All the Beautiful Lies(5)

“I can put some in a thermos for you,” Alice said, already swinging open the refrigerator where her mother kept her bottles of Mateus rosé.

It was almost noon by the time they had settled on the sand, each on their own towel. It was a perfect day, the only visible clouds thin ragged wisps on the horizon line. The air smelled of the ocean, but also suntan lotion, and the occasional trace of someone’s cigarette smoke clinging to the light breeze. Alice started reading; she was halfway through Lace again, by Shirley Conran. Her mother cracked her own book, but wasn’t looking at it. She was twitchy and unsettled, and she began to drink from her thermos of wine. “Wanna walk?” she asked after a while.

“Sure,” Alice said.

They walked the length of the beach and back, Edith keeping the shawl over her shoulders. “Look out, Al, it’s a gull,” she kept saying, prodding Alice’s shoulder.

“I’m not scared of gulls anymore,” Alice said.

“So you do remember the gulls.”

“No. You told me I was scared of them. I don’t remember those trips, if we ever went on them.”

When they got back to their beach towels, Alice was hot, the back of her neck damp with sweat. “Do you want to swim?” she asked her mother.

“God, no, it’s freezing.”

Alice went alone, swimming out past where the waves were breaking so that she could lie on her back and rise and fall with the swells. She closed her eyes and watched the small explosions of color behind her lids, and if she leaned far enough back, and submerged her ears, all she could hear was the blank roar of the ocean.

When she returned to her mother there was an older man standing above her, his feet spaced apart and his hands on his hips. He wore black swim trunks, cut high up on his thighs. His hair was parted on the side and greying at the temples. Even though he was in good shape, it was clear that he was standing extra rigid, pulling in his stomach a little.

“Alice, this is Jake,” Edith said, squinting up into the sun.

“Hi, Alice,” the man said, transferring a lit cigarette from his right hand to his left to shake her hand. He wore aviator sunglasses with reflective lenses. Alice wondered if he was looking at her body from behind them. When he released her hand, she bent and picked up the towel she used to dry herself, wrapping it around her.

“Your mother here—” Jake started.

“Jake helped me open up an account at the local bank. That’s where I got the new clock radio from, the one that’s in the kitchen.”

“Oh,” Alice said. She’d dried her hair and sat down on the edge of her towel, being careful to keep her wet feet firmly in the sand.

The man called Jake crouched down. Edith propped herself up on an elbow. She had a lit cigarette as well, perched between her fingers, the heat from its tip causing the already warm air to ripple.

“I was just telling your mother,” the man said, “how I’d be happy to show you two around Kennewick. Give you the real local’s point of view. Best clam roll, et cetera.”

Alice must have made a face, because he laughed. “Okay, then. Best ice cream place.”

“Sure,” Alice said, and scooched a little farther back on her towel. The man turned his attention back to Edith. Alice lay back, and concentrated on the way the hot sun was drying the droplets of water on her face. She could almost feel them evaporating, leaving behind tiny deposits of salt.

“Okay, then. It’s a date,” the man said, and Alice opened her eyes. He was standing again, blocking the sun. He wasn’t actually bad looking, Alice thought. He looked like a man who should be in a Newport cigarettes commercial.

The man crouched again, his bathing suit tightening around his crotch so that Alice could see the bulge of his genitals. She looked instead at his sunglasses, a silvery blue in the bright sunshine. “Alice, so nice meeting you. If you grow up any more the opposite sex won’t stand a chance.”

“That’s what I tell her,” Edith said. “All the time. Don’t grow up. It’s not worth it.”

The man stood, both he and her mother now laughing in that obviously fake way that older people did. He said good-bye and wandered off, still holding his body stiffly as though it might collapse if he fully let a breath out.

Edith stubbed her cigarette—the man’s brand, not her own—out in the sand, and said, “What did you think of Jake?”

She said it expectantly, her voice pitched a little too high, and Alice suddenly realized that this meeting had been at least partly arranged, that the man and her mother had not simply bumped into each other at the beach, or if they had, they’d seen each other before. And not just at the bank.

“He seemed nice,” Alice said.

“He’s very successful,” Edith replied, digging out one of her own cigarettes from the purse she’d brought.

Alice lay back down. She was worried she hadn’t put enough sunblock on her face that morning, and so she draped the towel over her head. It felt nice on her face, damp and cool. She thought about the man her mother had met. He was old and a little cheesy, but not that bad. When her mother was a mill worker at a paper factory and a single mother, she had to date a building manager who wore sleeveless T-shirts and had thick moles all over his shoulders and neck. Now that she didn’t have to work, and lived in a nice town like Kennewick, Edith could date men who worked in banks and cared about how they looked. It was the way the world worked. She knew that much from the books she read. Rich girls married rich boys, and their lives were better. It was simple.