The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing - Melissa Bank [20]
Jamie says a death-voiced "Hi" for both of us.
Then we're back at the beach where we started, facing the boat. Jamie sinks down in the sand, and I sink down beside him.
He turns to me. "I'm sorry," he says.
It's hard for him to apologize, and usually I just say, Say no more or No prob or 'Nuff said. Now I say, "Tell me what you're sorry for, Jamie."
"I'm sorry I didn't listen to you," he says. "I'm sorry I put you through this."
"You left me stranded," I say, and my voice cracks.
"I know," he says, and I can hear that he does know and that he really is sorry.
It scares me how fast I go from disliking to loving him, and I wonder if it's this way for everyone.
Walking into the water, he asks me if I think Cap'n Tom is smoking a joint now.
"Probably," I say.
"And do you think we're going to capsize and drown?"
"Yes," I say. "We will swim with the fishies."
Pretending to be one, he comes at me, fluttering his fingers like fins. He gives me little fish kisses. Then we put our masks on, go under, and flipper out.
M Y
O L D M A N
The only way for a woman, as for a man, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own.
—From The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan
Pin up on your bed, your mirror, your wall, a sign, lady, until you know it in every part of your being: We were destined to delight, excite and satisfy the male of the species.
Real women know this.
—From The Sensuous Woman by J
"Look up when you walk," my great-aunt Rita told me, the summer I stayed with her in Manhattan. "Tilt your chin," she said, lightly tapping her own. I was sixteen, and I listened to her because she was beautiful. She was tall for a woman, but small-boned, willowy, with long white hair she wore up in a chignon.
It was my last night with her, and we were going to the theater. I was already dressed in my Indian-print halter and wraparound skirt combo, and I lurked in the doorway to the bathroom, watching her put on the shade of red lipstick she'd told me Coco Chanel had invented. She noticed me then and looked me over, and her eyes paused at my Dr. Scholl's, the wood-heeled sandals that were the fad of my suburban high school.
Aunt Rita was cranky whenever it was humid or rainy, like my grandmother, her sister.
Following her into the bedroom, I heard my sandals clomp on the polished wood floor.
She shook her head.
I said, "They're all I have."
She handed me a pair of navy-blue pumps. They looked to me like shoes a stewardess would wear and were a size too small, but I squeezed into them. My feet began to hurt even before we left the apartment.
"That's better," my aunt said.
During the first act, she sat perfectly still and silent, enthralled.
At intermission, she went to the ladies' room to take her pill. She never took a pill in public. I was to wait for her in the lobby. My feet throbbed, and I shifted my weight, giving one foot a rest and then the other.
I scanned the crowd, thinking in placards: These Are the People Who Attend the Theater in Manhattan.
One older woman smiled over at me, spoke to her husband, and he turned to look in my direction, too. Then another woman did. I didn't really know what I looked like yet, and my face flushed with the possibility that I could be prettier here than at home.
Then I realized they were staring behind me, and I turned around to see.
You noticed her limbs first, long and tanned, and then her eyes and cheekbones and lips, perfect, like in magazines. She had on a hot-pink silk minidress with straps as thin as string. He was older, a big man, broad and tall, with blond hair and weathered skin. He wasn't handsome exactly, but his looks carried. He was teasing her, and she said something like, Okay, and she flexed her arm. He squeezed her biceps, and I saw, and faindy heard, him whisde. She laughed and he kept his hand there, around her beautiful arm.
When I spotted my aunt, I waved.