The Summer Wives

by Beatriz Williams

  “All right.” I turned and swam away in steady strokes, like my father had taught me on the Delaware beaches before the war. Don’t fight the water, Miranda, he used to tell me, as we trundled along past the breakers, and even though I became a strong enough swimmer, I remained grateful for his calm, muscular body—or so it seemed to me at the time, age seven or eight—keeping me company. Funny, I never thought of sharks then, and my father never mentioned them. It was my mother who liked to keep to the shallows, my mother who was afraid.

  When I had gone about twenty or thirty yards, I stopped and turned, and there was Joseph right beside me. Ready, I said. Set.

  Go.

  Of course he leapt right ahead of me. I mean, I couldn’t compete with those shoulders, those experienced arms, but I was glad he didn’t give me any quarter. I didn’t want any favors. I just stroked with all my might, strained every absolute muscle, wasting not a single speck of energy in trying to keep sight of Joseph’s churning body. But I thought I was close. When my fingers touched the hull of the boat, I looked up, panting.

  “I’ll be damned,” said Joseph, panting too. “You’re pretty strong.”

  “I’ve been swimming laps in the pool all summer.”

  He snorted. “Pools are for kids.”

  “Maybe I’m still just a kid, then.”

  “I wouldn’t say that.”

  We were right up against the hull, half holding the ropes that hung from the side. The boat had turned a little in the current, so the sun struck our wet cheeks, our dripping ears. I couldn’t see Mr. Vargas from where I was, floating next to that wall of white paint, and I guessed he couldn’t see us, and maybe Joseph had the same thought. He glanced up briefly, and his face softened, and his smile disappeared.

  “Miranda,” he said.

  I didn’t answer, just kind of kept myself afloat, holding the rope with one hand, waving my legs next to his, hanging myself on the quiet brown color of his eyes. I thought how long and dark his lashes were. His face moved, turning to an angle as he leaned forward and kissed me on the lips, salty and brief.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Do you mind?”

  I shook my head. Under the water, he touched my waist, very lightly, and drew me closer. My legs tangled with his as I kicked them back and forth. “Hold still,” he whispered, so I stopped churning and put my left hand on his shoulder to steady myself in the water. He kissed me again, just as gentle but much deeper, and the salty, silky perfume of his mouth stunned me. All I remembered of Clay was the taste of whisky; this was more real, this was like the essence of Joseph, the way two animals might know each other. The water tossed against us. For an instant, my legs found the current and slipped between his, and our stomachs met, our chests met, our lips fell apart. We were both still panting, maybe because of that reckless swimming, and maybe because of each other. Joseph’s hand tightened about my waist, but only to return us to a more demure alignment, to allow a little decorous water to flood back between my stomach and his stomach, between my white petticoat and his white shirt. I think I laughed, out of nervousness, out of shock, and so did he.

  “I’ve been wanting to do that all summer,” he said.

  “Really?”

  “Really really. Are you surprised?”

  “Yes! I thought—I thought—”

  “Thought what?”

  “Well, Isobel, obviously.”

  His brows slanted together. “Isobel? Isobel what?”

  “You and Isobel.”

  “That?” He was astonished. “Oh boy. You thought that—”

  The boat swung suddenly, catching us with a thump. Joseph pulled me free, but the enchantment was broken, and Vargas’s anxious voice floated above us, calling our names.

  “Right here, Pops,” Joseph said. “Can you get the towels from the deckhouse?”

  There was a noise of resignation from above. Joseph still held me by the waist, and my hand still rested on his shoulder. He turned his head back to me and kissed me again, swiftly. “We’ll climb in over the stern, it’s easier.”

  He held my hand as we half swam, half rappelled to the back of the boat. He helped me up over the side, where Vargas, looking carefully away, gestured to the towels on the bench. Behind me, Joseph hoisted himself inside, and I wrapped myself in one towel and handed the other to him, though not before glimpsing his wet shirt, plastered against his chest; not before losing my breath all over again at the audacity of what I had done. What we both had done, Joseph and me, a real kiss, not a mistake, not a drunken substitution of one woman’s mouth for another’s. A kiss of conscious intent. I couldn’t look at him. I thought everything had changed, I would never be the same Miranda again and he would never be the old Joseph. I sat on the bow in my towel, shivering, while the sun dried my hair and my petticoat and Vargas piloted us toward the traps he and Joseph had laid yesterday. I licked my lips and tasted salt, and Joseph.

  4.

  By the time we had collected the lobsters and returned to the harbor, it was past lunchtime and the sun had crested the sky, and three fishing boats had already come in ahead of us.

  “You had to swim,” Vargas said to Joseph, shaking his head.

  “Aw, it was worth it, Pops. Best swim of my life.” Joseph winked at me and I turned away, because I didn’t know what to say in return. I had worked silently beside him, hoping that this shared labor would cure the exhilarating awkwardness that lay between us. Now it was even worse. The sight of Greyfriars had frozen my throat as we passed it on the way to the harbor. I thought of Isobel and what she would say, what she would do if she knew I had kissed Joseph. When I had confided to her about Clay, a couple of days after the luau, she’d only laughed and said she hoped I enjoyed it, that you couldn’t ask for a better boy for your first kiss than Clay Monk, and she was going to give him hell about it later. But I knew I couldn’t tell Isobel that Joseph had kissed me and I had kissed him back. That was no laughing matter. To kiss Joseph was unforgivable.

  Vargas brought the boat in, and Joseph jumped nimbly to the dock and wound the rope around the piling. I handed down the lobsters in their baskets, keeping clear of the snapping claws—there were forty-two of what Joseph and his father called the little buggers, a good haul—and when the boat was clear I jumped down too, of my own power, ignoring Joseph’s outstretched hand.

  “Hey,” he said, in a low voice. “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Are you sore at me?”

  “No, of course not.”

  He put his hand on my elbow. “Miranda, I’m sorry if I—I didn’t mean to—”

  Vargas jumped down from the boat, practically between us, and went for the baskets. “Joseph, you got work to do, all right? I got to sell these little buggers.”

  “Pops—Miranda—give me a minute here—”

  Vargas pointed to me. “You come along with me and I’ll buy you an ice cream, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said meekly.

  “Pops, wait a second.”

  “You clean that boat, son. That’s all you got to do.”

  I had just enough courage to look over my shoulder as I walked down the dock with Mr. Vargas, carrying a couple of the wire baskets, but Joseph had already turned away to climb back inside the boat and put everything in order for the next day’s work. Mr. Vargas’s stumpy legs moved with remarkable speed. He didn’t say a word until we reached the end of the dock and stepped onto the quay that ran along Hemlock Road, where he set down his lobster baskets and dug into his pocket.

  “Here,” he said to me, shoving a dollar bill in my hand. “Go buy yourself some ice cream while I sell these little buggers.”

  “But I—”

  He took the baskets from my hand and picked up his own, and such was his strength and experience with these things, he trundled up Hemlock Street carrying all forty-two little buggers in their wire baskets, snapping and crawling in wholly justified panic, poor things, without missing a step.

 
The ice cream parlor was closed, had a little sign on the door handle that said Back in 30 min, so I went into the general store instead. I thought I could use some ice cream, I thought I could eat a gallon of it after tending those lobster pots all morning, besides swimming, besides kissing Joseph. Sure enough, they had a soda fountain behind a long, new Formica counter along one side of the store, trimmed in chrome, all out of place in that old-fashioned interior that smelled of must and spices. The old woman there offered me a choice between vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry. I asked for a double, a scoop of strawberry and a scoop of chocolate, and as she bent over the freezer I remembered with a shock that this was Joseph’s grandmother. That she had lost a son to the war and another daughter in a terrible accident on the water, the night that Joseph was born, that her husband was laid up after a heart attack and she ran the store by herself.

  “That’ll be thirty-five cents,” she said, handing me the cone.

  For an instant, I hesitated, because I realized this was Mr. Vargas’s money, and there was something strange about taking money from Mr. Vargas to pay his mother-in-law for ice cream. On the other hand, I had damned well earned that dollar today, not by kissing his son but by hauling those cages and getting those lobsters in their wire baskets. I took the dollar from the pocket of my sundress and handed it silently to her, over the counter, and she pressed some buttons on the cash register and gave me sixty-five cents change.

  “You’re Mr. Fisher’s new stepdaughter, aren’t you?” she said, as she gave me the money.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “How do you like it up at Greyfriars?”

  “It’s—well, it’s beautiful, I guess.”

  She nodded. “Was that you I saw, coming in with the Vargases just now?”

  “Yes. We—I went out lobstering with them today. Isobel—Miss Fisher’s on the mainland with her mother, and I thought—I had nothing else to do, so I—”

  “Just watch yourself, sweetie,” she said. “A lot can happen to a nice girl like you, if she’s not careful.”

  I slid the sixty-five cents into my pocket and took a paper napkin for my ice cream. “Of course,” I said.

  Mrs. Medeiro reached out a long, bumpy hand and took my wrist. “I mean it. You watch yourself. Don’t mix yourself up with any of it.”

  “Any of what?”

  She let go of my wrist and looked away. I thought, Maybe she wants to protect Joseph. Maybe she thinks I’m like Isobel, I’m no good for him.

  “Don’t worry,” I said, stepping back, “the summer’s almost over, anyway.”

  Oh, the look she gave me then. She shut the cash drawer with a demented ding and pushed a long, iron-colored strand of hair back into its knot at the back of her head. “That’s when the trouble starts, sweetheart. Trust me.”

  5.

  I walked away, down Hemlock Street and around the corner to ascend West Cliff Road back to Greyfriars, devouring my ice cream as it melted in sticky rivulets around my hand. I wanted to experience the mile and a half back to Greyfriars by the pace of my own two feet, I wanted to stretch my legs and feel the sunshine on my neck, the crumbled asphalt beneath my soles. I started up the road, under the shade of the huge elms, until the houses grew apart and the sidewalk fell away and so did the trees. I started up the slope and felt the breeze strike my cheek, blowing in unchecked from the southwest, and somewhere in the middle of that zephyr came the sound of my name, Miranda!

  I turned and shaded my eyes against the afternoon glare. For a moment, I didn’t see him, and then he burst free from the sun. His face was shadowed but I knew that silhouette, those dungarees and that white shirt almost blue as he jogged to catch me. I held myself absolutely still as he approached. Only my blood moved, hurtling down my arms and legs and up into my hot face.

  He came to a stop a few yards away, panting. “There you are! Why’d you run off like that?”

  “I was hot,” I said.

  He stared at me in disbelief while the rhythm of his breathing slowed and slowed. A trickle of perspiration ran down his temple and over the bones of his jaw. “Just like that? Leave without saying anything?”

  “Your father—”

  “My father what?”

  I held up the remains of my ice cream. “He told me to have an ice cream and get lost.”

  “Don’t listen to Pops. Listen to me.”

  The wind came up over the nearby cliff and flattened his shirt to his ribs. He wiped his shining temple with his thumb. The heat of exertion rippled from his body and reached mine, and I raised my fingers to hide the pulse in my neck, thudding and thudding like some kind of machine, while the two of us stared at each other, unable to speak, unable to look away.

  At last Joseph said hoarsely, “I’m sorry, Miranda. I apologize. I shouldn’t have done what I did.”

  “All right.” I turned back up the road and started walking. He caught up in a few strides.

  “That’s it?” he said. “All right?”

  “I don’t know what to say, that’s all.”

  “Are you mad at me, or not? I thought you—I’m sorry if I saw it all wrong—I just thought, when you looked at me in the water—I thought you wouldn’t mind. You said you didn’t mind.”

  “I didn’t. I don’t.”

  He took my elbow and turned me to face him. “Is that true? Just tell me plain, Miranda, tell me straight out. Did you want me to kiss you, or not?”

  “Yes,” I whispered.

  “Since when?”

  “Since—since the morning of the wedding. Since you dove into the water and saved Popeye.”

  His hand dropped from my elbow. He looked up at the sky and started to laugh. “All this time? You mean all this time?”

  “Joseph, please.”

  He looked back into my face. “For me, it started a few hours later. That night, when you stood up in the sand and said Once more unto the breach. I just stared at you and thought, I could listen to her forever. I really could.”

  “But Isobel!”

  “Isobel. Isobel. What about her?”

  “Those notes. I saw you meet her, at night, in secret.”

  “Oh boy. Oh, Miranda.”

  “What?”

  “You’re kidding me, right? Isobel?”

  “Yes,” I said, obstinate. “Isobel.”

  “Holy moly. You’re serious. You actually think—” He broke off in a laugh. “Was that it? Was that why you kept giving me the cold shoulder? Oh, Izzy. Izzy, you little devil. Listen to me. Listen up. You can just forget that thought, okay? Forget all about it. Wash it right out of your head.”

  “But—”

  “But nothing. I never touched her. I wouldn’t touch her. We’re—we’ve known each other since we were kids. I never—oh boy. How do I explain this? All right, I know how it looked. I can see what you must have thought, if Izzy didn’t explain.”

  “Explain what?”

  He just gazed at me, real steady, and for a moment there was nothing but the sound of the wind, the sea noises, the air in our lungs.

  “You just have to believe me,” Joseph said at last. “She’s my friend, that’s all.”

  “But all those notes,” I said.

  “I can tell you didn’t read them, did you?”

  “Of course I didn’t.”

  “We’re friends, Miranda. We’re good friends. We talked, that’s all. I swear it on my mother’s soul. The only girl . . . the only girl . . .”

  He took a breath like he was going to try again to finish that sentence, but while my ears strained hard for the next words, I never heard them. Only the whoosh of the breeze in my ears. We stood near the crest of the slope, where the road curved near the cliffs, and I thought that anybody could see us like this, in pungent silhouette against the sky. The sun struck the side of Joseph’s face, the wind whistled through his hair. He picked up my hand and looked at it. Turned it over and looked back up at me.

  “There’s only one girl on my mind,” Joseph said, “and it
’s not Isobel Fisher, trust me. I only just met this girl, but I can’t—I can’t seem to get her out of my head, no matter how hard I try, no matter how many hours I kill out there on that water, and I just—I just—when I saw this girl today, this fascinating girl, kind of shy but full of brains and soul and life, when I saw her down there in the harbor today, when I saw she’d walked all the way down before dawn, just to give me some stupid note from a friend of mine, I just about—I thought maybe there was a chance, after all.”

  I pulled my hand away.

  “Miranda, wait.”

  “I’m so stupid,” I said. “I should never have done that.”

  “But you did. You did, and you can’t take it back, you can’t tell me you didn’t want to kiss me, that kissing me wasn’t the reason you went out on that boat today, the same reason I invited you.”

  “Isobel—”

  “Isobel nothing! I already explained.”

  “You don’t understand,” I said. “Maybe she’s just a friend to you, but to her—don’t you see it? Don’t you see what she feels?”

  He stared at me. “That’s not what she feels.”

  “It is, trust me. Just because she’s engaged to someone else—”

  “I haven’t—I’ve never—this is crazy. Miranda, please. I promise you, you’re seeing it all wrong. And hell, you know what? She is engaged to someone else. There’s not a single reason on this earth why . . .”

  The sentence trailed away, as if he’d lost the thought behind it. He looked away, frowning, out to sea. I thought of Isobel, what she would say if she saw us now, what she would think of me.

  She’s engaged, I thought. She has no right to him.

  “Unless you didn’t mean it, back there on the water,” he said. “Unless you were just having a few kicks with the lobsterman’s son. I get it.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Swell.” He glanced down at his left hand, and for the first time I noticed the object contained there, which he now lifted and held out to me. My cardigan of navy blue. “You left this on the boat.”

  I stared down at the cardigan, which was damp and crumpled, and I thought, I don’t want this. This is not what I want. I want the hand, the large, short-fingered, work-hardened, fish-scented hand. Not the damned cardigan.