The Lifeguard

by Mary Morris

  When she started worrying about pipes freezing, she eased her way out of bed, went down to the beach bar, and ordered a rum punch. The man who sat beside her was a dead ringer for her ex-husband, Frank, whom she hadn’t seen, nor wished to see, for twelve years. She had been married to him for only six months. He was the nicest man in the world until their honeymoon when they sat in a restaurant overlooking the Blue Ridge Mountains and he told her that she was a stupid little shit—it was downhill from there.

  Marty was only a friend then. They worked at the same high school; he taught industrial arts and she taught special ed. Lenore worked with the learning-disabled in the local school district—children who read backwards, upside down, who could not follow a sequence. She devised tests for herself and for the teachers on her staff to show what it was like for the learning-disabled child—words with no vowels, words backwards.

  When Lenore told Marty over coffee in the cafeteria that she thought Frank might hurt her, he moved her out of the house. He told Frank as unambivalently as he could that he would kill him if he ever came near her again. He had rescued her and she was thankful, though she wondered if gratitude was the best emotion to feel toward her husband.

  Marty had smooth, wonderful hands, and he could make anything with them. Lenore thought it was good for someone to have one remarkable trait, and Marty’s was what he could do with his hands. They used to make her shudder. She could lose herself in his hands. When the twins were born, he made them little lamps out of toy boats, and when they bought their house, he made door knockers that he poured himself from bronze.

  Except for the incident with Frank, which she attributed to a lapse of judgment, she had lived an orderly life and she really had little to complain about. Now she kept staring at the man beside her until he stared back at her and said, “Is something wrong?”

  “No,” she replied, as she paid her bill. And though she knew it sounded corny, she said, “You just remind me of someone I once knew.” The man grinned, assuming it was a come-on, and went back to his drink.

  Later when she crawled back in bed, Lenore found herself overwhelmed with the desire to touch someone. It didn’t seem to matter much who the person was, but she just wanted to touch someone. She tried to determine the shape and gender of the person she longed to touch, but she couldn’t quite make it out. It wasn’t Marty, she was sure of that. Not that she didn’t want to touch Marty, but it wasn’t what she wanted now. When she was fifteen, she had made love to a boy once. She had lain with him on a blanket near one of the lakes and she felt as if her body would melt into his. She couldn’t remember that boy’s name, but she remembered what it felt like, to melt into someone else.

  Lenore heard the noise of the people next door again. The party was in full swing; she heard laughter, dancing, and finally she could stand it no longer. It was the help, she decided, having a party after hours. She still had the key to the room and went to turn it in the lock but the door was already ajar. She pushed it open and found the room as it had been earlier that day: empty, devoid of furniture, the housekeeping cart in the center. But the green curtain by the window was pushed back. When she looked outside, Lenore could see a white mist rising from the lawn.

  ———

  In the morning the wind was blowing as hard as before and Claire still could not speak. Crystie’s hair was a nest of frizz and Marty’s sunburn was hot enough to fry an egg on. The T-shirts and shorts she’d hung on the line in the bathroom were as wet as when she’d hung them days before. Waves hammered at the shore and, though the girls complained bitterly, they still could not go to the beach. Lenore convinced them that they should get a car and see the sights.

  At the taxi stand they found a group of drivers, standing together in front of the hotel. Some had Rasta curls or wore little hats like tea cozies. Erroll was standing with them beside a banged-up car with pony upholstery and bronzed baby shoes dangling from the mirror. “Today is my day off,” he said. “I’ll take you around.” A brief haggling went on among the drivers, speaking in patois, and then it was decided that it would be okay for Erroll to take them.

  Lenore realized that Marty did not recognize Erroll from the day before, so she tugged at her husband’s sleeve and said that she thought he had offered them a good price. They piled into his car. The windows were permanently fixed half-shut and the door on the passenger side could not be opened, so Marty had to go in on the driver’s side and squeeze past the wheel. “I’ll show you the caves first,” Erroll said. “The girls will like the caves.” He followed the coast—a clear, long stretch of developments, condos, and hotels—until they came to a place where the hotels seemed to stop. Here they parked at a beach where waterfall tumbled upon waterfall, and all the rivers that crisscrossed the island met—there was a tremendous crash of water all around. A dead pig floated in one of the pools at the base of the falls.

  They took off their shoes and stripped down to the bathing suits they wore underneath, leaving their clothes in neat piles in the sand, and Erroll led them into the cave at the edge of the sea. It was a dark, green cave, cool and luminous inside, and the water was an iridescent blue. The girls made fish shadows on the wall. They floated on their backs as if they were asleep. Lenore found it so restful in the darkness, away from the wind, that she too wanted to go to sleep.

  Erroll motioned for her to follow him deeper into the blue darkness of the cave. They went down a narrow passageway and came to a place where the walls shimmered like emeralds and the room was illumined with a phosphorescent green light, made by little animals, he told her. The air through the passageway was warmer and more humid and Lenore had trouble catching her breath. She thought fleetingly of the elevator she’d once been trapped in, but she didn’t feel that way now. It was more that the air seemed to thicken and grow heavy around her. Lenore could not see Erroll clearly, but she could make out his shadow. She heard his breathing. It was a shallow, rapid breath, as if he too were fighting for air. She could smell him. He smelled of spices and coconut and goat. She had never touched a black person’s skin before, but now she wanted to touch his. She thought it would be soft, like a child’s.

  Listening to his breathing, she wondered if he would reach out and touch her. Otherwise, why did he bring her farther into the cave? She didn’t know why she thought this, but she did. Lenore wanted something to happen. She didn’t know what it was she wanted, but this was her vacation. She wanted it to be different from her life. She saw him ahead of her now; she could just make out a blue-black specter, looming before her. Then Erroll stepped closer and she felt his breath on her throat. “We should leave now,” he whispered. He told her that two boys had drowned there once, caught in a tide that pressed them against the walls. Lenore shuddered, rubbing her neck.

  She followed him back through the passageway where they found the girls, still making fish shadows on the walls, and Marty taking a picture. “It’s time to go,” Erroll said. When they left the cave they squinted in the light and were met with the full force of the wind, pushing them, blowing them back. Marty said he couldn’t stand the wind anymore so Erroll offered to drive them inland, away from the sea, where the wind would be better. “I will show you my town,” he said. “There is a small market there if you would like to buy a few things.”

  Lenore didn’t want to buy anything, though she thought the girls might like some souvenirs. Something to take home for show and tell. Besides, she wanted to keep going. She felt as if she had to keep going. They piled into the car with Lenore and the girls in the back and Erroll began to drive. He drove more quickly this time along the coast road. He passed a truck carrying chickens, honking as he went. He had to pull quickly back into his lane. Marty glanced back at Lenore, shaking his head.

  When Lenore looked up, she saw another car driving straight toward them. “Oh, my God!” she cried. “We’re going to die.” The girls screamed and Lenore pressed them down toward the floor. Marty, who sat in the front seat, braced his arms across the fra
me of the car as if he could hold it intact. There was no shoulder on the road, nothing they could do, except to drive straight toward the oncoming car, which at the last moment swerved back into its own lane and went rumbling past them down the road. Erroll shook his head as he drove on. “The duppy do that,” he said.

  Marty turned to Lenore. “Let’s go back to the hotel.”

  “But there’s nothing for us to do there,” she said. Even the girls agreed, so Erroll turned off onto a road that headed up toward the mountains. As soon as he made his turn, the wind died down. Lenore wasn’t sure when the paved road turned to dirt, but soon they were bracing themselves, bouncing over ruts. Now the road was lined with sheep and goats, toothless old women, some who reached out their hands, begging, and men in halter tops, sweaty, many carrying things on their heads.

  The car swerved and twisted along the dusty road and birds suddenly appeared—colorful birds with red crests, blue-tipped wings. Without the wind and the sea air, the car turned very hot and Lenore felt a thin layer of dust settle on her skin. Whereas before they had winced at the wind, now they settled back into a kind of torpor. “Is it much further?” Marty asked after a time. Erroll shook his head. “Just a little ways now.” But there was a mountain straight ahead, and no one lived on the mountain, so Lenore knew that they had to cross it.

  The heat amazed her, the shock of it. She watched her girls wither and curl into fetal positions on either side of her, their long legs wrapped around one another in her lap. She sniffed their moist heads and smelled salt and sweat and sunscreen and another odor that was just their bodies, the bodies of little girls. Her arms hurt, but she didn’t have the heart to move them. She tried to settle back, her arms falling asleep, the girls entwined across her as they had once been inside of her.

  At last they stopped. Lenore must have drifted to sleep because when she looked up there were chickens, shacks with tin roofs, men with machetes chopping fruit. Erroll pulled over and said, “We can get out here. I’ll get you something to drink.”

  Lenore roused the girls and pulled her arms free. Her arms lay numb at her sides and she got out of the car to shake them. She flapped them wildly and the girls began to laugh. Marty stood at the side of the road trying to take a picture of the men chopping fruit. Lenore was busy, shaking her arms, when suddenly she heard the men begin to shout. They picked up their machetes and started pounding them on the ground, on the melons they were carving, and beating them on the flat of their hands. Other men came out of their huts and they too started slapping their machetes on their hands and against their houses. They slapped and banged and soon the sound was deafening. Lenore looked around and saw Marty with the camera.

  “Stop it, Marty,” Lenore shrieked. “Put the camera down.” She saw Erroll racing back across the dusty road, bottles of soda in his hand, shouting in a language she did not understand. Now the men were all shouting and Erroll was arguing with them, his hands covered with orange soda and Coke that had spilled, but at least the pounding of the machetes had ceased.

  “Give them money,” Erroll told Marty. “Not a lot, but give them something.” Then he turned to Lenore and said, “Camera worse than salt for keeping African people down.”

  They bought postcards in a small darkened hut and the girls bought rag dolls and straw hats; they bought baskets of straw spun into the shape of flowers.

  Then Erroll invited them over to his house. “My wife has prepared something for you to eat.” Marty was reluctant, but Lenore said they should go. Erroll led them up a dirt alleyway to a cinderblock house that sat in a dirt yard filled with scattered auto parts and a scrawny tree. Children, some dressed, some not, ran around with smudged faces, snotty noses. Inside the house a woman—a round, rather severe-looking woman—stood beside a table where she had prepared some bread and cheese, milk for the girls, and cold drinks. Marty gave Lenore a look that meant “Can we eat this stuff?” Lenore stared back at him. “You’d better,” she mouthed.

  “Oh, what nice little girls,” the woman said. “I bet even you can’t tell them apart. You know,” she told Lenore, “I took care of the babies of a woman at the hotel once and she said, You take care of my babies so nice, I’m going to have you come and work for me.”

  “This is for you.” Erroll interrupted his wife, handing Lenore a cup of hot broth.

  “She said it so many times, but then she never wrote,” his wife went on. “Who looks after your little girls?”

  “They go to the school where I teach,” Lenore said, staring into the drink Erroll had brought for her. She didn’t want anything hot, but she didn’t think she could refuse.

  “It’s the bark tea I made you for your neck,” Erroll told her as he gave his wife a frown, after which she busied herself with some plates, putting cheese slices on them. “You didn’t drink the other one, did you?”

  “No, I guess I didn’t,” Lenore replied sheepishly. Now she drank the tea. It had a strange, bitter taste, like dirt, things taken from the ground. Her body turned warm inside and she felt herself grow dizzy, as if she were on a drug. The flies on the table seemed bigger than any flies she’d ever seen and the mud floor was filthier than she had imagined and Erroll’s wife seemed to be laughing at her. They had a large bed tucked in one corner and small cots in other parts of the room. The big bed was unmade, the sheets tangled, and Lenore knew that when they lay down, they could not help themselves.

  The sky was growing dark and Lenore was relieved when Erroll said they shouldn’t stay long because he thought the storm was coming at last. They said good-bye and Erroll drove them down the road they had come from. All were relieved when they got back to the sea, though the girls complained that they wanted to go home. By home they meant Rockford, not the hotel. The sky turned darker so that it was almost night and the rain came. It came in sheets, driving coconuts and bananas from the trees. The waves churned up the sea grass that entrapped small yellow fish and dumped them on the shore as surely as if fishermer had caught them in their nets.

  Erroll pulled over to the side of the road. “I can’t see two feet in front of me,” he said. There was a restaurant across the road and they made a run for it. They were soaked to the skin, laughing. The restaurant was a thatched hut and rain poured down on all sides. They sat in the center where water didn’t drip and were waited on by the blackest men Lenore ever saw. They ordered red snapper with peas and rice (the only thing on the menu that night) and one of the men put on some music. Calypso.

  A woman who was sitting at the bar got up and danced. She was a round woman, not heavy, but large, who wore a T-shirt too tight for her. When she moved, her whole body shook; the men paused. She rolled her hips in a circling motion. Then Erroll got up and he began to dance. Not with her, but next to her, his body swaying. He closed his eyes and moved to the beat.

  Lenore stood up and tapped Marty on the shoulder. “Dance with me,” Lenore said, her wet clothes clinging to her body.

  Marty patted her on the rear with a laugh. “You’ve gotta be kidding.”

  “I’m serious.” Lenore put her hands around his waist. “Dance with me.” When he wouldn’t get up, Lenore began to sway. She heard her girls groan and laugh, but she kept on swaying. She turned her hips, raising her arms above her head. In the distance she heard clapping, whistles, the voices of her daughters growing fainter. But mainly she heard the music. Her feet and her hands followed its beat. Even after it stopped, the music was still in her head.

  That night Marty reached for her, but Lenore fell asleep so suddenly she would have no memory of drifting off. In the middle of the night, something woke her. She listened, but she heard no sound, except for the sounds of breathing. Heading to the window, she looked out and saw that the palm trees were still. She reached up to touch her neck and found that the pain was gone.

  She opened the balcony doors and stood outside. The sky was clear and full of stars. And there against the full moon, rising into the sky, she saw people, dozens of people, hundreds of pe
ople, some very old with no teeth, and some just children. They moved slowly, a long procession of them. They did not fly like birds, flapping their wings. Rather they moved like swimmers, their arms pulling them through the ink-black sky.

  In the morning Claire could speak and Crystie’s hair had smoothed back down. They found their mother standing on the balcony, gazing at a restful sea where egrets waded by the shore. Embracing their mother they said, “Oh, Mommy, it’s a beautiful day.” The girls raced out in their pajamas, chasing the egrets that rose gracefully, moving away from the shore.

  At breakfast they learned that all beach activities had resumed and the girls begged their parents to take them out again on the glass-bottom boat. Marty wouldn’t go because he got seasick, but he helped them on board since Gosset refused to help. In fact, he seemed to act as if they weren’t even there. As they sailed away, Marty gave them a little salute from the shore.

  The boat moved smoothly across the surprisingly calm water. The girls squealed as they had before, pleading with their mother to look, but she refused. “I think I’ve seen enough,” she said. Then she sat back, clasping the railing, and stared straight ahead.

  About the Author

  MARY MORRIS is the author of nine books: four novels, three collections of short stories, and two travel memoirs, including Nothing to Declare: Memoirs of a Woman Traveling Alone. Her most recent novel, House Arrest, was published in May 1996 by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. She has also coedited with her husband, Larry O’Connor, Maiden Voyages, an anthology of the travel literature of women. Her numerous short stories and travel essays have appeared in such places as the Paris Review, the New York Times, and Vogue. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rome Prize in Literature, Morris teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and daughter.