Barefoot Beach

by Toby Devens

  Em followed my focus and said, “It was the last time he went against her. To him she is the valide, the mother of a sultan. Four sultans. All of her sons are spoiled and my sisters-in-law are terrified of her. She arrived two days ago, and already she’s taken over my kitchen. Today, even the oven downstairs to bake the pide bread for tonight. As for Merry, I am waiting for a murder. The question is, which one will strike first?”

  “And on Ramadan you can’t even have a shot of raki to deal with it, right?” That was from Margo, who I knew was craving something to take the edge off. Pete had called late afternoon to tell her he had to stay in Baltimore overnight. Apologies to Emine for missing the dinner, but this was business. Yes, on Saturday. The Orioles were playing a home game tonight. He didn’t have time to explain, but Margo would find out soon enough.

  She’d called me immediately after. “Business on a Saturday night. Funny business. Monkey business.” Pete had already added one entry this week to what she called her “Gotcha List.” Prowling through his cell phone, she’d found a message from the plastic surgeon’s office postponing an appointment. “My husband has major cojones thinking he can get tucked behind my back. If Dr. Wu isn’t doing a balls reduction on him, believe me, I will.” Now she sat fuming.

  “I’m not a drinker anyway,” Em was saying, “but this may drive me to it. Allah will forgive me. He is all understanding.”

  With that, the front door opened and Selda bustled in with Merry dragging behind her. Selda carried her handbag. Merry lugged two loaded shopping bags. Her face was a portrait of misery.

  “Take them to the kitchen so I can greet your mother’s friends,” Selda instructed.

  Merry blinked what I interpreted as “SOS” in Morse code. Her scrunched eyebrows read, “Rescue me.”

  “You didn’t hear me, Meryem? There is yogurt that needs to be in a cool place. Go!” She watched the girl trudge off; then, satisfied, she turned first to her daughter-in-law. “I got perfect tomatoes.” An hour before dinner, she’d decided Em’s tomatoes were overripe. “And Meryem I gave a lesson in how to shop. How to pick the best fruit. The child knows nothing about fruit.” Her glance swept the sofa. “Full house,” she announced, not all that hospitably.

  “Anne,” Em said, using the Turkish word for “mother,” “you remember Nora and Margo.”

  “Of course.” Selda pointed to me. “You are the picky eater, yes?”

  “Right,” I said. “No eggplant.”

  She touched her temple as if to say “It’s all in your head” or maybe “crazy lady.”

  “And you’ve met Margo Manolis,” Em said.

  “Last time once. You are the Greek, yes?” She sniffed.

  “My husband is.”

  “You look different.” She moved until she was far into Margo’s personal space. “Ahh. You had the eyes done. The lids.” As Margo sucked in an incredulous breath at her nerve, Selda said, “Me too. Last year. Why look tired and old when you don’t have to?” Then she turned her back on us, calling, “Merry, you will take out the serving platters,” and barreled off through to the dining room, where she lifted a goblet to check for smudges, then whipped the swinging door to the kitchen so hard it hit the wall.

  As day faded to night, Adnan came upstairs to wash. An app on his iPhone chimed the official end of the fast and he made a brief welcoming speech and explained the meaning of the holiday. Then we took sips of water and ate Medjool dates and olives to begin the Iftar break-the-fast dinner, as was the custom in Turkey.

  “You will sit next to me,” Selda said to Merry, who had pulled Erol to stand in front of her like a shield. “I will teach you to eat properly. Americans make a dance with their knives and forks. You will follow what I do. It is much more cultured.” Her barbarian granddaughter’s eyes glazed over. “You watch too, kuzucuğum,” Selda said to Erol.

  “Yeah, little lamb, you too.” Merry punched her brother’s arm.

  “Margo, take the chair on Merry’s other side, please,” Em announced. I caught Merry’s soft, “Thank God.”

  Em began to head for the kitchen. Selda blocked her. “Sit. All is in good hands.” Adnan tried to follow his mother. She waved him away. “Sit, my sweet boy. You worked hard all day.”

  With a slam of the swinging door that shook the silverware, dinner was under way.

  There were olives, soft white cheese, and pastirma, cured beef.

  “It doesn’t taste like the pastrami at Schwartz’s,” Merry said, referring to the famous deli in Ocean City. “The kosher is better.”

  “What means ‘kosher’?” Selda asked.

  “Jewish halal,” Margo answered.

  Selda fanned herself.

  After the red lentil soup (“Meryem, don’t blow breath on the spoon. This is very crude.”), Selda plated everyone’s food. As she served the stuffed zucchini, she said to me, “Kabak dolması, it is called. Made like the eggplant, only you won’t die from it.”

  The “lady’s thigh” meatballs and roasted lamb shank were delicious. Then a stew of nameless meat that made Merry gag on her first taste. “OMG, what is this?”

  “Arnavut Ciğeri. What? You don’t know this dish? Your mother never cooks it?”

  “It is pretty gross,” Erol ventured.

  “What is this ‘gross’? It is liver with onions.”

  “Liver? Like from an animal?” Merry looked horrified.

  “Yes, of course. Your father used to love it when he was your age. He likes the taste of the sumac in it. Makes it sour like lemon.” Adnan, who had high cholesterol, helped himself to a hefty second portion under his wife’s glare.

  The meal was well spiced, but over-peppered with comments from Selda: Merry must not salt her food before she eats it. She should sit up straight or she will freeze hunched over. And she can skip dessert because she is built like her mother. Here Selda held her hands spread wide to indicate big hips.

  “But I love güllaç,” Merry protested. It was one of my favorites too, a pudding made with milk and rosewater, dusted with pistachios and pomegranate seeds.

  “Anne, please,” Em jumped in, too furious not to. “Merry, you can have as much güllaç as you want.”

  “Fine.” Selda sighed. “Since only once a year. But tomorrow I want to see what dress size you are.”

  “Uh. Tomorrow, what’s tomorrow?” Panic soared in Merry’s voice.

  “We go to the outlet stores. The Ralph Lauren, the Donna Karan.” Discount malls lined the highway to the beach. “Your father is driving us.”

  Two voices rose at once. Em’s: “Adnan!” Merry’s: “But I’m supposed to go to the sand castle contest. Aunt Margo, Mrs. Manolis, I’m on her crew. . . .”

  Selda waved for silence. “This is more important than the sand. I looked in your closet today, Meryem—”

  “You did what?” Fire exploded on Merry’s cheeks.

  “Just a look. This is a bad thing? To your grandmother, you show such a mean face?”

  “Her room is private,” Em said. I could tell that my most patient friend was barely maintaining control.

  “At her age, nothing is private,” Selda snapped. “I looked. I saw only one dress. The rest in there are dungarees and the shorts. You are a girl. I will buy you some dresses.”

  “You could go sometime during the week, Selda.” Margo was playing a new role for her: the voice of reason.

  “Adnan can take time off only tomorrow—yes, Adnan?”

  He nodded.

  Em said, “I could drive.”

  Selda shook her head, dislodging a hairpin from her French twist. “You don’t understand why you have such problems? I can tell you. A child should not rule a house.”

  Merry turned to Margo. “Kill me,” she muttered. “Kill me now.”

  Margo squeezed her hand under the table. I heard her whisper, “Let her buy. We’ll
return.” Over a double portion of güllaç spooned out by her mother, Merry snickered; then she sobered. “But the sand castle contest.”

  “Ah, there are contests and then there are contests,” Margo said. “Some you win; some you lose. Some you lose to win.”

  Selda drafted Em to help her with the dishes, which was Margo’s and my cue to leave, and we grabbed it. Walking through the café, we traded “horribles” and kaltak comments about Selda; we worried about Em and Merry, felt helpless. At the car park, Margo was reminding me to be at the beach no later than ten the next morning when her cell pinged. “Pete. He must have come up for air with the girlfriend.” She read the text. Watch eleven p.m. news WJX

  Whazzup? she texted back.

  You’ll see. Don’t miss it.

  She said to me, “Who knows what—or who—he’s gotten himself into? Don’t you dare miss it, Nora.”

  At home at eleven, I watched reports of a fire in Towson and a flood in Hamden, the predictably hot and humid forecast for all the Mid-Atlantic, and the venerable anchor announcing, “Now subbing for Jack Schine, who has the night off, one of Baltimore’s true greats, here with sports, Pete Manolis.”

  “Thanks, Mike.” Pete stared into the camera, loving it. Being adored in return. “So how do you like them Birds? They trounced the Tigers 11–2 in Camden Yards tonight.”

  Margo called when it was over. She was buoyant. “This was a test. They’re seriously considering him for some kind of sportscaster job. He could use a tightening under the chin and maybe some filler between the eyes, but, God, wasn’t he fabulous?”

  chapter thirty-one

  “So now you know he’s not playing around behind your back, right? You’re finally convinced the man is innocent?” I asked Margo at eleven Sunday morning as we toted buckets of water from the ocean. They’d help fill the huge hole that Pete, along with Margo’s theater crew, had dug in the sand, the first step in building the medieval castle representing Camelot, next year’s musical production at the Driftwood.

  “He left Baltimore at six this morning to return here in time to start the dig. I give him points for that,” she allowed. “On the major crime—adultery’s still a crime in Maryland, believe it or not, with a laughable ten-dollar fine—or his desire for it, jury’s still out. Though we did have the Viagra talk.”

  I stepped on a starfish but didn’t stop. With Margo you had to keep up.

  “He was in our bathroom when he went for the Viagra and found the vitamins instead. He came out shaking the bottle. I explained and he explained. He said what you said. That he was embarrassed to admit he had a soft-serve problem with, in his words, his beautiful, sexy wife. He was afraid I’d take it as a personal insult.”

  “How could he possibly think that?” My tone was on the wrong side of snide.

  She ignored me. “I suppose the rest of the evidence was circumstantial. Now I know that the nonstop texting was from the managing editor, the news director, and the lawyers at the station to work out possible terms of a contract. Also that some of them were from Max Cassidy about a possible commercial starring Pete for the casino at Upton Abbey. And the appointments with Dr. Wu were about Pete’s possibly getting his face in shape for high-def TV.”

  “Lots of possibles,” I said.

  “According to Pete that’s why he didn’t tell me before. Nothing was set in place and he didn’t want me to noodge him. Drive him crazy, was the way he so diplomatically put it. He says I get too involved and emotional before I have all the facts, and since he didn’t have them . . .” She shrugged, sloshing water on both of us.

  “And now he does?”

  “After last night, the station got a bunch of positive posts on their fan page. They’re ready for him to sign. Now it’s up to Pete to make the decision. Or me. Bottom line, it’s up to me, he says. We’re a team, or at least that’s his slick sales pitch.” Her opinion of it was a cynical twist to her mouth. “But I’m not sure how I feel.”

  Her expression went flat as Pete dashed over. “Sweetheart, let me take those.” He relieved her of the two buckets. “And I set up your music.” The sound track from Camelot. “The Merry Month of May” was wafting through The Grilling Month of August air. “It’s really pulling them in. You’re collecting a crowd. I’ll take yours too, Nora.” He scooped up my buckets.

  We watched him swing the water, as light as air to him, as he took giant strides back to the Driftwood dig. “Big suck-up,” Margo grumbled, which was better than Big Cheat. “Can you tell he wants this gig bad? Really bad. But there are issues to consider.”

  “Oh, Margo, I can’t believe you’re still worried about the extracurricular activities.”

  “Possible ones, possibly,” she said, pensively. “I’ve been thinking.”

  She was always thinking. When it came to Pete, usually the worst.

  “On TV, he’d build a new fan base, not just the old-timers who remember him from the field.” She twisted her wedding band, a diamond eternity ring, around her finger. “Dana Montagne has a theory.” The newscaster who helped Pete choose the ruby bracelet. “She says TV blurs the lines between image and reality. You come into people’s homes. You enter dark bedrooms bringing light. You report the eleven o’clock news, and it’s pillow talk. All that makes for a false intimacy.”

  According to Margo, Dana left her husband for a fan who fell in love with her beautiful talking head and made sure he got to know the rest of her. The affair in three dimensions had fizzled, but only after Dana had divorced the nice husband.

  “Dana’s a Catholic-school girl, first in her class at Mercy High, and she fell off the marital wagon. On the other hand, Pete Manolis is no altar boy, so what are the odds there? And when he travels with the team for away games? Ugh. That’s party time. There will be temptations.”

  “Margala!” I used the name her tante Violet called her, standing in for the one voice Margo believed in. “There are always temptations. You’ve got to trust him. And if you can’t trust him, trust yourself.”

  “Me? I trust me to work my ass off to protect my marriage.”

  “I’m talking about if Pete . . .” She waved me off as the man in question, her big question, came loping back with our empty pails to refill. “Not now,” she whispered. “But we’ll talk.”

  Of course we would. We always did. Well, she always did. Me, not all the time.

  For example, Scott Goddard and our incomplete and inconclusive love affair had not been a recent topic of conversation. Like Pete, I was not about to share with Margo before all the facts were in. She, for a change, was too caught up in her own angst to bug me about mine.

  I would have had nothing earthshaking to report, anyway. Scott and I had gone to Coneheads for ice cream after class Tuesday, where we came face-to-face with Jack. In a rare instance of advance planning, he’d traded work shifts with Stewie in order to be free on the Saturday night when Dirk would be in town.

  The conversation between Jack and Scott had been limited to:

  “Toppings?”

  “M&M’S for me. And for your mom . . .”

  “Heath Bar bits and double whipped cream. That never changes.”

  Jack handed over the order with his standard smile and parting line, “Enjoy, folks.”

  As we spooned our ice cream, Scott said, “Do you get the feeling we’re being scoped?” My son’s eyes flitted like fireflies from his customers to us.

  I smirked. “You think?”

  Later, as we pulled into the parking space at my house, I said, “Jack’s on until midnight. Would you like to come in for coffee?” Innocent, I swear. No intent to seduce. But Scott may have thought otherwise because he said, “Tempting, but I think I’ll take a rain check. I saw my psychologist again yesterday and I’ve got some homework to do before I’m allowed to . . . Uh, I’m not sure how to explain this without sounding like a doofus, but it’s kind of lik
e the peasant having to overcome obstacles before he can win the hand of the princess. Well, I don’t necessarily mean peasant, or your hand, but whatever.” He started laughing. “Oh jeez, I’m making this worse.”

  “No, I’ve got it. You’ve got to slay dragons to claim my whatever.” I was laughing too. When we trailed off, he leaned over and we kissed. One deep, loaded-with-meaning-and-pleasure kiss.

  “Going now,” I said when we separated.

  “I’ll watch you in,” Scott said.

  I was maybe three steps down the lantern-lit path when he called softly out the car window. “Nora, I’m making progress. I just wanted you to know.”

  There was no right answer for that, so I just nodded and kept walking.

  Sunday at three o’clock, and we were finishing up King Arthur’s castle an hour before the judging. I was on my knees in the sand carving a turret when Margo trilled, “Norrie, you’ve got a visitor.”

  I raised my head and zip-lined from Margo’s wide-eyed gaze to Scott. I felt my heart leap, then crack a little at the sight of him. Because what I noticed first, what everyone would, was his prosthetic leg. He was wearing shorts—not a pair of knee-length walking shorts that might have softened the image, but high-cut athletic shorts that shouted, “Look at me, look at me!” And the part of him that had been added wasn’t one of those artistically molded limbs, silicone sheathed to look like the real thing. I’d worked with a woman at the VA hospital who had a wardrobe of prostheses, pale for the winter, tan for the summer, shapely duplicates of her other leg down to the freckles. She even had one with an arched foot for dancing in high heels, and one for sandals, its toes painted with a French pedicure