Chapter 4

MONDAY

heir first morning at the beach they awoke to a breakfast of seafood crepes and fresh fruit. April, it seemed, was working her way through culinary school and had a notebook full of recipes she was dying to try out. She disappeared soon after they had gathered around the enormous breakfast bar, and reappeared a short while later dressed in a swimsuit and carrying a towel.

“Just leave the dishes in the sink,” she told Lola. “I’ll get to them when I get back.”

“Don’t worry about us,” Lola said. She was standing in a bright slash of sunlight looking sweet and cheerful, her thick-lensed glasses glinting in the sun.

April went out the French doors on to the deck and they watched her walk along the boardwalk and disappear over the dunes. A few minutes later she reappeared, a tiny figure moving across the wide expanse of beach. Captain Mike, Mel noted, was nowhere to be seen.

The women took their time eating breakfast, enjoying the opportunity to be lazy. They were all still dressed in their pajamas. Lola wore a pair of red silk pajamas that looked comfortable and expensive, but seemed strangely out of place with her heavy-rimmed glasses. Annie wore a nightgown with matching robe and slippers. Mel had on a camisole and sleep shorts covered in yellow ducks, and Sara wore a pair of sweat pants and a Carolina Law T-shirt.

“Let’s stay in our jammies all day,” Sara said. “This is the most fun I’ve had in ages.”

“You don’t get out much, do you,” Mel said.

The kitchen and breakfast bar overlooked the cavernous great room and when they had finished eating they took their coffee into the great room and sat across from one another on two long sofas positioned on either side of the stone fireplace, Mel and Annie on one sofa and Sara and Lola on the other, their feet stretched out and resting on the big glass coffee table. Beyond the wall of soaring windows overlooking the beach, the Atlantic glittered in the sun. A blue haze hung over the distant horizon.

Mel looked critically at her long legs stretched out on the table. “I need to get some sun on these bad boys,” she said, turning them this way and that. They were perfect legs and anyone looking at them could see that.

“Do what I do and go down to one of those places where they spray the tan on,” Annie said, lifting her nightgown so they could see her own heavier, rather splotchy legs.

Lola picked up a controller and punched a button, and the flat-screen TV slid out from behind a painting on the chimney breast. She scrolled aimlessly through a series of channels, stopping briefly on one of those entertainment shows that spread gossip about Hollywood stars.

“This show is good,” Sara said.

Mel picked up a magazine and thumbed through it slowly. “Since when do you have time to sit around watching daytime TV?”

“I told you I was only working part-time right now.” Adam was settling into his third new school and she’d quit to spend more time with him, but Sara didn’t want to go into all of that. She picked up a magazine too. “Is this the Bedford alumni magazine?”

“Briggs gets those,” Lola said quickly.

Sara looked at Mel and Annie. “Do y’all get the alumni magazine?”

“I get it but I never read it,” Mel said.

“I don’t get it,” Annie said. “Or if I do, Mitchell throws it away before I see it.”

“They must have lost my address.” Sara yawned and tossed the magazine on the table, where it opened to the center page, a glossy roundup of Bedford grads, past and present. Annie turned it around with her toes. “Hey,” she said, pointing at a photo of a bride and her much-older groom, “didn’t we go to school with that guy?”

Mel leaned over and peered at the photo. “Oh yeah,” she said “Bart. Sara used to date him.”

“I never dated a Bart,” Sara said.

“Sure you did.”

“Well, okay, maybe once.” She shuddered at the memory, and Lola smiled brightly and said, “Sara’s never loved anyone but Tom.”

There was a moment of silence, broken only by the gurgling of the coffee pot in the kitchen. Annie picked up the magazine and peered at the photograph. “Wow,” she said, holding it to Mel, “he must have robbed the cradle. She looks twenty years younger.”

“Trophy wife,” Mel said. “I hope he drops dead of a heart attack on his honeymoon. It would serve him right.”

Annie swiveled her head around to Mel. “As I recall, you like younger men yourself. What was the name of that bartender in London, the one with the curly hair?”

“Let’s not go there,” Mel said.

“Oh, let’s do,” Sara said. “I don’t think I’ve heard that story.”

“Well, I think it’s sweet,” Lola said, obviously not following the conversation. “I think it’s sweet that Sara’s still in love with her own husband.” She tilted her head and gazed pensively at the TV. From time to time an air of melancholy drifted across her face, seeping through the cracks of her happy facade like smoke.

“Lola, you’re a hopeless romantic,” Annie said.

“Am I?” She seemed surprised by this.

Mel looked up and then went back to glancing at the magazine.

“Besides,” Sara said to Mel, trying to change the subject. “As I recall, it was you who had the thing for Bart.”

“I never had a thing for him. I just slept with him.”

“Yes, I remember.”

Mel closed the magazine abruptly. She sat very still, watching Sara. “Do you really want to stroll down memory lane? Do you really want to go there?”

“I’ll stroll if you will,” Sara said.

“I thought we were talking about Bart and his child bride,” Annie said nervously.

“We are,” Mel said quietly. Her eyes were brown and steady.

Sara colored and turned her face to the TV. Outside the windows a gull hung motionless, riding the currents. Lola held a pillow against her chest as if she was cradling a child. Through the windows behind her the sea shimmered, a long line of whitecapped waves.

Annie took the alumni magazine from Mel and tossed it on the table. “If we’re going down to the Beach Club pool, we’d better get going,” she said, rising. “If we wait any longer all the good chairs will be taken.”

As children, Sara and Mel had been as different as two girls could be. Howard’s Mill in the 1960s and ’70s was a small but prosperous village of twenty-five thousand people clustered along the banks of the Tennessee River. Sara’s father taught history out at the high school, and they lived in a modest three-bedroom brick ranch house in a neighborhood of other modest three-bedroom brick ranch houses. Sara had two younger brothers and a pretty mother who stayed home to cook and clean just like June Cleaver, only on a tighter budget.

Mel’s father owned the town’s only car dealership, and she lived out from town in a big columned house with a boot-shaped swimming pool out back. Mel’s mother, Juanita, was Leland Barclay’s second wife and was rumored to have been his housekeeper and, as if that wasn’t scandalous enough, Mel’s older half-brother, Junior, was the town’s first heroin addict. He had dropped out of high school and gone out to Haight-Ashbury for the Summer of Love, where he took Timothy Leary’s advice to “Turn On, Tune In, and Drop Out” to heart. He was eleven years older than Mel, and by the time she was twelve he was back home in Howard’s Mill living in the pool house, working in Leland’s Ford dealership, and trying unsuccessfully to go straight. Mel and Sara used to go out to the pool house to find him sleeping with his eyes open, the Doors or Jimi Hendrix blasting on the stereo.

Sara liked going out to Mel’s house. There was always something to do, with the boot-shaped swimming pool and the playroom crammed with every toy imaginable, and the mini-bikes out in the barn. Mel’s mother was a small shy woman with a Guatemalan accent who stayed mostly in her room, scurrying down the back stairs to fix meals and then scurrying back up them before Leland Barclay came in to eat. Mel’s daddy, Leland, was loud and brash, and he had a big red nose and a belly that hung over his belt like a feed sack. He wore cowboy boots and a belt buckle with his initials on the front, and he liked to brag that he’d been born in West Texas, out where the men were tough as the calluses on a barfly’s elbows (“He should know,” Mel liked to say).

Sara also liked driving out to the country club in Leland’s big Cadillac Coupe de Ville with Leland at the wheel and her and Mel jumping around in the backseat to “Itchycoo Park” or “Take the Last Train to Clarkesville.” The Howard’s Mill Country Club was nothing more than a small brick building with a nine-hole golf course and a concrete swimming pool surrounded by a chain-link fence. There were probably only a thousand members (who didn’t include Sara’s parents), but it was the closest thing to upscale that Howard’s Mill had to offer.

Everyone in town gossiped about the Barclays; long before spoiled blonde heiresses and bad blond rock stars became the norm, the Barclays were local celebrities whose every move was noted and commented on. Sara liked being part of the Barclay inner circle. She liked ordering Cokes at the bar and signing Leland’s name. She liked that all the staff knew to put her chili cheese fries on the Barclay tab. It was magical the way anything you could possibly want would suddenly appear and all you had to do was sign for it. Being rich was like finding a genie in a bottle. The older she got, the more time Sara spent with Mel’s family. Her secret wish was that the Barclays would offer to adopt her and then she and Mel could truly be sisters.

She especially loved to eat dinner at Mel’s house. Eating dinner at Mel’s house was like waiting for a fight to break out in the stands of a Friday night football game between Howard’s Mill and Suck Creek. You never knew who was going to throw the first punch but you knew it was just a matter of time before everyone joined in. It wasn’t that way at Sara’s house. At Sara’s house everyone waited their turn to speak. They didn’t scream or shout or talk over one another or start eating before grace was said. That was considered bad manners, and Sara’s mother wouldn’t have tolerated it. If there was one biscuit left on the plate, and you wanted it, you’d ask politely if you could have it and if no one else did, it was yours. At Mel’s house, if there was one biscuit left on the plate, there was sure to be a fight to the death between Leland and Junior. She’d actually witnessed Junior throw a fork at his father one night over a lone biscuit and Leland had counterattacked by hoisting his glass of Old Crow at his son’s head. Sometimes, just for family solidarity, Mel would join in, too.

One rainy Friday evening not long after the start of eighth grade, Sara came home with Mel to spend the night. They’d been friends since first grade and by now Sara was accustomed to the mayhem of the Barclay household. On this particular evening Juanita had made fried chicken, squash casserole, mashed potatoes, and biscuits, and not long after setting the steaming food on the table, she had disappeared up the back stairs. Mel and Sara washed their hands and sat down at the table. There was never any evening prayer given at the Barclay table; you just started in helping your plate. A few minutes later Leland came in, followed shortly thereafter by Junior, who looked like a younger, longer-haired version of Leland only without the red nose and the beer gut.

The evening went pleasantly enough at first, with Sara and Mel chattering on about the homecoming dance, Leland sitting in uncharacteristic silence at one end of the table and Junior at the other. Leland sat hunched over his plate with his elbows on the table and his head lowered like a junkyard dog guarding a ham bone. From time to time he would sip from the tumbler of Old Crow at his elbow, watching his son over the edge of his glass with red-rimmed eyes. Junior just sat there looking sickly and skinny, and picked at his food.

“Eat your food, boy, don’t play with it,” Leland said suddenly, pointing at Junior with his fork. He’d given the boy every advantage and Junior had disappointed him in every way imaginable; he was bad at sports, he couldn’t hit the side of a barn with a scattergun, and he had absolutely no gumption or goals in life. Worse, he couldn’t hold his liquor (Leland lumped all narcotics in with alcohol) whereas Leland could down half a quart of Old Crow in one sitting and never show the effects.

“I don’t need you telling me how to eat,” Junior said in a surly voice.

Mel kept on talking about the homecoming dance but Sara turned her attention to the dueling Barclays. She thought it was cool the way they could just say what they were thinking, right out in the open with no restraints. At her house, saying what you thought was considered bad manners. She had never heard her parents argue. If they disagreed over something, they didn’t speak to each other, sometimes for days. Sara and her brothers would walk around on tiptoes, aware of an undercurrent of tension and a brooding silence that wafted through their house and into their dreams like a sinister presence. When the prescribed amount of silence had been carried out, as if on a signal, her parents started talking to each other again and everything went on as civilized and sedately as before. The source of the disagreement was never mentioned.

“You don’t like the chicken, we can get the girl’s ma (here he pointed at the backstairs with his fork) to make you something else. Cookin’s the one thing she’s still good at.”

Junior picked up a drumstick and stuffed it into his mouth. Mel gave Leland a baleful stare. She didn’t like hearing her mother abused in her presence. “She’s good at a lot of things,” she said.

“Not the things that matter,” Leland said, lifting his tumbler.

“How do you know what she’s good at? You never even talk to her.”

“It’s hard to talk to someone who’s shut up in her room all day.”

“No one wants to be around you, you smelly old goat.”

Leland grimaced and set his drink down. “Now, Sister, this don’t concern you. It’s between me and the boy here.” Leland liked to give Junior pep talks about getting his life back on track. Sling it against the wall, son, and see if it sticks was one of his favorites. Or sometimes, Run it up the flagpole and see if anyone salutes. And if that didn’t work he might weigh in with, If the fish ain’t biting, boy, change the bait. This was back in 1973, long before anyone in Howard’s Mill had heard of rehab.

“Stop calling me boy,” Junior said, his mouth full of fried chicken.

“Well, you sure as hell ain’t a man,” Leland said.

Junior scowled and started packing his cheeks with mashed potatoes. “Fuck you, old man,” he said.

Sara snorted and glanced at Mel and then down at her plate. She tried to imagine what her mother would say if she heard someone use the F-word at the table. She’d probably say, Just because you have money doesn’t mean you have class. She’d also say, Don’t ever set foot in the Barclay house again.

“Why don’t you just leave him alone?” Mel said to Leland. She stared at her father with a dangerous expression on her face. “Can’t you see he’s sick?”

“He ain’t sick,” Leland said, slapping the table with his hand so that the silverware rattled. “Ain’t nothing wrong with that boy a little hard work won’t cure.” He lifted his tumbler and took a long pull. When he set it down again, the glass was empty. “Anybody can swim into a whirlpool, boy,” he said. “It’s coming out that counts.” He coughed, sucked his teeth, and nodded sagely at Junior over these pearls of wisdom.

“Nobody cares what you say,” Mel said. “Nobody cares what you think.”

Leland ignored Mel, pointing one long hairy finger at Junior. “It’s all them bad habits you picked up out there in Chicky Butte, California or wherever the hell you were.”

“Well, it sure as hell wasn’t Nosepick, Tennessee,” Junior said, talking through a mouthful of fried chicken and mashed potatoes. “Thank God for that. Thank God I didn’t wind up down in Numbnut, Texas with all the other greasers and shitkickers.”

“If you had, you might a learned something, by God.”

Sara giggled over Nosepick and Numbnut, but Mel just sat there with her eyes moving from one to the other like the steady swinging of a pendulum clock.

Junior, who’d been busy stuffing more mashed potatoes, fried chicken, and squash casserole into his mouth, suddenly went limp. It was his best defense against his father. His passive-aggressive slumping drove Leland wild.

“Sit up there, boy!” Leland roared, slamming his fist against the table so the silverware jumped and the glasses rattled. “Don’t be such a candy ass!” But Junior sat slumped like a possum in the headlights of an oncoming car, his cheeks stuffed full of mashed potatoes and a thin strand of drool hanging from his bottom lip. Seeing his only son like that was a kick in the gut for Leland, partially because he looked just like Leland sitting there slump-shouldered and defeated, and Leland didn’t like to see himself like that. He sucked in slowly but before he could say anything else, Mel said, “You’re a mean, vicious old goat and I hate you.”

Leland chuckled and pushed himself away from the table. He got up to pour himself another tumbler of Old Crow. When he sat back down, he pointed at Mel and said proudly, “If you had half the spunk that girl’s got, you’d be a man. She don’t let nobody get the best of her!”

Mel would later say it was her dysfunctional childhood that had turned her into a writer but Sara figured it was more the material advantages she’d had that had done that (Leland supported Mel for years in between book contracts and husbands). Mel always put down her family’s social standing like it was no big deal. She was always going on about how she still had relatives who lived in trailer parks and Leland was nothing but an uneducated redneck who’d made his wealth dishonestly, but the truth of the matter was, money was money. And having it was better than not having it. Sara didn’t like to admit that she might be jealous of Mel but the truth was, if she’d had Mel’s advantages, there was no telling how much easier her life might have been.

•  •  •

It was almost one o’clock by the time they showered, dressed, and arrived at the Beach Club. The pool was not quite Olympic-size, but it was large and surrounded by a stamped concrete deck bordered on three sides by a tall wrought-iron fence and palm trees, and on the fourth by a large open bar. The pool was one of only three on the island and it was crowded with young mothers and their young children.

“Not a good-looking man in sight,” Mel said, dejectedly setting her beach bag down on a poolside lounger. They quickly commandeered two other loungers but had to walk around the pool to find a fourth. Toddlers wearing water wings and soggy swim diapers were everywhere, scampering beneath their feet, scurrying between the pool and the fence like trapped rodents.

“Is that even sanitary?” Mel said, watching one child in a droopy swimsuit who had stopped at the end of the lounger to stare at her.

“Oh, isn’t she adorable?” Lola said.

Mel grimaced and the child stuck one grimy fist into her mouth and tottered off.

“The swim diaper keeps the larger things—contained,” Sara said, thinking how it was only yesterday that she had outfitted her own children with water wings and swim diapers and watched them splash joyously in the water. Now they were twelve and fourteen, and had entered that stage of surly adolescence that made them difficult to be around. Or at least Nicky had. Adam’s surliness, of course, went much deeper than adolescence and wasn’t really his fault at all.

“They usually keep the chlorine levels pretty high,” Annie said.

“Well, I don’t care how high the chlorine levels are, I’m not getting in the water.” Mel took her cover-up off and leaned back against the lounger. Her figure was good but her skin was pale. She didn’t get a whole lot of sun in New York.

“Look at you in your white bikini,” Sara said flatly.

“It matches my skin.”

“I haven’t worn a bikini since college,” Annie said wistfully. “Not since Carleton was born.”

“I have a couple but I don’t wear them in public,” Lola said. “Only on the boat.”

“Why not?” Mel said, flipping her sunglasses up on her head and looking around at her friends. “You look great. All of you look great.”

Annie shook her head slowly and patted her stomach. “Stretch marks,” she said.

“Oh, who cares?”

“It just doesn’t seem right wearing a bikini,” Sara said, putting her knees up. She kept her towel bunched around her waist to hide her post-pregnancy bump. She’d always been self-conscious about her figure, even when she was twenty-two and it was perfect. “It seems kind of pathetic, like you’re trying too hard to hang on to your youth. You hit forty and there are some things you should just automatically put away. Things like black eyeliner, belly-button rings, and bikinis.”

“Okay, Hester Prynne, you’ve made your point. I don’t agree with you, of course, but I get it.”

Sara tossed a flip-flop at Mel.

“Besides,” Mel said. “Who among us has a belly-button ring?”

Annie and Sara looked sharply at Lola. She giggled and raised the top of her tankini to reveal a gleaming metal ring lying against her taut belly.

“Lola, you slut!” Mel leaned over to get a better look. “What happened to our demure little governor’s daughter? What happened to our sweet little homecoming queen?”

“She grew up,” Lola said.

The music playing on the PA system was a slow repetitive jazz number, like a tamped-down Chuck Mangione, as staid and innocuous as elevator music. After about twenty minutes, Mel had had all she could take.

“For crying out loud, play some real music,” she said loudly. She sat up and adjusted the back of her lounger, looking around. “This shit is putting me to sleep. What do you think, Lola? Led Zeppelin? Steppenwolf?”

“Free Bird,” Lola shouted.

A group of young mothers sitting to their right stopped talking to stare at them.

Mel raised her hand for the cocktail waitress and ordered a round of espresso martinis.

“I can’t drink caffeine after twelve o’clock or I’ll be up all night,” Sara said.

“That’s the idea,” Mel said.

“Caffeine gives me the shakes,” Annie said.

“The vodka offsets the caffeine. Trust me.”

Lola pulled her tankini down over her belly-button ring. “I’ll drink it,” she said.