Authors: Cathy Holton
There was a moment of silence, broken only by the gurgling of the coffee pot in the kitchen. Annie picked up the magazine and peered at the photograph. “Wow,” she said, holding it to Mel, “he must have robbed the cradle. She looks twenty years younger.”
“Trophy wife,” Mel said. “I hope he drops dead of a heart attack on his honeymoon. It would serve him right.”
Annie swiveled her head around to Mel. “As I recall, you like younger men yourself. What was the name of that bartender in London, the one with the curly hair?”
“Let’s not go there,” Mel said.
“Oh, let’s do,” Sara said. “I don’t think I’ve heard that story.”
“Well, I think it’s sweet,” Lola said, obviously not following the conversation. “I think it’s sweet that Sara’s still in love with her own husband.” She tilted her head and gazed pensively at the TV. From time to time an air of melancholy drifted across her face, seeping through the cracks of her happy facade like smoke.
“Lola, you’re a hopeless romantic,” Annie said.
“Am I?” She seemed surprised by this.
Mel looked up and then went back to glancing at the magazine.
“Besides,” Sara said to Mel, trying to change the subject. “As I recall, it was you who had the thing for Bart.”
“I never had a thing for him. I just slept with him.”
“Yes, I remember.”
Mel closed the magazine abruptly. She sat very still, watching Sara. “Do you really want to stroll down memory lane? Do you really want to go there?”
“I’ll stroll if you will,” Sara said.
“I thought we were talking about Bart and his child bride,” Annie said nervously.
“We are,” Mel said quietly. Her eyes were brown and steady.
Sara colored and turned her face to the TV. Outside the windows a gull hung motionless, riding the currents. Lola held a pillow against her chest as if she was cradling a child. Through the windows behind her the sea shimmered, a long line of whitecapped waves.
Annie took the alumni magazine from Mel and tossed it on the table. “If we’re going down to the Beach Club pool, we’d better get going,” she said, rising. “If we wait any longer all the good chairs will be taken.”
As children, Sara and Mel had been as different as two girls could be. Howard’s Mill in the 1960s and ’70s was a small but prosperous village of twenty-five thousand people clustered along the banks of the Tennessee River. Sara’s father taught history out at the high school, and they lived in a modest three-bedroom brick ranch house in a neighborhood of other modest three-bedroom brick ranch houses. Sara had two younger brothers and a pretty mother who stayed home to cook and clean just like June Cleaver, only on a tighter budget.
Mel’s father owned the town’s only car dealership, and she lived out from town in a big columned house with a boot-shaped swimming pool out back. Mel’s mother, Juanita, was Leland Barclay’s second wife and was rumored to have been his housekeeper and, as if that wasn’t scandalous enough, Mel’s older half-brother, Junior, was the town’s first heroin addict. He had dropped out of high school and gone out to Haight-Ashbury for the Summer of Love, where he took Timothy Leary’s advice to “Turn On, Tune In, and Drop Out” to heart. He was eleven years older than Mel, and by the time she was twelve he was back home in Howard’s Mill living in the pool house, working in Leland’s Ford dealership, and trying unsuccessfully to go straight. Mel and Sara used to go out to the pool house to find him sleeping with his eyes open, the Doors or Jimi Hendrix blasting on the stereo.
Sara liked going out to Mel’s house. There was always something to do, with the boot-shaped swimming pool and the playroom crammed with every toy imaginable, and the mini-bikes out in the barn. Mel’s mother was a small shy woman with a Guatemalan accent who stayed mostly in her room, scurrying down the back stairs to fix meals and then scurrying back up them before Leland Barclay came in to eat. Mel’s daddy, Leland, was loud and brash, and he had a big red nose and a belly that hung over
his belt like a feed sack. He wore cowboy boots and a belt buckle with his initials on the front, and he liked to brag that he’d been born in West Texas,
out where the men were tough as the calluses on a barfly’s elbows
(“He should know,” Mel liked to say).
Sara also liked driving out to the country club in Leland’s big Cadillac Coupe de Ville with Leland at the wheel and her and Mel jumping around in the backseat to “Itchycoo Park” or “Take the Last Train to Clarkesville.” The Howard’s Mill Country Club was nothing more than a small brick building with a nine-hole golf course and a concrete swimming pool surrounded by a chain-link fence. There were probably only a thousand members (who didn’t include Sara’s parents), but it was the closest thing to upscale that Howard’s Mill had to offer.
Everyone in town gossiped about the Barclays; long before spoiled blonde heiresses and bad blond rock stars became the norm, the Barclays were local celebrities whose every move was noted and commented on. Sara liked being part of the Barclay inner circle. She liked ordering Cokes at the bar and signing Leland’s name. She liked that all the staff knew to put her chili cheese fries on the Barclay tab. It was magical the way anything you could possibly want would suddenly appear and all you had to do was sign for it. Being rich was like finding a genie in a bottle. The older she got, the more time Sara spent with Mel’s family. Her secret wish was that the Barclays would offer to adopt her and then she and Mel could truly be sisters.
She especially loved to eat dinner at Mel’s house. Eating dinner at Mel’s house was like waiting for a fight to break out in the stands of a Friday night football game between Howard’s Mill and Suck Creek. You never knew who was going to throw the first punch but you knew it was just a matter of time before everyone joined in. It wasn’t that way at Sara’s house. At Sara’s house everyone waited their turn to speak. They didn’t scream or shout or talk over one another or start eating before grace was said. That was considered bad manners, and Sara’s mother wouldn’t have tolerated it. If there was one biscuit left on the plate, and you wanted it, you’d ask politely if you could have it and if no one else did, it was yours. At Mel’s house, if there was one biscuit left on the plate, there was sure to be a fight to the death between Leland and Junior. She’d actually witnessed Junior throw a fork at his father one night over a lone biscuit and Leland had counterattacked by hoisting his glass of Old Crow at his son’s head. Sometimes, just for family solidarity, Mel would join in, too.
One rainy Friday evening not long after the start of eighth grade, Sara
came home with Mel to spend the night. They’d been friends since first grade and by now Sara was accustomed to the mayhem of the Barclay household. On this particular evening Juanita had made fried chicken, squash casserole, mashed potatoes, and biscuits, and not long after setting the steaming food on the table, she had disappeared up the back stairs. Mel and Sara washed their hands and sat down at the table. There was never any evening prayer given at the Barclay table; you just started in helping your plate. A few minutes later Leland came in, followed shortly thereafter by Junior, who looked like a younger, longer-haired version of Leland only without the red nose and the beer gut.
The evening went pleasantly enough at first, with Sara and Mel chattering on about the homecoming dance, Leland sitting in uncharacteristic silence at one end of the table and Junior at the other. Leland sat hunched over his plate with his elbows on the table and his head lowered like a junkyard dog guarding a ham bone. From time to time he would sip from the tumbler of Old Crow at his elbow, watching his son over the edge of his glass with red-rimmed eyes. Junior just sat there looking sickly and skinny, and picked at his food.
“Eat your food, boy, don’t play with it,” Leland said suddenly, pointing at Junior with his fork. He’d given the boy every advantage and Junior had disappointed him in every way imaginable; he was bad at sports, he couldn’t hit the side of a barn with a scattergun, and he had absolutely no gumption or goals in life. Worse, he couldn’t hold his liquor (Leland lumped all narcotics in with alcohol) whereas Leland could down half a quart of Old Crow in one sitting and never show the effects.
“I don’t need you telling me how to eat,” Junior said in a surly voice.
Mel kept on talking about the homecoming dance but Sara turned her attention to the dueling Barclays. She thought it was cool the way they could just say what they were thinking, right out in the open with no restraints. At her house, saying what you thought was considered bad manners. She had never heard her parents argue. If they disagreed over something, they didn’t speak to each other, sometimes for days. Sara and her brothers would walk around on tiptoes, aware of an undercurrent of tension and a brooding silence that wafted through their house and into their dreams like a sinister presence. When the prescribed amount of silence had been carried out, as if on a signal, her parents started talking to each other again and everything went on as civilized and sedately as before. The source of the disagreement was never mentioned.
“You don’t like the chicken, we can get the girl’s ma (here he pointed at the backstairs with his fork) to make you something else. Cookin’s the one thing she’s still good at.”
Junior picked up a drumstick and stuffed it into his mouth. Mel gave Leland a baleful stare. She didn’t like hearing her mother abused in her presence. “She’s good at a lot of things,” she said.
“Not the things that matter,” Leland said, lifting his tumbler.
“How do you know what she’s good at? You never even talk to her.”
“It’s hard to talk to someone who’s shut up in her room all day.”
“No one wants to be around you, you smelly old goat.”
Leland grimaced and set his drink down. “Now, Sister, this don’t concern you. It’s between me and the boy here.” Leland liked to give Junior pep talks about getting his life back on track.
Sling it against the wall, son, and see if it sticks
was one of his favorites. Or sometimes,
Run it up the flagpole and see if anyone salutes.
And if that didn’t work he might weigh in with,
If the fish ain’t biting, boy, change the bait.
This was back in 1973, long before anyone in Howard’s Mill had heard of rehab.
“Stop calling me boy,” Junior said, his mouth full of fried chicken.
“Well, you sure as hell ain’t a man,” Leland said.
Junior scowled and started packing his cheeks with mashed potatoes. “Fuck you, old man,” he said.
Sara snorted and glanced at Mel and then down at her plate. She tried to imagine what her mother would say if she heard someone use the F-word at the table. She’d probably say,
Just because you have money doesn’t mean you have class.
She’d also say,
Don’t ever set foot in the Barclay house again.
“Why don’t you just leave him alone?” Mel said to Leland. She stared at her father with a dangerous expression on her face. “Can’t you see he’s sick?”
“He ain’t sick,” Leland said, slapping the table with his hand so that the silverware rattled. “Ain’t nothing wrong with that boy a little hard work won’t cure.” He lifted his tumbler and took a long pull. When he set it down again, the glass was empty. “Anybody can swim into a whirlpool, boy,” he said. “It’s coming out that counts.” He coughed, sucked his teeth, and nodded sagely at Junior over these pearls of wisdom.
“Nobody cares what you say,” Mel said. “Nobody cares what you think.”
Leland ignored Mel, pointing one long hairy finger at Junior. “It’s all
them bad habits you picked up out there in Chicky Butte, California or wherever the hell you were.”
“Well, it sure as hell wasn’t Nosepick, Tennessee,” Junior said, talking through a mouthful of fried chicken and mashed potatoes. “Thank God for that. Thank God I didn’t wind up down in Numbnut, Texas with all the other greasers and shitkickers.”
“If you had, you might a learned something, by God.”
Sara giggled over
Nosepick
and
Numbnut
, but Mel just sat there with her eyes moving from one to the other like the steady swinging of a pendulum clock.
Junior, who’d been busy stuffing more mashed potatoes, fried chicken, and squash casserole into his mouth, suddenly went limp. It was his best defense against his father. His passive-aggressive slumping drove Leland wild.
“Sit up there, boy!” Leland roared, slamming his fist against the table so the silverware jumped and the glasses rattled. “Don’t be such a candy ass!” But Junior sat slumped like a possum in the headlights of an oncoming car, his cheeks stuffed full of mashed potatoes and a thin strand of drool hanging from his bottom lip. Seeing his only son like that was a kick in the gut for Leland, partially because he looked just like Leland sitting there slump-shouldered and defeated, and Leland didn’t like to see himself like that. He sucked in slowly but before he could say anything else, Mel said, “You’re a mean, vicious old goat and I hate you.”
Leland chuckled and pushed himself away from the table. He got up to pour himself another tumbler of Old Crow. When he sat back down, he pointed at Mel and said proudly, “If you had half the spunk that girl’s got, you’d be a man. She don’t let nobody get the best of her!”
Mel would later say it was her dysfunctional childhood that had turned her into a writer but Sara figured it was more the material advantages she’d had that had done that (Leland supported Mel for years in between book contracts and husbands). Mel always put down her family’s social standing like it was no big deal. She was always going on about how she still had relatives who lived in trailer parks and Leland was nothing but an uneducated redneck who’d made his wealth dishonestly, but the truth of the matter was, money was money. And having it was better than not having it. Sara didn’t like to admit that she might be jealous of Mel but the truth was, if she’d had Mel’s advantages, there was no telling how much easier her life might have been.
• • •
It was almost one o’clock by the time they showered, dressed, and arrived at the Beach Club. The pool was not quite Olympic-size, but it was large and surrounded by a stamped concrete deck bordered on three sides by a tall wrought-iron fence and palm trees, and on the fourth by a large open bar. The pool was one of only three on the island and it was crowded with young mothers and their young children.