Florida(40)

When she looked at her hand again, it was puffy and hot and oozing. She put it to her mouth. When she stopped at last at the edge of a little oceanside town and gazed over the dune grass at the sea, her tongue was coppery with the taste of blood.



* * *



—

Someone had left a cooler on the beach, and it still held a bag of apples, a half-eaten sandwich, two Cokes. She sat, watching the dusk turn mustard and watermelon, and ate everything. Seabirds clustered on the wet sand, then winged apart into the air. When it grew too dark for her to see, she took the cooler back to the car and walked up to A1A to a pay phone.

She was poised to hang up if her stepfather answered, but it was her mother, vague and slow, saying Hello? Hello?

She couldn’t speak. She imagined her mother in her nightgown in the kitchen, a sunset, the neighbor kids playing outside.

Hello? her mother said again, and she managed, Hello, Mom.

Honey, her mother said. What a treat to hear from you.

Mom, she said. I just wanted to let you know that I moved. I don’t have a new number yet, though.

She waited, feeling the sunburn begin to prickle in her cheeks, but her mother said only, Is that so? absently. Ever since she’d been remarried, she’d had chronic idiopathic pain, treated, also chronically, with painkillers. She hadn’t remembered her daughter’s birthday for three years; she’d sent empty care packages more than once. One hot July day, when the girl had stared at her sickening bank balance at the ATM, she’d considered calling for help. But she’d known, somehow, that the envelope would also arrive empty.

Over the line, there was the sound of an engine drawing close, and her mother said, Oh! Your dad’s home. They both listened to the slam of the door and the heavy boots on the steps, and she thought but didn’t say, That man is not my dad.

Instead she said, Mom, I just want you to not worry if you don’t hear from me for a while. Okay? I’m all right, I promise.

All right, honey, her mother said, her voice already softer, anticipating her husband’s arrival. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.

As the girl walked back on the road, headlights spinning by in the dark, she said aloud, I’m doing exactly what you would do, and laughed, but it wasn’t very funny after all.



* * *



—

During the day, she lay in the sun for hours until she was so thirsty she had to fill her camping water bottle at the fish-washing hose again and again. In the rearview mirror, she watched her skin toast and her hair shift from honey to lemon. Her clothes flapped on her. She thought of the thousands of dollars she’d spent on highlights over the years: all that anguish, all those diets, when all she needed to be pretty was laziness and some mild starvation! She ate cans of tuna and sleeves of crackers and drank an occasional coffee from the beach café for pep. Her money dwindled alarmingly. The scar on her hand turned a lovely silver in the sun, and she sometimes stroked it absently, signifier in lieu of signified, the scratch for the lost life.

At night, she lay in the back of the station wagon and read Middlemarch with a penlight until she fell asleep.

When she smelled too strong for salt water to rinse the stink away, she walked into the gym of a fancy beachside condo complex in her running clothes. She waited for someone to yell at her, but nobody was watching. The bathroom was empty, and the vanities held baskets with lotions, tiny soaps, disposable razors. She stood in the shower and let her summer of loneliness wash away. Even before her boyfriend left her for a first-year master’s student, she’d withdrawn into herself. Her funding hadn’t been renewed, and she’d had only her TA stipend, which was barely enough for her half of the rent, let alone groceries. There was no going out, even if she could have swallowed her shame to look her funded friends in the eye. The boyfriend had taken everything with him: their Sunday brunches, the etiquette book he had unsubtly given her one Christmas, the alarm clock that woke them ten minutes before six every day. He had been a stickler for the proper way to do things—hospital corners, weight lifting, taking notes—and he’d stolen her routine from her when he left. Worst of all, he’d taken his parents, who had welcomed her for four years of holidays in their generous stone house in Pennsylvania. For weeks, she had expected the mother, a soft-haired, hugging woman, to call her, but there was no call.

The door opened and voices flooded the bathroom, some aerobics class letting out. She turned to wash her face in the spray, suddenly shy. When she opened her eyes, the showers were full of naked middle-aged women laughing and soaping themselves. They wore diamond bands and their teeth shone and their bellies and thighs were larded by their easy lives.



* * *



—

She woke to a hard rapping next to her ear and struggled up through sleep into darkness. She turned on her penlight to see a groin in stretched black fabric and a shining leather belt hung with a gun in a holster and an enormous flashlight.

Cop, she thought. Penis of death, penis of light.

Open up, the policeman said, and she said, Yes, sir, and slid over the backseat and rolled down the window.

What are you smiling at? he said.

Nothing, sir, she said, and turned off her penlight.

You been here a week, he said. I been watching you.

Yes, sir, she said.

It’s illegal, he said. Now, I get a kid once in a while doesn’t want to pay for a motel, okay. I get some old hippies in their vans. But you’re a young girl. Hate to see you get hurt. There are bad guys everywhere, you know?