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A quiet Sunday afternoon, a pitcher of vodka gimlets. Laying in the haze under a relentless sun. I've forgotten my bathing suit and am sprawled on my back on the grass by the pool, wearing only my grey Gap thong, oblivious to Fawn's husband padding around the kitchen.
The icy mug of mostly vodka melts on my stomach. The television plays quietly inside the house, the dim buzz of the search helicopters casting a pall over the day. None of us are talking much. Waiting.
This is our second day at Fawn's. I came yesterday to feel her boobs. Fawn got new boobs, and, having never seen breast implants up close and personal, I couldn't resist the urge to check them out.
Not exactly being up on the etiquette of groping breasts sans intent, I ask a male friend how to go about it. Avoid the nipples, he said. Seemed like sound advice. Fawn was a very good sport about letting me come over and feel her up.
We start drinking at one. After my third mug of vodka, I stumble into the den to call Nan. She's crying, now. "If he had to die, it seems right that it was the Vineyard…" She can't go on.
I know what she's thinking about, times when we were kids running amok in Katama, riding our bikes like banshees through Oak Bluffs and dipping candles and buying penny candy in Edgartown. Sunday brunch at the Black Dog. Hot dogs at Quarterdeck on the pier. Stealing brass rings from Flying Horses. David.
JoJo and I each got $1.50 a week allowance. Fifty cents of that would buy two white candles to dip, thirty-five cents would buy the latest Richie Rich comic, and the rest would be spent filling a little blue straw basket at the penny candy shop. Jo went for the dots stuck to the paper, I favoured the little wax bottles of sugar water.
Dripping with sweat, listening to the news, drinking slowly and steadily, thinking about Carolyn now, and not John.
Marriage is the brass ring he said to me once. I had to think for a long time about why that upset me so much, barring the obvious reasons. Standing up in a room full of people and committing, pledging love before God and Family.
It wasn't him, it was Carolyn, the Patron Saint of Excellent Marriages. It wasn't John I cared so much about initially, it was really Jackie. By extension I cared about him, too. But why so much that I completely lost it watching Dan Rather unravelling on the television?
It wasn't John, it was Carolyn. All of that golden blonde promise. For girls like us, anachronisms, defined by our husbands or our lack thereof, she was our queen.
I miss my sister. I think I need to go home to New York, for a while.
