The Wapshot Chronicle - John Cheever [11]
They drove through a few holiday village squares where newspapers were stacked outside the one open drugstore and where parades were forming. Now they were in the country, a few miles inland, but there was not much change in feeling, for the road was fenced with stores, restaurants, gift shops, greenhouses and tourist cabins. The beach to which he was taking her was unpopular because the road was rough and the beach was stony, but he was disappointed that day when he found two other cars in the clearing where they parked, and they unloaded the hamper and followed a crooked path to the sea—the open sea here. Pink scrub roses grew along the path and she felt the salt air form on her lips and tasted it with her tongue. There was a narrow, gravelly beach at a break in the cliffs and then below them they saw a couple like themselves and a family with children and then beyond them the green sea. Turning away self-consciously from the privacy he so sorely wanted then and that the cliffs all around them made available he carried the picnic hamper, the whisky bottle and the tennis ball down onto the beach and settled himself in full view of the other bathers as if this momentary gesture toward simple, public pleasure was made for the sake of whatever his mother had been able to wrap up of herself in the sandwiches. Rosalie went behind a stone and changed from her clothes into a bathing suit. He was waiting for her at the edge of the water and when she had made sure that all her hair was under her bathing cap she took his hand and they walked in.
The water was cruelly cold there, it always was, and when it got up to her knees she dropped his hand and dived. She had been taught to swim a crawl but she had never unlearned a choppy, hurried stroke and with her face half buried in the green she headed out to sea for ten feet, turned, surface-dived, shouted with pain at the cold and then raced toward the beach. The beach was sunny and the cold water and the heat of the sun set her up. She dried herself roughly with a towel, snatched off her cap and then stood in the sun, waiting for its heat to reach her bones. She dried her hands and lighted a cigarette and he came out of the sea then, dried only his hands and dropped down beside her.
Her hair was yellow and she was fair—long limbed and full breasted with a skittish look that even in the robes of a choir girl, which she had worn, made her look high-tailed and undressed. He took her hand and raised it and brushed her arm, covered with the light hair of an early down, with his lips. “I’d adore to pick blueberries,” she said loudly and for the benefit of the others on the beach. “I’d adore to pick blueberries but let’s take your hat and we’ll put the blueberries in that.”
They climbed the stones above the beach, hand in hand, but the search for a privacy that would satisfy her was lengthy and they went from place to place until finally he stopped her and she agreed, timidly, that there was probably nothing better. He took her bathing suit off her shoulders and when she was naked she lay down cheerfully, gladly in the sunny dirt to take the only marriage of her body to its memories that she knew. Tenderness and good nature lingered between them after they were done and she leaned on his shoulder while she stepped back into her bathing suit and they returned hand in hand to the beach. They went swimming again and unwrapped the sandwiches that his worried mother had made them the night before.
There were deviled eggs and chicken joints, sandwiches, cakes, cookies, and when they had eaten what they could they put the rest away in the hamper and he jogged down the beach and pitched the tennis ball to her from there. The light ball wavered in the wind but she caught it and threw it back to him with a wing that, like her swimming