Return to Sullivans Island

Dorothea Benton Frank

Return to Sullivans Island

For everyone on Sullivans Island,
past, present, and future

Contents

1
  Beth

2
  Bon Voyage

3
  Family Jewels

4
  Alone at Last

5
  Hello Trouble

6
  The Mother Ship Is Calling

7
  Goose Bumps

8
  New Shoes

9
  Cheap Talk

10
  Tabasco Night

11
  Afterglow

12
  Bank on It

13
  Woody

14
  High Anxiety

15
  Bad News

16
  Dark Cloud, Silver Lining

17
  Fault Lines

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Other Books by Dorothea Benton Frank

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

1

Beth

[email protected]

Susan, I’m arriving exactly a week before Beth and can’t wait to see you. Itching to get in my kitchen and cook! Please stock up and kick the bugs out of my bed! Maggie xx

[email protected]

Maggie, Your kitchen? Which 50% do you mean? Change your own sheets. Susan

[email protected]

Somebody needs estrogen! C u soon! xx

H
ER PLANE CIRCLED
the Lowcountry. Acres upon acres of live oaks stood beneath them, guardians festooned in sheets of breezy Spanish moss. They passed over the powerful waters of the Wando, Cooper, and Ashley Rivers and hundreds of tiny rippling tributaries that sluiced their way in tendrils toward the Atlantic Ocean. It was so beautiful. The shimmering blue water seemed to be scattered with shards of crystals and diamonds. Beth’s heart tightened. Every last passenger stared out through their windows at the landscape below. Whether you were away from the Lowcountry for a week or for years, it was impossible to remember how gorgeous it was. It never changed and everyone depended on that. Seeing it again was like seeing it for the first time—hypnotic.

The small jet finally touched down on the steaming tarmac at Charleston’s airport, and after a few braking lurches it rolled to a stop at the terminal. When the flight attendant opened the cabin door humidity poured in, blanketing the cabin in a great whoosh like an invisible gas. The air was heavy, weighted by the stench of jet fuel diluted with salt.

“Hold on, baby.”

Beth’s miniature Yorkshire terrier Lola seemed to understand everything she said. If she spoke to her in Swahili she would look at her with those licorice eyes of hers, raise her eyebrows, and smile. Yes, her dog smiled, but not just then. Lola whimpered and began to squirm. Beth stretched her finger through the netting of her dog’s carrier to console her with a tiny massage. All five pounds of Lola settled against her as they slowly made their way with the restless passengers across the muggy Jetway and into the sorrowful, weak air-conditioning of the terminal. She hoped Lola wasn’t going to start wheezing. Could a mother love a child more than Beth Hayes loved her dog? She doubted it.

The climate had changed over the years. Global warming was obvious, and in Charleston the weather was practically tropical. Beth had decided that it was too uncomfortable to consider anything except escape into the jungle or a total surrender to the ruling party.

Beth had chosen surrender, and was there to begin serving her one-year sentence in the Lowcountry, house-sitting the family’s grande dame on Sullivans Island. The Island Gamble. The family’s château stood in defiance of her age and history and she reigned over them like Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen. Beth could not envision England’s history without Elizabeth I any more than she could dream of Sullivans Island without that particular house as center stage for the disjointed hauntings of her sleeping hours. All of her dreams were acted out on Sullivans Island and at the Island Gamble. In the rooms. On the porch. In the yard looking back. Always, always there.

They used the term
château
loosely, even jokingly, but during the days and nights of their lives the Island Gamble was where any and everything of significance for generations had been told around her tables or had been revealed in the confessional of her front porch. Lives were dissected and discussed deep into the night until aunts, uncles, and especially children, exhausted from the heat and laughter, nodded off in their rockers or hammocks. Their aspirations, broken hearts, and victories were all recorded for posterity in the family’s collective memory, the details rearranged and embellished as time went on to make for better storytelling. The house knew everything about them, and being there made them believe that they were safe from the outside world. In their case, telling family tales was what they seemed to do best. They would laugh and say that if there had been an Olympic event for working a jaw, the walls of the Island Gamble would have buckled from the burden of gold medals. Truly, the family was a very sentimental lot, and their point of view was that the ability to poke fun at their own foibles was what saved them from despair on many a day.

That’s how it was. The aging, sometimes shaking ramparts of the Hamilton fortress were stockpiled with invisible weapons of
Remember when…We never…
and
We always…
as though they existed in their own great saline bubble, with a sacred family crest to live up to.

Sometimes the family wore Beth out with what she saw as excessive self-importance and righteousness. One day her aunts, uncles, and cousins would all be the stuffings of novels, even memoirs perhaps, if she could find the courage to put it all on paper. But not just yet. Today Beth was on another mission. The Dutiful Daughter was back.

Beth gathered her luggage, walked Lola on the grassy median outside, and found a place in the short taxi line. Part of her was excited and the other part was simply miserable. She loved Sullivans Island because it was her personal time warp. Even though it was 2009, when you were there you could almost believe that Eisenhower was still in office, even though that was well before her time. But in her heart she felt the island really belonged to her mother’s generation and those before her. The last four years had prepared her to live her own life, independent of her tribe. Isn’t that why she went to college a thousand miles away in the first place? Further, this
assignment,
decided upon with the cavalier flick of her mother’s and aunt’s royal wrists, blocked her from pursuing her own dream but enabled her mother to live hers. It wasn’t a fair trade but she wasn’t exactly given an option. If asked, she would say dryly, “My mom and my Aunt Maggie could benefit from even one session of sensitivity training. Seriously.”

She climbed in the next available rattletrap and soon she was on her way. At least she had Lola to console her.

“Could you turn up the air-conditioning, please?” she asked. Beth’s upper lip was covered in little beads of moisture and the roots of her hair were damp.

“Sure,” the driver said. “Today’s a hot one, ’eah?”

“Yep. It sure is.”

The old van complained with each pothole and strained against the slightest rise in the road. Its ancient driver, an old man whose white hair was as thick and coarse as a broom, was crouched over the steering wheel. The intensity of his focus on the road was nerve-racking. He drove like a lumbering walrus in the middle lane as hundreds of cars zoomed by them. She actually considered offering to drive, thinking she preferred death by her own hand.

Memorabilia was strung across the old man’s dashboard, photographs attached with bits of curling tape and lopsided magnets from Niagara Falls and, in Beth’s opinion, other painfully boring vacation spots. Judging from their faded condition, the people in those pictures, his children she guessed, were grown and had been gone from his home for a long time. His taxi license read
Mr. George Brown
. He sighed loudly and cleared his throat as the van’s transmission struggled and jerked with each changing gear. She wondered if they would ever reach the causeway. Mr. Brown did not know that he was delivering her, her little dog, two large suitcases and a duffel bag bulging with university memories, soggy farewells, and a poor attitude to one very bittersweet destination.

“You want to take 526 or the new bridge?”

“Whatever you think,” she said.

She had told her mother, Susan, that she would take a cab from the airport to the beach. She was in no hurry to see anyone. Besides, she had just seen her mother and family at graduation a month ago, so the usual sense of urgency she felt to be with her, the excitement of those initial moments of grabbing each other’s eyes, had been satisfied. She was home before the longing could begin again. As all mothers do, Susan frequently drove her daughter to the edge of what she could endure, but the truth was Beth loved her mother no matter what and more than anyone in the world.

Like most mothers and daughters, their relationship was naturally complicated by simply living, and lately by the many small acts of letting each other go. But theirs was different in that it was scarred by the pain of tragic loss. To be completely honest, the loss was epic to Beth but she felt it was less so to her mother. That single fact marked the beginning of a worrisome divide between them. Beth was not exactly sure of all the reasons why she felt so burdened, but she sometimes staggered under the weight of the sea of emptiness she carried. She felt like her mother had tossed aside her share and left her to flounder for herself. It wasn’t fair or noble.

Then there was the matter of expectations, ones Beth would never meet much less surmount. It was impossible to be the oldest girl in the next generation of Hamiltons/Hayeses and ever expect raving accolades from the lips of her elders. She might have looked for some measure of satisfaction from them but she would never expect a parade in her honor. There was no excessive flattery to be found.

Her aunts and uncles owned the past and they still thought the future was theirs as well. Beth begged to differ. She felt they were wrong about so many things that she was embarrassed for them, one more reason she had planned to continue to build her life elsewhere.

The distance between Beth’s college and Sullivans Island had allowed the rest of her relatives to revel in their shared hallucinations of perfect family. College had spared her four years of their self-congratulations and she thanked everything holy that she had not been there. If she had been on that porch or around that table peeling shrimp with them, she would have said that what they actually were was very far from perfect. They would not have valued her observations. In college, she had developed a tongue.

It didn’t matter now. She was not going to be the one to point out that their conservative ideas had never advanced their family’s name one inch. She was going to try to be the good daughter, the responsible niece, the one who came and did her duty. Why? Because even though they all practically bored her to death, Beth loved them with a fierce passion she doubted she could ever duplicate in another relationship. But that’s how they were, the Hamiltons and the Hayeses, bonded by loyalty and an unseen force.

Beth suspected what everyone else already knew. That unseen force, that Lowcountry Force, the Goddess of the Island Gamble, if you like, was waiting for her. That’s why surrender was the only choice. She guessed that any other course could be met with some strange but actual version of Universal Mockery until she gave in and became a willing player in the game. Welcome back to the chess-board! Get in position! Let’s see, that would make Beth a pawn.

But, she thought, in spite of everything, it would be very interesting to see how the year would unfold. A year was a long time. Her intention was to avoid any and all controversy and every kind of chaos.

Beth laughed to herself realizing she had almost no real hand in the whole scenario anyway. She knew better. With the beckoning curl of their fingers, Aunt Maggie and her mother, Susan Hamilton Hayes, had coaxed her to the edge of their ancestral frying pan and she was crawling in like a lean slice of bacon. It wouldn’t take long to cook her.

The taxi crossed over the Cooper River on the new bridge, and the next thing she knew, they were cruising down Coleman Boulevard, Mr. Brown’s van straining to meet thirty miles an hour.

Stylistically, that is, if you wanted to impress anyone, his vehicle, that great hulking Chariot of Smoke and Fire, was not the optimal way to arrive in your hometown. Not that anyone beyond the gene pool was expecting her. But Beth thought it would have been awesome to be driving in some hot convertible wearing oversized sunglasses listening to some new music, something she knew all the words to so that she could sing at the top of her lungs. It would have been very, very awesome, she thought, if someone in another convertible, someone of the opposite sex who resembled a movie star perhaps, like Robert Pattinson, turned his head, and the question of her true identity stopped him dead and all he could do was grin and follow her home, promising to rescue her from her dreary existence. Starting now. Lasting forever. Why not? A girl could dream, right?

But she wasn’t of that ilk—the rescued damsel type. She was, well, sort of the pathetically serious one, the one sporting the inexpensive copy of Tina Fey’s eyeglasses, without the benefit of her jawline or innate sense of style. Not to mention Tina Fey was really smart and funny while Beth was smart, her humor was dry, and sometimes she was marginally dour. Okay, so she knew her eyeglasses were an infinitesimal attempt at stardom chic, but it was a start.