The Watery Part of the World - Michael Parker [26]
Looking back was a luxury, a chance to tuck and tidy. The stories her sister told the Tape Recorders, especially the ones about her famous ancestor, weren’t all sweetness and light, but they somehow managed to wrap up in a way that left Whaley bathed in light as holy as pink Yaupon dusk. What Maggie remembered thinking and what she thought at the time: the distance between was the Pamlico Sound separating their island from the rest of the world.
She did not think, as she ought to have thought when Whaley told Woodrow he was too old to change, You heartless bitch, what is wrong with you, you need to be sucking up to the man after what we’ve done to him, and instead you sit up there on your top step insulting him. She did not look to Woodrow, did not appraise his hurt or notice whether there was truly a bug on the hand he pulled away from the skin he slapped. She did not tend to Woodrow because, much as she hated to admit it, her sister’s words—too old to change—made her think about herself.
Or rather of Boyd, of her life with Boyd.
She was forty years old when she met him, and he was twenty-four. She had heard of Boyd’s arrival on island even though she did not see him up close until that day he showed up was leaking away in shadows. She was down island, taking her nearly nightly swim. She liked to swim unencumbered, but that night for some reason she kept her suit on, or what she called a suit: bra and panties.
She had her back to the shore, eyes out to sea, floating past the breakers in the mild after-supper surf. Pointing her feet to the horizon, sculling as the sun shot through her, touched her places with sudsy fingers. A little bit of heaven and the best bits of earth merged in her afternoon bask. So deep was her pleasure that she was oblivious when, occasionally, boys all the way up to grown men—kindergarteners to when they dropped out of school, usually not much into their teens—came to spy in the dunes above her basking spot, knowing as all the world did of her habit of leaving off clothes when the water was warm. It liked to killed her sister, especially because Maggie never once bothered to acknowledge her audience. She liked to think of herself as the model you don’t get showed in school or at home. Boys needed to see the thing alive and full frontal so they at least knew what they were lying about when they went around bragging. She’d seen the pictures scrawled on the stall doors of the single bathroom in the schoolhouse. A nasty word for a woman’s private parts spelled out in a spindly hand, an arrow lassoing it and pointing to a pitiful triangle. If she could help out with the anatomy, well, everyone on the island took a hand in raising the children.
She had her back to Boyd but she knew he was there. She felt his eyes on her, steady as the sun tinting her skin, but she did not turn to him. She kept her toes pointed out to sea. She did not want to appear any too eager, for she’d seen him down at the dock that morning and he was tall and rangy like she liked them. Who knew how long he’d be around? So many of the ones who showed up announcing they were on the island to stay were gone the first big blow. They lacked fortitude, Whaley claimed. The island was no place for crooks, drunks, liars, gamblers, philanderers, and other sorts of reprobates because these particular types were in need always of outside resources to sustain them. Whaley made it sound like only the virtuous could survive on their island. Maggie knew better, though it was true that to any more than make do out here, you had to know how to make peace with yourself, and with the weather.
Sometimes Maggie felt at peace; other days she woke up to find that, like the sand sifted away by the current,