Surface Tension

by Christine Kling

  My eight-year-old nephew, Freddie, answered the door, and without even saying hello, he screamed, “It’s Auntie Seychelle!” Then he turned and headed back to the Nintendo hooked up to the big-screen color TV in the living room. I closed the front door behind me, and Jane appeared out of the kitchen wearing a flowered housecoat. Though she was only about six years older than me, she looked old and tired already.

  “Hi, Seychelle,” she said, up on tiptoe and delivering an air kiss next to my cheek. She didn’t look particularly happy to see me. From the kitchen I heard a wail. “Oh, Annie’s in the high chair. I’m feeding her. Maddy’s up in our room, at the office.” She pointed to the carpeted stairs and disappeared back down the hall.

  Such a warm family welcome.

  Maddy had an old rolltop desk that he kept in his bedroom, and that’s where he sat to pay all his bills. He called it “the office.” I guess he wanted his kids to be able to say, “My daddy goes to his office,” instead of “My daddy baits dead ballyhoo on rich people’s hooks.”

  I climbed the stairs.

  “I thought you might show up.” He didn’t look up from the check he was writing. One thing about his townhouse, it wasn’t exactly soundproof.

  “I guess you would expect it after that bombshell you dropped yesterday.” I sat down on the quilted bedspread. A can of Old Milwaukee was making a wet ring on the desk. It wasn’t even noon yet, and he was already sucking up the beer.

  “You shouldn’t be so surprised, Seychelle. There’s a lot of capital tied up in that boat. I can’t afford to keep on being sentimental over its being Red’s boat.”

  On the far side of the room, a sliding glass door opened onto a balcony overlooking a canal. The view looked nice, but he’d discovered the first time he tried to bring the Lady Jane up to the house that the water was less than two feet deep.

  I couldn’t believe what he was saying. My brother had never been sentimental a day in his life. He had agreed to let me run Gorda because he thought it was a good investment. “Maddy, that’s my business. It’s my life. It would be like my asking you to sell the Lady Jane.”

  “No. It wouldn’t. You don’t own a third of the Lady Jane.”

  I looked out the window across the canal at the townhouse opposite theirs. A white-haired man in bright golf-green polyester pants was sitting in a wrought-iron chair reaching for a young girl’s hand. The child looked about ten years old, and she was wearing a frilly, going-to-see-Grampa special dress. He pulled her to him and sat her on his lap.

  “I thought we all agreed to let me have a go at it for two years, Maddy.”

  “Seychelle, we also agreed that you were going to make payments to me and Pit.” He consulted his watch. “Today is March nineteenth. I haven’t seen the February payment yet. You’re getting behind, and I don’t think we should let the business go all to hell.”

  It was true, things had been slow lately, but I didn’t know how I was going to eat if I paid Maddy. I had been late before, and he had never said anything about it. Maybe it had been bothering him all along, or maybe something had changed.

  I looked back out the window and watched the girl and the old man. He was talking to her, and her face looked slack and vacant, as though she wasn’t hearing a word the old man said.

  I took my checkbook out of my shoulder bag and began writing. “Here.” I tore off the check. I wasn’t sure I had enough in the bank to cover the five hundred bucks, but I sure as hell didn’t want Maddy to know that. “February and March. I didn’t think my own brother would try to shut me down if I let one month’s payment ride for a couple of weeks.”

  “I’m not a banker. I got bills to pay, too, you know.”

  Maddy and I had never gotten along, and there was no way in hell I was going to admit I was wrong even if I was. It always took Pit, the middle child, to keep us from erupting and really hurting each other. “Have you talked to Pit lately?” I asked him.

  “No. But you know he could use the money. I don’t know what he lives on as it is.”

  I felt fairly confident Pit would side with me if it came down to it. He’d never cared very much about money and somehow seemed to live quite happily with very little of it. He supported himself with sponsorships and cash prizes, and he gave windsurfing lessons at various resorts in exchange for free room and board. The problem would be contacting him. I deposited his check in a bank account in Fort Lauderdale, and he used an ATM card to access it from wherever he happened to be. I was certain the bank would not release any information. And I knew next to nothing about the World Cup Windsurfing Tour. He could be anywhere from St. Thomas to Maui.

  “I guess, until we hear from Pit, it’s just between you and me, Maddy.”

  He lifted the can, chugalugged the rest of his beer, and belched loudly.

  “Maddy, look at me,” I said, raising my voice. His desk chair was one of those swivel jobs, and he eased around to face me. I noticed the bags in the flesh under his eyes, and the paunch that pulled his T-shirt tight. God, it looked like he had a basketball under there. “Are you in some kind of trouble? Is that what brought this on?”

  He looked away. “No, nothing like that. I just want out. That’s all.”

  “I don’t think you’re telling me the whole truth.” Maddy was known in our family for his terrific temper. Pit and I used to harass him just to watch his face turn bright red. Maddy had always been chunky, even as a kid, and though he was the oldest, both Pit and I could outrun him by the time we were ten or twelve. As his face flushed, I could tell he didn’t take kindly to me calling him a liar.

  “It doesn’t matter what you think,” he yelled, waving his arm in a dismissive gesture. “I knew this would never work. Face the facts, Seychelle. Guys don’t like to trust the safety of their big yachts to a woman. That’s the bottom line. You’re not getting the business, and you’re going to sell the goddamn boat.” He belched again and looked toward the bedroom door. “Either that or buy me out.” He tried to laugh, but it sounded more like a croak.

  “You know I can’t do that right away.”

  He shrugged. “Okay, so sell.”

  “Maddy, you’re a shitheel.” He was goading me into name-calling, like he always used to do. “Just give me a few days and I might be able to buy you out. I’ve got something working.”

  “This have something to do with the Top Ten?”

  “How’d you know about that?”

  “It’s in today’s paper. I figure the reason Neal didn’t show up is either he killed the girl and he’s running, or else he’s shark food.”

  “Thanks for your sensitivity, big brother.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t expect to get much out of that deal.” Instead of anger, Maddy’s face took on a calculating look. “I say take whatever they offer and get out of the towing business. Maybe you saved this boat this time. But you’re not always gonna have that kind of luck. We both know that. You can’t fool me, Seychelle, remember? I know you never ever talk about it, but refusing to talk about it won’t make it go away. You were there, but you didn’t do a goddamn thing for her.”

  I couldn’t trust myself to speak. The anger that had been building up in my chest against Collazo, Burns, Maddy, and especially Neal, for being stupid enough to get into this mess and dragging me into it with him, all threatened to explode. I wanted to bury my fist in Maddy’s basketball belly, but instead I took the stairs two at a time, slammed the door on my way out, and ground the gears on my Jeep trying to get far, far away from there.

  I drove blindly up A1A, over the Haulover Bridge, and on Collins Avenue into North Miami. Cars honked at me, and I honked back, a dangerous practice on the streets of South Florida, where over half the drivers surveyed confess to carrying a gun in their vehicles. Maddy would always blame me for what had happened that day on Hollywood Beach when we were kids.

  Up until yesterday morning, I’d been reasonably content with my life—I’d thought I had moved beyond all that. I had mourned the many losses
in my life, including the death of my relationship with Neal. I loved my job, and I’d discovered how much I enjoyed solitary life. I had gone from college roommates to taking care of Red and then to moving in with Neal. Now, coming home to an empty cottage and open evenings had grown to feel luxurious. No one expecting conversation, dinner, or clean laundry. No one leaving the toilet seat up or the cap off the milk jug. I would never be the domestic type, and after Neal left, I no longer needed to pretend. But now my cottage was a mess, I was broke, my livelihood was being threatened, and at least one more person was dead because I hadn’t gotten there in time.

  When I got to Hollywood Beach, I pulled off into one of the side streets and parked next to a meter. I fed it a couple of quarters and walked up toward the beach. Ever since that summer when I was eleven years old, I have always been drawn back to this beach when I’m sad, or need to think, or just want to sit on a bench, alone, watching the freighters on the horizon. By now, the season was starting to slow down a little, but most of the people I passed on the Broadwalk were speaking French—Canadians fleeing the frozen north. This was the beach we had come to most often as children. This was where my brothers taught me to bodysurf, where we’d held birthdays and come for holidays dragging beach chairs, picnic baskets, coolers, and inflatable rafts. And this was the beach where my mother had drowned.

  Kicking off my Top-Siders, I dug my toes into the cool, damp sand. The beach had changed very little in the eighteen years since it happened. There were still the funky low-rise family hotels along the Broadwalk and the hundred-yard-wide stretch of sable-colored sand that dropped down to the pale blue-green shallows. Now, after a long winter of northerly storms, much of the sand had washed away, leaving only a narrow band of aqua before the water turned deep Gulf Stream blue. To the south, in the direction of Johnson Street, the hotels gave way to pizza places, ice cream shops, and Greek takeouts with salads and falafel, and the beachfront always hummed with happy humanity like a carnival midway.

  My mother and father probably never should have married in the first place. As an adult, trying to look at them objectively, it was clear that they were not well suited to each other. Red once told me that he had met Mother in a bar on the Intracoastal. His ship was berthed in Port Everglades, and he and some buddies met this group of girls up in the old Crow’s Nest Bar over at Bahia Mar, at the time a hangout for sailors and charter captains. Annie was the wild one, he said, talkative, vivacious, daringly throwing back shots of tequila to compete with the navy guys. She was a third-generation Floridian, the daughter of a prominent Fort Lauderdale doctor, majoring in art at the University of Miami, artistic, flighty, and wildly impractical. Red, thirteen years her senior, was a navy lifer and a sensible, orderly, dependable, entirely practical man. He had already done a tour in Southeast Asia and would probably play out the remainder of his twenty years on ships in the Atlantic.

  They honeymooned on Staniel Cay in the Bahamas, and it was then they vowed to visit new islands throughout their married life. Eventually Red was able to buy a very modest little cinder-block canal-front home in the Shady Banks neighborhood of Fort Lauderdale. First it was finances that prevented them from ever carrying out their traveling dreams, and later babies, so they named each of us for the islands they’d intended to visit someday.

  In the early years Red was gone in the navy, and then he spent all his time on Gorda, and Mother never managed well alone. Her wealthy family had turned their backs on her when she married a penniless navy man, and she struggled to manage a household without servants. Her books were scattered around the house and her art covered the walls, and if there were dust bunnies the size of jackrabbits roaming the house, it mattered little to her. She could be so fun and laughing, so shining and beautiful, and then suddenly plummet into the depths of a depression that closed out everyone else. Maddy, Pit, and I did our best to avoid her when she was having one of her “bad days.”

  She wanted me to go with her to the beach that day. It was a Saturday, and I wanted to stay home and play with Pit and our friend Molly, who lived next door. They were planning on taking Pit’s skiff across the river and up what we called Mosquito Creek to a spot where there were lots of polliwogs and baby frogs. But my mother insisted I go with her. She was having one of her bad days, and often when she was depressed, she just wanted to get out of the house. Once away, either she wouldn’t talk or she would complain. I hadn’t wanted to listen to her go on about my brothers or Red, so I sulked but went along.

  In the car, I sat in the backseat. I’d relived that day so many times in my mind, tried to take it back, do it differently. But on that day, I wouldn’t look at her as we walked out onto the beach.

  We settled on our blanket, and I stretched out on the farthest edge.

  “Will you swim with me?” she asked after several minutes.

  I shook my head. She was talking to me, but I wouldn’t listen.

  “Honey,” she said, taking off her sunglasses, revealing the dark circles beneath her penetrating eyes. “Sey, please try to understand.” I buried my nose in my book and flipped my hair over my shoulder.

  She reached out and touched the part at the crown of my head, then gently slid her fingers down the strands to rest on the bare brown skin of my shoulder: Her voice was quiet when she spoke.

  “Seychelle, will you ever forgive me?”

  Getting it all wrong, thinking she meant just that day and making me leave Pit and Molly, I stared at her wrapping myself in preadolescent self-righteousness, and said, “No.”

  I pretended to ignore her when she stood and walked into the water. I remember noticing, though, that she was wearing her beach shoes, purple sandals with garish pink plastic flowers over the toes, which she usually kicked off onto the blanket. I knew there was something wrong about that, and I remembered thinking, I don’t care.

  I didn’t see her again until the people on the beach started running down to the tide line and I got up to see what the commotion was all about. I pushed my way through the crowd, already feeling the coldness staving off the sun’s warmth. The first thing I saw was the white foot beneath the pink plastic flowers, then this blond lifeguard trying to blow life back into her body.

  Yesterday I hadn’t been there for Neal or Patty Krix. Not in time. And just like Maddy said, I’d never ever spoken about what happened that day because even though everyone kept telling me that it wasn’t my fault, I always felt deep down inside that Maddy was right.

  When I got back to Lightnin’, I pulled out onto A1A and headed north toward Lauderdale. The more I turned things over in my mind, the more questions I came up with. I couldn’t just let it alone. It was like one of those persistent little leaks in the boat that would continue to nag me until I solved the problem of where it was coming from. Much as I was ticked off about the mess that had been made of my cottage, I knew that Neal had to be in a hell of a bad fix if he didn’t think he could come to me and just ask for my help. Was he that hurt, scared, angry? In fact, maybe it was a signal, maybe he was asking for help in his own way. I was determined not to miss any more signals. I wasn’t really conscious of having made a decision when I turned onto Seventeenth, but when I pulled into the parking lot of the Top Ten Club, I figured that if I asked around, found out a little more about Patty Krix, I might understand what had happened out there and help both Neal and me out of this mess.

  It was lunchtime, and the parking lot was about half full. The cars were much fancier than I would have guessed: Lincolns, BMWs, Infinitis. I’d always thought these places were full of frat boys and solitary raincoat wearers. Did businessmen really have power lunches while looking at naked women? The idea made me laugh out loud.

  I waved off the valet parking attendant and parked my Jeep out back by the dumpsters, where I didn’t think anybody would notice the clearly out-of-place vehicle. I walked around to the front door feeling the eyes of the jocular hail-fellow-well-met business guys in dark suits taking in my casual dress and my aloneness. I square
d my shoulders, which after years of competition swimming and lifeguard paddling were rather broad, stood at my full height, and dared the little parking attendant with my eyes. He didn’t say a word as I passed.

  Aside from the fact that there were ten stark-naked women around on brilliantly lit stages, dancing to an old Bee Gees tune, the restaurant didn’t really look much different from other franchise restaurants across America. It had the standard booths, tables, and bar. The tacky decor, in red and gold, was supposed to look better in the subdued lighting. Oversize lava lamps graced either end of the bar, looking like elongated, transparent female torsos. Lots of reproductions of oil paintings hung on the walls from the days when painters liked their models to have a bit more meat on their bones, when round bellies and fleshy thighs were thought as lovely as big breasts. The waitresses wore gold lamé bodices that revealed plenty of cleavage, frilly tutu-like skirts, and fishnet stockings. The lunch rush was over, and no more than half the tables were occupied. Every single customer in the place was male.

  A short, muscular Latino guy wearing a gold tank top stood just inside the door. His black hair stood up in a spiky crew cut, shiny with gel, and though his eyes were hidden behind dark shades, I could feel him looking me over. I headed straight for the bar, feeling awkward, but none of the customers paid the least attention to me. The tables were clustered in groups of four around the raised stages, and the men sat transfixed. Most of the dancers wore nothing but garters, under which they had bunches of bills. Periodically, one of the men would reach out and add to their collections. If there was conversation going on among the patrons, it was indicated only by heads cocked to the side. The men didn’t look at one another.