But it was always difficult for a stranger to guess Rosalie’s destination, she approached each journey with such great expectations. Sometimes in the autumn her date would tell his parents that he was going hunting and would then take Rosalie—who was under no kind of surveillance once she left the rooming house—out for a night in a tourist cabin on the turnpike, and when he picked her up on those Saturday afternoons she usually wore a chrysanthemum and an oak leaf pinned to her lapel and carried a small suitcase with an Amherst or Harvard label stuck to it as if all the pleasures of a football week end—the game, the tea dance, the faculty reception and the prom—were what she was expecting. She was never disappointed nor was she ever disabused. There was never a point, when she hung up her coat in the tourist cabin while he tried to burn off the damp with a fire, where the difference between this furtive evening and the goal-post snake dance would depress her, nor did she ever seem to reach a point where these differences challenged or altered her expectations. Most of her expectations were collegiate and now, as they found their way out of the city, she began to sing. Popular music passed directly from the radio and the bandstand into some retentive space in her memory, leaving a spoor of cheerful if repetitious and sentimental lyrics.
Going out of the city they passed those congested beaches that lie within its limits and that spread, with a few industrial interruptions, for miles to the south. Now, in the middle of the morning, the life of the beaches was in full swing and the peculiar smell of cooking grease and popcorn butter was stronger than any emanations of the Atlantic Ocean that seems there, held in the islands of a sinking coast, to be a virile and a sad presence. Thousands of half-naked bathers obscured the beach or hesitated knee deep in the ocean as if this water, like the Ganges, were purifying and holy so that these displaced and naked crowds, strung for miles along the coast, gave to this holiday and carnival surface the undercurrents of a pilgrimage in which, as much as any of the thousands they passed, Rosalie and her date were involved.
“You hungry?” he said. “You want something to eat now? Ma gave us enough for three meals. I’ve got some whisky in the glove case.”
The thought of the picnic hamper reminded her of his plain, white-haired mother, who would have sent along something of herself in the basket—watchful, never disapproving, but saddened by the pleasures of her only son. He had his way. His neat, bleak and ugly bedroom was the axis of their house and the rapport between this man and his parents was so intense and tacit that it seemed secretive to Rosalie. Every room was dominated by souvenirs of his growth; guns, golf clubs, trophies from schools and camps and on the piano some music he had practiced ten years ago. The cool house and his contrite parents were strange to Rosalie and she thought that his white shirt that morning smelled of the yellow varnished floors where he took up his secretive life with Ma and Pa. Her date had always had a dog. He had, in his lifetime, run through four dogs, and Rosalie knew their names, their habits, their markings and their tragic ends. On the one time that she had met his parents the conversation had turned to his dogs and she had come to feel that they thought of his relationship to her—not maliciously or harmfully, but because these were the only terms they could find—as something like the exchange between him and a dog. I feel absolully like a dog, she said.
They drove through a few holiday village squares where newspapers were stacked outside the one open drugstore and where parades were forming. Now they were in the country, a few miles inland, but there was not much change in feeling, for the road was fenced with stores, restaurants, gift shops, greenhouses and tourist cabins. The beach to which he was taking her was unpopular because the road was rough and the beach was stony, but he was disappointed that day when he found two other cars in the clearing where they parked, and they unloaded the hamper and followed a crooked path to the sea—the open sea here. Pink scrub roses grew along the path and she felt the salt air form on her lips and tasted it with her tongue. There was a narrow, gravelly beach at a break in the cliffs and then below them they saw a couple like themselves and a family with children and then beyond them the green sea. Turning away self-consciously from the privacy he so sorely wanted then and that the cliffs all around them made available he carried the picnic hamper, the whisky bottle and the tennis ball down onto the beach and settled himself in full view of the other bathers as if this momentary gesture toward simple, public pleasure was made for the sake of whatever his mother had been able to wrap up of herself in the sandwiches. Rosalie went behind a stone and changed from her clothes into a bathing suit. He was waiting for her at the edge of the water and when she had made sure that all her hair was under her bathing cap she took his hand and they walked in.
The water was cruelly cold there, it always was, and when it got up to her knees she dropped his hand and dived. She had been taught to swim a crawl but she had never unlearned a choppy, hurried stroke and with her face half buried in the green she headed out to sea for ten feet, turned, surface-dived, shouted with pain at the cold and then raced toward the beach. The beach was sunny and the cold water and the heat of the sun set her up. She dried herself roughly with a towel, snatched off her cap and then stood in the sun, waiting for its heat to reach her bones. She dried her hands and lighted a cigarette and he came out of the sea then, dried only his hands and dropped down beside her.
Her hair was yellow and she was fair—long limbed and full breasted with a skittish look that even in the robes of a choir girl, which she had worn, made her look high-tailed and undressed. He took her hand and raised it and brushed her arm, covered with the light hair of an early down, with his lips. “I’d adore to pick blueberries,” she said loudly and for the benefit of the others on the beach. “I’d adore to pick blueberries but let’s take your hat and we’ll put the blueberries in that.”
They climbed the stones above the beach, hand in hand, but the search for a privacy that would satisfy her was lengthy and they went from place to place until finally he stopped her and she agreed, timidly, that there was probably nothing better. He took her bathing suit off her shoulders and when she was naked she lay down cheerfully, gladly in the sunny dirt to take the only marriage of her body to its memories that she knew. Tenderness and good nature lingered between them after they were done and she leaned on his shoulder while she stepped back into her bathing suit and they returned hand in hand to the beach. They went swimming again and unwrapped the sandwiches that his worried mother had made them the night before.
There were deviled eggs and chicken joints, sandwiches, cakes, cookies, and when they had eaten what they could they put the rest away in the hamper and he jogged down the beach and pitched the tennis ball to her from there. The light ball wavered in the wind but she caught it and threw it back to him with a wing that, like her swimming stroke, was short of what was needed, and he caught the ball with a flourish and threw it back to her. Now the catching and the throwing, the catching and the throwing took on a pleasant monotony and through it she felt the afternoon passing. The tide was going out, leaving on the beach seriations of coarser gravel and strands of kelp whose flower shapes burst with a shot when she crushed them between her fingers. The family group had begun to gather their possessions and call to their children. The other couple lay side by side, talking and laughing. She lay down again and he sat beside her and lighted a cigarette, asking, now, now, but she said no and he walked off toward the water. She looked up and saw him swimming in the waves. Then he was drying himself beside her and offering her a cup of whisky but she said no, no, not yet, and he drank it himself and looked out to sea.