Jem sat tentatively on the edge of her blanket. He removed his shirt and looked down at his abs. He did a hundred sit-ups before he went to bed each night and it was paying off. “Thanks, but I already ate some chicken.”
“I packed enough for about sixty people,” Maribel said. “And I’m a good cook in case you haven’t heard.” She unwrapped a sandwich and handed Jem half. “Here, this is Saga, prosciutto, and fig.”
The sandwich was delicious, the kind of delicious Jem had never tasted before.
“You like it?” Maribel asked.
He finished chewing. “It’s the best sandwich I’ve ever eaten.”
“You can be my sandwich agent.”
“Definitely,” Jem said. “Definitely your sandwich agent.” An old woman walked by, naked. She smiled at Maribel and Jem and wandered off down the beach.
“See, it’s no big deal. This is a free and easy place.” Maribel pulled more food out of her backpack: homemade potato chips, clusters of tiny purple grapes, thick chocolate brownies.
“Nothing at all like the chicken at Stop and Shop,” he said. “And no exhaust. Where did you learn to cook like this?”
“I taught myself,” Maribel said. She threw a scrap of bread to the seagulls. “My mother worked full-time and when she got home she was too tired to do much of anything. I liked having dinner ready for her. I cleaned the house and did the laundry, too. My mother called me her housewife. And I thought of it as practical training.”
“Training?”
“For when I get married myself,” Maribel said.
“So you do want to get married,” Jem said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked.
Jem had stepped in mud and he hadn’t even seen it. “Nothing. It meant nothing. I’m sorry.” Where was safe ground? He finished his sandwich and licked his fingers, and then, before he could stop, he thought about being married to Maribel himself, and how awesome that would be, awesome beyond his wildest dreams.
“You know when you asked me about work before?” Jem said. “I was just wondering, does Mack ever say how I’m doing?”
“Not really. He did tell me about Mr. G.”
“He did?”
“Yeah, and I don’t see what the big deal is. So the guy was an hour late. So he had to cancel with the president. Shit happens. I’ll bet by noon he’d forgotten all about it.”
“There was this other thing that happened, too,” Jem said. “This woman Mrs. Worley. I walked in on her in the bathroom and she started to cry.”
Jem was expecting Maribel to laugh the way Mack had, but she didn’t.
“When I was a little girl, I walked into the men’s room at a restaurant and I saw the men standing next to urinals. I didn’t know men peed standing up. I don’t have any brothers and my father wasn’t around, and I just didn’t know. Now, that was a shocker.”
“So it was just you and your mother then?” Jem asked.
“My mom was only nineteen when she had me. It’s just the two of us.” Maribel fell back onto the blanket. “Nap time.” She rolled onto her side and propped her head up with one arm. “I’m going to take my top off, if that’s okay with you.”
“Wait a second. You said-”
She put her hand on his arm, and again he felt a thrill.
“We don’t have to tell Mack we met up,” she said.
“We don’t?” He didn’t like where this was headed: lying, secrecy, a secret from his boss. But Jem was happy sitting next to Maribel-so astonishingly happy whereas just an hour before he’d been so miserable-that he didn’t care. “Go ahead then,” he said.
Maribel untied her bikini and slipped it over her head. Jem looked at her breasts; he knew she wanted him to look at them, and admire them the way he’d admired the food. They were just like the rest of Maribel-sunny, perky, gorgeous. They were the size of teacups with a pale pink nipple. She took a bottle of Coppertone from her bag and rubbed herself with lotion. In a minute, Jem had an aching erection pushing through his swim trunks. He flipped onto his stomach.
“Nap time,” he said.
He closed his eyes and tried to think about other things, things that were not Maribel related, things that were not Maribel’s breasts and their impossibly pink softness. He surprised himself by falling asleep. When he woke up, it felt as though he were emerging from a hot, dark tunnel. He raised his head. Maribel was lying on her stomach, reading. She still had her top off.
“What are you reading?” Jem asked.
She flashed him the cover. “The Collected Stories of John Cheever,” she said. “And there’s a whole lot of cheating going on.”
“Really?” Jem said. What was that supposed to mean? “Hey, want to go for a swim?”
“Sure,” she said. He was thankful that she put her top on, tying the strings tightly. When Jem felt ready, he dashed to the water. Maribel chased after him. The water was freezing but that was okay. He needed to cool down. Maribel went under and when she popped back up, she shrieked.
“This is great,” Jem called out. A wave rolled over him.
“Next stop, Portugal,” Maribel said. She went under again and surfaced right next to him. “The rip current is bad here,” she said. “I don’t want to get too far away from you.”
“I don’t want you too far away,” Jem said. He touched Maribel’s forehead. Her hair was sleek. God, she was pretty. If she were anybody else, he might playfully untie her bikini. He might go under and pop up with her on his back. He might simply hold her and let her rock in his arms as the waves passed over them. But it wasn’t anybody else. It was Maribel.
“Would you like to come over for dinner some Sunday?” Maribel asked.
Here was the dinner invitation Jem had been waiting for, and yet now he felt uncomfortable. “Sunday is the day Mack eats with Lacey,” he said.
Maribel squinted her eyes toward shore. “Yep.”
“So it would just be us?” Jem asked.
“You’re more than welcome to bring a date,” Maribel said.
“I couldn’t find a date,” he said. “Would you tell Mack I was coming for dinner?”
“Would you want me to?”
He took a mouthful of salty green water and spouted it through his teeth. “I don’t know.”
“What do you say we call this a friendship,” Maribel said. “Unless you’re still determined to be my agent, in which case it’s a business arrangement. Would that make you feel better?”
“Yeah,” Jem said, “it would.”
“So you’ll come for dinner sometime?” she asked.
“Okay,” Jem said.
“Great,” she said. She rode the next wave all the way to shore, where she washed up on her hands and knees. Jem watched as she picked herself up, cleaned the sand from her legs, and headed back to the blanket. At that moment, Jem hoped she didn’t tell Mack about their day together. It had been Jem’s best day on Nantucket by leaps and bounds-good enough to wipe away all the nonsense that had preceded it, and Jem wanted the memory of it all to himself.
4 Summer Solstice
June 20
Dear S.B.T.,
At the risk of sounding ridiculously proud, I will tell you that on June 18, Therese and I traveled to Concord, Mass., where we watched our daughter, Cecily, graduate from Middlesex. She strolled across the manicured lawn like her other classmates, but she stood out, a shining star, a flashing beacon. Cecily is already a young woman, far more mature and sophisticated than her peers. She is our pride and joy and I know you will understand that it is for her sake that I will never sell the Beach Club.
Do you have children, S. B. T? You have never mentioned any. I would be interested to know the answer to that question, if you are willing to disclose it.
Cordially,
Bill Elliott
On the twenty-first of June, summer officially arrived. The sun stayed out longer, the restaurants opened seven nights a week, and the bars were full of college girls who, Vance noticed, favored blue toenail polish and tattoos this year. The weekly edition of the Inquirer and Mirror printed its first five-section paper of the season. The Stop & Shop was such a madhouse that management kept the store open twenty-four hours, which meant Vance could pick up his Cheerios and lunch meat at 3:00 A.M. if he wanted. The cobblestone streets of town were clogged with cars coming off the ferry, bicyclists, and pedestrians, people holding their maps, crossing the street without looking. Who were all these people? The island became inundated with Range Rovers from Connecticut (that sounded like a stereotype, but Vance swore it was true; that morning on Main Street he counted no less than three Range Rovers, all with the telltale blue license plate). The Steamship Authority ran six boats a day in each direction and the Nantucket airport was busier than Logan in Boston. The climbing roses and hydrangeas bloomed, causing more slowdowns; through his open window, Vance heard women cooing, “Look at the pretty flowers!”