Outer Banks (34 page)

“Well…Lord, Fig,” I said. “That's really something.”

“Isn't that a crock of shit?” she laughed, and all of a sudden something within me eased, and I laughed too, and found myself liking this ridiculous, flamboyant mythic creature, whoever she was, very much indeed.

“But God, it was everything to me then,” she said. “I've never forgotten that night, no matter if I did make it sound like something Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote on a bad day. I never will forget it.”

“Me, either,” Cecie said equably. “If old Kate hadn't gotten the vapors I would have. Those goddamned things always did go on too long. I wonder if they still do it that way?”

“Can you doubt it?” I laughed. “Of course they do, bells and kiss and the scales falling from the eyes, the whole nine yards. Listen, can anybody remember the grip, or those terrible words that must never be spoken aloud?”

We all began to laugh, and give each other the Tri Omega grip, and cast about to remember that holy of holies, the secret motto, but nobody could. So we settled for having just one more drink, and singing several explicitly scurrilous fraternity party
songs that Ginger knew, and then, finally, we went to bed.

At her own request, Fig was sleeping on the sofa in the studio.

“Can't resist waking up to sunrise over that ocean,” she said. Cecie and I walked Ginger down the spiral staircase and into the big house, and saw her between us into the big bedroom that, I remembered, had been her parents' in those long-ago days. She slurred and stumbled, but she stayed on her feet.

“Be okay,” she mumbled. “Be fine in the morning. Just need a little nap, and I'll be fine. ‘Night,' night, sleep tight, don't let the bedbugs bite…”

We shut the door and walked down the hall to our room. It was the same one we had shared all those years ago, that looked over the deck and straight out to sea. I sat down on the bed that had been mine, and looked out into the darkness.

“Full circle,” I said. “What goes around comes around…or something. You want to raid the fridge, or are you sleepy?”

“I'm pretty sleepy,” she said, and I knew from the tone of her voice that she was still feeling strange with me, and shy, and that in a moment she would go down the hall to the bathroom and change into her night clothes there. A powerful wave of love and memory rocked me. I wanted, suddenly, to take her in my arms and hug her again, as I had that afternoon, and feel the light bird's bones, and the rapid beating of her heart.

When she came back into the room, I had turned off the light and lay silently, still looking out to sea. I thought of the night of the great storm, when I had seen her far down on the beach, plunging luminous and naked into that awful black surf, swimming far out to sea with the lightning playing around her and the silver rain pummeling her. I remembered that she had turned over onto her back and taken the full brunt of the storm in her face…

As on that night, I heard her slip into her bed, and heard for
a while her light, even breathing. Somehow I knew she was not asleep.

Presently I said, my eyes still closed, “Did you know I saw you that night, swimming out in the storm?”

“I thought you did,” she said. There was a hint of laughter in her voice, but she did not say anything else.

I fell asleep then, and dreamed of Stephen. He was the age he was when we lost him. Five. I dreamed that we were at the circus with him, Alan and I, and that when the elephants marched into the ring in a circle he slipped away from us and was lost in the crowd. I ran after him, crying, but could not get to him through the mass of people. He called back to me, though.

“It's all right,” he said. “I'm going to go with the elephants. I'll be back when it's over.”

I woke up with tears running out of my eyes and onto the pillow. I lay still, struggling to calm the pounding of my heart, to will the tears to stop. In the next bed, Cecie stirred and sat up.

“You okay?” she said in the darkness.

“I had a little boy,” I said. “Stephen. He drowned when he was five.”

In the darkness there was silence, and then she said, gently, “I know. Fig told me before you got here. I don't think Ginger knows.”

“How did Fig know?”

“How does Fig know anything?” Cecie said. “You going to be able to go back to sleep, or you want to get some milk or something?”

“No, I'm okay,” I said. “I'm sorry I woke you.”

“It's okay,” Cecie said. “I wasn't asleep.”

We lay in silence until I thought she had dropped off, and then she said, “We don't lose them, Kate. When you love them they don't die. I have to believe that, and I do. It's the only thing
I really know, but I know that. Whoever you love is alive as long as you are.”

“Oh…I wish so,” I said. “I hope so.”

“I know so. Go to sleep,” Cecie said.

And before I could even answer her, I did.

A
RE
you mad at me?” Ginger said the next morning. “Have you been mad at me?”

We were walking along the tide line, kicking our feet through the water. The beach was empty as far as we could see; only the two of us and the wheeling seabirds and the lazy tide moved in all that blue and tawniness. The wind was down and the long grasses on the dunes were motionless.

It was mid-morning. The night had been chilly and the fresh coolness still lingered, though the sun on our shoulders and the tops of our heads was hot. We wore sweatshirts over shorts, and had left our tennis shoes and socks on the steps leading up from the beach to the house. The house itself rode dark and imperial against the steel-blue sky. The old cottages stretched away down the beach like old, black-clad matriarchs. Here and there smoke curled from a chimney, speaking of occupancy, but we saw no one
on the decks and porches and verandas, either. The water was surprisingly warm; I remembered Ginger's father telling us, long ago, of the gentle current that cut in beneath the colder one along these old Banks, that warmed the water and birthed the great storm seas. The air was so clear that we could read the lettering on the naval helicopters from Norfolk as they scissored over. Their clatter was almost the only sound in the morning, that and the hushhh of the low tide. I was rested and almost idiotically content. Time rocked at a standstill.

“Why on earth would I be mad at you?” I said, smiling at her. “It would be easier to be mad at a Lab puppy.”

“Well, I got pretty squonked last night, and I know I'm not a lot of fun to be around when I do that. Didn't you and Cecie put me to bed? Or did I dream that?”

“We pointed you toward it,” I said. “You did the rest. Come on, Gingerrooney, you know I'm not going to get mad at you because you got tiddly in your own house. This is me.”

She smiled.

“Nobody ever called me that but you and Paul,” she said. “And he hasn't, in years. It's nice to hear it again. I guess what I mean is, have you hated me all this time because of…him? I know you must have been awfully hurt and mad right after it happened, but I hoped all along that your life would be so wonderful that it wouldn't matter after a while…”

“I wasn't mad at you even then,” I said truthfully. “I never blamed you for that. I know how—persuasive he could be; can be. I couldn't have withstood that, either. I didn't, as you well know. And right after that I met Alan, and then it truly didn't matter. Alan is the best thing that could possibly have happened to me; I should have written you both a thank you note. I can't even imagine a life without him.”

“I'm so glad. I really am,” she said. “I've felt awful about it ever since. I knew it was wrong; I knew it when I was doing it. But…I was so crazy about him, Kate. I'd have committed murder for
him. I guess I still would. Sometimes I still can't believe that somebody like me has him. Even if a lot of it was the money. Anyway, I wanted to tell you officially that I love you and I've always been sorry. I'd have told you much earlier; I did write you, several times. I just couldn't find you.”

“I know,” I said. “I guess I was hiding, for a while. But it was never from you. Come here and give me a hug.”

She did, and I hugged her hard, and she held me for a moment, and then let me go. Her body felt slack and somehow ill in my arms, far too soft. But she looked more like my old Ginger this morning. She had left off the heavy makeup, so that the freckles and the beginning age spots showed clearly through the leathery tan, and she had pulled her white-blond hair into a long, fat braid that hung down her back. Her shorts were faded and frayed at the hem, and the sweatshirt was ancient, and said Currituck Yacht Club. Her blue eyes were veined with red, but they danced with Ginger's old deviltry. I thought she seemed years younger than when I had first seen her yesterday.

“It is time,” she said, “for a Bloody Mary. The hell with coffee and mineral water and fresh juice. Let's cut through the crap and get our perspectives straight.”

“If I start on Bloody Marys now I'll be back in bed by noon,” I said. “And I just got up. But coffee sounds good.”

We turned and plowed through the soft sand back toward the steps and the house, stopping to collect our shoes. The deck was still empty, but Cecie's tennis shoes and socks, ridiculously small, lay in a jumble under the porch hammock. I wondered if it was the same one that had dumped Paul and me onto this deck, half naked and blind with desire, all those years ago. It looked weathered enough to be. I felt nothing, looking at it.

“Have you seen Cece this morning?” I said. “She was gone when I woke up.”

“She's down the beach looking for specimens for her rock garden,” Ginger said. “She thinks she might be able to get beach
primrose and beach pea and golden asters to grow in Boston. It's the same kind of salt soil, only colder. She's experimenting with a new deep kind of mulch that she thinks will get them through the winter. It's an awful shame she lost the house on the water in Virginia. It would have been the saving of her, after Vinnie died and the boys left. There'd have been room for that old dragon of a mother-in-law, and she'd have had her garden, and her boat, and crabbing and the Bay and all her friends and people around her. As it is, I think they live in two rooms of that awful little house and shut the rest off, to save electricity. Vinnie never managed to buy it; she still rents. Jesus knows how she manages.”

Had Cecie not been permitted anything of her life, then? Not even the water of her beloved Chesapeake, not even the big, shabby old house she had grown up in? I knew that she would have stood to inherit it; she was all the family the grandmother and aunts had.

“What happened to the house?” I said. “I thought surely it was hers by now, and that she went there, maybe in the summers…”

“The aunt who inherited it from the grandmother went crazy as a loon and left it to some kind of awful fundy preacher,” Ginger said grimly. “He seduced her away from Mother Church and the other aunts and Cecie; turned her against all of them, and damned if she didn't leave it to him and his church. Cecie tried to take it to court, but Vinnie was failing badly by then, and the boys were in college and the old woman had moved in, and she just ran out of money. She could maybe have gotten it back, but it's been so long now that she just hasn't tried again. I don't think she can afford to, anyway. Don't tell her I told you. It must have almost killed her, but she doesn't talk about it.”

“I'm glad she's had you to talk to,” I said, aware of a craven lick of jealousy deep inside me, like wildfire smoldering. “She doesn't talk to many people about things that matter. It really helps.”

“Well, I wish she had, but in fact it was Fig who told me, and then swore me to silence,” Ginger said.

“God, how does Fig know the things she does?” I said. “There was a time that Cecie would have bitten out her tongue rather than tell Fig anything. I can't imagine them on terms that intimate.”

“Fig just knows things,” Ginger said indulgently. “She always was curious, you know that. She always could find out anything. And now she's a famous writer used to research, I guess she has her ways. She's been good about keeping up with me. Cecie says she's had a good many letters and calls from her, too. You have to admit, Kate, she's not what she was. Money and reputation aside, she's a whole lot better now than even I ever thought she'd be. Success can make a whole different person of you, I guess.”

“I'll say. Success and surgery,” I said, only half sourly.

Far down the beach a dot that I knew, even at that distance, was Cecie coming into view, moving slowly along the tide line. When she got nearer I saw that she was carrying a big paper sack, and a small hoe. She walked with her head down as if she was studying the sun-dappled shallows where the green water broke into foam and rushed back to the sea. Occasionally she kicked and foam flew. The sun glanced off her white hair as from spun glass, or sugar.

“She still looks like a little kid, doesn't she?” Ginger said.

“Yes,” I smiled. “A little boy in a white wig. Put the red back in those wild curls and you'd have Cecie Hart thirty years ago. It's uncanny.”

A big golden dog, a retriever, burst from between the dunes barking maniacally and made for Cecie, and she dropped her sack and hoe and held out her arms, and the dog ran into them, rearing up and putting its paws on either shoulder, licking her face and beating the air with its tail. She hugged it hard, burying her face in the golden fur of its neck; on its hind legs, it was taller than she was. She pushed it down and turned and dashed with it into the
waves, splashing and capering, sending sheets of diamond water flying. The dog bayed its joy and I heard, faintly, the glissando of Cecie's laugh. In a moment she came out of the water and trotted up the beach toward us, waving, the dog dancing along beside her. In a bit it gave one last bark and cut sharply away from her and loped off home. Ginger and I were grinning as she came up the beach steps toward us, wet to the waist and laughing, I would have given anything in that moment to wrap her in the sea's timelessness with me, and simply keep her there. Cecie belonged to the water like a fish or a gull.

“Cecelia Rushton Hart, go and change your clothes immediately,” she said in a prissy, precise Virginia drawl, looking down at herself, and I heard the voices of the nuns and the old aunts and the grandmother.

“Better do it; you'll get twat rot,” Ginger said, grinning evilly.

“Age cannot wither nor custom stale your infinite variety,” Cecie said mock-acidly to her. “Nor your foul mouth. Morning, Katie. Thought you were going to sleep forever. I was going to get the
1812 Overture
and blast you out again, but all Ginger has is old Elvis Presley records. Philistine that she is. Y'all scuse me. My…you know…is kind of cold.”

As she went into the big house Fig came down the curved stair from the studio. She was wearing soft black leather pants poured over her tiny figure, and a flat-knit red Italian sweater and short scarlet boots, and she had pulled her lion's mane of hair back and tied it with a black and red scarf that, even without the signature, I would have known was Hermès, and large black sunglasses. Like Ginger, she wore no makeup except a slash of red lipstick on her wide mouth and a smear of white zinc oxide on her nose, and even in the pure gold light of morning her skin was as flawless as tawny marble. No lines, no crow's-feet, no furrows, no wrinkles. She did not look like a child, as Cecie did, but something
else entirely, both young and old as time. A statue, perhaps, or a painting come to life…

“It's Joan Collins in the flesh,” Ginger said. “Or do I mean Jackie?”

“Neither one,” Fig purred in her new throaty voice. “I'm better looking than Joan and I write better than Jackie, or else I've wasted an awful lot of money. How are you all, chickies? Isn't it a glorious morning?”

Cecie came out in clean khaki Bermudas and a Tri Omega sweatshirt, and we sat at a round wooden table in the sun, as it climbed the vault of the sky toward noon. Ginger made Bloody Marys and brought them out with a tray of shrimp dip and crackers, and we drank them, lulled with sun and salt wind and the seamless perfection of the September day and the cell-deep simplicity that the open sea sings into you. We drank a second round, and then another. We talked a little, lightly and lazily, and laughed a lot, and by one o'clock the air around me had begun to shimmer as it invariably does when I have had too much to drink. I squinted at Cecie and her face swam, and I closed one eye and she came into focus. She saw me, and laughed.

“I'm glad my mother-in-law can't see me,” she said. “She'd burn the place down lighting candles for my soul. She's absolutely sure I hit the cooking sherry after I've put her to bed. And I do.”

“I'm glad Paul can't see me,” Ginger said. She had had four or five drinks to our three, and her face seemed to be melting slightly. Her voice, like the night before, was slurred just a bit. “He gets absolutely crazy when I drink. He watches me like a hawk, and I think he measures the bottles when he comes home from a trip. He's gotten so damned ashb…ashb…what is it when you're very austere and don't eat and drink much? something…stemious…that he doesn't even drink wine with meals anymore. I used to love our dinners together, and our drink at the end of the day, watching the sunset. He won't even take me to parties anymore.
So I don't drink at all when he's around. But boy, do I make up for it when he isn't!”

She laughed loudly. Fig laughed with her merrily, but Cecie and I did not. The morning lost some of its gold.

“Remember that night we went up on the roof and got drunk, Ginger, the night you made your grades for initiation?” Fig said.

We all groaned.

“That's still the worst hangover I ever had,” Ginger said.

“And I think it's still the most glamorous thing I ever did,” Fig said. “After all these years, I still do.”

The three of us hooted in disbelief. The night had had a certain naive sweetness to it, perhaps, or at least the part before Ginger began to cry and Fig threw up over the railing. But by no stretch of the imagination could it be called glamorous.

“Come on, Fig,” Cecie grinned. “Tell us what the most glamorous thing you ever did was, really. Or at least, the one that can be repeated. There must be some doozies, the life you've led.”

“Well,” Fig said, putting her head to the side so that her hair hung down over her shoulder like a palomino's tail, “it might have been the time I was in Venice for Carnival, just after
Melissa
came out, and I made love in a gondola with a gorgeous stranger all in black with a Venetian Lion's mask on. I never saw his face. But I sure did see his cod, as the Elizabethans used to say; it was a foot long and had a red ribbon tied around it…”