Were things really brighter then, or are they just more vivid in childhood?
She remembers moonlit foam, the waves splashing… The women were gone, it was only Melanie and Trina who remained, and Melanie was on top of one of the men, leaning back, digging her hands into the sand, smiling upside down. Tricia was too far to see her mother’s face, but she knew she was smiling like a little girl hanging from monkey bars. Melanie’s body was bobbing back and forth, all her pale hair spilling on the ground. Trina was on another man, kissing.
“You are both cats,” their mother tells them, giggling, as they walk back. “Like your momma. Meow, meow.”
Tricia is silent, and Trina runs ahead, her arms open wide. Once they’re on the cots out on the balcony, she whispers, “I could taste melted marshmallow on his tongue. It was sweet. He sucked on my tongue hard and then he let it go. It almost hurt, but it felt good.”
“I don’t want to hear. That’s slutty,” Tricia tells her.
“No. We’re cats. In the morning we’ll be different people. Like Melanie said.”
They wake at sunrise, and Trina touches her elbow, and they walk out into the ocean to bring in the traps, not speaking. Tricia thinks maybe it was something like a dream.
At home, they live in a long ranch house. Sometimes they turn off the hallway lights and play ghost. Their mother takes many naps during the day, but she is more like a mother there than she is on the beach. She pours them Count Chocula cereal in the morning, she talks about report cards, she makes them grilled cheese sandwiches. She even watches television with them sometimes. It’s entirely possible, when they come out here, Tricia thinks, that their mother is some sort of cat lady.
Audrey came out with a head full of dark hair. Then her dark hair fell out and was replaced by still darker, plumier hair. From the beginning, she latched without difficulty. Tricia held her whenever she cried. She remained toothless until she was a year old, and then they all came in at once. Audrey was up all night, feverish, and Tricia would stick her index finger over the sore gums as her baby clamped down. “Go ahead,” she’d whisper, “bite Mommy. It’s okay.” Audrey was colicky too; Tricia held her in the steamy bathroom and rubbed her back as her little one cried and gasped. Sometimes it was Tricia’s body Audrey wanted, and the baby would touch her mother’s face and turn it away as she took the nipple into her mouth. She twirled her fingers, closed her eyes. Tricia misses that sometimes. How just the breast could soothe her daughter into a trance. Nothing seems to have replaced that kind of content.
Tricia called her mother once, during a particularly difficult day of colick.
“Oh, I wouldn’t know, sweetheart,” Melanie said. “I didn’t nurse you two. Why don’t you get someone in to help? Where’s the little shit?” That’s what she calls David, Tricia’s husband.
Her mother is not so very far away now. She lives with another husband, in Dallas. But Tricia has not seen her in almost ten years. She hasn’t seen her sister either. It wasn’t a big deal, they said. They talk about it, about meeting for something, for a holiday. But there are always islands to visit, things to be done.
Her husband is gone; he is here but he is already gone. Tricia is a woman, not a cat. She can’t keep him, nor dispose of him. She loves him, or at least she wants him back so that she can try to love him.
There’s something, something that may have happened, or maybe didn’t. Not at the beach, but at the house on Albans Lane.
It was a late night, some night outside of time; she can’t remember her age. And she can’t remember if it was before, or after, the summer Allie and Grace disappeared. Tricia woke to a sound, a low hum. She walked into the living room. Candles flickered. The light was warm and bright, unlike any light she had seen before. The table was set with the green glass plates. Everything seemed burnished, as if someone had polished the air. Her mother was there, leaning back in her chair, white shirtsleeves rolled up to her elbows, a bloodstone dangling where the buttons began. And across from her was Trina. Her hair was brushed clean and pulled back off her neck with a black velvet ribbon. She wore a red dress, white lace tights, and patent leather Mary Janes. She nibbled a big slice of white cake and swung her stockinged legs under the table.
They were more beautiful than any two people Tricia had ever seen. She rubbed the crust from her eyes and watched. Melanie was laughing, and Trina kicked the table leg and looked right back at her.
Watching them together was almost like looking into one of those little plastic snow globes her mother put out at Christmastime. Another world, lovelier and smaller than this one. If it could come outside and into this world, it wouldn’t be so magical. But you wanted to get inside it just the same.
The night it happened, the moon was murderously bright.
That’s what Melanie says when she wakes them: “Wake up, wake up, my girls, The moon is murderously bright!” And this night, she wakes them all, Grace and Allie, Tricia and Trina. “Wipe the sleepy dirt from your eyes. This night is enchanted. It will last for a hundred years.”
The air itself feels charged. Allie and Grace stand up, wobbling, rubbing their eyes. They would follow Melanie anywhere.
The house flickers in the distance. That broken house seems to come alive at night and die every morning.
And Tricia remembers, yes-before that summer, it was an empty, abandoned shack, the stilts sinking into the sand, the windows boarded up. Tricia and Trina would go there, find things that had washed up. A glass disc full of colored blue water and pale sand. There were old shoes, baby bottles, fish skeletons. Once, a ring they thought was diamond, but when they brought it to Melanie, she told them it was cubic zirconia. Oh, and a coral necklace. That had been a treat, how they rinsed it and handed it to their mother. It was their greatest find.
But this night, there are men around and inside it. The women who are there are there for the men. There is a woman with stiff breasts and boots that go way up past her knees, walking toward the water. She looks painted onto the landscape. “It’s a stripper,” Grace whispers, and Trina says, “Be quiet.” The girls run beneath the house, looking for something. They whisper, wonder if they’ve walked into a ghost story. It’s very dark beneath, and there’s a sliver of light where the stilts rise to their highest, where the light from the windows and the moonlit ocean cut through.
“Do you think Brandy is here tonight?” one of the girls, probably Allie, whispers. Grace is scared. Allie takes her hand.
Upstairs, Melanie’s laughter, ice giggling inside a tumbler, war whoops.
A man jumps from the deck to the sand. When he sees them down there he squats, smiles. “Come out, come out, wherever you are.”
He’s reaching for Grace, and she begins to cry. She’s still in her pink pajamas, the ones with daisies all over them. Allie wraps an arm around her and so she feels the bottoms dampen. Grace has wet herself. It’s just a party. That’s when they hear Melanie say, “Come on, Grace, it’s all right. Come on out.”
“It’s okay,” the twins whisper. “It’s Melanie.”
It’s Mother’s Day. There are no Mother’s Day gifts; David didn’t come up with anything and Audrey’s too young to have done anything on her own. They sit in the lobby, eating their free continental breakfasts. Tricia peels a bruised orange for Audrey, and then they make waffles. Audrey is fascinated by the waffle maker. She sticks her fingers into the syrupy cherry sauce. “Oh, sorry, Mommy,” she says, “not sanitary.”
David looks awful. Like his eyes are just holes punched into his face. He hasn’t even bothered to shave. “Why would you, for this grand occasion?” she says, and too late she realizes she said it aloud. But he just nods.
And that’s when she squints, blurring his features a bit. Men, for her mother, were interchangeable. She liked to have sex with them, and she liked to look at them. She liked them to look at her. But beyond that, they didn’t interest her. And so, for Tricia, her father had been a scent, a cigar, cuff links, a nice leather chair. Those men on the beach, they were bar boys or college boys, or working men in soiled shirts and Stetsons. Her father wore boots with his suit. He liked to call them his girls.