Body Surfing (6 page)

"An announcement?" Art inquires.

"Really?" Julie asks, surprised.

Mrs. Edwards glances with some alarm at her daughter, whom she has apparently forgotten. The mother mimes "sealed lips" in Julie's direction.

Sydney, too, gazes at the lovely woman in the porch doorway. What is there not to like about Victoria? Vicki, actually, who does not resemble in the slightest the computer image of earlier, even with its many alterations. The crime artist will have to be fired.

Mr. Edwards announces that lunch will be served on the porch. He retreats to the kitchen, and Sydney willingly follows. Mr. Edwards appears to like the challenge of cooking, a skill he learned only later in life. In Troy, her father never went near the kitchen.

Sydney offers, when she has finished hulling the strawberries, to set the table, a task that requires carrying armloads of dishes and glasses and silverware out to the round teak table in the corner of the porch. A tricky screen door that wants to catch the back of her ankle has to be negotiated. Napkins have to be anchored in the stiff breeze.

When she makes her last trip, Sydney discovers that Ben and Victoria and Jeff are sitting in the heavy teak chairs around the table.

"Can I help?" Victoria asks.

"Thanks, but I'm all done," Sydney says.

"Join us, then," Ben says.

Jeff catches Sydney's eye. An invitation or a warning? The moment passes before it has fully registered.

Sydney sits, not liking the rudimentary math. Jeff and Victoria. Ben and Sydney. She wishes for the emergence of one other person, even Mrs. Edwards (perhaps especially Mrs. Edwards, with her knack for rendering Sydney invisible) to change the sum.

Ever since Victoria arrived, Sydney has been aware of shifting configurations. Mrs. Edwards, hands clasped together at her breast, her posture slightly tilted back, presenting Victoria as if the young woman might have distant royal blood. Mr. Edwards, casually draping an arm around Julie. Jeff discreet, not needing to hover over or touch his girlfriend; perhaps they already kissed passionately in the Land Rover on the way back from the bus station. Ben, Diet Coke in hand, perched on the landing of the stairs, surveying the scene from on high.

Because of the bright sunshine, dark glasses are de rigueur on the porch at lunch. An entire family incognito. The sandwiches that Mr. Edwards delivers are sublime--confections of mozzarella, tomato, basil, and olive oil between slices of crusty bread. Mrs. Edwards stares at the panini her husband sets in front of her as if to ask, What am I supposed to do with this? Doubtless she would like to pry apart the slices of bread and scrape out only the cheese, but she cannot do so in polite company. Certainly not in Victoria's presence.

Victoria is asked about numbers, and she names a fabulous sum. She speaks with confidence about baseball, acute myeloid leukemia, and a restaurant failure on St. Botolph Street. Ben perks up noticeably at the mention of possible real estate for sale.

Sydney observes Julie from across the table. The girl seems subdued. Perhaps Julie sees in Victoria a woman she will never be. Maybe she minds an outsider's claim on her brother. Or is it simply that she already hears the sounds of everyone leaving her for activities to which she will not be invited? Sydney makes a mental note to ask the girl for a walk after lunch.

Sydney is seldom told directly of future household events. Rather, she is meant to deduce them as the day progresses--from bits of conversation, from extra bags of produce on the granite counter, or, more subtly, from Mrs. Edwards's second shower at three o'clock so that her hair will be fresh for the evening's festivities.

Today, at lunch, a reference is made to needing two more bottles of Shiraz for dinner. A debate is held regarding the strength of the breeze and whether or not having drinks on the porch is even feasible. But it is this sequence of sentences--Ferris doesn't drink; Marissa likes Pellegrino; Claire said Will can come after all--that leads Sydney to arrive at the sum of thirteen for dinner long before she passes the dining room, elaborately set three hours ahead of time with etched glasses, mismatched antique china, and damask linens (all Emporia finds) for precisely that number.

Victoria delicately wipes her mouth and praises the lunch. She and Jeff and Ben are going to play tennis. Jeff extends an invitation to Sydney, but she begs off, declaring that she's a terrible player, which is, more or less, an accurate statement. But once again, the rudimentary math is troublesome.

"I'll play," Mr. Edwards, ever accommodating, offers.

Talents are weighed and measured. Ben and Mr. Edwards will take on Vicki and Jeff. From this, Sydney concludes that Ben is the best player of the four.

Sydney does not do the dishes more than once a day. It is a private rule she never breaks, even under dire circumstances, such as on the first Friday night of her stay, when an impromptu cocktail party required upwards of thirty glasses and hors d'oeuvres plates, not to mention four cheese-encrusted cookie sheets on which Mr. Edwards had hastily baked crostini. Sydney had already emptied and reloaded the dishwasher earlier in the day and so simply retreated to her room to listen to the Sox on WEEI. Today, she effects a similar retreat, knowing that much will be required of her after the evening meal. She is happy to help out, but she has her limits.

Sydney enters her room and is immediately overwhelmed by grief for Daniel. By simply shutting the door, she has been hurtled back to an understanding of precisely what it is that she has lost. The expectation of a normal life. A buffer against the dead hour, fast approaching. A respite from the necessity to remake a future, to enter the peculiarly other universes of strangers. She presses a hand to her stomach, which seems to have taken the worst of the blow.

She remembers their particular fit, her pale leg slipping between his two when they lay together after making love, as if their limbs had been deliberately fashioned for this purpose. The way Daniel would never cross a room without glancing at her face. The way he'd come home from his shift, drained, searching for her, room to room, only the sight of her allowing him access to a normal life.

The sensation fades, leaving in its wake a desire not to be left alone. Sydney walks to the dresser with its mirror. She has had two weddings, one in a church and one in a temple. One at which her mother wept with happiness; one at which her father seemed privately pleased. Surely, Sydney thinks, that is any woman's quota. Another wedding would be greedy, faintly ridiculous. She couldn't wear white, expect gifts, have a reception. Is she done, then? Is it all over? And if so, what will she do with herself? Become a doctor? Could she do well enough on the MCATs? Could she learn to fly?

A puzzle has been dumped upon a table in a corner of the living room. Julie is bent over a thousand pieces. Privately, Sydney hates puzzles--the frustration, the headachy sense of having nothing better to do, the disappointment at the end when the final image is not a Bonnard or a Matisse after all, but instead a saccharine landscape reminiscent of Thomas Kinkade. (The stupefying boredom of summers on the cement front stoops of Troy, the games of hopscotch and marbles and jump rope exhausted, the change from the errand to the corner store already spent. Midafternoon, the dead hour, her friend Kelly whining about the heat, her mother napping upstairs. The public pool was slimy underfoot; Kelly wouldn't go there. One afternoon Sydney walked to the end of the street, looking for shade. She crossed to the next street and then to the next and then to the next until she found herself in a vacant lot with a chain-link fence. A boy tried to sell her cigarettes and then asked her to pull her shorts down. Just like that. He would give her a dollar. A dollar would buy an ice-cream cone. Sydney walked slowly away, hunching her shoulders for a blow from behind, moving toward a corner of the fence where there was an opening through which a slender girl could slip. When she reached the corner, she saw, to her horror, that the gap had been repaired. She turned. The boy had his own pants down and was touching himself frantically. Sydney, panic rising, scooted around him and ran as if for her life, and it wasn't until she was married to Andrew that she could even say the word penis.)

"I'm finding all the border pieces," Julie announces.

"Can I join you?"

"You can help."

Sydney sits opposite the girl and studies the cover of the box. A house is perched on rocks overlooking the Atlantic, the painting bearing enough of a resemblance to the one they are in to suggest the motives of the purchaser.

"I'll do the house," Sydney says. "I'll find all the white ones and put them together."

Sydney feels dull-witted and slow. Too many decisions, she discovers, have to be made. Is this part of the house or part of a seagull? Is that a bit of a whitecap or a cloud?

Sydney glances up and notices the speed with which Julie spots a piece and flicks it to one side. Within minutes, it seems, Julie has assembled all the straight edges. She begins to work them into a plausible frame.

Sydney watches in amazement as Julie's nimble fingers build a border.

"Julie," Sydney says. "I want you to try something."

Julie looks up at her, her frown of concentration flattening out.

"I want you to switch seats with me and find all the pieces of the house."

Julie tilts her head. She doesn't understand.

"I love doing the border," Sydney lies. "It's my favorite part."

"Oh," Julie says with some reluctance. "Sure."

After each is seated in the other's chair, Sydney makes a half-hearted attempt to connect part of the border. Surreptitiously, she observes Julie. With a sharp eye and a deft touch, Julie accurately spots the relevant shards of white and within minutes has a house in bits. She begins maneuvering them into place. Whenever she has two that match, she snaps them together.

"You're very good at this," Sydney remarks.

In her room, Sydney finds a packet of photos she recently picked up at the drugstore in Portsmouth. Most are pictures of the beach, of the village, of the exterior of the house. She takes them down into the living room and makes a neat stack on the coffee table.

"Julie, I just want to try something else," she says to the girl. "If you could come over here?"

Julie turns and stares at Sydney, as if gradually bringing her into focus. "Sure," she says. She joins Sydney on the couch.

"These are pictures I took with my camera," Sydney explains. "I was thinking of getting a frame and making a collage. You know what a collage is, right?"

Julie nods.

"I wondered if you would lay them out on the table for me so that they'd make a nice composition."

Sydney sits back on the sofa, ceding the table to Julie. The girl, who is used to following Sydney's instructions, flicks through the packet of photos and begins to sort them. Beachscapes. Pictures of the house. Photographs of the lobster pound and the grocery store in the center of town. After a time, Julie begins to place them on the coffee table. Sydney watches with growing excitement.

Selecting nine photographs from the pile, some vertical, some horizontal, Julie sets each down in relationship to the one before. She does not hesitate and she does not pick up a photograph once she has put it down. When she has finished, she sits back, squints at the collage, then pulls the photographs apart from one another by a quarter inch. Then she puts her hands in her lap. Done.

Sydney leans forward to examine the assemblage. A sole picture of the house in shadow, the darkest photo of the lot, sits just below and to the right of center and acts as an anchor. The other photos bleed out from that central picture in color and tone and in actual geographic proximity to the house. More surprising is the selection of just the nine pictures, four to one side, five to the other, the extra photograph on the left balancing the weight of the central dark image. The girl knew instinctively not to use all of the photos. The end result is visually pleasing. More than pleasing. Accomplished. Julie, who cannot understand eighth-grade math and is incapable of mastering basic punctuation, is clearly gifted at the art of composition.

"You've got quite an eye," Sydney says.

But the girl seems disturbed.

"What's wrong?" Sydney asks.

"There aren't any people in your pictures," Julie notes.

"How about a walk?" Sydney asks after a time.

Julie examines Sydney as if through a film Sydney has come to think of as milky. "All right," Julie says, ever compliant in the way of a girl who finds most of life pleasurable.

"We'll go through town. Stop by and watch them playing tennis." Sydney bends forward, collecting the photographs, wishing she didn't have to destroy Julie's effortless composition. "We'll do this again," she says.

The village center on a Saturday afternoon is crowded with packed SUVs and two sets of renters: the first group wistful, reluctant to leave after their two-week stay; the other buoyant, fetching provisions in anticipation of a long-awaited vacation. Julie and Sydney skirt the lobster pound and the general store and head along a tree-shaded lane. Even the meanest asbestos-shingled cottage and the weediest lawn seem inviting in the hard sunshine.

Sydney can hear the thwack of the ball before she can see the players. A thwack and a grunt. She tries to identify the source of the exertion. Male or female? Young or old?