Life's a Beach (5 page)

I had the hang of this whole garden thing now, and I was adding soil to the cornflower pots without even being asked. “Yeah, that might work. It’s not like they’d remember whether it was true or not at their age anyway.”

“You’d be surprised what you’ll remember, honey.”

“Did you have a lot of boyfriends back then, Mom?” I’d never really thought to ask before. It had always seemed like my parents must have come into the world joined at the hip.

“My fair share.”

I wondered what
my
fair share was. Maybe I’d already had it, and I’d kept right on going past the person I was supposed to end up with. Maybe I was with him now. “What made you pick Dad? How did you know?”

Even to my ears, these sounded like questions that should be asked when you were, say, Rachel’s age. Maybe I’d even asked them back then. Maybe I’d thought I didn’t need to. It was amazing how you could think you knew everything as a teenager, and a couple of decades later, you realized you’d never had a clue.

My mother was just kind of standing there, watching a worm work its way back into the dirt. “The truth?”

“Sure,” I said.

“He was cute, and he was crazy about me. And he could dance.” She shook her head. “I was so young, it didn’t seem all that complicated. You pick a nice boy, and you figure out how to make it work together.”

She brushed some dirt from her hands and started a little grouping of pots off to the side. “I will say that the dancing part has held up quite nicely. Never underestimate the joy of being married to the one man at the party who knows how to dance.”

Maybe I could call up every guy I’d ever dated and invite them all to a dance-off.

My mother straightened up, a pot in each hand. “Okay, these are for you and Geri. We’ll put two of each perennial in Geri’s garden. You can dig yours up as soon as you have a house of your own.”

I tried to imagine ever having a house of my own. Maybe it could be the bonus prize at the dance-off.

“Unless you want to plant yours over at Noah’s?”

“No, no,” I said. “Geri’s house is probably safer.”

5

RILEY AND I WERE FOLLOWING BRIGHT YELLOW PLASTIC
signs, which were tacked to utility poles and planted in freestanding buckets of cement at the edge of the road.
SHARK SENSE
BASE CAMP
they proclaimed in tall block letters as they pointed the way with black arrows. As if we needed directions to the beach we’d been going to all our lives.

I was telling Riley the St. Joseph story. “So,” I continued, “I waited just the right amount of time. You know,
one Mississippi, two Mississippi
. Then I shoved them all out and slammed the door, and they went flying down the stairs.”

It was a slight exaggeration, but Riley laughed his squeaky laugh just the way I knew he would. “That was a good one, Aunt Ginger.”

“Thanks. Mom, I mean Gram, was pretty mad, but so was I.”

“Mothers always act mad. I bet you even do that with Boyfriend.”

I turned on my blinker. “Boyfriend is a cat, Riley. I’m not his mother.”

“Then why do you walk him in a stroller?”

“It’s not a stroller. It’s a, well, sort of a cage on wheels.”

“I rest my case,” Riley said. He tilted his head back and finished off the milk. “So who’s this St. Joseph again?” he asked when he came up for air.

As if I hadn’t skipped more Sunday school, or CCD, as it came to be called midstream, than I’d attended. I thought hard. “I think he was Jesus’s father.”

“Wasn’t that God?”

“No, his earthly father. I’m pretty sure he’s the patron saint of home and family. And Realtors.”

That seemed to satisfy Riley, or maybe he was just distracted by the fact that we were pulling into the beach parking lot. A guard found Riley’s name on the list, and then directed us to a roped-off parking area. After we got out of my Jetta, another guard pointed the way to something he called the “holding area.” This should have been my first clue that it was going to be a long day.

We milled around with a couple dozen people who looked as lost as we did. I didn’t recognize anyone, which raised the distinct possibility they’d brought in ringers from out of town. Either that or I needed to get out more. Finally, a fast-talking woman holding a clipboard and wearing a baseball hat came over and said something about AD.

I leaned down and whispered to Riley. “Did she say she’s ADD?”

Riley looked just like Rachel when he rolled his eyes at me. “AD means Assistant Director, and if they say ‘background,’ that means they want the extras. But I’m not really an extra, I’m Boy Number Four.”

I patted him on the head. “Don’t worry, honey, you’ll be Boy Number One before you know it.”

Riley looked up at me. “Is that a joke, Aunt Ginger?”

Riley seemed to be losing both his comic sensibility and his faith in his guardian. “Sorry,” I said. “It’s early. But, how do you know all this?”

“They sent us stuff. We got two whole pages of intrucksions and a permission slip.”

How nice of his mother to share them with me. Especially the
intrucksions
that, by the way, reminded me that despite being extremely advanced, I’d still said
cimmanon
at Riley’s age. Fortunately, it seemed like the AD person was repeating the pertinent information. If we absolutely had to leave the holding area at any time, we should let her know. Refreshments and the bathhouse restrooms were available. If we stayed long enough, we’d be given lunch. That last part sounded vaguely threatening to me, as if we’d only get lunch if we behaved ourselves, but maybe I was just being paranoid.

“Each scene,” she continued, reading from her clipboard, “as you may or may not realize, is filmed from a number of different angles, which are later edited together. Each angle requires the same careful camera placement and lighting as all the others. The illusion which must be maintained in the final product is that it is all happening at one time, in one place.”

She took a moment to look down at Riley and the other kids, who probably had absolutely no idea what she was talking about. “It is important for you to remember what you do and when and where you do it in relation to everyone else. You’ll have to repeat it within the same scene, and it must look identical each time. We call this ‘matching action.’ Now, any questions?”

A cute little boy about a head shorter than Riley put his hand up.

The AD woman nodded at him.

“Are you the teacher?” he asked.

I DIDN’T HAVE A SCRIPT,
of course. Geri was probably reading the guardian’s copy this very minute, assuming there was such a thing. But the way it looked from here, Rachel and Becca weren’t too far off with the shark bait thing. Riley, aka Boy Number Four, stood in a small circle of kids on the sand close to the edge of the water. I hoped none of them would get a sudden urge to go swimming, since the very shark that had brought the movie to town was out there.

Actually the shark was in a small bay about a hundred feet or so away from the beach. It was separated by a shoal of eelgrass, but I imagined that with the right camera work you could still make it look pretty scary. And, honestly, it
was
pretty scary to think of that dorsal fin pacing back and forth above the surface of the water just over in the lagoon. I looked over at the group of journalists, scientists, and tourists clustered on the rocks behind a cordoned-off area that was being protected by police and assorted officials.

I was sitting just out of camera range at a child-size picnic table under a freestanding awning, the kind you might put in your backyard if you wanted to have a cookout and didn’t have a shade tree. I glanced over my shoulder to see what looked like half of Massachusetts standing back behind the ropes. The movie crowd was double the size of the shark crowd, and twice as many cops stood by to make sure nobody made a break for the action. I couldn’t resist giving a smug little wave to the people who couldn’t get in. It was like being back in high school, but this time I was part of the in crowd.

The
Marshbury Mirror
was a weekly, so we all relied on
The Daily Catch
for breaking news. I picked up a copy of today’s paper, which someone had kindly left within my reach.

SHARK NEEDS REST, MORE ELBOW ROOM

After attaching a satellite-tracking device to the great white shark with a 6-foot spear, researchers coaxed the 1,700-pound female to within 100 feet of an outlet to the open ocean. A spokesman for the Executive Office of Marine and Wild Life Affairs said the move put a lot of stress on the shark, so a rest was recommended. He said this would conveniently coincide with Worldwide Studio’s location shooting of
Shark Sense
, scheduled to begin this week.

Locals appearing as extras in the movie include Marshbury Harbormaster Craig Bates, Marshbury School Committee President Mary Mulberry, and the twin daughters of Marshbury Beautification Commission Chairperson Allison Flagg.

I wondered what it would take to get a job in Wild Life Affairs.

I looked up from the paper. “Can you give me another inch on that dolly track so I can get a wider reveal?” I heard some important-looking guy sitting in front of a video monitor ask. I thought about sauntering over to see if I could talk my way into a small part in the movie, but when I stood up, another AD-looking guy gave me a warning stare. I smiled sweetly at him. He kept watching me and didn’t smile back.

I sat back down and took a sip of my coffee. There was a flagpole dug into the sand in the center of the kids’ circle, and brightly colored ribbons fluttered from the top of the pole. A couple of adults stood next to the pole with their hands on their hips, talking in low voices to one another.

“I’m Allison Flagg, the twins’ mother,” said the woman sitting next to me at the picnic table.

“Hi,” I said. “Ginger Walsh. So, what’s holding things up?”

She reached over and deadheaded a beach rose. “It looks to me like the educational consultant and the multicultural dance people can’t agree on the proper way for the kids to do the maypole dance.”

“Wow,” I said, “you can tell all that from here?”

She adjusted her terrycloth visor and looked out from under it at me. “My twins have worked before. Identical twins are quite valuable in the movie business.”

“I’ll have to remember that next time,” I said, for lack of a better comment. “Maybe I could even try for identical triplets.”

“Which one is yours?” she asked.

I pointed. “The cute little guy with blue shorts and freckles. Actually, he’s my nephew, Riley.”

“Oh,” she said. “No children of your own yet?”

“Nope,” I said. “Totally child-free.”

Allison Flagg rested her hand lightly on mine and lowered her voice. “I know a great fertility specialist. And I have some extra eggs frozen if you need to borrow any.”

6

I SPLASHED WATER ON MY FACE IN THE BATHHOUSE,
trying to cool off. Why was it that perfect strangers thought they had the right to butt into my private life? It just made me so angry that they somehow thought they knew me better than I knew myself. And the worst part was:
What if they did?

The find-a-guy-to-make-babies-with thing had never been a part of my dreams. Even when we were kids and Geri handed down her Ken doll to me, I ignored him and wanted G.I. Joe, honorably discharged from service and suitably dressed for an exotic adventure. And when it came to real live boys, Geri and her very first boyfriend seemed like an old married couple. I was pretty sure I remembered being lulled asleep upstairs by the sound of them discussing health insurance on the living room sofa below.

I, on the other hand, had to admit to an early fetish for AFS students. Hans from Denmark, Pato from Guatemala, Joshua from New Zealand. By the time I graduated from high school, my photo albums had a real United Nations feel, and I had big plans for my first passport.

A friend and I bought backpacks and headed for Europe as soon as we graduated from college. We planned to visit at least a dozen countries, staying at youth hostels and traveling by train, but we never made it out of England. We met two guys on the beach, Archie and Owen, or something like that. They took us to a fancy spa, complete with gambling, dancing, and therapeutic waters. They told us they were the spa managers and hired us to work for them selling discount packages back in the States. It was a fifty-fifty split, which would have been a great deal, except that it turned out they didn’t actually work for the spa. Looking back, it was the first of a long line of men and sales jobs that always promised more than they delivered.

I yanked a sheet of paper towel from its dispenser and managed to pat my face dry without dislodging my eye makeup. I walked out of the bathhouse. As I rounded the corner of the building, I almost plowed right into a curly-haired guy in jeans and a black T-shirt. I stepped to my right. He stepped to my right, too. We both stepped to my left.

“Dance?” he asked.

“Too early for me. But thanks.” He had hazel eyes and his hair was kind of a sandy color.

“So,” he said. “Having fun yet? It gets pretty boring, doesn’t it?”