Castle was a resort town up the coast from Boston. It was very small, and only a few people went there. But it had a lovely bay. In the winter time fishermen and shopkeepers lived in Castle, and perhaps one or two professional men who looked after them. But when spring came and the snow melted the tourists began to appear. Soon the real inhabitants were lost in a crowd of young people up from Boston. They rented cabins on the beach. They pitched tents, stayed in cars and in trailers, or in sleeping bags. As the summer came on, new faces appeared among them, old faces vanished. Finally it was fall, and they were gone.
Now, in July, Penny and Felix and Barbara lay in the warm sand, smoking and talking, enjoying the fish smells, the archaic streets and houses, the old wood that had been washed up from the sea around them. Ocean and wind, the smell of fish and salt and ancient timbers. But the last days of their vacation were on them. They would soon be going back to Boston.
Penny and Felix would be married. A new life was starting for them. But what of Barbara?
They had two cabins, next to each other. In the first one were Penny and Barbara; Felix had the other. After the first few nights Barbara woke up to find Penny gone. She was alone in the bed; the covers were tossed back on Penny’s side. She was not in the bathroom. She had gone out.
Barbara lay in the bed, fully awake, thinking and looking out through the part of the window visible past the shade. There were stars out, bigger than the stars she saw from her Boston window, upstairs in the family home.
It was a warm night. Silence lay all around her. She felt strange, lying alone in the big bed, in the unfamiliar cabin. As if she were in a train, lost someplace in the world, moving through the night without any idea of direction. Past vacant fields, houses bolted up, stores closed for the night, signs turned off. Deserted streets and silence everywhere, without life or movement.
She thought about Penny. When would she be back? Of course she was with Felix. Penny was twenty-three, and they had been engaged for a long time. A vague unhappiness settled over Barbara. She pushed the covers from her and lay naked, thinking about Penny and Felix. The darkness was warm against her bare skin.
Finally she turned over and went to sleep.
In the later nights, when Penny was gone so often, Barbara had plenty of time to think about herself and what direction she was moving in.
She was young, younger than any of the other people she had gone around with in Boston. Here, in Castle, they knew no one very well. Without Penny and Felix she was all alone. She was dependent on them. Her crowd was not here.
They were jazz enthusiasts, all of them. Not the jazz of the ballroom radio shows, the popular dance bands for high school proms. Their jazz was the real jazz, the jazz of the South, of New Orleans, the riverboats, the jazz that had moved up the river to Chicago. In Chicago it had become real music; in the hands of great musicians it had become an art.
Listening to the cornet of Beiderbecke, dead now, the rasp of Louis Armstrong, they found a raw, brutal and sophisticated music that seemed to move as they were moving. If the music were blind and lost, so were they also. They clung to this music, in the small places where it was played and heard, the cafés, the dim little Negro bars. There were records, the names, the sacred names. Bix. Tram. The hard, rough voice of Ma Rainey. Places and names. Sounds.
This was Barbara’s crowd, but they were not here in Castle. They were back in Boston. Here she was with a new group which she did not understand. She felt no desire, when she watched them talking, to join in with them. A kind of heavy stupor settled over her; she moved away, to the back of the room, sitting quietly alone. By herself she watched. A spectator, perched on the arm of a chair, or leaning against a door. She seemed to be ready to leave at any moment, disdainfully, haughtily; in reality she struggled with the rising tide of terror, and the desire to fell in disorderly panic.
Lying in the darkness alone, night after night, looking past the shade at the great stars, she thought about herself. She thought: what will I be in a year? Will I be alive? Will I be in Boston? Will I be living this way?
The prospect of living as she was now, filled her with a cold despair. If she had to spend her life alone, sitting at the edge of rooms, watching the others, then it did not matter what happened to her. She might as well give herself to anything that came along, any cross-tide that might tear her loose and carry her off.
She thought again of Penny and Felix lying in bed together. She imagined the sweating, panting exhaustion of love. The periods of quiet. The blood. Restlessly, she kicked the covers back. She got out of bed and sat looking into the darkness. At twenty, her mind and body were a battleground for some internal fever that was working itself slowly to the surface. The symptoms were long in coming. The waves of intense longing and desire were still indistinct and wave-like, rolling around inside her like a heavy fluid.
She got up from the chair and paced back and forth. After a while Penny came inside quietly. She saw Barbara and stopped at the door.
“Hello, honey. I was out walking along the beach.”
“I know,” Barbara said. “How was it?”
“Fine.”
Barbara got back into bed. “Coming?”
Penny came over and slid in beside her. Barbara felt her body, heavy and solid, almost like a man’s body. She gasped suddenly, tense. But Penny was already asleep. Barbara lay back, staring up at the darkness, her mouth open a little, her hands clenched at her sides.
The next day was the beginning of their last day at Castle. Because they did not have as much money as when they had come, it was decided they would try to hitchhike back.
“Lots of people are driving down the coast, right now,” Felix said. “An endless stream of shiny cars.”
Barbara pointed out that it might mean they would have to separate; no car would want to pick up three people. Even two was a lot. The best would be to go singly, but of course, that would be no fun. They let the matter ride for a while. More urgently, there was a final party for them which some friends who were remaining were giving.
Penny and Felix went to the party together. Barbara was to come along after them, since she wanted to write home once more before leaving. She wrote to her mother and to her father. Then she wrote a short note to Bobby.
“Bobby, sometimes I envy you, being married. I hope you and Judy are happy. Maybe I’ll get a chance to come and visit you later in the fall.”
She looked at what she had written and then taking a new sheet of paper wrote:
“Maybe I’ll have a chance to come visit you two and see how married life is. It must have some advantages.”
She wrote some more, and then sealed the note in an envelope and put postage stamps on the three letters. After a time she went to the closet and began to bring out clothes she wanted to wear to the party. She put out a dark green skirt on the bed, and an light neutral blouse. She dressed carefully, heels and nylons. She combed her hair down into place and fastened it back with a silver clasp.
Over the skirt and blouse she slipped on a suede leather jacket. Putting the letters in the jacket pocket she went out into the warm night, locking the door.
At the party, sitting on the arm of a big couch, watching the people talking and laughing, she realized she would really be sorry to leave Castle. To her, Boston, with stale air, familiar streets and hills, the same old faces, the high school, the movie theaters, would be the same old life again, exactly as before.