Dennis’s father, Grady, had built his family’s stilt house in 1945, when Dennis was just two years old. The idea came from a local fisherman named “Crawfish” Eddie Walker, who constructed a shack in shallow water in Biscayne Bay and became legendary for the fresh chowder he sold to passing boaters. Grady had friends who followed Eddie’s lead. By the time Grady secured the funds and manpower to build his own shack, several more had sprouted, including a men’s club called the Quarterdeck. By 1960, Stiltsville comprised twenty-seven shacks, but then the Quarterdeck burned in a fire and hurricane Donna leveled all but six of the other buildings. Many of the squatters, including Grady, rebuilt, and the new houses were cottage-style, larger and sturdier, designed to withstand all but the most devastating squall. Then in 1965, responding to complaints from Key Biscayne residents who claimed that Stiltsville ruined their ocean view, the state of Florida issued private leases for plots of submerged land. After hurricane Betsy hit that year, fourteen houses were left standing, and the state stopped issuing new leases and banned commercial ventures altogether. Grady was, by this point, Stiltsville’s semi-official mayor—he kept the paperwork up-to-date and mediated grievances between stilt house owners and the state, or between owners and each other.
Dennis was twenty-six years old when I met him, same as me. He’d lived in Miami all his life, as I’d lived in the Atlanta area all of mine. After graduating from college, he’d worked for a sailing company that hauled tourists on sunset cruises. He’d lived briefly with a girl named Peggy on a yawl moored at Dinner Key marina, but she’d grown weary of the waterlogged life and moved to Boca Raton to become a travel agent. He’d missed her for a long time. He’d quit his job and spent six months in Spain with his high school friend Paul, touring and living on fried fish from street vendors. Then he’d returned to Miami to attend law school, and moved into a small apartment on Miami Beach. He liked school but wasn’t crazy about the prospect of being a lawyer; he hoped an affection for law would come with the diploma. He knew Marse was after him and he liked her and considered having sex with her, but the thought of what would happen afterward made him feel unkind. He spent at least one weekend a month alone at the stilt house. On land, he studied in diners and took long drives at night, often ending up in the lounge of the Key Largo airport, where they served the best conch fritters in the state. Sometimes he thought about buying a house in Coconut Grove or Coral Gables—he couldn’t imagine living anywhere except South Florida—but he made no promises to himself. He liked his small beachfront apartment. He kept his bicycle unchained on the balcony and walked barefoot to the corner store. Once a week, he paid an upstairs neighbor five dollars to give him an hour-long Spanish lesson.
That night at the stilt house, Kyle and I set the table for dinner while Marse changed clothes and Dennis used the boat radio to check the weather. The boats rocked against the dock; the blue-black water heaved beneath the house. The lobsters’ tails ticked against the steel insides of the giant cooking pot, slowing from desperate to resigned. I could taste and feel salt on my lips and skin. When we were finished, Kyle stared out the kitchen window toward land, where lights along the shoreline flashed like sequins.
“I’ll be sorry to leave,” I said.
He took a jug of water from the refrigerator. “You’ll be back.”
In the bedroom, Marse was leaning toward the mirror, applying lip gloss. When she saw me come in, she turned her back to me and put both hands behind her neck, holding the ends of a red halter-top. “Do me up?” she said. I took the fabric and tied a bow. The backs of my fingers brushed her neck. “Not quite so tight,” she said. We looked at each other in the mirror. I admired the peaks of her collarbone, the hollows in her neck. The day before, at the wedding, her shoes had given her blisters—they were sling-backs, and new—so she’d taken them off and looped them around the strap of her purse so she wouldn’t forget to take them home. “You could forget your shoes?” I’d asked, and she’d said, “It’s been known to happen.” She’d greeted the bride and groom in her stockings, standing tall and straight-backed.
“Marse—” I said.
“It doesn’t matter.” She shook her head and shrugged.
I retied the bow slowly, leaving a little slack. “You don’t know me,” I said, “but if you did, you’d know that this isn’t like me.”
She thought for a moment. “If you say so,” she said. “I believe you.”
It would have seemed ridiculous to say what I wanted to say at the time: that I hoped we could be friends. I said, “I appreciate that.”
It seemed we were both making an enormous effort to act like grown-ups. She tugged at her halter to test the knot, then turned to face me. We both looked at her torso—the fabric was in place, everything covered. “How do I look?” she said.
“Lovely.”
All at once, the room went dark and the generators stilled. She said, “He always does this for dinner. Saves propane.”
Moonlight dove in through the windows, bluing the planes of her face. She led me into the main room, where the firelight from stout white candles made shadows on the walls. The room smelled strongly of garlic cooking in butter. Kyle and Dennis set down plates piled with lobster tails and filled cups with red wine. I watched their faces in the candlelight. They were easy together, chatting and teasing. Marse joined in. Dennis pulled out a chair next to him, and when we were seated, I toasted the most beautiful scenery south of the Mason-Dixon, and Dennis toasted adventurous southern belles. The meeting of Styrofoam brims gave off a squeak. Wine sloshed onto the table and no one bothered to wipe it up. Dennis’s knee brushed mine, then stayed there. Every so often I felt him looking at me. I cherished the sense of caged joy.
The lobster was so sweet I ate it plain. Kyle told a story about walking with a girl on the beach at night and slipping on a jellyfish. He’d cried real tears from the pain, and the girl had stopped returning his calls. Marse told a story about her first day working for a district judge—she’d been waiting for the judge to get off the telephone when he’d picked up a steno pad and written on it. He’d held it up for her to read: YOUR ZIPPER IS UNDONE, said the note. SORRY TO EMBARRASS YOU. We laughed so hard our eyes watered. During a lull, Dennis said, “The wind is up.”
“Aye, captain,” Kyle said.
“What does that mean?” I said.
Marse folded her long arms on the table. “Dennis thinks a storm is coming,” she said to me. I thought she winked, but it might have been the candlelight. “He’s about to tell us we can’t stay the night.”
Dennis leaned back in his chair and wiped his mouth with a napkin. “I’ll check the barometer after dinner.”
“Either way,” said Marse. “Just let me follow you in. I don’t know the way at night.”
It hadn’t occurred to me that we might stay the night. I hadn’t brought extra clothes. The boys went downstairs to check the barometer on the boat while Marse washed plates and I dried them. In the candlelight, without the thunder of the generators, the clatter of dishes punctuated the night. “Dennis is probably right about the storm,” she said. “He has hunches about these things.”
On land, one looks toward the ocean to predict whether a storm is coming. From the ocean, one looks to the horizon. But the sky through the window was black, the stars cloaked by cloud cover. I wondered what it would be like to ride out a storm at the stilt house. We would refasten the boat lines and shutter all the windows. The doors would rattle on their hinges, and surely the roof would leak. How much weather could the house withstand? This was a question that would go unanswered for many years. We went downstairs and found the boys on the big boat, which lunged with every wave. “The barometer’s falling,” said Dennis.