by Karen Brown
“I can’t take this,” you say. You mean everything, but you pretend to mean the heat in the room. During the day it fills the upstairs, heavy and oppressive.
“Get up, then,” I say.
You will go out on the beach with a newspaper, disgruntled about my avoiding you, and find out what is happening. If I stay at the window, I will hear our own porch door bang shut. You will pull one of the blankets off the Adirondacks and drag a chair to the front of our cottage to sit in, and notice that the children’s tents block our view. I move from the window and open one of the pine dresser drawers. I take out a swimsuit and change; go down the sandy stairwell to the porch. Below me you yank the blankets off the chairs. The sand whips up, caught in the breeze. You throw the blankets in a heap. I watch your torso spin, your arms heave. I see your body suddenly different in its angry contortions. The neighbors have dispersed. The police officer nods, solemn and businesslike. I see the mother’s eyes wide and hopeful, watching his face. I see the father put his hands in his hair and turn away to scour the horizon. When his hands drop they have their own texture and shape. I see them as beautifully wrought.
“What’s all this?” you ask. You sit in one of the chairs, your head tipped back.
“They found the boy’s boat out there this morning,” I tell you through the screen.
“So he’s missing,” you say, finally.
“Yes. That’s it,” I say.
I am afraid to go onto the beach. My heart makes a small fluttering. My limbs are weak. I want to go out and fold up the blankets and put them in a pile. I want to be helpful and ease everyone’s fear, tell the mother and the father that the boy has gone to Sound View to play the games in the arcade. He is there, buying fried dough with money he stole from the top of your bureau. He has gone out onto the salt marsh, followed the little path my sisters and brother and I made years ago. He is hiding out and simply waiting to appear.
I stand on my porch and the father looks up and sees me. On his face is an awful complicity.
“Make some coffee,” you call up from the beach.
I am relieved and saddened to have a reason to turn away. In the kitchen I can view the road and the police officer’s car. I see the children perched on the low brick walls, whispering. Beyond them the haze burns off the salt marsh. It is a hot, humid day. The breeze has died out. I make coffee and notice my hands trembling. Last night around the fire I had too much to drink. The night became blurred—part fire, part sand and wind. The faces of the mothers and fathers slid and shifted. The little waves came in. Beyond the bonfire the beach was dark. I got up to go inside. I remember I got up and walked off. Somehow, I missed the steps to our porch. I see that now, that I climbed the wrong set of steps and went into the wrong cottage. I was inside, stumbling through the kitchen to the bathroom. And he was there, the father. I wonder now if he had leaned over again while we sat by the fire and asked me to meet him. The kitchen was dark. The porch light was a yellow bulb swarmed by moths. We stood there, looking at each other.
I stand in my own kitchen now and feel the tender bruises on my body from the days of sex with you—on my elbows, the insides of my thighs, the ridges of my spine, and yet last night I could have taken him in my arms. He would fit there, as if our bodies had planned it. I would feel his warm chest under the madras shirt. His mouth would be desperate and greedy, his chin gritty with stubble. His sighs would make my heart swim. I see how it might have been if I hadn’t laughed, awkwardly, and stepped away from him, declaring my mistake. I went out the back door facing the road and walked to our cottage, and he stood behind the screen, watching me. I walked slowly, glancing over my shoulder at him, willing him to find the words to call me back, but he did not. In our own kitchen, everything was the same—the bathroom door ajar, the smell of soap and shampoo, the open kitchen shelves of canned and packaged food. The only difference was the air, its silence and shadow unmarked by the charge of our bodies. I returned to my chair by the bonfire on the beach.
“You went in the wrong cottage,” you said. You looked at me, carefully. You held an empty green glass, shot through with orange sparks.
“I know,” I said. “I made a mistake.”
And I saw you did not believe me. I felt my body, bright and alive in the firelight. I saw the boy’s father step from the darkness and circle the chairs.
“Here’s Carson,” one of the men said.
“Where are the drinks?” another asked. There was general laughter all around. Carson slipped into the chair beside me. He smelled familiar, like an old shirt. His hands were empty, resting on his knees. Everything around me grew keen and sharp—the little waves moving up the beach, the fire’s sputter, its whitened logs, the aluminum legs of the chairs, the empty glasses half-buried beside them. Carson’s wife eyed me in her quiet, wistful way. You stood to leave and I felt it then, the dull, inevitable withdrawing.
Now, I bring you coffee in one of the cottage’s old turquoise mugs. The beach is empty, the sand warm. Everything has changed, yet the day proceeds quietly. The white dinghy stays upturned in the high, dry sand by the cottage. Someone brings an oar, washed up farther down the beach. Someone else appears with a red tackle box, the bobbins and hooks, the saltwater lures, all lost from their plastic compartments. These items sit beside the boat like assembled relics. Under the porch steps is a bucket of crabs in water. Their bodies still move, hesitantly, the claws scraping against the bucket’s plastic sides. We all wait for news of the boy. Families come out of the cottages and gather in small, hushed groups. By late afternoon the children are allowed to display their heedlessness. They dive from the jetty and make flotillas with the colored rafts. The boy’s family stays inside. In our proximity we hear their shouting, its tones of anguish and accusation.
Eventually, you go inside and expect me to follow you, but I will not. I watch the Coast Guard boat comb the sound. I watch the sun brighten the rim of Long Island. I hear the drawers of the pine bureau scrape open and bang shut, signs that you are packing to leave. I do not stop you. I cannot raise myself from the wooden chair, from my vigil. I scan the water’s edge, waiting for more debris to wash in, for the boy’s body, tumbled and softened, delivered to his parents’ door in a wash of foam and seaweed. And then someone lights a grill for dinner, and the smell of cooking comes from underneath the cottages, and you stand on the porch clearing your throat.
“Well, I’m going,” you say.
I have just awoken in the Adirondack chair. I have dreamed of swimming in churning water and tasting salt. I am out of sorts, my hair damp and tangled, my chest tight, as if I have been holding my breath.
“I’m wondering,” I say. “If he didn’t go out there, to the mouth of the sound. It’s a place called the Race. When the tides change water rushes through breaches, and there are rip currents.”
It is evening, and the breeze is back, cooler, roughened with sand.
“They catch bluefish there,” I tell you. I hear you sigh.
“So, that’s it, then,” you say.
The breeze shifts and twists. Sand forms small spouts. I need to change from my suit into warmer clothes. I realize this concern for myself is not normal in the middle of all this—you on the porch with your bag packed, the family next door with a boy lost. Still, I find nothing to say to stop you. You will not listen to any more stories, and my body is tired, dulled from its use as a lure. I hear your footsteps cross the porch and recede into the house. I think I hear the back screen door close, the sound of the cab you must have called pulling away. I feel the cottage behind me, its familiar rooms ringing with your absence.
For two long days, I languish. I see Carson on the shadowy porch. I see him out on the beach in the dark, the sparks flying from his cigarette’s lit end, his shirttails waving. Overhead the moon is a worn shell. I pass him on my walk to the little store, and he is irretrievable, like his son. The weather stays warm and sunny, undaunted by tragedy. The mussel shards glitter in their piles on the beach. The wat
er thickens with seaweed like soup. I witness the family’s reluctance to accept the truth. One day they enlist us all to search the salt marsh. We follow sandy paths along channel-fed branches, fight blackflies in the neck-high grass, and return, our clothing damp with sweat. The next night the search party members split up and head in opposite directions down the beach, calling the boy’s name. I want to tell them that he has moved beyond the reach of the longing in their voices. I imagine him, his brown arms and bright hair, bumping along in a gypsy wagon on a cart path toward New Haven.
And then, on the third dazzling afternoon, the air salty and rank with mussels and seaweed, the family next door packs their Suburban, loads it with duffel bags, ties the bikes up on the roof’s rack. They leave behind their floats, tucked under the cottage, and the dinghy, its white hull upturned on the beach. The older girl tends to the young ones, her arms around each shoulder. The other children seem blanched, despite their tans. The mother moves mechanically in her pretty clothes. At last Carson, grim and unapproachable, slips behind the wheel. He will drive down the narrow tar road and cease to be the man who faced me in his cottage kitchen. I see us all, in the space of our lives, as pieces in constant alteration, revolving and joining, clashing and missing. You must understand it was never about sex. It was always what I see now in the mother’s face, what surfaces, buoyant and relentless, in the body’s absence.
beautiful
She was just Lorna when she applied for the job. She wore bangs and cutoff jean shorts and flip-flops. She went with her new friend, Yolie, who was already a bartender there, her exposed skin sticking to the seat of Yolie’s car in the Florida heat. Yolie told Lorna he would like her, not to worry, and pulled her through the door into the darkness of the club. The expanse of it was empty and wide and dank, the oval-shaped bar was lit underneath by yellow bulbs up on a dais in the center of the room, and all around were sections with booths cordoned off by brass railings. He came out from the office in the back. His eyes in the dark held a phosphorescence. His shirt was a blue oxford, untucked. He wore leather slippers.
“Arlo,” Yolie said. He seemed as if he would walk past them, jingling his ring of keys.
“Oh,” he said. He stopped and Yolie put her arms around his neck and kissed his unshaven cheek.
“This is Lorna,” she said. He looked over at her, and she heard him breathe, one breath in, then out. The keys in his hand shook.
“Yes,” he said. He looked down at the keys.
They followed him back to the door into the office. Inside, under garish fluorescent light, sat a glass-topped desk and a leather armchair behind it, and on the floor dingy, gold sculptured carpet. The walls were paneled, the kind people put in their 1970s refinished basements. A full-length mirror leaned against one wall, near a door that led into a small, white-tiled bathroom. He took a leotard from its wire hanger and handed it to her.
“You’ll have to try this on,” he said, looking at the shimmering thing held in the air between them. He appeared hesitant, almost apologetic. When she took the leotard from his hand their fingers touched, and she stared at his face, pale and damp under the new beard, waiting for him to look up, but he did not. Yolie pushed her, grinning, into the bathroom, and shut the door. In the dim bathroom light she was alone, and her heart raced. The leotard, red with white stripes on the bottom, blue on top with white stars, looked like a Wonder Woman costume. She moved quickly, taking off her clothes. She could not wear anything under the leotard because of the high cut on the legs, the scoop at the neck and back.
“You need to come out,” Yolie said.
She did not want to leave the bathroom with its dull light. In the mirror over the sink she saw her flushed cheeks, the sheen of sweat along the tops of her breasts. She saw her chest rise and fall with her own frightened breath. But she needed the job, and it didn’t matter, she told herself, what anyone thought. So she opened the door and stepped barefoot onto the gold carpet, into the spotlight of overhead fluorescence. He looked at her body in the leotard, but not her face. He stared at her so long she looked down at herself. “What?” she asked, masking her embarrassment with anger. And then he looked up into her eyes, his own eyes creased and pained.
“You are beautiful,” he said, quietly. The way he said it made it something she believed for the first time in her life.
———
Months later, the club closes and reopens under new ownership as a country and western saloon. One night, Lorna is on the back of a boy’s motorcycle, riding very fast on a major thoroughfare, and the streetlights and the headlights of cars and the storefronts in the strip malls and the white lines on the road all seem bright smears. It is early spring, the air sharp, carrying the smell of exhaust and the perfume of women in cars with the windows rolled down, and farther off, orange groves in bloom. She holds the boy tightly around his waist, feels his stomach muscles under his thin T-shirt, presses herself up against his back, and she both wants and fears the speed at which they travel, believing, because he has told her he loves her, that he will not do anything to harm her. He slows down in front of a strip mall and pulls into an empty parking lot and tells her to get off.
“Come on,” he says, as if time is pressing. It is late at night and no one is around.
“Tell me you love me,” he says. Lorna looks at him, his hair blown back, his soft, brown eyes, the chin with the cleft.
“You know I do,” she says. His face reflects a dawning despair. He takes off on the motorcycle without her and rides headlong toward a stucco wall at the end of the lot, and does not slow down or attempt to stop until the last moment, when he applies the brake and slides to the side. He rights the bike and heads back to where she stands, with her hands over her face.
“Were you watching?” he asks.
“What are you doing?” she wants to know.
“Tell me you love me,” he says again, and he gives the bike some gas and the back wheel spins on the black tar lot. And she hesitates because suddenly she doubts her love for him at the moment that she must not, and he sees and accelerates toward the wall, his speed even greater this time, the sound of the engine rising at an increasingly higher pitch, until she finds her breath stopped in her chest. But he pulls back like before, at the last minute. He rides back to her and looks up at her, tears streaking his face.
“I love you,” she says, and he tells her to get back on the bike, and she does, her arms around his waist shaking with something she will never identify for sure. Fear? Love? Desire? Or are they all, she wonders, the same?
———
At first, Lorna worked afternoons at Arlo’s club to learn the job. But it was so slow she didn’t learn much. There was always someone else with her to show her things:
“This is the soda gun, for ginger ale and club soda and all,” each small button’s code long eroded. “You just remember, you know, top is Coke, left is soda, right is ginger ale.” That was Susie, who set her long, blond hair in electric rollers so that it bounced and swung around when she moved, wiping out ashtrays, restacking glasses, checking the stock in the beer cooler. She spoke quickly in a high-pitched voice, her blue eyes darting up and down the bar, watching the only three customers. “This is the well, you know, it goes vodka, gin, rum, bourbon, tequila, and then the grenadine and the triple sec.” Lorna nodded at everything, and promptly forgot it afterward.
“Why don’t you go see if that guy wants another one,” Susie said. She lit a cigarette. Lorna dreaded confronting the man. She wasn’t used to herself in the leotard, the required L’eggs Sheer Energy suntan panty hose, the high-heeled shoes. She had taken on a role she could not perform. Susie gave her a look. Go, it said.
Lorna walked down the length of the bar and stood in front of the customer. He wore a golf shirt and his thinning blond hair swiped to one side. The sun had freckled the bridge of his nose. The skin around his eyes was puffy and white where his sunglasses sat.
“I’ve been waiting for you to come over
,” he said, under his breath.
She didn’t know what to do with her hands so she placed them on the edge of the wooden bar. She smiled, but his eyes, moving from her face to the blue-backed stars on her chest, unnerved her, and she felt the smile falter, and knew he saw.
“Would you like another drink?” she asked.
“If you bring it to me,” he said, and put the glass to his wet lips and tipped his head all the way back to drain it. He placed it back on the bar and the ice resettled. “I’m drinking rye,” he told her. She took the glass in her hand and he put his hand on hers to stop her. His hand was heavy and cold, and he gripped hers tightly, so she could not walk away. “I’m not going to even ask your name,” he said, his eyes intent. “I just know you know what we would be like together. And I’m going to give you this card,” and he pulled a white business card out of his shirt pocket, “and I want you to call me.” He placed the card on the top of the bar. Lorna looked down at it, and the customer still held her hand. “Take it,” he said, his voice low, melodious, laced with threat, and she picked it up with her free hand, and he let her go.
