Calypso(38)

“Thirty-eight, thirty-nine…”

By what miracle had neither of us contracted AIDS? How had we gotten away? I don’t just mean later, when people knew to be safe, but back in the days when it didn’t have a name and no one understood how it spread. One of the men Hugh had lived with—a professor he had his first year of college—had died of it in the late eighties, and surely there were others, on both my side and his. Yet for some reason we’d escaped, had prospered, even. Now here we were, the shadows lengthening, our spaghetti growing cold, as he hit the half-hundred mark, then blithely sailed beyond it.

Whore.





Sorry



When she was young, my sister-in-law, Kathy, had a kitten named Snowy. “She was white, of course,” she said one evening over the Sorry! board at our house on Emerald Isle. I’ve never been much for games, but this one I can play all night. Half of it is luck, and the rest is ruthlessness. You have to be cold, so my niece, Madelyn, who is twelve and has a heart made of frozen concrete, usually wins.

“She was just the prettiest thing,” Kathy continued, watching as I shuffled the deck for another round. “Then she swallowed a fishhook.”

I set the cards in the center of the board. “Yikes.”

“Tell me about it,” Kathy said. “It didn’t seem like there was any way to fix her, so my mom told my brother to hold her down.” She took a sip of her bourbon. “Then she shot her in the head.”

Maddy, who had no doubt heard this story before, gathered the bright plastic pawns in her hands and turned to her mother, asking, “What color do you want?”

Kathy considered her options and sighed. “I’ll go with the red.”

Whenever I doubt the wisdom of buying a beach house, all I have to do is play a round of Sorry! and it all seems worth it. For starters, it’s the only time Madelyn will really talk. Wiping the floor with everyone around her eases what is otherwise a crippling shyness and brings her fully to life. Ask her a question on the beach, and the most you’re likely to get is a shrug. At the board, on the other hand, she’ll tell you anything, is chatty, almost. Before getting the Sea Section, I didn’t have much contact with my brother’s family. I’d see them in Raleigh when I passed through town every other year. I’d send cards and letters, but that was about it. Were it not for Sorry! I’d never have known that Kathy’s mother shot a kitten in the head. Now that’s a sister-in-law, I thought. She drew a one, and I watched as she moved the first of her four pawns from the starting position. Then she whispered softly to me and her daughter, “I will destroy the both of you.”

We usually play Sorry! in the living room on the east side of the house while sitting on the floor around the coffee table. Getting a game together is the easiest thing in the world. Only four at a time can play, but there will often be others on the sidelines, coaching—Paul, for instance. When his daughter’s at the board he’ll take a knee and lean in. “C’mon, baby, go for the throat. Just like Daddy taught you.”

It’s hard to get ahead in this game without occasionally sending a fellow player back to start. “Sorry,” you say, sincerely at first, and then in a way that means “I’m sorry you’re the sort of person who deserves this.” Madelyn will take any opportunity to screw someone over. She’s like her grandmother shooting a kitten in the head—heartless. The Christmas that Paul brought his family to Sussex, she presented me with a Sorry! game of my own, and though we pulled it out a dozen or so times, it never felt urgent, the way it does at the beach. After they left, I played only once, with a friend of Hugh’s named Candy. “You sort of need the sound of waves in order to get in the proper mood,” I said, putting the board away after I had crushed her.



Another thing I love about the beach is sitting in the sun, mainly for the lazy kind of talk it generates. A person can say anything with lotion on, and I’m more than willing to listen. Most people, myself included, have moved on to sunblock, but not my sister Gretchen, who is outdoors a lot and usually arrives at the start of our vacation the burnished chestnut of a well-worn saddle. This is a woman who tans the spaces between her fingers, who lies on the beach with her mouth open so she can darken the front of her uvula. She’s starting to look like one of those dolls made from a dried apple, not that it bothers her any. My sister is one of the few women I know who doesn’t dye her hair or bemoan the fact that she’s getting older. She embraces her impending decrepitude.

Gretchen’s birthday falls in early August, and the year she turned fifty-five, we celebrated it together on Emerald Isle. Paul, Kathy, and Madelyn were there briefly, as was Hugh; his mother, Joan; and his sister, Ann, who is my age and has three grown children. She and Hugh could be twins, that’s how alike they look, both tall and slender with big teeth, just shy of Kennedy-size. Their mother is a lot smaller, and wispy. Joan is eighty-three now, pale as a lightbulb, with white hair cut bluntly at her jawline. She recently replaced her wire-rimmed glasses. The new ones have heavy black frames and lend her a studious, almost owlish demeanor, which is fitting, as she’s always got her nose in a book. The writers she prefers are long dead and were on the wordy side. If the novel on the sofa is seven hundred pages long and the author photo is an engraving, it’s either hers or Hugh’s.