The Four Ms. Bradwells (27 page)

In lumine tuo videbimus lumen
.

“Hence the red sky,” he said. “And as any kid who ever dyed an Easter egg can tell you, when you mix red and blue—”

“But why isn’t the ocean red then, like the sky?” Mia asked. “Isn’t its color just reflected light?”

As Trey explained that clean water absorbs red light—that’s why water usually looks blue, but in coastal zones with high concentrations of matter like this it’s more complicated—I considered this side of Trey: a man who cared about the different ways the sun’s rays appear at dawn and noon and four, who imagined children dyeing eggs the colors of the changing sky. It was a side of him I’d never seen at Tyler & McCoy.

Mia nodded eagerly as Trey spoke, having no worldly idea that thirty years later she would write a six-page piece for the Sunday magazine about how satellite images of ocean color indicate increasing levels of pollution at our shores.

“Think about it,” Trey had said. “If it weren’t for Rayleigh scattering—light’s interaction with air molecules—when we looked up at the sky we’d see the black of space.” Then he started on about the optical illusion that made the moon appear big as all outdoors at the horizon, talking about upside-down Ponzo illusions and our brains seeing the sky as a flattened dome. I braced myself for another Trey Humphrey monologue. But he grew silent, then, watching with the rest of us as the moon sank into the earth.

It was the end of a long and wonderful night running through the island streams under a vast, dark sky. The beginning of a third day of a whole week enjoying life with my best friends before we set off our separate ways. It was going to be the first in a string of long and wonderful nights with Ginger’s brothers and friends, smart fellas who could teach me something about the sun and the moon and the sea, the creatures on the island, the stir of life I hadn’t much noticed in law school, or perhaps ever. How often in my whole life had I just relaxed and enjoyed a moment without any thought to how it would appear on a résumé that would get me … what? Someplace my parents had always expected me to wind up, even if it would surprise the rest of the world to bump into a black girl there.

If Trey had been a bit off-kilter in that conversation in the Lightkeeper’s Cottage about the crabs, it was beginning to seem just another piece of something innocent and unthreatening, a fella who tried to understand his world. If I was finding something sinister in that, surely I should be looking inside myself.

After the last sliver of moon disappeared, we turned back to the east, our arms touching as we joked about how sturdy the lighthouse might be and whether it could take all this weight on one side—at the top, no less. The horizon continued to brighten with our laughter, and the sky reddened, and the water purpled until the first lovely smack of sunlight shocked our eyes.

Doug sang out then, “Morning has broken,” his voice joining the lap of the bay and the fading crickets, the rising clamor of morning birds. Beau’s voice joined Doug’s after a moment, followed by Frank’s and
Trey’s. And then we joined in, too, even Betts moving her lips to the words. It’s hard to describe how lovely it was. I’d forgotten that: how really lovely it was.

We went back to Chawterley and fixed breakfast, all eight of us crammed into the kitchen, as on top of each other as we’d been in the skiffs. We made griddle cakes and sausage we ate in the Sun Room, and after breakfast I found a sketch pad and charcoal pencil in the Painter’s Studio. I took them back into the Sun Room and sketched with Ginger observing over my shoulder. I remember the sensual odor of salt air and sausage and scotch clinging to her long hair, which was loose for once, not confined in a barrette but hanging long and untamed all the way to her fanny.

“I wish I had all your long, long hair, Ginge,” I said.

She reached down and fingered the edge of my sketch pad. “I wish I could draw, but Beau took all the artist genes.”

Beau, stretched out on the floor, raised his head to protest, but it was true: Ginger’s drawing would never be any better than my hopes for fanny-brushing hair.

Mia came and sat next to me on the couch, admiring my sketch with Ginger: the pier, the twin boats, the bay, and the endless horizon.

“I wish we could stay like this forever,” she said.

We all looked at her for a fond moment before Betts said, “ ‘I wish that I had duck feet. And I can tell you why …’ ”

We laughed, looking down at our feet as Betts hopped up and duck-walked around, and Frank obliged her with a comic quack. We were at that point you get to when you’ve been up all night, when you aren’t exactly drunk anymore but you aren’t exactly sober, when life seems full of endless hope. Betts kept duck-walking, tapping on heads now, saying, “Duck. Duck. Duck.” But Mia was the one who shouted, “Goose!” She leaned over and tapped Beau’s head and then hopped up and sprinted out the back door and down the stone path, Beau a puppy dog at her heels.

He trapped her at the end of the pier, playing like he was going to push her into the water to join his sleeping bag lost on the murky bottom all those years ago. Betts’s freckled face was so full of disappointment and frustration and longing as she watched them that I moved closer to her, thinking
poor Betts
, pitying this friend I knew even then was truly extraordinary. Pitying her in a way I don’t expect I ever would have pitied a fella. Why did we do that to ourselves? Why did we buy into the notion
that the fella we married was as important, or more, than the people we were our own selves?

I fell asleep in the Sun Room not much later, my head and Ginger’s feet against one armrest of the sofa, my feet and her head at the other end. I woke sometime in the early afternoon to find us covered with a light blanket. Betts was asleep on the other sofa, lightly covered, too, and the fellas were stretched out on the carpet, fast asleep.

I picked up my sketch pad and charcoal and slipped out, heading for the Painter’s Studio, thinking I’d poke around there while everyone else slept. I heard soft voices as I approached, though: Beau standing at an easel while Mia curled up on the window seat.

“Right there, just like that,” Beau was saying. “The light catches the gold in your hair and makes your eyes laugh.”

Mia giggled lightly, her head tipping back and her hair falling away from her face so I could see her blushing from her cowlick to her tiny ears to her narrow chin. “Makes my eyes
laugh
?”

As I edged backward from the doorway, I wondered if I’d ever seen her look so happy with Andy. And yet Andy was such a great fella. Andy was so good to her. We all wanted an Andy back then.

I went back later that day to sneak a look at Beau’s sketch. It was charming, effortless, the way I wanted to draw but could never quite manage to. He’d caught the light in Mia’s hair and in her eyes, even limited by the gray of the charcoal. He’d caught the sweep of cowlick at her forehead and whatever it was in her expression that made her both joyous and vulnerable. I remember thinking for the first time that maybe Mia
was
the prettiest Ms. Bradwell, at least in that moment. I remember wishing I were in love with someone who loved me back, and thinking it really was time to let go of Carl, time for me to let go of the bitterness I’d clung to for a whole long year by then.

Mia

L
AW
Q
UADRANGLE
N
OTES
, Summer 2009:
Mary Ellen (“Mia”) Porter (JD ’82) won the Holga Inspire Award at this year’s Krappy Kamera Competition, for her photograph “Women of Kabul.” Her photographic work is shown at the Left Coast Gallery in San Francisco, owned by Andrew (“Dartmouth”) Cooper IV (JD ’82).

B
EAU’S LIPS ON
mine that Monday in the Chawterley Painter’s Studio, with the sun through the windowpane warm on my shoulders, and the lingering smell of oil-based paint. I had seen that kiss coming and I had wanted it to come, I had invited it from the moment we sat in the skiff together, from even before that, in the Captain’s Library. I’d like to say there was more to it than that. I’d like to think my attraction to him arose out of the soft, thoughtful way he explained the difficulties of establishing economic stability in third world countries and the near-impossibility of instilling hope in people who’ve never seen anything but downsides to having dreams. I’d like to say I was charmed by his tales of adventure with Ginger: climbing around the moss-covered foundation of the original Chawterley kitchen; sailing all the way around the island for the first time without a parent aboard, and then from the island to the mainland just because they could; setting out with Max McKee in search of pirate treasures buried, legend had it, deep in Mad Man Barley’s Grove—a few acres of hackberries and persimmon and locust trees on the other side of the no-name road, where they would in later years meet the island kids to smoke dope. But the truth is, the attraction I felt for Beau was immediate and physical. The fact is that if he’d kissed me in the Captain’s Library even before we’d been introduced, I’d have done what I did the next afternoon in the Painter’s Studio: slid the diamond of my engagement ring palmward, closed my fist around it, and kissed him back.

One shortish kiss, followed by another, longer one, his beard tickling my cheek, my chin, the vulnerable spot at the join of my jaw and ear and neck. He ran a finger from my cowlick down my nose and over my lips, to the tip of my chin, ever so gently, as if to make sure I was real. Then down my neck, to the indent at my collarbone where the clasp of Ginger’s black pearls I’d worn to the Crease Ball my first date with Andy had sat.

“Want to hunt for pirate treasure with me?” he asked, his eyes as bright as they must have been on those childhood adventures with Ginger.

I glanced out the door—no one else awake yet.

He kissed me again, and I kissed him back again.

“We go halfsies on anything we find?” I said.

He set the charcoal pencil back on the easel and I stood, stretching tall. “Agreed,” he said, “even though I’m the one who knows the island.”

“Such amazing expertise, and yet you’ve failed to find any treasure to date.”

He smiled, Ginger’s wide grin surrounded by his soft beard. “You haven’t seen my collection of arrowheads.”

We slipped out the side door from the studio and down a narrow path into the woods. He didn’t take my hand until we were out of sight of the house, and when he did, he took my right hand in his left, maybe because he was a southpaw like his sister, or because he was a gentleman, or because he was as aware as I was of the ring on my left hand, the promise I’d made that everything about this moment broke.

Andy deserves better than this, I thought as I linked my fingers in Beau’s. Andy deserves better than me.

W
E’D ALL GOTTEN
pretty comfortable with each other by the Wednesday evening when the eight of us went to dinner at the Pointway Inn. We piled into the jeep the Conrads kept at Chawterley, and we headed down the island, across the no-name road, and into the little crabbing town. Frank drove and the rest of us squeezed in wherever we fit, sitting on laps and in the back where grocery bags might ride. My head bumped up against the ceiling, but my back nestled against Beau’s chest, my legs on his legs, so I wasn’t about to move.

We drank cocktails on a charming glassed-in porch overlooking the bay, watching the sun sink and redden over the water. I tried to remain
engaged in the conversation despite the distraction of Beau’s thigh warm against mine, his fingers surreptitiously brushing along my jeans.

“How long does it take from the moment the sun’s blazing bottom touches the horizon until its last cut of light disappears?” Laney asked.

“It depends,” Trey said.

“It
depends
?” Betts raspberried her lips, very sophisticated. “Doesn’t the earth always turn at the same rate? Isn’t that what determines how fast the sun disappears?”

“The time it takes the sun to set depends on the latitude you’re watching from, the season, and even the atmosphere,” Trey said, meeting Betts’s incredulity with facts: “The fastest sunsets occur around the times of the equinoxes, on March twenty-first and September twenty-third, and the slowest near the solstices, June twenty-first and December twenty-first. There’s a mathematical formula for the approximate time it takes the sun to set on those dates, the variable being latitude. It rises faster at the equator, and more slowly as you approach the poles.”

I thought of the long days that summer Mom dragged us to Alaska. Mom’s friend that year was Miss Georgia, and she was pretty enough to be the Miss America contestant her name suggested rather than the schoolteacher she was. We stayed in a cabin on the coast, where even in August I was never quite warm enough. Bobby was in his
Harriet the Spy
phase; he had a spy costume he put together from an old hunting vest of Dad’s, with binoculars and sunglasses to hide behind, a notebook, and a toy camera, a Holga. I was uncomfortable enough with the idea of him turning his spying eye on Mom that I walked into the little town with him every morning to spy on absolute strangers instead, although I couldn’t have told you why. But I did the spying on Mom myself the last night we were there. I stayed up with the midnight sun, watching the straight set of Mom’s lips as she and her friend sat on the front porch steps, arguing. I couldn’t quite hear their voices from the bushes I hid behind, and I was afraid to move closer, afraid I’d be seen, so I just watched Miss Georgia’s angry face, Mom’s more impassive one, hoping the sun would set and Miss Georgia would leave and Mom would go inside to sleep.