Beach Trip

by Cathy Holton

  “Well, you’ll have plenty to write about,” Sara said. “Your life is like a soap opera.”

  As if to confirm this, the door swung open behind them and J.T. strolled out into the yard wearing a pair of torn jeans and an old T-shirt. His feet were bare. Sara immediately picked up Middlemarch and went back to reading.

  “George Eliot?” he asked, leaning his elbows against the back of Mel’s lounger and peering down at the novel in Sara’s lap. His eyes, in the sunlight, were sea-green.

  “Your girlfriend doesn’t think much of George,” she said, not looking at him.

  “What can I say?” he said, fondly ruffling Mel’s hair until she hit him. “She’s a postmodernist kind of girl.”

  “Don’t make it sound so dirty,” Mel said.

  “Come on,” he said. “Let’s grab some beer and head out to Sliding Rock.”

  Mel shrugged and looked at Sara. “Sliding Rock?” she said.

  “I can’t. I have a test in my Fugitive Poets class.”

  “Oh, come on. You can study later. It’s a beautiful day and we shouldn’t waste it.”

  Sliding Rock was a local park where the students went to drink beer and slide down a waterfall that cascaded over a wide, flat rock. Bedford was out in the middle of the wilderness, an hour and a half from the nearest city, which happened to be Charlotte. You had to make your own fun.

  “I’ll buy the beer,” J.T. said. He leaned his weight on the back of the lounger so that it tilted slightly and Mel said, “Stop.”

  Sara read the same sentence over and over again, trying to make it stick.

  “I’m not going if Sara won’t go,” Mel said, trying to pry his fingers off the back of her chair.

  Sara colored slightly. “Don’t drag me into this,” she said.

  “Besides,” Mel said to J.T. “Annie says you have to mop the kitchen floor.”

  “I didn’t say you had to mop the kitchen floor,” Annie shouted through the screen. “I said Mel had to.”

  J.T. shook Mel’s chair. “Let’s go.”

  “No.”

  “We won’t get many more chances like this.” He gave her his most charming smile, the one that made women stutter and forget their train of thought.

  Mel stared up at him, wondering what would happen between the two of them when she went to New York. She tried not to think too much about the future. She tried to live every day in the present, savoring each experience, knowing she’d use it one day in a novel. “Mop the floor, and we’ll go,” she promised. “Besides,” Mel said, ducking to avoid his hand as he playfully tried to pinch her nose. “You practically live here anyway. You’re practically a roommate. You should do chores like the rest of us, shouldn’t he, Sara?”

  “Sure,” Sara said, bending suddenly to collect her things. “If you say so.”

  Listening to the three of them joke around outside in the yard, Annie sat back on her heels and tried not to feel bitter. She couldn’t help it that she liked things clean and orderly but Mel sometimes made her feel like she was some kind of freak because she did. And she didn’t really care if Mel mopped the damn kitchen floor or not. She had offered, and Annie had agreed, but the truth was that Annie would rather do it herself. That way, she knew it’d get done right.

  She got up and went to get the mop, filling the pail at the kitchen sink. She stood at the window and watched as J.T. put his arms around Mel and picked her up, and poor lovesick Sara quickly gathered her things and tried not to notice. It amazed Annie that Mel didn’t seem to know that Sara had a thing for J.T. Or maybe she did know and chose to ignore it.

  Watching Sara mope around the yard, Annie was glad she’d settled on Mitchell Stites. Her love for Mitchell was steady and dependable; it was the kind of thing you could build your whole life around. It wasn’t the wild, crazy love that Mel and J.T. shared with their endless fights and passionate reconciliations. Nor the sad, yearning kind of love that Sara seemed to feel for J.T. Everyone was always going on and on about passion, but Annie could see how passion might really screw up your life. It might keep you from thinking clearly. It might make you do things you’d regret later.

  No, passion was for movie actresses and novel heroines. Annie would settle for safety and security.

  She filled the pail with water and floor cleaner and took it to the far corner of the room. She locked the screen door so they’d have to go around and come through the front door. The one thing she couldn’t stand was footprints all over her freshly mopped floor. Mel and J.T. were sitting in one of the lawn chairs now looking out at the distant mountains. J.T. was sitting behind Mel with his arms wrapped around her, and she had her head resting on his chest. Sara was nowhere in sight.

  Annie dipped the mop into the pail. She wrung it out and began mopping with long, even strokes. It didn’t take her long to fall into a rhythm. It was almost like a Zen meditation, mopping, and one that made her feel calm and peaceful. After a while, she lost track of the time, glancing periodically at the clock as she worked. Mitchell was supposed to call her at two o’clock. He called her every Saturday at precisely two o’clock and every Wednesday night at precisely eight o’clock. It was a routine they had established when Annie first went away to college and one from which they never deviated. Mitchell hadn’t gone to college. He had gone to work in his father’s Cluck-in-a-Bucket store immediately after high school graduation, but Annie had felt that a college education was important. She was majoring in anthropology with a minor in business, the idea being that whatever she learned might be applicable later when she and Mitchell took over his father’s store. That was the plan. Graduation and then marriage at twenty-two, two children by twenty-five, a house in the suburbs by twenty-eight. It was all going like clockwork.

  She was almost to the sink now and she stood up to take a break, crossing her arms across the top of the mop and staring out the window. An errant breeze blew through the screen, warm and balmy. J.T. and Mel were making out in the lawn chair and Annie watched for a moment, feeling faintly repulsed and yet curious, too.

  Sex. She just didn’t get it. She had spent her entire freshman year listening to Mel, Sara, Lola, and the rest of the girls on her dorm floor talking about sex, and finally she just couldn’t take it anymore. She had to know for herself what it was like. When Mitchell showed up at school her sophomore year for Homecoming Weekend, she was ready. She had gone down to Planned Parenthood and gotten on the pill two weeks before, and they had given her a box of condoms to use until the pill became effective. They were sitting in Mitchell’s pickup truck out at Edwards Point when she told him. The ridge below them was bathed in moonlight. An owl flew overhead, its great wings flapping soundlessly.

  Mitchell stared at her, his face a mixture of shock and outrage. “What do you mean, you want to have sex?” he said.

  “I mean, it’s time,” she said, handing him the box that might have contained maybe two hundred condoms. “I’m ready. Let’s do it.”

  Mitchell stared down at the box and then up at her. His mouth hung open. A vein pulsed in his temple like an emergency flasher. “But you’re a good girl” he said finally. “Good girls don’t have sex until after marriage.”

  Annie didn’t see what the big deal was. They’d been dating for nearly six years, and for the last two, Mitchell had been relentlessly trying to coax her into taking off her clothes. “Look,” she said, beginning to get annoyed. “You’ve been after me for years to do it and now I’m ready, so what’s the big deal?”

  Mitchell tossed the box of condoms on the seat between them. He put his hands on the steering wheel, then took them off again. He looked like a man whose orderly view of the world had been suddenly and inexplicably dismantled. “But that’s my job!” he cried. “I’m a man and I’m supposed to try to get you into bed!”

  “And I’m a woman. What’s my job?”

  “To resist,” he snapped. “Your job is to resist.”

  Annie looked at him in astonishment. She put her hand out to him b
ut he shrank into the corner. “You’re being ridiculous,” she said. She crossed her arms over her chest and chewed her lower lip, watching him through lowered lids. She wondered if other girls had this much trouble losing their virginity. She wondered if Briggs Furman or J.T. Radford had put up this much of a fight. “I want sex,” she said finally, pushing the box toward him. “And I want it now.”

  Mitchell put his hands on the steering wheel again and stared through the window. When his breathing had slowed, he said glumly, “I can’t just perform at the drop of a hat. You can’t just turn to a guy and tell him you want sex and expect him to perform like a trained monkey.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it doesn’t work that way!”

  “Oh, for crying out loud,” she said, taking off her shirt.

  After that, things went a bit more predictably. Still, when it was over, she had to ask herself, What’s the big deal? It wasn’t anything like the girls on her dorm floor had described. And even later, when it got a little better, or at least a little easier, she sometimes had to ask herself, Is there something wrong with me? I just don’t get it.

  And she still didn’t get it, although Mitchell seemed to enjoy it and she guessed she should take some pleasure in that. Looking through the window at J.T. and Mel sprawled on the lawn chair, she realized that Mel obviously did enjoy it. She wondered what that must feel like.

  It probably felt like that slight, trembling sensation she got in the lower part of her abdomen whenever Professor Ballard walked into the classroom. Annie picked up the mop and went back to work.

  Best not to think about that.

  Briggs dropped Lola off at the library and she went up the wide steps and waited just inside the front doors. When she was sure he had driven away, she opened the doors, tripped down the steps, and ran around back to the administration building, where Lonnie Lumpkin was working.

  She had met Lonnie several weeks ago at the Duck Pond. Lonnie was a local boy who worked as a maintenance man on the campus and he liked to take his lunch breaks down by the pond, feeding the ducks. The Duck Pond was a secluded little park on the outskirts of the campus, surrounded by benches, tall trees, and war memorials to dead alumni stretching back to the Mexican War of 1846. It was too far from the quad to be used by most students, and Lola liked to go there to be alone and think. She had noticed Lonnie several times before she ever spoke to him. He seemed to come the same time every day. He wore a uniform and a cap with the school crest emblazoned on the front that he would take off and lay beside him on the bench. His hair was blond and he wore it in a ponytail. He was tall but thin and his hands were long and slender like a concert pianist’s. She noticed that he would feed the ducks with pieces of his own sandwich, breaking off larger and larger bits until, on some days, there was little left for himself.

  On the day they first spoke, he was squatting at the edge of the pond trying to coax one of the ducks to take a crust of bread from his hand. He had done this on several occasions, and one of the bolder ducks, a mallard with a beautiful green head, had come close to taking it. This day the duck waddled up on the bank and fixed Lonnie with a bright, beady eye. Then slowly, stealthily, it stretched out its neck and with a sudden movement like a snake striking, took the crust and flapped back to the water.

  “You’re the first one I’ve ever seen do that. They don’t trust most people,” Lola said in amazement.

  He grinned at her, still squatting at the water’s edge with his arms on his knees. “He knows I’m pretty harmless,” he said. He stood up and dusted off his pants, pulling his cap out of his back pocket. His uniform was obviously made for someone much shorter. His socks were sucked down into his shoes and she could see his bony ankles under the edge of the upturned cuffs.

  He held on to the brim of the cap and said shyly, “I’m Lonnie.”

  “Lola.” She smiled and went back to reading.

  Over the next few weeks she got to know him as their meetings at the Duck Pond became more frequent. Lola was not one to strike up conversations with strangers but there was something about Lonnie that put her at ease. Like the ducks, she trusted him. He had a kind heart. She could see that. They talked about many things but never about the fact that Lola was engaged to another man. She didn’t say much about Briggs at all other than to admit that she had a steady boyfriend she’d dated since her junior year of high school. Her mother, Maureen, always introduced Briggs as “Lola’s fiancé,” holding his arm greedily and smiling like a woman who knows she’s snagged the most eligible man around. It was Maureen who, on being first introduced to Briggs, had decided that come hell or high water, he would be her future son-in-law. His grandfather had been a state senator from Mississippi, and Lola’s father and grandfather had been governors of Alabama. To Maureen, it had seemed a match made in heaven. Lola, an only child long accustomed to compliance with her mother’s wishes, had not put up much of a fight. She liked Briggs well enough.

  But that was before she met Lonnie. Now she noticed things about Briggs that she didn’t like. Like the way his thick knuckles were covered in dark hair and the way his skin smelled like rusty iron when he sweated. And he had a bad temper. He was a big man, a former prep school quarterback, and when angered he would shout and clench his fists. Lola would feel her stomach tighten, not because she was afraid of him but because she didn’t like being around angry people. They upset her. They caused little disturbances in the air around them, vibrations that rolled through the atmosphere like shock waves following a detonated bomb.

  Still, as her mother so often pointed out, he was from a good family, he was blond and good-looking, and he was an ATO to boot. And Briggs was a Southern gentleman to the very core of his being. Most of the time he treated her like a princess, like a glass figure on a pedestal. So she should have felt guilty about deceiving him on this bright fall day as she left the library and hurried around the corner toward the administration building. But Lola wasn’t thinking about Briggs at all. She was thinking about Lonnie.

  He was up on a ladder painting the second-story soffits. She stood for a moment with one hand on her hip and the other shading her eyes as she looked up at him. It took him a few minutes to realize she was there, but when he did, he grinned slowly and stopped painting.

  “Hey, girl,” he said.

  “Hey, Lonnie.”

  He climbed down the ladder, holding the paint can and brush carefully in one hand. His overalls were covered in paint splatters. “What’d you bring me for lunch?”

  Lola got so caught up in looking at him that for a moment she couldn’t think of anything to say. He had an earring in one ear and the tattoo of a dragon on his right forearm, and he was just about the most exoticlooking boy Lola had ever seen.

  “Sorry?” she said.

  He grinned slowly, his gray eyes kind but lively. “Just kidding,” he said.

  She smiled and moved away so he could step off the ladder. “Do you have to work all day?”

  “No. I get off at noon.” He took a rag out of his pocket and began to clean his hands with paint thinner. When he’d finished he stuck the rag back in his pocket. “Why?”

  She wasn’t quite sure what to say, so she asked, “Do you like working here?”

  He shrugged. “It’s a job. It pays the bills until the music thing takes off.” He was a musician, the lead guitarist in a heavy metal band called the Lords of Ruin. They played at various small clubs around town. He had invited her on a number of occasions to come hear them, but so far she had declined. She knew that if she saw him up on a stage with a guitar strapped to his chest it would be all over. Her life as she knew it, as her mother had planned it, would be over.

  “My boyfriend might be able to help you out,” she said, noting the way his eyes turned from gray to pale blue depending on the light.

  He arched one eyebrow. “Your boyfriend?” They spoke of Briggs now as if he was some kind of private joke between them.

  “His frat’s having a party.
They need a band to play.”

  His smile widened. A dimple appeared deep in one cheek and Lola fought a sudden urge to kiss him. “We don’t play many frat parties,” he said.

  When Sara got back from her walk, Mel and J.T. had already left for Sliding Rock. She felt relief wash over her, followed swiftly by a feeling of dejection as she climbed the front porch steps and went upstairs to her bedroom to lie down. The house smelled of disinfectant and citrus cleaner. She could hear Annie moving around in her bedroom. Lola must still be at the library.

  Sara lay on the bed with her ankles crossed and her hands behind her head, staring at the ceiling. The window was open, and a sultry breeze blew through the room, flapping the edge of her Led Zeppelin poster that had come loose at one corner. Faintly in the distance, a leaf blower hummed.

  She wasn’t sure she could last another year. She had made it through three years already and that had been torture enough, but this year, when she was a senior, when she should have been enjoying her last year of college before heading out into the big world, Sara wasn’t sure she could stand the anguish. She fantasized about taking her clothes out of the closet and throwing them into her suitcase; she imagined tearing her posters off the walls and heading for home.

  But what would she tell her parents? That she was in love with the same boy Mel loved? That she couldn’t stand the strain anymore of trying to pretend that she didn’t feel what she felt?

  She had never been in love before, and she was unprepared for the ruthless misery of the emotion. There was no relief, even in her dreams, from the dull constant grief that afflicted her like an abscess. She had had other boyfriends. She had been popular enough in high school and had dated a steady stream of boys. But she had never felt more than a mild attachment to any of them. She had watched her friends contend with disappointment and heartache, and she had asked them, What’s the big deal? Leave him. If he doesn’t love you, then stop mooning after him and just leave. It had seemed so simple.