Outer Banks (33 page)

“Well…wow,” I said faintly. The room inundated and drowned every sense at once.

Ginger looked at me oddly, and then laughed.

“Oh, Kate, I completely and totally forgot;” she said. “This was your room; you designed the first one. The pretty white one. Oh, poor baby, no wonder…. This has been my place, mine and the children's and the grandchildren's, for so long that I'd forgotten it was ever Paul's. But of course it was…well. You can see that it's had a lot of living and a lot of love over the years. The kids adored it, still do, and the grandchildren just live out here. Literally. I do too, when Paul's gone, and he is, an awful lot of the time.”

“Where is his studio?” I said, still stunned by the metamorphosis of this room that had been the first fruit of my first love.

She shook her head ruefully.

“He hasn't practiced architecture in almost twenty-five years,” she said. “He did for a couple of years, right here, but for some reason he was having a hard time with it…he said the view was so sensational he couldn't concentrate…and then Daddy got sick and he started filling in at the mill, and that happened more and more often, and when Daddy died he took over. I don't think he's been unhappy with it; he's tripled the business. There are two more mills now. But sometimes I think it's a shame; he was just so gifted…. He's at the Norfolk house, or the one in Alabama, far more often than he is here. So he couldn't very well object when the children and I took this fantastic room over. And he didn't; he says himself it's the answer to a grandparent's prayer. Get them
out of the main house. Don't think he doesn't dote, though. He did on our girls, and he does on their kids. I'll be glad when he can retire and spend most of his time with us. I'll bet he hasn't been in this room twice in the past year…”

“You have girls…” It was not a question. Their photographs were everywhere in the big room, dark, slender, long-limbed girls with brilliant anonymous white smiles and a great deal of hair, caught in cheerleader uniforms and debutante dresses and wedding gowns, posing demurely with small children.

“Three. All of them with two or more children, all of them less than a hundred miles away. This place in the summer is worse than a juvenile and female house of detention. And the oldest, Genie, is pregnant again. Another girl; she's had ultrasound. Paul says one more and he's going to put out on a freighter for three years.”

One of the daughters uncurled herself from the depths of the vast sofa and came toward me, smiling. I put on my automatic social smile, but disappointment and faint resentment flared inside me. I had thought it was going to be just the four of us.

“Effie, dear love,” the girl said, and threw her arms around me. In a ringing moment of shock I realized that it was Fig Newton. Ginger, looking at my face over Fig's head, laughed aloud, and so did Cecie, behind me.

“My God,” I said, putting my arms around her and patting her numbly. “Fig, my God.”

“Never,” Fig said, “underestimate the power of a woman with a buck or two and a good plastic surgeon.”

Even her voice was different, low and throaty and with something like laughter in it, only, not quite. She almost whispered, like Jackie Kennedy Onassis, with the same result: you leaned close in order to hear her.

I put her away from me, and she laughed, and held her arms over her head, and turned around like a mannequin. She wore skin-tight stone-washed blue jeans tucked into high-heeled fawn
suede boots, and a meltingly beautiful russet cashmere tunic, outsized and hanging down to her knees. Under it, perfect bare breasts pushed at the fabric; I could see her nipples plainly. She wore no jewelry but a wide hammered gold cuff and gold hoops in her ears, and she smelled of something musky and bitter and Oriental. She was still as short as I remembered, but so slender and perfectly proportioned now that she looked like a life-sized doll, and the skin of her face and arms and neck and bosom was flawless and satiny, the color of very pale cafá au lait. Her face was high-planed and hollow-cheeked and full-lipped; her eyes were green and slanted, and her nose was…my nose. Mine to the last dimple, the last curve of nostril. Her teeth were white and there seemed to be a great many of them, and around her face a mass of tawny hair fell, full and leonine and glowing with strands of gold and bronze and platinum. She did not look real, and of course she was not: she was Barbie and Tina Turner and Lena Horne and Michelle Pfeiffer and…yes, more than a little…Kate Lee. She looked about twenty-five years old.

“Is there any Fig in there?” I said.

“Not so's you'd know it,” she laughed again, and hugged me a second time. “Everybody calls me Gina now, or Georgina, of course. You know perfectly well where the Stuart came from. I haven't been Fig since my first book came out, and that's more years ago than I want to remember. But as a special dispensation, just for you all, I'll be Fig this week. In fact, I want to be. That's why I called this meeting, in case you wondered. So we could all be us again.”

“I don't know if I can even think of you as Fig,” I said. “It's so…you're so…it's just incredible. I'm going to be tongue-tied by your fame and your looks all this week. I never saw such a difference in anybody. Oh, not that you were bad before; it's just that…”

She laughed again.

“I was bad before,” she said. “I was awful. Don't worry about
it. I always meant to reinvent myself the minute I had the money for it, and that's just what I did. I had the works, the minute the first book got on the
New York Times
list. Diet, teeth, face lift, nose and chin job, cheekbone implants, boob implants, contacts, liposuction, collagen, chemical peel…there isn't anything you can do to the human form I haven't had done. It took two years. I've never been sorry for a minute of it. You'll never know how much I wanted to be you at school, and by God, I've even gone you one or two better.”

“Ten or twelve better,” I said. “Lord, Fig, I never looked even remotely like that in college. You must know that.”

“I thought you did,” she smiled. “That was enough.”

We sank into the great soft chairs and the sofa and watched the light go out of the sky and sea, and drank the drinks Ginger brought us. They were outsized and strong, and I thought, from the glitter in her blue eyes and the slight slur in her voice, that she had had several. Her cheeks burned and she chattered. Fig drank white wine and Cecie sipped at bourbon in a balloon snifter, and we talked as if we had broken off this same conversation only a day or two ago. We talked and talked, and the sea went from grape to gray and finally to black, and the fire burned low, and still we talked. We talked of what we talked of when we last sat together: of people we all knew, and things we all remembered, and songs we had all sung, and movies we had seen, and professors we had had, and the clothes we had worn; and we laughed, and we drank some more, and we sang a little, and the years fell away and we were not women remembering the girls we had been, but somehow, those girls themselves. We were nineteen and twenty, and all that was closed to us reopened, and all things seemed once more possible. The pain and disappointments and flaws of our lives since vanished; a strange foreshortening of time took place. It happened over and over that week. We could not seem to dwell long in the present. From that first twilight, we all seemed to know that at some point we must speak of our lives as women, acquaint each
other with the roads we had walked to mid-life, catch up with each other…but not now. Not yet. We all seemed to want to put off the moment of growing up. When Ginger started to ask about husbands and children and careers, we shouted her down.

“Okay, let's just go around the circle and say who-what-when-where-how,” she said, “and then we can go back to libeling our Tri O sisters. I'll start. Ginger Fowler Sibley. Married twenty-eight years to Paul Sibley, mill owner. Housewife, mother, and grandmother. Three daughters, seven grandchildren, winter address Norfolk, summer address Nag's Head, Outer Banks, North Carolina.”

She pointed at Fig.

“Georgina Stuart, aka Fig Newton,” Fig said. “Novelist.
Bestselling
novelist. Five husbands, legion lovers, no children, four movies, two mini-series, three hundred million talk shows and tabloid interviews. Houses in Manhattan, Aspen, Malibu, and Puerto Vallarta. Current lover, but he's a secret.”

There was a pause, and then Cecie said, smiling, “Cecelia Rushton Hart Fiori. Widow of Vinnie Fiori, Boston Municipal Police Sergeant. Mother of two boys, Leo and Robert, one for each side of the family. Grandmother of Susannah Fiori, age two. Living now in the same house I married into, in Boston, with my mother-in-law, Cosima, who is an invalid. Housewife, nurse, cook, cleaning lady, and medieval herbalist.”

We all laughed at that. She did, too.

“I am, though,” she said. “I've been studying medieval herbalists and herb garden for years and years. I have a herb garden of my own, in my backyard, and I've been working on a book about them off and on since Vinnie died. It's almost done now.”

I looked at her, charmed and intrigued.

“Cece, that's wonderful,” I said. “Knowing you, I'll bet it's an incredible book. I'll bet you anything somebody would love to publish it. How far away from finishing it are you?”

“My time's up. Your turn now,” she said, and the others chimed in.

“Well…Kate Lee Abrams,” I said. “Married twenty-eight years to Alan Abrams, architect. I'm his partner in a design business and we live in a gray-shingled house sort of like this one, on the beach at Sagaponack, Long Island. I'm a gardener and…I guess that's it. Designer and gardener.”

“Children?” Ginger said.

“No,” I said.

Ginger started to bring out photographs of her children and grandchildren, and again we protested.

“We'll get to all that,” Cecie said comfortably from the sofa.

“Better still, let's not get to it at all,” I said.

Fig looked over at me. In the firelight her face looked like that of a movie star, or a department store mannequin. The strangeness of it brushed me again. She was simply so…not Fig…

“Oh, but I want to know,” she said in her soft purr. “I want to know everything about you, Effie. I want to know every single detail.”

“I'm not going to have you put me in one of those books, Fig,” I smiled.

“I wouldn't do that,” she smiled back. “I'm off duty. Besides, we're all just plain too boring for one of my books. It would never sell in the supermarket.”

“You, boring, after all those husbands and things?” Ginger said. She pronounced it “hushbands.”

“Oh, God, Ginger, I made all that stuff up,” Fig said, grinning. “Well, almost all of it. It's good PR, that's all. What kind of writer would I be if I couldn't invent a glamorous life for myself? You all know I've been writing my life ever since I was eighteen.”

“The diary!” the three of us shouted together.

“The diary. And guess what. I brought it with me. The one I kept then. And as a special treat, if you're very good, I'm going to read the chapters about us to you every night, after dinner. Us
in the flesh, the way we were. Would you like that?”

“Oh, yes,” Ginger cried. “God, what fun!”

“Just like Scheherazade,” I said. Somehow the thought of it made me uneasy.

“I hope not,” Fig said. “She was all set to die if she ever got finished telling her stories. So, you guys, look out! When I'm all done…it's death!”

“Whose?” Cecie said interestedly.

“All of us, I guess,” Fig said, smiling at her. It was a sweet smile, full and natural. I could not get over it, or her. “Us the way we were, anyway.”

“I'd rather think that it would be just the opposite,” Cecie said. “That it would keep us alive…the way we were.”

“Let's don't talk about it,” Ginger said, getting up clumsily out of her chair and stumbling a little. “Let's do it.”

And so, that first night, after we had cooked and eaten a mess of spaghetti in the kitchen of the big shingle house, we came back out to the studio and built up the fire, and Ginger poured a round of brandies, and Fig sat down on the rug in front of the fire and opened the familiar, battered old fake crocodile book, and read from it. And in the firelight of the house on the Outer Banks, we all went back.

She read the passage about her initiation into Tri Omega in the new, intimate voice, and I was there, there in every aspect and in all my senses, in that dark, hot, candle-and-carnation-smelling room at Randolph, with the bells and the incense, and the sweat of all those tightly-packed young bodies, and the effluvia of their terror, and the droning on and on of the Latin, and then more bells, and more incense…My head swam, and my stomach contracted. I closed my eyes and across the miles and the years Fig's face flickered in close, the face of that other Fig, heavy and fleshy and crazily rapt, great eyes swimming behind the glasses, lips loose and wet, tongue playing in and out…those lips, that dreadful hair, the thick waist and nonexistent neck…

“…and at the very moment of the kiss that would make me her sister, she was so overcome with emotion that she fainted, and we had to revive her,” Fig read. “My heart sang like a lark within me. I knew that we would be bound together forever, sisters in Tri Omega, and even more than sisters. I knew in that moment that she felt it, too, that great bond between us. Oh, Effie, my sister, I will love you always, and will strive all my life and with all my might to be worthy of you. I will make you proud of me. I will never let you forget me, just as I will never forget this holy night.”

There was more in the same vein, and then she fell silent. I could not think what to say. Surely she had seen me vomiting into the sink in the Tri Omega kitchen. She could not have escaped seeing that. Had she really thought, all these years, that I had been overcome with sacred love for her?