Tangerine(35)

WE SAT ON ONE of the lower terraces, under a few scraggly trees. The relief was immediate and I could breathe again. Up until that moment, I had not realized just how warm I had become, standing in the open field before the ocean, without a single tree for protection.

At our entrance, one of the workers ran over, balancing a swinging contraption that allowed him to carry several glasses of tea at once, its metallic coating glinting off the bright sun. Lucy ordered two, and thanked him: Choukran.

I mused briefly over the fact that “thank you” and “no thank you” were so closely related—the difference of a word added to the latter. It was, I realized, the type of inane observation that Lucy would probably enjoy. I closed my eyes and sighed. Wasps swarmed the blossoms on the trees above but for the most part ignored us, even our tall glasses of sugary, hot tea. It should have been peaceful, I should have felt relaxed—but anxiety gnawed at me, refusing to be ignored.

Her arrival had set something in motion. I could feel it already—churning, refusing to remain dormant. And yet, I could feel us both stalled, waiting for that something to happen, as if we had been waiting for it ever since that day she had stepped off the boat. I had the sudden irresistible urge to set it in motion then, to push us, together, over the cliff—to ask her everything that I had been wondering, puzzling over, ever since she had arrived in Tangier, ever since I had first met her at Bennington. All the things that eluded me, slipping through my fingers, the strange wisps of a girl I seemed to have conjured out of my misery but who had never seemed to materialize into something real, something concrete.

I was angry, the heat turning my mood. I could feel it, simmering around me, those things that I did not understand, the places and people that remained a mystery to me, that refused to yield no matter how often I puzzled over them. Tangier and Lucy were the same, I thought. Both unsolvable riddles that refused to leave me in peace. And I had tired of it—of the not knowing, of always feeling as though I were on the outside of things, just on the periphery.

“Are you all right, Alice?” Lucy asked.

“I’m fine,” I replied, though I knew there was an unmistakable edge to my voice as I pushed my sunglasses farther up the bridge of my nose. They had begun to slip from the sweat. I sipped my tea and then thrust it away in frustration. I was silent for a time, and then, only when I was certain that she did not intend to break the silence herself, I began, my eyes squinting in the sun. “I’ll never understand it.”

Lucy turned to me. “What?”

“This.” I indicated the mint tea. “How on earth anyone can drink hot tea in weather like this.”

“You can get used to anything eventually,” she surmised. “It all starts to seem normal after a while.”

“Not to me,” I said, rubbing at my fingertips, angry that I had held on to the glass for a moment too long, so that the hot surface had burned my skin, angrier still that Lucy had not rushed to agree with me, with my inane complaint. “Not this. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to drink this in such hot weather. I don’t think I’ll ever want to drink it in any weather, to be honest.”

She took a sip from her own tall glass. “Don’t you enjoy it?”

I shot her a look then—hysterical, I thought—though I quickly swept it away. “I would quite literally murder someone for a cup of builder’s tea at this point,” I told her.

A few heads turned our way, and I realized that my tone was wavering somewhere between lighthearted and serious, skirting the liminal boundaries between laughing and crying. Lucy extended her hand to me, but I did not take it. “Are you all right?” she asked again.

I considered, tired already of the question—of what I suspected was the truth.

“In New England,” Lucy began, abruptly, “my father had the most ingenious way of keeping us all cool during the heat waves.”

“And what was that?” I asked, the question curt, irritated by this shift, this change in conversation.

But if Lucy noticed, she only carried on, and I wondered then if it was because she could sense my flaring temper that she had introduced the topic—an attempt at distraction. “He used to bring out the garden hose—you have those in England, don’t you?”

I nodded but remained silent.

“Well, he used to take the hose and then walk around the house, watering the bricks.”

I frowned. “The bricks?”

“Yes, the bricks of the house.”

“Why on earth would he do that?” I questioned.

She smiled. “That’s where all the heat is—the bricks trap it all in. So, very carefully, my father would circle the house, spraying the water onto every inch, until the bricks steamed from the combination of hot and cold.” She stopped, and in her silence I imagined it, conjuring up the image of a tiny brick house, a father who cared for his daughter enough that he lingered on the bricks surrounding her bedroom window, making sure they were properly glistening before moving on.

“Did it really help?” I asked, my voice softer than it had been. I looked at Lucy and I wondered what she was thinking—if she was also imagining that small house in the middle of nowhere New England, or if she was thinking of somewhere else altogether.

“It did,” Lucy said, in a tone that I suspected was meant to assure me, to calm me. “I remember lying on my bed, listening to the water as it sprayed against my bedroom wall. And I could feel it. As I lay there, my eyes closed, the curtains drawn to keep out the sun, so the room was entirely lost in darkness, I could feel the moment the water hit, the instant relief it provided. As if someone had turned on a fan and placed it directly in front of me. Sometimes I would get goose bumps, it was so cold.”