The View from the Top

by Hillary Frank

  “In a towel?”

  “Yeah,” Mary Tyler shouted behind her, “just window shopping—on the boardwalk!” She ran down the wooden steps to her family’s private beach, which nobody ever used except her.

  She didn’t know where she was going, except that she wanted to find some people. People who didn’t sit around at their house all day. People who did things you were supposed to do on vacation: play tennis, volleyball, Frisbee. Blast a boom box while eating sandwiches from a cooler.

  Maybe she’d even find Tobin, the only kid she’d ever met in this town. Then again, he’d been pretty skittish when he’d helped his dad install the pool, so maybe he didn’t like her anyway. Probably because she was some annoying rich guy’s daughter.

  She turned left and jogged along the shore, past the house with plastic flamingos all over the lawn, past the house with the heart-shaped pool, past all of the other “cottages” and their private beaches, strung with handpaintedNO TRESPASSING signs.

  When she finally reached the public beach, people were doing exactly what she’d imagined. Building sandcastles, collecting shells, laughing under striped umbrellas. Everything was so lively. There was a circle of high school kids kicking around a Hacky Sack; she wished she knew how to play.

  She kept going. Seagulls picked at old peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and bees buzzed around spilled sodas. Squealing children ran up to the edge of the water and then back as the surf chased them toward dry sand. She went past festive-looking families and kissing couples; groups of pimply preteens; twentysomething girls on their stomachs with untied bikini tops.

  Nobody was there alone.

  As she got closer to the jetty at the end of the beach, the groups started to thin out and blankets got farther and farther apart, until it was just sand between her and the rocks.

  Then, off in the distance, something caught her eye. It sat a few feet back from the point in the sand where it went from lumpy and horizontal to flat and slanting toward the water. The thing looked like a head—a decapitated head—lying amid the dried seaweed and broken shells. She ran toward it, but as she got closer she slowed down. What if it really was a decapitated head? She wasn’t sure she would know how to deal with that. Maybe she should leave it for someone else to find. But now she could see that the head belonged to a girl. A girl, probably about her age, with amazingly curly light brown hair that glinted in the sun. Mary-Tyler decided she’d better check it out; if her head had been cut off, she wouldn’t want someone to let it sit there and rot.

  She took a deep breath and got within a couple feet of the head. No blood. It didn’t smell or anything. She squatted beside it. The glazed-over eyes were looking at the water, the lips pursed thoughtfully. She was trying to decide whether or not to touch the halo of ringlets when suddenly the head turned to face her. “What?!” it said, with a dirty look.

  Mary-Tyler jumped backward and landed on her butt. “Jesus, I thought you were a head!” she said, out of breath.

  “Like, without a body!” Wait, careful, she thought. Is that a handicap people can have? “Do you have a body?” she asked, less delicately than she knew she should’ve. “I mean, you’re not just a head, right?”

  “Of course I have a body,” the head said, and went back to looking at the water.

  “Right, duh,” Mary-Tyler said, smacking her forehead. She looked at the clumps of sand in front of the head and tried to imagine how far it was to her toes. Maybe she was extremely tall—like seven feet; it was impossible to tell. “That looks rad,” Mary-Tyler said. “Mind if I join you?”

  “I guess not,” the head said uncertainly.

  Mary-Tyler tossed off her towel and began to dig herself a pit. The sand on top was smooth and fine, like flour. A few inches down it became moist. She savored the clumps of cool, muddy wet grains between her fingers, and neatly piled them in walls around the body-size rectangular hole.

  She packed down the sand on the bottom and the sides, picking out stray rocks, crab claws, and pieces of sea glass. It would be fun to make a person out of sand, she thought, and imagined sculpting a giant hand, a torso, a row of toes.

  “Don’t take this the wrong way,” the head said, eyeing the hole. “But I think you’ll need it wider than that.”

  Mary-Tyler looked down at her body. Even in her modest bathing suit, she still felt like she was spilling out everywhere, all cleavage and thighs. She quickly dug around the edges of the hole, anxious to cover herself under the sand.

  “And longer,” the head added. “You’re kind of tall.” Mary-Tyler lay down beside the hole and saw that it came only to her ankles. “Good call,” she said, and expanded the end a little past the point in the sand where it started to slant downward.

  “And you’ll want a pillow for your head,” the head said.

  “Oh! Thanks, good idea.” Mary-Tyler built up a higher wall at the top of the hole. She climbed in to test it out. She mushed her body into the sand, making it fit her contours. “Maybe a little deeper,” she said.

  No reply from the head.

  Mary-Tyler dug out a couple more inches of sand, then got in again. That seemed about right. She sat up and gathered the displaced sand over her feet, then her legs, and packed it in firmly. Then she lowered herself back down and covered her torso and shoulders.

  “This is the tricky part,” the head said. “The arms.”

  “I was just realizing that,” Mary-Tyler said.

  “You can bury one. But then you kind of have to make a pile up above your other elbow, then shove your hand in.”

  “Rad!” Mary-Tyler said. The technique worked perfectly.

  “I just saved you a lot of time,” the head said.

  “I know. It’s a good trick.” Mary-Tyler looked out over where her body should be and saw nothing but sand. She felt cozy. As if she were being hugged by the earth.

  A little bird—a sandpiper was it called?—hopped over their nonexistent bodies. Waves whished up ahead, at the bottom of the slope.

  Mary-Tyler took a deep breath, catching a whiff of her sunscreen. “So, what’s your name?” she asked.

  “Anabelle,” the head said hesitantly.

  “Mine’s Mary-Tyler.”

  Anabelle studied Mary-Tyler’s face as if sizing her up.

  Mary-Tyler looked back at the clusters of people on the other part of the beach. “Maybe this was a mistake,” she said. “You don’t seem to want me here.” Even though it was late in the afternoon, the sun beat down on Mary-Tyler’s face and she actually wished she’d brought that big straw sun hat her father was always bugging her to wear.

  “Look, I don’t want to seem rude, Mary,” Anabelle said.

  “It’s just, well, if you lived in Normal, you’d understand.”

  “It’s, um, Mary-Tyler. That’s my first name.” She felt apologetic every time she had to correct people.

  “That’s unusual.”

  “Yeah.” Mary-Tyler almost lifted her hand out of the sand to hold it over her face—but she stopped herself; she didn’t want to ruin the illusion of decapitation. “It’s this weird family thing. All the girls are named Mary-hyphen-their-dad’s -name.”

  “So your dad’s name is...”

  “Tyler.”

  “And your mom?”

  “Mary-Milton. And my grandma’s Mary-Hank.”

  “Whoa. Really?” Anabelle’s voice perked up.

  “Yup.”

  “What about the boys? Do they get special names, too?”

  “Jack.”

  “Just Jack?”

  “Yeah.”

  “All of them?”

  “Right. And then there’s Aunt Jack. But I don’t really know how that happened.”

  Anabelle laughed, shaking her head. “That just made my day,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I like absurdity,” Anabelle said. “And this name thing is pretty absurd. You have to admit.”

  “Yeah, I guess it is.” Mary-Tyler half wanted to
get out of her hole and walk away, but then where would she go? Home? “Hey, what were you saying before—about how I’d understand if I lived here?” she asked.

  Anabelle turned to look at her. Her face was sunburned. Not everywhere, but on the tops of her forehead, nose, and cheeks—all the planes that faced upward. “Just that you’d understand how we feel about tourists, if you had to deal with them coming in every summer. And especially now, with McMansionville growing. Those people come into Taffy Castle all the time—where I work? And I want to strangle every one of them. They bring their bratty little kids with names like Mercedes and yell at me for being out of peanut brittle, when really we’re a taffy shop and there’s nothing in the name of the store that says we should have anything but taffy!”

  Mary-Tyler shuddered as she remembered her dad complaining about not being able to find peanut brittle the other day. “What’s McMansionville?” she asked, with the terrible feeling that Anabelle was talking about her street.

  Anabelle gestured to the right with her head. “That’s what we call those ginormous beach houses over there.”

  “Oh, those fucking things,” Mary-Tyler said, trying to sound as disdainful as possible. “Yeah, they’re awful. And hey, anyway, what makes you think I’m a tourist?”

  “Well, first, I don’t recognize you. Even if you were from Bay Beach or Surprise, I probably would’ve seen you around. And second, kids around here don’t say rad.” Anabelle flicked her head sideways. “But hey, I’m sorry if I was mean. Don’t take it personally or anything.”

  “It’s okay. I know how it is. You thought I was one of them.” Mary-Tyler made a hoity-toity face. “And I don’t blame you.”

  “Yeah. But it’s also—” Anabelle cleared her throat.

  “Well, I’m in a bad mood.”

  “What about?”

  “Life.”

  “Do you feel like talking about it?”

  “I don’t know. Probably not.”

  This was good: Anabelle had a problem. And Mary-Tyler was great at helping people talk through their problems. Back home, kids she didn’t even know that well sought her out for advice. Actually, what she gave wasn’t quite advice, just a lot of question-asking and agreeing, making people feel like they were right. In any case, her listening skills were going to come in handy now in befriending Anabelle. “Well,” she said, “I’m leaving in a few days to go back to New York. So you can feel safe telling me whatever, y’know?”

  Anabelle looked Mary-Tyler up and down, from forehead to chin. “I wouldn’t even know where to begin.” She tilted her head back, squashing her curls. “But I guess it’s not really that complicated. It just feels that way. It feels like there’s nobody else in the world going through what I’m going through right now. And at the same time it seems so insignificant in the grand scheme of things and I wish I could just get over it.”

  Gome on, Mary-Tyler thought. Give me something I can latch onto. “You’re being pretty vague,” she said, looking out at the ocean. The tide had started creeping up the sandy slope.

  “Okay, if you really want to know...” Anabelle exhaled hard through her mouth and a small wisp of sand flew out from under her chin. “There’s this guy I liked. A lot. I’m not even sure why. He’s totally not my type.”

  “Why not?” There we go, Mary-Tyler thought. Now she’s opening up.

  “I don’t know,” Anabelle said. “I guess just because he’s such a badass. Maybe it’s not so much that he’s not someone I should like, but that I never thought he’d like me”

  Mary-Tyler could hear Anabelle’s voice relaxing; she was pretty sure she was winning her over. “Did he?” she asked.

  “Yeah. Yeah, I think so. Maybe, probably. It’s so dumb. He used to high-five me when we passed each other in the hall at school and it made me feel so cool, y‘know? ’Cause he only did that with other guys. Then he started sitting on my lap all the time. Like in a joking way when we were hanging out in a group. And once he told me he had this dream. About me, like, floating over him and kissing him. I mean, what is that?”

  “Are you kidding?” Mary-Tyler said, nodding at Anabelle. “It’s him liking you. For sure.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “But...” Mary-Tyler flattened her hand under the sand, indicating for Anabelle to continue, and then realized that Anabelle couldn’t see it.

  “But then, ugh—” Anabelle moaned. “This is where it starts to sound so stupid and petty. Like something out of a soap opera, you know?”

  “Not really,” Mary-Tyler said. “Give me specifics.”

  “Okay. Problem is ...” Anabelle swallowed hard. “I had a boyfriend. A serious, long-term boyfriend. Not this badass guy I was telling you about. His, uh, best friend, actually.”

  “Uh-oh.” Mary-Tyler was sure her scalp was burning, but she told herself to fight the temptation to get up.

  Anabelle turned back toward the quickly approaching water. “You already think I’m awful. I can hear it in your voice.”

  “No, I’m not judging. I promise. I can just tell this is gonna get messy.”

  “Yeah,” Anabelle said flatly. “It does.”

  No, no, no, don’t shut down now, Mary Tyler thought. You were just getting started! “The boyfriend,” she said encouragingly. “What’s the deal with him?”

  “Well,” Anabelle continued cautiously, “he could kinda tell all along I had a thing for ...”

  “For Mr. Badass.”

  Anabelle let out a little laugh. “Yeah, so, my boyfriend was on my case about Sir Badass. And I swore up and down that he was wrong, that I wasn’t dumping him for someone else.” She tucked her chin and a few curls bounced forward, covering the side of her face. “The thing is, he was right.

  I was dumping him for someone else. I had this stupid fantasy that I would run off with this guy and everything would be great.”

  Mary-Tyler was familiar with this feeling. “But it wasn’t as amazing in real life as it seemed in your head?” she asked knowingly.

  “Actually, it didn’t get that far. We never even kissed or anything.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “No, it’s really simple. You obviously both want each other. And it’s not like you’d be cheating or anything. You already broke up with your boyfriend. Who cares what you told him when you were together?”

  “Well, the thing is, I could’ve kissed him. I could’ve kissed him after the breakup. I probably could’ve kissed him before the breakup. Trust me, I thought about it tons of times. Every time we were alone.”

  “So why didn’t you? Why don’t you get your butt out of this hole and go find him and just smooch him already?”

  “I know, it’s weird, right? When I’m away from him, all I can do is think about him. I’ll run over and over in my head the sweet things he’s said to me, the times he’s touched me. But then when it seems like a chance comes up for something to really happen, I’m the one who stops it. I’ll just start talking a mile a minute or laughing or something. And it seems crazy, y’know? Because I’ve been obsessing over him for months. But I just can’t get myself to go through with it. Maybe it’s because I’ve started noticing he’s not perfect. Like how he smacks his lips when he eats. Or that he’s got warts on his hands. Stuff that just snuck by me before.”

  “Funny how that can happen.” This was exactly why Mary-Tyler’s relationships never worked out. If you could even call them relationships; none of them ever lasted more than a month. There was always something that got under her skin.

  “But that all seems so superficial, and that’s not me.”

  Mary-Tyler knew what she meant. For her, those little things always seemed to be warning signs pointing to a bigger problem. “Well, maybe there’s more to it than that,” she said.

  “Yeah, maybe. I guess there is something else. Something that’s been bothering me about him, but it makes me feel bad to admit.”

  “What’s that?�
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  “Well, last night we were talking about the future and stuff. And I just ... I realized he’s really never going anywhere. I mean, I knew he was planning on staying here, going to Normal Community, living with his mom, working the same job he’s had the last couple years over at the bike shop. I knew all that. But somehow I’d convinced myself it was just temporary. That he wanted more.” The sand above her chest rose and fell. “It’s just so depressing,” she said, getting a little teary. “He’s got big dreams. Big ideas about things that nobody else I know ever thinks about. But he’s never going to do anything about them. I just imagine myself coming home from college and I would’ve changed so much and he’d be exactly the same.”

  “Ooh, I know exactly what you mean. He’s like those guys who are the epitome of cool until they start showing up at high school parties after they graduate.”

  “Exactly!” Anabelle said, cry-laughing. “He is totally going to turn into that guy.” Her eyelashes were wet and clumped together as if she were wearing mascara. “But it’s really bumming me out. Because now I’m feeling like I broke up with my boyfriend for nothing.” Her voice sounded like it had been flattened under a house. Like it was the Wicked Witch of the East.

  “Well, shit, that sucks,” Mary-Tyler said, trying hard to fight back her envy. It was clear Anabelle had had something special with this boyfriend of hers. She’d found something that Mary-Tyler longed for but never experienced, something that she wasn’t even sure was possible between two people. This is about Anabelle, she reminded herself, not you. “Do you want to talk about it more?” she asked. “Or be distracted?” This was Mary-Tyler’s standard question when people told her their problems.

  “Um, distract me,” Anabelle said, sounding pleasantly surprised to have that as an option.

  Okay, now she had to think of something. Something to make herself sound appealing. And definitely not rich. Mary-Tyler was drawing a blank. Just say the first thing that comes to your mind, she thought.

  The waves roared, then crashed and sizzled just inches from where Mary-Tyler figured her feet were. She imagined each wave as a hand grasping at her body, trying to drag her out to sea. Right now they were still too far away to reach her, but not for long. Anabelle would be dragged off, too. It was kind of a romantic idea—two sad girls disappearing mysteriously into the sad, sad sea.