He puts his hand up the back of my shirt. “No bra,” he whispers, his first words in a long time.
No breasts, I feel like saying, but he’s about to find that out. His hand begins to travel around to the front. When it’s just below my armpit, I reach up and pull it out. I stand up, the breeze blowing cold on my spit-soaked face.
“Prude,” he calls as I begin walking toward the lights of the cottages. “Stuck-up prude!”
There is only one light on in our cottage. The bedrooms are dark, and the other lamp in the living room is broken, smashed to pieces on the floor. Patrick and Elyse are on opposite ends of the couch, crying.
“They’re going to get a divorce!” Elyse wails when she sees me.
“No, they’re not.”
“I think they are,” Patrick says, the skin around his eyes even redder than his sunburn.
“They just had a fight,” I say.
“You weren’t here. It wasn’t a normal fight. She tried to strangle him.”
“They were drunk. They won’t even remember it tomorrow.” I realize they don’t understand about the drinking. They take the drunk behavior as seriously as the sober behavior. They don’t get the problem at all. “They’re alcoholics.”
“What’s that?” Elyse asks.
“It’s when you can’t stop drinking alcohol, like vodka and gin and all that stuff. The alcohol makes them behave like that. They can’t help it. It’s not really them talking.”
“They’re not alcoholics,” Patrick says.
“Yes, they are, Patrick.” My mother explained to me about my father’s drinking this winter. She figured out that he was an alcoholic on their honeymoon, and it only got worse. She tried to leave him twice before, but he promised to change and did for a while, but then slipped back. She told me it was like a sickness, only the people who have it don’t believe they’re sick.
“Gardiner has a job and a house and he’s the president of the tennis association at the club. He’s not an alcoholic.”
“Have you ever seen him sober at the end of the night?”
“Tons of times.” He’s lying. He can’t bear to believe my father has a flaw. But he’s crying. “That guy Murphy who sits in the corner of the sub shop. He’s an alcoholic, Daley.”
“I’m just saying that they drink a lot and they don’t mean half of what they say to each other. It will all be forgotten tomorrow morning.”
Elyse crawls into my lap and I stroke her arms and the bandages on her arms. Patrick sucks his thumb hard. I watch them both fall asleep, and after a while I carry Elyse into our room. I hear her fall back asleep immediately. I don’t go to sleep for a long time. My heart is throbbing and I find myself worrying that they are right, that they are going to get a divorce. As much as Catherine annoys me, I don’t want to be home alone with my father. I don’t want to be the only one left for him to yell at.
When I wake up, Elyse is not in the bed beside me. I hear laughter in the kitchenette, the coffeepot gurgling. No divorce. I put on my bathing suit and a pair of shorts. Frank is on the couch, just waking up, and when he sees me he shakes his head and tsk-tsks me with his finger. Why would I be in trouble and not him? The chatter has stopped in the kitchenette. They’re all there, my father, Catherine, and Patrick, all standing in the narrow space between the fridge and the counter, and Elyse on a stool, eating her sugar-coated cereal. Catherine whispers something to her children and they leave the room. Even Frank slips out the sliding glass door.
My father and Catherine look at each other and sip their coffee. There is some charge in the air I can’t identify. Maybe they are going to get a divorce. And they’re telling me first, so I can break it to Patrick and Elyse. I’ll be unemotional, I decide. I’ll say that it’s for the best.
“Daley,” Catherine begins. The V in her bathrobe has widened, and I can see the long nipples of her breasts.
“Sit down,” my father says to me, in a sudden guttural voice.
I move toward a counter stool.
“I said sit down.”
“I am,” I say, and my voice breaks. So much for unemotional.
“Daley, your father and I—”
My father breaks in. “I don’t know who you think you are, but I will not have you come down here with all the lies your mother has fed you. I’m sorry.” There is nothing sorry about him and the taut purple tendons running up his neck. “I’m sorry that you have to live with her, see her, listen to her, see those god-awful friends of hers. But if you start believing what she tells you, then you are an even bigger idiot than I thought.”
“Do you really think we’re alcoholics, Daley?”
I can’t find my voice. The stool feels so small beneath me.
“Do you really think this”—she points to the water through the glass door—”is the lifestyle of alcoholics? Are we passed out every night on the floor? Do we have bottles in our closets? Are we asking for money on street corners?”
I answer no to each of her questions.
“So what’s an alcoholic, in your opinion?”
“Someone who gets drunk all the time.”
“Do we get drunk all the time? Are we drunk right now?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s eight o’clock in the morning and we’re drinking coffee. Are we drunk right now?”
“No.”
“Maybe you’re drunk right now,” my father says. “Maybe you were drunk last night when you had your little talk with Patrick and Elyse.”
Catherine pats his leg to shush him.
“Maybe you and your fucking mother were drunk when you left my house with all my mother’s goddamn jewelry. If I’m an alcoholic, she’s a goddamn criminal.” He makes like he’s going to hit me and I almost want him to, want to have some mark my mother will see when I get back. But he just walks out of the cottage, muttering fucking bitch a few times and shaking his clenched hands around before careening down the path out of view.
Catherine finally notices that her boobs are hanging out of her robe and pulls it tighter. “We leave tomorrow, Daley. Could you just keep your trap shut until we drop you off at Water Street?”
The blond boy is at the pool, hanging his feet in at the deep end, talking to three sisters from Wisconsin who arrived yesterday. They all look at me as I go down the shallow end steps, then he says something and they all burst out laughing. I go under quickly. They are still laughing when I come back up. The youngest girl swims toward me.
“Is your name Prudence?” she asks, and the others behind her crack up again.
“Go to hell,” I say, before I register how young she is, not much older than Elyse. Her eyes widen and fill with tears. She didn’t know what she was asking, and I feel terrible.
I skip lunch and spend the afternoon in the cottage alone. I don’t care if my heart starts to pound. I’m not scared of that anymore. I look at the phone and think about calling my mother at work, but there’s the disapproving Jean to get past and I know I won’t be able to speak anyway. I’ll just cry when I hear her voice and she’ll get worried that something is really wrong. Or I’ll yell at her for telling me he was an alcoholic in the first place.