The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims (159 page)

“Gracious!” Margie said. “That is quite a lot of serious charges for a harmless little prank such as our own.”

The girls were loaded into the town cop’s car and taken to the local jail, where they were fingerprinted and booked.

Peg’s boyfriend, a handsome guy named J.J., eventually arrived to bail out Peg and Margie, but not before the two girls had spent a few hours in the tidy jail cell.

“Take a look around you, ladies,” the bored town cop had said when he was locking them up. “Get a feel for it. Remember what it feels like to be behind bars. Not so nice, is it? Remember that feeling, next time you decide to commit a crime.”

Margie and Peg took a look around. They got a feel for it. They chewed some gum that Margie had, and then fell asleep. When Peg’s boyfriend J.J. finally showed up to spring them out of jail, it was already three o’clock in the morning.

“You two are turkeys,” J.J. said, and he brought the car around to the front of the station so the girls wouldn’t get any wetter.

They drove home. The rain was hitting the car hard, hail-like. Each drop of rain had the weight, it seemed, of an uncooked bean. The Delaware shore was getting just a small piece of some hurricane farther out in the Atlantic, but it was a dramatic piece.

J.J. drove with his chin almost touching the steering wheel, trying to see the road. Peg slept in the back seat. Margie found some gum that was stuck in her hair and worked it out.

“The cop told me you two were supposed to spend the whole night in jail, but I talked him out of it,” J.J. told Margie.

“How did you manage to accomplish that, you clever darling?” Margie asked.

“I told him that the road to our house might be washed out by morning from all this rain, and I might not be able to come and get you. He was nice about it.”

“Men certainly do like to talk about manly things like roads being washed out, don’t they?”

“That’s right,” said J.J.

“Did you give him a firm and manly handshake, J.J.?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Did you call him sir?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Good for you, J.J.,” said Margie. “Thank you so very much for releasing us from that dreadful prison.”

When they got back to the house, Margie’s spoiled and foolish boyfriend John was awake.

“I demand to have a drink with the criminal masterminds,” John said.

John had the same habit that Margie had, of speaking in a refined and aristocratic manner. Actually, Margie had inherited her speech pattern directly from John. John had invented it.

“Do you think we are loathsome, John?” Margie asked, and kissed him on the cheek.

John said, “I have a demand! I demand that we sit outside in this magnificent rain and hear chilling tales about life in the big house.”

Margie said, “Foolish John. Silly John. Don’t you realize that
this
is the big house?”

Margie was absolutely right. It was a very big house, indeed. It was John’s house. He was only twenty-one years old, but he owned this big house right on the Delaware shore. His parents had given it to him as a graduation present. Margie’s parents, by contrast, had given her a bracelet. Peg’s parents had taken her out to dinner for a graduation present, and J.J.’s parents had sent him a graduation card, signed by all his aunts and uncles.

John was rich. His father was a producer who lived in Hollywood and was very rich. As for John’s mother, she was a former Miss Delaware. She was divorced from John’s father and lived in a mansion on Chesapeake Bay. She had driven down only once that summer to visit her son at his new beach house. She had arrived in a Mercedes, and that car had looked as black and hard as a wet rock.

John planned to live in his graduation gift house on the beach forever, and he had invited his friends from college to live with him just as long as they wanted. Originally, there had been five young people living there, in John’s house. They’d had only two names between them. There had been three Margarets and two
Johns. Some had nicknames, and some did not. They were John, J.J., Margie, Mags, and Peg.

“Gracious!” John had observed with delight. “We are a full house. We consist of a pair and three of a kind. Isn’t that lucky? Isn’t that a marvelous hand to be dealt?”

But Mags left the beach house at the end of August and moved to Florida.

Mags secretly said to Peg, “I’ll tell you something, Peg. The fact is, I’m beginning to hate John.”

John said about Mags, after she had gone, “She was welcome to leave at any time. Nobody has to stay in this house simply to please me. Although she might have thought to replace herself with another Margaret, just to keep up our lucky hand of cards, no? Alas! Now we are merely two pairs. But you will all stay, won’t you?”

“We will all stay!” Peg had said, and hugged her handsome boyfriend J.J.

“Is the house even winterized?” J.J. had asked John.

“Oh, mercy! I don’t know,” said the spoiled and foolish John. “Couldn’t you winterize it, J.J.? You’re so clever. No? How hard could that be, to winterize my house?”

In fact, the house was not winterized, as its four occupants were beginning to realize by the end of September. They did not have any realistic way of staying warm. What’s more, by the night of Margie’s and Peg’s arrest, it did not even appear that any of the four young people had a job. J.J.’s job as a lifeguard had ended right after Labor Day, when the tourists left. It certainly seemed that Margie and Peg would be fired from their waitressing jobs, after their drunken butter prank in the parking lot of the restaurant. As for spoiled and foolish John, he’d never had any sort of job whatsoever. John had passed his summer growing his hair and writing sequels to movies that already had sequels.

“Well, my resplendent jailbirds,” said John. “Let us commence to the roof. Let us sit upon the widow’s walk and drink some alcohol while enjoying this magnificent rain.”

So it passed that the four friends climbed up onto the roof of John’s big beach house to drink some beer and watch the weather. They were just a dune away from the sea, and the beach was having a difficult time holding on to itself against the beating waves and rain. The four friends sat, exposed to the rain, on four saturated lawn chairs. The cold water puddled at their feet and pelted their backs.

John proclaimed, “This storm shall bring the cold water in. We shall not be able to go swimming anymore. My friends, I am sorry to report it. This storm marks the end of our happy summer.”

“No swimming!” Margie said, horrified.

“No swimming,” said John. “Yes! Sadly, this tempest brings our sweet summer to a close.”

Margie seemed devastated. It appeared to be the first time that she had ever considered the concept of seasonal change.

“No more swimming?” she said again. She was shocked, really. “Can it be true?”

“September is the cruelest month,” John said.

There was a bag of potato chips open on John’s lap, and the rain had made it into a soggy, salty feed bag. He fished some of the damp potato chips out and tossed them over the edge of the house.

“What a storm,” observed Peg. “Gosh.”

J.J. said reassuringly, “This is nothing, Peg. This isn’t even the real storm. The real storm is too busy tearing the shit out of some other place to worry about us.”

“J.J. is correct,” John announced. “Why, this is just the afterthought of a real storm.”

“My goodness,” said Margie. “It is raining very hard nonetheless.” Then she said, “Peg, sweetheart?”

“Yes,” said Peg.

“Is it terribly difficult to get a job if one has a police record?”

“We don’t have a police record, Margie.”

“Do we not? Did we not just get arrested, this very night?”

“Yeah, but a police record is different. A police record is something you have if you’re a career criminal. You can’t get a police record until you’ve committed a string of crimes.”

“Peg sounds very confident about this,” Margie said.

“For someone who has no idea what the devil she’s talking about,” said John, “Peg sounds like a veritable attorney general.”

“I happen to believe that it is impossible to get a job with a police record,” Margie said. “I shall never be able to get another job, and neither shall Peg. We are doomed! John, sweetheart? Will you always take care of me?”

“Naturally,” said John.

“But what shall become of Peg? She will have to become a plaything of a rich old man. John, love? Do you know any rich old men who need young playthings?”

John replied, “Only my father. And I imagine that he already has a plaything.”

There was an impressive flash of lightning.

“Oh, baby,” said J.J.

John stood up. He took his ponytail over one shoulder and wrung it out. He announced, “I have a demand. We shall go swimming. This is our last chance. Let us not hesitate, for tomorrow the water shall be too cold.”

“That’s funny,” J.J. said. “I’m not going swimming.”

“That’s funny,” Peg said. “I’m damn sure not going swimming, either.”

“You are both exquisitely funny,” John said, “because we actually are going swimming indeed. I demand it.”

“Nobody’s going swimming tonight, buster,” said Peg.

John thrust his fist in the air and shouted, “To the sea! We shall go to the sea with zeal! I demand zeal.”

Margie said, “My sweet John has taken leave of his senses.”

“The storm will be gone by tomorrow, my friends,” John said. “The sun will come out, but the water will already be cold. And you shall be very sorry indeed that you missed your last chance to swim.”

“John’s senses have simply left him,” Margie said.

“This is not even the real storm,” John said. “Is that not exactly what J.J. said? No? And J.J. is a sensible man. This is merely the afterthought of a storm. I would be embarrassed to call this a storm.”

“I’ll go swimming,” J.J. said. “What the hell.”

Margie looked from Peg to John and then to J.J., who was, in fact, known among the friends as a sensible man. J.J. was slouching with his beer on his stomach. His handsome body was slunk down, low and wet, in the chair, in a terrible posture, like someone’s drunken uncle.

“Sure. I’ll go swimming,” J.J. said. And he added, as an explanation, “We couldn’t get much wetter, could we?”

“You got it,” said Peg. “That makes sense, I guess.”

At that point, it was as though an official decision had been made. It was as if the four friends were a conference of businessmen in strong agreement. It was as if the four friends were four CEOs in consensus, the way they stood up and headed down the stairs, over the dune, and to the beach. When they passed through the front porch, Margie picked up her Dumbo inflatable inner tube and slipped it over her head and around her waist. It was a child’s toy, but it amused her. She had taken it swimming all summer. She held Dumbo’s plastic gray trunk in her hand, as though it were a divining rod, and followed the head straight ahead to water.

Down at the beach, the spoiled, foolish John and the handsome J.J. took off their shoes and headed into the water, fully dressed. They pushed their way through the rough surf, which was sometimes waist high, sometimes chest high. They pulled
their legs up and over and through the water, struggling as though passing through dense, fast-moving mud. John got knocked over immediately by the first wave, but J.J. dived right into it and came out on top of another. John surfaced and cheered and was knocked over again.

Margie stripped to her underwear, but Peg took off only her skirt. Margie ran in after John and J.J., holding the Dumbo tube around her waist and screaming.

Peg stood in the surf for some time and let the tide bury her feet. Two waves was all it took to sink her over her ankles. There was enough dark and rain that she could not see very far past the three heads of her friends out there. She pulled her feet out of the sand and made her way to the surf, right into the face of a wave that stood for a moment above her as high as a chain link fence. The wave fell, and she relaxed and let it roll her. When Peg came up, she was on top of another wave. She saw John and J.J. and Margie in a valley below her, their mouths open. The trunk of Margie’s Dumbo tube stuck out of the water like a periscope. A bigger wave came down on Peg, and on her friends, too.

When Peg surfaced again, she could not see her friends. She treaded water and ducked under three waves before she got high enough on a swell to see that they had gone farther out into the ocean. Her boyfriend and her two friends were out to where the waves were rising but not breaking. J.J. was separated from John and Margie, and he was floating on his back. Margie saw Peg and beckoned to her. In ten minutes of swimming, Peg made it over to them. John had lost his ponytail holder, and his hair was floating all around him, like seaweed.

“Isn’t it loud?” Margie shouted. “No?”

Peg was out of breath, so she nodded. A long strand of Margie’s hair was stuck from the corner of her mouth to her ear, making a black slash across her face, like a wound from a knife fight. They were all treading water gracelessly, spitting seawater
and stretching their necks to stay above the rough surface. Except for J.J., who was never graceless. J.J. swam around easily, his stroke as even and strong as though he were doing casual laps in a YMCA, instead of struggling with a storming ocean.

“How deep do you suppose it is, sir?” John shouted.

J.J. laughed, riding on a swell.

“Twenty feet!” J.J. shouted. Then the swell dipped, and he shouted, “No! I take it back. It’s ten feet!” A new swell rose, and J.J. said, “No! It’s eighteen feet!”

Peg held her nose and went under, pushing herself down and seeking bottom. When she did touch, her foot first hit stones, then something soft. She panicked and kicked until she was at the surface. She tried to wipe the seawater from her eyes, but the rain pushed it back again.

“This would be easier if we were a species that didn’t have to breathe,” Margie said. Margie, with her Dumbo inner tube supporting her slightly, was less tired than her friends. She was the most cheerful, the least out of breath.

“John, honey?” Margie asked. “How long can
you
go without breathing?”