It was like home here, but different too. At home we have J. C. Penney’s and old ugly houses and vacant lots and new ugly houses. Here were pretty, wooden things, old and all painted white, a thick-skinned decorous white, thick as ship’s paint, and presided over by the women. The women had a serious custodial air. They knew the place was theirs. The men were not serious. They all but wore costumes. They plied their trades, butcher, baker, lawyer, in period playhouses out in the yard.
Evenings the Vaughts sat around the green chloriniferous pools of the California motels, Rita and Kitty swimming and minding their bodies, Mr. Vaught getting up often to monkey with his Cadillac (he had installed a topoiler and claimed he got the same mileage as a Chevrolet), Mrs. Vaught always dressed to the nines and rocking vigorously in the springy pool chair and bathing her face with little paper pads soaked in cologne. When she was lucky, she found some lady from Moline who shared her views of fluoridation.
Kitty avoided him. He sought her out, but she damped him down. She must think badly of him, he decided, and quick as he was to see as others saw, was willing to believe she was right. Was it simply that she took the easy way: she was with Rita and not with him and that was that? At any rate, if she didn’t love him, he discovered he loved her less.
When they met by chance in motel passageways they angled their shoulders and sidled past like strangers. At Folly Beach they collided at the ice dispenser. He stood aside and said nothing. But when she filled her pitcher, she propped it on the rim of her pelvis and waited for him, a somewhat abstracted Rachel at the well.
“It’s a lovely night,” she said, stooping to see the full moon through the cloister of the Quality Court.
“Yes,” he said politely. He didn’t feel much like waiting upon her. But he said, “Would you like to take a walk?”
“Oh yes.”
They put their pitchers in the chest and walked on the beach. The moonlight curled along the wavelets. She put her hand in his and squeezed it. He squeezed back. They sat against a log. She took her hand away and began sifting sand; it was cool and dry and left not a grain on the skin.
He sat with his hands on his knees and the warm breeze flying up his pants leg and thought of nothing.
“What’s the matter, Bill?” Kitty leaned toward him and searched his face.
“Nothing. I feel good.”
Kitty shifted closer. The sand under her sheared against itself and made a musical sound. “Are you mad at me?”
“No.”
“You act mad.”
“I’m not.”
“Why are you different then?”
“Different from what?”
“From a certain nut who kissed a very surprised girl in the automat.”
“Hmm.”
“Well?”
“I’m different because you are different,” said the engineer, who always told the exact truth.
“Me!How?”
“I had looked forward to being with you on this trip. But it seems you prefer Rita’s company. I had wanted to be with you during the ordinary times of the day, for example after breakfast in the morning. I did not have any sisters,” he added thoughtfully. “So I never knew a girl in the morning. But instead we have become like strangers. Worse, we avoid each other.”
“Yes,” she said gravely, conscious, he could not help but notice, of saying it so: gravely. “Don’t you know why?” she said at last.
“No.”
She sifted the cool discrete sand into her palm, where it made a perfect pyramid, shedding itself. “You say you never had sisters. Well, I never had a date, boyfriends — except a few boys in my ballet class who had foreheads this low. Rita and I got used to living quietly.”
“And now?”
“I guess I’m clinging to the nest like a big old cuckoo. Isn’t that awful?”
He shrugged.
“What do you want me to do?” she asked him.
“What do I want you to do?”
“Tell me.”
“How do you feel?”
“How do you feel? Do you still love me?”
“Yes.”
“Do you? Oh, I love you too.”
Why did this not sound right, here on Folly Beach in old Carolina in the moonlight?
One thing I’m sure of, thought he as he held her charms in his arms: I shall court her henceforth in the old style. I shall press her hand. No more grubby epithelial embraces in dogbane thickets, followed by accusing phone calls. Never again! Not until we are in our honeymoon cottage in a cottage small by a waterfall.
But when he kissed her and there she was again looking at him from both sides at once, he had the first inkling of what might be wrong. She was too dutiful and athletic. She worked her mouth against his (is this right, she as good as asked).
“Wonderful,” she breathed, lying back. “A perfect setting.”
Why is it not wonderful, he wondered, and when he leaned over again and embraced her in the sand, he knowing without calculating the exact angle at which he might lie over against her — about twenty degrees past the vertical — she miscalculated, misread him and moved slightly, yet unmistakably to get plainly and simply under him, then feeling the surprise in him stopped almost before she began. It was like correcting a misstep in dancing.
“What is it?” she whispered presently.
“Nothing,” he said, kissing her tenderly and cursing himself. His heart sank. Was it not that she was right and that he made too much of it? What it was, though, was that this was the last thing he expected. It was part of his expectations of the life which lay before him that girls would be girls just as camellias were camellias. If he loved a girl and walked with her on Folly Beach by moonlight, kissed her sweet lips and held her charms in his arms, it should follow that he would be simply he and she she, she as complete as a camellia with her corolla of reticences and allurements. But she, Kitty, was no such thing. She didn’t know any better than he. Love, she, like him, was obliged to see as a naked garden of stamens and pistils. But what threw him off worst was that, sentient as always, he found himself catching onto how it was with her: he saw that she was out to be a proper girl and taking every care to do the right wrong thing. There were even echoes of a third person: what, you worry about the boys as good a figure as you have, etc. So he was the boy and she was doing her best to do what a girl does. He sighed.
“What?” she asked again.
“Nothing,” he said, kissing her eyes, which were, at any rate, like stars.
He sighed again. Very well, I’ll be both for you, boyfriend and girlfriend, lover and father. If it is possible.
They stirred in the musical sand. “We’d better go back,” said the gentlemanly engineer and kissed her somewhat lewdly so she wouldn’t feel she had failed. It seemed to be his duty now to protect her non-virtue as best he could. After all, he mused, as he reckoned girls must have mused in other ages, if worst comes to worst and all else fails I can let her under me — I shan’t begrudge her the sacrifice. What ailed her, him, them, he wondered. Holding her hand as they returned to the Quality Court, he flexed his wrist so that he could count his pulse against her bone.