing suits and flip-flops and T-shirts, their skin grew brown as nuts, and their noses were always sunburned red. During the school year, they met at Moon Shell Beach in the late afternoon or weekend mornings, to tell each other the important things.
When it rained, and during the worst of the winter months, they had to play inside. The inside games were never quite as satisfactory—they were too close to the real world. When they were at Clare’s house, they played
her
choice—elaborate games of house, transforming Clare’s bedroom into a home complete with sometimes as many as twelve children made from Clare’s stuffed animals and dolls. In later years, they spent entire weekends experimenting with elaborate meals that Clare would store for her own real family—her literary, artistic, and absentminded parents and only child Clare—to eat over the course of the next week. Clare loved the coziness of baking on a rainy day, filling the kitchen with smells of cinnamon and butter. She even took pleasure in the way the windows steamed over when she did the dishes.
Lexi always grew bored with such domesticity.
She
wanted to see outside.
She
wanted to travel to faraway lands, she wanted
adventure,
so when Clare came to her house, they turned the backs of sofas into camels and elephants and dressed up like belly dancers or gypsies.
They respected their differences and even envied each other a bit. Lexi wished her mother were an artist like Clare’s mother, who spent most of her time in her studio at the back of the yard and forgot to shop for groceries or clean the house but sometimes sat with the girls, leafing through her art books, explaining in intricate and entrancing detail the works of Monet or Sargent or Childe Hassam. Every now and then Ellen Hart took the girls to a lecture on the island about Nantucket artists—Anne Ramsdell Congdon, Maginel Wright Barney, Frank Swift Chase—and Lexi’s passions stirred. When she compared her own family, she was ashamed of how cranky she felt about her own parents, so exhausted from running their shop that they never went out in the evenings but collapsed at home, watching anything and everything on television.
In turn, Clare envied Lexi her slightly larger and much more present family. Lexi had an older brother, Adam, who filled the house with noise and movement and slamming doors and bouncing basketballs and hoarse squawking laughter. Sometimes on winter Saturday nights the four Laneys gathered around the kitchen table to play Monopoly or Scrabble or Clue, and if Clare was invited to stay over, she grabbed the opportunity, loving the teasing and tumble of family life. Clare would bake brownies or cookies or even a pie to bring over with her for a Saturday night at the Laneys.
The summer of
their thirteenth year, they were filled with an unexpected restlessness, like air before a storm, charged, tense, and irritable. They started their periods, and Lexi shot up to almost six feet, and both girls suddenly found themselves with the unmistakable mixed blessing of breasts. Oh, they tried to stave off the transformations of adolescence. They gave each other lighthearted pet names—shorter, dark-eyed Clare was “Doe,” and Clare called tall, lean Lexi “Stork.” They wore loose clothing to cover their changing bodies, but they soon discovered they were helpless before the force that swept them up like driftwood in the sea.
Clare developed a passionate crush on Lexi’s older brother, Adam. He was fifteen, tall, broad-shouldered, with hair and eyebrows bleached white by the sun and Lexi’s aquamarine eyes. He had a deep voice and an easy laugh that made Clare feel shivery.
Lexi was infatuated with Adam’s best friend, Tris, who had broad shoulders, flaming red hair, and a deep rumbling voice.
Sometimes Adam went over to Tris’s house, or played soccer or baseball with friends. Some days Tris came over to hang out with Adam. Then the girls would leave Lexi’s bedroom to creep around the house, spying on the guys, peeking around doorways, ducking behind furniture, pinching each other’s arms so hard they left marks.
One Saturday afternoon, Adam and Tris and three other guys sat at the kitchen table playing poker. Clare and Lexi pretended to watch TV in the family room, but they went into the kitchen as many times as their dignity would allow, on the pretense of getting some chips, or some Coke, and then apples. When the game broke up, the five guys rose and clomped out of the kitchen on their huge hairy male legs, laughing in their deep male voices. Lexi and Clare stormed the room like a pair of spies, then raced outside and jumped on their bikes and pedaled to Moon Shell Beach.
They tucked their bikes down in the brush and made their way through bushes of rosa rugosa, tupelo trees, and tall, razor-edged grasses. Beneath their feet, the ground made squelching noises. Small twigs from the beach plum bushes scratched their skin, but they pushed on through the undergrowth until they suddenly arrived at the hidden cove. Before them spread the blue waters of the harbor. Behind them, the marsh curved like a green curtain, shielding them from the real world.
They sank on their knees in the sand and took out their stolen treasures.
Wrapped in a paper napkin lay the leftover part of a sandwich, the bread curved in a half circle where Tris’s mouth had bitten.
Clare had an apple, partially eaten by Adam.
“His mouth was here,” Lexi whispered. She held the sandwich to her lips and closed her eyes, thinking of Tris’s breath.
Clare ran her fingers over the moist white flesh of the apple and thought of Adam’s straight white teeth.
After a while, Lexi giggled, trying to lighten the intensity of the moment. “We’re kind of insane, aren’t we?”
But Clare remained serious. Across the water, by the town pier, islanders were painting the bottoms of their rowboats turquoise or scarlet. The sun dazzled like fireworks on the water and the air smelled of salt and spring. All around them in trees and shrubs, small buds unfolded like thousands of tiny hands opening slowly, releasing secrets. And something urgent was unfolding in Clare, something was waking.
“Lexi, let’s make a pact. Let’s promise never to bring a guy out here unless he’s the man we’re going to marry.”
“Marriage!” Lexi shouted. “
Ugh.
Marriage is about a million years away, Clare.”
“I know. But still…” Clare spread out her arms, including the beach, the water, the moment, so private, so rich. “This is really
our
place, Lexi. And things are changing.
We’re
changing, don’t you feel it?”
Lexi squirmed and shrugged her shoulders.
Clare ran her fingertip over the red skin of the apple. “We’re
playing
now, kind of. You know? But someday it will all be serious. And I don’t want to, oh, I don’t know,
spoil
this place.”
Lexi shifted on the sand. “I know what you mean. And you’re right.”
Clare continued, “This is
our
beach, and we won’t bring just
any
guy out here—”
“—cuz you
know,
” Lexi teased, “babes like us are going to be dating so many guys!”
Clare’s face remained solemn. “So I swear I won’t bring a man out here unless he’s the man I’m going to marry.”
Lexi settled down. “I swear, too.”
Both girls dipped their hands into the clear waters of Nantucket Harbor, then with wet palms, solemnly shook.
Lexi giggled again. “Clare. You said
man
.”
They looked at each other, awed, and frightened, and eager.