Beautiful Girls (8 page)

The ship’s tenders take them to the uninhabited island, which has a public address system and plumbing. They stand in the barbecue line with their
respective mothers, listening to “Surfin’ U.S.A.” over the P.A. “Hey, sexy,” Adam whispers into Eve’s ear, “I can see your ass through that skirt. Can you ditch your mom?”

Eve nods and grins. “Can you ditch yours?” she whispers back.

“Right after I get my soy dog.”

Eve and her mom sway to the music with the other passengers as they munch on hot dogs. Slowly Eve wanders away and pretends to take a stroll. Once she’s out of eyesight she hightails it around the tiny island, reaching into her backpack and tearing open the condom wrapper.

She sees Adam hightailing it toward her from the opposite direction. They run and embrace. Eve suddenly feels shy beneath the sunshine. Adam pulls her behind a shrub and yanks off her bikini top.

“Not so fast.”

“In about five minutes this place is going to be crawling with senior citizens.”

“Tell me something nice,” she coos. “Something sexy.”

“Do you want to do it or not?” he asks.

“Of course.”

They undress and lie on Eve’s wrap and have a quickie, a hot, sweaty quickie while Eve squints into the sun. When it’s over, they lie for a moment like corpses, tangled together. Then Adam pulls out and
rolls off the condom. They kneel naked in the sand, fumbling with their bathing suits.

“That’s one way to do it,” Eve says with a small smile.

“Sorry,” Adam says.

“No, no,” Eve says.

“You all right?”

“Uh-huh.”

They hear voices and quickly get dressed and fling themselves into the sea. Fellow passengers stream past them. Some wave. Eve is relieved when Adam swims over and takes her wet hand. “Let’s go back,” he says.

“And here I’m thinking you’re swimming over to whisper sweet nothings in my ear.”

“Sweet,” he whispers into her hair. “Nothings.”

Eve changes back into her wrap skirt while Adam pockets the gooey, sandy condom. Slowly, they start to back away from each other in the directions from which they came.

“See ya,” Eve says.

“Later,” Adam says.

Facing each other, they creep backwards until Eve wonders who will turn away first. It will be her, she’s ready to turn. Seconds pass, but she doesn’t turn. She becomes very still. If she turns away now she might miss what’s supposed to happen next.

It’s Adam who turns with a quick wave of his hand. Eve watches him grow smaller as he jogs away.

Adam has beaten her back to the other end of the island. He’s brought reading material and lounges under a palm tree. Eve sits with her mom, who’s baking under the sun, and they watch Adam slap at the insect circling his head.

“I thought hippies had gone out of vogue,” her mother murmurs.

“Hippies are timeless,” Eve says and sighs.

“They don’t make a lot of money.”

“Oh Jesus, Mom.”

“I want a grandchild,” her mother says. “I just think you’re barking up the wrong tree with that one. He probably doesn’t have much of a pot to piss in.”

“How romantic!”

“
Romance
?” her mother says. “You’re almost thirty years old. You need a husband.”

“I’m having some
fun
here!” Eve yells.

“You don’t look like you’re having fun,” her mom says.

Adam is still swatting the air. He flutters both hands before spinning away in a tizzy. Eve marches over to him and slaps the torturous mosquito against his forehead, leaving a bloody smudge.

“Fuck!” Adam says.

She realizes then how pissed off she is, not specifically, but generally; she’s a very pissed-off person. She flicks the mosquito away.

At dusk the crew builds a bonfire and the passengers form a single-file line and bunny-hop around the flames. The sky is pink and soft, beckoning. Eve gazes into it, transfixed by its perfect beauty and indifference, until she is forced to join the bunny-hopping line, holding onto the fleshy middle of the old man in front of her as they hop across the sand. There they are—fools and bunny-hoppers—hooting and hollering under a glorious sky.

Adam and Eve take the last tender back to the ship. They smile too widely at each other, and for the first time since she’s met him, which seems a long time ago, she can’t think of anything to say. As they climb onto the floating dock to board the ship, Eve’s aware of her naked ass beneath her wrap. Looking back at the tiny island, she realizes she’s left her bikini bottom behind.

Later when Adam and Eve meet up in the Water Hole, he is morose and fiddles with the olive in his martini. He hunkers down in his seat and complains about his depreciating Oppenheimer account and one of his exes, who is a ratfink. He gazes too long at the beautiful Asian waitress who brings them fresh drinks. As Eve gets buzzed on fuzzy navels, Adam begins to look strange to her. His head seems perfectly round and he wears the loose-lipped look of a
moron. How has she not seen this until now? Adam is a stupid bore. He drones on and on until she screams into his ear, “We’re on the Arabian Sea, for Christ’s sake.
The Arabian Sea!
”

He looks at her, alarmed. “Chill,” he says.

She lets the anger rattle around inside her for a minute, realizing that the air and the sea and the light have seduced them, conspired with them, pushed them toward this moment, toward nothing at all.

What’s clear is that Adam is a mostly nice guy who’s got some issues and is ultimately not the one; what’s also clear is that she’s not yet ready to know. So she clings, literally, to his arm, pawing him, while they get sloshed in the Water Hole beneath the stars.

Why has love eluded me? she wonders. Love is such a natural thing, after all. Is she too ridiculous, too cranky, too old, too set in her ways, too lusty, small-minded, immature? Other ridiculous people have found love, like her co-worker Lucy with the sleepy mascara-crusted eyes, who’s addicted to “Drama in Real Life!” stories in
Reader’s Digest
. Slurping her drink, Eve gazes up at the night sky—so high above her head—and thinks,
when will it be my turn? Mine
.

They dock in India, in the port of Goa, and Eve ditches everybody. She ditches her mom, who’s visiting
Portuguese cathedrals, and Adam, who’s visiting Hindu temples, and Adam’s mom, who’s going shopping in Panjim. Instead, Eve hires a taxi and goes to the beach, where cows lie on the red sand looking soulfully at the waves.

Eve hasn’t lost anything. It’s not her own spirit that concerns her, it’s Adam’s which has attached itself to hers. His ghostly residue is as useless and cumbersome as an extra foot. He’s living inside her, infecting her dreams, her thoughts, her every second. That’s the way it is with Eve. It’s an ancient story. How she wishes she could knock him out with the heel of her hand, like water from her ear.

So she does what she can. She spends the day swimming in the Arabian Sea, bobbing in the waves. She walks along the shoreline and catches glimpses of shells as the tide rolls out. Digging, she discovers finger-long snail shells—purple and gold—slender tornadoes. Some are broken, most are perfect. Such treasures. As the light begins to change, she lies on the sand near the cows while her taxi driver sits on the hood of the car, reading the newspaper.

Later she asks him to drive, to just drive. They ride through twisty tree-lined lanes. She stares out at houses the colors of Easter eggs, where chickens, dogs and cows wander through yards. Sparkly clothes hang on clotheslines and catch the last of the light. The taxi zooms with the windows wide open,
and the flotsam of Adam embedded in her crocodile brain begins to shed itself like dandelion fluff until she imagines she might be free and clear.

M
RS
. A
LLARD CALLED
J.D.’
S MOTHER EARLIER IN THE
day and asked if he could babysit since their regular girl had the flu. His mom said, of course.

“Ah, Ma,” he groaned, when he came through the back door and she told him the news.

“Have a heart, J.D. honey. They’re stuck, and they’re going to some kind of dinner party,” his mom said, looking delighted, the way she often looked, even now as she rooted through the refrigerator, opening lids and sniffing brown saucy things.

J.D. wasn’t sure he ever looked delighted. In recent Christmas photos he noticed he looked glazed, not with boredom exactly, but with something dull and gloomy, and he wondered about his mother, radiating goodness and luck. He stuffed a Twinkie in his
mouth and thought about objecting to the babysitting, but he liked the idea of getting out of the house.

“It’s money in your pocket,” his mom said.

“I’ll be loaded,” he said with his mouth full. “All right. I’ll do it,” he added, as if he had the final say.

J.D. had occasionally babysat the girls, Annabel and Sophia, when the Allards lived next door. But last year they had left their three-bedroom ranch and moved across town to—according to nosy neighbors—a tiny two-bedroom on a lumpy piece of property, and J.D. hadn’t seen one of the downwardly mobile Allards since. J.D. was now a high school freshman with bad skin and a meager social life and no real Friday evening options; sometimes he’d go to one of his friends’ houses and they’d listen to music and toss a tennis ball against the wall, passing the time. Soccer was his thing, but it was January and the streets and tree branches glinted with ice.

J.D. plopped in front of the TV and stared at an old black-and-white movie. The remote didn’t work and since he was too lazy to get up and change the channel, he watched a young woman with a hairdo in the shape of an ocean wave embrace a young man under a street lamp. “I would do anything for it not to be true,” the man said, pulling away from her and holding his hat over his heart. “But what we had here is over, dollface. We’re through.” J.D. watched their eyes glisten, he saw their sadness. He had his own little
storage bin of strange, sad feelings he tried to keep under lock and key. He felt something like heartache when he thought about the mysterious girls, walking the hallways of his school. There were so many new faces since the graduated eighth graders from both the town’s junior highs and at least half of the Catholic school spilled together to make up the freshman class. His drama class was filled with many of these exotic girls. There was Susan Steen with her magical hair. He had watched her pull on one of her tight curls, pulling it past her shoulder to almost her elbow and when she let it go it sprung back up to half its length. There was Katie Taylor, who he heard danced ballet. Her spine was straight and her neck long, and even though she was a little chubby, when she walked nothing jiggled. There was Luann Morley, who still had a child’s body and a loud, high laugh. She could do a cartwheel on the balance beam. One day after school he walked by the gym and saw her strong arms stretched taut on the beam as her little legs parted in the air, and then as if her legs had eyes they landed to safety, one chalky foot after the other. She wobbled only the tiniest bit. He wondered about all these girls and what they were like to talk to. What did they think about? Would he ever know? Thinking like this was sometimes delicious, sometimes terrible.

He hadn’t wanted drama class; he wanted shop,
where they made tool racks and bar stools, but freshmen got leftovers and he was rerouted to the arts. “A
thespian
,” the old guidance counselor shouted in J.D.’s ear, handing him his schedule. It would have been intolerable if it weren’t for these girls who filled the seats in front of him. From his seat in the back of the room, he could stare, unseen, at the back of their fine heads and wonder about them.

Two weeks ago, the drama teacher had asked the class to form groups, choose a play from the shelves, and present a scene. J.D. sat quietly, waiting for one of these girls to turn to him, which they were bound to do considering he was one of only three boys in the class; there were boy parts, he knew. But this didn’t seem to matter. He watched as desks were turned and groups sprung up. He watched and waited and found himself alone.

Then Dawn Martinelli poked him in the arm. “I guess you’re stuck with me,” she said.

“I am?” Dawn Martinelli was a big, beefy girl with bad skin, like his, although her pimples were red and mean and gathered in small clusters, while he had a couple of large, sluggish bumps. He knew Dawn Martinelli’s type, from her chicken soup smell to her huffy attitude. He had her pegged.

“You’ll be Vladimir and I’ll be this Estragon,” she said, thrusting a copy of
Waiting for Godot
at him. “We’ll do this scene where they call each other
names. ‘You abortion! You sewer rat!’”

“You lobotomy,” he whispered.

“You butthole,” she said. He inched his chair away from hers, looking at the gray sky. January was one of those months that went on forever.

“We’ll be bums. It’ll be wicked. You’ll see,” she said.

J.D.’s mom dropped him off at the Allards’ at seven o’clock. The house was small and bright with a yellow living room, a little yellow kitchen and a short yellow hallway, sprouting two bedrooms and a bathroom, which were probably yellow as well, J.D. thought. “John Dewey, how are you?” Mrs. Allard smiled. She was cheerful and dumpy, wearing pink lipstick.

The kitchen table had been moved into the living room and a rickety card table was pushed up next to it. Both tables were covered with a paper tablecloth. Six assorted chairs were gathered around the tables, and each place was set with a bowl, a spoon, and a napkin. Mr. Allard in his coat and boots carefully placed a dish of melting butter to the right of the bread basket, then the left. “Where do you think, Johnny?” Mr. Allard asked, when he saw J.D. watching him. J.D. shrugged.

“Girls, girls, John Dewey is here,” Mrs. Allard called.

Shy at first, Annabel and Sophia clung together and whispered into each other’s hair. They wore flannel nightgowns and plaid slippers. Annabel was eight and could be a chatterbox. J.D. remembered her once standing on his shoes and holding his hands, discussing nimbostratus clouds; she and J.D. had dazzled each other with the weather report. Sophia was younger and quieter and had dark, dark eyes. Both girls had chin-length hair and mild cases of static electricity. A couple strands rose, almost elegantly, toward the ceiling.