Outer Banks (35 page)

“Fig!” we all cried together, as we used to do at Randolph. Only now we were not exclaiming at her appalling naiveté.

“Wowee,” Ginger said, giving a little wiggle. “I wouldn't mind getting a load of that. As the Elizabethans used to say.”

“Or maybe it was the time in Morocco when I had lunch in a sheik's tent and stayed for breakfast the next morning,” Fig went on, licking her lips. “It is absolutely true what they tell you about the Bedouins, dear hearts.”

“What?” Ginger breathed.

“Two feet long,” Fig smiled beatifically. “And coated with Tiger fat.”

“Or was that camel dung?” Cecie said happily, and Fig laughed.

“No, but really,” she said. “I still think that night was it. Listen to this.”

And she took the diary from the big leather tote she had brought with her, and read to us the passage from it about the night on the roof of the Tri Omega house.

Again, as she read, we looked at each other, dumbfounded. The flowery words spilling from the book were undoubtedly those of that first Fig; you could actually see the dogged rapture in the eyes swimming behind the thick glasses, see the wet lips forming the words, hear the tremor of ecstasy in the treble voice. But they told of a night that had never happened; could not have happened. This night was so star-struck and enchanted and full of portent and promise, so highminded and purely and cloyingly romantic, that it could not have occurred to human flesh and blood. It surely had not occurred to four drunk, silly college girls who ended up in maudlin tears, or vomiting over a railing. As in the passage about her initiation, I starred in the story of the night of Fig's first transcendent brush with alcohol, and the things that she remembered my saying and doing were not even possible to a medieval saint.

“Effie and I lay together under the stars, in the presence of our dearest friends and sisters, and pledged our silent devotion to each other, and felt in our veins the music of the spheres,” Fig finished with a flourish.

“Now how could anything top that?” she said, when none of us spoke.

“Nothing could,” I said. “Fig, I just can't believe you ever saw me like that. I sound like St. Joan, or the Little Colonel, or Elizabeth Barrett Browning, or maybe all three. You know I was never that good. Half the time I wasn't even nice to you.”

“You always were, Effie,” she said. “I know some of the others weren't, sometimes, but you were. You three always were.”

“No,” I said, thinking ashamedly of those nights that Cecie and I lay in bed, strangling with laughter at her, and at my imitations of her.

“You must have known I laughed at you sometimes, and mimicked you,” I said. “I'm terribly ashamed of it now, but it's true, and you mustn't romanticize me. I was never as pure and noble as all that. None of us were.”

“Listen, you let me be one of you, and nobody had ever done that before,” Fig Newton said seriously. “I didn't care what you said about me. I knew you were just teasing. I even liked that. Nobody had ever even teased me before. You changed my life. All of you did. I'll never forget that.”

I got up unsteadily and went around the table and hugged her. The others followed. She hugged us back, so hard that I could feel her long nails digging into my flesh.

When I sat back down, my eyes were wet.

“I'm sorry I was a rat,” I said. “I was even sorry then. I'd feel just horrible if I thought I, or we, had really hurt you. But just look at you now.”

“Just look at me,” Fig said.

We got up and went in on tottering legs to lunch, and then to our beds to sleep off the vodka and the little burst of emotion. Or rather, Fig and Ginger and I did. I left Cecie curled up in the hammock on the porch.

“No sense wasting the ocean,” she said. “I think I'll sleep in full view of it. Want to go swimming when we wake up?”

“Sure,” I said. “What did you think of that little soul-bearing? Very cathartic, wasn't it?”

“Ummmn hmmmm,” Cecie said noncommittally. “It was really something.”

I laughed.

“You still don't take any prisoners, do you?” I said.

“Somebody's got to keep their head around here,” she said.

I fell asleep on my bed by the open window, the afternoon wind off the sea blowing cool on me. It was a delicious sleep, sweet and deep, and I woke feeling clean and whole and light, as I remembered feeling when I woke from one of those perfect, dreamless sleeps of adolescence. I stretched luxuriously. And then the thought came, sweeping everything before it: “I have cancer. I am going to die in less than a week.”

The shock and surprise and simple desolation of it flung me out of bed and had me running down the hall before I was even aware that I had gotten up. I ran, I knew viscerally, for Cecie. She was sitting in the hammock in a faded old bathing suit that I thought I remembered from school, rocking herself with one foot and humming, looking out at the cobalt sea.

“Well, hello, there,” she grinned. “Dr. Livingston, I presume.”

I stood with sweat drying at my hairline and heart hammering, trying to smile naturally around the devastation of that unguarded revelation. I felt it beginning to ebb.

“You said something about swimming,” I said. “Let's do it.”

She looked at me keenly.

“You look, as my grandmother's faithful old retainer Titterbaby used to say, like you'd been whupped through hell with a buzzard gut,” she said.

“I should never drink at noon,” I said. “I'm a wreck the rest of the day.”

We swam far out in the heaving blue sea. The tide was coming in and the wind was strong and cool, but the water, after the first shock, was lovely, like swimming in brilliant bubbles, or wine. We stayed in for almost an hour, and when we came out we collapsed side by side on our towels, breathing hard, letting the sinking sun dry and warm us, and lull us nearly back into sleep. Once more the timelessness of the sea came into me and soothed me, shutting away fear and outrage and death. This was right; this good moment was all.

Presently, without lifting her head from her arms, Cecie said, “I'm sorry about your little boy.”

“It was a long time ago,” I said automatically; it was what I said when anyone mentioned Stephen. It meant nothing except, “Stop. Don't say any more.”

“It doesn't make it any less hard,” she said. “I know. It's been ten years since Vinnie, and I still hurt for him every day.”

I rolled my face toward her. I had never, in all the years I had been close to Cecie Hart, heard her speak so openly of pain. Her face was peaceful, but there were new lines in it, as if simply to speak of the loss brought it forth afresh, to cut and tear anew.

“I wish I'd known him,” I said. “Ginger said he was absolutely charming. He must have been really special, to capture you.”

She smiled. “He was special,” she said. “He was handsome and romantic, and a silly fool; nobody has ever made me laugh like he did, except you. He was also opinionated and frankly not too smart, and maybe the worst male chauvinist pig I ever met. Just a perfect stereotype of the Italian male. I have no idea why I fell so for him. He was everything I thought I hated. In the long run, it just doesn't matter.”

“I guess not,” I said. “It's a lot simpler when you can feel that way about somebody. That kind of constant love…it can get you through anything.”

But, I thought, it isn't getting me through. Why is that?

Cecie shook her white head impatiently.

“I didn't say it was simpler,” she said. “It's not simple. The love may be constant, but it isn't enough for the worst of the times. In the long run you have to do that yourself. I came almost to hate Vinnie before he died; to hate the dependence, and the manipulating, and the out-and-out bullying…never underestimate the strength of weakness, Katie. There's an awful power to it. He was a very brave and simple man, and he couldn't forgive life for crippling him, or me for having to help him and support the kids. When he saw he was going to die soon, he invited his mother
to leave his sister's, where she'd lived for years, and come live with us; he said she would be company for me after he was gone. What he meant was, it would be another chain to him, even after he was dead. And she is. I know that. I still love him as much as I did the day I met him, and I always will, and I miss him every day of my life, but I hate him for that, and for other things, too. I refuse to romanticize what he was, and what we were. It's like refusing my entire life for all those years. It's like a kind of death in life. The real thing is quite enough for me.”

I was silent. Under the old Cecie there was a new one, then. A woman I did not know, and wondered if I could. This woman was very strong. The Cecie I had left in her bed at Randolph on graduation day had not been strong in this way.

“I hate it about the house,” I said. “I know what that must have done to you. Cecie…are you awfully poor?”

She laughed. It was a free laugh, her old one, a girl's.

“Jesus, am I! Rock bottom,” she said. “Flat line. One step above food stamps. His insurance stopped when he died, and his social security is practically nothing, because he didn't work that long, and his mother's barely pays for her therapist and medicines and what not. I don't have any benefits: I never worked at anything long enough. And it wasn't any kind of work, really; I ran the bookmobile in the neighborhood for a while, and did a little tutoring, and I've done quite a bit of sewing, but it's not the kind of thing you get pensions from. Mostly I was nursing him and raising kids, and then his mother came. His brother Gino sends me a little money sometimes, and he's going to pay my tuition at the community college at home, to see if I can finish my degree. I'll pay him back, of course. I may make it through law school yet. The kids will be able to help some in a little while.”

Her voice was easy and cool, as it always had been. Her face was serene, eyes closed against the last slanting rays of the sun. I stared at her.

“You didn't graduate?” I said dumbly.

She opened her eyes and looked at me for a while.

“No,” she said. “I thought you knew.”

“No,” I said. “No, I didn't.”

“Well…” and she took a deep breath. “I went home the day after you graduated and I had what I guess you'd say was a nervous breakdown. A clinical depression, I think they call it now. I must have had it for a long time, that last year; it was what most of that sleeping was about. I never realized it; I just thought it was the mono. But when I got home Aunt Claire, the one who had just a hair more sense than the others, saw that there was something really wrong, and she sent me to my Uncle William's, in Boston, and he and Aunt Susan clapped me into a discreet and hideously expensive little hospital the same day. I'll always be grateful for that, even though I know it was because Aunt Susan couldn't cope with me staring around underfoot. I was almost catatonic by then. It's an awful thing, Kate, that utter, sucking blackness. You really are sure it will never end. Death looks not only good, but like absolutely the only option there is. They'd just started with the psycho-active drugs then, and they had me on those, and I had a lot of therapy from a woman who seemed to have more sense than most, and after eight or nine months I got where I could leave and go to a halfway house, and that's where I met Vinnie. He lived with his Mama and younger sister next door; I used to see him swaggering off to work in the mornings, singing and looking sideways at me under those foot-long eyelashes. I'd be out working in the garden early. I was still awfully shaky; I think he literally flirted and teased me back into life! We did most of our courting over the garden fence under the baleful eye of Mama, who definitely did not want the apple of her eye to hitch up with a redheaded fruitcake. I think that was one of the things that decided me. We eloped to Elkton, Maryland, the day I got out of there. I had Leo exactly ten months later. So no, I never did go back and finish. I always meant to, after the kids were in college. But of course, by then, he'd been shot.”

“And you never got back to the water.” It was not a question.

“No,” she said ruefully. “Losing the Tidewater house is the one thing I really regret out of all this. That and never seeing the Cloisters in New York. I'd kill to see their herb gardens, and to study with their medieval herbalist.”

“Well, I can't do anything about the house, but I can surely by God get you to the Cloisters,” I said. “You come this winter and we'll go spend every day for a week there…” and then I stopped.

“I'd love to see your house,” she said. “The pictures are beautiful. But I've used up all my respite time with Mama Fiori for the year. In the spring, maybe.”

“I want to tell you, here and now and out loud, that I think you're something, Cecie Hart Fiori,” I said. “Anybody else would be whining or playing the holy martyr if they lived like you have. You make the rest of us look like self-indulgent snips.”

“Oh, Lord, Kate, don't you give me that,” she said impatiently. “One reason I don't see more people is that I always get that poor-noble-Cecie garbage. Listen, I love my life. It's so full now that I can't get done everything I want to do. And I'm not being noble; I mean that. There's absolutely nothing I want that I don't have, except maybe enough money, and I can probably rectify that, ultimately. Of course, there are a few things I do have that I wish I didn't, like Mama…”

“Say the word and I'll find somebody to put a hit on her,” I said. “Tell me what you do that you love, Cecie.”

“Oh, Kate. Well, I garden. That's just utter joy to me. I've turned the entire yard into a garden. Flowers in front, herbs and vegetables in back.
Boston
magazine came and took pictures of it a couple of years ago; I'll send you the article when I get home. And then there's the herb book; it's really quite something, Kate. I haven't seen anything else like it in the book stores. I have high hopes for it. And the boys; they're not special, Lord knows, but they're funny and nice, and I enjoy them. I only wish I saw more
of them. And I study things: I've studied astronomy, and ornithology; I help with the Christmas Bird Count for Audubon, and I volunteer with the Massachusetts Conservancy. I belong to three different reading clubs; I read constantly. Even, God help me, Fig's appalling and astonishing opi. And I rent millions of videos, and I watch the Arts and Entertainment Channel slavishly. I'm the world's leading authority on “The Jewel in the Crown” and “Rumpole of the Bailey.” And I have friends, and I sew, and I have three absolutely worthless and eccentric cats. And other things. It really pisses me off when people assume my mind and soul are impoverished just because my pocketbook is.”