Barefoot Girls (20 page)

In a way, it reminded her of how Keeley had been when they first met, that first summer when they were seven. The mood swings were ridiculous back then. Well, they seemed ridiculous until they all found out what was really going on and why Keeley was happy and funny one day, and sad and grumpy the next. It had been an incredible shock, shaking Amy’s world to its core.

Chapter 19

The four girls played together all day every day after the diving contest, and each day that summer had the same pattern. Pam, the early riser, sat on her family’s dock each morning playing with her shell collection and watched the sun rise. She would sit there until Amy arrived, usually an hour after sunrise. Then she and Amy would go back to Amy’s house, which was their headquarters due to the fact that Amy’s parents loved having the girls around and encouraged them to stick around by offering up a variety of diversions.

Amy’s father would take them crabbing most mornings, patiently teaching each girl how to scap crabs: scooping them up quickly with the long-handled net from a boat or the dock and dropping them in a bucket. He also taught them how to sail, how to tie a knot that would never unravel, and how to read clouds and forecast the weather more accurately than any meteorologist. Amy’s mother pulled out puzzles and games for them on rainy days and popped Jiffy Pop popcorn on the gas range for a snack.  Even when Amy’s parents weren’t directly entertaining the girls, they were endlessly indulgent and deaf to the racket the four girls made running in and out of the house, shrieking with delight when one of their sons decided to tease the girls or chase after them.

Keeley would be the next to show up, either smiling or glum, and then the last to arrive was Zooey, whose mother insisted on her eating a big hot breakfast and getting fully slathered in sunscreen before leaving the house. Once together, they would either go crabbing with Amy’s father or swim and dive from the family’s dock. Afterward, they’d file upstairs to Amy’s room where they would play with her dolls. Amy’s parents always insisted on providing their lunch, and then the afternoon would be spent sailing with Amy’s father or playing a swimming game they called “mermaids” where they all pretended to be mermaids and made up stories to act out together in the water. Late in the afternoon they would walk up and down the boardwalk and visit other families as well as stop by the Lion’s Den to see who was there and if there was anything fun going on. Then it would be dinnertime and they would each go home, saying goodbye and waving endlessly as they walked in separate directions as if it would be a long time until they saw each other again instead of only the next day.

By August, it was accepted that, in addition to being moody, Keeley was clumsy. She always had cuts and bruises and corresponding stories of her misadventures at home. Amy thought that Keeley’s night vision was bad, as she never saw her friend knock into things during the day.

One morning in mid-August, Keeley showed up later than usual. Even Zooey had already arrived and they were sitting on Amy’s dock waiting for Keeley so they could go crabbing. Amy’s oldest brother, Will, had just arrived on the island after working most of the summer as a counselor at Camp Winaukee in New Hampshire. After briefly asking them about their summer in a polite yet artificial way that fully communicated that he was done with little kids for the summer, he went to work on the outboard engine that had been giving his dad trouble.

Keeley arrived wearing a floppy blue cotton sunhat that was about three sizes too big for her head. It was actually an adult’s sunhat, and Keeley had to keep pushing it back off her face as she walked down the boardwalk toward them so she could see where she was going. Her hair, usually neatly brushed, was sticking out like a rats nest, visibly messy even from a distance. She reached where they were sitting on the dock and sat down next to them, saying hello in the subdued voice she always spoke in when she was in one of her bad moods.

When the girls were first playing together, they would try to jolly Keeley out of her grumpiness on these days, but they had learned that it didn’t work. Keeley would just go mute and hunker down more into her funk. Now, they simply ignored it and went on with their day. If they were lucky, by the afternoon Keeley would have forgotten whatever was bothering her and they would all be having a great time as usual. Of course, they all wondered about their friend, but no amount of asking ever yielded anything.

Amy’s father took them crabbing in his rowboat, but they didn’t catch anything. It was too late, the sun too high. The best time was when the sun was just starting its ascent in the early morning and the crabs scurried about on the sandy bottom like it was rush hour. When they got back, Will was waiting to show off his work on the outboard which now started with a roar on the first try. Mr. Dougherty beamed and slapped Will on the back repeatedly. The girls, bored with their talk of valves and oil, went inside and upstairs to play with Amy’s dolls.

As they climbed the stairs, Amy spotted a five dollar bill sitting on the floor at the top of the steps.

“Five dollars! Finders keepers!” she called, and grabbed at it thinking of all the candy they could buy across the channel at Clark’s.

The five dollar bill moved to the left, apparently blown by a draft. Amy grabbed at it again, and, once again, it leapt out of her fingers.

Then she heard a hissing sound. She knew that sound. She stopped grabbing at the bill and looked at it. There was something shiny attached to it. A clear fishing line had been taped to it.

Hissing again.

Rich! Amy climbed the last step of the stairs and there he was, bent over and laughing his hissing laugh. He looked up, saw her face, and burst into outright laughter.

“Got you! Ha! Ha!” Rich said, and then threw his hands up in an effeminate pose. “Oh, five dollars! Oooooh, five dollars!” He bent over in a convulsion of laughter. What made this much worse was that he had fooled her only yesterday. How had she forgotten? Yesterday it had been a quarter, super-glued to their dock. It was still there.

“Oh, shut up!” Amy said. “Shut up!”

Something moved quickly to her right in the doorway of the bedroom that the three boys shared. A flash of light blasted in her face. “Gotcha!” Jim yelled, dropping the camera away from his eyes and grinning.

“Give me that!” Amy shrieked and started toward him. She hated that stupid camera! Why had her parents given it to Jim, of all people? Mr. Nosy Busybody himself!

Jim slammed the door shut. The lock clicked on the other side, a simple bolt that the two younger boys had installed on their own and used only when their sister wanted to enter the room, usually after they’d gotten her good and angry. Amy had thought about telling her parents about the lock, but there was no way to do it without looking like a snitch. She wouldn’t give her brothers another label to work with.

Amy turned back to see that Rich was laughing even harder. “Oooo, he got you! That picture’s going to be a beaut!”

Amy, looking at Rich, who was too big for her to fight, and then at the door protecting her youngest brother, realized she was beat again. Resigned, she gestured at her friends to follow her. They were still standing on the stairs open-mouthed and curiously watching the scene unfold. None of them had to go through this torture. They were all either only children or the oldest.

“Come on, let’s go,” Amy said. The four girls filed into Amy’s bedroom and shut the door, leaving Rich’s hissing laughter behind them.

Once inside Amy’s room, which looked like a typical Captain’s Island bedroom with its simple wooden furniture and rag rug as well as a few little-girl touches including pink ruffled cotton curtains on the windows and a matching pink bedspread and dust ruffle on the bed, the girls assumed their usual positions. Like their mermaids game, they played a special game with dolls, too. Each girl picked up her favorite doll and they played a game where all the dolls were in a family and experienced new and exciting dramas daily.

Amy’s favorite doll was a brown monkey doll with a large red mouth. He was her favorite because she loved monkeys more than any other animal, he had wire in his body that allowed you to pose him in all types of fun and fantastic positions, and he had big brown eyes that looked both happy and amused. She loved telling him jokes because he always got them. She called him “Mo-mo” and had loved him best since she got him for her birthday when she was four. Mo-mo was the father of the family and usually the one to find solutions to any problem the other dolls had.

The first day they played dolls Pam had gravitated towards the large purple puppy doll that sat in the central place of honor in the white wicker chair where all the dolls lived. Part of the reason the doll was there was simply its size – it made more sense to pile the other smaller dolls on top of it. The other reason was that it was a doll to show off – it was the only present she’d ever gotten from her revered oldest brother, won that spring at a local carnival’s water-gun game.

It didn’t matter that Will was essentially babysitting her and the other youngest child in the family, Jim, that day. It mattered that he had won it and told her he won it for her, presenting it to her with a flourish. When Pam first approached the doll, Amy had the urge to tell Pam to leave it alone, but then she saw Pam’s bright expression and decided not to. She still couldn’t get over her luck that Keeley and Pam were her friends now. She liked Zooey, too, but Key and Pam were the popular cool kids. Amy had idolized them and been ignored by them for the last two summers.  Pam called the dog-doll, which Amy hadn’t gotten around to naming yet, “Mr. Pups”. Mr. Pups role in the doll-family was to stir up trouble.

When Zooey picked out her favorite that first day – the way they all did, not saying anything, just picking up the dolls that attracted them most – Amy was glad. She felt bad about that doll. It was a princess doll dressed in a golden dress and wearing a gold and rhinestone tiara. It wasn’t Amy’s style at all, but her Aunt Judy had given it to her, her father’s sister, and now she had to cart it with her to Captain’s because her aunt would be visiting them on Labor Day weekend. She had to pretend she liked it and not hurt her aunt’s feelings. That’s what Amy’s mother had said. Now, the doll had some good wear-and-tear going, giving it that loved-look. Thank God for Zooey’s weird taste in dolls. Zooey called the doll Princess SunSparkle and it played a kind of mother character to their family, usually admonishing Mr. Pups for being bad and making “teas” for them to eat all the time. Amy didn’t know what a “tea” was, only knew of the beverage that was like coffee, but she played along.

Keeley had giggled and cooed when she saw Baby Elly, a plastic baby-doll that used to be able to drink from a little bottle and wet diapers, but now had a clog or something. Baby Elly was named after the Dougherty’s neighbors’ baby who Amy had fallen in love with when she was five. Baby Elly was one of those dolls that was like a fad, you loved her when you got her, couldn’t get enough of her, and then you were just – done. Luckily for Baby Elly, Keeley didn’t know this, and loved that baby doll like it was her own. Keeley even found some of her own baby clothes at her family’s house and brought them over to dress the doll up. The baby’s job, it seemed, was to be changed constantly from one outfit to the next and then cuddled.

They played dolls in Amy’s room only, never taking them down to the boardwalk or the beach, as both Rich and Jim had taught Amy early on that dolls were easy targets for them. Mo-mo was missing an ear from one skirmish and several of her dolls’ heads were loose in their sockets from the time the boys stole them from the playroom and put the heads on stakes surrounding their fort to warn off marauders. Amy strongly suspected Rich when it came to Baby Elly’s inability to drink or wet her diaper anymore, and she had even gotten a shrug out of him when she confronted him. Yet, no justice was served. With fights like these between the siblings, her parents rarely interfered, believing children had to learn the harsh ways of the world early in life and that protecting them did them no favors.

Today Zooey was the one to introduce the storyline based on her favorite new book,
The Little Princess
, where a privileged little girl in a London boarding school becomes suddenly orphaned and is treated terribly: starved, worked to the bone, and forced to live in a freezing rat-infested attic. Zooey hadn’t gotten to the end of the book yet, but she had been telling Pam and Amy all about it that morning while they were waiting for Keeley to show up and it sounded wonderfully horrible.

Zooey picked up Princess SunSparkle and said in a loud voice, “You, Princess, are no longer a princess! You are a poor wretch now and will go hungry and work in the kitchen! Remove that fancy gown at once and wear the rags suitable to your station!” Zooey immediately undressed Princess SunSparkle, leaving her only in her white frilly slip and stockings. “Now get to work! You must serve all the other dolls here!”

Pam spoke up in Mr. Pups’ growly voice, “Yes, serve us! We want tea and crumpets! Now! Hurry up!”

“Yes sir! Right away, Sir Pups!” Zooey said, and made the princess run in circles.

Amy lifted up Mo-mo, “No! We must save Princess SunSparkle!”

Pam said, “No, I am Sir Pups and I say she must suffer. She may not even have a bed to sleep in. She must sleep on the floor!” Pam pointed at the floor and Zooey laid the princess doll on the wooden floor.

“Help!” Amy said, shaking Mo-mo above her head, “We must save the princess from a terrible fate! If she sleeps on the floor, she is so delicate she will die!”