Body Surfing (3 page)

"We just loved Portsmouth," Wendy says. "All those coffeehouses and little boutiques."

"Crowded," Art says.

"The city turned itself around in the eighties," Mr. Edwards says. "It used to be a rough place with the shipyard."

"We ate on the water," Wendy says. "Art had the chowder, and I had the fried calamari."

"Couldn't find anywhere to park," Art says.

"Then we were walking along that main street there, and I saw the lamp in a window."

"You should bring it in and show it to us," Mr. Edwards says.

"It's all wrapped up," Art says.

"You can take a ferry from Portsmouth out to the Isles of Shoals," Ben offers.

"Maybe we'll do that tomorrow?" Wendy asks in her husband's direction.

"So what are you up to, Jeff?" Art asks as he wipes his mouth with a foot of paper towel.

Jeff, startled, raises a pale eyebrow. "Teaching," he says amiably. "In the fall. Research now."

"Like what? What courses?"

"Postcolonial East Africa," Jeff says. "Genocide in the Twentieth Century."

"Nothing about the Middle East? The War on Terror?"

Art is bald on top but hirsute elsewhere, curly tufts emerging from the open V of his dress shirt. Sydney searches for a connection between the man and Mr. Edwards but can't find one. She reasons that the true friends are Mrs. Edwards and Wendy, both of whom seem nearly giddy at the prospect of a visit to Emporia, a local flea market, in the morning.

"I've found all my etched glass there," Mrs. Edwards says, raising her long-stemmed wineglass. "I never pay more than two dollars for one."

Sydney raises hers as well and admires the delicate workmanship. She wonders how old the glasses are, to whom they once belonged.

"He'll ruin us all," Mr. Edwards says with feeling. From prior conversations, Sydney knows he is referring to the president of the United States.

Shortly after her arrival, Sydney learned that Mr. Edwards switched his political allegiance, the conversion taking place during the contested presidential election. Mrs. Edwards appears to invent and groom her political opinions in anticipation of her sons' visits.

"He's set us back a century," Mr. Edwards adds with surprising vehemence. "Two centuries."

That would be, Sydney calculates, 1802. Her command of history is poor. Was the country in bad shape then?

"You think he can get reelected?" Art asks.

With his lobster pick, Mr. Edwards stabs the air in the direction of the waxy container in which the already-cooked lobsters arrived from the lobster pound. "I'd vote for that [stab] paper [stab] bag over there if I thought it would get rid of the guy," he says.

Displays of anger from Mr. Edwards are rare. Respect is paid in silence. A silence that appears to annoy Mrs. Edwards, who drops her metal lobster cracker into her deep tin lobster plate, making quite a racket.

"Bread?" Sydney offers, picking up a basket.

Mrs. Edwards stares. Mrs. Edwards does not eat bread.

In the distance, there's a distinct but low rumble.

"Fireworks!" Julie says.

"Big storm coming later tonight," Art informs the gathering.

"Good," Mrs. Edwards says. "Clear the air out."

As if it smelled, Sydney thinks.

(For Sydney, the sudden smell of Troy. Sydney is eight or nine. Onions from her grandmother upstairs. Diesel fumes from the delivery trucks. Cigarette smoke woven into the old upholstery. Her father smokes Marlboros, her mother Virginia Slims. Sometimes, coming home from school, Sydney finds lit cigarettes in ashtrays in the bathroom, near the kitchen sink, and in her parents' bedroom, where her mother sits at her sewing machine making purses out of silk and cotton, the colors too bright, never seen in nature. Hot pink and shiny aqua, slicker-yellow, neon orange. Her mother reaching for the cigarette as she says hello to Sydney, her upper lip puckering into lines that will soon become permanent. "What do you think?" her mother asks, holding aloft a design of a purple convertible, the women in it with royal blue head scarves and red arms flying. This is meant to suggest, Sydney guesses, freedom.

Outside the front windows, color enough. None of it in nature, either. The fat pink of the Troy Pork sign. Magenta curtains on a brass rod in an apartment across the street. Yellowed Venetian blinds at the office of J. F. Riley, DDS. Kodak, Molson, Kent in the window of the candy store on the corner. The apartment a railroad flat in a row house, theirs identical to all the others on the street, in the city for that matter. Two windows in front, two in back looking out to the covered deck. The only sun through the front two, a couple hours in late morning. If you missed it, you were out of luck.

"They look happy, don't you think?" her mother, who never looks happy, asks. The purses are the life that is leaking out of her.

"Wild," Sydney says.)

Sydney learns that Art is in the paper business--sheets of paper, rolls of it--and that Wendy, retired now, was once a magazine editor in New York (or an assistant editor, or possibly even an assistant to an assistant--this isn't quite clear). One child, a daughter, is completing graduate work at the University of Vermont, while a son has recently graduated from Williams. Wendy mentions Williams twice more in passing the way others use Harvard as currency. Sons are in ascendancy tonight, Sydney thinks, and immediately has sympathy for the girl at UVM, who, for all Sydney knows, might be her father's favorite.

A petal falls from a bouquet picked earlier in the day by Julie and her father. Sydney touches it and rubs the velvet between her index finger and her thumb. A perfume is released. When she looks up, both Ben and Jeff are watching her.

"What are these called?" she asks Mr. Edwards.

"Cabbage," he says. "Those are Damask. Pride of nineteenth-century gardeners. They're drought resistant, which makes them good for the shore."

"This one's my favorite," Julie says, fingering a heavy beige blossom.

Sydney waits, hoping for more from the girl, who usually offers only a sentence or two at the table. But Julie immediately bends to her meal.

"What happened to the woman, the widow?" Sydney asks after a long silence, Sydney having an affinity for both widows and pilots, culpable or not.

Beside her, she can feel Mrs. Edwards stiffen. Perhaps the guests have not been told they are sleeping in the house of a mildly notorious celebrity.

"She and her daughter moved in with her mother here in town," Jeff answers. "Then I think the widow went to live in London."

Jeff gives these facts in a polite but businesslike way, as though to signal the end of the conversation. The sons, Sydney can see, defer when necessary to their mother's emotional weather. Perhaps they have heard rumbles in the distance and fear a storm.

Julie's face is flushed pink with heat and happiness, the girl seemingly not at all attuned to her mother's mood. Her thick blond hair has been tied into a careless knot, unfortunately emphasizing her mother's sprayed banana clip. The girl's lashes are blond as well, long and beautifully shaped. Julie appears not to worry about her weight, and, as a result, there is an appealing voluptuousness about the girl. The brothers must be watchful, Sydney thinks. Someone needs to be watchful.

"Victoria will be here in the morning," Mrs. Edwards announces, and it is clear that the guests have been briefed, for both glance over at Jeff, who is sipping a Rolling Rock.

"Lovely girl," Mr. Edwards says, his political vitriol a dozen comments back and seemingly forgotten.

Ben looks pointedly at Jeff. "She certainly is," he says.

Apart from a possible blush, Jeff gives no indication that he's heard a word. The blush might mean anything. Unhappiness at being singled out? A mention of the very thing dearest to his heart? A history of prior teasing?

"I'm looking for a new condo," Ben says, abruptly changing the subject.

"You're the man to go to," Jeff says.

"I'm tired of the South End. Like to give the waterfront a try."

"They say never live on the water year-round," Mr. Edwards says. "Depressing as hell."

"Some terrific luxury condos going up," Ben says.

Mr. Edwards plants an elbow on the table and points his hand toward Ben. "It will be your generation who will suffer," the older man says, his anger apparently not having been forgotten after all. "You'll be decades extricating yourself from this mess. Monstrous debt. Terrorists. Abysmal foreign policy."

The table ponders the future, which does indeed look grim. Mrs. Edwards sets her jaw (one imagines a sharp dressing-down later in the privacy of the marital bedroom). "You'll scare the children, Mark," she says. "And you're ruining a perfectly lovely dinner."

Mr. Edwards studies his wife from the length of the walnut table. "Why would our children not want to know what the future holds?" he asks ingenuously. "Besides, I'm not saying anything Ben and Jeff don't already know. Jeff, I imagine, could tell us all a thing or two."

One imagines Jeff could tell them a thing or two or three, though he seems disinclined to do so.

"Sox playing tonight?" Ben asks.

"Oh, ho, we're in Sox territory here!" Art says with mock fright, grabbing playfully at his wife's wrist. "Who's pitching?"

Mr. Edwards and Sydney stand to collect the dishes, as they do each night. Mr. Edwards says, Wait a minute, and returns from the kitchen with a large black garbage bag. He holds it open and makes the rounds, the diners sliding the remains of the meal--shells, bodies, green tomalley, red roe--into the plastic sack, trying not to splash any of the lobster liquor onto their clothing. Sydney collects the deep tin plates, on which the red crustaceans have been enameled (another Emporia find) and backs through the swinging door to the kitchen. Each time she emerges again into the dining room, fewer people are sitting at the table. First Julie leaves. Then Ben and Jeff. Finally only Mrs. Edwards and her guests remain.

Mr. Edwards and Sydney have perfected a routine in the kitchen. Mr. Edwards soaks the silverware in a wide-mouth ceramic vase kept on the counter for the purpose. He rinses each plate and sets it in the sink. Sydney wonders if he's still pondering the paper bag he would vote for in order to unseat an incumbent president. Sydney's task, at which she is very good, is to stack the dishwasher as efficiently as possible so that only one load is necessary.

She sets the glasses in an upper plastic-coated wire trough, flips down the rack, and puts the ramekins on top. When she is finished, not another item could be squeezed into the appliance. She turns the dials and shuts the dishwasher with her hip. She listens for the quiet hum of the water draining. In the two years since Daniel died, she has had to learn all over again the satisfying pleasure of household tasks completed: a grocery list checked off, two errands accomplished in a single afternoon, dishwasher-loading as performance art.

"I'll do the tablecloth," she says, looking for further occupation.

"I'll warm the pies."

Sydney can see spots of lobster juice on Mr. Edwards's pale green polo shirt, other discolorations from previous washes. She senses a reluctance on his part to greet his guests on the porch, where pie and coffee will be served. Perhaps he isn't wild about Art.

Sydney scrubs the bright-blue-and-red oilcloth while it is still on the table. Then she rinses and scrubs it again. When she took the cloth, used only for lobster dinners, out of the drawer earlier in the evening, an unpleasant smell of old dinners rose to her nostrils. Rotted fish. Congealed butter.

Sydney is on her second rinse when Ben enters the room. He takes the dry dish towel dangling from her left hand and polishes the tablecloth in her wake.

"Thank you," she says as their fingers meet on the first round of stretch-and-fold, the heavy oilcloth dangling below them.

"No, thank you," Ben insists. He takes the cloth from her and expertly stretches it again and makes a perfect second fold. He folds and folds until it is the size of a flag given to a widow.

"Want to go night surfing?" he asks.

Sydney is confused. Does he mean surf casting? Surfing on boards?

"Sure," she says.

"Wear your suit under your clothes. My mother hates it when we do this."

Sydney heads upstairs to her room, a small chamber papered in pale azure with miniature cream roses, the woodwork and the narrow beds painted white. In the daytime, through the sole window, Sydney can see the ocean. If she sits on one of the beds to read, which she often does in the late afternoon (allowing the Edwardses to think that she is napping), she has an ocean-liner view. On the middle ledge of the window is a tall cobalt-blue bottle with a gull's feather in its opening. To one side is an enameled red chair, and near it two shallow closets. Sydney is puzzled by the two closets side by side and has come up with no satisfactory explanation. One for suits; one for casual wear? One for dresses; one for nightgowns? One for her; one for him?

Sydney likes her room and thinks it perfect for the time being. It reminds her of old photographs of hospital rooms with women in starched wimples and aprons tending to patients on beds with sheets tightly drawn.