Summer of Love (4 page)

“Find the matching blue and white mug and drink in all life has to offer. Everyone deserves a”

The words cut off after ‘a’ — everyone deserves…what? I don’t know now, but I will if I can find the mug that matches the green one. With my next clue in hand, I take my blue coffee mug from Tink, the note from Aunt Mable, and the mugless handle, and head back to my car. Who has the matching mug? And why?

My cell phone rings, breaking the quiet and my thoughts. “Are you here or what?” Arabella asks.

“I’m on my way — seriously,” I answer, “I’m just going to call my dad and tell him I’m alive and well and then I’ll get there.” So I call home, have the perfunctory but obligatory talk with my dad about being safe and having but not too much fun, and then drive my cluttered car toward Edgartown and the café.

After circling the block for fifteen minutes and dealing with traffic and pedestrians crossing the street with little notice, I double-park outside Slave to the Grind II. Nestled between a bank and a clothing store, but on an angle so it’s sort-of separate, the café is teeming with people. Good news for business, perhaps bad news for Arabella whose arms are streaked with espresso, her forehead damp. Doug and Ula, the brother-sister team Mable hired to help run the place, are an example of yin and yang. Where Doug is calm and smiling, Ula is frantic and frowning — hurrying coffees over to the tables, plumping pillows as soon as people stand up from the orange and purple floor cushions, and generally looking miserable.

Not that I expected a marching band to herald my arrival nor a chorus of well-wishers hailing me as the latest and greatest ferry transport, but a notice might be nice. Instead, all I get is a smile and cheers from Doug who looks robotic in his caffeine-charged cash registering, and nary a nod from Ula who gives off the emotional air of soured milk, until Arabella delivers a frozen mochachino to one customer, wipes up a spill with her trusty cloth, and then sashays over to me.

“Fucking hell, Bukowski, it’s about time.”

And just like that, summer has officially started.

A few minutes later, during a lull in the fairly steady stream of tourists and locals looking for an afternoon pick-up-up (AKA frozen lemonade or ice coffee), Arabella shows me up the narrow, creaky stairs in back of one of the storage closets to our small apartment. Each of the risers on the stairs is painted a different shade of blue.

“Cool — it’s like walking up the ocean!” I say as we climb the steps — passing azure, sky blue, turquoise, indigo, navy, and every other blue that exists.

“That’s exactly the look I was going for!” Arabella beams at me over her shoulder.

“You did this?” I ask. “Isn’t this a summer lease?”

“And your point is…”

“Point being you’re not supposed to paint or permanently alter the place?” I say and take the last two steps at one time. “I mean, my dad and I don’t even move the furniture that much at home — since it’s like a long-term rental…” My voice trails off as I take a second to think about my dad — right now he’s tying up all those end of the academic year issues, dealing with Aunt Mable’s will and trying to get over his grief by plunging into a trip to Europe with his girlfriend, Louisa. I won’t see him until mid-August here when he visits for Illumination Night in Oak Bluffs, when the whole town is lighted up by lanterns — it looks so romantic in photos, but I haven’t seen it in person since I was little.

Arabella pauses outside the plain white front door to the apartment and waves her hands like a supermodel selling skin crème. “Now — this…this is your new home — well, home for a while. But then, everything’s temporary, isn’t it?”

“Thank you Lady Philosophy,” I say and lean against the wall while she unlocks the door. Once she does, she hands me the key.

“Just so you know, I never lock the door. It just sticks and you have to use the key to unstick it.”

“So basically you do lock it,” I say and nudge her butt with my knee so she’ll finally open the door and let me see inside.

“Ta-da!” Arabella throws her arms open wide and reveals her current masterpiece: our new flat. “The theme is Endless Summer!”

“Like that Beach boys’ album?”

Arabella nods and rushes from a wall where she’s collaged Hawaiian prints and glued actually retro surfboards to a wicker cave-chair suspended from the ceiling by a chain. “I figured we needed to make this place a little glam — a sort of Beach Blanket Bingo retreat from the cappuccino chaos downstairs.”

“It’s amazing,” I say and walk around like it’s a dream. Then I think of something. “Do you have any mugs?”

“Sorry?” she asks and points me to a glass cabinet. Inside are rows of mismatching glasses form the sixties — hula girls, surfing guys, a set of shot glasses glued to matchbox cars. Arabella demonstrates one. “You drink and then race them!”

“But no mugs?” I ask, just in case she’s got the missing red mug.

“No — but you can grab one from downstairs.” She waits for me to react more to the flat. “Do you like it?”

The small kitchen is part of the main room, but sectioned off with a low wall on top of which Arabella has placed lanterns and lights shaped like stars with diamond-shaped holes cut out — all in shades of blue. “The whole thing just works — forget acting, forget golf-putting, you should go into design!”

Arabella hoists herself up onto the kitchen counter and watches me try out the bar stools, the striped beach chairs, and the giant inflatable shark where I sit down, straddling Jaws like the thing’s a horse.

“No — design’s just something I like. I’m still game for acting. And the golf — I still haven’t been.”

“We should go. Not now, but we should drive over and…oh, shit.” I stand up, tipping Jaws on his side, and then go to the door.

“What?” Arabella hopes down from the counter and follows me, checking her watch. “You’re not working until the night shift — four till whenever — whenever being whenever the hell you feel like it because Doug and Ula will be gone by then. Thankfully.”

“No,” I say, frantically dashing down the stairs. “I’ve been double-parked this whole time. My car’s blocking part of the street — I was just going to run in and…”

I get down to street level and find — of course — that my car and all of my belongings, everything — clothes, books, Mable’s package, my phone, and my wallet — are, too.

“Oh dear,” Arabella says and frowns.

“You say
fuck
like every two seconds — now my car’s been towed with all my earthly possessions in it and all you can come up with is
oh dear
?”

“Oh dear,” she says again, this time cracking up.

“It’s not funny — what am I supposed to do?” I stand with my hands on my hips. Normally, I’d call my dad or Aunt Mable or just suddenly know what to do, but I don’t. “Okay — get me the phone book. And a phone.”

Cut to a half an hour later when I’ve reached the non-emergency police number, been put through to the parking bureau, and told that since it’s Saturday past noon, I can’t retrieve my car until Monday.

“But I don’t have any clean underwear!” I say to the parking person like she cares. “And my phone is in there. And my wallet.”

All my complaining gets me nowhere so back up in our beachy bungalow. “I’m going to have to borrow your clothing,” I say. “I’ve been wearing this…” I pluck my grimy tee-shirt off my body and then let it go. “I am so gross right now. All I wanted to do was shower and get clean before getting gross again tonight. Now I’ll smell like stale beer, b.o., and espresso.”

Arabella puts on her very English advertising voice. “A new perfume from Love Bukowski.” Then she thinks for second. “You know you’re welcome to anything you can find, but I have to say there’s not a chance in hell my jeans will fit you.”

We stand next to each other and check the height difference for the thousandth time in our friendship. “Yep,” I say. “You’re still mammoth.”

“Mammoth makes me sound fat.”

“You’re not fat,” I say and poke her stomach.

“I know that — it just sounds that way.”

“Oh my god. Stop.” I sigh. “Fine you’re modelesque — better?” Arabella nods and I go back to my clothing conundrum. “So what do you suggest I do? Go shopping in the two hours I have before serving coffee for the night’s eternity?”

Arabella suddenly smiles and winks. “No. Not at all. I don’t know why I’ve only just thought of this.”

“What?”

“Henry,” Arabella says. “You should phone Henry.”

“Because….” I stretch the word out like it’s a full sentence.

Arabella starts making us a frozen blended drink. “Because his dad owns half of this island. And before you go shaking your head all prim and proper, it would just be a favor.”

“I don’t know,” I say.

Arabella shrugs and glops some chocolate syrup on a mound of shaved ice. “What’s the big deal?”

“The deal is…” I want to object, to explain that I don’t want to be that girl — the one who runs to a guy every time she needs help. I want to be able to build a bookcase, change my car’s oil, and get my car out of the lot after it’s been towed. But I also just want my car back and want to get settled without having to wait forty-eight hours. “Give me the phone.”

While I wait for Henry to come pick me up, Arabella and I share a giant concoction of our own — shaved ice, chocolate syrup, whipped cream and a large puddle of mint flavoring.

“The fact that Mr. Randall — sorry, Trip Randall the third — owns the tow lot shouldn’t surprise me. And yet…” I shake my head. “I’m not sure about these super-funded summer people.”

“Hey — you
are
one of those people,” Arabella says and sips the drink.

“No — not really,” I say but maybe she has a point. I don’t want to be a prepster and yet I am by sheer nature of my education. I don’t want to be seen as having a guy-infested brain and yet by sheer nature of my romantic roving eye Jacob, Henry, Charlie — I could be. “Besides — summer’s the great equalizer, right?”

“Meaning?” Arabella sucks some sugary sludge through a straw.

“Meaning…everyone’s got the somewhat the same intentions during the summer so no matter what your financial factor, you want to have fun.”

Arabella tilts her head to the side, and nudges me. “And just how do you spell fun?”

“Um, f-u-n?” I ask.

“No — try s-u-m-m-e-r f-l-i-n-b.”

“Summer flinb?” I ask and crack up. “I’m not sure I’m familiar with that term.”

“Oh, shut up — you know I meant fling. Not that you’d be the one to recognize such a term.”

“I’m just as much of a…flinger as you are,” I say like it’s a competition.

“Oh yeah? Prove, Bukowski,” Arabella says. Then she lets me sip.

“Listen — it’s easy for you. You’re…modelesque and tan and British and no matter what happens you take off at the end of the summer. I meanwhile…” I look at my disheveled self and begin the self-critique. “I look like some Irish girl circa eighteen hundred something shoved into the clothing someone forgot at the Laundromat. Not exactly hottie material.”

Arabella sighs. “How lame is it that no matter how amazing a woman thinks she is, self-doubt always creeps in?” I sigh back her and listen to her. “You are beautiful — quirky, non-traditional — but really pretty. And you know that. You just feel slimy. You slept outside covered in beer and have no Jacob to show for it — which, coming off of a transatlantic break-up with my brother can’t have felt good.”

She’s so right — Asher and I were a couple — we had that thing, that fun and hand holding — but it never felt totally good. First, he was off-limits because Arabella objected. Then we got together officially and then I had to leave — and then he pretty much dumped me on my ass after hooking up with someone else.

“All of this doesn’t exactly make me want to run out and find another potential heartache,” I start and open my mouth to speak more but she shoves the straw in to shut me up.

“Love — I hereby pronounce you free from your past.” She taps me on my shoulder like I’m being knighted. “Look around. Pick a guy you like — you don’t have to fall head over heels for him — you just have to
like
him.”

“An interesting notion,” I say and make a note to consider it.

“It’s perfect we’re friends,” Arabella says and shovels a spoonful of the icy mint chocolate mixture into her mouth. “Who else would eat this with me?”

I shake my head and scoop some up for myself. “No one. That’s why we can never break up.”

Arabella raises her eyebrows. “Oh, like we’re a couple?”

“You know what I mean — female friendships can be just as great and intense and crazy as relationships — and people do break up.”

“Well, we won’t,” Arabella says. “We’re far too mature — or wait — maybe we’re far too insane for that.”

“Agreed.” I lick my spoon and take another mouthful and then add, “But Mable did.”

“Did what?” Arabella asks. Her hair starts to slip from its loose knot and a bunch of it winds up in our muddy, sweet drink. She licks the ends of her hair and pronounces them delicious.

“Aunt Mable and my — my mother — Galadriel. They used to be best friends. And then they weren’t. That’s why I asked you about having a mug…” I show her the mug handle from Tink’s pottery place. “I thought Mable was making a point about valuing female friendship — everyone deserves a…what do you think it means?”

Arabella holds the handle and then gives it back. “I haven’t got a clue.” Then she puts on a heavy Lord of Rings voice. “But I am not the mug barer.”

“Okay — I’ll try someone else,” I say.

“What makes you so sure it’s someone you already know?” she asks.

I hmmm out loud and say, “I don’t know. I guess it could be anybody.”

I look around the Endless Summer flat and smile. The afternoon light slices across the floor, casting blue and gold rays from the window ornaments. Every detail is taken care of — even the bathroom is wallpapered in old album covers. “Thanks for this, Bels. It really is great.”

Arabella smiles shyly and nods, then goes back to sipping until a car horn beeps and she thumbs to the window. “That’ll be Henry. He won’t bother coming up.”

I raise my eyebrows. “Oh, you’re intimate with his pick-up patterns?”