by North, Will
He saw the years rolling past, and there was little “Pete” Petersen and her girlfriends in pink and green and blue bathing suits with tiers of flounces around their bottoms, shoving boys off the diving platform edge and piercing the air with screams of fake fear and real delight, the way only pre-teen girls do when they win—the boys, after all, not trying too hard to resist. There were lots of kids on the beach back then.
And today he could see, right in front of him and just off the beach, Young Adam, the apple of his eye, struggling with Rob and Peggy’s son Mike to toss off Mike’s sister Katerina and her friends from town—who were all older and bigger than the boys.
See, that was what most of these fretful parents never understood; all you had to do to provide seemingly endless opportunities for invention and mayhem at a beach was to build a floating platform. Even the plugged-in kids this summer, attached as they often were to their iPhones or video games or whatever the hell they were wired to like patients on life support systems—even they unplugged and became like all the other kids over the years when the sun was on that offshore floating platform. It was magical. Childhood was really as simple and reliable as an old wooden float.
There was a simple and reliable rhythm on shore as well, which gave him comfort. During the week, the mothers kept one eye on the children and the other on whatever novel their book clubs were reading, alternating shifts from time to time for tennis sets. Lunch was typically a do-it-yourself spread laid out by all three families in the kitchen of the Old House. But then, at five, the ladies had cocktails on someone’s porch while the children bathed. Dinners were often communal.
Even in this day and age, the Madrona Beach mothers did not work in the city, and Old Adam considered this to be as it should be. He wasn’t against women working—his law firm had already elevated three women to partner—but he believed mothers belonged with their children, and he was unapologetic about it.
When the men arrived at the beach on Friday afternoons, having left the city behind, everything changed: there would be a short but furious period of cutthroat tennis, or raucous touch football, or daredevil water skiing on the harbor. That was in the old days, though, before Two’s accident. After that, there had been no more water skiing. The following summer, as if some silent signal had been passed, the families arrived on the Fourth towing simple aluminum fishing skiffs, not speedboats. Crabbing skiffs, they were. No one spoke of the change.
Then, when the sun dipped behind the low hills west of the harbor, the men would take to their grills. Slugging back cold bottles of Mac and Jack’s African Amber or Redhook ESB, they’d sear thick burgers and brown bun-length hot dogs for the kids, the charcoal smoke curling into the air and resonating like a vestigial memory of the peat burned by his ancestors in the boggy levels of Somerset, in England.
Around the grills there’d be good-natured banter and insults about one another’s culinary skills and, of course, flirting with the ladies. The women spent most of their time in the kitchen preparing side dishes, sipping fruity cocktails, trading gossip, and from time to time sashaying outside, ostensibly to replenish the beer supply, but also to remind the men what they’d missed all week.
The Labor Day weekend party was all of this, but magnified in a way the Fourth of July party wasn’t, as if there were still torches of need, jealousy, lust, or anger among them all that had to be quenched before the houses could be closed up for the season.
It was also the unofficial but universally accepted day for the girls to get sloshed. Old Adam didn’t remember when this had become the tradition, but as far as he was concerned, it made for interesting and revealing entertainment. All afternoon, the women, as if they lived in their mothers’ era instead of the present, sipped old fashioned cocktails: martinis, whiskey sours, gin and tonics; the daiquiri that had become became a national fad during the Kennedy administration, as well as something new and pink that Adam had learned they called a “Cosmo.” It was always something of an amusing mystery to him how anything got done in the kitchen when the women had only one useful hand with which to work, the other being wrapped around a condensation-bejeweled cocktail glass.
Then, as if on a signal, the women vanished. They repaired to their respective cottages to “freshen up” for the evening. The fathers fed the kids, bullied the reluctant ones to eat, gave them ice cream as bribes, sent the younger ones to the games room afterward and the older ones outside into the waning light. Eventually, the women emerged again, as if from chrysalises, dressed to kill. Sneakers and flip-flops gave way to heels that clicked across the painted porch floorboards and aerated the lawns, necklines swooped to reveal tans that glowed as if on globed lanterns, sleeveless print dresses swished on switched hips to the music from the Tacoma jazz and blues station playing on the radio, and the party kicked into high gear.
The season was ending; ripeness, ambiguity, longing, and finality flickered in the dusk like fireflies.
nineteen
OLD ADAM, DRESSED FOR THE FESTIVITIES in a cream-colored linen suit grown too big for his shrinking frame, an open-collar white shirt, and a weathered but still jaunty straw hat, had been given his customary bourbon on ice and a small bowl of salted peanuts, and been promptly forgotten. The delightful thing about being an old coot, Adam mused, was that you became invisible.
This evening, though, there was something new: Young Adam sat on the porch step next to him, his sun-burnished, blemish-free hand resting on one of Old Adam’s polished brown brogues. He had not invited the boy to join him; the kid had just appeared, smiled, and sat, leaning slightly against the old man’s leg, like a favored dog. They sat as if sharing the warmth of a fire in winter, inhabiting a small, insulated pocket of reality while the rest of the world swirled about them. For the most part they said nothing. They were observers of events, from two different ends of time.
There was quite a crowd this evening, Old Adam noted with pleasure; the families, of course, and their children, and their children’s friends from the city, along with a new, younger couple, the Keatings, who’d recently bought a bungalow on the hill above Burton. They’d been invited, ostensibly, because their two young children had become playmates for Peggy and Rob’s kids. But Old Adam guessed the main reason was because Jemma Keating, a Seattle psychotherapist in her late thirties, was immensely decorative.
Justin’s widow Sylvia was expected, too. She’d never remarried, and Adam had always admired her—her resilience, her stoicism, her determination to make a life on her own terms after her husband’s death. He’d also admired her big-boned frame and strong face, its cheekbones and jawline sharp and angular as if cut from granite. It was those Nordic genes, he guessed—centuries of weathered women standing on rocky shores, their Delft blue eyes focused on the leaden horizon as if by their intensity alone they could will their husbands’ brightly-painted, snub-nosed fishing boats to reappear there.
Just now, Sylvia was across the lawn on her knees working in the border garden of her own small cottage: a woman not yet knotted by her advancing age, still fit, her graying long blonde hair braided and wrapped around her head like a crown. She would join the others, he knew, but in her own time. He looked forward to it.
Some years after his Emily had died, Adam had surprised himself by discovering he was attracted to Sylvia, but he never acted on the impulse. Oh, no, the age difference was too great. And yet, all these years later, he still fancied her. He shook his head; the stubborn persistence of desire.
Down at the beach, Adam watched Sylvia’s leggy daughter, Alexandra, round up children for dinner. He suspected Sylvia and Justin had chosen the girl’s Russian name because of all the time he’d spent on the Bering Sea. But Adam was a student of history and he wondered whether either Justin or Sylvia even realized that the girl’s namesake, Tsar Nicholas’s wife, had come to an unhappy end. Nothing unhappy about this girl, though; she raced along the sand behind the kids with her arms wide like trawler doors scooping bottom-fish into an invisible net, the
children all shrieking with feigned panic.
Adam liked Alex, but she troubled him, too. The girl was closing in on forty fast, had married young, divorced soon thereafter, and bumped along in a series of either painful or unfruitful relationships ever since. Adam heard she’d recently moved to a co-housing development near the center of town, perhaps in search of reliable companionship.
Alex was a looker: trim and supple. A yoga teacher or something, he thought he remembered. Long strawberry blonde hair that may or may not have been natural; Adam couldn’t tell and didn’t care. He thought of it as pale fire. What worried Adam was that the girl nearly vibrated with the need for offspring. Over the course of the summer, he’d watched her eye every eligible man who showed up on the beach, single or married, family or visitor, and run through her own private calculus: Father material? Income? Potentially available? Desperation wreathed her like a fragrance, a scent most men caught immediately and fled from.
Damn shame, really. If she was anything at all like her mother, Sylvia, the girl had a lot to offer.
***
JEMMA KEATING STOOD behind the railing at the corner of the Petersens’ porch, nursed her second Cosmo, watched her husband Todd wander among the linked beach families on the lawn, and admired yet again the ease with which he engaged virtual strangers. After twelve years of marriage and two children, it still amazed and pleased her. Almost six and a half feet tall and with a head of hair that always looked like dirty straw pitched carelessly into the corner of a barn, it was as if Todd’s gangly, easy way of moving through the world extended, uninterrupted, from bone to brain. He’d wade into a knot of people he’d never met, smile his crooked smile, stick out a bony hand, and say something self-deprecating that directed attention away from him: Hi, I’m Todd, the interloper. Now, how do you folks all know each other?
She wondered if this quiet confidence wasn’t a fundamental difference between tall boys and tall girls. Jemma was six feet tall in her stocking feet and had been since she was fourteen. She’d felt like a freak then, and despite the fact that she’d made a seamless transition from ugly duckling to graceful swan and become a beauty with lissome limbs, a feline smile, and anthracite eyes with hair to match, she still saw an awkward stick figure when she looked in the mirror. So, where Todd learned to lead, Jemma, the pale-skinned dark-haired skinny girl no boy would ever dream of asking to dance, had learned to stand to one side and observe. And because she was as bright as she was tall, her habit of being the observer had become, with time, training, and experience, a career.
The “cocktail hour” had begun at four and was still going strong at seven-thirty, as if it wasn’t clear to anyone whether it or dinner was the main event. Initially, Jemma had gravitated to the kitchen where the other women were preparing side dishes. Most of them, she knew, had known each other all their lives. Perhaps all that familiarity bred contempt, though, because their banter seemed a language of insider jokes, sharp-edged jabs, and side-swiped, hit-and-run jealousies. It was an observer’s paradise.
“Sylvia’s Alex has certainly turned into a fetching young woman, don’t you think, Pete?” Peggy March had been watching Alex as she rounded up the children on the beach. With her fingers, Peggy was turning mayonnaise, diced red onion, and fresh cut dill into the salted potatoes she’d boiled for potato salad, a process that seemed, as she did it, inexpressibly sensuous.
“Young?” Pete snorted, glancing out the window. “Girl’s pushing forty!”
“Uh-uh; mid-thirties, as I recall. Still looks hot, though…”
“You would, too, if you’d never had kids and spent your days in a gym doing yoga contortions.”
“Think so?” Peggy said, doing a mini-twirl by the sideboard.
“Actually, no, Peg,” Pete said, laughing. “I’m guessing those two frontal cushions you’ve added as accessories would get in the way of all that twisting and bending.”
“You’re just jealous,” Peggy said, arching her back and thrusting her chest skyward.
A short, sharp, laugh from Pete. “Between us girls, Peg, I never found that particular physical feature to be the main event anyway.”
“Well, you wouldn’t, would you, our petite little wren,” Peggy countered, looking around to the others for affirmation and receiving only smiles and shrugs.
“But I commend you nonetheless,” Pete continued. “It must take a fair amount of contorting just to get next to that rotund bedmate of yours…so maybe I’m wrong; maybe yoga is your métier!”
Jemma felt herself pulling away, as if rising up to a corner of the ceiling to watch the verbal fencing below.
“Ladies,” Peggy’s Seattle neighbor and guest, Lucia, interjected, “let us not be unkind, yes?” Lucia was Brazilian and there was still a Portuguese lilt to her English. “Besides, in Brazil absolutely everyone has these little surgical adjustments. Are we not like flowers that need a little pruning here, a bit of fertilizer there to flourish? Not to mention to be pollinated…”
Peggy flashed Pete a broad smile.
“Only in season,” Pete grumbled, and everyone laughed.
Lucia had met Rob and Peggy when she and her American husband, Joe Robertson, a photojournalist, had moved into the small Craftsman cottage next door to the March’s big “four-square” on Seattle’s Queen Anne Hill, years ago. Lucia—“lush Lucia,” as Peggy referred to her in private—was in her disgracefully vital mid-forties and had, as near as anyone could tell, never been visited by a surgeon’s knife, but who knew? She had auburn hair that cascaded in loose waves well south of her perpetually bronzed shoulders. Her eyes were dark as baker’s chocolate and surrounded by moats of white so brilliant it was as if the searing tropical sun radiated from them directly. You could be burned by those eyes, and many men had been.
On a walk one particularly shimmering Rio morning, the kind that presaged a stifling afternoon, she’d noticed a barrel-chested photographer picking his way slowly among the blankets and towels that quilted the sand along the beach at Ipanema. He wore khaki shorts, a white T-shirt, a multi-pocketed olive vest, and was armed with a big black Nikon camera to which was attached a foot-long, white telephoto lens. His eyes swept the sand not with the hungry voyeurism she’d grown accustomed to in this city of leering men and women in thong bathing suits, but with the intensity of a bird of prey. From time to time he’d lift the camera to his eye and quickly study a scene. When he saw something that held promise, he lowered the camera, smiled, handed out a postcard-sized piece of paper, mumbled something, and offered a pen. The person on the beach, or the group of people, would sign the release and the photographer would step back, smile again—a guileless, boyish smile, sweet and fresh and intoxicating as a lime caipirinha—and click off several frames. Then he’d bow slightly and shake hands.
A moment later, his radar picked up Lucia, who was strolling along the waterline. Though not tall, Lucia carried herself with a model’s poise: an erect and knowing carriage that telegraphed confidence, and, of course, pride of body. She was fecund as a rain forest, and just as unselfconsciously natural. This time, the photographer lifted his camera first and asked permission second, handing her a card with the glossy image of a much-pierced and tattooed beach denizen on one side and his own name on the other. She looked at him without smiling, and looked again at the card…buying time. Then she signed the permission card, smiled, took his arm, and walked with him.
Thus, she and Joe began, and never looked back.
Pete liked Lucia immediately because she was so effortlessly honest, like a child to whom no one had ever said, “Hush.” Peggy loved Lucia the way someone in a lawn chair in late spring loves the strengthening sun and basks in it gratefully; Lucia warmed her soul. Lucia reminded Peggy almost daily that a woman is born with special powers and needs only to cultivate and exercise them, like an athlete, to achieve her goals. The two of them could spend entire afternoons chatting and painting each other’s toenails. Lucia teased that she was giving Peggy “girl lessons,” an
d she wasn’t far wrong. Raised in that commune by near strangers, Peggy had been improvising the role of a contemporary woman in the world for most of her adult life, mostly using women’s magazines as her script. With Lucia she had a teacher. Lucia took Peggy shopping and helped her dress for public occasions with Rob, and private occasions with him, too. Lucia understood sensuality; she exuded it the way a hothouse plant emits oxygen.
It was just after Lucia had spread diplomatic oil on the choppy surface of conversation in the kitchen that Alex bounced into the kitchen in short-shorts, midriff-baring T-shirt, and sneakers.
“Kids fed,” she announced to all and sundry. “Three bean salad next!”
“Alex, dear,” Peggy said, “not all of us welcome bean salads at our age…”
Alex didn’t miss a beat. “At your age,” there was a momentary pause and a smile, “pulses, legumes, beans, should be a key part of what you eat and serve your families every day. They’re at the heart of the Mediterranean Diet, which, as everyone knows, keeps your weight down and improves longevity, both of which would be of interest, I should think…at your age.”
Alex smiled and tossed her hair, as if all she was doing was dispensing dietary tips. She lifted her left foot to the seat of the bar stool at the kitchen island, bent forward into a stretch, and touched her chin to her knee, then reversed and repeated the move with the other foot.
“Pete,” Peggy said, “isn’t that cellulite on the back of Alex’s thigh?”
Alex whipped around to peer at the back of her legs, a move which, even with her “rubber lady at the circus” flexibility, was almost impossible.
“What? Where?!”
“There,” Peggy said, pointing to a dimple.
Alex relaxed. “That’s a scar! From rock climbing. But I expect the only rock climbing you’ve ever done is for that one on your ring finger.”
