Soon Bruce would be home, his lips purpled with wine, and we would share another bottle together and the squash I had stuffed with leftovers from another type of squash and rice dish and watch a video he had discovered at work of cats falling in slow motion and landing on their feet.
Though I felt shy I forced myself to walk down the ramp to the dock and sit on the opposite side of the pier from Nancy, slipping my feet, already cold and pruned from my wet sneakers, into the ocean because that’s what I had envisioned I would do. I watched my feet in the freezing water, and after some sharp pain I couldn’t feel them anymore. They looked fat and skittish, like they’d taken on a temperament of their own.
“Hey, stranger,” she called from the other side of the pier. “I see you over there, pretending you don’t see me.” I wished I could hide myself from her. It felt important that she not recognize me, in the sickly, greenish light of an oncoming storm, my face caked with Sun-kissed Medium, but there was nowhere to go. She sat beside me and dangled her legs off the dock, her feet next to mine in the water like two smaller fish of the same species.
“I didn’t want to bother you,” I said, and she held out her hand to me, for a shake, I thought, but when she slipped her tiny, freezing hand into mine she just held it there like I might kiss it. She wore a man’s overcoat, and a yellow, rubber rain hat. I couldn’t tell looking at her that her brain had been altered in some grave, irreparable way. She was still a girl who would look good on the cover of a cereal box: upturned nose, freckles, blue eyes, quick to blush.
“I don’t know if you remember me,” I said. “I’m Mae, Roy and Becky’s daughter.”
“Of course I remember you,” said Nancy. “I remember everything.”
She took off her rain hat. Her white-blonde hair was braided in a crooked tangle down her back. “Do you know how to French braid? I’ve been trying on myself all summer.” I started working on the knots. Her hair was brittle, as though salted by the sea. The nape of her neck was damp with sweat. Downy, dark hairs hid beneath the blonde. Hair didn’t grow on the pink scar behind her left ear. The clouds had turned to purple and then to black, suspended above us. I pulled my feet from the water and waited for the painful circulation of blood. It was time to go, but Nancy had a lot of hair, and I was only halfway down her back.
One summer, a pack of teenagers, one of them Nancy, lit candles on the tennis court across the street from my parents’ house, held hands, and spun each other in circles, sneakers squeaking as they whipped around faster and faster. Only after the kids left the tennis court did my dad go out and discover the courts littered with beer bottles and yellow wax, which would have to be cleaned by a professional. “Never be oblivious like that,” my dad said when he returned home, shaking the dregs of their beers into our garden’s slug traps.
But the next evening when the courts were clear and it was dark I snuck across the street and spun with the roller used for squeegeeing the courts dry, gripping the end of its long handle like a dance partner’s hands, its weight a counterweight to my body, until I was queasy and had to lie down. The stars spiraled above me, and I pretended deliciously that I was sick and dizzy from beer and that everyone else was spinning in the surrounding darkness.
I tied off her braid, and tried to look her in the eyes. Looking her in the eyes felt like the next best thing to asking about her coma, which I didn’t know how to do. When I got up to leave I reached out and balanced myself on her shoulders.
“Please don’t go,” she said. “If you stay I’ll show you my best secret, as payback for the braid.” She pulled a slimy sheet of seaweed from the water, smooth and alive, and draped it over the shoulders of my raincoat.
“I love your stole,” she said. “Is that real mink?” By now Bruce would be home, calling my name. “Look, you’re all dressed up now. Come out with me.” The rowboats were unruly on the ends of their lines. She untied the smallest one and rooted the oarlocks out from a secret crevice.
“I can’t,” I said, but she climbed into the boat and patted the prow, the sun sinking behind her.
“If you don’t come I’ll have to row out to the island alone and that’s just pathetic,” she said. She dug in her pockets for a tin of sardines and a can of seltzer. “Dinner and drinks. Private island.”
“I wish I could,” I said. “I should get back to my boyfriend.”
She began to drift out from the dock. “I’m supposed to wear a helmet all the time. Imagine what might happen without your company.”
I climbed into her boat. When the rain began I took over rowing. The rain fell so hard all I could do was laugh. I rowed like a maniac, the oars flailing.
By the time we reached the island it was just light enough for me to follow Nancy’s outline along the dark path to its center. Everything was giving off its growth smell in the rain.
“I just need a break,” she said, lying down across the middle of the path. “Don’t worry, this is normal.”
“What should I do?” I said.
“Nothing. I get dizzy. It feels like I’ll never stop spinning.” I crouched beside her and held her hand, wondering if she was small enough that I could carry her. She pushed my hand away. “No dramatics,” she said, rising. She leaned on me to walk. I watched the stream of stars where trees had been cleared for the pathway and tried to let them comfort me.
I had visited the island church when I was a little girl, but was still surprised to see its shape hidden in the overgrowth, one side of the steeple rotted away. Inside, the church smelled of raccoon droppings and death and beer. Clusters of bats hung from the rafters. Nancy flicked her lighter and let the flame play over bottles, scraps of newspaper, an acid-washed jean jacket. A tidy collection of sheep skulls lined the windowsill.
There was no chance of rowing back now, in the dark, in the rain, which was hammering against the roof and leaking in all around us. When I stepped toward Nancy a rivulet threaded down my neck.
“Tell me about this boyfriend,” she said, interlocking her fingers with mine.
“Bruce is a good guy. A gentle giant.”
“Bruce,” she scoffed. “Does he hold doors open for old ladies?”
“He does. That’s exactly right.”
“Tell me about this thing you’ve got going with Bruce,” she said. “Bruce. A fat person’s name.”
I felt sad for him. Bored and anguished and sad. Pressed against Nancy, my wet clothes were unbearably cold.
“I think he’s my person,” I said. Then, she kissed me. She didn’t really want to know about Bruce. I kissed back. She was a bad kisser, frenzied and sloppy with too much tongue, and I didn’t try my best either. We lay down on the floor of the church together, among the newspapers and soggy leaves and the threat of splinters from the rotting floorboards, and she climbed on top of me, the tip of her braid curled against my neck like a snake.
In my dreams I took lovers who were not Bruce, and always in the dream, before sex or after, I would feel a dawning dread. There is someone I’m betraying, I would think, the other lover still inside me, my fingers in their hair. I’d struggle to remember Bruce’s name, dredging for the image of his good, round face, his thinning blond hair, his quick smile, the drooping eyelids that made him look sad and weary even as a little boy. He was always so hard to remember, but I always remembered him, and then I searched for him in mad remorse to confess, my guilt so fierce it turned the dream lucid. Each time waking up was glorious relief.
“Whoa there,” Nancy said as though I were a bucking horse, “dizzy spell,” and she lay down beside me, droplets of rain falling on her forehead, in my mouth, on the back of my hand. “You don’t want this,” she said. “I’m sorry. Tell Bruce I’m sorry. Tell him I’m the loneliest person in the world.”