“Quiet, Tish,” Trate said.
“Well, it is,” Tish said.
“Since the grown-ups were about to have a race, we decided to have a race of our own. The idea came from a little girl I despised — a thirteen-year-old whose name I’ve already forgotten. Iris? Irene? Yes, it was Irene.”
As I recalled the story, Irene was Rhoda’s mother, the woman who had drowned. Sandy seemed to be appropriating characters and plot, loosely reshaping both to suit the needs of a theme she had not yet revealed, a form of borrowing sometimes known as plagiarism. Apparently, she had decided to respond peacefully to Mary Margaret’s earlier provocation. If this, then, was an attempt at negotiated settlement, her story would have to make a point readily understood and accepted by Mary Margaret. Knowing better than to believe Sandy was in any way retreating, I began wondering how she could possibly transform tragedy into not only comedy but comedy that carried the additional burden of peace with honor. Or was she really seeking peace? As Katherine of France once remarked, “O bon Dieu! les langues des homines sont pleines de tromperies,” not to mention the tongues of women, too.
Fascinated, I listened intently as Sandy described the imaginary little brat named Irene, a girl who sounded very much like Mary Margaret. (This, then, was to be a parable of sorts. That long-ago feud twixt Sandy and the invented little monster was being related to illuminate the existing tension between Sandy and Mary Margaret.) It seemed that Irene, that darling little child, had irked Sandy from the beginning of the summer, taunting her, calling her names, embarrassing her in the presence of other children, once even revealing that Sandy wore a cotton training bra, how mortifying! On more than one occasion, surrounded by water as they were, Sandy had considered drowning (source material again) the horrid little creature, but had put such thoughts out of her mind as being beyond the capabilities of a mere slip of a fourteen-year-old. This night of nights, however, seemed to offer splendid opportunity for actually carrying out the foul deed, holding little Irene’s head under water while she gasped her last obscenity and then sank slowly from sight.
“What do you mean?” Tish asked, alarmed. “You mean you actually thought of murdering her?”
“Drowning her,” Sandy said.
“That’s murdering her.”
“I suppose.”
“I’ve never in my life hated a person enough to even dream of...”
“I was only fourteen,” Sandy said.
“Even so.”
“Emotions run high at fourteen.” She smiled at Mary Margaret. “We learn to control them when we get a bit older. Anyway, let me tell the rest of the story.”
“If you’re going to say you really did drown that little girl...”
“No, no, no,” Sandy said, and laughed.
“Thank God!”
“She said it was a funny story, Tish. Drowning somebody isn’t very funny.”
“I know, Johnny, but she also said she thought of it. She seriously considered it.”
“Let me finish, okay?” Sandy said.
“Well, go ahead,” Tish said reluctantly.
The band began playing just as Sandy started talking again, a Viennese waltz particularly unsuited to this supposedly hilarious tale she was tortuously unraveling.
“The grown-ups all got into their bathing suits,” she said, “and went down to the beach, leaving us kids alone together in the house. Irene began poking me in the belly, and telling the other kids I had a layer of fat around me...”
“What a horrible little child!” Tish said.
“And why didn’t we have our own little race to prove that I was a lousy swimmer even if I was obese.”
“Were you?” Trate asked.
“I was pretty fat that summer. I didn’t slim down until the following year. Just before I met the boys.”
I didn’t know which part of Sandy’s story was true and which was false any more, so I merely glanced at David, and he shrugged slightly, and both of us waited for the conclusion to this so-far hysterically funny tale based on an original underwater tragedy by Buster Crabbe.
“Naturally, all the kids thought it would be great fun to do what the grown-ups were doing, provided we didn’t do it on the same beach, and provided we didn’t do it in deep water. Then somebody... Irene, I think... remembered that the grown-ups had been drinking, and if we were about to do the same thing they were doing, we’d have to drink a little before going down to the water.”
“You sure knew some nice kids,” Tish said.
“Well, we were all very excited,” Sandy said. “It was two o’clock in the morning, and we could hear the grown-ups laughing down there on the beach, and getting drunk seemed like a very good idea to all of us.”
“Did you get drunk?”
“We did. That’s the point of the story.”
“I fail to see the point,” Tish said.
“She’s not finished yet,” Trate said impatiently.
“We took a bottle of scotch from the bar in the living room, and went down to a little beach about a hundred yards from where the grown-ups were laughing and yelling and having their race. We were all in bathing suits, and it was very cold, and I was beginning to shake all over. Irene kept poking me in the belly and saying somebody as fat as I was shouldn’t be shivering, and I kept thinking I was going to get her in the water and drown her.”
“Every time you say that...”
“Come on, Tish, they were just kids.”
“The fifteen-year-olds got bored and went off looking for boys. The twelve-year-olds took two or three swigs from the bottle and passed out cold. Irene and I sat sitting in the sand alone and drinking, she trying to get up the courage to go into the water, which we knew was freezing, and I getting up the courage to drown her. Around the bend in the beach, the grown-ups were having a high old time. We drank and we drank. Irene began to forget why she’d suggested the race. I began to forget I wanted to drown her. In fact, and this is what’s so funny about the story, in no time at all we discovered we had a lot in common and that we’d wasted half the summer fighting with each other when all along we might have been good friends. We ended up singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ and staggering up the narrow wooden steps that led from the beach to the house, and passing out on the back porch. It was a great night. We were friends for the rest of the summer.”
“Sandy,” David said dead-panned, “that has got to be the funniest story I’ve ever heard in my life.”
“It’s a nice story,” Mary Margaret said quietly.
“I thought you’d appreciate it,” Sandy said.
“I don’t get it,” Trate said. “What’s so funny about it?”
“Are you still friends?” Tish asked.
“Who?”
“You and Irene.”
“No,” Sandy said quickly. “She drowned last year at Coney Island.”
Mary Margaret burst out laughing, slapping the tabletop with one of her delicate hands and almost knocking over the pitcher of beer.
“I don’t think that’s funny, either,” Tish said.
“Mary Margaret?” Sandy said, leaning forward.
“Yes, Sandy?”
“Want to ski with us tomorrow?”
“How do I know you won’t try to drown me?” Mary Margaret said, and smiled.
“No water up there,” Sandy said, and returned the smile.
“Then, I guess I’m safe,” Mary Margaret said.
ME: She was safe. I thought she was safe.