Surprise Stories

by Nick Niels Sanders

  The four women were all in rare good spirits for an afternoon outing, giggling and laughing as first Julia then Marcella tried to walk forward with swim fins on, tripping over them and falling headlong into the water. The lesson about walking backwards when wearing fins was quickly learned. Walking backward leads quickly to swimming on one’s back, and the four women were soon doing just that, heading out to the reef, where they would snorkel from a base where the reef was very shallow and they could rest on it.

  It took Maria only a few moments to find several brain corals next to one another – they would make excellent resting spots, since they did not have sharp edges and corners. They swam and snorkeled. Once Julia and Marcella were able to swim along, face down, breathing through the snorkel for some time, Jeanne and Maria taught them how to dive and how to breathe on surfacing from a dive. As experienced snorkelers, this was not a great effort for them, and they were surprised to remember how difficult it had been for them to learn that they really could return to the surface, exhale strenuously and start breathing again without lifting their faces from the water. Julia was determined to do everything perfectly, which manifested as a certain amount of frustration as she learned; Marcella was blithely open to learning any new thing, without preconception, and therefore without inhibition. As a result, both were good students and the time went by quickly.

  They were out in the lagoon, swimming around, when they heard voices from the camp and surmised that the men had returned with water. They started directly back to Bathing Beach, pulled off their swim fins and were emerging from the water as the five naked men walked back to the water to swim.

  There was a brief moment of complete bilateral embarrassment as nine sets of eyes sought to find somewhere else to look and some way not to be seen. Maria broke the silence.

  “We’ve been having snorkeling lessons. How did the search for drinking water go?”

  “We brought you six jugs of fresh water,” replied James, his visible relaxation acting as a stimulus to the other four men, who also relaxed. “What have you accomplished with your snorkeling lessons?”

  “Marcella and Julia are to the point where they are beginning to learn to dive and surface entirely using the snorkel for breathing. Jeanne and I have been teaching them.” Maria’s conversational style, as unembarrassed and frank as always, was soothing in the extreme for the other three women, who seemed to forget that they were naked, and joined the conversation as easily as if they were fully dressed.

  Julia: “I’m not very good at it, but I did enjoy getting to see all the pretty fish and coral formations. I don’t know why I never learned to snorkel before.”

  Marcella: “It was the most beautiful time I have ever had. The colors are so wonderful! And the fish! One knows we will have to eat some of them, but it gives me a pain in the heart to think of killing such colorful animals.”

  Maria: “Thanks for the water. We’ll get dressed and meet you back at Kitchen Tent after you have a chance to swim and cool off.”

  The shock of the confrontation was gone. Four naked women continued up the beach to their clothes while the five men headed down to the water to swim. Reactions were mixed, but while some were wondering if the encounter had really happened, others were breathing a sigh of relief that it had gone as well as it had. In a moment of crisis, James and Maria had once again led the way out of inertia into actions that produced a positive result. No one was happier with the outcome than those two.

  The women walked on to the place where they had left their clothing on the rocks and dressed themselves without a backward look. The men followed their progress briefly, then turned and dashed into the water. They swam out to the reef, then to the far point of Camp Beach, then back again. Ralph was the first to emerge, standing for a few moments to drip dry, then wrapped in a sulu, wet pajama pants in hand, walked to his lean-to to hang the pajama pants, and on to the Kitchen Tent to rejoin Mark in carving palm fronds.

  Jim and Ron took a somewhat different path; since Jim had not participated in the exploration of the island, they climbed the Front Wall and walked along it to the apex of the island. After looking around, they made their way down the other side onto the line of lava separating Camp Beach from Coral Beach and walked back to their lean-to. Having hung up their wet clothes, they went to the Kitchen Tent, and found Mark and Ralph involved in shaving palm fronds and the women discussing supper and evening activities. They conferred, selected heavy knives from the kitchen, and went looking for more palm fronds. By sunset, they had found another half dozen, which they dragged back to the Kitchen Tent.

  James and Paul were the stragglers. As they emerged from the water, Paul was still puzzling at the encounter with the women.

  “James, weren’t you at all embarrassed?”

  “About what?”

  “Being naked in front of the women?”

  “Paul, my attitude about nudity may be a little different from yours. In medical school, my classmates and I learned physical diagnosis by examining one-another before we examined patients. About half of my medical school class was women, and every learning group had about half women in it. They learned to do exams for hernias and how to check testicles and prostates by working on their male classmates. We learned how to do breast and female genital examinations by working on them. You stop being embarrassed really fast under those circumstances.”

  “Wow. And that works? I mean, it didn’t seem overwhelmingly sexy?”

  “It wasn’t the least sexy. Sex and nudity connect in your mind only because sex is one of the few things you do in the nude with members of the opposite sex around. But I would wager good money that those Fijians we saw dancing didn’t think there was anything about their dance that was sexy, even when all the women were naked. In fact, I imagine that those folks are all naked at this very moment because that is how they are when they live together on a day to day basis.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “Paul, were you embarrassed?”

  “Well, actually, I wasn’t. And it surprised me. I really thought I would be. I had actually supposed that I would have an instant erection, but I didn’t.”

  “It is rare that a man will get an erection in public unless there are special circumstances.”

  “Wow. Well, this is all an eye-opener to me. Thank you.”

  By this time, they had retrieved and donned their clothes and were walking up Camp Beach toward the Kitchen Tent. James turned off toward the infirmary and Paul continued on to the Kitchen Tent.

  James continued past his lean-to, where his wet sulu joined Maria’s wet clothing hanging on a tent post to dry, to the lean-to where Roger Applebee sat on a packing crate, staring off into the distance.

  “I’m back.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you want to talk?”

  “Yes.”

  “What would you like to talk about?”

  “Let me tell you my story.”

  “I would be delighted.”

  “I grew up in a small, rural town in inland Australia, Cunnamulla. My father was a school teacher, but the school wasn’t a good one. I got a pretty below-average education. Dad wasn’t able to compensate for the school the way Jayne’s dad did. My dad drank instead. Mom took to drinking too. My older sister mostly looked after us until she got sick. Between the middle of my last year in school and a few months after I graduated, one way and another, they all died. Mom, Dad, two sisters and two brothers. I was the only one left with a house and a big mortgage.”

  “What happened to them?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Automobiles, cancer, alcohol, guns. All gone. I sold the house, took the money and hitchhiked to Sydney. I found some work along the way and when I got to the city. It wasn’t easy.

  “I guess not.”

  “I worked at odd jobs and saved. I did my best so I would always be kept on longer at every job than the other temporary folks around me. But there was no permanent work. Every paych
eck, I saved some money. Sometimes I didn’t eat, but I always saved some money. Then the secretarial service idea came to me. I hired some girls to be secretaries, and they were good. I did the marketing. Soon, they were busy all the time and there was more demand coming. I hired more girls. The business grew some more. We moved to larger quarters.”

  “Wow! That’s impressive!”

  “I was about a year into it and about half way through my savings when Jayne came along. It was like she was my fairy god-mother. She was ten years older than me. I adored her. She saved me financially and she helped me to make the business better. I have made millions from that business. I have over 150 employees now.”

  “That’s good.”

  “I wonder how they are getting on.”

  “They don’t even miss you yet. We are still not past the end of your planned vacation.”

  “Yes. Well. Jayne was destined for greatness. And I followed in her footsteps. There were days when I guess I resented her a bit. But she was always so good to me.”

  “You resented her?”

  “Yes. We have been married 25 years. I guess anyone gets on your nerves from time to time. Sometimes, she wanted to tell me every detail of what to do with my business. And at home, she was always the one who planned everything.”

  “That could be a little suffocating.”

  “Suffocating. That is a good word for it. For the most part, I was glad that I didn’t have to plan everything because she did that. But once in a while there was something I wanted to do – but I was never allowed to.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I did as I was told. I never thought to object. Jayne’s judgment was always so much better than mine, you see. But once in a while, I would have liked the opportunity to make a mistake on my own.”

  “I can understand that. Was there anything else?”

  “No, I need to think now. Thanks for coming to talk with me.”

  “I’ll be back.”

  James rose and went to find Valerie. They talked briefly about how Roger was doing, concurring that he needed more contact with the rest of the group, and that he was showing signs of emerging from his grief. He indicated that Roger really didn’t need both Val and Shelly to be standing by, but Valerie was clear that it was their preference to be together, and that they took turns taking naps so that one of the two of them would always be very nearby.

  James walked to the Kitchen Tent. When he got there, he found that Ron, Jim and Paul had all joined Ralph and Mark in whittling on palm fronds while Marcella cooked and the other three women sat together talking animatedly.

  Supper

  The sun set in its slow and majestic fashion, sinking down into the western sky, turning itself, the sky and the world all the various shades of orange and red that make sunsets so remarkable. The whittlers worked on through the sunset, but found the gathering darkness an impediment to continuing their work. James watched the sun setting, musing on the day and thinking in wonder that this was the conclusion of only their fourth day on the island. It seemed so much longer. So many things had happened. Three of the sixteen people who had left the Fiji Queen alive were now dead, and James sincerely regretted the loss of each of those three lives. In the meantime, Jim was much better and Roger seemed to be processing his grief well. Julia, whose mild-to-moderate compulsiveness had threatened to overwhelm her, was now apparently coping with it. The group was pulling together, working together, and generally seemed to be feeling a greater and greater sense of being a team. Marcella had emerged from being almost a non-entity to being chief cook, much to everyone’s surprise and delight. Everything was going so well, it was amazing.

  As the orb of the sun finally disappeared, the last light from it was a flash of green. There was a hand on his shoulder and Maria’s soft and almost inaudible voice in his ear, “Did you see the green flash?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sunset is so beautiful.”

  “Yes. I like it too.”

  “I remember standing on a deck of the Fiji Queen in the starlit night after the native dancers. Do you remember too?”

  “Yes, with great pleasure.”

  “I would like to do that at sunset.”

  “Where?”

  “On Third Beach. Will you join me if I can get folks to grant us a little privacy?”

  “It would be my great pleasure.”

  This murmured conversation, overheard by no one, came to an end as Marcella announced that supper was ready to eat. She had prepared grilled steaks, frozen peas, and baked potatoes with sour cream. For dessert she had made bread pudding again. Everyone crowded around to get food and ate with gusto. A plate sent to Roger Applebee returned mostly eaten. As supper wound down about half an hour later, people started talking about what to do with the evening. The moon was now at first quarter and casting a lot of light until it set at about midnight. Unlike the previous night, everyone seemed to want to “stay in” – to be with the others and do something together.

  Marcella and Julia, cleaning up, were joined this evening by Maria and Jeanne. They took the kitchen knives away from the palm frond whittlers and washed them along with the others, so the whittling was really stopped now, though the dim light had really stopped it before. Mark, Ralph and Paul were putting away the palm fronds in a neat pile to be accessible in the morning. Jim and Ron were conferring. As soon as the kitchen cleaning detail was complete, everyone gathered on the sand around the fire at the end of the Kitchen Tent to discuss the evening’s entertainment.

  Let’s Tell Stories

  “One of the things we did when I was at camp was to tell stories to one another,” said Jeanne. “Maybe we could tell stories.”

  Mark: “Would they have to be true stories or made up stories, or does it matter?”

  Maria: “That sounds interesting. The story teller could choose either to indicate the truth or untruth of the story, or to leave it to us to guess which kind it is.”

  Jim: “We could take turns.”

  Paul: “A fellow named Boccaccio once wrote a book like that. It was in the time of the Plague in Italy and ten young people went to a country estate to escape the plague. They amused one another by telling love stories, some of which were very ribald, and everyone was required to tell stories as well as to listen to them. They went on telling stories for ten days, as I remember.”

  James: “Some of us may have interesting stories to tell about ourselves or things we have seen during our lives. Some may want to retell fairy tales. I guess some might want to make up stories to tell. It might all be very amusing as an activity by moonlight.”

  Jeanne: “It was a lot of fun at camp. Some people told ghost stories and stuff like that.”

  Julia: “We had camp like that in Girl Scouts. I didn’t know they did that in Tasmania too. How interesting!”

  “Oh, yes. And it was Girl Scouts for me too. This is really exciting. Don’t we have any marshmallows?”

  Marcella: “No, there are no marshmallows. But story telling sounds good to me too.”

  Valerie: “Sounds interesting to me, too.”

  The agreement became general, so they decided to begin immediately. The first to volunteer to tell a story was Marcella.

  Marcella began her story.

  “Once upon a time, there was a girl born to a large family in central France, near the city of Dijon. They were farmers but they were very poor; they had their land, but they had little else. They worked the little bit of land that they had, keeping goats, sheep, pigs and chickens. They raised crops of grapes, vegetables and grains, rotating crops and pasture. Every Saturday, her father would go to the Farmers’ Market in Dijon to sell eggs, home-made cheese and wine, and occasionally some home-butchered meat. With this money, they were able to purchase things they could not make – shoes, cotton cloth, sugar, salt, flour and spices. They had a small woodlot on their land, so they had fire wood that they didn’t have to pay for – and they
used the wood for their cooking stove and for heating the house in cold weather.

  “They were part of a small community of farmers who were all much like themselves – each with about the same amount of land, each with the same lack of money. There were about 20 families in the community, each family consisting of grandparents, parents and children of various ages all living together in old, carefully maintained houses on to which additional rooms had been added to create enough sleeping space. There was electricity available, but there were no electric lights and few appliances to use it. There was no plumbing or running water – each family had an outhouse and a well. The families lived, houses well separated, along several intersecting dirt roads, all within walking distance of a small church.

  “In winter, the children all went to school together at the church. There were a lot of children attending the school. Most started school when they were about six and stopped going when they were twelve or thirteen. A few went on to a school in Dijon run by the Sisters, and there was a minibus from the Dijon school that would come to get them each morning and to bring them home at night. After school, the girl learned to stoke and tend the fire in the kitchen stove. When she could handle a knife, she began helping with cooking.