“Forgot about that,” Tricia says. When their child falls asleep in the back, she reaches over. This trip is about him, how he says he feels no love for her anymore. She climbs over the seat, in the daylight, thinking, This will do it, this has to do it. Her long pale hair in his face, her mother’s blue eyes, the lashes darkened now. “I love you, I love you, I love you,” she says, and when his arm fumbles and he pushes her off, she’ll think, Fuck it. You fucker.
He doesn’t push her off, he is soft there, holding his head back from her face.
“There are worse things in life than a job you don’t like and a wife who leaves you cold,” she says. “You could have a knife in your back.”
“I don’t want to talk about that. You aren’t thinking about it anyway,” he says.
And he is right, until she seats herself again and looks back at her daughter.
“Don’t make yourself cry for my benefit,” he says.
“Man, it’s really changed,” she says aloud on the drive back. She’d imagined walking along the beach, their girl on his shoulders, her hand inside his. She would point to the dunes, And there it is, that’s it, that’s where… and he would put his hand on the small of her back, guiding her away. Or no, he would rest it on the nape of her neck, cradling.
There is a coffee shop with free wi-fi, and they pass gift shops, even a couple of hotels. “It wasn’t like this back then. It was just houses and a corner store. We used to go crabbing, did I tell you that? Mom would cook them for us, if we cleaned them and pulled them apart. We did it when they were alive. It didn’t bother us. Grace said they had no nerves. One time, I was about to gut one of them and it started eating its brains out. Autocannibalism, Allie said. She was the smart one. We thought it was funny. And we ate mussels too. Trina and I, we brought the traps in every morning, We woke up at the same time. Trina said the same sound woke us, but I don’t remember. I don’t know. Maybe I never heard the sound.”
He is smoking, window down. She would like to think that he is afraid of his own love for her, but the way he’s looking at the windshield, she’s thinking maybe not. They’ve been married for eleven years. When she met him, he was a skinny studio art major at a state college. Now he’s grown more handsome. And glib.
In the backseat, her baby girl gurgles. Two years old, fingers in her mouth. Her hair is black like her daddy’s, cut straight across her cheeks. Her eyes are blue like her mother’s, like her grandmother’s, like Trina’s.
The girls sleep out on the balcony, listening to Judy Collins tapes. She sounds so otherworldly. There is a song with whales calling, and a song about eyes like isinglass windows. The girls don’t know what isinglass is, but it sounds like something from old ships or lighthouses. Then Allie puts in Stevie Nicks. Sylvia and Melanie are dancing in the field. They wear black bathing suits and sarongs. Melanie unties her sarong, letting it float up, up, and away. It’s a warm and breezy night. Across the way, at that girl’s house, men whoop and holler.
“I want to call my mom,” Grace says. “Your mom drinks too much.”
“Oh, go inside and call her then,” Trina says. Allie and Tricia smile.
Grace falls asleep with her glasses on, her arm thrown over her face.
Allie, Tricia, and Trina watch as Melanie and Sylvia walk off past the dunes.
“She’ll find a bonfire,” Trina says.
“Will she come back?” Allie says, then thinks about how that sounds.
“She always does,” the twins say.
Allie whispers, making her voice low, husky. Like the girl’s. “I don’t think she’s a girl,” Allie says. “She’s a spook. She’s a ghost. She’s a demon inside a girl’s body.”
And then she hisses:
Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack
All dressed in black, black, black
With silver buttons, buttons, buttons
All down her back, back, back.
She cannot read, read, read
She cannot write, write, write
But she can smoke, smoke, smoke
Her father’s pipe, pipe, pipe.
She asked her mother, mother, mother
For fifty cents, cents, cents
To see the elephants, elephants, elephants
Jump over the fence, fence, fence.
They jumped so high, high, high
They reached the sky, sky, sky
And they didn’t come back, back, back
Till the Fourth of July, ly, ly!
July can’t walk, walk, walk
July can’t talk, talk, talk
July can’t eat, eat, eat
With a knife and fork, fork, fork!
She went upstairs, stairs, stairs
To say her prayers, prayers, prayers
And bumped her head, head, head
And now she’s dead, dead, dead!
In the mornings the twins carry in the crab traps. They wake up at the same moment, and leave Grace and Allie asleep on the balcony. They walk in their pajamas, and wear flip-flops to protect their calloused feet from the sticker burrs.
July Fourth, firecrackers and watermelon. Melanie sips a mint julep from a tall blue glass. The girls sip from the bottom of the tumblers. Their father is there, for this celebration, an arm thrown over his wife’s shoulders. They are surprisingly broad for such a petite woman. Allie approves of the exposed freckles, the blood-red stone dipping in between her breasts. The only makeup she wears is dark lipstick, and her toenails match. Her skin is dead-girl white. Tricia and Trina are wearing batiked sarongs like their mother’s. Allie would have said, On the beach a woman should be golden, but Melanie’s skin is right, it’s unexpected. Her husband has the kind of muted, rumpled handsomeness that complements a great beauty. Everyone wants to touch her, just for a moment. Tricia and Trina watch her from a distance, that woman they might become. She is drunk, but not slurry drunk. Women lean in toward her; men brush her arm as they walk by. The girls run up to her with plates of oysters and shrimp, offerings. She rests her hand on Allie’s shoulder for a moment and says, “This is my girl. These are all my girls.”
The girls stay downstairs in the junk room, sipping lukewarm Lone Stars. That’s when they see the neighbor girl across the field, dancing with a sparkler. She moves in waves, making ribbons with the sparks. Allie is the one who stands up and calls to her.
“Brandy, Brandy! Come here. We have beer!”
Brandy motions for them to come to her, waving that sparkler around and around.
The way Melanie taught them in the car, it goes like this:
Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack
All dressed in black, black, black
She has a knife, knife, knife
Stuck in her back, back, back.
She cannot breathe, breathe, breathe
She cannot cry, cry, cry
That’s why she begs, begs, begs
She begs to die, die, die.
They are clapping, laughing. Tricia loves the way her mother takes to the freeways, speeding, passing, changing lanes with ease. She never curses at the other drivers, and she talks her way out of tickets. One trip, she’d blinked her eyes and said, “My little girl is sick.” Trina leaned over the seat and shivered. That officer wanted to give them a police escort to the hospital. Later, they’d laughed, and Melanie bought them all-what were they called back then? Blizzards?-at the DQ. She’d dared Grace to finish it, knowing full well she would. The things they got her to do, just to see if she would. It seems wrong, now, looking back on that, a grown woman getting a little girl to guzzle down something so big and sweet it made her puke.