Outer Banks

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?

I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves

Combing the white hair of the waves blown back

When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
T. S. ELIOT

O
N
the Outer Banks of North Carolina there is a legend about the ships that have come to grief in the great autumn storms off those hungry shoals. Over the centuries there have been many; the Banks have more than earned their reputation as the Graveyard of the Atlantic. Most of the graves are in Diamond Shoals, just off the point of Cape Hatteras, but the entire hundred-odd-mile sweep of coast has devoured its measure of wood and flesh. Myths and spectres and apparitions lie as thick as sea fog over the Banks, but the one that I have always remembered is the one Ginger Fowler told us all…Cecie, Fig, Paul Sibley, and me…the September of my last year in college, when we were visiting her between quarters.

“They say that whenever a ship is going to go down you can hear something like singing in the wind,” she said. “Bankers say it's mermaids, calling the sailors. Lots of them claim to have heard it.
It's not like wind or anything. They say when you hear it, you have no choice but to follow it, and you end up on the shoals. A few of the sailors who've been rescued swear to it.”

We were sitting on the front veranda of the Fowlers' house on the dunes on Nag's Head beach, watching the twilight die over the Atlantic. On either side of us hulked the great, black-weathered, two- and three-story cottages that made up what the Bankers call the Unpainted Aristocracy—a long line of huge, weather-stained wooden summer houses that had been built in the early days of the century by the very rich. When they were first built, the houses reigned alone on that lordly line of dunes, owning by sheer
force majeure
the wild, empty beach. Now they are surrounded by flealike armies of bungalows and time-shares and fishing piers and umbrella and float rentals, like mastodons beset by pygmies. But even now, when you are on the front porches or verandas, you have no sense of the graceless, idiot hoards nibbling at their skirts. Only of wind and sun and emptiness, and the endless sea.

I remember that I felt a small
frisson
that might have been night wind on sunburned flesh, and reached for Paul's hand. He squeezed it, but did not turn to look at me. He was looking intently at Ginger's sweet, snub face, stained red by the sun setting behind us over Roanoke Sound and by the long, golden days in the sun. Autumn on the Outer Banks is purely a sorcerer's spell: so clear you can see each grain of sand on the great dunes, and bathed in a light that is indescribable. We had stayed on the beach from dawn to sunset for the past four days, and all of us wore the stigmata on our cheeks and shoulders. But Ginger was the red-brown of cast bronze all over. The freckles on her broad cheekbones had merged in a copper mask, and her eyelashes and tow head had whitened. She looked like a piece of Mayan statuary in her faded cotton bathing suit with the boy-cut legs, squat and abundant and solid as the earth.

I thought she looked almost perfectly a piece of the old house
and the older coast, but in fact her father had only bought the house two summers before, from an imperious old widow who was going, most reluctantly, to live with her children in Wilmington. Before that Ginger had summered at Gulf Shores, on the Alabama coast, and lived with her family in a small north Alabama town called, appropriately, Fowler. It consisted of a huge textile mill, a mill village and store, and little else, all of which belonged to Ginger's father. The Fowlers were newly, enormously, and to us, almost inconceivably rich. Ginger worked very hard to conceal the fact, and succeeded so well that until we went to visit her on the Outer Banks, and saw the house, we did not really comprehend it. Fig had told us when she proposed Ginger for sisterhood in Tri Omega that Ginger had a trust fund of her own approaching five million dollars; in those days that was a breathtaking sum of money. But since none of us paid much attention to what Fig said, we either forgot it or discounted it. In the end, Ginger became a Tri Omega because we all loved her. It was impossible not to. She was as gregarious, sweet-natured, and simple as a golden retriever.

“And,” Cecie observed thoughtfully, “looks not unlike one.”

On the darkening porch that night at Nag's Head, Paul smiled at Ginger and said, “Have you heard the mermaids singing, Ginger?” and the little cold breath on my nape and shoulders strengthened.

“God, no,” she said. “It would scare the bejesus out of me. I hope I never do.”

“I wish I could,” he said, and then he did look at me, and squeezed my hand again. “That would be something to hear. I think that would be worth just about anything.”

I actually shivered; it seemed to me as if the very air around us had weight and meaning, and every whirling atom had particularity and portent. But I was so much in love with him by then that everything he said, everything we did, everything that surrounded us, our entire context, had resonance and purpose. Cecie looked at me and then at Paul, and said, “I think I'll go make some
tea,” and rose and padded into the house. I watched her out of sight, thinking once more how like a small, slender boy she looked in silhouette, wishing that she liked Paul better. For two years Cecie had been the friend of my heart, one of the two real loves of my life, and I wanted her to share this new love with me. I wanted the three of us, I think, to be a unit, a whole. But Cecie, who did not often or easily give her heart, was not about to accord it to Paul Sibley. From the moment she met him she had removed herself from him, physically when she could, emotionally whenever she could not. With another friend I might have thought it was jealousy, but what Cecie and I had went far beyond and deeper than that. I did not know what it was, and somehow could not speak of it with her, and she did not to me. Paul knew that she did not like him, but had been wise enough to simply let it alone. They did not often meet.

That week in September was, in fact, the last time Cecie ever allowed herself to be in his presence, but in the end it did not matter. I lost him that weekend to that old sea and Ginger's new money, but I did not know that until much later.

That winter I studied T. S. Eliot in a Contemporary Poetry class, and when we came to “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and the professor read aloud those lines of ineffable beauty and heartbreak,

I began to cry, suddenly and silently, and excused myself from class, and walked across campus to the Tri Omega house blinded by wind and tears, near suffocating with heartbreak and exaltation. I was still crying, intermittently, when Cecie came in from her history lab, and Fig and Ginger stopped by to see if we wanted to go to early supper.

“Who is it? Yeats? Dylan Thomas?” Cecie said, who had had
the poetry course the quarter before, and knew my penchant, that winter, for quick, rapt tears. It was mostly the helpless love for Paul that triggered them, a mature and obliterating and sometimes crippling thing, that left me flayed and vulnerable, as if I had no skin. An astounding number of things pierced me and brought tears in those days. But it was partly the poetry, too. Cecie and I often stayed up late into the nights reading poetry to each other, mostly the bitter, beautiful, sharp-edged poetry of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and if she did not, like me, weep openly, her blue eyes were sometimes liquid with tears. I never saw Cecie cry, but on those nights she often came close.

“Eliot,” I snuffled. “About the mermaids singing, but not to him…I don't know. It reminded me of that thing Ginger told us up at Nag's Head, about the mermaids and the ships, and then…well, I just think that it's such a
sad
line. So sad, so sad…it's all of life. It's what ought to happen, but doesn't. It's…when you know it isn't going to…”

“What is?” Ginger said, her brow furrowed with perplexity. She and Fig shared a suite with us, connected by a bath, and often, in the mornings after Cecie and I had sat up reading poetry, Ginger would stick her shower-wet head into our room and say, “I hear there was a meeting of the Tri Omega Intellectual Society last night,” and would grin and put out her tongue and slam the door as Cecie or I threw a book or a stuffed animal at her. Ginger was as slow to study as she was quick to laugh, and her grades, even in her undemanding major of Elementary Education, were in constant jeopardy. It took the entire sisterhood to get her through her pledgeship and maintain a grade average sufficient for initiation, but nobody minded. As I said, everybody loved Ginger.

I read her the lines from Eliot, and she said, “And that's what you're bawling about?”

“I think it's one of the most romantic things I ever heard,” Fig breathed adenoidally. Her eyes, swimming myopically behind her thick lenses, looked like those of a rapt bug. She breathed through
her mouth, audibly, as she did in times of transport. We hooted her down as we often did, and like a dog that is often threatened but not actually struck, she grinned gummily and tucked her short neck into her heavy shoulders, and looked at us slantwise.

“And sad,” she added. “It's really sad.” If I had said the poem was the funniest thing I had ever heard, Fig would have laughed heartily. Since we pledged her, Fig had had a kind of suffocating, sexless crush on me that was as obsessive as it was inexplicable. Very few things have made me so uncomfortable. Fig was a triple legacy, and National had threatened to put us on inactive if we did not pledge her. Otherwise, in those days of casual and killing cruelty, there is no doubt that she would have lived her years at Randolph in one of the independent women's dorms.

“If one of us were to hear the mermaids, who should it be?” she said archly. It was the kind of precious, off-balance, idiot thing she was always proposing: “If you were a flower, what would you be?” “If Kate was an animal, what animal would she be?” “If I were a famous woman of history, who do you think I'd be, Kate?”

“Grendel's Mother,” Cecie snapped once, and Fig trilled her laughter, by then disconcertingly like mine.

“That's good, Cecie, I'm going to put that in my diary,” she said, and Cecie groaned. Fig's diary was infamous at the Tri Omega house. She wrote in it, furtively and ostentatiously, almost constantly. At chapter meetings you would end a heated discussion and look around and Fig would be scribbling in her diary. If you asked what she was writing, or made as if to snatch it away from her, she would pantomime fright and press it to her nonexistent bosom. Often, sitting in our room in one of the endless late night discussions that went on among us, I would feel Fig's eyes on me, and look over and see her staring at me, mouth open, and then she would smile mysteriously and drop her eyes and scribble in the diary. By that winter she had amassed four or five of them, big fake-alligator volumes she ordered from somewhere and filled with her tiny, cribbed hand. She kept them in a locked metal
strongbox under her bed, and hinted that they contained enormities. None of us felt anything anymore about the diaries but weariness.

I knew that she knew who Grendel's Mother was, though. Fig was probably, in her own way, as brilliant a student as Randolph had ever had. Her grasp was intuitive and instant, her recall prodigious, and she studied like no one I have ever known before or since. Her point average alone, the sisterhood agreed, was worth the rest of Fig to the Tri Omegas. She was an English major, with a minor in history, and there was not a scholastic honorary she did not belong to. She meant to be a writer, and sometimes, when someone asked her again what she was writing in the diary, she would say, “I'm writing about all of you, and how proud I am to be a Tri Omega.” And she would look so humbly, hangdog grateful, and smile so terribly coyly, that the questioner would turn away in embarrassment and distaste. Fig was so thankful to be one of us, and so relentlessly, Pollyanna-cheerful, and effusive in her praise of us, that we soon ceased baiting her and simply avoided her when we could. Most of us could, except Cecie and I and Ginger. Ginger is the only one of us I never heard say an unkind word about Fig. Ginger was, and is, incapable of malice. She came into Tri Omega as a sophomore pledge from Montevallo Women's College, having being sponsored, surprisingly and insistently, by Fig, who had lived her entire life in the shadow of Ginger's father's mill, in Fowler. It was, in fact, the Fowler-Kiwanis scholarship that sent her to Randolph. Fig's people were as spectacularly poor as Ginger's were rich. Ginger roomed with Fig, becoming our second suitemate, and went a long way in making the association bearable to me. I don't think it ever was to Cecie, not really.

Poor Fig. Her name was Georgine Newton, but I think she had probably been called Fig from birth. She was pale, puffy, squatty, spotty, frizzy-haired, sly-eyed behind the quarter-inch glasses, and had the constant, quivering, teeth-baring smile of an
abused dog. She had sinus and asthma and snored so terribly that the dean of women made a rare exception and let her live alone. When we pledged her, we drew straws to see who would become her suitemates, and when we pledged Ginger and she moved in with Fig, we had a lottery going to see how long she could bear the fusillade of garglings and snortings. But Ginger was fortuitously deaf in one ear from a stray baseball, and so they simply arranged their beds so that Fig's snores fell on her deaf ear, and remained roommates. It was Cecie and I who heard her, through a plaster wall and a bathroom with two closed doors.

“Oh,
Lord
,” Cecie would say, when Fig's name came up, and refused to elaborate. But I knew that she disliked Fig with a pure and fastidious animosity that was, for her, unusual. Cecie was censorious of few people; she simply avoided those she did not like, but she could not avoid Fig. It must have been an uncomfortable three years for her. We never talked much about it, except that once in a while she cautioned me about Fig. I had long since learned to smile and make light of Fig's heavy, cloying adoration and her incessant copying of my voice and gestures and clothes: I was myself a stranger in a strange land, and thought I knew how she must feel, somewhere under all that Fig-ness. But I soon developed a fine-honed skill at mimicking her, and I confess that I often used it in the late nights when Cecie and I lay in our beds with the young moon shining in on us…talking, talking.