Return to Sullivans Island (4 page)

“It’s what you always wanted,” Maggie said. “Remember when you used to say you were going to run away to Paris and live in a garret and smoke French cigarettes?”

“I was thirteen.”

“Well, now you’re postmenopausal and isn’t Simon good to let you go?”

“Thanks for reminding me not to pack tampons—”

“Hush! Your! Mouth!” Maggie said in horror. “We’re in the
kitchen
!”

“Whatever. You think the milk will go sour? Anyway, I did not need his permission. Like he asked me if he could go to California for a year to work with Grant?”

“Like he could do anything about it anyway?” Beth said, trying to catch her breath from laughing so hard. “When my mom wants something that badly, I wouldn’t want to tangle with her!”

“Seriously, Maggie, I didn’t need my husband’s permission. That’s ridiculous!”

“Well, I’ll keep an eye on him,” Maggie said. “All those cute young nurses! Woo hoo!”

“Oh, thanks a lot,” Susan said.

Maggie took some measure of delight in making her sister insecure, but Susan knew it and after all these years, she had learned to take it in stride.

Beth had finished all the napkins and suddenly couldn’t hold her eyes open.

“I’m going to catch a nap for a few minutes,” Beth said.

“You go on, darlin’,” Maggie said. “Thanks for all your help.”

Susan followed her to the foot of the steps and then gave her a hug.

“I’m glad you’re home, baby,” she said. “I always miss you.”

“Me too, Momma. Call me if I sleep more than an hour, okay?”

“Sure,” she said, and kissed her on her forehead.

Beth climbed the stairs envisioning the laughing faces of her relatives. Her mind had time-traveled to the next week and she could already feel them there. She became giddy thinking of the endless teasing that would go on, the advice that would be freely dispensed from their generation to hers. She knew how it would be. Their voices would be a continuous hum like a swarm of honeybees around a hive. White breezes from the Atlantic would drench the rooms in something sweet and delicious. Thousands of memories would be whispered to them from inside the weathered boards of pine. And they would move around one another like tiny planets in their own elliptically shaped orbits, revolving and revolving.

She was so tired. Her legs seemed to weigh a thousand pounds. She reached her room and could barely open the door. Beth did not remember having turned down her bed or that she had put Lola in her crate, where she snored in tiny puffs. But there were the facts. She could not recall lowering the blinds and positioning the slats just so, so that the air could sweep in and around the room cooling everything off, with the rising tide playing its age-old lullaby. It was all a welcome mystery, typical of the things that happened there. She pulled off her jeans, dropped them to the floor, and slipped between the crisp white sheets. Pale fragrances of mint and jasmine escaped from the pillows, lulling her into dreams of what? She did not know. Someone was there; she could feel them, there in the room with her. A faint presence. She was too tired to open her eyes or to ask who it was. It did not matter. She did not care. She smiled to herself knowing she had already been sized up, the rules of engagement were being laid forth, and the games were about to begin.

2

Bon Voyage

B
Y FRIDAY, THE
house was loud, bulging with bodies, excited voices, and there wasn’t a vacant bed or chair. Beth’s aunts Sophie and Allison had yet to arrive but all the others were in various stages of getting settled. Everyone wanted to spend the weekend in the bedrooms of their childhood, but that was, of course, impossible.

On the flip of a quarter, Uncle Henry and Aunt Paula, affectionately known as Teensy, were enthroned in Uncle Henry’s old room, which did not measure up to Teensy’s highfalutin standards at all.

“There are mosquitoes in here, Henry. Do you hear me? Nasty!” she complained in her often-imitated shrill juvenile voice from behind their closed door.

“Shut your damn mouth,” Beth heard her Uncle Henry say. “The whole world will hear you.”

But they were staying there anyway because everyone knew that Uncle Henry was tighter than a mole’s ear and wouldn’t waste money on a hotel if he didn’t have to, which was probably one reason why he had so much money in the bank. As a boy, he had shared that room with Uncle Timmy. Uncle Timmy and Aunt Mary Jo had decided to sleep in the twins’ old room, downstairs with two of their four kids in the next bedroom, on creaking rollaway beds that were older than Beth. Maggie and Grant were staying in her grandmother’s old room, and her mother and Simon were staying across the hall.

The rest of the clan was sleeping down the island in Mary Ellen Way’s rambling eight-bedroom house on the marsh, which she occasionally loaned to friends or friends of friends. Maggie and Grant’s oldest son Mickey, who was now called Mike because he was twenty-six after all, knew about Mary Ellen Way’s house because he had dated her niece and, after winning the campaign for the uncles, including Henry, to foot the bill for some groceries and so forth, he invited all the boys to stay there and organized everything. Beth thought this was an excellent idea as there was only one bathroom on the second floor of their house and two tiny ones downstairs. It didn’t matter how large the capacity of the hot-water heater was, no residential system was going to deliver hot showers to that many people. Anyway, the most important detail is that Beth had too many cousins to know and all of them were lazy cows when it came to pitching in to help.

Coming to that same realization, as she tripped over running shoes and tote bags that were thoughtlessly tossed and dropped everywhere, that her nieces and nephews were a bunch of slugs, Maggie snapped out of her delirium and engaged the services of a woman named Cecily Singleton to help with meals on Friday and Saturday. Cecily was the granddaughter of Livvie Singleton, who, according to family lore, had single-handedly saved the whole family from implosion back in the sixties when Beth’s mother was a girl. So, between the second house and an extra pair of helping hands, Beth began to think they might survive the house party after all.

Friday afternoon, almost everyone had disappeared to walk the beach or to browse the new Whole Foods for exotic breads and olives. Beth’s hair was restrained in a ponytail, her breasts were almost concealed, and she was tying on an apron (with an Eiffel Tower hand-painted on the front) to help with Friday night’s fish fry, which would take place in two hours’ time. She looked out the kitchen window and there came the person whom she rightly assumed was Cecily, straight up the back steps. She rapped on the screen door, but before Beth could answer it she walked right into the kitchen like she owned the place.

“Humph,” she said, looking Beth up and down with a huge grin, dropping her tote bag on the table with a thud. “Nice apron.”

“Humph yourself,” she said. “I’m Beth.”

“If you say so.” Cecily arched an eyebrow at her. “Where’s our Miss Maggie?”

Beth arched an eyebrow back at her and said, “Out on the front porch with her hot glue gun, building a last minute four-foot-tall Eiffel Tower out of shells she personally collected from the beach. With her own hands. Without wrecking her manicure.”

Cecily held herself still for the entire span of two seconds and then they both burst out laughing.

“Oh Lord! That woman is so crazy!” Cecily said between hoots. “You got an apron for me?”

“You’re telling me?” Beth said, reached for a tissue to blot her eyes, and tossed her an apron that matched her own.

“But it’s a good crazy, I guess. Thanks.”

“Yeah, I think so too.” She blew her nose and looked at her again. “So you’re Livvie Singleton’s granddaughter, huh?”

Cecily was tall and lean with high cheekbones and a smile so bright that it seemed to flash light all over the room. Her hair was pulled back in a low knot and she was dressed in white linen trousers and a jade green cotton knit shirt. Beth liked her right away because Cecily was smart and for some inexplicable reason she seemed like an old friend.

“That’s my claim to fame,” she said.

“That’s a very big pair of shoes to fill. It’s great to meet you.”

“Same here,” she said, and they shook hands.

“So, how do you know my Aunt Maggie?”

She reached in her bag and pulled out a business card, handing it to her. It read:

Get it Together
For all your Organizing Needs
Cecily Singleton 843-555-1212

“Cool,” Beth said. “This explains a lot. Except that it reads like you do more office work.”

“Honey, at twenty-five dollars an hour, I do office work, cater, garden—you name it, I can do it, and if I can’t, I call my men who can. In this recession? Wouldn’t you?”

“Yeah, most definitely.”

“I’ve got over thirty houses and condos I take care of. It’s a great business,” Cecily said.

“Wow!” Beth said.

“And, your mother and Miss Maggie hired me to see about you while they’re gone.”

“Oh really?” Well,
that
was annoying. When was somebody going to tell Beth she had a babysitter? “To do what?”

“Pay all the bills, balance the household accounts, take care of all the hanging baskets and window boxes, make sure the yard gets cut and I guess to generally just see about things—you know, call someone if something breaks? Like the plumber?”

Admittedly, none of those jobs held any appeal for Beth, and although she was glad to have them taken care of by someone else, she was still mildly torqued. When were they going to treat her like an adult?

“Oh. So, if we need a plumber, I have to call you first?”

“No, you call the plumber. I’ll give you the list of household contacts.” She looked at her, understanding why she was miffed. “Beth? You don’t want to do all that stuff, do you? Please. Anyway, aren’t you gonna get yourself a job or something? Hand me a cutting board, okay? I need to start chopping onions.”

Beth pulled the old wooden board from under the cabinet where all the cookie sheets and trays were lined up like warped soldiers.

“I can do it,” she said. “What do we need onions for?”

“You ever have a decent meal that didn’t have onions in it?”

“Guess not,” she said, and didn’t bring up cereal or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, the two headliner onionless dishes from her student budget.

“We’re making onion rings and hush puppies. As long as we’re going to stink up the house frying fish, we may as well go all the way. Why don’t you put together the salad?”

“Fine,” she said. “Okay, so, tell me about Livvie. There must be at least
one
story I haven’t heard.”

Cecily cut her eyes in Beth’s direction in the first of what would become countless glances to note unspoken inside jokes and mutual understandings.

“She was something else, ’eah? I’ll tell you about her but first you have to tell me why your hair is so blazing red. It ain’t natural!”

“Ah yes. The hair. It was, alas, a poor decision,” Beth said in a dramatic whisper, coming clean with how she felt about it for the first time. “But don’t say I admitted it, okay?”

“Not me!” Cecily said, chopping the ends off an onion. “So, let’s see now. My grandmother Livvie? Well, she was the most magical woman I ever knew, that’s all. She could charm the birds right down from the trees. In fact, I used to watch her do it.”

“Seriously?” Beth looked in the refrigerator and found six bags of prewashed lettuce stuffed together on a shelf.

“Yep. When I was a little girl I used to follow her everywhere. I can remember playing hide-and-seek with her in the rows of corn in her vegetable garden. Anyway, when she got tired of me chasing her around we’d sit on the front steps of her house with a glass of iced tea. All these little birds, wrens, I think, they would just glide down from the big oak and land around her feet. She would reach in her apron pocket and come out with a handful of seed or bread crumbs. Those little stinkers would hop right on her hand and take some. She would pet their heads and then they would fly off so another bird could come say hello.”

“Shut up! You’re lying, right?”

“Excuse me?” Cecily’s smile turned to ice. “Who you calling a liar? You must think you’re talking to a white girl.”

Apparently, there were some limits to Cecily’s humor and good nature.

“No, no! Sorry. It’s just a figure of speech. I mean, you’re fooling with me, right?”

“Not one bit.”

“Okay. You mean to say that untamed birds ate from her hands? Just like they were pets?”

“Only if she wanted them to.”

“Holy crap. Francis of Assisi, no less.”

“Amen. You’d better wash those tomatoes. Who knows where they’ve been?”

“Right.”

She was taking orders from Cecily the same way her mother said she took them from Livvie! History repeats itself, she thought.

They went on telling stories until they found a solid ease with each other. One thing was for sure. Cecily didn’t take to sloppy language. And Beth realized she should have known better than to assume that level of familiarity with someone she had just met. This was the South, not Boston, and Beth was borderline impolite. Besides, Beth thought, Cecily was probably thirty-five. Maybe older.

“So, you just graduated from college, is that right?”

“Yeah. I was supposed to be on my way to graduate school but I got hijacked into doing this.”

“I see. Humph. Well, what did you major in?”

“English lit. I want to be a writer.”

“Sweet. But you’re stuck here.”

“You got it. I’ll just have a life starting like a year from now.” Beth made a mental note to stop saying
sweet
because using the same terminology as someone Cecily’s age was just as pathetic as singing along to music in the grocery store.

“Lemme ask you something. You can tell me it’s none of my business if you want to, but why can’t you write while you’re here?”

“Well, I can, but it’s not the same thing as studying with serious academics. I mean, I’ll probably make some attempt to keep up with my journals and I still have my blog.”

“A blog. I see. Well, to my way of thinking, all blogs do is put all your thoughts out there for anyone to steal for their book or their magazine article. You’re just giving it away.”

“Maybe.”

“Ain’t no maybe about it.”

Beth knew Cecily was right, of course, but everyone blogged—everyone with too much time on their hands, that is. And there wasn’t any real reason why she couldn’t write while she was in lockup except that it just wasn’t how she had envisioned beginning her career. She wanted to submit her first manuscript with
Graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop
on her résumé. Stubborn. She knew it. Muleheaded and stubborn. But she also knew that platinum credentials would give her an edge in the world of letters and all things literary.

She threw the lettuce in the bowl, chopped cucumbers and tomatoes with a fury, and soon the oversized salad bowl was filled with enough roughage to stimulate the collective digestive system of Charleston County.

When the whole family had returned to the house and began pouring cocktails for one another, Beth brought Cecily a glass of wine. That is, after she had the requisite chat with every one of her relatives for a minute or two.

“I really shouldn’t because I have to work,” Cecily said.

“Oh, come on! Let’s toast to something!” Beth held her glass up in the air. “To meeting you and to the summer!”

“Cheers!” Cecily said, and then burst out laughing.

“What’s so funny?”

“Nothing.”

Beth looked at her with her most suspicious face and said, “Come on. What’s up?”

“Okay,” she said, pointing to a platter on the table. “Did
you
make ham salad? Because
I
didn’t make ham salad.”

“What the…? Where did that come from?”

“Ham salad. My grandmother’s specialty, besides her world-famous egg salad, of course.”

“Which my Aunt Maggie makes too…um, wait! Are you saying what I think you’re saying? That these things just appeared out of thin air? Come on! Gimme a break!”

“All I’m saying is that I didn’t make any ham salad. Shoot, if she wants to come round ’eah scaring the liver out of people, the least she could do is fry the fish!”

Beth assumed she meant Livvie and she cleared her throat. Loudly and deliberately. “They’re all out on the porch. I’m gonna go get us a whole bottle of wine!”

“Will you take that platter with you and pass them around?”

Beth gave Cecily a thumbs-up, picked up the mysterious sandwiches and a handful of cocktail napkins, the ones she had stamped, thinking for a split second that her artistic efforts might go unused if she hadn’t seen them.

“Weird,” she said, and went out to the front porch wondering what kind of nonsense this was. Nonsense or not, Beth had goose bumps the size of jelly beans.

She left the aroma of fresh fish and onions and entered another world when she reached the ocean side of the house. The French doors and windows were opened wide and the breezy air smelled like rosemary and Confederate jasmine, which at that time of year was blooming in great tangled masses on fences and trees all over the island. It was the most beautiful window of time for a summer evening on Sullivans Island, after the heat of the day was broken and right before sunset. Perhaps a brief shower had come and gone, judging from the heavy dew on the lawn. I must have missed it, she thought, remembering that it was not unusual for rain to fall in the front yard and nowhere else.