Beach Trip

by Cathy Holton

  Lola was sitting in the quad in her Mat Maid uniform the day she first spoke with him. The term cheerleader was considered gauche and vulgar, so at St. Anne’s they were called Mat Maids. The uniforms and the activities were the same but the titles were different, as befitted a twenty-six-thousand-dollar-a-year boarding school. The Mat Maids were chosen for their popularity and their beauty of face and perfection of figure, and Lola had already served on the squad for two years on that bright fall day.

  He was crossing the quad in front of a phalanx of giggling girls, walking with that peculiar swagger known only to rock stars and high school quarterbacks. Lola was sitting on the steps of Baylor Hall, her head buried in a copy of Wordsworth. They were ten feet from each other when Briggs stopped his admiring horde, and, throwing up one hand in greeting to Lola, said, “There’s my girl.”

  Lola, still caught up in daffodils fluttering in the breeze, lifted her face, smiled dreamily, then went back to reading.

  A small ripple went through the group of girls. Briggs squared his shoulders and tried again. “I thought Mat Maids only read in class,” he said. “Never out of class.”

  A nervous twitter went through his fan club. Lola raised her face again and fixed him with a blank stare. Her eyes were wide and innocent as a kitten’s. “Do I know you?” she asked sweetly.

  It was silly, she realized later. Of course she knew him. He had dated half the Mat Maids and most of the tennis team. But she had been caught up in Wordsworth, her mind floating free as a wandering cloud, and she had not been able to focus on the boy standing in front of her.

  The humiliation he suffered at her hands seemed to awaken in Briggs the first faint stirrings of love. A girl had never treated him that way before. He had always been the sun, and they had been the planets circling endlessly in the glow of his magnificence. But this girl showed little aptitude for circling. She seemed made for straight lines and geometric angles. He called that night and asked her out.

  They dated for several months before Maureen found out. By then Lola had already decided to break it off with him. She had decided one night after dinner, when they had ridden the bus together into town to see a movie and had stopped by a local restaurant for a meal. They were sitting at a booth in a brightly lit hamburger joint and all around them was the bustle and banter of the town kids as they greeted one another loudly and hopped from booth to booth. “Stairway to Heaven” played in the background. Lola was looking into Briggs’s handsome face and trying to block out the noise and confusion around her, trying to concentrate on what he was saying when it suddenly occurred to her that she was bored. Desperately, terminally bored. She was more interested in what was going on in the booths around her than she was in listening to what he had to say. She thought, All he ever talks about is himself. I could never love someone like him.

  But when Maureen drove up for Parents’ Day she fell immediately for the charming and handsome Briggs. She was like one of his little giggling groupies, hanging on his every word, blushing when his blue eyes rested too long on her. Between the two of them, Lola could hardly get a word in, sitting quietly in the backseat of the car or at the dinner table while they gossiped about people they knew or droned on endlessly about fashion and style and exotic locales. By the time she left, Maureen was as infatuated as a starstruck schoolgirl and Lola decided it would be easier to just go along with it all. She would break up with him over summer vacation.

  But Maureen and Briggs’s mother had different plans. They got together for day trips and cocktails several times before school was out, and each planned a series of summer “visits” for “the children” complete with cotillions, ice-cream parties, and barbecues. Lola saw more of Briggs that summer than she had all school year. She decided to wait and break up with him in the fall, once they returned to boarding school. But then his mother got sick, and by the time she died the following summer, Lola had already fallen into the inertia of their relationship. Besides, she couldn’t break up with a boy whose mother had just died.

  By senior year they were like an old married couple that has learned to ignore each other’s faults in exchange for the comfort and stability that comes with custom and routine. Lola felt a certain faint affection for him, although she didn’t think it was love. He was from the same social class and upbringing as she was, they were both Episcopalian, they shared many of the same friends, and they knew many of the same people.

  Many couples she knew had married and started families with less affection and compatibility between them than she and Briggs shared. Her own parents had done it. And although their marriage hadn’t turned out well, it had endured long past the impetuous marriages her schoolmates’ parents seemed to jump in and out of every six or seven years. Some of her friends had two and three sets of stepparents. The fact that someone would leave a marriage just because they weren’t happy seemed alien to Lola. It seemed cowardly. Her own parents had done battle for nearly thirty years and neither one had flinched or weakened until the very end.

  Her own parents had survived a thirty-year marriage and yet here she was turning tail and running after only three years.

  Lola got up and went into the bathroom to bathe her face with a wet washcloth. Henry fretted the moment she disappeared, turning his eyes to follow her, but when she came back he brightened and thrust his arms and legs out like a turtle rolled on its back. She leaned over and nuzzled his neck until he giggled and grasped her hair with his fat fists. After a moment she rolled him over on his stomach, patting his back gently as he practiced lifting himself with his arms.

  She wasn’t leaving Briggs because she expected to find happiness anywhere else. She had given up on happiness the day Lonnie Lumpkin was wheeled out of her life. She did not expect to find it again. What she wanted was a quiet simple life, a cottage on the beach where she and Henry could spend their days basking in the sun and swimming in the sea. Briggs’s loud, exuberant ways, his fierce temper, and his constant craving for her wore her out. He was, at the root of it all, an unhappy man. And he wanted everyone around him to share his unhappiness.

  The phone rang shrilly, startling her out of her reverie. She leaned over and picked it up, putting one hand on Henry’s back to keep him from rolling off the bed. “Sara,” she said. “Thank God.”

  “Why are you doing this?” Briggs asked in a heavy voice.

  She was quiet for a moment listening to the sound of the rain. “How did you find me?”

  “Your mother.”

  Of course. Maureen had known where to look with an instinct born of thirty years of looking for her own wayward husband. Lola had been foolish to come here; she saw that now.

  “Why are you doing this?” Briggs repeated and his voice, which had been flat and expressionless, rose slightly in pitch. “Didn’t I give you everything a woman could possibly want?”

  “Those are just things.”

  “Things!” he said harshly. “Just things!”

  “I don’t want to talk about this right now. I need time to think.”

  “I loved you through all of that …”

  “I know. I know.”

  “You bitch.”

  “Don’t.”

  “Through all that bullshit with that fucking house painter. Do you know how humiliating that was for me? Do you know how it felt knowing everyone was laughing at me?”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “You cunt.”

  “I wish you didn’t love me. Then it wouldn’t be so hard.” She could hear him breathing. Outside the window the rain had subsided. Clouds of mist swirled around the streetlamps.

  “There better not be anybody else,” he said in a quiet voice.

  “There’s no one else.”

  “It better not be that fucking yard boy.”

  “Hush. It’s no one.”

  “Because if it is, I’ll kill him.”

  She knew he would. He was capable of murder. She had learned by now to handle his rages. She had learned to speak q
uietly, to show no fear. “It’s me,” she said soothingly. “There’s nothing wrong with you. It’s me. I need a different life. I need a simple life. I don’t need the money. I don’t want it. You can have it.”

  There was a humming sound on the line like a phone left off the hook. When he spoke his voice was bitter. “You don’t want the money? Have you ever lived without it, you spoiled bitch?”

  “No, but I …”

  “What?”

  “I can get a job.”

  He laughed. “You? Get a job? Doing what?”

  “I can live with my mother.”

  “No,” he said. “You can’t. She won’t support you. She’ll put you out.”

  Her face, in the mirror, turned pale. She knew he was right. Her mother wouldn’t support her in any divorce action. She’d be furious with Lola for the scandal, for the airing in public of family dirty linen. She’d take Briggs’s side like she’d always done, like she’d taken the side of the masochistic Charlotte Hampton all those years ago. Once a Scottie, always a Scottie. “All I want is a quiet life,” Lola said. The dimly lit room, which before had seemed only dirty and threadbare, now surrounded her like something sinister. She could feel it closing over her like the lid of a box. “All I want is my son,” she said.

  “Your son.” And then, as if he had finally realized what he needed to say to break her, he added harshly, “My son. And don’t think I’ll just let you walk out of my life with him. If you go, he stays. You may not prize money but I have a lot of it, and without your mother’s support you have nothing. And in case you don’t know, Lola, it’s the partner with the most money who winds up with the best deal in a custody arrangement.”

  She began to cry softly. Henry tried to turn his head to see her, bobbing up and down on his elbows. He put his face down on the blanket and began to fret. Lola sobbed into one hand and patted him with the other. Now that she was crying, Briggs’s anger seemed to have dissipated.

  “Come home,” he said in a weary voice.

  “No.”

  “Come home,” he said. “Don’t make me come get you.”

  Chapter 14

  hat afternoon they jumped into the golf cart and headed down to the village stores to do some shopping. Mel drove and Sara sat beside her. Lola and Annie sat in the back. The sun was directly overhead, and when they broke from the cover of the overhanging trees it was like opening the door of a furnace, the heat prickling their arms and faces. A narrow strip of asphalt stretched in front of them, bound on one side by scrub pine and laurel oak and on the other by the slumbering marsh. Out past the yellow spartina grass the green waters of the tidal creeks glimmered faintly.

  “Are we sure we want to go shopping in this heat?” Sara asked. She wore a black tank top, a pair of white cropped pants, and a straw hat trimmed with a black ribbon. She looked like someone out of Hamptons magazine. “We should be lying on the beach.”

  “We won’t be long,” Mel said. “Everything closes down at five so we don’t have a lot of time to get to the shops. We wasted all morning just lying around the house.”

  From the back, Annie snorted. “Whose fault is that?” Across the marsh, a lone heron rose into the sun-bleached sky, dragging its legs behind it.

  Mel said, “Hey, I can’t help it if y’all are lightweights. Don’t blame me.”

  “You were the one making the martinis,” Sara said.

  “You were the one who wanted to play Clinker,” Annie said.

  Mel made a dismissive gesture with one hand. “No one twisted your arms,” she reminded them. “No one put a gun to your temples and forced you to drink.”

  “Well, I can tell you right now, I’m not drinking tonight,” Sara said.

  “Me either,” Annie said.

  “I’ll drink,” Lola said.

  Ahead the tunnel of live oaks began. They drove from the glaring sunlight into a cool green shade that closed around them like water. Beards of Spanish moss hung from the branches of the trees. Cicadas whirred in the shadows. They passed a cart with floats and boogie boards tied to its roof, ambling along the road. A father in flip-flops and board shorts sat in the backseat beside a curly-haired girl of eight or nine. A mother in a pink swimsuit drove the cart and, tucked beside her on the front seat, a sleepy child sat sucking his thumb. Lola waved as they drove past and the boy lifted his hand and waved listlessly.

  “Henry used to love the beach,” Lola said, gazing fondly at the boy. “We had a place at Gulf Shores when he was little, and he and I used to stay down there for most of the summer. Briggs would fly down when he could. He used to scream and kick his feet whenever I’d make him come in from the beach.”

  “Who, Briggs or Henry?” Mel said.

  “His hair was so blond,” Lola said wistfully, her eyes fixed on the disappearing child. “He used to squat at the edge of the sand and dig holes with his little shovel. And when the water rolled up and filled in the hole he would get so mad and stomp his little feet and throw his little shovel in the surf and then I’d have to go in and get it.”

  “How did a child with such a bad temper grow up to be so normal?” Annie asked earnestly. She glanced at Lola and colored slightly. She hadn’t meant to say that out loud. Sometimes her mouth worked before her mind had a chance to shut it down. Annie loved her own children but she hadn’t spoiled them. Once, on a trip through Birmingham, they had met Lola’s family at a fast food restaurant. Annie’s sons had sat quietly and politely at the table but Henry, on learning that he already had the toy being offered in the Happy Meal box, had insisted on going to a different restaurant to get another toy. When his mother refused, he had a screaming fit that culminated with Briggs throwing the boy over his shoulder and carrying him out. The whole time Henry had stretched his arms toward his mother, and with a tearful face, screamed, “I’m your only little boy! I’m your only little boy!” Lola stood it for as long as she could and then hurried out after them.

  “You never know how they’ll turn out,” Sara said, thinking how sweet and docile Adam had been as a child. He would play by himself for hours, alone in his own little world. That was before he’d come to realize that he wasn’t like other kids. The knowledge had made him surly and short-tempered. Or maybe it was just adolescence; Sara didn’t know.

  Lola smiled dreamily and continued with her daydreams of Henry. “Soon he’ll be a daddy with a son of his own,” she murmured. Caught up in her memories, Lola gave no indication that she’d heard a word anyone else had said and Annie was glad of that.

  “Do you really think he’s old enough to be getting married?” Mel asked. “What is he, twenty-one? Twenty-two?”

  “I was twenty-two,” Annie said, “and so was Lola.”

  “And I was twenty-four,” Mel said, “and that was way too young.”

  Sara said nothing. She’d married at twenty-eight, two years after finishing law school. By then she and Tom had been dating, off and on, for three years and had been living together for two.

  A soft snuffling sound made Mel glance over her shoulder. “Lola, are you crying?”

  Lola smiled apologetically and dabbed her cheeks with the backs of her hands. “One day you’re standing on the beach with your child,” she sobbed, “and the next it’s your child standing there with his own son. Where does the time go?” Annie took a Kleenex out of her purse and gave it to Lola, and she took it and blew her nose softly.

  It occurred suddenly to Mel that Lola was lonely. And Mel knew a thing or two about loneliness, although with her it was a condition she had chosen. Her career as a writer made a solitary life necessary but it was a choice she’d never really regretted. Well, most of the time, anyway. But with Lola the loneliness was forced, and that was different. Briggs had his money, Mel had her writing, Sara and Annie had their own families, but all Lola had ever had was Henry. And now Henry had found someone else.

  “Lola, you and I need to see more of each other,” Mel said suddenly. She put her chin up and stared at Lola in the rearview m
irror. Sara put her hand out as if to take the wheel but Mel pushed it away. “Why don’t you come up to New York in the fall? We can do the museums, take in a few shows, shop until Briggs cuts you off, and eat in a different restaurant every meal.”

  The cart whirred through the cool green tunnel of the maritime forest. Insects floated in the still blue air. Lola sniffed and stuck her nose in the Kleenex. “That would be nice,” she said, blowing gently.

  The village was bustling with noontime shoppers and diners who crowded the island’s only two restaurants, Sophie’s Seafood and the Oyster Bar. Both restaurants fronted the harbor and faced each other at right angles. Sandwiched in between was the marina, and across the harbor was the ferry dock, where the big ferries ran every thirty minutes between the island and the mainland, carrying happy or depressed tourists (depending on whether they were just beginning their vacation or going home). Clustered along the perimeter of the harbor stood tall, cedar-shingled houses and shops weathered to a soft gray. The boats in the marina bobbed gently on the tide, their canvas rigging snapping in the steady breeze that blew in from the sound and the open sea beyond. Golf carts trundled along the narrow roadways, and children played on the village green under the watchful eyes of their parents, who sat on the deck outside Sophie’s sipping frozen margaritas out of wide-mouthed glasses.

  Mel pulled the cart into an open bay in front of the cluster of village shops. She got out and plugged the cart into an outlet while the others stood up and stretched.

  “Where should we start?” Sara asked, yawning. The sun was hot but the breeze was pleasant and fragrant with the scent of cape jasmine and fried fish.

  “There’s a really cute dress shop over there,” Lola said, pointing. She seemed happy again, which was just like Lola, sad one moment and cheerful the next. “And right next to it is a store that sells little gifts and collectibles for the home.”