Beach Plum Island (6 page)

Ava had a sudden urge to fling herself onto the bed and burrow under the quilt. She’d been tired down to her bones since the memorial service. She thought fleetingly of Katy, wondering how she was coping, and hoped her call to Elaine yesterday had done some good. She wondered, too, where Gigi was. She had invited her to the studio today, but the girl had been noncommittal, evasive.

“All set,” Caroline said briskly, poking her head out of her office. “What can I get you? Soda? Iced tea?”

“Water’s fine.”

“Come sit down for a minute. Watching you carry all of those heavy boxes wore me out.”

Caroline’s office was tucked beneath a staircase leading to the shop’s second floor. Unlike the painstakingly arranged tableaux in her store, the office looked inhabited by a college fraternity. Stacks of papers and photographs rose from every horizontal surface; the hat rack was barely visible beneath layers of clothing; and a gym bag gaped open on the floor, spilling workout clothes.

“I didn’t know you were going to the gym again,” Ava said.

Caroline made a face. “I wish I were, but I can’t seem to find the time. I’m reduced to paying gym membership fees like I tithe at church, hoping for salvation. Good intentions must count for something, right?” She lifted a tower of file folders off her desk chair and sat down, gesturing to a stool in the far corner for Ava to use. “Hungry?” She pulled open a desk drawer and started rummaging.

Ava shook her head. “I had breakfast. Besides, I’m too stressed to eat.”

“That’s the difference between you and me. Stress makes you thin but puffs me up like a pigeon.”

Ava laughed. Caroline continued fishing through her desk drawers and talked about her kids and the latest on the city’s new waterfront development plan. It was true that her friend had thickened around the waist and hips, but that was hardly surprising. Caroline was content and settled. She’d married her high school boyfriend, just as Ava had married hers.

The difference was that Ava and Mark slowly drifted apart as the kids grew older, until eventually Mark had a brief affair with the secretary in his civil engineering firm. Elaine and her friends couldn’t understand how she and Mark had settled into such an amicable relationship after the divorce, given Mark’s affair, but Ava knew the divorce was at least as much her fault as his. He had failed to honor their marriage vows by straying physically, but she had abandoned him emotionally long before that.

They had mediated the divorce without arguing about furnishings, custody, or money and remained friends, a fact that had made Caroline say, “Good Lord, you two get along better than most married couples I know.”

Ava knew Caroline didn’t get it. Neither did most of her other friends, especially when they happened to drop by while Mark was helping her with things around the house or called to ask for advice about his father, now eighty. “We raised each other,” Ava told them. “We’ll always have a connection because of the boys.”

This was true. Yet sometimes she wondered if she’d done the right thing, if perhaps leaving Mark had been harder on the boys than it seemed, despite being selfishly thrilled to be on her own, at last, without having to feel like she was failing as a wife.

The only serious relationship she’d had since the divorce was with an architect she’d met two years ago. Jack had a pale Irish complexion and blue eyes, and a way of looking at Ava that made her knees buckle. He’d been determined to crowbar Ava out of her “comfort zone,” as he’d put it after hearing she’d never been with a man other than her husband.

Once, after drinking too much frothy stout at a fishermen’s bar in Gloucester, Jack had made silent, urgent love to Ava on a damp tangle of fishing nets on one of the docks. He’d taken her to his weekend house in Vermont, too, where they’d swum in waterfalls so icy that her skin burned when she clung to him in the water.

She had started to feel like a different person with him. Sensuous. Desirable.
Desiring.
She had never felt this electrical physical excitement with Mark. There was a change in her work, too, as Jack showed her how to look at buildings as art and encouraged her to think about creating pottery in ways that went beyond the functional.

Then they’d reached a crossroads. Jack was offered a job in California and asked Ava to come with him. Not to marry him—he wasn’t ready for that, he said—but to join him for a year to test the waters. “You’d love Berkeley,” he said. “We could find a place with enough room for you to have a studio. You wouldn’t even have to teach.”

“What about the boys?” she had asked.

He’d looked confused for a minute. This was partly Ava’s fault. For the six months they’d been dating, she had scheduled their time together to coincide with weekends the boys spent with their father, not wanting Evan and Sam to become attached to Jack in case things didn’t work out. Jack clearly hadn’t given the boys any thought, and why should he? He hardly knew them.

Jack had valiantly tried to rally. “Of course Sam and Evan could come to California,” he said too heartily, while pointing out that the boys would probably want to stay in the same school with their friends. “What if they live with their dad and visit us on holidays?” he’d said. “Would that be possible?”

It would have been. But Ava knew she couldn’t do it. She hated sending her sons to their father for even two weekends a month. The house echoed around her without Evan and Sam to fill the rooms. Whenever the boys were gone, every baby she passed reminded her of how her own children had looked as infants with eyes squeezed shut against the light, wrapped like croissants in their blankets.

It was as if she were only partly real without her children. The boys gave shape to her days. Caring for them was exhausting, yet it created a rhythm she desperately missed when it was no longer there.

The only thing that got her through those awful weekends alone in the house was knowing that, on Sunday night, Evan and Sam would come bouncing back in like a pair of golden retrievers, damp and smelly and happy to see her. And how could she tear the boys away from their father, even if Mark agreed to the move? Mark was the only person in the world who loved the boys as much as she did.

“I’m sorry,” she’d told Jack. “I can’t. I need to live with my children, and they need to be close to their dad.”

Jack had gone west without her. She hadn’t missed him as much as she’d worried she might; she supposed now that she hadn’t ever really fallen in love with him.

Caroline emerged from the desk, triumphantly waving a bag of corn chips. She tore the bag open with her teeth and munched a handful of chips. “So, ready to wow me with your new masterpieces?”

Ava felt suddenly tentative. “I don’t know. I’m feeling anxious now that I’m here.”

“Don’t be an idiot. You know I’m your biggest fan.”

“You might not be, after seeing these bizarre things.” Ava followed her into the back room.

“Why? What’s so bizarre about them?”

“They’re just not me,” Ava said, standing with Caroline in front of the worktable where she’d put the boxes. “I start to throw my usual mugs and pitchers and bowls, but lately something weird happens. It’s like my hands are possessed or something. I’m turning out things that look like they’re made by someone else.”

“Maybe you got bored with playing it safe.”

“Maybe,” Ava agreed, but the remark stung.

She hovered anxiously while Caroline used an X-Acto knife to slice through the tape on the boxes, removed the half-dozen pots, and set them on the table. Then Ava narrowed her eyes and tried to see her work as if another artist really had created it.

She had thrown the bases of these pots as giant bowls, using two cylinders she attached together before widening them. Then she’d hand-built the top half of each pot using a combination of coils and tiny sculptures. Three of them had sculptures of women only, their hair crafted out of spaghetti-sized coils, their breasts and buttocks carved to protrude from the walls. The other pots had sculptures of entire families, the babies held aloft by their mothers to form the curvy rims along the edges of the pots. Ava had used iron oxide alone on the bottom halves, then glazed the top halves in brilliant blues and greens.

Caroline spun around to give Ava a hug. “They’re brilliant!”

“You think so?” Ava allowed herself to smile.

“I do. These are pots with personality! Let me try to sell them before you take them anywhere else.”

“All of them?” Ava asked in disbelief. Caroline typically took only a few of her larger decorative pieces at a time. “Not everyone wants pots with personality. Most people just want a reasonable casserole dish.”

“True. But people also buy art that’s emotionally expressive. And you know what I love best about these?” Caroline put her hands on Ava’s shoulders, her hazel eyes solemn. “For once, you’ve made pots that express something about
you
.” She took a small notebook out of her pocket and began jotting down descriptions of the pots to give Ava as a receipt.

Ava, meanwhile, wondered what these strange new clay creations—so crowded with men and women and children—could possibly say about her.

Afterward, she drove back to her studio to meet Sandra Judd, a photographer Caroline had recommended. Elaine had convinced Ava to invest in a Web site; she’d even offered to design it. Sandra, who arrived at Ava’s studio a few minutes later in a white van full of camera equipment, was going to shoot photographs for it. She was a squat brunette in blue jeans and a red T-shirt, a bulldog of a woman who said little but worked efficiently.

Caroline stopped by at lunchtime to check on their progress. They’d nearly finished shooting when Olivia, a painter who lived on the basin side of Beach Plum Island and was one of Ava’s dearest friends, came loping toward them wearing a sweat suit that must have been one of her son’s castoffs. Ava and Caroline stared in amazement as Olivia dropped to the beach in front of them and did twenty push-ups, then stood up and succumbed to a coughing fit.

“I think she’s losing a lung,” Caroline said.

Ava patted Olivia’s back. “Are you okay? Why in the world are you jogging?”

“I could hardly button my jeans this morning,” Olivia wheezed. “Damn that menopause middle.”

Caroline laughed. “Welcome to my world. And I’ve got ten years to go before the Big M.”

“Right, rub it in now while you can. Don’t worry. Your invitation to Cronesville will come.” Olivia reached into the pocket of her gray hoodie, pulled out a pack of cigarettes, and lit one, ignoring their cries of disbelief. “So what’s all this?” She gestured toward Sandra, who had placed one of Ava’s pitchers on a small hillock of sand and was kneeling in front of it with a light meter.

“Portfolio shots for my Web site,” Ava said. “We’re doing the mugs next. Any ideas?”

Olivia cocked her head at the row of mugs Ava had lined up on the bench outside her studio. “They look like birds, because of those bright glazes and the feathery swirls on the handles. What if we play with that?”

“I’m not sure what you mean,” Ava said.

“Here.” Cigarette dangling between her lips, Olivia carried the mugs from the bench to a hunk of driftwood, where she arranged them on the log with the handles facing outward like birds on a fence, tails in a row.

“Perfect!” Ava said, grinning at Olivia.

“Not completely terrible,” Caroline said.

Olivia snorted. “High praise from the High Priestess of the local art scene.”

Ava called the photographer over. “What do you think, Sandra? If you shoot these mugs from down low, in front of the driftwood, maybe we can get the grass in the background, too.”

Sandra nodded. “That should work.” She shot the mugs from various angles, then packed up her equipment and said she’d have the pictures ready in two days. Caroline said good-bye as well and followed her out of the driveway.

Olivia had regained her composure after a second cigarette and somehow managed to look put together even in the oversized sweatshirt. Her hair was the same shade of gray as the fabric and had escaped from the hood to fall in long tendrils around her narrow face. “Who’s your little stalker?” she asked, gesturing behind Ava.

“What?” Ava started to turn around, but Olivia put a hand on her arm.

“No need to be so obvious,” Olivia whispered. “You don’t want to spook the wild critter. It’s a girl, and she’s up by your studio on a bike.”

“Oh! That must be Gigi, my half sister.”

Olivia pursed her lips. “That’s some hair color.”

“Yes, well. Wait until you see the rest of her. Come on. I’ll introduce you. She needs friends. Just put out that cigarette, will you, please? Gigi’s trying to quit.”

“Oh, great. Another self-righteous reformed smoker. Just what I need in my life,” Olivia grumbled, tossing the butt onto the sand.

“Hey! You shouldn’t litter,” Gigi called from the studio doorway.

Ava was startled into laughing, but Olivia scowled. “It’s biodegradable,” she yelled back.

“Those are toxic chemicals!” the girl argued. “And if everybody littered, the beach would be like one big ashtray!”

Olivia rolled her eyes at Ava. “Is she always like this?”

“I don’t know,” Ava said. “I certainly hope so.”

They walked up the beach to the studio, where Gigi straddled her bike with a defiant look. She wore a torn black T-shirt, baggy green shorts, and neon orange sneakers. Her short hair was no longer blue, but glowed a bright orange with magenta highlights. She looked like her head was on fire.

Ava wondered where Katy thought her daughter was right now. “Want to come in?”

“What for?” Gigi glanced over her shoulder, as if she were afraid of being surrounded.

“Well, have you had anything to eat this morning?”

Gigi shook her head.

“All right, then,” Ava said. “How about coming in for some French toast?”

“You don’t have to ask
me
twice,” Olivia said.

Ava rolled her eyes. “I didn’t even ask you once.”

“Guess I’ll have to ask myself, then,” Olivia said, which made Gigi laugh, a giggle that made both women smile and then duck their heads to hide it.