It was cocktail time. The sun, which had been in and out all day, now found a crack in the piles of gray cloud and shone brilliantly, falsely, down the length of the beach, even though thunder rolled on in the distance. The ocean was full of whitecaps. Its color went from a mean gray, far out near the horizon under those clouds, to steely blue patches closer in where the sun hit it. The tide was coming in, running about a foot higher than usual, eating up the beach, bunching the people on the beach closer and closer together. It was unreliable, irritating weather, unusual for August. A strong wind had come up after the most recent shower, blowing straight in from the ocean over the waves. This wind was perfect for kites and kites had sprung up everywhere, flown mostly by grandchildren who tangled their strings or let them get caught on TV antennas and then had to have another one, immediately, from El’s Hardware Store on the mainland. It was this day, August 25, nearing sunset, cocktail time in kite weather, when Mrs. Darcy received her first vision.
Below the house, Mrs. Darcy’s daughters had arranged themselves together on the beach. Tall, graceful women like flowers, they leaned delicately toward one another and sipped their gin and tonics and shouted into the wind. Their family resemblance was noticeable, if not particularly striking: the narrow forehead, the high cheekbones, the dark eyes set a fraction of an inch too close together: the long straight nose, rather imperious, aristocratic, and prone to sinus. They were good-looking women.
Yet try as she might — and she had tried, all their years of growing up — Mrs. Darcy was unable to find anything of herself in them. Mrs. Darcy was short, blonde, and overweight, with folds of flesh that dangled like dewlaps from her upper arms. She had been a pretty girl once, but she had never been a thin girl, or a fashionable girl, or a fashionable young woman. These girls took after their father; they had his long, thin hands. Inside the house, Mrs. Darcy leafed through the pile of craft books that Trixie had brought her, and looked down at her daughters on the beach. Craft books! Mrs. Darcy thought. Craft books. What does she know? Wrapping her robe about her, Mrs. Darcy moved to stand at the door.
“WHAT WAS SHE DOING when you came out?” Trixie asked. Trixie was the oldest, with three teenagers of her own. Her close-cut hair was streaked with gray, and her horn-rimmed glasses sat squarely on her nose. “What was she doing?” Trixie asked again, over the wind.
Maria, the middle sister, shifted her position on the quilt. “Not much, I think. Puttering around the kitchen.”
“Well, there’s nothing to do for supper,” Trixie pointed out. “It’s already done.”
“I don’t know,” said Maria, who always deliberated, or gave the impression of deliberating, before she spoke. “I think some of the children had come in and gotten a drink or something.”
“I tried to get her to help cook,” Trixie said. “Remember how she used to cook?”
“You know what really drove me mad?” Ginny said suddenly. “I was telling my shrink this the other day. I mean, whenever I think of Mama, you know what I think of her doing? I think of her putting leftovers in a smaller container. Like, say, we’ve had a roast, right? And if it were me, I’d leave the roast in the pan it was in. But oh no. After dinner, she had to find a smaller pan, right? For the refrigerator. Tupperware or something. The Tupperware post-roast container. Then somebody makes a sandwich maybe, and one inch of the roast is gone, so she had to find another container. Then another, then another, then another. She must have gone through about fifteen containers for every major thing she fixed. That’s all I can remember of childhood.” Ginny had been leaning forward intensely, sucking on a Winston in the wind. Now she stabbed the cigarette out in the sand and flung herself back flat and her long black hair fanned out on the quilt.
“You’re feeling very angry about this,” Maria said in her precise, well-modulated voice. Maria was a psychologist, married to another psychologist, Mark, who sat some thirty yards behind the sisters on the deck at the back of the house, observing things through his binoculars. “Your anger seems oddly out of proportion to the event,” Maria remarked.
“No kidding,” Ginny said.
One of Maria’s children, Andrew, came up to get his shoe tied. “Why can’t we buy any firecrackers?” he wailed, and then ran off, a blur of blue jean legs, without waiting for the answer.
“Now, then,” Trixie said. The wind had died down, it was possible to talk, and Trixie liked to get right to the heart of the matter. “It does seem to me, as I wrote to both of you, that a certain amount of, er, aimlessness is understandable under the circumstances. But as I said before, when I went to Raleigh last month, I just couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe the way she was living. Dust on everything, and you know how she always was about dust. She was drinking Coca-Colas. Hawaiian Punch. Frozen pizza in the refrigerator — pizza, can you imagine?”
Maria smiled at the idea of pizza, the mere mention of it so incongruous with their childhood dinners in Raleigh. She remembered the long shining expanse of mahogany, the silver, the peacocks on the wallpaper, the crimson-flowered Oriental rug. “Pizza!” Maria said softly. “Pop would have died.”
“He did,” Ginny pointed out.
“Really!” Trixie said.
“I think there has to be a natural period of mourning,” Maria said, not meaning to lecture. “It’s absolutely essential in the cycle of regeneration.”
“But it’s not mourning, exactly,” Trixie said. “It’s just being not interested. Not interested in anything, that’s the only way I can describe it. Lack of interest in life.”
“I can understand that,” Ginny said.
“That could be a form of mourning,” Maria said. “No two people mourn alike, of course.”
“Different strokes for different folks,” Ginny said. They ignored her.
“But you know how she used to keep herself so busy all the time,” Trixie said. “She always had some craft project going, always. She was always doing volunteer work, playing bridge, you know how she was.”
“She wore spectator heels and stockings every day,” Ginny said in a passing-judgment tone.
“Yes, well, that’s what I mean,” Trixie went on. “And now what is she wearing? Rubber flip-flops from Kmart. She’s let Lorene go, too. Lorene only comes in once a week now and does the bathrooms and the floors.”
“I can’t imagine that house without Lorene,” Maria said. Lorene had been a central figure in their girlhood, skinny as Olive Oyl in her starched white uniform.
“Well, Lorene is just as worried about Mama as she can be,” Trixie said. “As you might well imagine. I went over to see her in the projects and gave her some money and I wrote down my number for her, at home, and told her to call me up any time. Any time she goes over there to clean and anything worries her.”
“That’s a good idea, Trixie,” Maria said.
“Well,” Trixie said. Trixie saw her two daughters, tan, leggy Richmond girls, far down the beach, walking toward them in the foaming line of surf. “I’ll tell you what I told Mother,” Trixie continued. “I said, ‘Why don’t you start going to church again? Why don’t you join one of these retirement clubs in town? They have all sorts of them now, you wouldn’t believe it. They go to the mountains and they go to New York to see plays and everything is all arranged for them ahead of time. Why, we saw a group of them at Disney World in Florida, having a perfectly wonderful time!’ “
“I can’t see that,” Ginny said.
“Of course you can’t, you’re twenty-seven years old,” Trixie snapped. Sometimes she felt as though Ginny were her daughter instead of her sister.
“Still, she did show some interest in coming down here,” Maria pointed out. “Surely that’s something.”
“Interest but no initiative,” Trixie said. “I suggested it, I picked her up.”
“Aren’t you something?” Ginny said.
“Ginny, I realize that you’re going through a difficult period of adjustment yourself, but that is no excuse, no excuse at all for childish behavior. I think we have to start thinking in terms of a nursing home, is what I think. Caswell agrees, incidentally. Of course that would involve selling the Raleigh house: it would all be quite complicated. But I do see that as a distinct possibility.”
“There’s Margaret, why don’t you ask her what she thinks?” Maria said. “She came over to see Mama this morning.”
“When?” Trixie asked sharply.
“Oh, about ten o’clock. You were at the Hammock Shop, I think.”
“Gotcha!” Ginny said.
MARGARET DALE WHITTED, who had divorced one husband and buried two, made her slow majestic way across the sand. A white caftan billowed about her and she carried a martini balanced carefully in one hand. “Cheers!” Margaret said when she reached them, steadying herself with a hand on Trixie’s shoulder. “My God, dears, it’s not worth it, is it? Nature, I mean.” Margaret’s voice was raspy and decisive, the voice of someone who has always had money. She had known their mother for forty summers more or less, since the time when Lolly and Pop had built their house, the Lollipop, next to Margaret’s Sand Castle. There had been nothing, almost nothing, on the south end of the island then. They had been pioneers.
“Margaret, how are you?” Ginny asked. Ginny had always liked Margaret.
“Oh, there’s some life in the old girl yet.” Margaret gave her famous wink. “I’m having some trouble, though, just between us girls, with this shoulder. I fell, you know, in March.”
They didn’t know.
Margaret sipped her martini and stared out to sea, breathing heavily. Ginny stood up and dusted the sand off her jeans. Margaret’s gold medallion winked in the fitful sun.
“We wanted to ask you about Mama. What you think, I mean,” Trixie said. Trixie noticed how her own daughters had seated themselves just far enough away so that no one could connect them with her at all.
“Mama, Mama, it’s all tangled up,” wailed Christy, Maria’s six-year-old daughter.
“Take it to Daddy,” Maria said. “He’ll have to cut some string.”
Trixie and Maria stood up.
“Well,” Margaret rasped. “I’ll tell you what, girls. It’s hell to get old.” Margaret laughed and steadied herself on Trixie’s elbow. The wind blew Margaret’s huge white skirt about their legs, entwining them. Suddenly Ginny dashed off after a Frisbee, got it, and threw it back to Bill, Trixie’s son. Maria picked up the quilt, shook it, and walked back up toward the Lollipop, the deck, her husband. Through the binoculars, he stared toward the ocean, his red beard curled around his pipe. The screen door of the Lollipop opened and Mrs. Darcy came slowly out, blinking in the sun.
Down on the beach, Margaret raised her silver cup aloft, “Cheers, honey,” she said to Trixie.
“Look, Mama, look!” Christy and Andrew started up a howl. “Look, Mama, a rainbow, a rainbow!”
Maria nodded to them, with exaggerated gestures, from the deck.
“How’s it going, honey?” Mark asked without lowering the binoculars. “Getting everything worked out?”
“Oh, it’s just so difficult.” Maria put the quilt over the rail and sat down in a chair. “Ginny is so difficult, for one thing. I hate these whole-family things, I always have. There are so many things to work through. So many layers of meaning to sort out.”
“Actually, there’s a great deal to be said for the nuclear family structure,” said Mark, focusing his binoculars on the sight he had been viewing for some time now, Ginny’s breasts moving beneath her pink T-shirt as she played Frisbee with his nephew.
But Ginny stopped playing Frisbee then and turned to stare out at the ocean and Bill did too, as all movement stopped along the beach.
“Mama, Mama, Mama!” Christy screamed.
“I’ll be damned,” Mark said, putting the binoculars down. “A double rainbow.” Mark put an arm around his wife and they stood together on the deck, nuclear and whole, like a piece of architecture against the wind.
“All the summers we’ve been here, I’ve never seen one of those,” Trixie remarked to Margaret.
A giant rainbow shimmered above the horizon, pink and blue and yellow and blue again, above the mass of clouds, and as they all watched, the clouds parted and a second rainbow — almost iridescent at first, the merest hint of color — arced across the sky beneath the first, spreading color until the rainbows seemed to fill the sky. The children on the beach, caught in motion as definitely as if they had been playing Statues, broke up with a whoop and began to cavort madly, whirling around and around in all directions. Sand and Frisbees flew. Up on the porch, behind Maria and her son-in-law, Mrs. Darcy moved hesitantly at first, in an oddly sidewise, crablike fashion, farther out into the afternoon. Mrs. Darcy wore her flip-flops and a flowered housecoat. She raised her arms suddenly, stretching them up and out toward the rainbows. “Ai-yi-yi!” she wailed loudly. “Yi-yi-yi!” Mrs. Darcy stood trans-fixed then fell forward into the sandy deck in a dead faint.
THE NEXT MORNING DAWNED clear and beautiful. The joggers were at it early, pounding the road from one end of the island to the other. Fishermen lined the bridge over the sound to the mainland, dropping their lines straight down into the outgoing tide. Marsh grass waved in the wind and strange South Carolina birds flew overhead. Somebody caught a blowfish. Along the road beside the biggest houses, white-uniformed maids came out to dump the bottles and trash from the night before, getting their houses ready for the next day, lingering to gossip in the sun. Children ran out onto the piers that protruded far into the marsh, checking crab traps, squealing at the catch.
At the far south end of the island, Ginny prowled the beach for sand dollars, watching the shifting tide pools as the tide rushed out to sea. She remembered getting on her raft in the sound at about the middle of the island, drifting lazily through the marsh grass past all the piers, gaining speed as the tide picked up, rocketing around the south end of the island finally, right here, jetting out to sea to be knocked back at last by the waves. Ginny remembered the final, absolute panic each time in the rush to the sea, how strong the current was. In this memory she seemed to be always alone. Maria never wanted to do it, Trixie had been too old, off at school or something. But there had been friends every summer. Ginny remembered the Mitchells from Columbia, whose house had been sold five years ago. Johnny Bridgely, her first beau. The Padgetts who always had birthday parties with piñatas. Ginny sat in a tide pool and played with the hermit crabs. The water was so clear you couldn’t tell it was there sometimes. She could feel the sun, already hot on her shoulders, and nothing seemed worth the effort it took.
At the Lollipop, Mrs. Darcy lay back on a daybed in the big rustic living room, surrounded by children and friends who urged her back each time she attempted to rise.
“I still think, Mama, that it would be very silly — I repeat, very silly — for you not to let us take you right up to the doctor in Myrtle Beach. Or down to Georgetown if you prefer. But you cannot just ignore an attack like this,” Trixie said.
“I wonder if this might not be some sort of ploy,” Maria whispered to Mark in the kitchen. “An attention-getting thing. Unconscious, of course.”
“It’s possible,” Mark said. “Or she might have had a slight stroke.”
“A stroke!” Maria said. “Do you think so?”
“No, but it’s possible,” Mark said. Mark got a cup of coffee and went out onto the beach. His nieces, already oiled, lay on their stomachs reading books from their summer book list. His own children were making a castle in the wet sand, farther out.
“I think I’ll scramble some eggs,” Mrs. Darcy said, but the lady from across the street, Susie Reynolds, jumped up and began doing it for her.
There was something new about Mrs. Darcy, something ethereal, this morning. Had she had a brush with death? A simple fall? Or what? Why did she refuse to see the doctor? Mrs. Darcy looked absurdly small lying there on the rather large daybed, surrounded by pillows. She still wore the flowered housecoat. Her small fat ankles stuck out at the bottom, the bare feet plump and blue veined, with a splotch or two of old red nail polish on the yellowed toenails. Her arms were folded over her stomach, the hands clasped. Her hair curled white and blonde in all directions, but beneath the wild hair, her wrinkled face had taken on a new, luminous quality, so that it appeared to shine.
Trixie, looking at her mother, grew more and more annoyed. Trixie remembered her mother’s careful makeup, her conservative dress. Why couldn’t she be reasonable, dress up a little, like the other old ladies out on the beach? Even Margaret, with her martinis and her bossiness, was better than this. Life does go on, Trixie thought.
Mrs. Darcy smiled suddenly, a beatific smile that traveled the room like a searchlight, directed at no one in particular.
“She seems a little better, don’t you think?” Mrs. Reynolds said to Trixie from the kitchen door. Mrs. Reynolds brought in the plate of scrambled eggs and toast.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Trixie said. “I’ve been so worried, I just can’t tell.”
“Well, I think she looks just fine,” Mrs. Reynolds said. “I’ll go on back now. Call me if you need me, honey.”
Mrs. Darcy sat up and began to eat. Maria, book in hand, watched her silently from the wicker armchair. Morning sun came in the glass doors, and a cross breeze ruffled the pages of the magazines on the table. Bill came back for his flippers and mask. The volume of the children rose from the beach. “How do you feel now?” Maria asked carefully.
Mrs. Darcy’s watery blue eyes seemed to darken in color as she looked at her middle daughter. “When I saw the rainbow,” she said in her soft southern voice, “why, it was the strangest thing! All of a sudden I felt this, this presence, I can’t tell you what it was like, it just filled me up until I was floating. Then I saw him.”
“Saw who?” Maria put down the book and leaned forward in her chair. In the kitchen, Trixie dropped a coffee cup with a clatter and came to sit at the end of the daybed.
“Why, I don’t know!” Mrs. Darcy said in a wondering sort of way. “I just don’t know!” She began to eat heartily.
“Mother, I don’t believe I quite understand,” Maria said calmly. “Do you mean that you saw a stranger, some strange man, on the deck? Or did he come into the house from the front?”
“Oh, no,” Mrs. Darcy said airily, waving her fork. “Oh, no, nothing like that. I went out on the porch, I was looking at the rainbow, I felt this overwhelming presence everywhere, oh, I just can’t tell you what it was like! Then I saw him.” She beamed at them. “Trixie, honey, could you bring me some salt?” she asked.
Trixie rose automatically, but was stopped by the sight of her son Bill standing in the kitchen door, flippers and mask in hand, staring at his grandmother. “Go on down to the beach,” Trixie said to him. “Go!” He went. Trixie got the salt, came back and gave it to her mother who sat placidly munching toast and dropping crumbs all down the front of her housecoat.
“Could you be a little clearer, Mother?” Maria asked. “I’m still not sure who this man was.”
“But I don’t know!” Mrs. Darcy said. “Thank you, dear,” she said to Trixie, and sprinkled salt liberally on her eggs. “He had long hair, he wore a long white thing, sort of like Margaret’s dress as a matter of fact, you know the one I mean, and he had the most beautiful blue eyes. He looked at me and stretched out his arms and said, ‘Lolly.’ Just like that, just my name.”
“Then what?” Maria said.
“Then I went to him, of course.” Mrs. Darcy finished her breakfast and stood up. “I may have a swim,” she said.
“Oh, I wouldn’t,” Trixie said quickly.
Mrs. Darcy seemed not to hear. Training her new smile upon each of them in turn, she went into her bedroom and softly closed the door. The sisters stared at each other.
“That beats everything I’ve ever heard!” Trixie said. “You see why I brought up the nursing home?” Under the brown thatch of hair, Trixie’s face looked nearly triumphant, causing Maria to reflect fleetingly upon the strange accident of birth, the fact that if the woman facing her had not happened to be her sister, they would have had nothing in common at all. Nothing! Maria thought.
“I think we have to proceed very carefully here,” she told Trixie. “Let me go and discuss this with Mark.”
Trixie went upstairs to lie down, thinking, as she climbed the stairs, that Caswell had been right after all. They should have gone to Sea Island by themselves.
Ginny had joined the others on the beach, standing with Mark at the water’s edge to watch the children swim.
“Let me put some of this on your back,” Mark said, holding up a bottle of suntan oil.
“No, thanks,” Ginny said. “Please. Not any more.”
Mark put the top back on the bottle. “Well, what happened with Don, then?” he asked. “You want to talk about it?”
“No,” Ginny said. “I don’t.”
“Mark, Mark!” Maria came running toward them. She arrived; she told them everything. Ginny began to laugh.
Bill came dripping up out of the water, followed by the girls. “There’s a real strong undertow,” he yelled to everybody. When they didn’t answer he came closer, pushing the face mask up. “Grandma’s going batty, isn’t she?” he said to his uncle and aunts.
“Is that true?” the girls demanded. “Is she going to go in a nuthouse?”
“Of course not,” Ginny said.
“What’s a nuthouse?” Christy asked.
Ginny was laughing and laughing.
“This will take some thought,” Mark said, pulling at his beard.
Slowly and daintily, Mrs. Darcy made her way past the whole group of them and stood at the edge of the ocean to adjust her red rubber bathing cap. Her skin was so white that she looked startling among the sun-browned children in the surf. She turned once, waved, before she walked straight out into the waves until they were hip high. Then she raised her hands and dove.
“You know I don’t believe I’ve ever seen your mother swim before,” Mark said to Maria.
Maria stood open-mouthed. “She doesn’t,” she finally said. In years past, her mother’s beach routine had never varied: up around nine, a walk perhaps, some shopping, drinks with friends, but never — never — had she actually gone for a swim. Maria burst into tears. “She needs help,” Maria said.
“Oh, come on,” Ginny said. “We all do. Look, I’ll drive all the kids up to the trampoline for a while, okay?”
Before them, just beyond the breakers, Mrs. Darcy’s red bathing cap bobbed like a cork in the rise and fall of the waves.
THREE DAYS PASSED, ALL of them sunny and blue, calm and idyllic. Caswell arrived. The Lollipop settled into the old routine of summers past. Plans were made and carried out, menus planned, groceries were bought and cooked. Caswell and Mark chartered a boat out of Murrell’s Inlet and took Bill fishing. Maria was always amazed at how well Caswell and Mark got along; she couldn’t imagine what they had to say to each other. Trixie’s girls found some nice boys from Charleston to date. Old friends came and went. Margaret took Mrs. Darcy to lunch at Litchfield Plantation. Pop was mentioned often, casually and affectionately, and Mrs. Darcy seemed not to mind. She did not mention the “presence” or the blue-eyed stranger again. She continued to pad about the house in her flip-flops and housecoat, but she showed some interest in the cooking and she played checkers with Christy and Andrew.
By Thursday morning, Trixie had begun to relax. She thought it was time to interest her mother in Shrink Art. Trixie had brought all the materials with her, and now she unpacked them and brought them into the kitchen and spread them out. The others had gone crabbing up at Huntington Beach State Park. “Now Mother,” Trixie said, “let’s do a little bit of this. It’s really fun, really easy, and you’ll just be amazed at what you can make.”
“Maybe a little later, dear,” Mrs. Darcy said. Mrs. Darcy sat in a wicker armchair, looking out at the beach.
“No,” Trixie said firmly. “Now is the time. They’ll be back before long, then we’ll have to make sandwiches. Now look, Mother, all you do is trace designs onto this clear plastic, using these permanent markers. Or you can make your own designs, of course. Then you cut them out and bake them for three minutes and — “
“Bake them?” Mrs. Darcy echoed faintly.
“Sure!” Trixie said. “Then they turn into something exactly like stained glass. They’re really lovely. You can make jewelry, Christmas ornaments, whatever. They make lovely Christmas ornaments.”
“But how would you hang them up?” Mrs. Darcy came to stand beside her daughter at the table.
“Oh, you punch a little hole before you put them in the oven,” she said. “I’ve got the hole puncher right here.”
Trixie spread out the plastic sheets, the designs, the permanent pens. She turned the oven on to three hundred degrees. “Okay,” she said. “All set. Which one do you want to try?”
“Maybe this,” Mrs. Darcy said. She placed a sheet of the clear plastic over a design involving a bunch of tulips stuck into a wooden shoe. Trixie was mildly surprised by the choice, more surprised by her mother’s easy acquiescence. Everything seemed so much better since the weather had cleared. Perhaps things were not so complicated, so serious as they had thought. Still, it was reassuring that Mark and Maria had arranged treatment for Mother, back in Raleigh. A most competent doctor by all accounts, highly recommended. Trixie felt sure that Mother would agree to see him. The teakettle began to whistle. Trixie got up to make the iced tea. This pitcher, old heavy brown pottery, had been at the beach house ever since she could remember. Out of the corner of her eye, Trixie watched Mother biting her tongue a bit and gripping her marker tightly, like a small, pudgy, dutiful child. Trixie added lemon and sugar to the tea.
“There now,” Mrs. Darcy said, sitting back in the chair, her round wrinkled face rather flushed. She looked at Trixie hopefully. “Now what?”
“Now you cut it out,” Trixie said, “and punch a hole, and we put it in the oven for three minutes.”
Mrs. Darcy cut the design out carefully, using some old roundtipped scissors that Trixie had found way back in a kitchen drawer. Trixie took the design from her, somewhat distressed to find that Mother had colored the tulips blue. Still, it would not do to appear disparaging. “This is so pretty, Mother,” Trixie said. “Now you can watch it shrink if you want to.” Mrs. Darcy turned her chair, so that she could peer through the oven’s glass door.
The kitchen door burst open at that moment and there they were suddenly, all of the rest of them, with two coolers full of scrambling crabs and the children all talking at once.
“Just leave those on the porch,” Trixie directed. “Go on, take them right back out this instant. Right now. Go on. Bill, what do you mean tracking in here this way? Go take off those shoes on the porch.”
“Bill fell in, Bill fell in!” Andrew danced up and down, still holding his piece of twine with the rock and the chicken neck tied to the end.
“You’re so excited, darling,” Maria said.
“Well, I’m starving.” Still wearing her black bikini, Ginny came barefooted into the kitchen, so that she was the closest one to her mother, the only one who actually saw Mrs. Darcy’s face as she watched her tulips shrink, and shrink, and shrink before her eyes. Ginny stopped, caught in the oddest sensation: it might have been her own face before her, it might have been her own voice that began to scream.
A FINE DRIZZLE FELL all day Sunday, jeweling the surface of things. They left for hours, it seemed, and their leave-taking took up most of the day. Lolly knew that they had been up far into the night, deciding what to do about her. She realized that she had created a problem by her refusal to leave. But she did not want to leave yet, and she had never created a problem before — not ever, for anyone. So. She remained stubborn and went to bed early, leaving them to deal with her as best they could.
As they told themselves over and over, the others had to go. There was no question. Caswell had to fly straight up to Washington for a conference. The children’s schools were beginning again, and Trixie had to buy school clothes for the girls. Maria and Mark had faculty meetings, workshops, classes. It was hard to believe that Christy would be in the first grade.
“Look,” Ginny had surprised them all by saying. “Look, I’ll stick around for a week or so. Okay? You all go on. I’ll bring her back to Raleigh before long.” It was so unlike Ginny to be responsible that Maria had stared at her with considerable interest.
“I’d like to know why you’re doing this,” Maria said.
“Why not?” Ginny had answered.
And they had left, Trixie and Caswell and their large children in the long sleek car, Maria and Mark in their van. Christy and Andrew waved madly from the rear window as long as they stayed in sight. Lolly stood on the rainswept back porch, looking across the road to see the rising mist over the marsh. She traced designs in the drops of water that clung to the sides of the water heater. Each little drop seemed singular and profound, seemed to hold some iridescence of its own, or perhaps it was just the reflection from passing cars.
“Mama,” Ginny said for the third time. Ginny stood in the kitchen door wearing white slacks, a windbreaker. She looked Lolly in the eye. “Listen, Mama, I’m driving up to Long Beach to have dinner with a friend, okay? The number is by the telephone. I might be back tonight, or I might be back tomorrow. There’s a pizza in the freezer. Okay?”
“Okay.” Lolly smiled at Ginny and watched her leave too, running lightly down the steps, slamming into her little car.
Lolly went back in the house. The silence wrapped her up like soft cotton. She got a Coke from the refrigerator, poured it, and sucked off the foam. She smiled to herself, turned on some lights. After a while she went to the telephone and called Margaret and in a little while Margaret came, bringing the friend she’d told Lolly about.
This friend was a wealthy widow of their own age, from Norfolk. “The doctor can’t seem to find any explanation for it,” she said. “Some sort of damaged nerve. It’s just this intense pain, right here.” She lifted her forearm so that the heavy bracelets jangled like wind chimes. “Sometimes the pain is so intense I just can’t seem to go out at all. I can’t even get out of bed.”
“I know,” said Lolly. Her pale eyes darkened and focused; she smiled. “Lie down,” Lolly said, indicating the daybed, and she took the stringy manicured hand of Margaret’s friend in her own soft white ringless fingers.
“That’s right, dear,” Margaret rasped from the wicker armchair. “Don’t be nervous, dear. This is exactly the way she fixed my shoulder. I was lying just like that on my own chaise longue. The green one. Remarkable. Now just do exactly what Lolly says. Close your eyes, dear. Relax. That’s right. Relax.”
Later, healed and radiant, Margaret’s friend wanted to pay Lolly, to make some contribution at least to the charity of her choice. Lolly declined, and they all had a glass of sherry.
“Really, how do you do it?” Margaret’s friend asked. “Really, if you only knew how much money I’ve spent on doctors. Why, I even tried a chiropractor at Virginia Beach.”
“It’s nothing,” Lolly said.
“Listen to that!” Margaret hooted. “Ha!” Margaret blew out a great puff of smoke that hung blue in the comfortable glow of the lamps.
“It’s not me at all,” Lolly told them. “I’m just an agent, you might say. An intermediary.”
“Do you do much work with arthritis?” Margaret’s friend asked. “I have a friend who’s in the most terrible pain.”
“I could give it a try,” Lolly said.
When they had gone, she heated up the pizza and drank a glass of milk, leaving all her dishes in the sink. She took a bath. She put on a faded terry housecoat. Opening the doors to the ocean, Lolly went out on the deck. Out here everything was cold and clean-smelling and a sharpness bit through the air, signaling summer’s end. There were few lights along the beach; most of the summer people and renters had gone. Beyond Lolly, out in the darkness, waves crashed onto the sand. She could taste their salt on her lips. Lolly was not even cold. She seated herself in a damp deck chair, and leaned back. “Now,” she said into the night.