She wore a loose shirt patterned with red and yellow flowers. Well out away from her, like something that might claw or bite, she held a frosty glass.
“Don’t be such a mope,” she said impatiently.
In I dove, surfacing at the shallow end with a victorious grin though chlorine burned my eyes and I had water up my nose. The twins waved excitedly, my mother pressed frosty glass to face, and Carla, awkwardly hunched in a narrowing strip of shade, her new bathing suit out of sight behind a quilted robe and a copy of Mademoiselle, said, “Your watch, stupid.”
Condensation had already started beneath the crystal of my little man’s Timex.
This, along with Mother’s fainting over lunch (zucchini fritters) an hour or two later, more or less set the tone for the rest of our tropical sojourn.
“Now I know why Daddy stayed home,” Carla observed as we nibbled cold hot dogs outside the examining room where an intern was removing the treble hook that had lodged in Dan’s cheek during the climactic minutes of our deep-sea fishing trip aboard the Tina Marie III.
“Maybe it’ll leave a hole,” I said, really far more interested in clear tears dripping from Cordelia’s milky eye and onto my mother’s sunburned neck.
“Great.” Carla twisted her lips. “He can blow baked beans out the side of his face.”
My sister’s hormonal shift rendered her mordant and sharp rather than nervy and shy. This would hold true for some time to come, and, as now, would bring her grief. As now, overhearing the remark, Mother came forward to swat Carla across the mouth, and not the behind, befitting her incipient womanhood.
All of which left me the only dry-eyed passenger for the ride home.
So it wasn’t much of a pleasure trip. A field trip, then? A research project? That “unique in all America” line had a distinct textbook flavor. Wasn’t Mother always pointing, naming trees and flowers? It seemed reasonable to suspect we’d been set up for one of those enriching experiences. Anyway, here came three days of uninterrupted rain, and what could we do but observe?
Steamy drizzle outside, puzzlingly overcast inside — the house was large enough to have its own weather. Long and heavy silences were forces to be overcome by the intrepid party. Of course, there were the usual trifles, things learned to be forgotten, like card tricks or the script to a Bozo the Clown record the twins refused to tire of. But there were more lasting, more indistinct things as welclass="underline" a flimsy feeling in the stagily cluttered rooms, the curiously intense behavior of the adults, conversing in pressured whispers behind half-closed doors. Most of all, there was stout, sighing, distant Cordelia with her childish braids and clumsy motion, the side-to-side uncertainty of someone on a pitching deck as here she came with more cocoa, another plate of pineapple rings. Small things required great effort from her. Sighing, she alluded to her exhausting responsibilities. What? There was a woman from the Virgin Islands to do her cleaning, a man in a pith helmet who mowed and pruned and raked, even hosed down all the white statuary. Well, something was bullying her, threatening any minute to leave her in a clumsy heap on the terrazzo floors. Was it grief? Five years — nearly half my life — had passed since the day Mr. Bontempi attempted to prime his Evinrude and fragmented into the sea.
Carla shrugged. “She drinks too much. So what?”
I went to my mother to confirm this observation, smelled the gin in her grapefruit juice before I’d asked anything. Her face was slack, her eyes seemed very old, and it scared me. Not as much as my sister’s developments, but enough. It was ten o’clock in the morning on the third day of rain.
By that evening the air had cleared, though a few drops still fell. I’d spent the afternoon in random observation, moving from room to room, a junior Sherlock, opening drawers and closets, reading things that were none of my business. Descending the stairs thoughtfully now, my head jammed with clues, I was confronted by a strange tableau: my mother snoring into the sofa, the twins inert among crayons, Carla, open-mouthed and held tightly in her own arms, fast asleep under an oil portrait of Mr. Bontempi, pensive in dark tweeds. Dire tactics! I suspected gas.
“The prodigal returns,” Cordelia said, clumping toward me in her scarlet muumuu. “Seems we’re the only ones left to enjoy the stars.”
That was it. Cordelia had drugged the cocoa. But too late; she’d already grasped me ferociously by the hand, was tugging me onto the patio. We stood in the soft mist, on the wet bricks, and looked up. My hand grew numb in hers.
“Winking lights.” She pulled me against her hip. “But don’t let anyone tell you that your life is written out up there. That’s rubbish, you hear?”
Yes yes, all right. Why was she shouting?
“My hand…”
“Misery may have your name on it, but you’ll be the one to put it there. You and nobody else.”
She let go of me to gesture bitterly at her looming home, and I took off. There wasn’t any way of locking the door to my room, so I braced a chair under the doorknob as I’d seen people on television do. Sleep would have to wait. I stood at the window and looked out over statues glowing thinly in the dark.
Next day we visited a chimpanzee attraction down the coast, where someone let the air out of our tires. Cordelia, dutiful hostess, left her Fleetwood in the parking lot and took us home in a cab. This necessitated borrowing her gardener’s car the following morning so she could take Dan in to have his stitches removed.
Not until our last full day did we make our first visit to the beach, a private beach, part of some club Cordelia belonged to. Waiters came with cork-lined trays when you got thirsty and the glasses, half-filled with ice, were drippy and slick. The members looked well-dressed in nothing but swimwear; they glistened and smelled of cocoa butter. My mother wore khaki pants and shirt, sunglasses, and a canvas hat that appeared to be melting — a redundant costume in the shade of a wide green umbrella, but, like the headache and the absorbing German novel, it went with her sulk. She dreaded returning to New York and was making no secret of it. With all this, though, as was so often the case, she gained a cool serenity. She was indifferent to the complaints of her children, as she should more often have been.
I think it was out of frustration at this that Carla put on lipstick, slipped off her robe, and placed herself, hands on narrow hips, at the edge of the water. Her suit was as red as the lipstick and her skin was as white as the clouds.
“What a picture,” Cordelia said rather sadly.
“Hmmm?” My mother peered momentarily over the top of her book.
Carla pulled the barrettes from her hair, corkscrewed her toes in wet sand. The screaming of children and the screaming of gulls combined with canned music that drifted out of the snack bar. I didn’t know what I felt as I watched her, but whatever it was called was pulling me tight.
The boy who spoke to her was slightly older and much taller. He had a deep scar on his leg and a Dodgers jacket which he kept zipping and unzipping.
“She’s fine,” my mother said when I reported that they’d walked off out of sight.
“A protective brother,” Cordelia sighed. “I wish I’d had one.”
What was with these two? They huddled in the shade, one staring at a book, the other at her bulbous freckled knees, both of them dully immune behind their plastic lenses to the shiny pleasure all around. I saw women sprawled in white chairs, women oiling themselves and being oiled, tugging at their bikini tops and laughing hard enough to spill their drinks, but my sister was nowhere among them. I remembered reading in her diary on my rainy Sherlock expedition.