Beach Trip (36 page)

“Don’t embellish it,” Sara said. “Don’t do that thing writers do. Don’t try and make it sound more romantic than it really was—a lonely forty-five-year-old woman taking advantage of a minimum-wage delivery boy.”

Mel laughed in a guarded way. It sounded sad when you put it that way, and truthful. It confirmed the feeling she’d had lately that she’d reached some kind of impasse in her life, an overwhelming place of stagnation and regret, not just in her professional life, but in her personal life, too. Once she had been confident and self-assured, but now she spent a lot of time second-guessing her choices.

“Actually,” Annie said, “I think you’re wrong about the minimum wage. UPS pays pretty well.”

“That’s not the point!” Sara snapped.

Out past the breaking surf, a narrow sandbar stretched across the water like a carpet. You could walk along it for nearly half a mile, until the tide came in, and then be swept out to sea.

“Lola? What about you?” Mel asked.

“We might have some of that shrimp scampi left,” Lola said, still thinking about lunch. “I could make a shrimp salad.”

Mel said, “Okay, Annie, how about you? Give us something we don’t know.”

“Yeah, Annie,” Sara said, relieved to be off the subject of the UPS driver. She didn’t want to argue with Mel again. Mel couldn’t help it that she was the way she was. She’d never had to think about anyone but herself. She’d never lain awake at night worrying over a sick child. She led a life breathtaking in its freedom and simplicity. “Surprise us.”

“Tell us something that’ll knock our socks off,” Mel said.

Annie thought,
Oh, I could blow your socks clear across the beach.
She said, “The women at my sons’ school used to call me Q-Tip.”

They all turned to stare at her. She sat huddled on the sand with her hat pulled down over her ears like an hombre in a bad Clint Eastwood movie.

Mel snorted. “See, I told you, you should color your hair.”

“What do you care what they think?” Sara said. “They don’t sound like
the kind of people you’d want to be friends with anyway.” She smiled sadly at Annie.

“Poor Annie,” Lola said.

Mel wasn’t giving up. “Look, I can pick up a box of Miss Clairol at the village store. Then we’ll go back to the house and have a cocktail and I’ll dye your hair.”

“I’m not letting you color my hair,” Annie said. “Especially after you’ve been drinking.”

“It’ll wash out. We’ll go with something bright and sassy.”

“Forget it. That was years ago. I never see those women anymore.”

“My turn,” Lola said, clapping her hands with excitement. She had finally thought of something she could share. “Once I charged ten thousand dollars on my mother’s credit card and gave it to the United Negro College Fund. She’d given me her credit card to charge some new furniture. It wasn’t too long after Briggs and I got married and we were living in that little house over on Chariton. She told me to get some new furniture and new drapes and she gave me her credit card to pay for everything. They had this ad on TV, you know the one, ‘A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Waste.’ And I just thought that was so sad, you know. A wasted mind. So I called the number and donated ten thousand dollars.” She was breathless from telling it. She put her hand over her mouth and giggled.

Annie smiled at her in encouragement. Mel patted her knee. Sara thought how girlish Lola seemed, how vague and empty-headed, and yet for a swift, fleeting moment she wondered if it was all an act, if Lola wasn’t somehow putting them on.

“Speaking of wasted minds,” Mel said. “Let’s make up a batch of pomegranate martinis to take with us to tennis.”

They had no trouble getting a court time. The tennis courts, under the merciless midafternoon sun, were nearly deserted. They parked the golf cart and walked past the Beach Club, past a wide verandah littered with tables and chairs, where a few hardy souls were getting an early start on happy hour, and along a narrow asphalt trail that threaded its way between a collection of scattered courts.

The air was sultry and still. They walked in single file, Lola in front, followed by Sara and Annie, with Mel bringing up the rear. Palm trees swayed above them, catching what little breeze there was, and in tall stands of sparkleberry and wax myrtle, cicadas droned like buzz saws.

“Jesus,” Mel said. “I’m sweating like a plow mule. Whose idea was this anyway?”

“Right,” Sara said flatly. “What idiot suggested we play tennis?”

Annie swatted at a mosquito. “Why’d they put us down on the bottom courts?” she asked irritably. Already her tennis panties felt damp. Her thighs were chafed from the long walk from the parking lot. She’d tried to lose a few pounds before the trip, but all she’d managed to lose was an inch from her already-too-small waist. She carried all her weight in her hips and rear end; she was a perfect pear. She had what her mother so cheerfully called
the Jameson thighs
, which meant she could diet and ThighMaster for months and still wind up with saddle bags as flabby as jello sacks.

“It was probably A. Lincoln’s doing,” Sara said. “A. Lincoln probably figured out that Mel was in our party and put us out here in the wastelands to make up for Casino Night.”

Mel looked over her shoulder at the imposing Beach Club. She’d learned from experience never to underestimate an enemy. “Lola, whose name did you make the reservation in?”

“Mine.”

“He knows who we are,” Sara said. “You gave him your name that day on the croquet greens.”

Lola stopped and looked at her. “I did?” She was wearing an apricot-colored tennis skirt and top that showed off her tan, and her trim figure, nicely.

“Mel did.”

“He’s not going to remember the name,” Mel said, motioning for them to go on. “Besides, he doesn’t know it was me who pulled the dirty trick on Casino Night.”

“He’s probably got a pretty good idea,” Sara said.

They passed two clay courts where a group of senior citizens was playing. “Good day for tennis,” one of the men called and Lola called back gaily, “Wheatgrass is good for sunburn!”

“What’d she say?” one of the old men asked his partner.

Briggs had called during lunch and Lola had gone into her bedroom to take the call. When she came out later she looked like she’d been crying. She seemed all right now. She was prancing along as if she hadn’t a care in the world, and smiling, although there was something false and brittle about her smile.

They came to a lagoon crossed by a narrow bridge. An alligator slept in
the murky water below. They could seem him clearly in the green depths. “Remind me not to go in after any tennis balls,” Mel said.

“That’s assuming we’re ever going to
play
any tennis,” Sara said. “That’s assuming we’re ever going to
reach
the court.” She wasn’t looking forward to this. She hadn’t played tennis in years, not since Adam was diagnosed and she’d dropped out of the Atlanta Lawn Tennis Association. She’d found then that in the overall scheme of things, tennis just wasn’t that important to her. There were so many things that weren’t important.

“Number Twenty!” Lola shouted, all excited, pointing to the sign hanging against the backdrop. “This is it!”

The other three went out on the court to warm up while Mel got set up. Tennis was a Very Big Deal to Mel. She and Sara had played sporadically in high school and college, but in the last ten years she’d joined an indoor tennis league and now she played twice a week with a group of highly competitive twenty-something career girls. She took a water bottle and a bag of Twizzlers candy out and laid them on the bench between the courts. She took a sun visor out of her bag and performed a series of brief stretching exercises.

When she was ready, she went out on to the court with the others. They played doubles for a while, switching partners to keep it interesting, and then they walked to the bench to take a water break. The shade here was paltry; a tall palm tree cast a slender shadow across the broiling asphalt. In the cloudless sky a buzzard circled endlessly.

“I wish I had a martini,” Mel said, sipping from her water bottle. They had somehow managed to talk her out of the pomegranate martinis.

“You can’t be serious,” Sara said. They all stood around the bench drinking from their bottles.

“I don’t think you’re supposed to drink alcohol when you exercise,” Annie said. “It dehydrates you. You start drinking in this heat, you’re likely to drop dead of a stroke.”

Mel took a long pull from her bottle, staring at Sara above the rim. She put the bottle down and wiped her mouth. “Pray that happens, girls,” she said. “It’s the only way you’ll ever beat me.”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” Sara said.

“It’s the only way you’d ever beat me in singles,” Mel said.

Sara picked up her racket. “Okay smart-ass,” she said. “Let’s go.”

Mel put her bottle away and followed Sara out on to the court. Lola sat
down on the bench, absentmindedly bouncing her racket off the toe of one shoe. Annie called after Mel and Sara, “It’s too hot to play singles. Lola and I didn’t come out here to play singles.” She looked at Lola for confirmation of this statement, but Lola appeared deep in thought, staring down at her racket. She looked odd. Her head was tilted as if she was listening to distant music, and her lips moved soundlessly.

Annie turned her attention back to the court, where Mel and Sara stood facing each other across the net. “If I’d known we were playing singles,” she said in a sulky voice, “I wouldn’t have come.” She stood there with her tennis skirt flaring over her hips like a parachute, feeling hot and sweaty and fat.

“Just three games,” Sara said. “Just long enough for me to whip Mel’s ass so we can get on to other things.”

“Hey, I’m trying to serve here,” Mel said. “Stop talking.”

“Who said you could serve first?”

“Sorry. We’ll spin it.”

“My mouth tastes like yellow,” Lola said unexpectedly.

Sara watched Mel intently. She waved her hand and said, “Go ahead. Serve.” She glanced over at Annie, but Annie was watching Lola with a strange expression on her face.

“Are you sure?” Mel asked.

“Just do it,” Sara said.

Mel bounced the ball slowly. She had a killer first serve, although after that she was just as likely to hit it into the net. She tossed the ball high and leaned back.

“Rosa’s aura is like a peacock feather,” Lola said to no one in particular.

Annie frowned. “Who’s Rosa?” she asked.

Mel froze with her arm stretched behind her head. The ball dropped harmlessly to the ground, bounced several times, and rolled against the fence. She slowly lowered her arms and sighed, tapping the toe of one shoe repeatedly with her racket. “Girls, I’m trying to serve here,” she said with exaggerated patience.

“Okay,” Lola said. She put her racket up in front of her face. “Sorry,” she said.

Palm fronds stirred lazily with the breeze. The sun beat down on their heads.

Mel bounced the ball and looked at Sara. “Ready?” she asked.

Sara got serious again. “Ready.”

Mel crouched down in position. She tossed the ball high overhead and leaned back into her serve. Everyone waited, watching quietly.

Lola said, “Mel, can I have a Twizzler?”

The ball dropped to the court. Sara put her hands on her knees and looked at her feet. Over on the bench, Lola began to giggle.

Sara won, two games to one, although they went to deuce every game. Mel flung her racket over the fence into a palmetto thicket and had to go in to retrieve it, and after that they played doubles again, Mel and Annie on one side of the net and Lola and Sara on the other. Lola was a good tennis player. She had the long, pretty strokes that denoted a privileged childhood spent in private tennis lessons. She was fine for the first few games, but after a while she stopped playing and stood there looking at the sky or staring at her racket as the ball whizzed by.

“Lola, are you all right?” Sara asked. She was leaning on her racket, trying to catch her breath. She’d just run across the court trying to hit one of Annie’s lobs while Lola stood at the net looking at her feet.

Lola was staring at the bottom of one shoe with a look of amazement on her face. “Look,” she said, holding her foot up so they could see it. “There’s a hole in my shoe.”

Sara was reminded of her earlier impression that Lola was putting them on. “Let’s take a water break,” she wheezed.

“Fine,” Mel said. “It’s our serve anyway.”

They went over to the bench and sat down. The sun had moved in the sky, and the shade cast by the palm had lengthened, so that now it was almost pleasant sitting there. Mel poured water over the back of her neck. Annie and Sara sipped their water bottles. Lola sat down and took her shoe off.

“Lola, what are you doing?” Mel asked. “We’re between games.” The score was three to two and they were ahead, so Mel had no intention of stopping now.

“I’ve got a hole in my shoe,” Lola said, holding it up.

“So what? Put it back on.”

“Okay.”

They watched Lola put her shoe back on. The courts were beginning to fill up again, as the late-afternoon sun died and the cool of evening began to glide across the landscape. Courts Sixteen and Seventeen were full, and
everywhere now came the steady pleasant
thock
of tennis balls hitting racket strings. Annie stood watching the foursome on Court Sixteen play The perspiration she had worked up during the warm-up had long since dissipated. Mel was a maniac on the court—she poached balls left and right—and after a while Annie had been content to simply stand on the baseline and hit an occasional lob, a shot Mel steadfastly refused to use. With Lola focused, it had been an intense match, with them going to deuce for the first three games, but now that Lola had lost interest, Sara was having a hard time of it.

The women on Court Sixteen were probably in their sixties and seventies, and they played at a leisurely pace that Annie could relate to. She liked a slow, unhurried game, which probably helped explain her hips and those troublesome Jameson thighs. She wasn’t fat, but she was
matronly
, whereas Mel and Sara had somehow managed to hang on to their college figures and Lola seemed to be mysteriously regressing toward girlhood. Whatever heartbreak Lola was dealing with in her marriage, it hadn’t put a wrinkle in her face or a single dimple in her thighs, and there was something to be said for that.