Body Surfing (11 page)

Sydney walks fast, trying to put considerable distance between herself and the house at the end of the beach. The exercise is good, and her calf muscles tingle. She breaks into a jog. She is not a runner by nature, preferring the brisk stroll with its opportunity to observe to the run, which focuses attention on the body, but the urge to run is unexpectedly overwhelming.

She reaches the end of the beach, a distance of two miles, and slows down. She collapses into a cross-legged sitting position on the sand. The sun is setting noticeably earlier than it did in July, and already there is a suggestion of dusk. Below these observations, Sydney is aware of half-thoughts of Jeff. Despite her unusual marital history, she has never been unfaithful to any man, nor has she ever been in a relationship in which a man was unfaithful to his wife or his girlfriend. She cannot claim any great virtue in this; it is, she believes, simply a matter of circumstances. But to have inklings of desire for a man who is all but engaged to a woman Sydney has met is surely reason enough to have run from the house at the other end of the beach as if it were a burning building.

The concavities of bones. The tanned calf. Sydney remembers, at the dinner table, Jeff's sense of being elsewhere, a place she wanted to visit. She thinks about the panic that connected them as they ran through the streets of the village in search of Julie, who may have been in trouble--a sister he loves, a girl Sydney finds winning. And she remembers that actual connection, a brief but distinct touch of fingers, a gesture so seemingly casual as to be nearly nonexistent. Nonexistent, but incendiary. Sydney stands, knowing she must return to the house she has so recently fled--she has no flashlight; she needs water--wondering if Jeff is at this moment thinking of her. She decides that he is not. Sitting in the backseat of the Land Rover, with Victoria just a bit forward and to his right in the passenger seat, Jeff will be studying her profile as she talks to Ben.

This traffic is terrible, Victoria will be saying. I have to get up at five.

When Sydney returns to the house, she walks directly to the garden. Mr. Edwards is bent over, deadheading the roses. So intent is he on his task, he doesn't notice her presence until she speaks.

"Hey," she says.

Startled, he snaps up too quickly, putting a hand to his back. He has on an old flannel shirt, a pair of khakis stained at the knees. "Hi there," he says.

The roses are magnificent. They are rust-colored and lavender and mauve and ivory. No common scarlet or boisterous yellow. Though she has often seen both Julie and Mr. Edwards working in the garden, she has never been this close to it. At its center is a stone bench.

"These are beautiful," Sydney says, bending to inhale the perfume of a faintly salmon bloom.

"Thank you. They get away from me sometimes."

"I've seen Julie working out here, too."

"She seems to enjoy it."

Sydney can see that Mr. Edwards knows she has come to talk, that she is not merely passing by on her way into the house. He waits patiently, clippers in hand.

"Actually," she says, fingering another bloom, "I'm a little worried about Julie."

"How so?" he asks, his face immediately serious.

"Could we talk a minute?"

"Sure," Mr. Edwards says, gesturing to the stone bench.

Sydney sits at one end. Mr. Edwards takes the other. His hands are dirty, his fingernails caked with mud.

"I'd like to speak freely without getting anyone in trouble."

Mr. Edwards nods slowly, watching her face.

"You may not know this, but Julie went out last night. She slipped away from the table before any of us could ask her where she was going. Around ten-forty-five, Jeff and I went to look for her. We couldn't find her, but she came home on her own close to midnight." Sydney pauses. "She was drunk. Very drunk." She pauses again. "Dangerously drunk, I would have to say."

Mr. Edwards closes his eyes.

"She wouldn't--or couldn't--say where she had been," Sydney adds. "She was sick to her stomach, and I think got rid of most of the alcohol. But she was in bad shape. Jeff and Ben and I took turns staying up with her."

Mr. Edwards lets out a long sigh.

"I'm not telling you this so that Julie will get into trouble. I don't want that at all. But I think someone needs to talk to her about letting us. . .you. . .know where she is going."

"Yes."

"I know that she's. . ."

"Yes, you had every right to be very worried. All summer she's more or less kept to herself. I felt your coming here was a gift, really. I've liked it very much that she had someone to be with. It's clear she adores you."

"Well, I, too. . ."

"But she's had very little experience with the way the world works. I honestly didn't think we were going to have to worry about this yet, but I've been an idiot. She's eighteen. You only have to look at her."

Sydney opens her palms. "I worry because she seems like someone who might be taken advantage of," she says slowly.

"I'll talk to her," he says.

Sydney notes that he does not say, I'll have Anna talk to her.

"She may not remember anything," Sydney says. "Or much of anything."

"She's a good girl," says Mr. Edwards, a man suddenly struggling to control his emotions.

"Oh, she is," Sydney says quickly.

There is a long silence, during which neither of them looks at the other. Sydney puts her hands in her lap and studies the roses. Mr. Edwards appears to be examining the scrub brush that borders the property. To stand up and leave this man seems wrong. Sitting with him, however, is excruciating.

"The roses are really beautiful," Sydney says after a time, her voice sounding thin.

"Do you think so?"

"I do, yes."

"The thing about roses," Mr. Edwards begins but then seems to forget what he was going to say. "The thing about roses. . ."

"Actually," Sydney says, "I was thinking of taking Julie into Portsmouth with me tomorrow to get some art supplies."

Mr. Edwards glances at Sydney, a question in his eyes.

She clears her throat. "I have an idea for her. She's very gifted at. . .for lack of a better word. . .composition. I thought I might get her some drawing pencils, maybe some paints. I won't let it interfere with the tutoring. I'll just--"

But Mr. Edwards waves his hand, as if to suggest that she not worry about the tutoring.

"I think she may have some talent in this direction," Sydney adds. "From what I hear, I guess she comes by it naturally."

Mr. Edwards nods once and smiles, but his eyes, Sydney can see, are elsewhere. He is thinking still about what he will have to say to his daughter. She does not envy him this task.

"We have no idea where she was?" he asks.

"No. She went to a party. That's all I could get out of her."

Mr. Edwards inhales a long breath. He looks noticeably older than he did the night before, and it is not simply the work clothes, the hunched spine, the dirty hands.

"I'm sure she'll be fine," Sydney adds, unable to refrain from delivering this platitude. She wants suddenly for this man not to have to worry about his daughter.

Sydney stands. While they have been talking, dusk has turned into evening. A mosquito bites her ankle. She hears tree frogs, the constant surf. In the house, a light goes on. "Well," she says, "I'd better be getting in."

Mr. Edwards stands as well, making a conscious effort to straighten his spine. "Thank you, Sydney," he says. "I appreciate your coming to me."

His formality is disturbing.

Sydney turns away. When she enters the house and glances back, she sees that Mr. Edwards has not moved away from the bench.

Mrs. Edwards, in her bathrobe, is stretched along one of the white sofas. She smiles perfunctorily when she sees Sydney. Sydney can hear Wendy and Art in the kitchen, rummaging through the cupboards and the refrigerator, looking for something to eat. She can't hear their words, but the tone is clearly one of bickering. She imagines they are miffed at not having come back to a meal. Mrs. Edwards seems blissfully unconcerned about her guests, however, as she turns the pages of the novel she is reading.

"Where's Julie?" Sydney asks.

"She was down earlier for some toast," she answers without looking up from her page. "She's got a bug."

"She's okay?" Sydney asks, noticing that the soles of Mrs. Edwards's feet are decidedly not clean.

"Oh, she'll be fine."

Sydney nods. She is hungry as well, but she makes the decision to go up to her room and wait for the squall to pass. As she puts her bare foot on the bottom step, the phone rings. Mrs. Edwards, recumbent, springs into action, even though no one else is making the slightest attempt to get to the phone before she does.

Her smile is instantaneous. Her eyes peer inward, seeing only the person at the other end of the line. She laughs, asks a question, seems reluctant to say good-bye. She is, Sydney discovers, remarkably gifted at extending a conversation. Sydney pretends to be examining a callus on her foot. See you soon, she hears the matriarch croon. Mrs. Edwards waits a second longer in case the person at the other end has something more to say. Finally, she hangs up the phone and tightens the sash about her robe. She looks in Sydney's direction.

"That was Jeff," she says with immense satisfaction. "Got home fine."

In the back lot of the row house in Troy, old vegetation. Lilac and hosta and walnut. Violets and mulberry and hydrangea. Everything wild and unkempt, nothing trimmed or neat. Sydney's mother set out milk bottles with the first roses of the season on the sill in the kitchen--ancient pink rugosa, flat-petaled and treacherously thorned.

Red plaid wallpaper over the sink. Yellow curtains at the windows. Where did that ocher Bakelite clock go, the one with the frayed cord? Sydney remembers the brown Norge fridge; the day her mother had the washer and dryer installed. The cellar floor was still dirt. A week later, her mother was carrying a basket of laundry to the washer and saw a rat as big as a small dog. Sydney's mother cornered it and beat it to death while Sydney watched. An act of frenzy and violence that left Sydney speechless for hours.

Sydney remembers crumbling plaster walls. The narrow floorboards, unvarnished and nearly black, that ran the length of the long hallway. Linoleum in the kitchen. There were two bedrooms, a living room, and a bathroom, and, at the end of the hallway, the kitchen. In Sydney's room, she had a bed, a desk, and a wall of cupboards. She had shimmering purple curtains and a pink duvet. She had a plastic bedside table with drawers in which she put her nail polish, her diary, scribbled notes from friends, and recent birthday cards. As she climbed up the cement stoop each day after school and made her way to her bedroom, it seemed to her that she had swum briefly through the past and emerged safely into the present.

When Sydney was thirteen, she came home from school one afternoon to find the apartment unusually tidy. Her mother was sitting at the kitchen table, waiting for her. She asked Sydney to sit down.

"Did you clean up?" Sydney asked, glancing at the bare shelves.

"Sort of," her mother answered.

Her mother announced that Sydney and she were leaving, that they were going to live in a real house in Massachusetts. Her mother made it sound like fun. Sydney would have two homes to live in, two sets of friends, two rooms of her own. She would go back and forth from Massachusetts to New York.

What her mother didn't say was that she was fed up with the brown Norge and the cement stoop, with having to wait for her husband to fulfill his artistic promise. She didn't say that she had met another man. She didn't say that she hadn't told Sydney's father yet.

That night, after Sydney and her mother moved into the Massachusetts house with its dishwasher and microwave and spiffy new laundry room, the telephone rang. Sydney picked it up and listened. Her father was crying.

This is how Sydney thinks of her parents now: a border runs up from Manhattan; the topography is clear but for two stick figures, one on the left side, one on the right.

Sydney makes the trip into Portsmouth on Monday morning and returns with an easel, a sketch pad, canvases, drawing pencils, oil paints, and two books, one on how to draw, one on how to paint. Mr. Edwards tries to give her money to pay for these supplies, but Sydney explains to him that this is her experiment.

Later that evening, Sydney sees Mr. Edwards enter Julie's room. When he emerges, pink-eyed, he fumbles for his handkerchief in his pocket. Sydney notes that he visited Julie while Mrs. Edwards was at a cocktail party. Mr. Edwards was invited as well, but he begged off, using the excuse of a stomachache.

The week passes. A storm rolls in from the northeast. Pellets of rain hit the windows. To walk outside to the car is to be blown forward with such force that one trips and stumbles. The rain lasts for days, and Sydney forgets what the beach looked like in the sunshine. It seems that it has always been raining, that this is what she signed up for.

Sydney spends hours in Julie's room. Sometimes she teaches the girl math, but mostly she watches Julie arrange objects and draw them. Sydney is slightly amazed that neither of the parents realized their daughter's innate gift. Perhaps they thought that because there seemed to be a deficit, there was little point in probing. But were there not childhood drawings? Paintings Julie brought home from grade school?