Outer Banks (36 page)

“I didn't assume that. I just…wish things had been better for you,” I said.

“Well, they're perfectly okay,” she said, smiling. “What about you, Katie Lee? I know about your nice Alan…funny, isn't it, us two WASPS of all WASPS, marrying a Jew and an Italian? It's like a bad WWII movie…but what about the rest of it? How's your life working out, old Kate?”

“I lead a charmed life,” I said lightly. “I'm almost embarrassed to say it, but I really do.”

“Oh, Kate…nobody does,” she said, smiling gently. “Isn't there anything at all you regret? Not, I hope, anything to do with the beautiful and talented Paul, but anything…”

“The only thing I really regret in all my life, besides Stephen, and you can't call that regret, is that I never said goodbye to you,” I said. “And that I never wrote or called you. I thought I had an excuse, but I didn't.”

“I'm not sorry,” Cecie smiled. “I couldn't have stood it if you'd said goodbye. That's why I put your bags out in the hall, brave soul that I was. And I could have called and written you, too; I knew what the Paul and Ginger thing must have done to you. But I didn't. I think I needed to keep you just like you were.”

“And am I?”

“To an almost remarkable degree,” she said.

And of course, she was right. I was. We were. Or rather, Ginger and I were; we worked enormously at it. Fig, though, was simply too un-Fig even to retain a shard of her past Fighood; and Cecie, though on the surface still the delicately dry, unworldly sprite we had known, was something else too, now. Oh, she laughed with us, and sang, and did the dance steps and drank the drinks and swapped the remembrances we did, but that other thing that she was sat apart and watched us, with, it seemed to me, an odd commingling of tenderness and uneasiness. It made me just a hair constrained with her, just a shade puzzled and off-balance. I did not know for what she watched.

Fig watched, too. That, at least, had not changed. While we giggled and romped, bridled and sang and capered on the beach and indulged our clumsy sillinesses in the evenings, Fig watched and watched and watched. And smiled, and egged us on with remembrances of her own and entreaties to tell about this and that that we had done, and of course with the evocative and wildly fanciful entries from the ever-present diary. And watched.

“You look like a little ol' hoot owl perched over there on that stool, watching away,” Ginger said to her once, a trifle owlishly herself, after dinner, after we had howled and protested and giggled at the passage from the diary where I had read poetry to her and changed her life, once again, forever.

“I hope you aren't getting any ideas about writing about us.”

“What's there to write about?” Fig smiled. “You act just like you did back in school, and I've already got that down.”

“If I'd brought my camera I could blackmail you all with the Junior League and the Welcome Wagon and the Design Council and whatever else you hold dear,” Cecie said one afternoon when Ginger and I, in our sandy-rumped bathing suits, were on the beach reenacting Tri Omega rush skits and songs. “I have a revolutionary idea: let's dress up and put on adult clothes and go out to dinner tonight. My treat. I want to see what you're going to be like when you grow up.”

“Ringading-ding-ding-ding, ram it up your ass,” Ginger and I sang loudly. “Good times are coming soon!”

Cecie got up and went into the house and did not come back. I found her asleep on her bed later that afternoon. I did not mention the little scene. It made me ever so slightly angry, and worse than that, for some reason, it frightened me a little. What was the harm in being nineteen again for a while? There had been a time when she would have danced along with us, had indeed done just that. We had, after all, come to the Outer Banks to recapture each other. Hadn't we?

The weather held in a molten luminosity so perfect that it was almost eerie. I had never seen light like that, never felt and smelled air as soft and pure and heady, never tasted so sharply the savor of freshness and salt and smoke from early morning fires. Food tasted glorious, and we ate like wolves; liquor tasted fine, too, and we all drank more than I supposed we did at home. I hoped that was true of Ginger. Fig had brought several cases of exemplary spirits, and not an evening passed that Cecie and I did not walk Ginger between us to bed. I would have worried more about it, I think, if she had not been so totally Ginger when she was tipsy: sweet and funny and clumsy and endearing, precisely the oversized nineteen-year-old who had come to us all those years ago. Ginger drunk was still Ginger, only more so. I put it out of my mind.

One day melted into another, and except for grocery shopping we never really left the beach. We kept meaning to, kept planning nebulous trips to Manteo, and the Gardens, and the
Elizabeth II,
jaunts in the beach tractor, fishing and crabbing expeditions, a sunset tour of the Sound in Paul's runabout. But somehow we never went. Later, we said to each other. Later. There's plenty of time. I remembered that we had done the same thing that autumn we had come from Randolph. Planned and planned, but never managed to leave the gilded September beach until the last day. The day we had driven far down the coast road to where the
ferry left for Ocracoke, and seen the great, haunted dunes and the primeval maritime forest, and that wilder sea, and the awful and wonderful little Carolina Moon Motel. Thinking of it, I grinned.

“Ginger, is the Carolina Moon still there?” I said. “Do you remember, when we rode down there in your father's car?”

“Still there and going strong, Magic Fingers and all. Do you know, Paul Sibley actually took me there for our honeymoon night? Can you beat that for elegance?”

I was silent. So was Cecie.

“Lord, I remember he was going to take Effie Lee there,” Fig said gaily. “Look what you escaped, Effie.”

“I'd forgotten about that,” Ginger said softly. “I really had, Kate.”

“Oh, Gingerrooney, so had I,” I said. “Don't even think of it.”

“Oh, my dears. I
am
sorry,” Fig said remorsefully. “I have an awful mouth.”

“True,” Cecie said levelly. I glared at her.

“You just aren't going to give her anything, are you?” I said to her indignantly later, when we were alone. “I wish you'd lighten up on her. She's been perfect this trip. She's gone out of her way to make things nice for us; God knows how much she's spent on liquor and gas for that monstrous car, and the jet that brought you down and will take you home, my dear. Where is your gratitude?”

“Not, apparently, where you think it should be,” Cecie said unrepentantly. “I just can't get a handle on her. At least, before she was Fig, awful as that was. Now she's…I don't know who. Or what. It makes me nervous.”

“Maybe, just maybe, she's what she seems,” I said. “A very successful woman who had the guts to make herself over completely and worked like a mule and made a mint. And is having a glorious time with it.”

“Kate,” Cecie said seriously, “Fig is not what she seems and she never has been. You of all people ought to be able to see that.”

But I was unwilling to see anything but what lay light upon
the surface of me: sun and stars, water and horizon and golden light, lavender twilights and the girls I had loved long years ago. And I was unwilling to be anything but one of those girls. Later. Later…

But there was not much later left.

A night came toward the end of the week when it all blew up. I think we had all been waiting for it, on some level; the days had passed too uniformly in perfection; the laughter had gone on too long. The girls of that long-ago autumn had come too vividly alive. Nothing of that transcendence can last. But we had tried our best to keep it with us.

On this night, we gathered after another day in the sun for the drinks that had become our ritual, and to hear the excerpt from the diary that was, like Scheherazade, keeping our tender ghosts alive. We were, I think, addicted to Fig's fulsome words by then, or at least Ginger and I were. I felt Cecie going further and further inside herself as the days and the excerpts wore on. I don't think the others knew it, but I did. I had seen her do it often enough.

We sat in the sunset in the big studio, watching the sea turn pink, then the silver of crumpled foil, then violet, then gray. Ginger touched a match to the beautiful gray driftwood logs that were piled in the fireplace, and they roared into life, giving a whispering, beating heart to the room. We drew close around it. The night outside seemed, suddenly, very black and full of a vast old silence. I shivered. Endings shimmered unseen in the air like moths.

We drank a great deal that night. A restlessness seemed to have gotten under all our skins, and we could not seem to settle; we changed positions around the fire, and drank our drinks fast, and refilled them often. It seemed to me we worked harder to keep the foolishness going. We were able to keep the skins of those young girls around us, but only just; a fire is not a young thing.

In the leaping light I looked at us. A strange kind of firespawned pentimento prevailed in the dusk; through the used flesh of the women the taut, sweet flesh of the girls shone clear, and
under that the strong, green young bones. And under those, somehow, the simpler, fresher hearts. At that moment we absolutely
were
Kate and Cecie and Ginger. Even Fig was nearer to Fig. It was as if we had been practicing rites all week to take us back in time, and all of a sudden, to our surprise, while we weren't looking, had succeeded.

Take Ginger. In her cutoff blue jeans with the hole in the seat, her faded sweatshirt, her sneakers with the toe out, her straw hair in pigtails, her freckles shining clear in the bare tanned face, the battered plastic ukulele with the Arthur Godfrey attachment her father had sent her at school on her scarred knee, there was nothing left of the painted and beringed and caftaned fat woman who had met me on the stairs the first night. Or Cecie. Whether or not she wished it, she had shed the years like a sunburn, and, wearing an old nylon fishing hat over her white curls and a pair of back-buckled Bermuda shorts I knew she had had since college, was that other Cecie, my Cecie, once more. Fig, sitting across from the three of us on the sofa, was not that old Fig, but she did not seem the outrageous, lacquered chimera who had come to Nag's Head, either. She was laughing and singing along with Ginger and me, to the faltering strains of the ukulele, but mostly she was watching. As she watched, she smiled. It was, I thought, a sweet smile, and open. As if, somehow, what she saw pleased and delighted her to her core. I felt a surge of affection for her. Surely Fig had paid her dues with us.

Rising to get a drink I saw my own reflection in the wall of dark windows. I stopped, frozen. I had not seen the face of the girl who looked back at me for a very long time, but I knew her. I had first seen her in a watery old mirror in a bathroom in Kenmore, standing next to the tall, beautiful man who was her father. I heard his voice across all those years: “That girl doesn't belong in this town.”

“You were right, Daddy,” I thought, on a rising surge of grief. “I didn't. But you forgot to tell me where I did.”

I did not want to feel the grief and so I made the drink quickly and drank it down. The grief receded. Hot gaiety ran along my veins.

“What's the dirtiest song you know, Ginger?” I shouted over the ukulele's plonk.

“Is the F word permitted?” she yelled back. Her eyes glittered and red spots burned hectically in her cheeks. She looked as if she had a high fever. I knew that she was on her fourth drink.

“Sure,” I said.

“NO,” Cecie shouted. “Come on, y'all.”

“Oh, be a sport, Cecie,” Fig smiled. “I use it all the time and get paid a bundle to do it.”

“Yeah, but I have a choice about whether I have to read that or not,” Cecie said mildly. “When Kate and Ginger crank up to sing, nobody has a choice.”

“Well, then, without the big F…I guess maybe it's this,” Ginger said, and struck a chord, and sang: “Tingaling, goddamn, get a woman if you can; if you can't get a woman, get a clean old man…oh, she wasn't very pretty and she acted sort of shitty so I hit her in the titty with a hardboiled egg.”

Ginger and I shrieked with glee, and Fig laughed too, and cried, “More, more!” Ginger complied.

“Oh, first trip up the Yukon River, first trip up the Michigan shore, there I met the Mistress Flanagan, otherwise known as the Winnipeg Whore. Some were drunk and some were drinking, some were lying on the floor, but I was over in the corner, screwing the hell out of that Winnipeg Whore…”

“That's awful,” Cecie said, holding her nose. “That's enough. Stop. Have another drink.”

“The cabin boy, the cabin boy, the dirty little nipper,” Ginger howled. “Stuck a piece of glass right up his ass and circumcised the skipper.”

Cecie put her glass down with a thump and got up.

“Enough,” she said. “You're regressing five years with every
word. If you're going to do that, I'm going to go make a sandwich.”

I don't know why it struck Ginger and me as so funny. The liquor, doubtless. We roared with laughter, gasped, beat each other on the back, rolled around on the rug before the fire. Fig, smiling, said, “Don't go, Cecie. It's diary time. Then we'll eat and sober up.”

“Why not skip the diary this one time?” Cecie said good-naturedly. “I think these guys need food more than nostalgia. And I know I do.”

“Oh, but this is the best one by far,” Fig said. “I've been saving it specially. This is guaranteed to bring back all our golden yesterdays.”

“Am I the only one thinking about tomorrow?” Cecie said wryly. “The dawn's early light is going to feel pretty grim to you two.”

“Hey, Cecie, remember?” I shouted over the uproar. “Remember Dorothy Parker?