The Girl from Charnelle (25 page)

I
n mid-August, Mrs. Letig decided to take the boys to visit her sister in Dallas for a week, and John and Laura planned to spend one or two evenings together and, if they were lucky, maybe a whole night. After the Lake Meredith incident, Laura had been nervous about the lies, particularly those involving imaginary others. She had grown weary of sneaking around, and their usual meeting place, the barn, was hot and dusty in the summer. So although she looked forward to the time alone with him, the logistics loomed tiringly before her.

But then her father announced that Gilbert O'Donnell had just caught a twenty-pound bass and a twenty-three-pound catfish on the Canadian River. Her father had been so inspired that he marched into his boss's office and demanded a week off—shocking because he'd not willingly taken any days off since his wife had left. Then he told the family that they needed to get their things together because they were leaving tomorrow.

“I don't want to go!” Laura said, panicked.

“Fine,” her father said. “Make other arrangements.”

She was shocked by the ease of it. It seemed like a good omen, though she worried that Manny would also choose to stay home, but he was unexpectedly excited about this spontaneous boys' vacation and was able to get off work as well. Later that evening, while her father and brothers were outside, sorting through the fishing gear, she called the Letigs' house. She had a plan for what to say in case Mrs. Letig answered—asking if she could borrow one of their ice chests—but John answered. His wife was out running errands with Jack and Willie in preparation for her trip. Laura told him what was happening.

“Can you believe it?” she whispered, staring out the window at her father and brothers.

“That's great.”

“Let's go somewhere,” she said.

“I have to work.”

“Oh, can't you get off? Just a couple of days before the weekend. Please. I want to be away, far away, where we don't have to slink around. I want to walk outside. I want to go to a movie with you, to a restaurant. Please, John.”

“Honey, it's impossible.”

And then she hung up because Manny came through the door.

 

The next day she stood on the porch and waved good-bye to her father and brothers.

“See you soon,” her father called from the truck window. “You're fine here?”

“Yes, sir. I'm going over to Nancy's house later this evening.”

“Nancy?”

“You know my friend Nancy. I told you.”

“Her parents are okay with this?”

“Of course.”

“Okay, then,” he said, relieved because he was ready to go, and she didn't like to fish, and he knew it, and he even seemed excited about taking little Rich, which surprised her.

She watched the truck roll away, Manny and Gene in back with the gear, and then she sat in the old rickety chair on the porch, not ready to go
inside because the house seemed so empty, and she'd never stayed by herself for a whole week, so that seemed frightening. She would have to be careful because of Mrs. Ambling. John couldn't come over here unless he came at night, through the back alley, and snuck in.

All this damn sneaking around. Part of her liked it, but she wished for once that they could be free of it all, free of the constant threat of being caught, but for now that was what they had to do, and it was worth it. It was. There were no longer the clumsy miscues and apprehension of their first encounters. There was an easy, fluid quality to their lovemaking, and throughout the long, hot summer weeks, as she listened to her friends talk about the boys they admired and found handsome, smiling innocently at their excitement and anxieties, she felt secretly superior to them. As she swam in the Charnelle public pool or played Foosball or Ping-Pong in the rec room on the days when she did not see him, she looked forward to the brief times with him and teased herself not only with the thoughts of what they did together now but also of what they
might
do if their life together was no longer a secret.

She tried to convince herself that this made the sneaking around worth it. On weekend nights, though, she would go with her family or friends to the drive-in, and, wandering around, she would see the couples in the cars, their arms draped over each other's shoulders, and it did not matter if they were seen kissing or holding hands. At the pool, she would watch the men and women splashing each other, even the teenagers holding hands, putting homemade suntan lotion—baby oil with a drop of iodine—on each other's back, and too often she felt a twinge of envy. No, it was more than envy; it was a longing for extended time together, for visibility, the openness of affection. She would lie sometimes on the large hill of grass by the pool, with her hat and sunglasses on, and watch in a sun-induced trance, wishing she and John could do as these other couples did. The sun would beat down on her until she felt agitated, and she would jump up, throw her hat and glasses on her towel, dash to the pool, and dive over two or three little kids. The cold water slashed her skin, and she stayed under, her eyes open, the chlorine burning them, and watched the bare legs of all the people moving up and down like slow-motion pistons in the sun-spackled blue of the water, and she would hold her breath until her lungs felt ready to pop, and then she'd kick off the pool bottom and propel herself out of the water like a rocket, the sudden air and sound and water in her face like an explosion. It was that feeling of exposure that she yearned for badly.

She was still sitting on the porch, thirty minutes after her father and brothers drove away, when he called, as if he'd been reading her mind, and asked, “Where do you want to go?”

And she said, as if his question was the natural extension of a long conversation, “Far away, where there's lots of water.”

Then amazingly, within a few hours, she was out the door with her bulging bag slung over her shoulder, and down the alley to their spot behind the warehouse where he was waiting in the truck, and they were on their way. And with each mile they put between them and Charnelle, she felt freed of the weight, of the burden of secrecy, and she did not so much rise from his lap as float in the cab. In the dark, with the highway singing under the wheels, Wichita Falls and then Fort Worth behind them, the radio buzzing with Patsy Cline, Elvis, the Big Bopper, the Platters and the Everly Brothers, Bobby Darin and Ray Charles and Marty Robbins, and that silly little song that she couldn't get out of her head, “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini,” ice-cold grape and orange Nehis in their hands, she felt like she was levitating, as if the whole truck were levitating. Or as if the truck itself, with them in it, were a song they could sing, a fast-beating melody that they'd been forced to hum quietly for too long, and now they were finally allowed to let 'er rip.

 

When they arrived in Houston, the barometric pressure seemed to change. The humidity was visible, a gray, misty light over the city, and then, farther south, there was the first smell of sea salt and brine. And through Pasadena and Texas City and across the bridge into Galveston, the air welcomed them like a fat, wet lick of a dog's tongue, and John drove right up to the beach, parked his truck on the sand, ripped off his boots and shirt, and chased her as she ran barefoot, screaming and laughing. He threw her over his shoulder and sprinted, as she kicked and laughed and pounded his back, straight into the morning surf, and on into the surprisingly warm water until a wave knocked them both down and water stung her eyes and tasted like a handful of salt in her mouth.

It was hot and humid, more humid than she would have thought possible, the air thick with moisture, which made her think about her mother at Lake Meredith, her face barely cracking the surface, her hair floating, saying how easy it was to breathe water. The gulf was not lake cold but rather
like a lukewarm bath, and the beaches by midday were thronged with swimmers and sunbathers and sandcastle builders and walkers and wet-furred dogs. They put on bathing suits, and John rented an umbrella and spread out their towels, and they slept under the umbrella through the hot afternoon in a pleasant beach sweat, the two of them side by side, her head nuzzled in the crook of his arm so that the smell of his body was part of her. And later in the day, they drank lemonade and waded in the water, the surf curling hypnotically around their ankles. She'd been to many lakes, but she'd never looked out across an endless expanse of water that seemed to drop off the edge of the horizon. It made her understand for the first time what it was like to live before Columbus, what peasants and kings may have believed about the world as they stood on the shore.

They stayed in a small seaside shanty—that was what the place was called, Seaside Shanties—but it was clean enough, with a bathroom and an outdoor spray to rinse off the sand and sea, and best of all, it was thirty or so yards from the next cabin. The sheets on the bed were worn, the towels old but clean, and there was a broom to sweep out the grit—part sand, part salt, always there as a fact of life—which they could not keep off the sheets or the chairs. It was in the food and in their hair and of course on their bodies so that their lovemaking later seemed slightly overspiced.

The humidity was hard to get used to, but John said, “
You
wanted water,” and he laughed loudly, such a long, powerful belly laugh that it was infectious. They were both exhausted from the all-night drive and from the boldness of the trip itself, the fact that they'd actually done it, gotten out of Charnelle, and not just a few miles away where they'd still have to worry about being caught, but really
away,
to a new world that was wonderfully and benignly indifferent to them. She'd never heard him laugh like that. It was a laugh that would be impossible in Charnelle. So much of their time together had been swathed, she realized, in silence or whispers. Even their lovemaking at the old deserted barn—at least a mile from any other house—had been muted. This laugh rejoiced with sound, and she, too, began laughing, and before they knew it, the two of them were on the floor, unable to stop. Tears streamed down their reddened faces. Their breaths were jagged rasps between giggles. This laughter was painful and kept on and on until it spluttered out, the giggles coming in smaller, more manageable fits. And when it finally subsided, they lay on the floor, her head on his chest, and they looked out the window, filmy with sea salt, and breathed deeply, as the sun slowly died in the room.

They fell asleep like that, and when they woke, they were starving because they had not eaten anything except corn nuts, Nehi, lemonade, and some peaches an old, heavily clothed Mexican woman was selling from a cart on the beach in the afternoon. Their stomachs gnawed and growled so loudly that the prospect of food took priority over sex.

She did not particularly like fish, but the only place open after nine on a weekday was Rotten Red's, a barnacle-covered restaurant that jutted out over the water. The floor was warped from numerous floods and more than a few hurricanes; the windows were fogged over from seawater, and the place smelled like it had been steeped in brine. The odor overwhelmed her. If she hadn't been starving, she wouldn't have eaten anything there, but John ordered bowls of iced shrimp and lobster tails and crab, none of which she'd ever tried before, and after she got the hang of removing the shells from the meat, she devoured the food with the passion of a convert. The food kept coming, and he ordered margaritas for them, which she loved also (more salt, more salt), and they finished their meal with slices of ice-cream-topped cherry pie and sat stuffed in the wicker chairs, shell casings piled on their table like the remains of a massacre.

They listened to a man with a guitar and harmonica play a strange mixture of Hawaiian music, Woody Guthrie songs, and spirituals. She had gulped down a second margarita during dinner, and now everything had a pleasant spinning quality. Her skin was pink and hot from the nap in the sun. The ocean splashed against the pier beneath them and seemed attuned to the rhythm inside her body.

In the flicker of the table candles, John leaned back in the chair, glass in hand, and smiled in a dopey, boyish way. His nose, cheeks, forehead, and the triangle of skin beneath his collarbone were sunburned pink, and his hair was puffy from the humidity and gulf water. She felt an outpouring of gratitude to him for bringing her here. It seemed unreal almost, like one of her dreams, and some part of her wondered when she would wake up. She knew it was not a dream, though to call it real, she realized, would not be true either. Of course, she thought suddenly of the word “idyll,” which had been on a vocabulary test last year. She remembered copying it from the dictionary into her notebook: “a poem treating an epic or romantic theme in idealized terms; a carefree episode; a romantic interlude.” And she remembered the example that made her think of Gloria: “a summer
idyll
on the coast of France.”

“Thank you,” she said.

“Thank
you,
” he said.

And back at the cabin, with the night and the sound of the ocean surrounding them, their bodies fevered from the day in the sun, they made love with a slow, joint-loosened abandon. Their bodies moved in startling ways. Her skin seemed to expand, strangely malleable, and the smell of salt and the aftertaste of margaritas and seafood and the rhythm of sex were like a hot glaze. She felt like a piece of burning metal—reshaped, transformed by the blue flame.

“I love you,” she said, crying. She'd never told him this before and wondered, momentarily, if she was drunk from the margaritas, if she'd made a mistake, not in her feelings for him but in voicing them.

After a pause, he said, “I love you, too,” and she clung to him tightly.

Afterward she felt very awake, alert, and the ocean seemed to call to her. “Can we go walking on the beach?” she asked.