Beach Trip

by Cathy Holton

  She pushed herself through the giggling Delta Gammas toward Briggs. “Ex-cuse me!,” one of the girls said. “The line starts back here.”

  “Oh, yeah? Well, this is my party so I don’t have to stand in line.”

  “Bogus,” the girl said.

  The Japanese lanterns shed a festive light, illuminating the bare trees and tall shrubs that ringed the yard. A pale sliver of moon hung from the winter sky. A series of high temperatures the week before had melted most of the snow, which was good because they’d been able to set the keg up in the yard. Usually this time of year, they were forced to set it up on the side porch, a narrow enclosed space running along the side of the house that they used as a laundry room.

  Sara tapped Briggs on the shoulder. He and another frat brother were holding one of the Sandmen up by the ankles while he did a handstand on the keg. Another brother stuck the beer nozzle into the Sandman’s mouth. Briggs grinned when he saw her and said, “Yo, Sara, you want to get vertical?”

  “I am vertical, Briggs.”

  “Suit yourself.” The Sandmen chanted to ten in unison and now the guy on the keg shook his leg and Briggs and the holder dropped him. He spit out the nozzle, stood upright for a moment, then moved sidewise through the crowd before his knees buckled, and he went down. The crowd roared and Briggs motioned for the next contestant to step up.

  “Feel free to go buy another keg,” Sara said.

  “I bought this one,” Briggs said.

  “No, you didn’t. Lola did.”

  “Same thing.” He grinned and made a dismissive gesture with his hand. “Hey, don’t spaz out. I already sent a couple of the guys on a beer run.”

  “Well, I hope you told them to buy plenty. You and your friends aren’t the only guests, you know.”

  “We’re the only guests who count.”

  “I know it’s hard, Briggs, but try not to be an asshole.”

  “Hey, I’m just being myself.”

  “Exactly.”

  On her way back to the house, she met Lola crossing the yard with a plate of food in her hands. “Please tell me that’s not for your boyfriend,” Sara said sharply. “Please tell me you’re not waiting on him hand and foot like a servant. Or a perfect little wife.”

  Lola giggled and glanced at Briggs, who was busy loading another victim onto the keg. “He’s busy right now,” she said. “I really don’t mind. I really don’t mind at all.” She backed across the lawn as she was talking, holding the plate up in front of her like an offering.

  Sara sadly watched her cross the yard. It was obvious that in Lola’s little world feminism didn’t exist. Despite her expensive liberal education, Lola would always be what she had been born and bred to be; a good Southern Girl. Sara sighed and went into the house to look for Mel (a not-so-good Southern Girl), stopping in the dining room to replenish a big wooden bowl with potato chips. Most of the special food was gone now and they were down to chips and dips. She pushed through the crowd, stopping to talk to a girl dressed like Linda Blair from The Exorcist, who was in her Russian Poets class. It took her a while but she finally reached the front door. She peered through the screen and stepped through, the door slamming loudly on her heels.

  She couldn’t see Mel anywhere. The porch was hazy with marijuana smoke. An overhead light glowed feebly, casting shadows around the edges, where people clustered in groups of twos and threes, sitting on the balustrades or cross-legged on the floor. Someone had pushed a speaker up to the window screen, and the Eagles were singing “Hotel California.” The mood here was mellower, less frantic than the keg stands going on out back.

  “This bud’s for you,” a curly-haired boy said, handing her a joint. She took a couple of hits and passed it on. Out in front of the house a guy dressed as Mad Max was pedaling her Big Wheels up and down the sidewalk shouting, I’ll get you, Toecutter! She turned to go back in, but as she did, something in the shadows at the other end of the porch caught her eye. She stopped suddenly and stood very still, staring. Mel and Bart were sprawled in the porch swing, making out.

  She stood there watching them with a kind of sick fascination. The crowd swirled around her like smoke, parting from time to time to reveal Mel, obviously drunk, sprawled across Bart’s lap. The whole scene was sickening and false, and made Sara feel mildly dirty, like a voyeur at a peep show. She thought of J.T Radford drinking himself into a stupor down at the Bulldog. Despite all that had happened between them (or hadn’t happened between them), she hoped J.T. wouldn’t show up to see this.

  Annie appeared suddenly on the porch steps, materializing out of the darkness like a ghost. “Where’ve you been?” Sara asked, as she came up on the porch.

  “At the library.” Annie pushed past her. Her cheeks were red with the cold and it looked as if she’d been crying; her eyes were pink and swollen.

  “Are you okay?”

  Annie swung the door open and stepped inside, letting the screen door slam against her heels. “I don’t feel well,” she said, avoiding Sara’s eyes. “I think I’ll go lie down.”

  Sara watched her disappear up the stairs. Everyone’s life seemed to be unraveling. If Sara could have fixed everything, if she could have made everyone happy, she would have. But standing there watching Mel make out with Bart, she realized how destructive it had all become. Unfixable. It was a fight to the death now between Mel and J.T, and there would be no survivors. People would get hurt. People would have to take sides. Sara imagined herself pitching between the two of them like a battered shuttlecock.

  She put her hand on the door to go in. And then, as if to remind her just how bad things could get, J.T. showed up.

  Lola waited until she was sure Briggs was drunk before taking him the plate of food. She had fixed it earlier in the evening and then hidden it in the back of the refrigerator until later. Around ten o’clock she took out the plate, ground up one of her sleeping tablets, and sprinkled it all over the Spicy Bat Wings, Brain Pâté, and Corpse Salsa.

  It was a beautiful evening, one of those evenings that made Lola happy, as if the moon, dangling like a jewel above the horizon, and the stars, glimmering in the dark velvet sky, had been made just for her. Coming down the steps to the backyard, carrying Briggs’s plate in her hands like an offering to Hypnos, the god of sleep, Lola could feel her heart fluttering in her throat. In another twenty minutes she would be free. In another twenty minutes she would be wrapped in the arms of her beloved.

  She passed Sara, who stopped to hassle her about carrying the plate to Briggs. Lola wanted to giggle, to laugh out loud. She wanted to say, Don’t worry, it’s not what you think. She wanted to tell Sara everything, because Lola was bad with secrets, but she couldn’t tell her, not yet anyway, not until everything was settled. Not until she was sure her mother and Briggs wouldn’t be able to sabotage her plans.

  “Where’ve you been?” Briggs asked irritably when he saw her. He was sitting on a chair next to the keg, watching as the Delta Gammas did their keg stands. He reached for the plate hungrily, sucking on a chicken leg and scooping large portions of the dip and pâté into his cavernous mouth. Lola looked away. She couldn’t bear to watch him eat. She couldn’t bear the way his eyes glazed, the way his jaw popped and creaked and his blubbery lips glistened wetly “Answer me,” he said. “Where have you been?”

  “In the house,” she said. “Helping with the party.”

  He grunted and kept chewing. She wondered how long until he was out completely. She usually felt sleepy within ten minutes of taking the Halcion but Briggs was built like a bull, and she had counted on it taking at least twenty minutes. She had told Lonnie to pick her up at ten-thirty.

  “Whoa, Barnett, watch where you put your hands!” Briggs shouted at the keg spotter, who was trying, unsuccessfully, to keep one of the Delta Gamma’s skirts from falling over her head. Lola figured Briggs would get sleepy and pass out in her bed (in which case she’d arrive home early Sunday morning and climb in beside him before he woke up) or he’d pass out
and one of his Sandmen would haul him back to the fraternity house. Either way, Lola figured she’d have eight hours of uninterrupted time alone with Lonnie. And given her school schedule, his full-time job and weekend music gigs, and Briggs’s constant vigilance, eight hours was an eternity.

  Somewhere deep in the house, the Eagles were playing. Briggs held the plate up to Lola. “Any more of those chicken legs?” he asked.

  “No, sorry, they went pretty fast.”

  “Goddamn it, I knew those potheads would scarf down the food before we could get to it,” Briggs said, scowling. “I don’t know why you invite those losers to your parties anyway.”

  “They’re not losers,” Lola said. “They’re nice.”

  “I’ll have some more of the chips and dip then,” he said, holding the plate out to her. She hesitated and then took it. He slapped her fondly on the ass as she walked off.

  “And Lo,” he called after her. “For Christ’s sake get some clothes on. You’ll catch pneumonia out here.”

  And then she was running, flitting through the night like a bird, her black Mary Janes flying through the frosty grass. She had never felt like this before. She was in love and her heart spun in her chest, true and weightless as an arrow loosed from a bow. It wasn’t the deep habitual love she’d felt for Savannah, which was warm and comfortable as an old coat, or the dutiful love she’d felt for her mother and father. It wasn’t the slight affection she felt for Briggs, more like an obligation than love, really. It was something new and entirely different, something that opened Lola’s heart to a world made suddenly large and generous.

  Behind her the noise of the party gradually grew faint. Ahead the cozy streetlamps glowed, haloed by the cold night air. She could see Lonnie waiting for her at the end of the street, parked in his old Chevrolet truck beneath the glow of a lamp. His old Chevrolet truck with the camper in the bed, the place where they made hurried love most of the time, their own little honeymoon suite that smelled of dog and paint thinner and fishing tackle.

  He saw her coming and flashed his headlights in greeting. She was laughing when she opened the door and threw herself into his arms.

  “Hey, Sunshine,” he said, grinning and kissing her. It was the first time she’d ever had a nickname and she loved it, even though he’d named her after one of the squaws in Little Big Man. “Damn, your cheeks are cold,” he said, rubbing his freshly shaved face against hers.

  She giggled. “Which ones?” she said.

  “Let me see,” he said, slipping his hands down the back of her tights.

  He was wearing a pair of jeans and an army jacket, and he looked adorable with his gray eyes flashing fire in the dim lights of the radio dial. He had cut his hair, and it fell now in shaggy curls around his ears. He leaned over and started the truck and she snuggled up next to him on the seat. He threw his arm across her shoulders.

  The old truck clattered and whined and pulled away slowly from the curb. “How was the party?” Lonnie asked as they passed the house, lit up now like a Christmas tree with the Clash blasting from the windows. There was some kind of ruckus occurring on the front porch. Lola could see the crowd milling around and several dark figures moving back and forth but she couldn’t make out any faces.

  “The party was boring,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Because you weren’t there.”

  He was quiet for a few minutes, and then he said, “What did you tell your boyfriend?”

  “He was busy drinking with his friends. I didn’t tell him anything. Besides, he’s not my boyfriend.”

  “Does he know that?”

  “Not yet. But he will.”

  Lonnie made a soft derisive sound. “I’m not holding my breath.”

  “I told you, Lonnie, we’ll work it out.” She didn’t want an argument tonight. They had eight hours together, his mother was out of town visiting her sister, and they had the house to themselves. She didn’t want anything to spoil their time together. “I love you,” she said earnestly and he looked at her and smiled. It was one of the things she liked best about him, his easygoing nature. Nothing ever bothered him for long. Briggs would stew about some imagined slight for days, planning his revenge, but Lonnie just let it all roll off his back. He was bighearted and gentle and patient. The ducks at the Duck Pond had sensed this about him, and Lola sensed it, too. He would make a good husband and father. Lola liked to imagine their life together: a big house bursting with children, her in the kitchen, and Lonnie coming in from work in the evening in his flannel shirt, carrying his paint bucket like a briefcase. Lonnie playing baseball with the children in the yard while she cooked dinner. It would be a happy life. A good life.

  They drove slowly through the center of town, darkened storefronts reflecting the blinking traffic lights. The traffic was sparse; there were few cars on the streets this time of night. They drove past the Episcopal Church, with its lovely stone tower, and the public library, the bakery where Lonnie’s mother worked, and the hardware store. They drove past the feed store and across the humpbacked railroad tracks, and now the houses became smaller, more shabby and run-down than the Victorian cottages near the campus. Here and there they passed a lonely house still lit up with Christmas lights. The area was called Tucker Town, and it was the kind of place where Bedford students were warned not to go at night. Lonnie and his mother lived in a peeling two-bedroom house on the outskirts of Tucker Town. She worked as a cashier at the Piggly Wiggly and as a late-shift worker at the bakery. There was just the two of them; Lonnie’s father had disappeared soon after Lonnie’s birth.

  The first time he brought Lola home, his mother had been there, sitting in the front room with her feet up. She was shy, and she seemed embarrassed by Lola’s sudden appearance in her crowded front room. “Oh my, I wasn’t expecting company,” she said, standing up and looking helplessly around the shabby room strewn with magazines and newspapers. She was a small round woman with a careworn appearance and graying hair. She was younger than Lola’s own mother, but she looked older, with her stooped shoulders and tired expression.

  “It’s not company,” Lonnie said, laughing. “It’s only Lola.” Mrs. Lumpkin, who’d obviously heard about Lola, smiled and stuck her hand out shyly. “How do you do?” she said. “I’m Lonnie’s mama.” She was wearing bedroom slippers and an apron that read KLEGHORN’S BAKERY—PUT A LITTLE SOUTH IN YOUR MOUTH.

  “Hello,” Lola said warmly, taking the small woman’s hand in both her own. “I’m Lola.” The house was only a little larger than Lola’s childhood playhouse, except that the playhouse had been decorated by an interior designer and had sported French wallpaper, and the Lumpkin front room had pine-paneled walls and an ironing board in one corner covered in stacks of threadbare towels. The only attempt at decoration was a series of small plates printed with scenes of the English countryside that hung above the cluttered sofa. Lola found the plates oddly touching. She had a sudden desire to bundle up Lonnie and his mother and carry them home with her, not to Birmingham, of course, not to Maureen’s cold palatial mansion, but to something a little nicer and more stylish than what they had now, perhaps a brick ranch house on a large tree-filled lot where they could all live happily ever after.

  “See, I told you she wouldn’t bite,” Lonnie said, and Mrs. Lumpkin blushed and said, “Now, hush.” She moved some magazines aside on the sofa and indicated that Lola should sit down. “Are you hungry?” she said. “I’ve got some pecan pie in the kitchen.”

  “No, mama, we just ate,” Lonnie said.

  “Pie would be lovely,” Lola said.

  Lonnie pulled slowly into the graveled drive and stopped. The little house was dark but for the porch light that glowed feebly above the front door. He leaned and pulled the keys out of the ignition. “Honey, we’re home,” he said softly.

  Lola felt a deep trembling joy. He made it all so easy. Loving him was as easy as stepping off a ledge. It was as easy as swallowing a bottle of Halcion and going to sleep forever.
“When does your mother get back?” she asked.

  “The day after tomorrow.” He put his arm around her and pulled her close. “You can stay all weekend if you like,” he said, his mouth against her hair. “You can stay forever.”

  She sighed and played with a button on his jacket. “I wish I could,” she said.

  “It’s up to you.”

  Lola put her hand up and tugged at his curls. “We have to be careful,” she said. She frowned and stroked his cheek lightly. “We can’t make any mistakes or my mother and Briggs will figure out a way to stop us.”

  Lonnie put his head back and stared at the roof. He sighed and shook his head. “How?” he asked. “You’re twenty-two. You’re legal.”

  “You don’t know them,” Lola said. “You don’t know what they’re capable of.”

  “Yeah, I keep hearing that,” Lonnie said morosely.

  Lola pulled his face to her and kissed him. “It won’t be long,” she said. “It won’t be long. I promise.”

  They had begun making their plans weeks ago. On a cold snowy day in November, two weeks after they first climbed into the back of Lonnie’s truck, they had begun talking marriage. Lonnie had called her that night to tell her he loved her. She was huddled in the upstairs hallway with the phone clamped to her ear while just a few feet away Briggs lay stretched out on her bed watching TV.

  “I love you,” Lonnie said. “I’ve never felt this way before.”

  “Hush,” Lola said, trying to keep her voice low. It was all she could do not to jump up and go dancing down the hallway. Tenderness swelled her chest, catching in her throat. “I know,” she said to him, and all the longing of her sad childhood was tied up in those two words.