Return to Sullivans Island (3 page)

So, in addition to house arrest, Beth would have the company of every dead person the family had ever known, if you believed in that stuff, which she did, because she knew it to be so from firsthand experience.

This was the moment of Beth’s return, and moving into the house required considerable energy. After twisting her spine in every conceivable direction, Beth finally managed to get her luggage upstairs and opened her bags. She took Lola’s dishes and a Ziploc bag of her food downstairs—after she washed her hands—and placed it on the kitchen floor in a spot that was out of the way. Lola began to drink, lapping the water in such an anxious way that everyone remarked she was just adorable.

Maggie had produced a spread of tuna salad sandwiches with no crusts, pickles, celery, and olives, iced tea, and sliced watermelon. This was the hallmark hot-weather lunch of their childhood.

“This looks great,” Beth said, determined to be pleasant.

“Good, honey, why don’t we say grace?” Maggie said, and sat in her usual spot at the head of the table. She snapped her linen napkin in the air and pulled it across her lap, bowing her head, mumbling some words in a voice she never used except for serious prayer and holiday toasts.

“Amen,” they all said.

“My sister can make tuna salad like nobody’s business,” Susan said, taking three sandwich wedges, a load of pickles, celery, and olives. She passed the platter to Beth. “Saltshaker?”

“Hungry?” Maggie said, pushing the salt toward Susan, and winked at Beth.

Beth took three wedges and more pickles, celery, and olives to support her mother’s healthy appetite and passed the platter to her aunt.

“Don’t we have any potato chips?” Beth said. She couldn’t stop her inner devil from having a word.

It was well known within the family that Maggie thought everyone should act like an anorexic at meals. In her mind, it was unladylike to fill your plate, even if you had been stranded out in the ocean for ten days, eating nothing but raw seagull, and just came home from the hospital blistered and starving, barely recovered from life-threatening dehydration.

“No, darlin’. Sorry. I don’t keep that kind of thing in this house.”

Maggie scanned everyone’s plates, corrected her posture, and gingerly took two wedges for herself, two slices of Mrs. Fanning’s Bread ’n Butter pickles, and one small stick of celery. Then she smiled her smug little smile of superiority, the one that had irked Beth all her life.

It was sweltering. Beth was wearing a long, lightweight, pink scarf made of cotton gauze, twisted and double-looped around her neck, but now the room seemed warmer and even more humid, despite the ocean breeze and the ceiling fan, but mostly because of her Aunt Maggie’s opinions. So she unwound it, pulled it off, and horrified them with her cleavage.

Maggie inhaled with a great gasp. Maggie and Susan were markedly less endowed.

Her mother giggled and said, “She got those from Tom’s side of the family, I guess.”

“Gee-za-ree, honey! What’s happened to you?” Beth thought her aunt’s eyes were going to burst forth and join the olives. “You know, this is Sullivans Island and you just can’t go around like that!”

“Like what?” Susan said.

“Like, like…you know! With your tatas almost showing!”

“My what? Did you say my tatas?” Beth started to laugh but stopped when she saw how serious her aunt was. “Um, Aunt Maggie, this is how everyone dresses these days. Little tanks layered up, long scarves, tight jeans…it’s how we dress. It’s okay. Really. I can show you on Facebook.”

Beth looked around. Her mother’s face was confused. She had always trusted Beth’s sense of propriety in matters of clothes and so forth. It wasn’t as though she had come home tattooed all up and down her arms. Or with twenty little rings pierced through her lips and nose. But Beth decided her mother had bowed to Aunt Maggie’s judgment too. They should see what goes on in the world, Beth thought. And even though Beth thought Maggie could be an old-fashioned, out-of-touch, world-class prude, her face and neck got hot. She was pretty sure her skin matched her hair.

“I’m sure you’re right, Beth honey,” Maggie said. “I just don’t want people to get the wrong impression of you, that’s all.”

“What? Did Sullivans Island suddenly become some kind of Islamic fundamentalist country or something?”

“No, sweetheart,” Maggie said, and Beth loathed Maggie calling her
sweetheart
like you cannot imagine. “But you know, ahem”—Maggie cleared her throat, and Susan and Beth hated that gesture of hers because it was always the precursor to her reminding you that you were a big stupid idiot—“your Uncle Grant always says that the bait you use determines the kind of fish you catch, right? That’s all.”

Now Beth’s anger was on the rise.

“Well, I didn’t come here to fish. I put my life on hold and came here to watch this house so you two can go do your thing. How about instead of insulting me someone says thank you, Beth, for giving up a year of your life?”

There was complete silence at the table then. The only sound was the clicking of the ceiling fan, which seemed to grow louder by the second. Beth had been rude and knew she had better quickly make amends.

“Look, Aunt Maggie, I’m sorry, but here’s how it is. My hair is a little crazy, I know it, but it’s only color, for Pete’s sake. And humidity doesn’t help. And my top? I dress like everyone else my age. Believe me! You all are like a lot older than me, and maybe, just maybe, a little conservative? No one in Boston ever looked at me funny. Well, not anyone I knew anyway. I swear. Anyway, thanks for lunch. I’m gonna go unpack now and walk Lola on the beach.”

She left the table and put her plate in the dishwasher. Silence.

“Awesome tuna salad, Aunt Maggie. I’ll see y’all in about half an hour?”

“Just a minute, miss,” Mom said. “Sit down.”

Whenever Susan said
Just a minute, miss,
Beth knew the ice on which she was skating had grown thin. So she sat and Lola settled back down at her feet.

“Your Aunt Maggie and I thought long and hard about who to ask to watch the house, and you were the only candidate who made sense to us. Above all your cousins and everyone we could think of, you are the most responsible and you have good common sense.”

“Your momma is right,” Maggie said.

“And, we are a family, which means we come to each other in our hour of need. I won’t have you coming in here with a chip on your shoulder like you are so put upon to do this for me and for your aunt. It isn’t nice. So let’s drop the martyr attitude right now. I mean, I have done everything for you I ever possibly could, so let’s be fair. It’s one year, not the rest of your life.”

“Fine. Look, I know all this and I appreciate how you feel, but I don’t feel like getting pecked to death the minute I get here either. I mean, I’m almost twenty-three, right? Can I please have some respect as an adult?”

“If you want us to treat you like an adult, then perhaps—”

“Hold on, Maggie,” Susan said, and it was a good thing she did or Beth might have grabbed a sharp object and done her worst. “Beth’s right, you know. She is. Maybe we were a little harsh?”

Maggie sighed as only their mother, according to legend, had ever been able to do, and looked from her sister’s face to Beth’s.

“I’m sorry, Beth. I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I am so glad you’re here. I am. And I know everything’s going to be fine. You go on and unpack and walk that precious dog of yours. She is housebroken, isn’t she?”

“Yes. She’s housebroken.” Beth accidentally made a guttural sound, picked up Lola, and left the room.

The fact was that Lola was not entirely housebroken and there would be hell to pay if Maggie’s rugs got ruined. Beth made a mental note to double up on Lola’s outside schedule, wondering again how she got suckered into this.

Upstairs, Beth dropped Lola on the bed and Lola settled down to watch her. She hung up her clothes, arranged her ten pairs of flip-flops and four pairs of shoes on the racks in the closet, stacked her books on the floor, and made a pile of laundry to wash later on. It was remarkable to her that she could unpack almost four years of her life in under an hour.

“Want to go see the Atlantic Ocean?” she said to Lola.

Lola lifted her tiny head from the bed and then plopped down again, staring at Beth through the fringes of her long eyebrows. Lola, having had enough action for one day, was bone tired from her trip and needed a long nap.

“Okay,” she said, “you rest right there, don’t move, and I’ll be right back.”

It was just like having a baby, Beth thought, but a very hairy one that would never give her any sass. She changed into a T-shirt with a high neck to calm her aunt’s nerves.

Downstairs she found them in the kitchen, lunch cleared away and everything tidy as could be. They had moved on to the next item on their agenda. Maggie was painting Eiffel Towers on plastic wine-glasses, but Eiffel Towers that appeared to be dancing.

“Isn’t it unbelievable that you went from writing that ‘Geechee Girl Remembers’ column to teaching in Paris?”

“I’ll say!”

They stopped talking when Beth came in.

“All unpacked? Do you need anything?” Maggie said.

“No, everything is fine. Lola is zonked out. What are y’all doing?”

“Planning your momma’s bon voyage soirée. Want to help?”

“Sure,” she said, and sat at the table. “What can I do?”

“Here,” Maggie said, “stamp these napkins. Ink pad is in there.”

She handed Beth a small shopping bag with several packages of white paper cocktail napkins, an Eiffel Tower stamp, and a flat tin of black ink on a blotter pad. She opened everything, lined it up in front of her, and stared at it.

“Now what?” she asked. “When’s the party?”

“Next Saturday. Okay, let’s try one on an angle and one straight, in the corner there, and then we can decide which one we like best. What do you think?”

“Sure,” she said, and stamped two napkins, holding them up for judgment. “And the verdict is?”

“On an angle,” Mom said.

“I agree,” Maggie said.

“On an angle it is then,” Beth said, and proceeded to stamp away, thinking this was the most ridiculous job in the world. “So, who’s coming to the party?”

“Our whole clan,” Susan said. “Kids too.”

“Excuse my groan,” Beth said.

“Who makes you groan, darlin’?” Maggie said. “Doesn’t this look so good?” She held out a wineglass for us to observe her creation, and what could you say? She was right.

Beth had to give the devil her due. Maggie was one of those people who could duplicate the colors inside an abalone shell in bedroom paint and it would make you feel like a goddess when you woke up in the morning. She could spot a piece of driftwood on the beach, bring it home, redesign the living room around it, and have it featured in
Charleston Magazine
. She was the family wizard in all things artistic and culinary, while Beth and her mother were, well, not.

“Looks amazing,” Beth said, and continued to stretch her creative muscle by stamping napkins. “Uncle Henry’s boys are a pain in the neck. They’re coming too?”

“Yep. But it’s Uncle Henry who’s the colossal pain in the neck of all times,” Susan said, “not to mention our sister-in-law Teensy, right, Maggie?”

“It is poor taste to speak badly of one’s own family,” Maggie said. “And Henry is our patriarch, so he says.”

Beth giggled to herself. “Who doesn’t talk about their relatives?”

“You’re both right, of course,” Susan said, looking at them in false innocence. “I just think it’s a shame Henry can’t think of anything to talk about besides his wallet.”

“And too bad that Teensy can’t find clothes to fit her size zero cadaver,” Maggie said. “But maybe if she didn’t spend so much time in the loo—”

“She wouldn’t be so skinny,” Susan said, finishing Maggie’s sentence.

“Yeah, and it’s a pity Uncle Henry’s charming boys got kicked out of Sewanee for plagiarizing term papers from the Internet,” Beth said. “If they hadn’t been caught with that case of liquor and all those files, they’d still be in college.”

“Now, now,” Aunt Maggie said, “let’s be charitable. Phil’s going to finish up at Athens this fall and Blake is going to be a sophomore at Georgia State. They’ve learned their lessons.”

Beth and Susan just looked at each other and shook their heads.

“Yeah, sure,” Beth said. “And what about the rest of Uncle Timmy’s crew?”

“Uncle Timmy and his slightly less exciting family will be here Friday morning,” Susan said. “Crazy or not, I can’t wait to see every last one of them. I mean it, y’all.”

“Me too, but you have to say that Aunt Mary Jo is a little bit of a mouse,” Beth said. “At least their daughters are somewhere in the range of normal. Boring but normal.”

“Hush now,” Maggie said. “They cannot wait to see you! They told me so three times. Timmy said his girls said the only way they were coming was if you were here.”

“See?” Susan said, smiling like they had all just won the state lottery.

“See what?” Beth said. “If they are all staying here, this place is gonna be a crazy house! Where’s everyone gonna sleep? Do we have help to clean up and all?”

“What for?” Maggie said with her quiet smile. “We don’t need help. Why, we’re all healthy and you’re all young…If everyone pitches in, it won’t be a burden to anyone.”

Beth began to stamp napkins with a vengeance. She had been brought home in shackles to watch a house that would be watching her and to cook and clean for a bunch of ingrates. Her cheeks and neck were scarlet and she knew it.

“Have you heard from the twins?” Susan asked Maggie.

“Sophie’s coming for sure. I think. But Allison? Who knows about Miss Hoity-Toity? She’s too important to return phone calls,” Maggie said.

“She’s a pain in the A,” Susan said.

“Aunt Sophie’s coming?” Beth perked up then because Aunt Sophie was her favorite and she rarely saw her.

“As far as I know,” Maggie said. “She’s got a new cell number if you want it.”

“Definitely,” Beth said.

“Yeah, so big house party next weekend and then I’m off to Paris,” Susan said. “Incredible.”