Better Luck Next Time

by Julia Claiborne Johnson

  “You’re terrible, Nina,” Emily said. “You have no idea how aggravating it is, being short. Everything you need the most always seems to be just out of reach. Anyway, there are only six of them.”

  “Six? There are seven dwarfs. It’s right there in the title. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”

  “Yes, but there are only six other guests. Six of them, plus the two of us.”

  Nina made an exasperated noise. “What difference does that make, Emily?” She leveled that cobra gaze of hers on me again. “The point is, Ward, you could go back, or you could keep driving. Your call.”

  I gave the car the gas again.

  Chapter Twelve

  It was late afternoon by the time the three of us piled out of the Pierce-Arrow at Pyramid Lake, a vast body of water an hour north of the Flying Leap. The lake was on a Paiute reservation—still is, as far as I know—and had been left pretty much untouched back then, aside from a road that connected Reno to the reservation and the old fishing camp on the lake edge that had once doubled as a stagecoach stop.

  I parked on a pebbly beach, far enough back from the water’s edge that the wheels wouldn’t get mired in sand. The lake stretched immense and placid, a bathtub for the gods, its azure surface stamped here and there with silvery scales where the wind and insects tipped it. The inland sea it once was had shrunk over the millennia, leaving behind sand dotted with fossil-covered rubble and a surround of terraced hillsides, the edge of each giant step down to the water’s edge an abandoned shoreline.

  “If you told me time began here, I’d believe you,” Emily said.

  “It did,” Nina said. “Starting now.” She took Emily’s hand and the two of them raced barefoot across the scorching beach, hair and dresses flying, like children let loose on the first day of summer. They stood on the cool wet sand at the water’s edge waiting for me, moseying along in my cowboy boots and carrying Nina’s canvas bag.

  “It’s so lovely,” Emily said to Nina as I caught up to them. “But where are the other people?”

  “What other people?” Nina asked.

  “The other people who are always all over every other lovely beach I’ve ever been to in the summertime.”

  “Not right here, right now,” Nina said. “This lake is so remote that I’ve always had it pretty much to myself in the late afternoon. Except for the birds. They’re what brought me here the first time. I was flying along, following the river, because that’s the easiest way to navigate when you’re just tooling around. Then I fell in with a flock of enormous pelicans, the white ones that have the black-tipped wings. I recognized them right away because they had them at the St. Louis Zoo. Turns out the pelicans were on their way to their nesting grounds on that flattish island over there. That one’s named Anaho. The pointy one is called Pyramid. For obvious reasons.”

  While they were talking I lay a sheet on the sand and emptied the bag of everything else Nina had taken from the clothesline. “I don’t see any bathing suits here,” I said. I shook all the sheets and towels to make sure the suits hadn’t got twisted up inside something larger, but no such luck.

  Nina took the bag from me, turned it upside down, shook it, then peered inside again. “Oops,” she said. “I must have left the swimsuits on the kitchen counter. Oh, well. We’ll have to do without.” She pulled the fairy costume over her head and handed it to me. “Hold this,” she said. Based on the past two days, if I hadn’t seen lingerie clamped to our clothesline by wooden pins marked “Nina,” I wouldn’t have believed she wore undergarments, ever.

  Nina splashed out into the water, then dove under. Just as I was starting to wonder if we’d ever see her alive again she came up for air some distance out. “It gets deep fast, just so you know,” she shouted, treading water. “Come on in. It isn’t cold.”

  Emily cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted back, “I. Don’t. Have. A. Swimsuit.”

  Nina shouted back, “You. Don’t. Need. One.”

  Emily put her hands on her hips. “I’m not the kind of person who goes swimming without my clothes on.”

  “Oh,” Nina called. “I thought you were tired of being that kind of person. Pardon me.” She dove under again and didn’t surface until she was a discreet distance from the shore. Then she flipped on her back and floated.

  Emily stared after her for at least a minute. Then she looked up at me, her forehead wrinkled and her eyes suddenly full of tears. “Ward,” she said. “Do you know the difference between an elephant and an aspirin?”

  “No. What is it?”

  “Then I’d better not send you to the car to see if there are any aspirin in the glove compartment. Ha ha.” The “ha ha” was so very small and sad. “That used to be Portia’s favorite joke. I do have such a headache, though. The trouble is, now I can’t think about aspirin without thinking about an elephant. Those two things will be tied to each other in my brain for the rest of my life.”

  “No wonder you have a headache,” I said. “It must be so crowded inside your skull.”

  She gave me a blank look. “What?”

  “It’s like that old gag,” I said. “Would you care to join me in a cup of tea? Why, yes, but won’t it be awfully crowded in there?”

  Emily took hold of the dimple in my chin the way Margaret was fond of doing. “You’re a boy after my own heart, Ward,” she said. She let go and sighed. “My husband hasn’t thought anything I said was funny since I don’t know how long. Portia used to. She doesn’t anymore.”

  “Tell you what, ma’am,” I said. “I’m going to drive over to the fishing camp and fill up the car with gas. If you want to swim, go swim. No one will see that you aren’t wearing a swimsuit aside from Nina and the pelicans.”

  “Will you do me a favor, Ward?” she asked. “Before you leave, will you see if there are any aspirin in the glove compartment? I seem to remember a bottle in there. If you find it, please bring me a couple. If there’s an elephant inside, let the poor thing out.”

  “Sure thing, ma’am,” I said, and tipped my hat. I located the bottle she remembered, shook out two, and brought them to her. “I found your aspirin, but I don’t have any water for you to take them with,” I said.

  She held her hand out and I dropped the pills into her palm. “Down the hatch,” she said, tossed them back and smiled at me. “Who needs water?” she said, then coughed. She swallowed again, and grabbed my hand with such urgency that I worried she was choking. But when she found her voice again she said, “Please, Ward, please don’t call me ma’am. It makes me feel like I’m your grandmother.”

  She surprised me then by pulling her dress over her head, same as Nina had, and handing it to me. The difference was that Emily said, “Happy birthday,” and she was wearing underclothes. Still was when she plunged into the water and swam out to where Nina floated.

  To get a grip on myself as much as anything before I got behind the wheel, I built a beach cabana of sorts in case the ladies came out of the water before I got back from the fishing camp and wanted shelter. First I weighed down the spread-out sheet with rocks so it wouldn’t blow away. I was careful to find pretty ones imprinted with the fossils of ancient bivalves, laughing a little at myself for making the effort since I doubted either of them would notice. After that I folded all the towels and their clothes and tucked the lot inside the canvas bag, then went back to the Pierce-Arrow, hoping to find something I could wedge upright in the sand. I opened the trunk and the papier-mâché donkey’s head eyed me accusingly. I lay Bottom’s deflated body across his face while I rooted around under the fairy’s wings for something I could use to create some shade, but no dice.

  I walked around the vehicle, scratching my head and thinking. Then I noticed a little door in the back, on the passenger side, like something Alice would have crawled through into Wonderland after drinking from the bottle of magical shrinking liquid. I opened it out of curiosity and found a set of golf clubs and an enormous golf umbrella that fit the space so perfectly, I figured i
t must have been a custom job. That was the way-too-wealthy for you. Always finding inventive new ways to spend more money.

  As it turned out, the clothespins Nina had tossed into the canvas bag came in handy for constructing a nice little beach pagoda of sheets clipped to the foundation I built of that golf umbrella strapped with my belt to a tent pole made of golf clubs. I wished the Hollywood set designer had been there to see it. I think he would have applauded my ingenuity.

  Since sunset in Reno during the high summer came so late, while I was at the fishing camp I bought a jug of water and sandwiches in case Emily and Nina wanted to stay out past dinnertime. I thought I might call Margaret from the store there to give her a heads up, but they didn’t have a pay phone. I told myself she would put two and two together since Nina was helming our adventure. They would forgive us for missing dinner.

  When I got back to the pebbly beach, Nina came out of my makeshift beach pavilion wrapped in a towel. She waved the fairy costume over her head. “Ahoy, Cash,” she called. “I thought we’d been abandoned at sea, but Emily promised you were coming back. We’re so thirsty, and Emily refused to let me drink lake water.”

  Emily joined her, also wrapped in a towel. “There were fish swimming in it,” she said. “One swam past me that was as long as my arm.”

  The two of them turned and went inside the tent. I overheard Nina say, “You should have been more sympathetic to that poor fish. Couldn’t you see that his heart was broken? This lake was just a puddle before he filled it with his tears. That’s why the water’s just the tiniest bit salty, you know.”

  “Oh?” Emily asked. “Why was the fish crying?”

  “His soul mate left him. Big fish looking for a deeper pond. You know how it is. She ended up in Scotland.”

  “Are you talking about the Loch Ness Monster?” Emily asked.

  “Please,” Nina said. “Nessie is not a monster. She’s just larger than the average girl, and very misunderstood.”

  From the way they were rustling around in there, it seemed they were getting dressed. In case my delicate edifice of sheets collapsed from all the action inside I headed back to the Pierce-Arrow for the sandwiches. When I opened the auto’s trunk to retrieve our bag of refreshments my eyes fell on the fairy’s wings again. I took them out and strapped them on. They fit all right once I adjusted the buckles some. I amused myself by thinking how the wings would help me mix with the other waterfowl around the lake. I pulled off my cowboy boots and socks, too, and rolled my dungarees up my calves. Might as well get a little wading in if I meant to mingle with those other birds.

  As I started picking my way gingerly down to the beach I realized that I’d become the very definition of a tenderfoot. When I was a kid and the weather started getting warm, I couldn’t wait until I achieved what we kids in those days called our “summer feet.” How long had it taken for my soles to harden into hooves? I couldn’t quite remember. My mother hated to see me skipping around without my shoes on. In the first place, Miss Pam couldn’t understand how a child with such nice ones would ever want to go without them. In the second, she saw the world outside our house as one big rusty nail lying in wait to deliver a deadly dose of lockjaw. To be fair to Miss Pam, there was a real element of danger in going barefoot before the tetanus vaccine was invented. It was so much harder on a woman’s soul to be a mother in the days when a kid could be snatched away by an infection or a disease in the blink of an eye.

  But I digress.

  The ladies were sitting on the sheet, still wrapped in towels, when I rejoined them. “One of the pair was gone from the exhibit so long that I got worried,” Nina was telling Emily. “So I asked the zookeeper in charge of the Flight Cage what had become of it. He said it had a hurt wing.”

  “Was it broken?”

  “Maybe. Probably. I don’t remember exactly. I do remember that the zoo vet had the wing bound against the pelican’s side to immobilize it until it healed. They let me visit it in the sick bay.”

  “They did? That was sweet.”

  “Not sweet so much as smart. They knew my grandfather was obscenely rich, even by St. Louis standards. Made his money manufacturing dog food, which the zookeepers could give to the jackals in a pinch when people didn’t throw enough of their awful little children into the jackals’ pen.”

  “Nina!” Emily said. “You’re awful.”

  “I know,” Nina said. “Such a shame I managed to climb out of the enclosure before the jackals got me, isn’t it? So anyway, I told the zookeeper who my grandfather was, and the next thing you know I was visiting my injured friend. The zoo vet assured me that my pelican would recover. Not enough to live in the wild again, but he was never going to be set free anyway. Oh, look, here’s Cash. Bearing gifts.” Nina jumped to her feet and ran to me, took my paper bag, and peeked inside. “What are those bundles wrapped in waxed paper? Could they possibly be sandwiches?”

  “They are,” I said. “Swimming always made me ravenous when I was a kid.”

  Nina threw her arms around my neck and kissed me, on the cheek this time. “Decorative as well as useful. You’re going to make some lucky girl very happy someday.” She scampered back to Emily with the jug of water and the sandwiches. “Look what our boyfriend brought us.”

  By the time I reached the sheet, the two of them were kneeling on it, unwrapping the food I’d brought. Emily seemed as delighted to see me as Nina had been to see the sandwiches. “Oh!” she exclaimed, putting the salami and cheese I had sort of wanted for myself on the sheet beside herself to clasp one of my hands in hers. “Look how beautiful you are in my wings!”

  Nina switched the salami and cheese sandwich for the egg salad sandwich she’d just made a face at. “Your wings? You mean the wings you stole from the college?”

  “I thought we might as well get a little more mileage out of them before you take them back,” I said. I could feel my pants slipping down my haunches without my belt and hitched them up. “The pelicans invited me to a party. The invitation said, ‘White tie or wings, please.’ I didn’t have white tie.”

  “You couldn’t possibly look any better than you do right now, not even in white tie,” Emily said.

  “I don’t know about that,” Nina said. “You could put an orangutan in white tie and he’d look like the Prince of Wales. They did that at our zoo once, you know, when they threw a fancy dinner to celebrate the opening of the Ape House. They seated the Prince of Wales at the head table, by an orangutan in a tuxedo. We were at the next table so I saw it with my own eyes.”

  “They seated an orangutan in a tuxedo next to the Prince of Wales?” Emily asked. “Please tell me you’re lying.”

  “It’s not so much a lie as a plausible fiction,” Nina said. “In fact, they seated the orangutan next to Mayor Kiel. The mayor wasn’t the dandy the Prince of Wales is, of course. More magisterial. I prefer that, actually. Do you want this other sandwich, Emily?” She’d finished the salami and had moved on to the third wax paper bundle.

  “What kind is it?”

  Nina unwrapped it. “Egg salad.”

  “No, thanks,” Emily said. “I don’t like egg salad much.”

  “Neither do I,” Nina said. “Oh, well.” She proceeded to make short work of it anyway, watching a pair of pelicans wheel overhead while she ate. “Look how magisterial those pelicans are when they’re flying. Once they’re on the ground all dignity evaporates. They waddle around like old drunks.”

  “Well,” Emily said. “Word is they drink like fish.” She held up a finger. “No, wait, excuse me. I meant to say, they drink fish. I saw several do that just this afternoon.” She tossed her head back to demonstrate, saying, “Glub, glub, glub,” then loosed her tinkly laugh. Emily picked up the sandwich in front of her, took a bite, looked confused, and pulled back the bread on top. I was about to point out that one of the sandwiches was meant for me when she said, “Oh, well. I’m so hungry I could eat a horse. Please don’t tell Dumpling that I said that.”

  �
�By the way, we aren’t taking the wings back,” Nina said. “The theater department at the college doesn’t need those costumes anymore. They’re going to buy themselves a lot of new ones.”

  “How do you know?” Emily asked. A seagull landed close to the edge of the sheet and eyed her sandwich.

  “Because I mailed them a check and attached a note that said, ‘If you’ve noticed a couple of your costumes missing, go buy yourselves a lot of new ones.’ I signed the note ‘A Friend.’”

  Emily shooed the seagull away and nibbled on her sandwich. “Won’t they figure out who their friend is when they see your name on the bottom of the check?”

  “I wrote them such a large check, I expect they’ll be willing to forgive and forget.”

  The seagull landed a little closer this time. Emily tossed it the rest of the sandwich. “Now go away,” she said. “Nobody likes a beggar.” The gull took off, the crust of egg salad sandwich clutched in its beak.

  I got up then and wandered down to the water. I don’t know how long I glared at the pyramid-shaped island, trying not to brood about Nina and Emily eating my dinner. Those two were like children, oblivious to other people’s needs as long as theirs were being taken care of. But so many of our guests were like that, as I’d had ample time to witness. No point in working myself into a swivet about it. They’d be gone back where they came from soon enough. I’d learned early on that, for the sake of my sanity, it was best to hold my irritation in check until an irritating guest packed her bags and left.

  I’d about talked myself out of my upset when the pair of them showed up at my elbow, their hair dry and wild and their bodies still wrapped in towels, holding three delicate-looking little paper dinghies pinched between their fingers. “Look what Nina made, Ward,” Emily said. “Boats. She used the waxed paper the sandwiches you brought us came in.”