And in this manner Stella won — rich men came to her with their receipts, and she owned a number of good wool suits that she now wore to work. But for the fair her short skirts were still made of denim, though store-bought now and finished at the hem. She liked to wear them with flashy heels in colors whose names Ginny remembered from the big crayon box: fuchsia, celadon, cerise. She also wore sunglasses, an extra pair of which she once tried offering to Ginny: “So you won’t be afraid of running into any of your kids or their parents,” she said. “Just in case you decide you wanted to cut loose.”
“When have you ever known me to cut loose?”
“Hey, Gin, I figure there’s a first time for everything.”
Ginny made the comment that she was not the sister who usually needed a disguise, but this made Stella shake her head. “No, you don’t need a disguise when people see you wearing one every day. Get me out of a suit and no one has a clue.”
“I was thinking more about your husbands.”
“Oh, them.” Stella waved her hand in front of her face as though she were shooing away a cloud of gnats. “They already have their ideas about me.”
THAT WAS HOW the Old West ended, that night Stella did her song and dance: I’ll be your hootchie-cootchie girl, you’ll be the jelly man. After everyone scurried away it was just Leroy on the stage, puffing his cigarette while Stella whooped. The barker rolled his eyes. “It’s that girl again. Your number one fan.”
Leroy squinted and tilted his heavy glasses before he said, “Let’s have a look.” Then he made the barker push him down the ramp, so that he was there with the sisters on the wharf, peering up at them through his thick lenses. He looked at Stella, then Ginny, then back to Stella again.
“That’s what I call groceries,” he said.
Up close, Ginny could see that his shirt was cheap and crudely stitched. When Stella asked if he wanted something to drink, he scratched his shoulder against his chin, which had a few black hairs too sparse to qualify as a beard.
“I s’pose I could do with a Coke,” he said.
Ginny was dispatched to get it from the concession stand at the other end of the wharf. And while she waited in line, the evening dimmed — by the time she was headed back toward Stella with the cup in her hand, the bay was more black than silver where it stretched across the opening between stalls opposite the Old West’s stage. Farther north, on the other side of the bay, sat the pulp mill lit up like a steamship, its stacks churning out the vapors that reduced everyone who ventured down to the waterfront in those days to tears.
She could not find Stella at first — she was not where Ginny’d left her — though eventually she spotted the wheelchair tucked behind the skee-ball booths and a shooting gallery. Stella was sitting slantwise on Leroy’s lap, her white shirt hanging on the back of the wheelchair, where it fluttered like a flag. Ginny knew that her sister was the one who’d done the unbuttoning, the Salmon Boy’s fingers sealed inside his fins.
“Whoa. Double trouble,” he said when Ginny approached. But Stella was only annoyed.
“What are you looking at?” she snapped.
“OH, THAT WAS YEARS AGO,” Stella says, waving her hand across her face, again the gnats. She has her bare feet on the dashboard; she’s using the earstick of her sunglasses to dig mud from between her toes. The reason for the mud is that at around ten o’clock Stella had grown annoyed at the way her heels kept getting stuck in the cracks between the planks. And she’d flung her shoes off the wharf, hollering after them, “To hell with you!”
That’s all it was: a woman standing with one leg crossed behind the other to peel the shoe off of her heel. Then other leg/other shoe. Then they both get fired into the drink.
That’s all it was, a woman taking off her shoes and flinging them into the sea, and yet seeing this somehow made Ginny forget (for a minute) all her sister’s petty offenses throughout the years — after all, wasn’t Stella right, weren’t her transgressions petty? So that what remained was everything about the fair that did not change: the cotton candy like cheap pink wigs and the smell of frying onions, the boys with giant stuffed animals on their shoulders that they’d won for their beloveds, though the conquest had cost them a hundred bucks.
“Hey,” Stella says, “you know why accountants always want to meet girls they can bring home to their mothers?”
“Why?”
Stella stops digging to look up at Ginny. “Guess.”
“I give up.”
“You always give up.”
“Just tell me.”
Stella wipes the earstick on the dash before popping the sunglasses back on her face. “Maybe I don’t feel like it anymore,” she says sulkily as they idle in the car, waiting for the traffic to clear from the parking lot.
“Here’s the difference between you and me,” Stella says at last. “You’d be embarrassed if you were me, but I’m not. Even when I was a kid, I knew exactly what I was doing. When I’m ninety years old and peeing in a bedpan, that night with Leroy’ll be how you remember me and don’t tell me it won’t. When it comes to you, I’ll be fourteen forever. And how much would other people give for that, unh? To be fourteen forever? If I could bottle that, I’d make a mint.”
Ginny doesn’t answer because she’s still thinking about her sister’s shoes, ebbing in the Sound, bright red. Meanwhile, Stella takes the flask from her expensive leather Coach bag and drains the last swig, the flask being another thing that hasn’t changed, though she keeps better booze inside it these days.
“Anyway,” Stella continues, wiping her lips with the back of her hand, “that’s why you always come back here with me, though I’m bound to drive you nuts. There’s always a chance that I’ll be able to come up with something that’ll top having my tits licked by the Salmon Boy. I don’t think so, but you never know. Maybe someday that old Indian will reappear and you’ll catch me balling him. Or the blind lady!” she quacked.
Then there’s quiet in the car for a while. “So what’s the answer?” Ginny says.
“Answer to what?”
“The girls and the accountants and their mothers.” But Ginny can tell that Stella is already bored by the accountants.
“Hunh,” she grunts. “The answer is: because they still live with them. But see, it’s not funny anymore. That’s what happens when you give up. All the funny goes away.”
By now the traffic has filed out of the parking lot, and when Ginny pulls out, the fair lights in the side-view mirror blur into one smear. They’re headed north along the shore road, though this is not the direction home. Ginny’s just glad to be driving with no husbands, with her sister in the front seat.
“So where are your husbands tonight, Stell?” she asks, and when Stella says, “Who?” in a rednecky voice, Ginny can’t help but laugh.
“They’re history, Gin. I swear sometimes I can’t even remember their names.” Then Stella sticks her head out the window and shouts Leroy! to the night.
“Isn’t it strange?” she says when she pulls in her head. “That someone you love can dry up and blow away like an old leaf? Whereas ten minutes with the Salmon Boy is something that I never will forget.”
They’ve come out of the trees, and here the house lights shine on the bay’s far shore, marking the contours of the hills. The far shore is also where the mill sat, lit up like a steamer the girls once claimed someday would carry them away. When they were girls, in the pulp mill days, the air smelled so sour that a whiff of it would bring tears to your face. But it’s been years since the pulp mill burned, and now the air tastes clear and sweet.