Duplex (14 page)

None of it mattered anymore. There hadn’t been so many cars back then but even so everyone had to be careful—the kind of vigilance Marjorie had felt called upon to exercise ceaselessly seemed nowhere in evidence now. The sorcerer’s silver-gray car appeared out of nowhere; Mary’s forehead was spangled with stars. Eddie’s parents collected money to have a memorial put up. But the past was over. It was gone. It wasn’t
anything.

When Blue-Eyes returned from the kitchen she was bearing a cherry pie between two pot holders. “Look what I found,” she said, waving the pie under Marjorie’s nose.

It smelled wonderful; as Blue-Eyes began to slice into it Marjorie could see the cherries bursting with juice. She tried to remember the last time she’d eaten anything—it had to have been before she rode off on the horse. She had been sitting on her living room sofa with a tray table in front of her, eating macaroni and cheese and watching the console. A man wearing what looked like a hazmat suit was balancing what looked like a pie on a broom stick, trying to get from point A to point B without dropping the pie while an enormous clock like the one in her classroom at school kept ticking. It was a funnier pie than the one Blue-Eyes had just brought in from the kitchen—something like banana custard, the kind of pie designed to make the man look especially stupid when he dropped it on his head. But before that happened she’d heard the thump and ran to the window.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Penny whirled to face Blue-Eyes. “The pie got burned! Don’t you ever listen? Sometimes a pie is really burned and you have to throw it in the garbage. Sometimes a person really dies.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Blue-Eyes said. She removed a slice carefully and set it on one of the waiting dessert plates. “Guests first,” she said, handing the plate to Marjorie.

“No!” Penny said. “You can’t make her eat that!” She turned to her and Marjorie could see that she was starting to cry. “You’re a teacher,” Penny said. “You know the story of the girl who ate the seeds—I think she’s the one I mean. Maybe I’m thinking of the hunters who lost their way. I used to know which story was which.”

“For heaven’s sake,” Blue-Eyes said. “Why don’t you just calm down?” She folded her hands in what looked to Marjorie like a parody of piety.

By now the sun had come all the way out and was shining brightly, setting sparks flying everywhere across the dancing waves.
Brigadoon,
Miss Vicks thought. Before the photographer appeared with his horse—before she got up on the horse and rode away—she had been listening to a group of girls singing as they walked along the street. “There may be other days as rich and rare,” she remembered the girls singing, “There may be other springs as full and fair. But they won’t be the same—they’ll come and go ...”

“Please oh please!” Penny said. “Don’t eat it! I beg of you!”

The dining room was warm and she had thawed out completely. Marjorie Vicks, Miss Vicks, Vicks, M., Vicky Dear—whoever on earth she was she had never felt so hungry in her life, and despite her own worst fears she hadn’t melted away. When she picked up her fork, to her delight she saw that her hand looked the way it used to when she wasn’t much older than Penny and Blue-Eyes, the ropy veins and the brown spots gone, and in their place the creamy, hydrated skin of her youth.

Things couldn’t be more perfect, Marjorie thought, three girls sitting together in the sunshine, their lives ahead of them. By now the water had come so close to the hotel that if a window were to be opened she could reach out and her hand would get wet. The water was bright blue like the girls’ uniforms, the shade of blue in a regular-sized box of crayons. Luckily the windows weren’t open, though, because if they were, the water would be coming into the dining room and everything would end up soaked.

She could hear the same rattling noise she’d heard the night before that sounded like it was made by a dog collar. It seemed to be coming from the other side of the blue door leading to the hotel lobby. She took her first bite of pie. “If only I’d known they allowed dogs,” she said, “I’d have brought mine.”

“That
is
your dog,” Penny said. “You know that, don’t you?”

“My dog?” Marjorie started to get up but Blue-Eyes pushed her back down into her chair. “I thought by now he’d have been taken away to the pound,” she said. “I thought he was dead.”

Blue-Eyes started to laugh. “Just where do you think you are, anyway?” she said.

It was then that Marjorie looked up from her plate and saw the infernal thing. It was sitting across the table from her, hunched over and chewing with its mouth open, cherries spilling out of its mouth and onto the tablecloth. It looked just like Blue-Eyes—probably even its own mother couldn’t tell them apart.

E
VERYBODY THINKS IT’S GOING TO BE DIFFERENT FOR them, Janice said. The dinosaurs thought so too. She was on the porch of her rental duplex, busy smearing her thighs with suntan lotion, her tan an enviable deep golden-brown. By this time Janice had been at the shore for a month. Golden-brown was the color everyone craved, not only for their body parts but for their food.

The dinosaurs had small brains, one of the girls said. All of us were older now; we’d learned things in school. Everyone thought the sun went around the earth, then every one thought the earth went around the sun. Who knew what they’d be thinking next? The moon came out of the place where the ocean is now. The moon came from outer space and the earth captured it in its orbit.

The moon, Janice said. The moon was what started all the trouble. She finished her thighs and started in on her arms. She took her time, squeezing the lotion out bit by bit and rubbing it into her skin in small circular motions; she was driving the little girls crazy. They’d promised their mothers they wouldn’t go to the beach without her. You couldn’t apply lotion on the beach—that was Janice’s rule. If you waited until you got to the beach, sand would get in the lotion, spoiling your tan.

Janice informed everyone that after her husband arrived Friday they were taking a moonlit cruise on a luxury sailboat. She hadn’t married the boyfriend with the two-tone car; he turned out to be unreliable, meaning he dumped her for someone better looking. The man she married was named Henry and everyone thought he was too nice for Janice. He had the appearance of an English gentleman, very delicate and pale, the way a hermit crab looks between shells. Henry treated everyone with kindness. One of the little girls said he asked to see her pee hole, but it was common knowledge he liked Janice best.

After two people got married everything that had formerly seemed interesting became uninteresting—this was common knowledge too. Once you were married, romance and heartbreak were no longer an option. Where were the surprises? When she wasn’t wearing a bathing suit, Janice wore a girdle under her clothes. She didn’t have a pussy anymore, she had genitals. Her nipples disappeared in one big thing called a bosom.

You girls know nothing, Janice said, lighting a cigarette and blowing smoke rings. The sky was the usual color, a solid shade of blue that suggested everything worth seeing lay behind it. This was also true of the houses on either side of the street, two rows of identical white duplexes, like the semidetached brick houses back home. The only way you could tell the duplexes apart was by their awnings—Janice’s was forest green with yellow stripes.

The curly-haired girl came walking down the stairs from the second floor with her raft under her arm. Have any of you ever
looked
at the moon? she asked. The raft was the same color green as the green of Janice’s awning, the canvas so old and dry that until the girl got it into the water it made her skin creep. If you look at the moon you see it’s something different from what they teach you, the girl said. She’d been planning to go to the beach alone but when she overheard Janice talking about the moon she couldn’t resist joining in. Stars around the silver moon hide their silverness when she shines upon the earth, the girl said, quoting her favorite poet. Upon the black earth.

It used to be too dangerous to go on moonlit cruises, Janice continued. Once she got started she was unstoppable. The thing about the moon is how it makes things happen just by being there, like the way it can pull all the water on one side of the planet into a big bulge and then let it go. That’s why there are tides.

I wish I could go on a cruise, someone said.

My dad says those cruises are highway robbery, said someone else.

It was a block and a half from the duplex to the boardwalk. The sidewalk was so hot the curly-haired girl could feel it through the soles of her flip-flops. The grass was yellow, the hydrangeas blue. The ocean was a wobbly sliver of light even brighter than the sky and shimmering like a mirage—she could hardly wait to get there.

The cruise is worth it, Janice corrected. Ab-so-tive-ly pos-i-lute-ly. She said it helped if you were a newlywed. She leaned forward to put out her cigarette on the sidewalk, and when she sat up everyone held their breath to see if her bosom was going to stay inside her suit. The thing I’m talking about happened long ago, Janice said. Not as long ago as the Rain of Beads but a thousand times worse. People used to think the Horsewomen were involved, only this was another group. They were older and they were human girls and they had a leader—they called themselves the Aquanauts. Their leader was a girl who no longer cared what anyone thought about her. She no longer cared if everyone thought she was weird. During the week there were only women and children at the shore, just like now. The men came on the weekends. If the men had been there probably none of this would have happened.

People went to the shore then? someone asked.

You think vacation is something new? Janice laughed the laugh she’d been working on, one that was supposed to sound musical.

If the men were there it wouldn’t have made any difference, someone said. I’ve heard about the Aquanauts. What happened had nothing to do with what sex people were.

Across the street the mother of one of the little girls had appeared in her driveway in a red bikini, a lit cigarette gripped between her lips as she hosed down her convertible. The mothers didn’t pay Janice for keeping an eye on their daughters, but they made it worthwhile for her, occasionally inviting her and her husband to their parties. Otherwise Janice wouldn’t have had any social life to speak of, she knew that, just as she knew the reason why had something to do with her being unsuitable in some way she couldn’t put her finger on, but that she suspected had to do with the fact that she, unlike the mothers, spent so much time with their daughters. It would be different when she had a daughter of her own.

In the beginning the group was like Pangaea, Janice said—that was how they got their power. They were like one giant lump of land surrounded by a single giant sea. It wasn’t until the lump broke into pieces that you could tell from the fossils how it used to be. One girl had a black locket that used to belong to another girl’s mother, one girl had another girl’s friendship ring. One girl had another girl’s hand-knitted argyle socks. One girl stole. She stole Blue Boy from Pinkie in the pack of trading cards in another girl’s cigar box, breaking up that treasured pair forever. Of course the girls didn’t like each other equally. When they played Nancy Drew someone always got left out, frequently the girl who stole, who refused to be Bess, while the girl who didn’t care what anyone thought of her was always George. She came from very far away and then one day she disappeared. In between she lived on the second floor of a duplex apartment at the shore.

When I say
girls,
Janice said, I mean
teenagers.

How many girls were there? someone asked. By now everyone knew better than to ask their names.

What difference does it make? I don’t know, Janice said. Maybe four. Maybe five. Not a big group.

I have a black locket, someone said.

Do you think I’m blind? said Janice. And don’t everyone go telling me about your friendship rings.

A hot breeze gusted off the bay, riddled with flies. Janice swatted at them but they kept landing on her; they were attracted to the suntan lotion. If she knew who’d taken Blue Boy she wasn’t saying.

The Aquanauts always waited until the families had left the beach and gone home, Janice said. It added to the girls’ feeling of power to think of what was going on in the duplexes without them there. Everyone’s bathing suit had a crotch full of heavy gray sand and you had to be careful not to make a mess in the bathroom when you peeled it off. On weekends the fathers mixed cocktails and opened cherrystones while the mothers mixed cocktail sauce. During the week the mothers did it all themselves. If you were a good girl you sat on the duplex porch with your mother while she painted your fingernails bright red to match hers. She drank a martini and you drank apricot nectar. The little sisters played with their Ginny dolls, the Ginnies who couldn’t walk and the Ginnies who could, though you wouldn’t really call what they did “walking.”

By the time the girls got to the beach the sun was on its way into the bay on the other side of the island, and the shadows of the boardwalk shops and amusement park rides had grown longer and longer, making the sand dark and cool. The two lifeguards had turned over their chair and their lifeboat and taken off their whistles, dreaming of kissing the same girls they’d spent the whole day protecting. The beach was empty except for the gulls and the things people left behind accidentally like wristwatches and shoes or on purpose like trash. The sand castles had been swallowed by the sea. It was low tide, the shadow of the top car of the Ferris wheel swinging back and forth at the edge of the water.

I like the black-haired lifeguard, said one of the older girls.

He likes you, too, said another girl. I can tell.

What about the man with the metal detector? said the curly-haired girl’s little sister. The man with the metal detector was always one of the last people to leave the beach. Her heart went out to him, with his over tall red crew cut and the way the sleeves of his white short-sleeved shirt stuck out like fairy wings.

Don’t be stupid, said someone else. This happened before any of us were born.

What difference does it make? said the curly-haired girl. It could have happened yesterday.

Every night it was the same thing, Janice said. The girls would wait until the beach was dark and then they would walk straight into the ocean and swim away from shore until they disappeared. Afterward they would sit under the boardwalk and get so drunk that by the time they came home and went to bed it seemed to all of them that they were like clothes tumbling around in a dryer.

One night something different happened. The girls didn’t come back. The mothers were sitting on the duplex porches, smoking cigarettes and drinking cocktails. They were sitting in groups of two or three, the fathers still in the city. Some of the fathers also were sitting on their porches at home, drinking and smoking and listening to the hot summer wind moving through the crowns of the sycamore trees. The fathers weren’t in groups; aside from the ones having affairs they were alone. There was a feeling of melancholy everywhere, the melancholy of being in a place apart from the person with whom you normally spent your time, thinking of her sipping her martini, picturing the lit tip of his cigarette traveling in darkness away from his lips and toward the ashtray. The sound in the other person’s ears of a car turning onto the street where the two of you normally lived. The sound of the sea in your own ears. The feeling of melancholy was everywhere and it wasn’t, generally, such a terrible feeling. Because everyone knew they were going to be reunited with the person they were missing, they could throw themselves into their melancholy mood.

There had been warnings. But people never heed warnings.

No one listened, and as more and more people stopped listening, more and more people stopped telling the truth. Even Madame X didn’t tell the truth, having been designed that way by the chamber of commerce. Nothing will put a bigger damper on a family vacation than being told the world’s about to end.

You’ve seen how she just sits there in her glass case in the arcade, Janice said, with her big glass eyes and her little plaster hands lifted like the pope’s, waiting for the next coin to drop. That night she decided—no more lies. Supposedly it was one of the lifeguards who got the fortune, but he didn’t take it seriously. The only thing lifeguards take seriously is looking good for girls. You don’t belong here, the fortune said. You never have. Once the land stops getting in its way, the ocean is going to be everywhere.

Madame X told me I was lucky in matters pertaining to business and finance, someone said.

She told me I was going to meet a dark, handsome stranger, said someone else.

I bet she meant the lifeguard, said one of the little sisters.

Girls, Janice said, oh girls. For a moment she stared off into space like she was trying to collect herself. The parents didn’t realize anything was different, she said, and she sounded angry. Not at first. If they’d been paying attention to the moon they might have had a clue, but they were too filled with feelings of nostalgia and self-pity, the way adults become after they’ve been drinking. The girls knew it was going to happen that night though and they were ready. Their leader said she hoped they’d said their good-byes. Everyone had brought her air hose, for all the good it would do.

It was late and the tide was as low as it gets. The girls didn’t think they’d ever had to walk so far before arriving at the water. They walked and walked and walked and meanwhile the moon was practically on top of them, like they could touch it. Like they could stick a finger in one of the craters—you’ve all seen the moon do that.

My dad says that’s just an optical illusion, someone said.

If your dad’s such a genius why did he ever have you? said someone else.

The curly-haired girl moved a little closer. I wouldn’t dream of touching the moon with my two arms, she said. She was quoting the poet again but no one cared. They were too busy listening to Janice. Even the curly-haired girl couldn’t leave. That was the thing about Janice—she made you want to know where she was taking you, even if you didn’t want to go.

After what seemed like forever the girls got to the water, Janice continued. There had been a sea breeze all day long. Now there was nothing except a feeling like something holding its breath. The girls waded in, enjoying the warm water on their feet and the burst of the first waves against their ankles, still warm but cooler, the shallow water mixing with water from the heart of the ocean, which was cold. The ocean is coldhearted, you don’t have to be a genius to know that. It makes boats sink. It makes you watch where you put your feet. If you choose to swim at the end of the day after the lifeguards have left the beach you take your life in your hands. You know that, don’t you? Janice gave everyone a piercing stare meant to drive her point home.