Return to Sullivans Island (2 page)

Beth left Charleston four years ago dressed like a Lowcountry princess-in-training and somehow fell into the student life, adopting a Beacon Hill slash Jack Kerouac kind of look that wasn’t exactly Lilly Pulitzer. Lately, people knitted their eyebrows together at the sight of her and, completely unsolicited, they offered her rubber bands to restrain her hair. She was the first one chosen as a lab partner and the last one invited on the conga line. Oh sure, she drank her share of beer in college and once she actually got completely toasted on tequila shots and had to spend two days in bed drinking Maalox and nibbling little bites of bananas dipped in peanut butter. But that was the exception, not the rule. Perhaps she had overdone the brainiac study thing in college and didn’t look like a Carolina girl on her way to the Windjammer to shag all night—and that’s a dance, not a sexual act—and, well, so what? Beth was still a smart cookie who simply had yet to latch on to a lasting personal style.

Beth knew very early on that if she wanted to go to graduate school she was going to need a scholarship. So when all her girlfriends were out raising hell, dressed in bedsheets and acting like boozerellas, she was in her dorm memorizing biology spellings and studying finance. Unlike her friends and roommates who all seemed happy to have predestined futures, she viewed college as a ticket out of a life on that great southern hamster wheel. One generation hopped off and went to heaven and the next one hopped on, picking up where the others left off, running like idiots in Ray-Bans and Top-Siders until they dropped dead too. Not that she really had anything super serious against her family or that life, it was just that she wanted to see the world and think about things, be somebody different, do something great, like write the Great American Novel or at least have her blog picked up for publication before she was thirty. Was that too much to hope for? She was thinking now that maybe it was. At least, so far. Because if she was so Albert Einstein smart and destined for such global literary greatness, what was she doing with a deferred scholarship, sweating like a pig in the back of a clanking van, headed for a funky old haunted house on a sandbar? She already knew the answer, but to reinforce her own commitment, she would breathe the words again. She was Beth Hayes, the Obedient One.

They crossed the Ben Sawyer Bridge and for the billionth time she wondered who Ben Sawyer was. It would have made sense if the bridge was named for Edgar Allan Poe, who actually lived on Sullivans Island for a while. But Ben Sawyer? She had never heard of any Sawyers on Sullivans Island. Like her mother always said, who were his people? But there you had one more small but significant enigma of Sullivans Island, a land washed in mystery and populated with the kind of characters Tennessee Williams would have loved to have known.

They were on the island then, and Beth was straining her neck to read the leash laws that were posted on the huge sign on the right. She didn’t want Lola to get busted by the dog police for dropping her carte de visite in the wrong spot.

She rubbed her eyes. What was this? Oz? Perhaps it was the time of day but the houses seemed brighter, more well-defined, and the palmettos and oleanders seemed greener, their branches and the edges of their fronds were sharper. The sky seemed to be a more vibrant shade of blue than she could recall. She took a deep breath and even with the van’s air-conditioning running full blast she could still smell plough mud, which was an acquired taste and dangerously addictive. In her dreams she actually smelled plough mud.

Despite the economy, there was gentrification everywhere, but the kind that pleased her. Most of the old migrant worker cottages that flanked the road onto the island had been resurrected and transformed into million-dollar futures with colorful lush window boxes of fuchsia geraniums, hot pink petunias, and bushy asparagus ferns to prove it. It was amazing, she thought, what you could accomplish with the combination of elbow grease, a little money, and a clear vision.

They came to the corner and she noticed that the gas station was under new ownership, gouging its customers an extra twenty cents per gallon for the privilege of convenience. That would never change no matter who owned it. The patrons of Dunleavy’s Pub, noisy families and happy dogs, spilled out onto the sidewalk picnic tables, laughing, talking, and having lunch. Her stomach began to growl when she thought about their quesadillas. Judging from the parking lot, Durst Family Medicine appeared to be doing a brisk business. Probably legions of poison ivy and sunburn victims, she thought. People were walking to the beach pulling wagons loaded with gear, toddlers, and ice water in their coolers, and Beth thought she might like a walk on the beach that day to introduce Lola to the ocean.

The dependable rolling panorama of robust life gave her some relief. For as much as Beth embraced the twenty-first century, like all true Charlestonians, she hated change of almost any kind. Commercial development made her suspicious and she generally ignored its creeping advance, hoping it might go away. If she had lived there full-time she would have fought it with all her might. They could build all the Starbucks and Sonics in the world on Mount Pleasant and the adjoining island of Isle of Palms, but something deep inside of her depended on the peninsula of Charleston and the entire length and breadth of Sullivans Island to remain the same. So far it was reasonably so.

They turned right on Middle Street, the Champs-Élysée of the island, and began to head toward her house. In the time it might take to swallow a pill, she would be back, perched on the threshold of her childhood. Her stomach began to flutter.

Memories flooded her mind—all of them together, cousins, aunts, uncles, all of them. She could see herself and the others as children, running around in their pajamas, spinning like helicopters in the silver dusk, fall down dizzy, chasing lightning bugs, scooping them into mayonnaise jars with holes punched in the top. The holes were made by her Uncle Grant’s ice pick, which they were forbidden to touch.

“Don’t you children even think about laying a hand on that thing,” he would say in a very stern voice to his boys. Then he would turn to Beth with a wink and she knew he wasn’t so very mean as all that.

Summers! Searching the thicket for wild blackberries in the full sun of the day, filling coffee cans with them, and later, sunburned and freckled, how they feasted on hot sugary blackberry dumplings that her Aunt Maggie whipped up in her copper pots. There were literally hundreds of days when her boys, Mickey and Bucky, and Beth caught crabs down by the rocks with Uncle Grant. They used chicken necks for bait, tied up in knots on weighted ends of cord. They caught blue crabs by the score, shrieking as they moved them ever so carefully from the line to the net to the basket, trying not to get pinched—the Revenge of the Ill-Fated Crab. They shrieked again with excitement when one escaped the basket in the kitchen or on the porch, clicking its claws as it hurried sideways, looking for salvation. There was no salvation for those guys, no ma’am. They wound up steamed and dumped right from the colander on newspapers that were spread over the porch table, cracked apart and dipped in cocktail sauce. It made her laugh to remember. She realized then that she had not been crabbing in years. And she remembered how she had completely embraced her closely knit family when she was young and how important they had been to her.

“Maybe I should take up crabbing again, Lola. Do you want to come and help?”

“What’s that?” Mr. Brown said.

“Nothing. I was just talking to my dog.”

“No reason why not.”

They passed the hill fort then and Beth sighed with relief as it had not changed one lick, except for the children’s park built in front of it that had sprung up some years ago. In her mind’s eye, she could see herself, her cousins, and a gang of island kids sliding down it on flattened cardboard boxes and catching the devil from the town fathers for trespassing and sledding on the patchy grass. They had been very young, not quite ten, when Mickey had his first brush with the law.

“What do you think you’re doing, son?”

Mickey looked up into the face of the chief of police and everyone thought he was going to wet his pants right there in front of the whole world.

“Um, nothing?”

“You children get on out of here now, before I have to lock you all up! You hear me?”

Beth giggled to remember how they had abandoned their cardboard and run in every direction to escape incarceration.

She remembered flying kites on the beach in the winter and all those stories they told and retold…you see, as long as things looked about the same and they told and retold the same stories, the past was still alive. They could all stay young and live forever. In that moment, that was what she wanted—for her life to be as it had been before her father died and to live forever in that corner of her childhood world.

“Turn left here?” Mr. Brown said, snapping her out of her daydream.

“Yes, left here and then right to that driveway on the left. Yes. Left here.”

“Welcome home,” Mr. Brown said, and put the car in park, leaving the engine to continue its rumbling. “Always good to be home, ain’t it?”

She simply said, “Yeah, it is.” What she wanted to say was something else entirely. She wanted to say, You don’t know how complicated this is. I might be swallowed alive in the next year. Get me out of here. But she didn’t.

She only said, “Yeah, it is.”

Beth leaned forward in her seat to size up the Island Gamble. She thought she had known exactly what to expect. The house would loom large, spooky, and scare the daylights out of her with its enormity. But it didn’t. She was ship-shape. Her shutters were straight, her white clapboards glistened from a recent paint job, and her silver tin roof mirrored the enormous clouds overhead like the compact mirror of a dowager. The Island Gamble seemed sweet, grandmotherly, and nostalgic, as safe a haven as one could ever want. At the sight of it she became emotional and suddenly she wanted to cry. There was her mother’s old Volvo wagon and her Aunt Maggie’s car too. They were there, waiting for her.

She got out and liberated Lola from her crate, hooking her leash to her collar. She paid Mr. Brown and he deposited her luggage at the foot of the steps, meaning she would have the pleasure of hauling it all up the steps and into the house and then up another two flights to the second floor.

“Thanks,” she said, and gave him five dollars instead of the ten she would have given him if he had taken her bags inside.

Mr. Brown shrugged his shoulders, got back into his van, put it in reverse, and backed out of her life.

Lola was nosing around, sniffing the lantana and the pittosporum, when a screen door slammed against its frame.
Thwack!
Beth looked up to see her mother and Aunt Maggie hurrying down the steps to greet her.

“He-ey!” Aunt Maggie called out in a singsong. “Come on and give your auntie a kiss, you bad girl!”

“I’m not bad,” she said, and smiled.

“Yes she is!” Mom said. “Come here, Lola baby!”

“What about kissing your daughter?” she said.

“After I scratch my granddog,” she said, gave Beth a slap on her bottom, and scooped up Lola from the grass. “Look at my precious widdle baby!” Lola proceeded to wash Susan’s face, one slurp at a time. “Come see, Maggie! Our Lola’s got your nose and my chin!”

“Well, look at that! Would y’all look at this little bit of a fur ball? Hey, darlin’.” Aunt Maggie allowed Lola to lick her hand, much like you might kiss the pope’s ring, and then she turned her attention to Beth, narrowing her famous blue eyes. “All right now, missy. Want to tell your aunt what in the world you did to your hair?”

“I merely enhanced the red.”

“I’ll say! Whew! Well, hon, it’s just hair, isn’t it?” She sighed so large Beth caught the fragrance of her toothpaste.

Aunt Maggie, the self-proclaimed matriarch of the family, did not like Beth’s hair. Apparently. Beth did not give a rip what she thought. She was there to do them a favor, not to get a makeover. She was immediately annoyed but hiding it pretty well. She deemed it unwise to arrive and start bickering right away.

“Don’t you pick on my child,” her mom said to Maggie, and gave Beth a dramatic hug, fingering her ringlets. “I happen to love red hair!”

Beth took Lola back from her. As usual, her mother had read her mind.

“Let me help you with the bags, kiddo,” Aunt Maggie said, groaning under the weight of her duffel bag. “Lawsamercy, chile! What you got in here? Bricks?”

“Books,” she said, “and more books. Sorry. This one’s worse.”

Everyone took a bag and they grumbled their way up the stairs, across the small back porch, and into the kitchen.

“Where do y’all want me to sleep?”

“Take your old room for now, but when we leave you can rotate bedrooms if you want,” Aunt Maggie said. “You must be starving. I made lunch, so why don’t you go wash airplane and dog off your hands and we can eat?”

Airplane and dog? She was almost twenty-three years old. Did she
really
need someone to tell her to wash her hands?

“Sure,” she said, kicked off her flip-flops, and took two of her bags up the steps to her old room that had never really been hers.

The bedroom where Beth had spent many nights housed her parents’ four-poster bed, which had come into their hands when her grandparents went to their great reward. When her mother and stepfather sold the house on Queen Street and moved in with her Aunt Maggie and Uncle Grant just as they were moving to California, her mother had sold most of their belongings in an undistinguished yard sale and brought only the most important pieces of furniture and some other things with her. Those things that mattered to her and those she thought mattered to Beth, and yes, that was another issue Beth had with her. How could someone else decide what was important to you?

The big mirror was the first artifact to arrive, followed by an old grandfather clock that chimed when it was in the mood. But the mirror was the thing. The Mirror, the curious and well-used doorway for those no longer of the flesh, was firmly installed in her Aunt Maggie’s living room the week before her mother married Simon Rifkin. So her mother’s exodus back to the island had actually begun before Beth realized what was going on. Maggie had always wanted the mirror back, saying it was original to the house. She had whined about that thing like it was made out of the skin of her children. But that’s how Beth’s Aunt Maggie was—acquisitive to the tenth power. Her mom didn’t mind returning it, saying she didn’t need the deceased walking around her house at all hours anyway. This made her mom happy and Aunt Maggie happy and Beth, well, not so much if she had recognized its departure as a sign of the times.