Sullivans Island-Lowcountry 1 (4 page)

the elegant task of pumping the gas and Beth to get a cold Coke.

A group of old Island salts were ogling the thermometer in front

of Buddy’s store. One of the old men called out to Buddy.

“Jesus! If it’s this hot in June, what’s August gone be like?”

“Gone sell y’all a loada ice, ’eah?” Buddy said.

“Gone be hotter than the hinges on the back door of hell,

that’s what!” the old man shot back.“Humph!”

I smiled, listening to them. They sounded the same as

Islanders had sounded for generations, same accent, same lilt in

their speech.Traces of Gullah phrasing. It was my favorite music.

As we drove down the Island I decided to take Atlantic

Avenue to check the horizon, watch the shrimp boats and con-

tainer ships.Today’s slow ride did not disappoint us. Boats were

S u l l i v a n ’ s I s l a n d

15

everywhere. I pointed them out to Beth. It was the whole

world, these container ships, coming and going from our busy

port as they had done for centuries. She nodded with me in

agreement. First, that it was beautiful, second, that we were

lucky to be there.

Along our drive by the water, we passed ten or so young

mothers pulling their offspring home in wagons from the swel-

tering beaches, hopping from one bare foot to the other on the

blistering asphalt roads.

“How stupid is that?” Beth said.

“What?”

“Shoot, Momma, even I know not to go to the beach with-

out flip-flops or sandals! God, they must be dying!”

“Please. Don’t use the Lord’s name, unless you’re in prayer.

It’s a hundred years in purgatory.”

“You do.”

“I’m an adult and personally responsible for my own immortal

soul.”

“Whatever.” She made one of those sounds of disgust, the

kind that could be confused with indigestion, used for running

defense against parental dominance.

Beth.This child got the cream of our genetic smorgasbord.

She inherited the Asalit blue eyes, a shade of chestnut hair with

more red and wave than mine, my brains and grapefruits ( bos-

oms), Maggie’s tiny waist and when she finally stops growing

she could be five feet, nine inches. She was a colt, all legs and a

shiny coat, looking for a place to run. She was really beautiful to

watch and she worked it too, pulling all her poor momma’s

chains.

“Two hundred years of Catholicism coursing in your veins

is gonna make a lady out of you if it’s the last thing I do,” I said.

“Well, at least you’re not trying to make me a nun,” she said

with some relief.

“Honey, I wouldn’t encourage my worst enemy to the doors

of a convent.”

16

D o r o t h e a B e n t o n F r a n k

“Come on, Momma, step on it. I’m dying to go to the beach!

It’s so hot I could scream!”

I was just cruising along, enjoying the scene before me and

looking around to see if I knew anyone.The Island had changed

so much from when I was a child, but thankfully all the attempts

to make it slick like Hilton Head or Kiawah had failed. Part of

me depended on that. If it stayed the same I still owned it, even

though my sister, Maggie, got the Island Gamble.

Maggie had laid claim to our ancestral home when our

mother closed her eyes for the last time. I got the haunted mir-

ror and that seemed like a fair trade to me. The rest of us had

always known Maggie would walk those floors in adulthood.

She would raise her children within the same rooms. Tradition

was as much a part of her makeup as rebellion was of ours.

Digging roots off the Island had been essential to my sanity.

I would have tied that house up in a bow and given it to her

rather than live there.There were too many ghosts in the panel-

ing, too many tears in the pipes. I had too much energy to stay,

and back then I had no desire to reconcile the issues. No, there

was no argument from me on who should get the house. If

Maggie wanted it—and I would never understand why until I

was well into my thirties—it was just fine with me. I had run an

entire seven miles away from home to Charleston. But seven

miles from this Island was another world.

At last, I pulled up in the backyard next to Maggie and

Grant’s boat and tooted the horn to announce our arrival. The

back door swung open and Maggie called down to us from the

back porch.

“Susan! Beth! Where have y’all been?” She waved, smiling at

seeing us.

She looked frighteningly like a nineties version of June

Cleaver, Beaver’s mom, only with frosted blond hair. I hated to

admit it, but she was beautiful and always had been. She had

Bermuda blue eyes like all the Asalits.A natural blond toned to a

perfect size six, she was pleased to no end with her life. Maggie

S u l l i v a n ’ s I s l a n d

17

was hopelessly lost in a Talbot’s world of flowered skirts and

hand-knitted sweaters. She was the president of the Garden

Club and active with the Junior League. Even though we dis-

agreed on everything from politics to the merits of duck decoy

collecting, when her blue eyes met mine, we were family.

“Getting gas at Buddy’s and smelling the marsh,” I said,

gathering up all the towels and tote bags. “Got caught by the

bridge again.”

“That awful old bridge! Y’all come on in! Beth, the boys are

waiting.You want to go crabbing? Tide’s perfect!”

“Ab! I brought my bathing suit.” Beth grabbed her straw

beach bag and pushed past us to find her cousins.

“In the parlance of today’s young people,
ab
is short for

absolutely,
” I said. “God, is it hot or what? Thanks for letting us

invade your afternoon. I thought I was gone
die
in Charleston.

It’s so hot in the city the blacktop sinks under your feet.”

“Y’all moving in? Let me help you with some of that.”

“Thanks,” I said.

I followed her up the steep steps into the kitchen; my eyes

struggled to adjust to the low light inside.

“I hate the heat too.Well, this summer’s gonna be a scorcher,

I guess.You want something cold to drink?” Maggie opened the

door of the refrigerator and pulled out a pitcher of iced tea.

“Please.” I reached for two glasses from the cabinet and

handed them to her.“No Diet Pepsi?”

“Picky, picky. No, I have to go to the store.”

“Tea’s fine. I’m gonna change into some shorts and hit the

porch.”

“Okay.Wanna go for a swim?”

“Maybe later. First I have to calm down and cool off.”

“Tom?” Maggie cleared her throat with a knowing “ahem.”

I hated that little “ahem” thing she did.

“Who else?” I leaned against the counter as she poured,

feeling embarrassed that my whole life had spun clean out of

control.

18

D o r o t h e a B e n t o n F r a n k

“What’s happened now?”

“Maggie, you should’ve been a shrink. I can’t keep dumping

stories on you about him. I’m gonna drive you crazy. Let’s just

say that he’s still a son of a bitch.” I took a long drink of the tea.

“Thanks. I’ll meet you on the porch. Can you sit awhile?”

“You bet. Let me just start the dishwasher and marinate the

steaks for tonight. Grant got a new grill for Father’s Day and

wants to break it in.”

“I wish he’d break it in by putting Tom Hayes’s behind on a

spit,” I said, thinking that I’d been muttering a lot lately. “See

you on the porch.”

I sprawled out in her Pawley’s Island hammock, using my

heel to kick off from the porch banister.The hammock, a testi-

mony to the practical application of macramé, was like all the

ones that have hung on the western end of this porch since I

was a child. Hammocks were generally undervalued, except in

the South and probably the Amazon. There was nothing like

crawling in, stretching out and swinging away your troubles.

I closed my eyes and began daydreaming about the porch. If

this porch were hanging on the side of my house in the city, it

would be a veranda. But over here on the Island, it was a porch.

That general lack of pretension was one more feature that made

the Island so appealing.

I could be blinded and still find everything here. If I hopped

out of the hammock, I could take three steps and sink into one of

the two old metal frame chairs, the kind that bounced a little.

There was an ancient coffee table between the chairs and the

glider. If I wanted to perch in the bench swing that hangs from

the other end, or park myself in a rocker, I would only have to

stretch out my right arm and follow the ferns that Maggie had

hung in perfect intervals above the banister.

The only differences between the porch of today and the

one of forty years ago were the ceiling fans that moved the air

around, making the suffocating heat bearable, and the fresh coat

of paint on the furniture and the floor. In my day, nothing much

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19

was shiny.Whatever Maggie didn’t decorate, Grant painted.The

porch used to be entirely screened in with doors to the outside,

but Grant and Maggie took them off. The house looked won-

derful without them and nobody seemed to mind an occasional

yellow jacket. Even the most persnickety old-timers on the

Island agreed that Maggie and Grant had done a great job with

the house. You have to understand that the old Islanders were

highly suspicious of any sort of change. Busybodies. After all,

Grant was from Columbia, and what in the world would he

know about historic beach houses? But, they crept around, one

by one, with a pound cake or some fresh fish as a house gift, to

see what Maggie and Grant were up to. In the end, they all said

that Maggie and Grant had done all right.

Like many of the older houses on the Island, this one had its

own name: the Island Gamble. Living on the edge of the

Atlantic Ocean, our house had its own tide that rose, fell,

foamed, swirled and, at times, went mad. Everything inside and

outside was suffused with the smell of salt water and sea life.The

Island Gamble was very nearly a living, breathing thing.

Our mother’s parents, Sophie and Tipa Asalit, were its second

owners, its first being a lady of dubious background. Legend

holds that she entertained a handsome sea captain here for a pro-

longed period of time while her husband was in Philadelphia on

business. It must’ve been true, because when Tipa and our father

renovated the house they found torrid love letters between the

floorboards and thousands and thousands of Confederate dollars.

Island Gamble. Our grandmother had always hated the name.

She said it made us sound like a bunch of hooligans. The argu-

ment was one of the few times that our grandfather ever stood up

to her, that I knew of anyway. He insisted that the name not be

changed, suggesting it was tampering with history to remove it.

Lord knows why he picked that battle to fight, given the number

of hissing matches she started, but the name remained and the

Island Gamble has belonged to our family for nearly one hundred

years. At first it was our family’s summer house, but when

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D o r o t h e a B e n t o n F r a n k

Grandma Sophie became frail,Tipa moved her from the city to the

beach permanently, believing the salt air would do her some good.

The Island Gamble was a sentinel; she stood tall with a

commanding view of Charleston harbor and Fort Sumter. Her

white clapboards made up three stories, built in the old Island

style that only God could pull asunder. Her wide hips were

wraparound porches and her French doors swung open for air-

flow. The most interesting original details were her cupola and

widow’s walk on the top of the house. They sat up there like a

bonnet on her lovely head.When I was little, I used to climb up

there to hide from everyone to write in my journals, privacy

being a precious commodity in those days.

In our family, the birth of every new baby was preceded by

a building frenzy. Our grandfather, with the help of our father,

added rooms to the sides or off the back like a line of freight

train cars. Our house was kind of crazy looking, the patchwork

quilt of our family’s history. She gave the impression she could

withstand anything and, indeed, she had weathered scores of

hurricanes, sheltered many broken hearts and played host to

hundreds of people in her history. Her heart had harbored too

many secrets for my blood, but I seemed to be the only one

really bothered by that.

“Oh, if these walls could talk . . .” people would say.

And I’d say, If these walls started talking, the entire Island

would be put under quarantine while the government moved in

an army of psychiatrists.

But there were marvelous things about this place too. The

hammock, for one, was extremely comforting, and Maggie was

a great friend to let me come here to nurse my wounded heart.

I didn’t sleep too well these days with all that I’d had on my

mind. I tossed and turned in my bed in the city, but the nightly