The Beach Club (20 page)

“Her life is difficult?” Maribel said. “
My
life is difficult! My life is very, very difficult. Have you forgotten that? Have you forgotten what I’ve gone through to get here, Mack?”

“That’s different, Maribel. I’m not taking anything away from you. But you’re not dealing with what Andrea is dealing with.”

“Go to her then,” Maribel said. Thinking, hatefully,
Go to her and her fucked-up son
. “Get out of here.”

“But I love you, too,” Mack said.

“Tough shit,” Maribel said.

“I don’t want to leave,” Mack said.

“What
do
you want?” Maribel asked. “Do you have any idea? Do you want to sell the farm? Do you want to manage that blasted hotel your whole life? You don’t know. Do you want to get married and have kids? You don’t know. You don’t know anything except that you love us both. You want me here at home and Andrea down at the hotel. I’m sorry, Mack. I am so, so sorry.” Maribel was hysterical now, her breathing ragged, her tears hot and salty; her eyes stung. She plucked a Kleenex and tried to blow her nose but she was blocked up, stuck. She thought of the broken toilet. Her life was a toilet.

“I’m going to do something for you,” Mack said.

“The only thing you can do for me is to get out of here,” Maribel said. Her voice was small and nasal.

“I’m going to ask Bill to profit-share. I’m going to ask him right after the Fourth. I swear it, Maribel.”

Maribel tried to snort, but her nose was stuffed up. Her snort sounded like a bleat. “Ha! Why now, Mack? So you can give James and Andrea a good life? So you can show them how important you are? Go ahead and ask Bill for the profits. I hope he turns you down. I hope he fires you and you leave this island.”

“But I’m doing it for you, Maribel,” Mack said. “I’m doing it because you want me to.”

“I want you to
marry me
!” Maribel screamed. She couldn’t believe how angry, how upset she was. Never in her life would she have predicted the relationship would crumble like this, so suddenly, in one night. “I want you to marry me! I thought the problem was with
you
. I thought you were just not
grown
yet, I thought you still had issues with your parents, the farm. And I thought if you asked Bill to profit-share you’d feel better about yourself, you’d feel established, you’d feel
ready
. What I didn’t realize is that the problem isn’t with you, Mack, it’s with
me
. I’m not the woman you want.”

“You are the woman I want,” Mack said.

“Then
ask me to marry you
,” Maribel said.

Mack reached for her again and she surrendered. She buried her face in his chest and cried even harder. His shirt, his smell, her Mack, she loved him so much. He was all she wanted, all she needed to fill the empty space where her father should have been. But she waited five minutes, ten minutes, and he said nothing. He was shushing into her hair, but he wasn’t asking her to marry him. Suddenly her head was heavy, a sandbag, her mouth was dry and scratchy from the wine and the tears.

“You have to go,” Maribel said. Unsteadily, she stood and pointed in the direction of the door. “I’m sorry.”

“Mari, you don’t mean that.”

“I do,” she said. She walked into the bedroom and fell onto the bed. Her eyes closed the second she heard Mack’s Jeep pull away.

Mack spent the rest of the night in the Jeep in the Beach Club parking lot. He considered sneaking into Lacey Gardner’s cottage and crashing on her couch, but he didn’t want to frighten her. And so, Mack wrapped himself in his Polar Fleece, put the seat back as far as it would go, and closed his eyes.

He woke to the sound of talking. He sat up and looked around—it was still dark. He didn’t see anyone near the lobby or on the beach. Mack climbed out of the Jeep, quietly, and he made out the figure of Cecily sitting on the front step of her parents’ house, talking on the portable phone. Mack checked his watch; it was three-thirty.

“I love you,” she was saying. “I can’t stand it here without you. I’m dying of love for you.”

Please, Cecily
, Mack thought.
Do not fall in love
. But from the sounds of it, it was too late. He climbed back into his car.

“I love you, Gabriel.” Cecily’s voice was sweet, pleading. “Can you hear me? I love you.”

What seemed like only minutes later, Mack heard the sound of tapping on the window of the Jeep. He opened his eyes. It was Andrea and James. The sun was up. Mack checked his watch; it was six o’clock. He opened the door.

“Why do I get the feeling you’re not here to go with us to the airport?” Andrea said.

“Is Mack coming to the airport?” James asked. “Are we shaving today, Mack?”

“How’re you doing, buddy?” Mack asked. He looked at Andrea. “I told Maribel.”

“Told her what?” Andrea asked. Her green-gray eyes widened. “About us? Why? Oh, Mack, what did you say?” She turned to James. “Get in the car, James. Mom will be there in five minutes.”

“It’s six-oh-three, Mom. We’re late already.”

“Five minutes,” Andrea said.

“Five minutes.” James tapped the face of his watch. “Mom will be there at six-oh-eight.”

Andrea waited until James climbed into the Explorer, then she said, “What happened?”

“I had to tell her,” Mack said. He thought of Vance, pointing the gun at him like it was some kind of toy. But when he got right down to it, Mack hadn’t told Maribel because of Vance; he told her because it was time. He told her because he couldn’t stand lying anymore. Vance was just a manifestation of Mack’s own conscience, like something out of fucking Shakespeare. “I told her I loved you.”

“No,” Andrea said. She put her hand over her heart. “She must be devastated. The poor girl. Ouch.”

“What about me?” Mack said. “She threw me out. I spent the night here in the parking lot.” His mouth felt as if it were lined with flannel, he stank with the four scotches he’d had at Lacey’s, his head ached and his legs would cramps up as soon as he stepped out of the Jeep. He needed five more hours’ sleep, a hot shower, some clean clothes.

“You’re a man, Mack,” Andrea said. “Men will always survive.”

Mack touched Andrea’s hair. “You might see me surviving this winter in Baltimore.”

“Mack,” Andrea said, shaking her head sadly.

“What?” Mack said. “I could help you with James. I could give you the help you need.”

“Go home and take it all back,” she said.

“You don’t want me in Baltimore?”

“Just go home,” she said. “I’m not coming between you and Maribel. She’s much better for you than I am.”

“But I love you,” Mack said. “That’s how I ended up here. I love you.”

“Maybe,” Andrea said. “Or maybe you feel sorry for me. The point is, you should be with Maribel. I’m just a friend, Mack, a summer friend. You have no idea what my life is like the rest of the year. You have no idea what happens once I return to America.”

“I know I don’t. What I’m saying is, I want to find out.”

“I should stop coming here. I’ve depended on you too much, and I made you feel like you can help me. But you can’t help me, Mack. Nobody can help me. James is my lot in life—he’s my blessing, he’s my albatross.” She tried to smile. “Anyway, I hear the Vineyard is nice too. Maybe next year we’ll go there.”

“No,” Mack said. This was too much: to lose them both in one night. “No way.”

Andrea picked up Mack’s wrist and checked his watch. “My five minutes is up,” she said. “Go home.” He listened to her footsteps crunch across the shells and the loose gravel. He heard the soft dinging of her open car door and James saying, “You’re one minute late, Mom.” Then Andrea started the car and drove away, but he didn’t turn to watch her go.

Mack sat back in his seat and looked at the water. Maybe he should just drive into the sound. Then he heard a voice, a low thrumming voice.
Home
. He bowed his head.
Home
.

“I can’t believe this,” Mack said. He closed his eyes.

Cecily’s job this summer was to watch the beach, keeping her eyes peeled for people who blatantly ignored the signs saying Nantucket Beach Club: Private Property. After four years at Middlesex—tens of thousands of dollars spent on her education—this was the job her parents gave her. Lookout. Policewoman. Head scout of the Nantucket Beach Club patrol.

Cecily sat on the steps of the pavilion with a clipboard and a computer generated list of the Beach Club members. If she saw people on the beach she didn’t recognize, she had to ask their names. If their name appeared on the list, she smiled and repeated their name, “Why
hello
, Mrs. Papale!” as though she had recognized them all along. That was what a club was about: Being recognized, belonging.

If their names didn’t appear on the list, she had to ask them, politely, to leave. Cecily’s father was too chicken to do this job himself, although he claimed he wasn’t afraid, but rather, too busy, doing financial things and reading from his volume of Robert Frost.

On one very hot and crowded day just before
the
major holiday of summer, Cecily encountered her first squatters. She was sitting with her legs stretched out in the sun when an unlikely couple wandered in from the right. What made them “unlikely” was exactly the thing that Cecily hated about her job: they looked poor. The price to sit on a swatch of her father’s beach under one of the umbrellas her mother ordered from the south of France was five thousand dollars for the summer. It was too much money for almost anybody to afford—and definitely too much money for the couple spreading their towels (short white towels, the kind one might find in a Holiday Inn) under a royal blue umbrella.

The couple looked like Jack Sprat and wife. The man was skinny and pale, wearing a black T-shirt and cut-off jeans, and the woman wore an enormous turquoise muumuu. The woman carried a red Playmate cooler, which she plunked down at the foot of the towels.

Cecily heard a clicking noise behind her. She turned to see her father tapping with his pen on the window of his office. He pointed at the couple.

Reluctantly, Cecily stood up. She trudged through the hot sand, savoring the torturous burning on the soles of her feet. The man turned his head from left to right, checking, literally, to see if the coast were clear. The woman plucked a green bottle out of the cooler: a Heineken. The beer of choice at Middlesex. The man offered the woman a penknife from the front pocket of his jeans shorts and the woman flipped the top off the bottle and let it land in the sand.

“Excuse me,” Cecily said. The man’s head whipped around. He hadn’t thought to look behind him. “I just need to check your name off our list.”

The man stood up. The front of his T-shirt had a mandala on it. He had long dirty blonde hair and a mustache. He touched his mustache when Cecily spoke.

“The name’s Cadillac,” he said. “Joe Cadillac.”

Joe Cadillac. It was a good try: maybe he thought it made him sound rich. Cecily checked her list. She could feel her father’s eyes boring into her back. The burning of her feet became unbearable and she moved to stand in the shade of the royal blue umbrella.

“Cadillac, hmmmm. Like the car, Cadillac?”

The man cleared his throat. “That’s right.”

“I don’t see it here,” Cecily said. She didn’t meet the man’s eyes.

“Are you sure you’re spelling it right?” he asked. “Cadillac, with a ‘C?’ With two ‘C’s?’”

“Yes,” Cecily said, “I’m sure.”

The man shoved his threadbare towel under one arm. “Okay,” he said, “we’ll go then.”

The woman let out a long, shrill laugh, like a hand trickling down piano keys. “Heavens,
Joe,
” she said. She had curly blond hair and wore red lipstick. “Would you please let us stay, sweetie?” she asked. “Just for today? I’m afraid in this sun I’ll positively fry up.” The woman had a stripe of bad sunburn already—across the tops of her round cheeks and the bridge of her nose.

“I can’t let you stay,” Cecily said. She felt horrible; she felt like a child or an angry neighbor saying “Get off of my property!”

The woman held out the beer. “Would you like a swig?” she asked. “It’s ice cold.”

Cecily eyed the sweating bottle. How she wanted to take it, and force her father to watch her making her own choices.

“Debra, let’s go,” the man said.

The woman beamed at Cecily. Mrs. Sprat, Mrs. Cadillac. Cecily tore her eyes away. She looked, instead, at Nantucket Sound, lapping lightly onto her father’s beach.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

Cecily was also maître d’ of the beach, the goodwill ambassador. She chatted with the Beach Club members, and made sure everyone was happy. Once she got to know the members by name and learn a little bit about them, the list would become unnecessary. Cecily hated chatting, she even hated the word
chatting
. She could never think of what to say that would sufficiently mask her real question.
Why are you spending your money this way? Haven’t you heard of world hunger? Don’t you have a conscience?
The Beach Club had existed since 1924. Back then, the club cost a quarter a day and was open to the public. Her father had sepia-tone pictures of men and women in old-fashioned bathing suits sitting under crazily striped and polka-dotted sunshades, drinking bottles of sarsaparilla. This was how Cecily preferred to think of it. She’d kept one of those pictures, framed, in her dorm room at school.

The number of people on the beach peaked on the Fourth of July, and this year, it was sunny and hot. On the south shore, Cecily knew there would be radios blaring, volleyball games, picnics, kegs, Frisbee, dogs. But here at the Beach Club, things were as much fun as a pile of wet bathing suits, as exciting as a handful of sand. Mr. Conroy, who had a glass eye and a pair of saggy old-man breasts, sported his starspangled swim trunks. That was it in the way of excitement.

Cecily stood in her father’s office. “Total hell,” she said, looking out the window at the beach.

“Someday it’s going to be yours,” he said.

“What if I don’t want it?” Cecily said.

“What’s not to want?” Bill said. “Now get out there and show ’em who’s boss.”

“You’re the boss,” Cecily said. “
You get
out there.”

Bill laughed, then his voice got serious. “Go,” he said, “and don’t forget to wish everyone a happy Fourth of July.”

To start her rounds, Cecily had to walk past Kevin and Bruce, the beach boys.

“Hey, sexy!” Bruce called out. Bruce was skinny with pimples and glasses, and he thought he was a hot shit because he was going to Yale in the fall.

Cecily gave him the finger. Kevin never said anything. He just sat next to Bruce and giggled. The beach boys were exactly that—boys. They set up the umbrellas in the morning and then plunked themselves in the sand like a couple of ugly frogs, and when a member needed help with chairs or towels, the boys reluctantly got to their feet. They had an even cushier job than her own.

Cecily walked by Mr. and Mrs. Spoonacre, Mr. and Mrs. Patterson, and stopped at the kelly green umbrella closest to the water where Major Crawley sat Always the same spot closest to the water, always a kelly green umbrella, and always alone—because Mrs. Crawley was allergic to the beach. Major Crawley had retired from the army before Cecily was born, but he still looked like a major. He wore army green trunks, aviator sunglasses, and his gray-silver hair was clipped in a crew cut.

“Hello there, lady friend,” the major said.

Cecily crouched in the sand next to the major’s Sleepy Hollow chair. They had a short conversation every day. Cecily’s father told her the major deserved extra attention. He’d been a Beach Club member for almost fifty years. “Hello, Major. Happy Fourth of July.”

“Let me tell you a little something,” the major said.

Major Crawley loved to tell Cecily stories about her grandfather. Sometimes, if Cecily was lucky, he would talk instead about his days on the last mounted cavalry in Germany, riding through the forest, looking for runaway Nazis.

“Your grandfather, Big Bill Elliott—and we all called him Big Bill—asked me for advice when he bought this Beach Club. You know what I told him?”

“Complimentary towels,” Cecily said.

“That’s right. Do you know why?”

“It’s the small courtesies that make a place stand out,” she said.

“Someday all this is going to be yours, and you’re going to have to see that the place is run with integrity. I might not be around to prod you.”

Cecily had heard the same speech dozens of times. She wanted to tell the major that she had no intention of running the Beach Club, because deeper, more exotic voices called her name. Other countries, other cultures. “Tell me about Germany again.”

“Germany?” the major said. “My time in the hills, you mean? Riding Liebchen? That was a good horse. A mare. Mares don’t frighten easily, and that’s why we all rode mares. Because we were looking at some scary stuff there in the hills.”

“Nazis,” Cecily said. “The murderers.”

“Had one of them Nazis hold a gun to my head,” the major said. “Thought I was dead. Only eighteen years old. And do you know what I was thinking about, right at that second?”

“Mrs. Crawley?”

The major’s aviator sunglasses slid to the end of his nose. “Hadn’t met Mrs. Crawley yet. She came later.”

“Your parents?”

“Nope.” He poked at his sunglasses. “Thought about cigarettes and beer. Those were the two most important things in my life. All I wanted to do was smoke Luckies and drink Miller High-Life. And I thought how sad it was that all my smoking and drinking potential was about to fall facedown in the mud with a bullet shot through it.”

“So then what happened?”

“The slimy German had the gun to my temple, pressed right into my brain and I could smell him. He stank like a pig. He had me on my knees and my eyes were level with his crotch and then I saw that the stinking bastard was wetting himself, he was so afraid. I knocked the gun out of his hand and that kid ran off. Someone in my company found him later and shot him dead.” Major Crawley took off his sunglasses and lay back in his Sleepy Hollow chair. “I often wonder if maybe that weren’t such a bad kid. Anyway, we killed him. Couldn’t have mercy on someone who agreed to stand behind all that murdering of the Jews.”

“There was a kid at my school who’s a Nazi,” Cecily said.

The major shook his head. “No, lady friend, not possible. We got them all.” The major’s words grew low and grumbly. “Today’s the Fourth of July and I’m happy to say you’re in a safe place. No Nazis here.” He nodded off to sleep in his chair. Cecily pulled his complimentary beach towel over his legs, so they wouldn’t burn.

Cecily threaded her way between the umbrellas in the front row, past Mrs. Minella, the Papales, and the Hayeses, the only African American Beach Club members. She heard someone call to her.

“Miss! Miss!” A man under one of the canary yellow umbrellas gestured to her. Cecily walked slowly toward him and his wife, skimming her eyes over the list. These were new members this year—the Curtains? The Kershners? The man was balding but made up for it with a perfectly trimmed goatee. The woman had red hair like Cecily, only she had millions of freckles, whereas Cecily tanned.

Cecily smiled. “Hi, how can I help you?”

“We need you to settle an argument,” the man said.

“Douglas!” the woman said. She folded her arms across the sheer top of her Chanel bathing suit.

Douglas and Mary Beth Kershner. Cecily found their names on the list.

“What you need to understand is that my wife is a
giving
person,” Douglas Kershner said. “Charity woman
supreme
.”

“Douglas,” Mrs. Kershner snapped.

“And under the guise of the Church, she has planted a garden for the poor, so that the less fortunate citizens of Groton, Connecticut, can enjoy fresh produce,” Douglas Kershner said.

There were tiny wrinkles in the corners of Mrs. Kershner’s mouth.

“I didn’t know there were any poor people in Groton,” Cecily said. She’d only been to Groton once, for a field hockey game.

“There are poor people everywhere,” Mrs. Kershner said.

“But now, in Groton, Connecticut, the poor can enjoy arugula, raddichio, and tarragon,” Mr. Kershner said. “Tarragon for the poor!” He raised his hands above his head in a gesture of mock political triumph, giving Cecily a view of his hairy armpits. “Have you ever heard of anything so absurd?”