He pressed me against the porch railing and slipped off my underwear, which I looped around one ankle. I held the railing and Dennis held my breasts. The wind blustered in my ears when I faced him, so I turned away, and gradually my attention shifted as well, and I watched the boat as Dennis moved inside me. There was a liquid compass the size of a man’s fist on the boat console, and I imagined its needle jerking with every wave.
Dennis wanted my attention. Sometimes when he lost it, he let it go, and sometimes—this time included—he fought for it. He pulled out of me, keeping his hands against my hips. Then I was being pivoted, facing away from the house, with my hips squeezed against the porch railing and my torso pitched out over the water, holding on to the railing with both hands. He spread my legs with his knee and circled my waist with one arm, which was my cue, I felt, to let go.
That weekend, before leaving for Bette’s, Margo had packed five stuffed animals and a smattering of bedtime books and every pair of shoes she owned—four, total. I didn’t know how other only children coped with the long quiet hours, but Margo found ways to amuse herself—she put on performances for us, she tromped through the backyard, examining every stone and stick, and she sat coloring on the kitchen floor while I cooked or cleaned. She’d recently developed a habit of lining up her stuffed animals and talking to them as she puttered around her room. “Mimo,” she would say to her stuffed monkey, “this is where the toys go when you’re done with them. Nettie, this is where I keep my pajamas.”
The only other time she’d stayed at Bette’s overnight, she’d twirled so long on the swing in the backyard that her hair had tangled in the chains and Bette had been forced to cut her free. Her beautiful dark brown hair, chopped before I’d been ready—it had broken my heart. Margo was a somewhat serious little person and enjoyed the company of adults; Bette claimed to prefer conversing with her niece rather than with most of her friends. The plans for this weekend included visiting the Crandon Park Zoo—Margo had asked me to call her aunt ahead of time to make certain Mimo would be invited along—and swimming at Dennis’s parents’ pool, and baking cupcakes with Bette’s lover, a pastry chef named Daphne. When we’d dropped her off, Bette and Daphne had been arguing. Dennis had taken Margo inside to unpack while Bette and I stood on the porch. “She’s so stubborn,” said Bette. She blew a thin stream of smoke and handed me the cigarette. I checked to see that Dennis was out of view, then took it.
“What’s the problem with Daphne?”
“She has a bee in her bonnet about getting a cat. Imagine us, the lesbians and the cat. I can barely stand having people in my house, not to mention vermin.”
“Cats aren’t vermin,” I said, though I more or less agreed about them—I’d never had any affection for them, but this was something I’d learned to keep to myself, since most people thought cats were just great. “Lots of people have perfectly clean cats.”
“Plus, she keeps making these spicy Mediterranean desserts, and I don’t have the heart to tell her, but Frances, they are not good.”
I thought that probably Bette had told her, and more than once. “I try to imagine what Dennis puts up with.”
“What?”
I took another drag on the cigarette. “You know, when I’m annoyed with him. I remind myself that there’s plenty to annoy him, too.”
“For once you might just commiserate.”
“Sorry.”
Across the street, at a bungalow even smaller than Bette’s, a man walked to the street to check his mail. He had a life-size manatee mailbox, the kind with the manatee standing on its tail and holding the mail slot in its mouth. The man waved at us and walked inside again.
“That’s guy’s a poofter,” said Bette.
“Bette!”
“I know I shouldn’t talk, but my word—he sashays!”
I laughed in spite of myself. “Stop it.”
She elbowed me gently. “Seriously, though, I’m thinking of kicking Daphne to the curb.”
“Will you miss her? Will you miss anything about her?”
She thought for a moment. “Not the spicy desserts, that’s for sure.”
Daphne was the most recent in a string of girlfriends, the first of whom had been Bette’s diving partner, Jane. I’d met Jane in person only once, years earlier; as it turned out, she’d been a decade older than Bette, and married. She had salt-and-pepper hair and a large, patrician nose, and her angular, rawboned body had reminded me of a waterbird. She hadn’t smiled when she’d shaken my hand. After Bette had run out on her wedding, she’d seen a lot of Jane for a time, but then suddenly they didn’t see each other at all. The second woman who had come to occupy Bette’s attention was Delilah. She had crooked teeth and long, straight brown hair that might never have been cut. This relationship had ended for reasons I never knew, and it was not easy to recall the sequence of infatuations after that. Bette’s circle of friends now encompassed, almost exclusively, a certain ilk of women: feminists and artists. As for Daphne, Margo liked her, and even Gloria and Grady invited her to dinners and holidays, and everyone loved her baking, but I had never sensed an uncontrollable affection between them.
Bette had left her job at the Barnacle shortly after Dennis and I married. With her part of the inheritance from their grandmother, she’d rented a storefront in downtown Coconut Grove and opened a dive shop. She’d started small, organizing day trips and classes, but within two years she’d moved into a larger space and had a staff of six. It had been more than five years since we’d camped together at Fisheating Creek, and still her hair was cut very short.
After Dennis came out of Bette’s house—he was a little rattled at leaving Margo behind, I recall—we’d gotten into the car, and Margo had stood waving happily at us from the porch, clutching Mimo and leaning against her aunt’s slender hip.
The package bobbed along while we ate breakfast, and every few minutes either Paul or Dennis walked to the window.
“Still there,” Dennis said.
“No sign of the pickup,” Paul said.
“Our detectives,” said Marse, rolling her eyes. “I say, call the Coast Guard and be done with it.”
“I agree,” I said, and received a sharp look from Dennis.
I’d barely spoken to Paul during breakfast, but afterward, when I was washing the dishes, he came up behind me. Marse and Dennis were on the porch, drinking coffee and keeping an eye on the Becks’ house. Paul took a plate from my hands and dried it with a dish towel. We continued for several minutes—me washing, him drying—without speaking. “Frances,” he said after the last dish was in the cabinet. “I thought maybe we could walk the flats while they fish. I don’t feel like fishing anyway, do you?”
“Not really.” I should have known Paul would be interested in the flats—he owned a plant nursery down south. “Did you want to go now?”
“Why not? There’s no wind, and the tide’s out.”
“Put on a T-shirt so you won’t burn.”
“Do I need shoes?”
I nodded. “There are some in the generator room. What size?”
“Eleven.”
“I’ll meet you down there.”
On the porch, Marse was staring through binoculars at the shore, and Dennis was telling a story I’d heard half a dozen times. “Right about there,” he said, guiding her binoculars. The buttons of his shirt were undone: Paul’s influence, I surmised. “Just off Gables Estates—those gigantic houses with the fake columns and the sculptures in the yard, those ugly houses.” Marse put down the binoculars and Dennis continued, “It just looked like a mannequin, to tell you the truth. That’s what I thought—someone had lost a mannequin in the middle of the waterway. I was twelve years old. My mother went crazy when she saw. She started cursing like a trucker. I’d never heard her curse like that. Fucking Mafia, she yelled. Fucking no-good sons of bitches, fucking drug-dealing pieces of shit. You would’ve thought she knew the guy. My father covered her mouth with his hand, and we drifted right by the body. I just stood there at the helm, watching it float by. It was a man, and he was twisted out of shape, like both arms were broken, and I could see one open eye, a bunch of bruises on his face. My father called the marine police, and they showed up in thirty minutes or so, and we went home. We had planned to go to the yacht club and get some sandwiches or something, but we just went home.”