Emily started to run up the beach. Her feet pounded the wet sand. The man's hands fluttered madly now and his sharpening face was flushed and contorted. His wife waded out, holding up her yellow shift from the water; she pointed to him and yelled.
Emily told Lila to stay with the woman and then ran into the surf. Her body rippled under a wave; she flicked her feet like fins and pulled herself forward with breaststrokes. She saw the man just beyond the wake and thought of her own aging parents. Her heart beat fast; she could feel her hips and ribs pressing down the water. She rose to the surface and swam quickly to him. He grabbed her, strangling his arms around her like a lover. She let out a chain of silver bubbles.
She wedged her foot against his stomach and pushed hard — his bathing suit went down to his knees and floated gracefully off. She scooted up quickly for air, grabbed him across the shoulder, and settled her other hand on the loose skin of his waist.
They started moving slowly, and after a few yards, the man said weakly, “Underwater you looked like a mermaid.”
Emily swam hard, concentrating on the flat of green to be crossed and the beige beach and blue sky beyond it.
Lila emerged from a wave, swam to them, and took the man's other arm. “I can carry him,” Emily said.
“But he's heavy,” Lila said.
They tugged at the man from each side. Emily thought Lila was purposely swimming too fast and she saw her looking down through the water at the man's body, squinting her eyes to make out the edges of his genitals. Emily swam hard. “Hold your breath,” she said each time a wave rose over them.
Their feet touched a sandbank and they moved into shallow water. “Are you okay to stand?” Emily said.
They helped him up the beach. She guessed he was seventy or so and she could tell he was embarrassed. His wife ran to him and wrapped a moss-green towel around his waist. He pulled from them. “I'm fine now,” he said and staggered toward his blanket.
Emily lay on her stomach, letting the sun ease and loosen her muscles. She was trying to even her breath and figure out why she felt annoyed at Lila: because she had told her to stay on shore, because she could have been drowned and then everyone would have said it was Emily's fault. She thought how young Lila looked in her bathing suit. Her cheek pressed to the sand, flushed, as she watched the ghost crabs tickle out of holes, then, like tiny race cars, speed back in.
“I'm sorry,” Lila said. “If I did anything wrong.”
Emily sat up. “I don't know,” she said. “I just wanted to save that man myself.”
Lila laughed. “Maybe another will go down.”
“Yeah, maybe all the men on the island will go out there and I'll save each and every one.” She didn't wait for Lila to answer, but got up, walked to the water's edge, and scanned the long line where sea and sky met. He probably loves this girl, Emily thought.
“Want to walk down to the kettle,” Lila yelled to her.
“I'll take you in the car to get a soda first,” Emily said. As she turned and made her way back, she saw Lila looking strangely at her. “You know,” she said. “You must be a weird mother to have.”
Emily smiled. “You don't have to tell me that.”
Lila tipped the Coke can to her lips, then let it bump her thigh as she walked. She was watching Emily move, the way you could nearly see her joints work. The skin on her chest and shoulders was patch-brown and slightly wrinkled. I'll look like that, Lila kept thinking, and it was just as surprising as when, years earlier, leaning over her cousin's bathing suit, she'd seen her breasts, pink nipples, like the world's most delicate embroidery.
Sometimes it would occur to Lila that she was more interested in Emily than Eddie. Lila would try to think the way Emily did — about men mostly and always about water. To Lila, Emily's mind was like a light source always shaded, a sheet slung over the window, a towel draped over a lamp.
“Do you like having a kid and all that?” Lila said.
“Sometimes it's good,” Emily said. She reached down and poked at shells. “What do you think?”
Lila said, “I wouldn't want to be like my mom or do the things some ladies do.”
Emily tied a calico scallop shell to the strings of her bikini. “You don't have such clear ideas of what you like and don't after a while.”
“I hope I always will.”
“I hope you do,” said Emily. Birds pattered in front of them, always flying up a few feet before they passed.
From the corners of her eyes, Lila watched the little tummy that seemed to rest on the elastic of Emily's bathing suit bottoms.
“I think I see a beached fish up there,” Emily said. “It looks like a shark.”
“I see it,” Lila said. She wasn't nervous about being with Eddie's mother now, just a little strained.
They both jogged toward where it lay skewed on the sand.
Lila thought of a time she'd walked with her parents on the beach. It was one of those memories before her fourth birthday when everything came to her as sensation: the wind trying to push her to the wet sand, the waves chasing her, the shells she wanted but was too slow to get before the white water took them back into the sea.
The shark was four feet long and solid like a huge piece of rubber. Its mouth had little sand bugs running in and out, and one eye gazed to the sky.
“Let's roll it over,” Emily said, using a piece of driftwood to poke its belly.
“Why?” Lila said. “It's dead.”
“Help me.” Emily put down the Coke can and pushed against the fish. Lila snuggled her can in the sand and helped Emily heave.
“Eddie used to want to take these beached fish home,” Emily said as the fish flopped over, showing a white stomach and pale blue sex parts.
“Think it died of old age?” Lila said.
“I guess so,” Emily said. “Do you love my son?”
Lila didn't speak for a few seconds and then said, “I think so.” She kicked the shark softly, little taps with the smooth pad of her sale. “What kills me is that life slips off them.”
“Yeah,” Emily said, kicking the shark hard with her toes. Lila raised a foot, stood on the carcass, and offered a hand to Emily. They balanced together on top of the shark. Lila saw that its right eye was filled with sand. She put her toe near it, and a few grains brushed and drizzled from the bottom lip of the eye over the gray-blue skin.
EIGHTEEN. EARRING
Emily cut the peaches she had soaked in warm water. The skins pulled off easily as a wet bathing suit and she sliced them paper-thin. Holding one in front of the kitchen window, she saw pale orange veins, then laid it over the others which over-lapped slightly like fallen dominoes. Each time she touched it, the angel food cake gave off tiny confectionery sugar puffs. The sound track from Camelot was on the record player.
She ate another fig from the white bowl. Above all other fruit, Emily loved the ass-shaped fig. The flushed purple-green skin and the inside tentacles, sea-like and sweet. And there was that grainy way it made your tongue feel if you ate too many. She picked them carefully from the tree in the backyard near the fence. Squeezing them just enough to know exactly how ripe they would be.
She hummed the songs with the record and thought of Lancelot and the thin, girlish way she'd always envisioned him. She had a theory that all men were either like the beautiful boyish Lancelot or like Arthur, burly and earthy. The crab bisque steamed dreamily on the stove and the cobia, surrounded by green pepper and mushrooms, was baking slowly in the oven.
Birdflower was coming over and Eddie had invited Lila to dinner. A family occasion, she thought, turning the cake slowly around and admiring it as if she were in front of a mirror in a new skirt. After dinner she had promised to pierce Eddie's ear.