“Yes ma’am.” Robbie’s lips were tinted wild cherry. Kneeling, one hand braced on his sister’s head, he pushed in the chrome knobs to lock both doors.
DaVita pushed a ragged straw bag between them. “You have to both be watching this for me ’cause our sandwiches and everything are in here. That’ll be your job, okay?”
“Yes ma’am.”
But Robbie pushed the bag into one corner, Gina clambered over the transmission hump, and they sat close, clasping sticky hands.
Tildy was not in the best frame of mind for a weekend drive. It was hot and growing hotter and DaVita unbuttoned her shirt; a lacy scar curved out from under her bikini top. She snooped restlessly through debris in the glove compartment.
“Can’t you go any faster? We’re liable to miss the prime tanning period.”
“It’s an old car.”
But Tildy put a hair’s extra pressure on the accelerator. A delivery van zoomed past, honking. She checked the odometer, then the rearview mirror; 12.7 miles and still not a word out of those kids.
They reached the coast and turned south past fruit stands and reptile museums and pastel stucco bunkers offering live crabs by the bag. Tildy rolled her window down to catch some of that salt breeze, but all she could smell was diesel smoke. Jammed up behind a laboring trailer truck, they passed slowly by a tongue-shaped inlet where men were wading waist-deep and scooping great weed balls into olive-drab buckets on shore. A guard sat nearby on a camp chair, shotgun across his knees. His bald head was red and peeling.
“Water hyacinth,” DaVita explained. “It fucks up boat propellers so they rip it out, chop it up, spray it with molasses and use it for cattle feed.”
“I’m impressed. Where’d you pick all that up?”
“Those are boys from the farm. Little bit ago you coulda seen Donnie out there pulling twice as much as anyone else.”
Robbie broke his vow of silence: “My dad’s so big he could pull a train.”
DaVita howled with laughter, reached over to squeeze a little baby fat leg. “But he couldn’t be the caboose, could he?”
“No ma’am.”
Past a line of palms, through a couple of S curves, and DaVita said, “Take a right, your next available right.”
They rumbled down a sandy trail descending gently toward water that was dirty green with shreds of white over the surface where the wind kicked it up. With a long sweep of sky behind it, the silvery beach was right out of an airline magazine. The only problem was the barbed wire they would have to climb to reach it; and the big red NO TRESSPASSING signs every ten feet. To the left, where the shore swelled out round and fat like the toe of a sadist’s boot, was a power generating station. If anything was coming out of the monstrous stacks it was colorless.
“Park right here and you’ll be invisible from the road.”
“‘Violators subject to fine and imprisonment’?”
“It’s all right. I’ve been here lots of times and it’s always deserted. We won’t have to bother about suits.”
DaVita padded the top strands of wire with folded towels, boosted Tildy up, then lifted the children over to her. With a vault and a spin she cleared the wire herself, landing gracefully with arms spread as in the finish of a tap routine. They picked a spot below small dunes tufted with sawgrass and laid a blanket down. Robbie took the plastic pail, Gina the matching shovel, and they wandered off along the hot sand.
“They’re independent,” DaVita said. “I like that. You been married a few years, how come you don’t have any kids?”
“It never came up really, we were both away so much. Now? Who needs one more thing to fail at. I don’t have so much confidence in myself as a mother.”
“That didn’t stop me. Fuck it, I know I don’t do all the things I should, but they’re tough and they’ll get by — or not — regardless of what I do.”
DaVita peeled off her clothes, then her bikini, and stood hipshot, humming softly, challenging Tildy to look.
“You think I got a good body?”
The scar was a tilted capital C under one tiny breast and her sloping crotch was shaved. She pinched her thighs, slapped at them, thrust herself forward with palms on her ass.
“Too much bone, you know. You can count every rib I’ve got.”
Staring at this scrawny, breakable woman, Tildy did not know what she felt, but it was sitting heavily in the pit of her stomach.
“For a man my tits are too small but I like them just the way they are, and like I tell Donnie, anything over a mouthful is wasted. I think you maybe got a little more up here. Come on, let’s see. Let’s see who’s bigger.”
Tildy looked down at the chipped pink polish on DaVita’s toenails, then over at the surf sliding in, frothing, bouncing up in little wedge-shaped waves. Whatever the spirit was, wherever it was leading, she’d get with it. Was this what DaVita meant by toughness? With stunning speed, she got naked.
“Zowie.” DaVita whistled through her teeth. “You got gorgeous lines. Yeah, everything tapers just right. But when you get right down to it I’d say we were about even. My breasts are firmer, see, the way you hang just makes them look bigger. I bottle-fed my kids from day one ’cause I didn’t want that droop.”
“I’m a thirty-two B. How about you?”
“I take an A cup myself, but I still say we’re even.”
This seemed to satisfy DaVita and she lay back on the blanket brushing hair out of her face, a fine web of sweat along her collarbone.
“Can you see the kids? Are they okay?”
“I guess so.”
Tildy stretched out on her stomach. Hot as it was, there were goose bumps all up and down her legs. She shifted from side to side, digging herself a hollow in the sand. The itch of the blanket was not unpleasant. After a while she felt her flesh soften, her muscles relax. The sun was directly overhead and the still air seemed to hum with its clean yellow fire.
“I love the heat.” DaVita sat up and began to anoint herself with olive oil from a glass jar. “Mmm, that’s good,” massaging her breasts, scissoring her fingers on shiny, tumid nipples. “I hope I’m not making you uptight. When I’m close to the ocean like this with the sun on me I feel like the first woman on earth.”
Tildy ducked her head and said nothing.
“Don’t you want some of this? You’ll get an evil burn without it. I’ve never seen skin so white.”
Tildy felt cool glass against her hand. “Not yet. Not just yet.”
“Demon heat.”
DaVita’s squelching hands moved in wider and wider circles as she opened her legs and Tildy became aware of layered fragrances, the slightly rancid oil, something sharp and gaseous released from DaVita’s body. She pressed her eyes harder into the crook of her arm and there were blinking yellow dots in the blackness behind them. This is ridiculous, Tildy told herself. You want to look, she wants you to look. So go ahead and look.
DaVita had three fingers of one hand jammed up into herself, the other hand softly pivoting at the top of her hairless seam. Tildy was not aroused by what she saw, not physically; but DaVita bit down on her lip, Tildy looked into a face that was a fixed animal mask of something resembling pain, and was moved. Moved by a raw tenderness. This frantic, despairing woman inches away with every nerve exposed. It was touching and sweetly sad and almost like looking at herself.
“Oooh, I’m coming, coming.”
And quickly Tildy pushed DaVita’s hand aside and replaced it with her own. Her fingers were numb, a set of tools; she felt everything with her eyes.
Heaving, DaVita flipped onto her side and hugged her knees. “Thank you,” she whispered.
The wrong thing to say. Those two words of gratitude, and the deadly confusion behind them, pushed outside the magic circle, destroyed illusion like a long knife slicing through the center of a movie screen.