Outer Banks (37 page)

“Right!” Fig bellowed. “ ‘Go take your damned tomorrow!' ”

“Well,” Cecie said, getting up, “I believe I will.”

“No, Cece, wait,” I said, sobering a bit. “We'll be good. Come on; stay. Let's hear the diary. Please? Pretty please?”

She looked at me.

“Okay,” she said, grinning. “I sound like Mother Superior even to myself. Lay on, Fig.”

And Fig did. She came and sat on the hearth rug with the firelight falling on her lion's mane, the exotic chimera's face bent over the crumbling fake alligator, the bitter Persian scent of Detchema rising from the V of her white silk blouse, and read to us the
passages from the time that I first met Paul Sibley, and about the dinner party in his apartment, where she first fell under his spell. At first we laughed; the words, in the breathy, rich voice, were simply so ludicrous, so unlike what we knew of the truth of that time. But gradually we stopped laughing. Despite the naive hyperbole and the reverent references to Paul as a sort of prince, or young god, and me as his princess and consort, two things emerged with diamond-hard clarity: the fathomless depth of my helpless love for him and my utter, tremulous happiness in those days; and the savage and aching thing that was Fig's hopeless passion for him. When she stopped reading, after the part about that other September on the Outer Banks, we sat still and silent, our heads bowed. Paul Sibley sat with us, warm and living; he and I sat together, wrapped apart in our oneness and absorption like a single unit. I felt no nameable emotion, but I could perceive, on the skin of my arm, the precise, exact heat and texture of his, where it pressed against me. I could smell the warm smell of him, somehow a dark and musky thing. I closed my eyes. I was afraid that I would see him next.

Fig's new laugh rang out into the silence, silvery.

“Lord, I even embarrass myself,” she said. “He must have wanted to drown me like a puppy. You, too, Effie. I followed you all everywhere that summer and fall; but you were too wrapped up in each other to notice me. And when you graduated, I followed him like a bloodhound for another year. Did you know that? I bet he never told you, but I did. If Ginger hadn't come along, I think I would have proposed to him. You saved us both a lot of embarrassment, Ginger.”

No one said anything, and then, in the silence, I heard the sound of weeping. It was silent weeping, but you could hear the little soft, indrawn breaths, and the sniffles. A child cries like that when it is cranking up for a storm of tears. Stephen used to do it. I opened my eyes. It was Ginger crying. I had known that it must be.

“Oh, Ginger, sweetie, don't…” I began.

She lifted her head and looked at me. Her mouth was drawn open in a rictus of woe, perfectly square. She took a great, shuddering breath.

“He never loved me,” she sobbed. “It was always you, Kate. I knew it then and I've always known it, and he knows it too. He said he did, but it was my money and I knew it was…he still talks about you sometimes, when I've done something that makes him mad, or embarrasses him, and I know he's thinking about you a lot of the time when he's quiet…”

“Oh, no, he isn't, he doesn't; don't say that,” I whispered in a frail, little-girl voice. It sounded silly even to me. “You were ten times cuter than I was, that was why. He always thought you were just the cutest thing; he told me…”

“Nooooo,”
Ginger wailed. “No, he didn't. No, he did not…it was you. And you know, I tried so hard to be like you…to be good…to be what he wanted, classy and quiet and smart and funny, like you…I wanted so bad to be good for him…”

I realized she was very drunk. I realized that I was, too. I wanted to end this infantile idiocy, but I did not know how.

“Let's don't talk about it anymore. Let's sing some more,” I said, smiling winsomely.

“No, get it all out,” Fig said from before the fire. She was leaning slightly forward, her lips parted. “If it's been festering all this time, it's better to get it all out and then it can heal. Go on, Ginger, sweetie. It's just us…”

From her wing chair Cecie made a small, strangled sound of disgust. Ginger took a deep breath, and whimpered, on a tide of tears, “I always thought if I was a very good girl, everything would be all right. I thought if I was sweet and cute enough, I would have a good life, and be a good mother, and keep Paul. I even thought…if I was funny and charming and lovable and wonderful…I wouldn't have to know that I'm going to die.
Maybe I wouldn't even die. I'm so afraid of that; I always have been…”

Something cold and malignant coiled up from my stomach like a snake. I felt it coming and did not even try to stop it.

“Well, then, you lose, Gingerrooney,” I said coldly. “You're going to lose this round. You're going to D-I-E, die! Even you can't outcute and outgood a baby, and babies die. Even the cutest and best ones die…”

I looked at her blindly, appalled at myself. She dropped her face into her hands and wailed loudly, scrubbing at her eyes with her fists. Cecie stared at me whitely. Fig looked, in the firelight, interested and sympathetic and rapt. There was a small, curved smile on her perfect new mouth.

“Well, I'm sorry, but that was such a silly thing to say,” I began fretfully. Cecie jumped to her feet, her face paper-white, her blue eyes blazing.

“GET REAL!” she shouted. She stood there, fists clenched, tears in her eyes. We looked at her in silence, all of us.

“I'm sick of this and sick of you all,” she said. “You, Kate, and you, Ginger…you're acting like the worst kind of children and you have been, this entire week. My God, just so cute and funny.…There's nothing real about you…”

“And I suppose there is about you?” I said angrily. But under the anger, I felt grief, coming fast.

“You're damned right there is,” she said. “You bet your cute little Tri O fanny there is, and there has been, for a long goddamned time. Lord, what a drag it is to have to deal with people who aren't real; the work and grief and pain it dumps on the people around them is just…enormous! All this effort, all this work…just so two middle-aged women can play sorority girls and feel good again. Shit! It makes me furious! You know, I used to wonder what kind of women we'd all be. I thought about it for hours, and I'd fantasize that one day we'd all meet again, years later, and I'd know. And here we are, and I still don't know…except about
me. Just think about that; that's awful. All those years, all that living, and I still don't know what kind of women you all are! I don't know what you've done with your lives…I don't know how you feel about being here, in the middle of them, like we are; I don't know what you've come to believe all this adds up to…”

I felt myself begin to cry. I tasted the tears. But I had no sense of crying. Only of deep, weary sadness, and an end to something.

“I think reality sucks,” I quavered. “To hell with real life. Life is just too awful…” I could not go on.

“Christ, Kate, how would you know?” Cecie said relentlessly. “If this week is any example, you're going to die without ever having lived. I hate death as much as any of you, and I have just as good reasons as you all do, whatever they are, but I hate this kind of non-life more. It
is
a death. It's a chosen death. And that's a sin. That's a sin against the people around you, who have to live a harder reality because you won't live yours at all…”

She turned and ran out of the studio. We heard her feet clattering down the spiral stairs, and the door to the big house open and shut. We stood still. Ginger stopped crying, and I did, too. The beginning of shame and a great, whistling white shock lurked just beyond the bell of liquor. I knew when it lifted both would crash down over me.

“Well, goodness, our little cucumber has a boiling point after all,” Fig said in a light, amused voice. “Come on, let's build up the fire and have some brandy and I'll read you some more…”

“No,” Ginger said, and her voice was dull and lifeless. “I want to go to bed. I'm awfully tired and I think I'm going to be sick.”

“Want me to help you?” I said.

“No,” she said. “I want to do it by myself.”

Fig and I watched her down the steps and into the house. She stumbled once or twice, but she did well enough. But the puppy spring had gone out of her step, and her big shoulders drooped. She did not look like young Ginger Fowler now, but like what she
was: a middle-aged woman who weighed too much and had had too much to drink, and who had just seen the merciless and banal truth of her life.

“I'm sorry,” I whispered after her.

“She'll feel better in the morning,” Fig said. “So will Cecie. I have a wonderful idea; it will make up for all this silliness. We'll do it first thing in the morning.”

“What?” I said listlessly. I did not care; could not imagine caring.

“You'll see. Something really special. Something magical,” she smiled.

When I reached our room, Cecie was not in it. I hesitated, and then padded off in search of her through the darkened house. Somehow I could not sleep until I had tried to make peace with her. Cecie had never been angry with me before.

When I reached the deck facing the sea, I saw that she was lying curled up in the big old hammock. There was a blanket over her, and she was rocking, back and forth, back and forth. The chains that held the hammock creaked steadily, like the stays of a sail in the wind. I started to speak, and then I didn't. I did not know what I could say to her. I knew that she was right, but I was not able to address that, and perhaps I never would be. Perhaps, in the end, it did not matter. Probably it did not.

I lay awake a long time that night, and heard, until I finally fell asleep, the creak of the hammock's chains as it rocked with her in the little night wind off the sea.

I
T
began, that perfect day, with bells and cannons. I heard them dimly at first, and lay curled into a ball with the comforter over my head, trying to work them into a dream. But soon they were simply too loud for that, and I sat up, feeling, under the disorientation and alarm, a frond of
déjà vu
uncurling down deep in my mind. Bells and cannons and Cecie…

I opened my eyes and there she was, holding a little cassette player near my ear. Tchaikovsky's
1812 Overture
boomed to its exuberant conclusion and I scrambled out of bed and chased her down the hall. Only when we reached the deck, laughing and gasping, did I realize that I was naked except for my panties. The morning was newborn and washed with pearly sea-light, and fresh with frost. Down on the beach the low tide lapped and whispered in that absolute crystal clarity that the cold brings. I turned and fled back to my room, Cecie behind me. I was skinning gratefully into
a heavy sweater before I remembered last night's sad, shabby ending.

I turned to look at Cecie, and she grimaced.

“I know. I'm sorry,” she said. “I made an absolute butt of myself. I don't have any excuse at all except that I'd had too much to drink and I was so mad at Fig for setting all that up, and egging you all on. But it's such a great morning I've even forgiven her. And if you'll forgive me I'll shut up and play the ‘1812' for you again. The tape cost me a fortune.”

“Please don't bother on my account,” I grinned. “And no apologies are necessary. Really. Let's just pretend it never happened; I'm not sure Ginger's going to remember that it did, anyway.”

“I don't think she does, at that. I've already been in to see her and take her some coffee. Come on, breakfast's ready, and then Fig has something she wants to show us.”

“You
cooked breakfast?” I said, in exaggerated surprise. Cecie was by her own admission a dreadful cook. We'd agreed early on that she should handle dishwashing detail, and she accepted with alacrity.

“Now you know just how sorry I am,” she grinned.

Ginger was in the kitchen grimacing over toast and coffee. I could not tell if it was the food or the hangover. Probably the latter; Ginger had what Fig called a tin tongue, relishing fast food fried clams as much as she did Fig's exquisite little pâté suppers. An untouched plate of scrambled eggs and bacon sat before her.

“Good morning, sunshine,” I said.

“There is absolutely nothing good about this morning,” she said. Her eyes were swollen nearly shut, and her hands trembled. She had not yet combed and braided her hair, and it stood about her broad face like excelsior from a packing crate. She wore a fleece robe with a hole in the elbow. Shirley Booth in
Come Back, Little Sheba
came to mind.

“Aren't you going to eat that five-star breakfast I cooked for you?” Cecie said dryly.

“No, I am not,” Ginger said. “I'd just throw it up. If it's so bad that I can't eat, I must really have made a jackass of myself, so for whatever it was, I apologize right now.”

“It wasn't you that was the jackass,” Cecie said. “It was me and Fig, and I've already apologized. I don't think she's going to, but she's got a surprise for us that's probably her way of apologizing. Finish your coffee and get dressed and let's go. I said I'd bring you all over.”

“Over where?”

“No more questions. Scoot. Move,” Cecie said happily, and Ginger went slumping off. Cecie and I polished off the eggs and bacon while we waited; they were as bad as I thought they would be. I ate hungrily. There was a rising tide of something in the new morning that felt like simple joy, and after the misery of the previous night, I did not want to examine it, but only to revel in it. Outside, the light over the sea dazzled like a spill of diamonds.

Ginger came back in shorts and tennis shoes and a huge, fleecy brown sweater that I knew must be Paul's. It hung down below her wrists and nearly to her knees. In it, she looked like a benevolent woolly mammoth, or a prehistoric Viking woman wrapped in skins. Her long single braid and fair hair and lined blue eyes heightened the image.

“All you need is a shield and a spear,” I said.

“I feel too bad to even guess what you're talking about,” she said wanly. “I hope this surprise is a killer. Otherwise I'm going back to bed.”

Cecie tossed a set of car keys to me and opened the doors to the big, battered Land Rover.

“I hope you can drive this thing,” she said. “I wouldn't try, and I wouldn't ride with Ginger this morning in a kiddie car. Fig said to meet her at the public dock over on the Sound. Do you know where that is?”

“It's just right across the main highway; it's not half a mile,” Ginger said. “Why are we going to the dock?”

“You'll see,” Cecie said, and laughed aloud, her wonderful gurgling laugh.

I wrestled the big Rover around in the sandy yard and drove it slowly across the main highway and down the little sandy lane to the public boat dock. It was heavy and sluggish; I felt as if I were hauling it physically, rather than driving it; felt awkward and exposed and vulnerable sitting so high up. The road and the lane were practically deserted, and the boats in the public marina rode silently on flat pink mirror water. It was still very early.

We saw it before we saw Fig standing beside it: a trim, blue and white seaplane riding at rest alongside the silvery dock out into Roanoke Sound, bobbling very gently on the satiny skin of the water. Beside it stood Fig in white slacks and a scarlet leather bomber jacket. Her hair was bound back with a red scarf, and she wore the outsized dark glasses that shielded her eyes completely. She looked impossibly exotic and rich among the sea-stained fishing and pleasure boats and the oil and gas cans, and wet coils of dirty rope. She looked like a mirage, or something from a movie being filmed on the dingy little working dock. She was smiling brilliantly, and the low early sun glanced off her teeth. Beside her slouched a very tall young man in filthy blue jeans and cowboy boots, with a baseball cap on his head and mirror aviator glasses covering much of his brown face. He was drinking coffee with one hand; the other held Fig's waist, loosely.

“Holy shit,” Ginger croaked. “She's bought a goddamned seaplane.”

“Rented. But not just any seaplane,” Fig said merrily, trotting up to meet us. “This seaplane belongs to the one and only Poolie Prout, former Nag's Head tight end…wouldn't you know…and full-time illegal substance runner and all-round Pussycat. Isn't he beautiful? Not to mention his little plane, which is full to the gunnels, or whatever, with French champagne and ready to
take us all the way down to Ocracoke. So how do you like them apples, Tri Omegas?”

We liked it. More than that, we loved it. It was just the sort of grand and eccentric stroke that the glorious day-in-the-making called for; just the antidote for the heaviness of the ending to this time that lay in wait for us, at the edges of our consciousness. It wiped last night's shoddy little ugliness completely away; it brought those vanquished young women scampering back. Ginger's rump, as she scrambled into the rocking plane ahead of me, was the muscular, teasing rump of young Ginger Fowler once more; the flash of tanned legs as Cecie skipped aboard seemed miraculously wiped free of scales and scars and the sad little nests of blue veins behind the knee and ankle. My own legs and arms seemed to move in their sockets as if they had been oiled. Fig, who had slipped into the seat beside the elaborately taciturn Poolie Prout, looked like an ingenue in a movie about barnstormers or wingwalkers. She tossed her heavy hair and held a champagne bottle aloft, and gave us the old WWII thumbs-up sign. It would have been impossible not to be charmed by her.

It was clear that Poolie Prout was. He did not so much as acknowledge the rest of us, except for a nod of his head when Fig introduced us. But he cut his mirror-glass eyes toward Fig with regularity, and after he had us in the blue air and droning smoothly down the coast, rested his callused brown hand on her thigh. Occasionally he leaned over and whispered something in her ear, and she laughed and tossed her hair. Once I even saw him smile; when he did, the muscles in his jaw that spoke of regular acquaintance with Red Man tobacco bunched and knotted, and white lines fanned out familiar eyes behind the lenses of the aviator glasses. He had a decal stuck on the plane's dashboard that said, “Born to Raise Hell,” and a pair of gossamer black panties rode on an anonymous knob. Every so often Fig would hold the champagne bottle to his lips and he would swig some, not bothering to wipe the foam off his chin.

“He must think he's got ahold of Dolly Parton,” Ginger said as we drifted down the long white ribbon of the Cape Hatteras National Seashore. “Look at him; he's in macho hog heaven. He probably thinks we're her old maid aunts, or something.”

“I don't care what he thinks, as long as he keeps this thing in the air,” Cecie said. “That makes the second bottle of champagne they've opened. Pass that bottle over here, Kate. If I'm going into the drink I want to go swigging Perrier Jouet.”

“It wouldn't be a bad way, would it?” I said dreamily. “Blue sky over you and blue water under you, and champagne bubbles in your blood…”

“Bad enough so that I'd rather not,” Cecie said. “Lord, Kate. Shut up. Drink your champagne and look out the window. Did you ever, in all your life, ever on this earth, see such a day?”

It was true. There never was such a morning; never will be again. Blueness streamed and shimmered through everything; crystal blue edged the horizon and the dunes, and the sky over the sound was perfect cobalt. The air we floated in was liquid radiance; the great, wild dunes and the dark maritime forests and the occasional tiny villages fled beneath us, limned in blue-edged clarity as if by an Old Master's brush. I thought of the perfect, bronze-blue of Van Gogh's Arles paintings, and of Winslow Homer's burning, translucent subtropical landscapes. They were close, but nothing, no human hand, could have captured the radiance of this day. I think perhaps you get days like these maybe twice or three times in your life. I remembered only one: the day long ago when we had come together, with Paul, down the same highway that unrolled below us, to where the ferry left for Ocracoke.

Ginger said the same thing that she had that morning.

“Weather breeder,” she said, swigging champagne contentedly. “Too perfect to last. See the blue edges to everything? Something's making up somewhere. And there's no wind at all…has anybody seen the news? What's going on in the tropics?”

No one had, but Poolie Prout said over his shoulder, in a
tenor nasal twang that belied the shoulder and neck and jaw muscles and made Cecie grin at me, “Nothing big, but a little blow coming up-coast from across in the Gulf. Small craft warning in Georgia and South Carolina. Headed out to sea before it gets here, though. But the next few days will probably be foggy and sully.”

“Then I'm glad we picked today, or rather, that you did, Fig,” I said. “I wouldn't want to navigate around here in fog.”

“I can fly this thing in fog or anything else,” Poolie said remotely, but he cut his eyes over at Fig. “I've flown in force ten gales, with wind blowing the rain into us like machine gun fire. I can remember taking her home when the hurricane flags were flying all along this coast.”

“Where's home?” I said. The champagne was buzzing in my head, running sweet and fizzing through my veins. I felt wonderful.

“Down to Avon, just on ahead,” he said. “Right before the Ocracoke ferry. Got a dockage at the fishing pier in Pamlico Sound.”

Fig giggled. It was a little girl's sound. She had taken off the glasses; her eyes glittered as if she had been taking some psycho-active drug. I wondered suddenly if she was. She had laughed often and gaily and at nothing in particular all morning. We were all giddy from the day and the flight and the liquor, but I had never seen Fig this way before, either that old Fig or this new one.

“Avon,” she piped. “Isn't Avon where the Carolina Moon is? Do you know the Carolina Moon, Poolie?”

“Do I know the Carolina Moon,” he said. He reached over and ruffled her hair and let his hand trail down her neck to the collar of the jacket, and linger there. “Is the Pope a Catholic? Listen, I've tried out the Magic Fingers in every one of them rooms. They've got a bronze plaque in one of them. Says, the Poolie Prout room. Got a mark on the wall for every time I've…”

“Spare me the details,” Fig purred. “I've got a mighty wide
jealous streak. Well, well. The Carolina Moon. I'd love to see the inside of one of those rooms…”

“That could be arranged,” he said, smirking. “I could run up to Nag's Head anytime you say. Not more than an hour flight in any weather.”

“Even at night?” Fig said in a low, growly voice. In the back seat, the three of us grinned at each other.

“She'll have him lifting the plane when we land,” Ginger whispered.

“I doubt if he'll have to,” Cecie snorted. “Looks like she's halfway to those Magic Fingers as we speak.”

“Even at night,” Poolie Prout said to Fig. “Even with no moon and no stars. Even in fog at night. Even in rain at night. I've landed in any kind of weather you can imagine all up and down this coast. You get an itch to see the Carolina Moon by night, you give me a call. I'll get you there.”

“I'll keep it in mind,” Fig laughed, and looked back at us and winked. Poolie Prout put his hand on her thigh and left it there. She did not move it.

We set down in the little harbor at Ocracoke and had lunch there, at a fish place on the wharf. Poolie vanished into the dark bar, to play video games and frog biceps with his buddies. We could hear their raucous laughter. He was undoubtedly telling them about his conquest of the rich older woman. We four each had steamed blue crabs and cold beer, and a slice of the lemon pie that a handwritten sign on the wall said LaVerle, the wife of the Prop., made herself. If she did, she was not a great deal better than Cecie. We ate the gummy pie, laughing. We laughed a great deal at that lunch; I don't remember at what, now. But I remember the laughter, and under it, the sadness, like chill dew in grass.