For days there was nothing to say except, What a glorious day. Wildflowers galloped across thorn-free fields, stopping only when cut and placed in water. Shopping lists grew to include carrots for the horse next door, black but for a spattered-looking black-and-white rump—a horse who ran crazed around the paddock at dusk, and whose name was Fury. The men of the house would start to drink then, but only enough to be playful late at night. They gave the kids rides on power mowers, careening over the lawns in great loops in the dark, missing the two kinds of oaks—white and red—the one with its rounded leaves, the other’s leaves in points, which the kids were taught to know by saying, White men shoot bullets and Red men shoot arrows. Mornings, robins robbed the ground. A rooster startled the cat that had been raised indoors. Nothing clever was said.
What did come under discussion when everyone met in the evening was why, when people go to the beach, they always lie with their feet to the ocean. Asking ourselves this question was the most work that most of us called upon ourselves to do.
We were women in one-piece bathing suits beneath faded, loose clothes, walking across dunes to call on one another, bringing bouquets of Queen Anne’s lace and goldenrod trailing roots, quoting the poet’s hope that “Through gleaming gates of goldenrod / I’ll pass into the rest of God.”
This is the lyric seizure that succeeds a close call. Or surge, lyric surge, from the name “black surge” that is given to the storm-induced seepage of sewage that closes the beach. Had the black surge come one day sooner, there would not have been this lyric surge because there would not have been the close call.
Day’s husband called it a sea poose. This was later, after Day and the kids were safely on shore, after Day had described the circular current that had kept her from raising her arms to wave for help. After Ray had finally seen what was wrong, after Ray had lost his head but his fishing buddy had not, had managed to get a rope to Day and play her in with the kids, one by one.
Within minutes the kids were bragging, and Day—not the type to cry—had turned snappish at her husband Ray. Day trained horses and Ray farmed trees, and to Day’s way of thinking there was shame in being weak, even if the stronger was a freakish ocean wave.
We celebrated our friends’ safety with a party that night, though, in fact, the barbecue had been planned the week before to take advantage of a high full moon. We chose a stretch of sand between the ocean and a pond, posted as a home for egrets by the local conservants of nature.
Empty of trees, Ray’s truck hauled grills. We were each assigned a contribution; Caitlin brought hot dogs, which opened up discussion of possible past lives. Caitlin was Day’s right hand at the stable, and a vocal vegetarian for most of her thirty years. But early in the summer a psychic had regressed her, had told Caitlin that she had been a fox in a previous life. The next day Caitlin was riding her horse when she saw a rabbit leap in a field. “My, doesn’t that look good,” she said she thought, and found herself broiling a chicken for dinner.
While Ray heated coals, Dr. Bob took the smaller boys off to the pond with nets. Just at dark, the boys began scooping up fish—tiny, flipping like silver dollars.
“My mother used to fry everything she found,” Dr. Bob was telling the boys. “She’d throw a hundred of these into the pan, but everything always tasted like bacon,” he said.
The shirkers got up a volleyball game while Pete and I got the bonfire going. Even with the fire, we had to put on sweaters, a fact that had Pete looking ahead already to fall. “The first cold snap,” he said, “I get in my car and drive south till I can roll down the window.”
Ben studied the steak he was asked to do black and blue for Jeff Taylor’s date, a woman who showed real estate and who kept up her nails. She had brought a locally baked boysenberry pie and, inexplicably, a bag of candy corn, which I saw some of us bite off white-orange-yellow and others of us bite off yellow-orange-white.
Two grills over, Ray turned hamburgers and suffered the children’s humor, evinced in sidesplitting riddles such as this: What do you have if you have fourteen oranges in one hand and eight grapefruit in the other? and the children’s shrieking laughter all but drowning out the answer, which was, I believe, “Big hands.”
“I love barbecue sauce,” Ray was saying, “especially when it’s homemade.”
“Yeah, that’s right,” Day said. “I just put it in this Kraft’s squeeze bottle for convenience.”
Day turned to one of Dr. Bob’s flock. “How much you want on that chicken leg, Will?”
“Not too much,” Will said, holding out his paper plate. “Just enough much.”
The fire was drawing some notice by then. Jeff Taylor, a kidder you could count on at holiday time for gifts of coasters that said “Eat, drink, and remarry,” announced that later in the evening we would gather around the fire and sacrifice a virgin, amending his remarks after the requisite silence to “sacrifice an old maid” instead.
That late in the season we had our timing down. We were the model of capable neighbors, filling our plates in an orderly manner, then scrambling for places in the sand close to the flames.
Dr. Bob waved Ray and Day over to a pot of steamers.
“I didn’t know you brought steamers,” Ray said. “I’m warning you all, I inhale these things.”
“Don’t worry,” Day said, securing a few of the clams for herself. “I can stand on my own two feet and fight for what is mine.”
A call went out to Dr. Bob to please start up a sing-along. Dr. Bob protested. "I couldn’t carry a tune if it had handles,” he said.
“Then come here by the fire and tell the kids a ghost story,” Ray suggested.
“I don’t want to scare anybody,” Dr. Bob said.
“You already have!” said Will, and the other children screamed their approval.
Dr. Bob was something of a medical inventor, esteemed by every one of us although we could not say exactly what it was he had invented. He was the one who tended to Day two summers earlier after her horse, spooked by an umbrella over a roadside farm stand, threw her into a ditch.
Day had complained only of a headache where her head had hit the dirt, but Dr. Bob knew to take her in fast. In his car, Day’s eyes had crossed. Asked for her name, Day gave her maiden name. By the time they got to the hospital, Day’s speech was down to sounds—the sounds of crows and owls.
There were lessons to be learned wherever one looked, which is not to suggest that those lessons were learned. Witness the Henkins’ boy, Bill, who left a party drunk, then discovered he had left his glasses behind only after he had pulled out of the drive and was headed for the highway home. Rather than return for his glasses, he later explained he had driven home really fast so that he would make it back before he had an accident.
That was something I remembered when Caitlin told us what else the psychic said, which was that, as a fox, Caitlin had been killed when she was struck by a speeding car on the beach access road. What Caitlin wonders now is, What if she hits a fox with her car?
Then Ray said, “Remember the deer?”
“Jesus, Ray,” Day said, and got up and walked in the dark direction of the ocean.
Ray dropped the subject, but everyone knew the story as vividly as if we had been the one who hit the deer, then knelt by the side of the road and held the deer’s dying head in our lap, and shielded with one hand the eyes that blinked at each pair of passing headlights, affording the animal that tiny measure of relief until a state trooper showed up with a gun.
In what she must have perceived as an awkward silence, Jeff Taylor’s date jumped up and began to collect our empty Coke and beer cans, stuffing them into a plastic bag for trash.
Then we heard Day calling out to Ray to hurry. Ray threw his paper plate into the fire and all of us took off running toward the shore.
We found Day standing in the surf, surveying a rare phosphorescence in the tide. She took a step and scattered sparks, then bent over and shook her flat hands underwater like a miner at a watery mother lode panning for gold with her hands. We watched Ray run into the glowing shoals and take hold of his wife from behind. We watched both of them go over so that they were sitting on the rocky bottom. When a stray beach dog ran in to join them, we could see—phosphorescence clinging to his fur—the outline of his legs as they paddled underwater. When Ray and Day stood up again, holding on to each other, the sudden phosphorescence was gone.
What was left of the summer passed quietly, as if in deference to that night as one befitting summer’s end. It was a time when the only pain was inflicted by bees, and an easy remedy—three kinds of weeds pressed together and rubbed on the sting—was right in your own backyard.
