What's Mine and Yours(92)

“We got married too fast. I was twenty-two, and just finishing up school. We liked surfing together. I thought she was the prettiest girl I’d ever seen. It was stupid.”

“Prettier than Margarita?”

Bailey put his hand over his heart. “Oh, no. No one, in my book, is prettier than Margarita Ventura, age fourteen.”



They left the museum before long, underwhelmed by the exhibits, but Ruth was electric, satisfied at seeing the two of them together. She flung an arm around each of them and suggested ice cream. Noelle showed them to a parlor, warned them it was mediocre, but they all ordered their cones, and Bailey paid.

“Agribusiness treating you well?” Noelle said, and realized she was flirting.

“You can get the next round,” he said, and they all walked back toward the water.

They sat on a bench facing a strip of marshland where the horses grazed.

“Isn’t this nice?” Ruth said. She seemed nervous, talking to fill the silence, as if she could sense what was between them now. They licked their cones, and eventually threw them away. The ice cream was too fatty, not sweet enough. Ruth muttered it was a pity. Wasted calories, she said. Soon it was time for her bus.

“Well, now you know where to find me,” Noelle said. She pressed Ruth’s body to hers and felt naked in her need for the woman. She admired her, longed for her. She was the mother Noelle had always wanted to have. Sometimes, she wondered whether she should say these things to Ruth, but she assumed she already knew.

“Next time I come and see Bailey, I’ll stop by and see you, too. And you let me know when you’re back in town. I hardly saw you last time. It was criminal.”

“It was a bad time.”

“I know,” Ruth said. She took Noelle’s face in her hands, kissed both her cheeks.

As she was boarding the bus, she pointed firmly at her son.

“Now, you drive Noelle home before you hit the road. I don’t want her cycling back in the dark.”

“I’ll be fine, Ruth. I do it all the time.”

Ruth shook her head, waved her index finger in the air. “You let him drive you home.”

They stood together in the street until the bus disappeared, turning toward the highway. It was dusk, the light over the water transforming to gold.

“It sure is pretty here,” Bailey said. “You’ll probably spend the whole summer in the water.”

“I sure as hell won’t. Don’t you listen to the news? Every year, there’s a shark attack somewhere new. Atlantic Beach, Wrightsville Beach. All up and down the coast, there’s some kid whose lost an arm, a leg. And that’s in the shallows. No thank you.”

“Didn’t you all go to the beach a lot when we were kids?”

“I’m not a kid anymore.”

“I can see that,” Bailey said, slitting his eyes against the setting sun. “Let me take you home.”



They picked up Noelle’s bicycle, and Bailey drove them along the sound toward her apartment. He kept looking over the wheel at her, and she felt herself go warm. There weren’t very many single men her age in this town. They were married, or, if they weren’t, there was a sour story as to why not. She didn’t like picking up men in bars, and the ones she found online lived too far away. Noelle didn’t know how else people met each other. She hadn’t dated all of her adult life.

She felt herself growing larger under Bailey’s attention. Her skin expanded, a gentle thrum in her throat, her limbs. She wasn’t surprised when he pulled over, said, “Let’s go for a swim.”

“But I already told you about the sharks.”

“Those are ocean beaches. This is a sound.”

“It’s too cold,” Noelle said.

“We’ll be fine.”

They parked atop a small hill and crawled down through a thick brush of sea lavender. They found a strip of sandy beach, ringed by high grass that gave way to the water, placid and slate blue. Down the bank, a few boats were docked in front of large Gothic Revival houses, their peaks facing the sound. There was no clear entrance to the tiny beach, no one else around. A lone bench stood at the edge of the water.

Bailey stripped down to his underwear, and Noelle followed him. They waded in. It was cold, and Noelle let the water fill her mouth when she sank under. It had the sweet tang of fresh water mixed with salt.

“I didn’t think you’d come in,” Bailey said. He was treading water, his hair slicked back. “My mother told me you’ve had a rough time. But we can’t stop living. We’ve got to keep on doing things like this.”

Noelle swam toward him. “And why is that?”

“The planet is dying. We’ve got to cherish it all.”

“That’s true,” Noelle said, and she wondered why she didn’t think of it more, the wreckage that was soon to come. She wanted children. She wanted them to live on the earth. Maybe this was another way that she was white: the ease with which she could ignore calamity, focus mainly on what she wanted.

She swam closer to Bailey. His shoulders were beaded with water. A band of fat clouds was blowing in toward the shore.

“You know, they say that’s what gives life meaning. The fact that we’re all going to die,” he said. “I don’t believe that at all. I don’t need death to remind me how good life is. If I had an infinite amount of life, I’d be happy to go on living. Look at all this.”