Silver Girl (20 page)

“There we go,” he said proudly.

“Oh, my God!” Connie said. “Meredith, a diving board!”

Meredith made her way to the back of the boat. She saw the springboard and put her hand to her mouth.

Dan said, “I got it for my kids. They love it.” He climbed up onto it, stripped off his T-shirt, which he threw into the well, and took a couple of test bounces. Then he approached the end of the board and did a soaring swan dive. He surfaced and rubbed at his eyes. “Your turn!” he called to Meredith.

Meredith looked at Connie. “I haven’t dived in years.”

“You were the best at Merion Mercy,” Connie said. “You held all those records.”

Meredith was pulling the bobby pins out of her head—off came the wig. Meredith’s real hair was matted underneath, and she shook it out.

“I can’t believe I’m going to dive,” she said. “Will I remember how?”

“Isn’t it like riding a bike?” Connie asked. She drank some more, and a feeling of well-being settled over her. Her arms tingled; there was a golden glow in her chest.

“I guess we’ll see,” Meredith said. She shed her cover-up and climbed onto the board. She walked to the end, then walked back. She gave it a few test bounces. Then, she composed herself at the back of the board, and, like a gymnast, she took one, two, three choreographed steps, bounced impossibly high, and folded her body into a perfectly straight up-and-down front dive. It was a thing of beauty. Connie blinked. She had gone to all of Meredith’s home meets in high school, and what struck her watching Meredith dive now was the time warp.

Dan whistled and clapped and shouted. Meredith surfaced, her hair wet and slick, and swam easily over to the ladder on the side of the boat.

Meredith said, “Just like riding a bike.”

Connie said, “Do another one. Do something fancy. Really show him.” She remembered Meredith once telling a reporter from the
Main Line Times
that a simple front dive or a reverse dive was the hardest to execute because her body wanted to flip and twist. Her body, she said, craved degree of difficulty.

Meredith climbed back up onto the board. She did a front one and a half pike. Her pike wasn’t as tight as it had been in high school, but that was to be expected.

Dan grabbed a towel and sat next to Connie. “Man,” he said. “Did you see that?”

“I told you,” Connie said. She drank her wine. She had two inches or so left in her cup. Another glass like that and she’d be ready for some food.

Meredith climbed back up onto the board. She walked out to the end with regal bearing and turned around.

Back dive. Her entry was perfect, her toes pointed, though she didn’t get the height she’d gotten in high school. God, Connie could remember the way Meredith had seemed to float in the air, the way she had seemed to fly.

“Do another one!” Connie said.

“I don’t know,” Meredith said. She mounted the board and did a backflip with a half twist.

Dan put his fingers in his mouth and whistled.

Connie said, “That was too easy!” Connie remembered Meredith stretching on the blue mats that the coaches laid out alongside the diving well. Meredith could put her face flush to her knees, her arms wrapped around her thighs. It hurt now just thinking about it.

Meredith did a simple inward dive. Then a reverse dive. Then, without any warning, she approached the end of the board and whipped into a front two and a half somersault, tuck. Dan hooted, and Connie wondered if she should feel jealous. She had been an aggressive field-hockey player in high school, but that didn’t inspire this kind of admiration. Connie touched Dan’s shoulder, to remind him that she was still there. “Are you ready for that beer?”

He said, “Aren’t you going to try?”

She filled her cup with wine—glug, glug, glug—and didn’t quite catch his meaning. Meredith executed something else; Connie only looked up in time to see Meredith’s legs enter the water. The key to a good entry was as little splash as possible.

Connie said, “Excuse me?” She corked the wine and stuck it back in the cooler.

“Aren’t you going to take a turn on the board?” Dan asked.

“Oh,” Connie said. “I don’t dive like that.”

“Come on,” Meredith said. “The water’s nice.”

“Come on,” Dan said, standing up. He climbed onto the board. “You must be hot.”

She was kind of hot, yes, but she didn’t like being pressured into things. And she still found the water too cold for swimming. But now if she said no, she would seem prissy and high maintenance or, worse, she would seem old. She would jump off the board once, she decided, and then she would drink that wine.

Dan did another swan dive and waited, treading water, for Connie to have a turn. Connie bounced on the board, testing it, as she’d seen Dan and Meredith do, but the board had more spring than she anticipated—either that or her legs weren’t as steady as theirs—and she lost her balance and had to windmill her arms like some vaudeville act just to keep from falling.

“Whoa!” she said. “Okay.” She steadied herself and proceeded to the end of the board. In the distance, she saw Great Point Light. Seagulls flew overhead, a few wispy clouds scudded by. She didn’t want to jump. She liked it here, perched over the water, surveying.

She bounced, placed her arms over her head, and dove, hitting the water much sooner than she expected, and harder. Her chest, where she’d been holding that golden chardonnay glow, stung. And she had water up her nose. Her nasal passages buzzed and burned, and the burn trickled down her throat. Connie wiped her eyes, adjusted her bathing-suit top, pawed at her hair.

“There you go!” Dan said. “Great job!” But Connie felt he was being patronizing.

“The water’s freezing,” Connie said, though it wasn’t, really. She wanted to get back on the boat. But here came Meredith again.

She said, “Okay, last one.”

“What’s it going to be?” Dan asked.

Meredith ran for the end of the board, bounced, and launched herself into another front one and a half pike, though her pike was loose, and she entered early, making a big splash. Despite this, Connie gave Meredith two hands up: a ten. Meredith jerked her head toward her shoulder. “Water in my ear,” she said.

It was only swimming back to the ladder that Connie noticed the name of the boat written in gold script.
Nicky.

Nicky?
Connie thought. And then she realized: Nicole, the wife. Nicky.

She felt ten kinds of sad as she pulled herself aboard.

It was nothing a second and then a third glass of wine couldn’t cure. Dan cracked a beer, and Meredith drank a diet Nantucket Nectars iced tea. Connie didn’t love the fact that she had been bullied into the water, but she did love drying in the sun and feeling the saltwater evaporate off her skin.

Meredith’s wig lay on the seat next to Connie like some kind of poor, abandoned animal. Connie held it up with two fingers.

“I wish you didn’t have to wear this,” Connie said.

“Here, give it to me,” Meredith said.

“I wish people would just leave you alone,” Connie said. She could feel the wine circulating around her brain, embalming it. “Leave
us
alone.”

There was an awkward silence. Meredith jerked her head again, still trying to drain her ear. Connie hoped she hadn’t heard; the words had come out wrong.

Dan said, “I don’t know about you, but I’m ready for lunch.”

Lunch, yes! Connie enthusiastically pulled lunch from the cooler. There were two kinds of sandwiches: chicken salad on wheat, or roast beef and Swiss with horseradish mayo on rye. There was potato salad that Connie had made from scratch, as well as a chilled cucumber soup with dill. There was a fruit salad of watermelon, strawberries, and blueberries. There were chocolate cupcakes with peanut-butter icing.

“Amazing,” Dan said. He had one of each kind of sandwich, a whopping portion of potato salad, a cup of soup. “You made all this yourself?”

“Meredith dives,” Connie said, “and I cook.” She felt like perhaps this evened things out. She took a bite of her chicken-salad sandwich. “Did your wife like this boat?”

Dan nodded. “Loved it.”

“You named it for her?” Connie asked. Her voice sounded confrontational to her own ears, though she wasn’t sure why. Clearly the boat was named for his wife, and why should that matter? It was his boat, he’d had it a long time, longer than the past ten days, which was how long he’d known Connie. And there was nothing between him and Connie anyway except for a handful of great kisses. But still, wasn’t it a little weird to take a woman that you’d kissed a few times out on a boat named for your dead wife?

“We used to have a boat,” Meredith said wistfully. She said this without irony, as if everyone in America hadn’t heard about Freddy’s megayacht,
Bebe,
which had cost him $7 million of his clients’ money. She smiled at Dan. “But it didn’t have a diving board!”

In the afternoon, they motored to the end of the jetty. There were seals lounging on the black rocks, and Connie thought of Harold.

Dan said, “We’re going out to check the lobster pots.”

“Oh, yes,” Connie said. She had finished one bottle of wine by herself and had eaten only part of half a sandwich, so she was pleasantly buzzed. She had achieved a perfect state of equilibrium. She was happy and lighthearted, without a care in the world. She debated opening a second bottle of wine but decided against it—she was, after all, the only one drinking. Dan had drunk one beer and Meredith had stuck to diet iced tea. But when Dan pulled back on the throttle and the horsepower kicked in, Connie wished she had a drink. If she stopped drinking now, in this sun, she might fall asleep, and if she fell asleep, she’d wake up with a headache. The boat was ripping along, skimming the water, and when they encountered wake from the high-speed ferry, which passed them on their starboard side, the front of the boat slammed against the chop, and a fine mist splashed over the side. Meredith was facing front, as still and alert as the maidenhead on a whaling ship; she hadn’t replaced her wig, and her glasses were off. She didn’t seem to mind getting wet.

Connie had been sitting next to Dan behind the controls, but she made a move to the stern to see if reaching into the cooler was feasible. But as soon as she stood up, the boat hit a wave and Connie fell against the gritty floor of the deck and scraped her knee. There was blood. She crawled to the safety of the cushioned seats and held on to the back rail for dear life. Dan hadn’t noticed her fall, which was a good thing, though he would notice the blood on his deck. She inspected her knee. It stung. They crossed the wake of another, bigger power yacht, and the front of the boat slammed again; there was more spray up front. Connie couldn’t reach the cooler; it was wedged under the seat, and even if she could get to it, the motor skills required to open the wine were beyond her under the circumstances. She would have to wait until they stopped or slowed down.

Their speed was breathtaking. Connie squinted at the boat’s speedometer: one hundred knots, or nearly. Was that equivalent to a hundred miles an hour? She couldn’t remember. Dan was a cowboy behind the wheel of a boat, whereas Wolf, while sailing, had been an orchestra conductor. But, Connie reminded herself, she wasn’t looking to replace Wolf. She wasn’t looking for anything except a respite from her misery. She liked motor boats, she reminded herself. Up front, Meredith seemed completely unfazed by the speed. Connie needed to loosen up.

And then, suddenly, Dan downshifted, and the boat slowed. Sticking out of the sparkling water, Connie saw tall buoys on stakes. Dan maneuvered the boat toward the buoys and cut the engine.

“Okay!” he shouted. He scrambled for the ropes and, like an experienced rodeo hand, lassoed a buoy with a green stripe. He seemed busy, so Connie made a move for the cooler, feeling like a pirate trying to pilfer from the treasure chest. She unwedged the cooler and had just gotten the second bottle of chardonnay in her hands when Dan said, “Quick! I need help here!” He was barking orders, just as Wolf tended to when he sailed.
Men,
Connie thought. She had her eyes on Dan—did he really expect
her
to help him with the lobster traps?—but her hands were rummaging for the corkscrew.

“Help!” Dan called again.

Meredith appeared beside him to help him pull up the ropes. Connie could see she was needed as well, so she abandoned the wine in the cooler and hurried over. Heave, ho—they yanked and rested and yanked and rested. Dan’s forearms were straining with the effort, and Connie got the feeling that she and Meredith weren’t contributing much in the way of strength. Finally, the heavy wooden trap broke the surface of the green water and Dan said, “Back up!” He hauled the trap up over the side of the boat and Connie and Meredith helped him maneuver it onto the deck.

Dan exhaled and wiped at his forehead. He looked at Connie and thought to smile. He was handsome, he had kissed her, but he was a complete stranger to her. She was glad Meredith was here.

“Wow,” Meredith said. She crouched down to inspect the contents of the trap, but Connie didn’t want to get too close. She could see thirty or forty blackish-green lobsters crawling all over in a panicked frenzy, like kids at a rock concert. The shells clicked against one another and some of the antennae stuck out of the slats. Lobsters were a lot like cockroaches, Connie decided, with their armored carapaces and their prehistoric ugliness. Still, she thought, delicious. She loved lobster salad, steamed and cracked lobsters with drawn butter, lobster bisque…

“So many!” Connie said admiringly. “What will you do with them?”

“Well, three lucky ones will be our dinner tonight,” Dan said. “And the rest I’ll sell to Bill at East Coast Seafood.”

Meredith said, “I feel sorry for them.”

Dan nodded. “Typical female answer. My wife felt sorry for them, too. She used to beg me to let them go.”

Connie felt like she should chime in with her own expression of sympathy on the crustaceans’ behalf, but she didn’t care. She said, “Do you need our help?”

“No,” Dan said. “But I have to band these guys and put them in coolers. And then I’m going to fish for a few minutes. Are you ladies okay to kick back here for a little while?”