The Girls of August

by Anne Rivers Siddons

* * *

  I was roused from a velvet sleep the next morning by sweet, sweet old-fashioned scents that drew me out of bed and down the hall, where I bumped into Rachel and Barbara, who, it would seem, had smelled them too.

  We ran barefoot down the stairs like kids on Christmas morning. We hushed each other as we tiptoed across the living room. We peeked into the kitchen and could barely believe our eyes: Baby hard at work, her polka-dot bikini barely hanging on. Her face was scrunched in concentration as she stirred something on the stove. She appeared to be immersed in adult thought. It was an arresting sight.

  “Mmmmmmmm,” Barbara said in a hushed tone, lifting her face to the scents of oatmeal, sugar, vanilla, raisins, apples, cinnamon, and something else I couldn’t divine.

  “Maybe we spoke too soon about her,” Rachel whispered. “Or maybe the thing is to just let her cook.”

  We pattered into the kitchen. She looked up and said, “Hey! Just in time.” She opened the oven door and removed a cookie sheet sizzling with golden pastries. “Raspberries and cream cheese! Mmmmm. And I also made us some yummy oatmeal.” She shimmied the pastries onto a cooling rack and then spooned the oatmeal into four deep bowls.

  “Holy crap. The child can cook,” Rachel said.

  I moved to help Baby and she said, “No, no, no! I’ve got it!” She moved around the kitchen as if she knew exactly what she was doing. Barbara, Rachel, and I were mildly stunned. I looked at the table. It had already been set. A single rose in a crystal bud vase was nestled beside each of our napkins. “I’m sorry. I used frozen puff pastry. But I’m on vacation,” she said, setting the bowls on the table and serving the pastries on individual dessert plates that were rimmed in gold. Lenox, if I had to guess.

  “Nobody in their right mind makes it fresh,” I murmured, taking in the luscious scents and the lovely place settings.

  We took our seats and I gazed down at the rosy, steaming oatmeal with submerged bits of all sorts of goodness—apples, walnuts, raisins, brown sugar, cinnamon. “Wow,” I said. “This smells delicious.”

  “It sure does,” Barbara said. “And I’m famished.”

  “Go on. Eat,” Baby said as she set the coffee carafe and a bowl of brown sugar on the table. The OJ had already been poured. “Anybody need anything else?”

  “Nope. We’re good,” Barbara said and pulled out the chair next to her, indicating it was time for Baby to sit down and enjoy breakfast with us.

  “To the chef!” I said, raising my spoon.

  “Hear, hear!” the girls rang out all round. And we dug in.

  “Baby, I’m mad at you,” Rachel said, her mouth full of pastry.

  “Why?” Baby batted her eyes as if she were girding herself for another onslaught from Rachel.

  “You’ve been holding out on us. Damn! You can cook, honey.”

  “This is the best oatmeal I’ve ever eaten. It’s real. None of that out-of-the-packet instant stuff,” Barbara said right before she shoveled in another big mouthful.

  “It really is delicious,” I said. “What is in with the berries? A liquor…”

  “Chambord,” Baby said.

  “Well, it’s just perfect,” I said, and Baby beamed. I gobbled down three or four good spoonfuls, relishing every single bite, and suddenly I was struck. I didn’t even have time to speak or warn anyone or run to the bathroom. I simply slewed around in my chair and threw up on the floor.

  “Oh, Madison…,” Barbara began.

  Baby shrieked. Rachel stopped eating, her spoon in mid air.

  “I am so sorry,” I said, scrubbing at my face and bending over to quell the suds in my stomach. “I don’t know what…”

  “What in the name of God?” Rachel slid back her chair and wet a hand towel with cool water. She held it to my face.

  Baby began to whimper. “I’m so, so sorry! Oh my God. Is it the food?”

  “No, Baby. It’s not the food,” Barbara said softly, and I clutched my stomach, afraid I was going to heave again.

  Baby burst into tears.

  “No, Baby. It’s not you. I-I-I just don’t feel good,” I said stupidly.

  “Let’s get you into bed,” Rachel said. “Baby, get her some water. Just take it upstairs. She’ll be OK. I’ll clean up down here.”

  With Barbara’s help, I made it down the hall and to the bathroom where I proceeded to vomit again. After the room stopped spinning, Baby and Barbara helped me upstairs where I spent most of the day shuttling between my room and the bathroom, throwing up. I was so woozy, hugged the wall coming and going. In between bathroom visits, I stayed in bed rereading Jude the Obscure, which I’d found wedged between the mattress and the wall.

  “If the stomach flu doesn’t get you, Jude certainly will,” Barbara said, coming in with a cold cloth for my head. “God, if there is a more depressing book on the planet, I don’t know what it would be.”

  I scooched up to a sitting position and my head spun. Barbara placed the cloth on my forehead.

  “Is Baby OK?” I asked.

  “Yeah, but she’s still blaming herself even though we keep telling her it’s not her fault that you picked up a bug.”

  “I’ll have to apologize tomorrow.” I closed my eyes, hoping to thwart another stomach upheaval.

  “For what? It’s not your fault you got sick.”

  “I just feel bad, Babs. She actually made a really good breakfast and I ruined it.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about it. Good cook or not, she’s just a self-involved little rich girl.”

  “I don’t agree. I know she’s annoying, but I think she’s got more going on upstairs than we’ve given her credit for. Maybe Teddy didn’t make a mistake after all.”

  “Damn, you really are sick. You must have brain fever.”

  I didn’t respond. She paced the room, silent, and I closed my eyes, hoping to stanch the nausea by staying still. “You ought to go home and let Mac look you over,” Barbara said finally. “You don’t look good. We can get hold of that ferry fella and have him fetch you before he heads to New York.”

  Despite the fact that the last thing my stomach, in its current condition, could tolerate was a boat ride, I actually longed to go home, to climb into my own fresh lavender-smelling sheets and simply sleep, listening to Mac’s voice as I drifted off. We read together most nights; he was currently reading me the poems of T. S. Eliot. I did not think I liked Eliot, but the night before I had left he read me “The Hollow Men,” and I had wept aloud.

  I could not have said why the poem affected me so; it simply seemed unutterably sad to me. Mac had held me close to him all night and, from time to time, I would wake up and breathe in his scent—sweat and soap and the Burberry cologne he favored—and the sadness engendered by the poem ebbed each time.

  “No, I’ll be OK,” I said to Barbara. Beyond the issue with the boat ride, I wanted to make the rest of our time out here count for Rachel. “I’ll be good as new by morning. I promise.”

  I felt a tremendous urge to confide in Barbara, to unburden myself, to tell her that our dearest friend on the planet was dying. Maybe that’s why I was so sick. Keeping the secret was poisoning me. But I had given Rachel my word. And I would not go back on it. I squeezed Barbara’s hand. “I think I’m already feeling better,” I lied.

  * * *

  I do not know what the girls did Wednesday evening. Around six p.m. Barbara gave me a sleeping pill, which I gladly accepted, and I slept straight through to morning. When I awoke I felt human again. The sun streamed through the windows and French door. I rolled over and looked at the bedside clock. Nine a.m. I could not remember the last time I’d slept that late. I got out of bed, pulled on my bathing suit, threw a cover-up over it, and ventured downstairs. I heard the girls chattering on the front porch. After I got my coffee, I went out and joined them. Barbara and Rachel, that is. Baby was not in attendance.

  “How are you feeling?” Barbara asked.

  “Loads better,” I said. I sipped my coffee and stared at the endl
ess morning blue.

  “Rachel was just telling me about the time she and Oliver did it in the front seat of his Jaguar.”

  “Stick shift?” I asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” Rachel said.

  We were laughing about that, and I was trying to erase images of the two of them getting hot and heavy amid the leather and glass and instrument panel, when Baby burst out of the house, said, “Hello, y’all,” and started off down the beach hugging a bulging grocery sack so close I thought that surely it must contain precious cargo. “You feeling better?” she asked.

  “Much. Sorry I ruined your wonderful breakfast.”

  She flashed a brilliant smile and then kept going. “You didn’t ruin anything. So glad you’re better.” Her words trailed behind her like wisps of smoke.

  “What’s in the sack?” I called after her.

  “Sandwiches.”

  “Who are you feeding?” Rachel asked.

  “Nobody,” she said, picking up speed.

  “Well ain’t she Little Miss Tom Sawyer,” Barbara said.

  “What in the world? It’s as if she doesn’t want anything to do with us. What did y’all do to her?” I asked.

  Barbara immediately looked guilty but Rachel gave away nothing.

  “Barbara?”

  “We just sort of roughed her up a little bit about Teddy last night.”

  “Oh, come on back, Baby. For God’s sake.” Rachel sighed and rolled her eyes. “We’re sorry we acted like numbskulls last night. It was the wine. Besides, Teddy will kill us if he thinks we ran you off.”

  Baby turned around and faced us, but she kept going, walking backward. “I’m busy. I’ll see you later.”

  “Where are you going?” Rachel stood and planted her hands on her hips, and I thought for a moment she might run down the beach and tackle our problem child.

  Baby stopped and turned. She seemed to consider her answer for a couple of seconds, and then said, “Actually, it’s none of your business.”

  Rachel gasped and I started laughing. Baby headed off again, and soon she and her bag of sandwiches were a memory.

  “At this rate we’ll have to go over to the mainland and get more food,” Barbara groused.

  “Oh, she’ll bring it back,” I said. “She can’t possibly eat all that. Let her be. She’s just being…a baby.”

  “Spoiled brat is more like it,” Rachel said.

  I looked at my dying friend. She appeared absolutely fearless, prompting me to wonder if she was cycling through Kübler-Ross’s stages of grief or if a sense of one’s mortality infused a soul with clarity, wrongheaded or otherwise. I took a deep breath. Frankly, at that moment, I felt as though it was all too much to think about. “It’s OK. I suspect she’ll be back in a couple of hours. But y’all must have surely pissed her off.”

  As it turned out, I was wrong. Baby did not return until late evening, and she did not bring back the food. To make matters more puzzling, she was gone when everyone got up the next morning.

  “Hallelujah. The little nut job is MIA,” Rachel said, stretching and stifling a yawn. “Who’s for pancakes?” We’d gathered in the kitchen for morning coffee. It had become a ritual.

  “Not me,” I said. The nausea was threatening to creep back, and I was well aware that I was tottering slightly. “I think I need some warm milk. Do we have any milk?”

  Rachel looked at me sharply, her brow knitted with concern. “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “Sit down,” Barbara said. “I’ll make you some. How about I make it like I did for my kids when they were little—with a little sugar and a dash of vanilla?”

  “Sounds great,” I murmured, sliding into a kitchen chair.

  Rachel pulled a carton of eggs out of the refrigerator, set them on the counter, and then handed Barbara a gallon of milk. “You don’t have any kids still at home, do you?” she asked.

  “Just one. Steven. But he heads to Vandy at the end of the month. I’m well on my way to being an empty nester.”

  “God,” Rachel said, catching her breath, “they grow up so quickly, don’t they?”

  Barbara, oblivious, said, “I’m scared witless about it. I mean, Steven is hardly home anymore anyway with all his running around. But he sleeps at home. I like having another person in the house.”

  “And I guess Hugh doesn’t count,” I said, laughing.

  “No, no he does not,” she said, pouring a stream of cold milk into the pan.

  I looked at Rachel, tried to catch her eye to let her know I was with her, that I loved her, but she was deep into her tough-as-nails persona. The only thing that might have indicated what she had really meant by the no-kids-at-home comment was the fierceness with which she scrambled those eggs.

  The three of us sat on the front porch in the strengthening sunlight and sea breeze, me sipping sweet warm milk and Rachel and Barbara eating eggs and sliced tomatoes. We chatted about diets and face-lifts and how, for the most part, we were determined to eschew both. Of course, Barbara had already lost a ton of weight, so an empty promise about avoiding diets was easy for her to make.

  I looked at the ocean—it was nearly translucent, like Caribbean water—and had almost started to say, “I wish we’d gone someplace else, as pretty as it is here, because Baby is just about the end of me. I’m worried sick about her,” when we spied her heading toward us with nothing but her bikini bottoms on.

  “Here we go,” Barbara said under her breath.

  Baby had barely placed one foot on the steps when Rachel said, “Let me guess. Tan lines.”

  “Baby, where have you been?” I asked.

  “Oh, just here and there,” she said, smiling. “There’s a lovely spot in the middle of the island. I’ll take y’all there if you’d like,” and then she drifted into the house as if she were a feather floating in a breeze.

  “I swear to God,” Rachel said after she was out of earshot, “if this place wasn’t hers, I’d call up Teddy and tell him to come get her.”

  “And I’d pack her bags,” Barbara said.

  “Well, we’ve only got a week to go,” I said, standing. I ambled to the far side of the porch and gazed at the sun-dappled Atlantic. “Let’s enjoy ourselves, no matter what. OK?”

  I felt the urgency of my words so intently that I kept my back to the girls so they would not see the tears that threatened to well and fall.

  Chapter

  <

  6

  The rest of that day and the next were unremarkable. The weather remained warm and still and so quiet that the July flies in the trees were loud as a choir. But odd things kept happening…irritations and accidents that put Barbara, Rachel, and me on edge.

  Baby mainly steered clear of us; over the next three days her manic behavior seemed to have turned into low, simmering hostility. Over lunch she told Rachel that she should “lose the Yankee accent,” and when Barbara said during a Sunday-afternoon ocean dip that she wondered if men needed sex more than women or if some were simply genetically coded to cheat, Baby said, “Men cheat on women who deserve it.”

  In lieu of slapping her, I slapped the water—it’s lucky she wasn’t within arm’s reach or I might have grabbed her by the hair and yanked hard.

  “Baby, that’s the most asinine thing to come out of your mouth yet,” I snapped.

  “Oh yeah?” she said. “Look who’s talking.” And then she splashed out of the flaccid surf and stomped up to the house, muttering to herself the entire way.

  “What exactly did y’all say to her when I was laid up in bed?” I asked.

  “Rachel told her that Teddy had a thing for blondes with money, that love didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  “You told her what! Why, Rachel, that’s just plain mean.”

  “No,” Rachel said, her face hardening. “It’s the truth. Life is too short not to know the truth.”

  I was speechless. Rachel wasn’t a cruel person, but what she’d said to Baby was cruel. No wonder Baby was maki
ng herself scarce. And by the stubborn expressions on Barbara’s and Rachel’s faces, I knew it would be up to me to try to make things right.

  We spent another couple of hours at the beach and went back up to the house. From the looks of the kitchen—a half-eaten sandwich and a mug of beer that had barely been sipped—it was clear that Baby had taken off in a hurry, probably when she heard us coming.

  So that evening, over a dinner of gazpacho, chilled shrimp, and green salad, I said, “Listen, I know Baby tries our patience. But we’re not mean people. So tomorrow, no matter if it’s stormy or sunny, we’re going to walk over to the bay side and see if we can find where Baby keeps escaping to, and what she does there. And we’re going to be nice about it.”

  “If she’s having an affair,” Barbara said, “Teddy deserves to know, even if we’re mad at him.”

  “Damn straight,” Rachel said.

  “OK, fine,” I said. This was not going the way I wanted it to. “But we have no evidence of any affair.”

  “Yeah, right,” Rachel grumbled before pouring more wine.

  * * *

  Monday morning after breakfast, we put our plan into effect. Or at least we tried. I sat on the hammock and grabbed my sneakers, which I’d left there overnight. I slipped them on and stood up. The pain was instant and fierce. I cried out, but still the bee trapped in my right shoe buzzed ferociously while it stung me. I kicked off the sneaker, yowling, and the poor bee flew away, wobbly, as though it were punch-drunk. With pain searing through my foot, I examined the shoe from heel to toe, fearing that an entire colony had set up shop in there.

  “A bee. It stung me,” I said to Barbara and Rachel, who were rushing out of the house in response to my yelping.

  In no time, my foot swelled up to the size of a small watermelon.

  “How in the hell did a bee get into your sneakers?” Rachel asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  I waved my two friends off and hobbled into the house. It hurt, surprisingly badly. I made a paste of aspirin and seawater that Barbara fetched for me—a poultice, of sorts. The pain, but not the swelling, subsided just a hair.

  Rachel, scowling with worry, inspected my foot. “It looks like you’ve been snakebit.”