But Jenny was waiting on the edge, patient as a dog. “Can you touch bottom?” she asked when Cecile resurfaced.
“If I want to.”
“Is it over your head now?”
“Of course.”
“I don’t like swimming over my head,” Jenny said.
“Jack swims over his head, and he’s only eight.” Cecile pulled herself up the ladder and sat down. The dock was warm on the backs of her legs.
“I’m a total chicken,” Jenny said. “I’m afraid of dogs, too. Even small ones. William calls me Chicken Little.”
Chicken Little! If Natalie were here, she’d look at Jenny’s stomach and make a face behind Jenny’s back. Somehow Cecile didn’t think Jenny would care. She felt oddly envious of the way Jenny sat there, so unself-conscious, so contented. Cecile never used to care either.
Suddenly she was glad Jenny hadn’t been insulted; she was happy. “I think flirting’s dopey, don’t you?” she said, rolling over onto her stomach to let the dock warm her whole body.
“The girls at my school practice on one another,” Jenny said, doing the same. “We don’t have boys.”
“What do you mean, practice?”
“You know, they dance, and one of the girls pretends she’s the boy and leads. Or they practice kissing the backs of their hands and watch what it looks like in the mirror.” Jenny shrugged. “Stuff like that.”
“Kissing the backs of their hands?” Cecile said. “What does that do?”
“Don’t ask me.”
“Weird.”
They rested companionably, side by side, and, cupping their chins in their hands, stared at the action on the float. Leo was watching Jack cast, with his own fishing rod dangling uselessly at his side. Jack was patiently explaining something. He held out his rod for Leo to take, keeping a careful eye on Leo when he did, and made casting motions with his arms for Leo to imitate.
William stood at the far corner of the float staring out at the wall of sea grass, as if he found it far more interesting than Natalie lying tan and sleek behind him.
“Leo’s not going to catch a fish with that hook,” Cecile said.
“He wouldn’t know what to do with it if he did,” said Jenny. “Does your brother catch things?”
“Tons of fish. We eat them for breakfast, sometimes.”
“Eeuuw, I hate fish,” Jenny said.
“What about lobster?”
“I’ve never had it.”
“You’ve never had lobster?” Cecile rolled over and sat up. This was wonderful! Jenny was afraid of deep water and had never eaten lobster. Why, she didn’t know anything!
“Have you ever held a hermit crab?” Cecile asked. Then, “You do know what a hermit crab is.”
“Those little things with shells and lots of legs?” Jenny said, sitting up.
“That could be a lot of things,” Cecile said. “Don’t you go to the beach where you live?”
“We mostly swim in the pool at our club.”
“Pools,” Cecile said. She had nothing else to say about pools.
“My mother’s worried we’ll step on something at a beach,” Jenny said apologetically.
“Don’t tell me she doesn’t let you go barefoot.”
Jenny hunched her shoulders in the face of Cecile’s cold stare. “My father stepped on a rusty can at a beach when he was little and had to get a tetanus shot,” she said meekly.
This was getting better and better.
“Your mother’s not going to follow you around the whole time you’re here, is she,” Cecile said, “making sure you have lotion on and are wearing your sandals?”
The question felt momentous. The two girls sat, eyes locked, as it quivered in the air between them. Much depended on Jenny’s answer: the direction of their friendship, or (more delicious and dramatic) if a friendship would even be made.
“She hates the sun,” Jenny said. “We only came here so my father can be in a golf tournament. Mom will sit in the house all day and read. Anyway,” she finished, and it was as good as a drop of blood exchanged between them, “I wouldn’t let her.”
There. It was sealed.
“All right, then.” Cecile got to her feet. “We’ll start with hermit crabs.”
Jenny stood up, too. “Do they bite?”
“Not hard. I suppose you’ve never touched a jellyfish, either?”
“Yuck,” said Jenny, shivering, excited.
They heard a laugh and looked toward the float. Natalie was sitting up now, her hands on the straps of her bathing suit as she looked up at William, who finally seemed to have noticed her.
“See? They’re already starting.” Jenny’s voice was breathy. “First they pretend they don’t notice each other. Then they start.”
This wouldn’t do. Jenny hadn’t sounded nearly as interested in hermit crabs.
“Who cares?” Cecile said, starting off. “Let’s go. How long are you going to be here?”
“Ten days,” Jenny cried, running to catch up with her.
“Only ten days? That’s hardly any time. I’m sure Lucy has some hermit crabs in her bucket.”
“You promise they won’t hurt?”
“They’ll tickle, Chicken Little,” Cecile cried as she broke into a run. “Hurry up, slowpoke!”
The girls staggered back in the late afternoon, sunburned and victorious, to show the day’s bounty to Jack and Leo. The four of them crouched around the two buckets on the float, inspecting. Cecile kept her eyes on Leo as he held out his hand for Jack to put a huge hermit crab on it.
“We had to walk up and down the club beach about ten times for it,” Cecile warned. “Be careful.”
Leo’s face was a mixture of terror and excitement, as if he were dreading the moment when the crab drew blood but was prepared to face it like a man. He would have faced anything for Jack by this point in the day. Jack was the mighty fisherman. Jack was kind.
“Don’t jerk your hand away, even if it tickles,” Jack said in his serious way.
“But what if it hurts worse than a needle?” quavered Leo.
“You’d better do it on the beach,” Cecile told Jack. “You know he’s going to drop it.”
Cecile fixed the whole of her attention on the bucket. She’d spotted Natalie and William when they came around the corner of the beach from the direction of the club and quickly checked to see if they were holding hands. She let out a soft puff of air when she saw they weren’t.
“Here they come!” Jenny said excitedly when their footsteps sounded on the dock.
“So?” Cecile said. “Make sure you don’t hurt those minnows! Pay attention!”
But Jenny didn’t want to pay attention. “I wonder what they’ve been doing,” she said, and squeezed Cecile’s arm. She’d been squeezing Cecile’s arm all day, whenever she got excited. Cecile had enjoyed it earlier; it made her feel brave. Now she jerked her arm away and kept her head down as Natalie and William approached.
The weight of them standing there when they stopped at the top of the ramp bore down on the top of her head. Only when Jack led Leo up the ramp did Cecile finally look up, and then it was all right, because it was the boys she was interested in, not them.
Natalie had rolled up the sleeves of one of Harry’s old shirts and tied the tails in a knot over her bikini. Her blue eyes stood out in her tanned face; her sunglasses held back her hair. The tops of William’s shoulders and the rims of his ears were red. His madras bathing suit hung to his knees. The outline of his sunglasses, visible in his shirt pocket, was faintly etched against the sunburn on his face.
“They’re hermit crabs,” Natalie told him as he peered into the bucket when the boys hurried past. “What else did you get, Cecile?” she asked.
“A few jellyfish and a ton of snails.”
“Oh, snails,” said Natalie. “Whoopie.”
“We got three horseshoe crabs, but we let them go.”
“Where have you two been all day?” Jenny asked in a coy voice, looking
at her brother. Cecile longed to pinch her.
“That’s for us to know and you to find out,” said William.
He sounded as if he were eight. Natalie knew it, but she laughed anyway, saying, “I showed William around the island.”
“I bet you didn’t catch anything,” said Jenny. “Other than each other, that is,” she added under her breath.
“I can get all the fish I need right here,” William said. He grabbed the rope tied around a piling and started to pull it up, hand over hand.
“That’s King’s bait trap,” Cecile said.
“I told him that this morning, Cecile,” said Natalie.
The top of the bucket appeared above the water and made a great sucking noise as William pulled it clear.
“Did you tell him King doesn’t like people to fool around with it?” said Cecile as William pulled the bucket all the way up to sit on the dock. “Not even people he knows?”
“Don’t be such a brat,” said Natalie.
“He doesn’t, Natalie. You know he doesn’t.”
“Down, Fido! Sit!” William commanded, grinning broadly when Natalie laughed.
“King really is a beast about people touching it,” she said as she rested her hand on his arm.
“I certainly wouldn’t want to offend a king, now would I?” said William. He let go of the rope and pushed the bucket toward the edge with his foot. It hurtled down and slapped against the water before sinking out of sight. “Whew,” William said, wiping imaginary sweat from his brow. “Maybe now the king won’t behead me.”
Look at them, Cecile thought disgustedly when Natalie laughed. Natalie, trying to sound like Mom, and William puffing out his chest like a silly rooster. She longed to hit him, to somehow puncture William’s air of confidence and send him hurtling down, too. “You’re not supposed to drop it like that,” she said, her eyes blazing.
“Who’s she, the dock keeper?” William said to Natalie with a rude jerk of his thumb.
“My little sister’s very strict,” Natalie said. “Aren’t you, Cecile?”
“I’m not your little sister.”
“Very strict, indeed.” Natalie shook her finger in William’s face in a perfect imitation of a teacher. “If she knew half the things you said to me today…” William tried to grab her finger, but Natalie quickly hid it behind her back.
“I am not strict, Natalie,” Cecile said loudly.
But Cecile wasn’t there for Natalie, only William. When he reached around her with both arms, she twisted and turned inside his embrace as if delighting in the feel of it. Her shirt rose up as she did, and William put his huge hands on her waist. Squealing, Natalie ducked and ran laughing up the dock. William was fast on her heels.
She could have been leaving Cecile once and for all, Cecile felt so bereft. Have fun with your playthings, children, I’m gone. How could she make fun of her own sister like that in front of a stranger? Cecile thought as she looked blindly into the bucket. An Interloper. Everything blurred.
“I told you he was girl crazy,” Jenny said proudly beside her.
It was horrible, horrible, that this pudgy girl should be allowed to think her pudgy brother was so wonderful. But for Natalie to think so, too?
“Don’t do that,” Cecile snapped when Jenny idly stuck her hand into the bucket, causing the minnows to dart frantically. “Now look what you did.” As if no one ever stuck their hand in a bucket with minnows before! a voice in her head chided. As if they wouldn’t settle down the minute Jenny withdrew her hand.
“Sorry.” Jenny’s voice was gratifyingly meek, but Cecile couldn’t forgive her.
“You probably frightened them to death,” she said. She snatched up the bucket. “We’d better get them into the water before they die. If they do, their blood will be on your hands.”
What blood? Imagine! Cecile could have laughed. But Jenny had fallen willingly into the mood; her face was a tragic mask of turned-down lines. She could have been mourning the loss of a beloved hamster, with her hands so piously clasped. “I can make music,” Jenny offered.
“What kind of music?”
Jenny rested her hands on the rise of her soft belly and intoned, “Dum, dum, de-dum, dum, dedum, de-dum, de-dum…”
“All right, but not too fast.”
Holding the bucket out in front of her as if it were an offering, Cecile solemnly led the way to the beach. Both girls wore grave expressions suitable to conducting a funeral. Cecile knelt down at the water’s edge and beckoned for Jenny to do the same. Somberly, oh, so somberly, she tilted the bucket in the shallow water until three still bodies bobbed lifelessly out.
The mourners looked at them in silence. Then, miraculously, “Made you look! Made you look!” If fish could shout joyfully, these fish would have; they sprang into life, darted away from the shore, and were gone.
“You did it!” Jenny cried, clapping. “You saved them!”
Cecile forgave her completely.
Chapter Seven
Lucy went first, clutching the bag of bread crumbs Sheba had entrusted to her care as they made their way slowly across the lawn toward the inlet. Jack walked behind her, brandishing his stick. Cecile trailed last, with Granddad. He held her elbow gently; she kept her arm bent in a stiff crook. Ice cubes clattered from the terrace as her father dumped them into the bucket at the bar. Her mother was upstairs getting dressed.
Granddad’s white linen pants and shirt gleamed in the setting sun. His silver hair was slicked back from his forehead in neat, straight rows like the furrows in a field. He looked at Cecile and squeezed her arm. “Happy?” he asked.
“Yes.”
Granddad’s cheeks were gently bellowing in and out. Cecile had learned, over time, that it meant he was thinking. He ran a large newspaper in the city and was often preoccupied. He had a black phone in his study that he got important phone calls on; no one other than him was allowed to answer it. When the children were young, they often stood in the doorway and stared at it, as if expecting it to explode.
Granddad’s driver, Jimmy, came and went throughout the month, delivering messages and important papers. On Sunday, he’d drive Granddad and their father back into the city, where they’d spend the week at their jobs before Jimmy drove them back to the Island on Thursday night. Cecile felt proud to have Granddad to herself now; proud but anxious. She wondered whether he would talk to her and ask her questions. She dreaded disappointing him. She was happy to skirt the corners of adult conversation and know him in that way.
“Red sky at night, sailor’s delight!” Jack called back as they neared the water.
“Take Lucy’s hand,” Cecile said officiously.
“She won’t let me!” he reported.
“Lucy…?”
At the sound of Granddad’s voice, Lucy took Jack’s hand. There were rules to be followed, even when it came to feeding the greedy clutch of seagulls Granddad called his “pals.”
“What do you say we go feed my pals?” he’d say when he came down from taking a shower after golf. “Anyone interested?” He’d look around uncertainly, as if they didn’t all rush to join him every summer, night after night.
“How can they be hungry when they steal food from people’s picnics and smash those poor defenseless mussels against the rocks all day?” their mother would protest. She said seagulls were worse than rodents, but Granddad loved them.
His pals had seen them coming. As if summoned by a dinner gong, dozens of them had materialized in the inlet and hovered over Lucy and Jack, screeching and laughing as they darted and swooped.
“Can we start?” Jack asked when they came up to him.
“Go ahead,” said Granddad.
Jack’s first piece flew straight up and was attacked by several gulls. Lucy threw her entire handful, all at once. The pieces scattered on the ground in front of her like confetti.
“Not like that, Lucy,” said Jack. “One at a time. Like this.”
He bent his knees and then shot straight up, le
aning back as he hurled the bread high over his head. A seagull picked it neatly from the air before it could start back down. Cecile took a few pieces and threw them out over the water. Granddad threw his one at a time, carefully, like Jack. He handed his last piece to Lucy and said gravely, “Let’s see what you’ve learned, Lucy.”
Lucy tossed it. It rose hopefully into the air and dropped back down, bouncing off her hair onto the ground, where a gull hopped over and nabbed it.
“Better watch out for those curls,” Granddad told her solemnly. “My pals might think they’re worms.”
Lucy clamped her hands over her head and ran in delighted circles, shrieking. “Seagulls don’t eat worms,” Jack tried to tell her, but Lucy was giddy with the idea of her hair, alive. She started back up the lawn toward the house, zigzagging crazily, with Jack running behind her, waving his stick, a loyal sheepdog directing a stray sheep back to its pen.
Their mother stood up from where’d she’d been watching and walked toward them over the grass. Lucy grabbed her mother’s hand and shook her head vigorously; her hair flew out around her like sparks. Her excited voice, raised in explanation, floated through the evening air.
“What’ve you been telling Lucy, Dad?” their mother said laughingly as Lucy and Jack raced up to the terrace. “More of your nonsense?” She linked her arms through his and pulled him against her, smiling back quickly at Cecile as if to say, Mine, all mine. She leaned her head against her father’s shoulder; Granddad planted a kiss on the top of her hair.
It was almost dark. Ahead of them, the house was coming alive. Candles flickered in small lamps scattered on the tables around the terrace. Cecile could see Sheba through the French windows. She was moving slowly around the living room, stooping to turn on lamps, to straighten a magazine, to fluff a pillow. She picked up an empty tray from the sideboard and moved back across the windows to stand in the screen door, a dark silhouette.
“The children’s dinner is ready,” she announced through the dusk.
The Lucky Ones Page 6
