by Anita Shreve
“I’ll play,” Mr. Edwards, ever accommodating, offers.
Talents are weighed and measured. Ben and Mr. Edwards will take on Vicki and Jeff. From this, Sydney concludes that Ben is the best player of the four.
Sydney does not do the dishes more than once a day. It is a private rule she never breaks, even under dire circumstances, such as on the first Friday night of her stay, when an impromptu cocktail party required upwards of thirty glasses and hors d’oeuvres plates, not to mention four cheese-encrusted cookie sheets on which Mr. Edwards had hastily baked crostini. Sydney had already emptied and reloaded the dishwasher earlier in the day and so simply retreated to her room to listen to the Sox on WEEI. Today, she effects a similar retreat, knowing that much will be required of her after the evening meal. She is happy to help out, but she has her limits.
Sydney enters her room and is immediately overwhelmed by grief for Daniel. By simply shutting the door, she has been hurtled back to an understanding of precisely what it is that she has lost. The expectation of a normal life. A buffer against the dead hour, fast approaching. A respite from the necessity to remake a future, to enter the peculiarly other universes of strangers. She presses a hand to her stomach, which seems to have taken the worst of the blow.
She remembers their particular fit, her pale leg slipping between his two when they lay together after making love, as if their limbs had been deliberately fashioned for this purpose. The way Daniel would never cross a room without glancing at her face. The way he’d come home from his shift, drained, searching for her, room to room, only the sight of her allowing him access to a normal life.
The sensation fades, leaving in its wake a desire not to be left alone. Sydney walks to the dresser with its mirror. She has had two weddings, one in a church and one in a temple. One at which her mother wept with happiness; one at which her father seemed privately pleased. Surely, Sydney thinks, that is any woman’s quota. Another wedding would be greedy, faintly ridiculous. She couldn’t wear white, expect gifts, have a reception. Is she done, then? Is it all over? And if so, what will she do with herself? Become a doctor? Could she do well enough on the MCATs? Could she learn to fly?
A puzzle has been dumped upon a table in a corner of the living room. Julie is bent over a thousand pieces. Privately, Sydney hates puzzles—the frustration, the headachy sense of having nothing better to do, the disappointment at the end when the final image is not a Bonnard or a Matisse after all, but instead a saccharine landscape reminiscent of Thomas Kinkade. (The stupefying boredom of summers on the cement front stoops of Troy, the games of hopscotch and marbles and jump rope exhausted, the change from the errand to the corner store already spent. Midafternoon, the dead hour, her friend Kelly whining about the heat, her mother napping upstairs. The public pool was slimy underfoot; Kelly wouldn’t go there. One afternoon Sydney walked to the end of the street, looking for shade. She crossed to the next street and then to the next and then to the next until she found herself in a vacant lot with a chain-link fence. A boy tried to sell her cigarettes and then asked her to pull her shorts down. Just like that. He would give her a dollar. A dollar would buy an ice-cream cone. Sydney walked slowly away, hunching her shoulders for a blow from behind, moving toward a corner of the fence where there was an opening through which a slender girl could slip. When she reached the corner, she saw, to her horror, that the gap had been repaired. She turned. The boy had his own pants down and was touching himself frantically. Sydney, panic rising, scooted around him and ran as if for her life, and it wasn’t until she was married to Andrew that she could even say the word penis.)
“I’m finding all the border pieces,” Julie announces.
“Can I join you?”
“You can help.”
Sydney sits opposite the girl and studies the cover of the box. A house is perched on rocks overlooking the Atlantic, the painting bearing enough of a resemblance to the one they are in to suggest the motives of the purchaser.
“I’ll do the house,” Sydney says. “I’ll find all the white ones and put them together.”
Sydney feels dull-witted and slow. Too many decisions, she discovers, have to be made. Is this part of the house or part of a seagull? Is that a bit of a whitecap or a cloud?
Sydney glances up and notices the speed with which Julie spots a piece and flicks it to one side. Within minutes, it seems, Julie has assembled all the straight edges. She begins to work them into a plausible frame.
Sydney watches in amazement as Julie’s nimble fingers build a border.
“Julie,” Sydney says. “I want you to try something.”
Julie looks up at her, her frown of concentration flattening out.
“I want you to switch seats with me and find all the pieces of the house.”
Julie tilts her head. She doesn’t understand.
“I love doing the border,” Sydney lies. “It’s my favorite part.”
“Oh,” Julie says with some reluctance. “Sure.”
After each is seated in the other’s chair, Sydney makes a half-hearted attempt to connect part of the border. Surreptitiously, she observes Julie. With a sharp eye and a deft touch, Julie accurately spots the relevant shards of white and within minutes has a house in bits. She begins maneuvering them into place. Whenever she has two that match, she snaps them together.
“You’re very good at this,” Sydney remarks.
In her room, Sydney finds a packet of photos she recently picked up at the drugstore in Portsmouth. Most are pictures of the beach, of the village, of the exterior of the house. She takes them down into the living room and makes a neat stack on the coffee table.
“Julie, I just want to try something else,” she says to the girl. “If you could come over here?”
Julie turns and stares at Sydney, as if gradually bringing her into focus. “Sure,” she says. She joins Sydney on the couch.
“These are pictures I took with my camera,” Sydney explains. “I was thinking of getting a frame and making a collage. You know what a collage is, right?”
Julie nods.
“I wondered if you would lay them out on the table for me so that they’d make a nice composition.”
Sydney sits back on the sofa, ceding the table to Julie. The girl, who is used to following Sydney’s instructions, flicks through the packet of photos and begins to sort them. Beachscapes. Pictures of the house. Photographs of the lobster pound and the grocery store in the center of town. After a time, Julie begins to place them on the coffee table. Sydney watches with growing excitement.
Selecting nine photographs from the pile, some vertical, some horizontal, Julie sets each down in relationship to the one before. She does not hesitate and she does not pick up a photograph once she has put it down. When she has finished, she sits back, squints at the collage, then pulls the photographs apart from one another by a quarter inch. Then she puts her hands in her lap. Done.
Sydney leans forward to examine the assemblage. A sole picture of the house in shadow, the darkest photo of the lot, sits just below and to the right of center and acts as an anchor. The other photos bleed out from that central picture in color and tone and in actual geographic proximity to the house. More surprising is the selection of just the nine pictures, four to one side, five to the other, the extra photograph on the left balancing the weight of the central dark image. The girl knew instinctively not to use all of the photos. The end result is visually pleasing. More than pleasing. Accomplished. Julie, who cannot understand eighth-grade math and is incapable of mastering basic punctuation, is clearly gifted at the art of composition.
“You’ve got quite an eye,” Sydney says.
But the girl seems disturbed.
“What’s wrong?” Sydney asks.
“There aren’t any people in your pictures,” Julie notes.
“How about a walk?” Sydney asks after a time.
Julie examines Sydney as if through a film Sydney has come to think of as milky. “All right,” Julie says, ever co
mpliant in the way of a girl who finds most of life pleasurable.
“We’ll go through town. Stop by and watch them playing tennis.” Sydney bends forward, collecting the photographs, wishing she didn’t have to destroy Julie’s effortless composition. “We’ll do this again,” she says.
The village center on a Saturday afternoon is crowded with packed SUVs and two sets of renters: the first group wistful, reluctant to leave after their two-week stay; the other buoyant, fetching provisions in anticipation of a long-awaited vacation. Julie and Sydney skirt the lobster pound and the general store and head along a tree-shaded lane. Even the meanest asbestos-shingled cottage and the weediest lawn seem inviting in the hard sunshine.
Sydney can hear the thwack of the ball before she can see the players. A thwack and a grunt. She tries to identify the source of the exertion. Male or female? Young or old?
When Julie and Sydney reach the court, they stop, by unspoken agreement, just short of revealing themselves. Sydney is intrigued and wonders at Julie’s motives. Not wanting to be seen wanting? She wonders something else: Are her own motives the same?
In the distance, she can make out Victoria in tennis pinks and what looks to be a pair of new running shoes. Jeff, beside her, about to serve, has large sweat stains under his armpits, rivulets of perspiration trickling down the sides of his face. He brings his racquet down in a ferocious display of pure power. The ball hits just inside the line and seemingly out of the reach of Ben, who nevertheless makes a nifty return. Having had a smattering of tennis lessons during her strenuously WASP period, Sydney can follow the game. Beside her, Julie has her fingers pressed to her mouth.
“What?” Sydney asks, smiling.
“Dad.”
Julie’s father has on an abbreviated pair of tennis shorts he might have bought forty years ago—pale gray from many washings and so worn as to be comically revealing. His white legs are shocking; he looks a different race than his partner and his opponents. He sometimes flails at the ball, but he has a surprisingly accurate serve, a fact that appears to please him, even though he answers pure luck to Ben’s nice serve. To Ben’s serves, Jeff responds with speed, his backhand almost faster than the eye can register, trying to erase the carefully placed shots.
“Julie,” Jeff says, noticing his sister. He has his hands on his hips, and he is panting hard.
“Hey, guys,” Julie says, stepping forward.
“Want to play?” Ben asks.
Julie lifts a shoulder to her cheek.
“Just taking a walk,” Sydney explains, moving away from the shadow of the trees as well. “Who’s winning?”
“We are,” Jeff answers quickly, revealing a certain investment in the game.
“Great,” Sydney says, although she feels confused. She cannot think of any reason she would root for Ben over Jeff, though it would give her great satisfaction to see Mr. Edwards come home with a victory.
“We’ll watch for a minute,” Sydney says. “Don’t mind us.”
But the players do appear to mind Julie and Sydney, or at least to pay them mind. Sydney registers a self-consciousness that wasn’t there before: in Victoria’s exaggerated moue of disappointment when she misses a shot; in a dramatic lifting backhand from Ben; even in a spectacular net smash by Jeff from which he walks away with unnatural indifference. For a moment, Sydney longs to be on the court with them, paired with Jeff, lost in the competition, the easy laughs, the sweat.
“Do you play?” Sydney asks Julie.
“I’ve had lessons.”
“Would you like to play later?”
But each of them knows that to play later would be to invite a sense of afterthought. The only game that matters is the one happening now, and they are not a part of it.
“Had enough?” Sydney asks after a time.
“I guess so.”
“Want to go out to the rocks?”
“Maybe.”
They turn away from the court. Sydney notices two boys, perhaps seventeen or eighteen years old, walking in their direction. Deep in conversation, they carry golf bags on their shoulders. The taller of the two glances up. “Julie,” he says with some surprise.
“Joe,” Julie answers, dipping her head as she does so. She crosses her arms over her chest.
“I didn’t know you were here,” Joe says, hoisting his bag further up his shoulder. Dressed in a white golf shirt and a pair of khakis, the boy has thick brown hair that invites fingers, maternal or otherwise. “You know Nick, right?”
“I think so,” Julie says. “This is Sydney,” the girl adds, remembering her manners.
“Hello,” Sydney says, nodding to the boys.
There is an awkward pause, during which no one speaks.
“Well,” Joe says finally. “Maybe we’ll see you around?”
“Maybe,” Julie repeats, clearly at a loss for words.
Through the trees, Sydney hears a shout from Jeff.
“So. . .,” Joe says, apparently reluctant to move on.
“Good luck with the golf?!” Sydney offers with some finality.
With a small wave, the boys pass by. Sydney doesn’t have to turn around to know that Joe, the one with the lovely brown hair, has stopped to look at Julie from behind. After a minute, she lets Julie get a step ahead of her. Sydney studies the girl through the eyes of an eighteen-year-old boy.
Luscious is a word that comes to mind.
Ripe for the picking.
On the rocks, Sydney leads the way, though she is less sure of foot than Julie, who is more afraid than incapable.
“We’ll sit on that one,” Sydney says, pointing to a flat rock far enough out from shore for them to feel that they’ve accomplished something, but not so far as to feel the spray of the ocean.
Julie hesitates, and Sydney takes her hand. Together, they negotiate the jagged surfaces of the granite boulders, their feet sometimes slipping on bits of seaweed.
“There,” Sydney says when they are settled.
The sky is aqua with fast-moving fair-weather clouds. A spray, majestic and rhythmic, beats against the least sheltered of the boulders. To the left is an abandoned lighthouse, the red roof of its keeper’s cottage picturesque in the bold light. Sydney cannot imagine the isolation of such a life, the need to perform a single task over and over, its responsibilities grave. The desolation would drive her mad.
Offshore, a lobsterman, late to his traps, trawls near a set of rocks that will become more visible as the tide recedes. The smell of the sea and the clean air is potent, and Sydney inhales a lungful. Not far from them, a Sunday painter has set up shop with an easel. The tableau gives her an idea for Julie that she files away for Monday.
“Why are you so afraid of the water?” Sydney asks.
“I once almost drowned.”
Sydney knows this fact but wants more. “How did that happen?”
Julie seems hesitant.
“I don’t want to dredge up bad memories,” Sydney says.
“No, that’s okay.” Julie takes a breath for courage. “My dad was fishing on the beach one day after a bad storm. The waves were huge.” Julie, who has a habit of speaking with her hands, uses them to indicate the height of the waves. “My cousin, Samantha, had a boogie board, but she put it down because she was scared of the waves. I thought she had just left it for a minute and that I could grab it and use it.”
“How old were you?”
“Seven. Samantha was nine, I think. I floated for a minute and then I could feel myself being pulled out to sea.” Beside Sydney, Julie stiffens with the memory. “I tried to swim in, but I couldn’t. I yelled for Dad. He looked over and saw me and dropped his fishing pole and dove in after me. When he got to the boogie board, he told me to hold on tight. But then he realized he couldn’t get us back in—the riptide was too powerful for him—so he started yelling to Samantha, who was jumping up and down on the sand and screaming, to go get the lifeguard.”
Sydney puts her arm around the girl. “You must have been
really frightened,” she says.
“I was. After a while, the lifeguard came with his surfboard and put me on top of it and told Dad to hang on to a rope he had off the back. He paddled us in.”
“I’m sorry that happened to you.”
Julie is silent.
“They say that in a riptide, you should swim parallel to shore so that you can break out of the rip.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Julie says. “I’m never going in again anyway.”
“When we get back to the house,” Sydney says, “we’ll put on our suits and go in up to our ankles. Just our ankles.”
Julie, who has her arms wrapped around her knees, shakes her head. “I don’t know,” she says.
“That’s all we’ll do,” Sydney insists, knowing that she is being pushy. But she has a plan. “Just our ankles. Unless you want to go out to your knees. I’ll let you go to your knees, but no more than that.”
“I don’t think so. No offense.”
“No offense,” Sydney says.
The breeze dies down, leaving the water docile. Sydney’s tank suit is still damp from having been left on the floor of her closet. Last night, she couldn’t get it off fast enough. Now she wishes she had thought to wash it. It seems to Sydney to reek of stealth. Of cunning.
Sydney has seen Julie in her aqua bikini several times on the deck. The suit, though skimpy, appeared appropriate there, full attire, Julie’s bare skin glistening with a sunblock with a low SPF. Now at the water’s edge, the bathing suit seems but pitiful armor against the Atlantic Ocean.
“Just the ankles,” Sydney says.
Julie instinctively reaches for Sydney’s hand. Sydney can feel the tug and pull of the girl’s weight as Julie, even in the shallow water, adjusts to the undertow. She looks clumsy in her fear, though Sydney suspects she is a natural athlete—something in the ratio of the size of her feet to the length of her legs, in the strength of her shoulders.
