Islands: A Novel Part 4

"Well, there's always the dunes," I said, and he laughed and took my hand and we ran up the steps and onto the porch and into the wind.

It hit us squarely when we reached the back door of the house, which was open. The front door was, too. A river of salt-sweet air rushed through it and I could see the entire big room and the front porch beyond it, and beyond that the lines of the dunes retreating down to the beach and the sea. The tide was coming in full, and white surf laced the blue-and-green water. I had a jumbled impression of old wicker and frayed gra.s.s rugs and a litter of newspapers and books, and coffee cups and crumpled napkins, and a huge, dead stone fireplace at one end. At the other, narrow stairs climbed up into the gloom of the second floor. A clutter of fishing rods stood propped beside the front screen door, and for some reason, a battered yellow sea kayak rested on the porch beside a rope hammock. There was no one in the house.

There was a note, though, pinned to the battered trestle table with a bottle of insect repellent.

"On beach," it said. "Bring more towels and some ice from the freezer and another umbrella. Welcome, Anny!"

It was signed simply "C." Camilla, I thought. My throat tightened.

"I don't have a bathing suit," I said in a small voice.

"There's bound to be one around here that'll fit you," Lewis said. "Go upstairs and look in the first bedroom on the right. That's Camilla and Charlie's. She's the keeper of the spare bathing suits. People keep leaving them; there must be twenty of them by now."

"I can't just go into their room-"

"Oh, go on. n.o.body cares about that. Sometimes you'll wake up and somebody will be rooting through your dresser drawer or your suitcase, looking for a stamp or your car keys, or most likely an Alka-Seltzer. This is a pretty socialist house."

I crept up the dark old stairs and into the tiny bedroom overlooking the porch roof. There was a big old mahogany bed, a rice bed I thought, piled high with yellowed lace pillows and covered with an ivory cotton coverlet. Except for end tables and a couple of lopsided lamps and a ma.s.sive old chest of drawers, there was little else in the room. It smelled of salt and camphor and generations. And then I saw a small alcove that held a slender writing desk and a lamp and piles and piles of papers and clippings and stamps and stationery, its envelopes undoubtedly stuck together with damp, and a beautiful green silkcovered book that I a.s.sumed was a journal or a diary of some sort. Beach roses wilted in a little bisque vase. Camilla's corner, the place where she truly lived.

In the bottom drawer of the chest I found the bathing suits, neatly folded in tissue paper and smelling of lavender. There must indeed have been twenty of them, and from the look of them, they spanned at least thirty years. I finally found a pink-flowered cotton suit with a little skirt that shouted Lilly Pulitzer, and put it on in the dimness, and crept back downstairs holding my shorts and shirt before me.

"It's perfect," Lewis said, grinning, pulling my folded clothes away from me to look. "It's you. If you'd put on a bikini, I'd have taken you straight home."

"The latest thing up there is one of those Rose Marie Reid things with the puffy legs and the fronts so boned that they stand a foot away from your b.o.o.bs. I had one in high school. I looked like the front end of a fifty-three Studebaker."

He laughed and kissed me on the forehead, and we took the towels and ice and the big, skewed umbrella and went down the front steps and across the long board walkway over the dune and onto the beach.

The tide was full in, and the sun stood directly overhead, so the whole beach and sea were a sheet of blinding glitter. The light swallowed the world; it was as if I had been stricken sightless by light. It even sucked in sound. I could see groups of people down the beach, under umbrellas, and children whooping and splashing in the surf, and gulls wheeling overhead. But I could not hear them, nor the soft hush of the surf as it ran far up the beach to lose itself in a smear of gla.s.s, edged with foam. I could smell, though: the primal, amniotic smell of the sea; the scent of hot sun on the sea gra.s.s, somehow like hay; even the ghost of someone's coconut sunscreen. And something else: under it all, the sick-sweet, acrid smell of the pluff mud from the marshes along the inland waterway, Charleston's official smell.

Beside me, Lewis said something, but I could not hear him. He began to laugh. He pointed to the beach, but I could not see what he was indicating. I might as well have been smitten by Apollo.

I turned to look at him and he took off his sungla.s.ses and put them on my nose, and the world snapped back again, clear and sharp shadowed.

In the damp sand along the beach, the words "Hi, Anny" had been incised, in letters three or four feet high. Behind the message, side by side like a chorus line, stood the Scrubs, waving and laughing.

I felt the wind lift the limp skirt of my ghastly bathing suit and explode my hair. If I could have turned and run, I would have. But Lewis's hand was firmly on my back, pushing me forward, and the Rockette line of the people who would be my friends, or not, came swarming up the dunes to greet us.

They were, I knew, all except Fairlie, about Lewis's age, brushing fifty and maybe edging beyond it. But they looked to me like those clever kids who came spilling out of a thousand movie barns, shouting, "Hey, gang, I know! Let's put on a show!" I got a confused montage of red-silk hair burning in the sun, white-blond hair over a narrow deeply tanned face, faded, utilitarian swimsuits, long brown limbs, and white teeth. Everybody was thin. How could so many middle-aged people look so gawkily, gracefully adolescent? There was one male shape that was thick barreled and broad shouldered, but he was so tall that he seemed a part of that thicket of slender trees. Lewis and I, standing there on the dune above them, were the only low-slung, earth-footed people in the group.

"I feel like a garden gnome," I whispered to him miserably, and he hugged me hard around the shoulders before they swallowed us up.

I was hugged and kissed on the cheek and borne down the beach to where a couple of sun-whitened umbrellas stood. Underneath them was a tangle of damp towels and rubber flip-flops and paper cups and a sweating cooler. Lewis dumped the ice and towels and the extra umbrella.

"Okay," he said. "Here she is. One at a time or she's going to run like a rabbit. Your fame has preceded you."

I sat down on a damp towel, feeling the chilly sand under it seep into the tights under the swimsuit's skirt. One by one, like supplicants to a queen, they came and sat or knelt beside me. Lewis presented and explained them. I knew that I would remember little of it, but I smiled and nodded like an idiot, thinking I must look like a black-thatched jack-o'-lantern in a too-small Lilly Pulitzer swimsuit.

Camilla Curry was tall and very slender, already stooped a little with the osteoporosis that would claim her body before too long. But her long legs and arms and her slender hands and feet were youthful, and her narrow, fine-boned face was as serene and beautiful as an effigy on a medieval tomb. She had thick chestnut hair that she wore in a loose chignon and brown eyes that glowed deep in a thicket of lashes. Her smile was a benediction.

"Well, Lewis," she said, "you finally got it right." And to me, "You must be something special. You're the only one Lewis has ever brought out here."

I felt a rush of love. In all the time I knew Camilla, that never changed.

Her husband, Charles Curry, was the tall, broad man I had noticed earlier. He was going bald, and his skin was weathered to the color of mahogany, and he gave me a hug that threatened to break my ribs. Charles was, I knew, the chief administrative officer at Queens Hospital, downtown, where Lewis and Henry McKenzie were attending physicians. Charles, I remembered, was one of the only two Scrubs, not including me, who was not Charleston born and bred. It did not seem to have hindered him in any way. He had married into one of the city's oldest and most distinguished families, and that did not appear to have hindered him, either. I thought I remembered Lewis telling me he was from Indiana, and marveled at the completeness of his a.s.similation. He was a bit overweight, and his skin was peeling like an old walrus's hide, and he had a hole in his trunks that just missed being obscene, but his gravelly voice and genial, honking laugh spoke of total self-confidence and I could see that his sheer vitality would have won him entry into more than a few pallid drawing rooms. I did not think that he cared, one way or another.

Fairlie McKenzie came next to be presented. I had the swift impression that I was being interviewed for a position as house-maid. Fairlie drew the eye like wildfire. Even in her late forties, it was nearly impossible to look away from her. I thought of what Lewis had said about the way she had looked as a young dancer just come to town, and I could see that girl in her as if in pentimento. Her heavy copper hair blew free in the wind and burned in the sun; she had sharp, foxes' features and astonishing blue eyes and she moved like a beautiful snake, coiled and utterly unaware of her body.

"Anny," she said, and Kentucky ran like rich sour mash through her voice. It was the Kentucky of thoroughbred farms, not coal mines. "We've all been waiting with bated breath to see what fabulous Mata Hari finally managed to get old Lewis to bring her onto sacred ground."

"Not much of one, I don't think," I said, and she laughed, but did not say anything else. I did not like Fairlie McKenzie, not then. She was sharp and sarcastic, and her dancer's body in her black racing suit fairly shouted "tacky" at mine in the Lilly.

Henry McKenzie came behind her. I loved Henry instantly. I thought most people would. Somehow, he radiated safety. He was the tall, fair-haired one I had noticed, and his brown body was as lanky and limber as a scarecrow's. He had hazel eyes that seemed half asleep, and a smile that you could only call sweet. Every girl's mother would have coveted him. It must have been a real loss to the Charleston gene pool when Henry picked the flamboyant Fairlie and moved her into Bedon's Alley. Lewis had told me Henry was a cardiologist, and spent much of his time, when he could get away, working with native doctors in such agonizingly poor places as Haiti and the wild green heart of Puerto Rico, and even Africa. I thought, spitefully, that there was probably no chance that Fairlie accompanied him.

"Lewis has told me about your work at the agency," he said. "It's wonderful work. I'd like to talk to you about it one of these days. All of the countries I visit need something like that desperately. Maybe you'd like to come with us sometime and just see how we might go about it-"

"Henry, for pity's sake," Camilla said in exasperation and affection. "I'm sure Anny's got a few other ideas about her life besides serving as an unpaid lackey for you in Hoo-Doo Hollow or wherever."

"Well," Henry said equably, "whatever she wants to do with her life, she sure is pretty."

Fairlie snorted. The rest of the Scrubs laughed. Suddenly, it was all right. For that moment, everything was.

Simms and Lila Howard came last, together. If you were familiar with the city, you would have thought "Charleston" immediately upon sighting them anywhere in the world. Lila was small and neatly curved, and had chin-length honey-blond hair anch.o.r.ed away from her face with sungla.s.ses on the top of her head. She was only lightly tanned, and had a heart-shaped face and large, far-apart brown eyes. She wore a boy-legged blue seersucker swimsuit faded almost to white, and there were little gold hoops in her ears. Her voice was honey and smoke, with Charleston's peculiar broad a embedded in it. Her smile was sunny. I could see her on some crepe myrtleshaded veranda, asking if anyone would like their drink freshened up a tad. Simms was neither tall nor short, and slightly built, with brown hair going gray. He had the sleepy eyes and slow voice of every downtown-born man I had ever met, and I could imagine, over his baggy, knee-length madras plaid trunks, the downtown uniform of khaki pants, blue shirt, and bow tie. He had the white lines of a sailor incised into his forehead and around his eyes; Lewis had them, too. Lewis had told me that Simms was probably the best sailor in the Carolina Yacht Club, and was a fierce and focused compet.i.tor. That must, I thought, be the side of him that ran the second-largest medical supply company in the country. Here, in the dappled shade of the beach umbrella, the only side I saw was the easy, slightly lazy man who was boyhood friend and adult companion. I imagined that Simms made a great deal more money than any of the others, and could add to that Lila's family's two-hundred-year-old largesse. But here on this beach, under this sleepy sun, he was first and foremost a Scrub. I liked him for that, and liked Lila for her generous smile. Lewis had told me that Lila sold real estate, rather desultorily, in a small firm of downtown women who knew every house south of Broad and when it might come on the market weeks before it was listed. He said they made a lot of money.

"You are a breath of fresh air in this bunch," Lila said, and hugged me. She smelled of lavender soap. Simms took my hands in his and smiled at me. "You are mighty welcome, Anny Butler," he said. "We were fixing to throw this boy here out of the house for not pulling his own weight."

"What he means," Lila said, "is that we take turns bringing the food, and of course the women get stuck with that, and Lewis's contribution, when he thinks of it, is to pick up some beer and boiled peanuts on the way out here. Prepare to help feed the mult.i.tudes, Anny."

"Will takeout do?" I said, thinking of my schedule of late nights and early mornings.

"We'd be happy to get takeout," Henry said. "We usually get tomato sandwiches and Kool-Aid because that's what we all ate when we were kids over here. I for one would consider take-out exotic in the extreme."

"You conveniently forget the gallons of she-crab soup and the tons of raw shrimp I lug over here," Lewis said, grinning.

"Yeah, but your Sweetgra.s.s housekeeper makes the soup and I happen to know you get the shrimp at Harris Teeter," Simms said. "The rule is, we have to suffer for our feasts."

"What's this "we" stuff?" Fairlie said from under the huge straw hat she had put on.

"Since when have you learned to cook anything but tomato soup and toast?" Henry teased her.

"I clean up. I wash dishes," she retorted. "While, of course, all you guys sit on the porch with cigars or go sailing."

Gradually the conversation slowed and faded, and everyone seemed content to simply sit in the shade and gaze at the sea. I was glad of the quiet, glad the initial ordeal was past me, and tried to slump as casually on the towel as everyone else while keeping my skirt tugged down over my crotch.

Silence soon fell, and people lay back on towels and stretched in the green-tinted umbrella shade, and gradually breathing deepened. Somebody coughed, and somebody else cleared a throat; outside the little kingdom of our umbrellas the sounds of children and radios and waves and gulls swelled and faded as sounds do when you are sliding into sleep. For the first time that day, I felt my muscles slacken and my breath deepen. I can do this, I thought, just before my mind flowed away with the hush of the sea.

"ALLEY-OOP! OOP! OOP-OOOP-OOP!"

A squalling, near-demented howl jerked me out of sleep, heart hammering, and before I could blink, hands on either side of me jerked me up off the towel and across the beach at a stumbling run. Blinking and gasping, I saw that I was at the center of a line of Scrubs, being hauled relentlessly and ingloriously toward the sea.

"Stop!" I cried. "Stop! I haven't been swimming in twenty years!"

But no one heard me, roaring and chanting as they were. Before I could get my breath, we were crashing through the surf and on out into rolling waist-deep water, and then a great swell took us and we all went under.

If you have not been into the ocean, really into it, in a very long time, you simply forget. You forget that to go deep, to let it take you completely, to bear you up on tides unseen in a green sun-shot stasis, is to roll and dive in weightlessness that is a sort of bliss. I think that it must be what those lovely, endless saline days swimming in the womb are like. That day, under the glittering surface of the sea off Sullivan's Island, I drifted, spinning slowly in the water, shadowy and cool in its depths, brightening and warming as you looked toward the surface. My limbs became free and supple; my hair floated out like a mermaid's; my ridiculous skirt flowed around me like silk gauze. I was lighter than air and more supple than a dolphin, and I did not want to come up. I could see why drowning might be seductive. When Lewis grabbed my wrist and jerked me to my feet in chest-deep water, I jerked back, frowning.

"Do you know how long you were down there?" he said tightly. "We thought we'd drowned you. Camilla has gone down the beach to the lifeguard station. What was the matter?"

"Nothing," I said dreamily. "It was wonderful. I'd forgotten how it feels to really be all the way in the ocean."

"Well, you managed to scare the s.h.i.t out of everybody," Fairlie McKenzie said. "What do you do for an encore?"

"Shut up, Fairlie," Henry said, and this time there was no softness in his drawl.

Lila ran down the beach to divert Camilla, and the rest of us gathered the towels and cooler and umbrellas and trudged back over the dunes to the house. The others bantered back and forth, but I followed along, head hung in mortification, feeling the suppleness leave my limbs and the grace seep out of my sopping skirt.

"I'm sorry," I whispered to Lewis as we came up onto the porch.

"What for?"

"For scaring everybody like that."

"Forget it," he said. "Sometime I'll tell you about the time Lila and Fairlie took the Whaler out on the creek and ran it aground in an oyster bed, and we had to get the Coast Guard to tow them in. You're small potatoes to that."

"It's funny, then, isn't it, that it was Fairlie who got so mad at me?" I said.

"That's just Fairlie. She's p.r.i.c.kly and outspoken, and she's jealous of anything or anybody who threatens to break up the group. But she's the most loyal friend I know. Once she's seen that you're no threat to the group dynamic, she'll take you in like a sister. Christ, you should have seen her with Sissy. She nearly flayed her alive with her tongue."

"Did Sissy mind?"

"I don't think she even noticed."

"You'd think that someone from outside wouldn't feel so strongly about the group," I said.

"I think that's precisely why she does," Lewis said. "Go get dressed and we'll start lunch. It's the main event out here. Lasts for hours."

I changed swiftly in the upstairs bathroom, the dim, underwater green of the old windows and mirror turning my puckered flesh fish white. I had locked the door, and when I came out, Fairlie and Camilla were walking around in the bedroom stark naked, towels wrapped around their hair, laughing and collecting dry clothes. Fairlie was smoking a cigarette. No one was hurrying.

"Hi, sweetie, are you okay?" Camilla said.

I nodded, vigorously, averting my eyes. I turned and went out the door and down the stairs in my dry shorts and shirt, hearing, behind me, the wasp buzz of Fairlie's laugh.

Well, I thought, my b.o.o.bs are bigger than hers. Next time I'll show her. I can get as bare a.s.sed as anybody.

We had lunch at the scarred old trestle table on the screened-in porch. The wind had dropped at the turn of the tide, and the lazy overhead fan stirred the thick air just enough to dry the sweat that stood on our faces. Cheeks and shoulders were flushed with new pink, and wet hair dried uncombed. Fairlie and Lila and Camilla had opened boxes and bags and brought out wonderful things: caviar on ice and little toasts, piles of fresh fruit, bread and cheese and cold shrimp and crab legs, thin slices of smoked salmon. Many bottles of wine sat sweating on a side table. Tomato sandwiches and Kool-Aid, indeed.

"I'm really sorry," I said. "I didn't know about the food. I'll bring double next time."

Fairlie's eyebrows rose: next time?

"Don't worry about it, love," Camilla said. "Lewis paid for the wine. Next time you can bring the entree. Chinese takeout would be just fine."

"I can do a little better than that," I mumbled. I determined then to make something so incredibly elegant and difficult that it would be greeted with applause and cries of ecstasy, and bring it the next time we came.

We ate and drank wine and talked and laughed for three hours. Music from a cracked white plastic radio curled around us: the Tams, the Shirelles, the Zodiacs. Beach music. The talk was mainly of their childhoods, or their first years together as a group: this beach and this house were not, I saw, about times and events outside it. All of them had Charleston lives full to overflowing: work, other friends, families, charities, boards, vacations, bad times as well as good. But out here, among themselves, they could live for a bit in a time-stopped parallel universe. I did not mind the stories of people I would never know, jokes I would never understand, references that I could never connect until someone patiently did it for me. I knew that over time Lewis would bring me into the web of the Scrubs. For now I was content to sit, full of shrimp and wine, and listen to the intricate verbal tapestry of this group of friends. I had never heard its like before.

At last the red heat went out of the sun and the beach and the sea grayed, and the sky over the inland waterway opposite the house began to flush and then flame with sunset. Over the ocean, now dull pewter, a young moon rode high. And still they talked, and they talked, and they talked. I did not ever want them to stop. This was the new language that might define my life.

n.o.body was in a hurry, or hungry. We sat until the thick, sudden darkness of the Low Country fell down over us, until the young moon whitened, until the swarms of stars came out. We sipped the last of the wine, and still they talked. When someone finally turned to me and said, "Tell us about you, Anny. Don't leave anything out," I found that I had almost no voice.

"I think I've forgotten how to talk," I said, and they laughed, even Fairlie.

"A not-uncommon syndrome out here," Lewis said. "I'll tell y'all about Anny Butler, because she'll leave the best stuff out."

And he did. He told them about my childhood and my mother and sisters and brother, and about the agency and what it was and what I did there, and about our meeting the bobcat on the dock at Sweetgra.s.s. I held my breath, but he did not tell them about the rest of that night. I thought, though, that it might be implicit, for everyone smiled indulgently.

"You really are a nurturer, then," Henry said. "That's good. So is Camilla, but we've about worn her out."

"Not going to happen," Camilla said from the semidarkness of the old rope hammock where she had nested. "Speaking of nurturing, though, I've been through the most awful thing I'll ever go through this week. I had to move Mama into Bishop Gadsden. There was just no way she could stay on Tradd anymore, even with Lavinia there all day and me and Lydia taking turns at night. If you turn your back, she's out the door; Margaret Daughtry found her out beside their fish pond last week, and that's on Meeting, a couple of blocks away. She was wearing her fur over her nightgown. How she got that far without somebody seeing her and bringing her home I'll never know. Well, except that the streets are full of tourists, and I guess for all they know, all old Charleston ladies regularly run around in their nightgowns and minks. And last week she put a pot on the stove and turned on the burner while Lavinia was in the bathroom, and the smoke alarm went off and the fire department came. Lydia and I get almost no sleep at all when we're there with her. Listening for her to start that awful shuffling around all over the house that she does at night. I can't let her fall down those narrow old stairs and I refuse to lock her in in her own house. And there's just no way we can have her at the house, not and keep on working, and Lydia has her grandchildren full time after Kitty...well, you know. So Charlie pulled some strings and got her in, and I took her over there day before yesterday. Oh, G.o.d, she thought she was going to a garden club meeting; it was just horrible. And it's a lovely suite, and a lot of her friends are already there, and Lydia or I will go every day, but I'll never get over feeling guilty. When I left she cried and said, 'When can I come home?' and I cried all the way home. Because I know what she means. She wants, by G.o.d, her own place, the place she's made beautiful and welcoming all these years, and her things, and her friends, and the street she knows, and to live by her own rhythms and call her own shots, and, most of all, not to walk down a hall or into a dining room and see a sea of old people who all look alike and smell like talc.u.m and pee, none of whom she can recognize. Of course she wants that. And I just don't know how to give it to her."

"Dementia," Lewis said. "It's a killer. I think I'd shoot myself, if I was still compos mentis enough to know I had it. Can y'all see Anny changing my diapers?"

I could. I could do that, I thought. As if he had caught the thought, Henry looked at me and smiled.

"It's something we're all going to have to face, if our parents live that long. And I guess we'll face it ourselves one day, and our children will feel the same way you do, Camilla," Lila said. For once she did not sound cheerful and perky.

"I just d.a.m.ned well refuse," Fairlie said tautly. "I'll be a bag lady before I let somebody dump me in a place I don't know, with a bunch of people I couldn't care less about, and I'd kill anybody who came near me with diapers."

"It's not something anybody wants to think about," Camilla said. "I guess I never did, until it came up. But I'm going to start planning now. I don't know what the plan will be, or how I'll make it work, but my children are not going to have to go through that with Charlie and me."

Camilla's two boys lived on the West Coast with their families, and did something unimaginable in Silicon Valley. I did not think Camilla and Charlie saw them very often.

We were silent, watching the moon leave its silver snail's track on the water. I knew that all our thoughts dwelled in some painfully bright, sterile place far in the future, a place that was inimical to life. A little wind off the inland waterway sprang up, and all of a sudden sun-reddened shoulders felt chilled. People began to stir and stretch. I did not want this magical day to end in that cold place.

"Let's just all move out here together, and take care of each other," Fairlie said. "We have all the medical help we need, and G.o.d knows Simms could get us enough drugs to keep us happy until the Rapture. There are stores just over the bridge and the hospital is twenty minutes away. We could easily find somebody to cook and clean and run errands."

She looked at me. I looked back, levelly.

"It's an idea, isn't it?" Lila said. "Not necessarily here...the weather's just too uncertain and we could get blown over to West Ashley in one night. But somewhere really nice, with a lot of rooms, or even little villas, with a central living and dining area. There are a lot of resorts like that around on the islands. I could start looking tomorrow."

"No resorts," Simms said. "I'm not spending my golden years on Hilton Head."

"No, really, I'll bet I could find something in a month," Lila said.

"We don't have to decide where now," Charlie said. "But we can decide to do it when the time comes. We could even find something where we could spend a month or two together and see if we can stand each other. Later, of course. Right now this house is perfect."

The mood lightened, and the talk drifted to the bizarre and ridiculous things we might all do together. Form a geriatric outlaw band and steal toilet paper out of hotels and motels. Storm Wal-Mart and have a sit-in in our wheelchairs. Skinny-dip in whatever body of water was near-for water must be part of it all-and raise such a scandalous commotion that property values in a three-mile radius would drop.

"Play doctor on the beach," Lewis said.