The Watery Part of the World - Michael Parker [30]
Maggie wasn’t exactly not nervous. It had been a year then since she’d been with Ronnie. She knew she looked better than most island women her age, a fact generally attributed by everyone but her to her childlessness. She did not like to think that babies would have ruined her looks. She’d seen some women get their hips back, a few even blossom afterward, take some color in their skin they’d lacked. She’d rather believe that some people are given their looks early and others grow into them. Whaley, when she was seventeen, had a figure used to drive every man on the island to throw themselves in the surf to save showing their obvious and attentive salutation. She hedged badly, banked on looking good forever; she went around with her lip as stiff as her read-aloud voice and did not pay one iota of attention to any man, and when in her early thirties she started down that lonely-as-hell-I-wouldn’t-mind-settling-down road, her ass was flat and her high haughty look yonder breasts were gone to sag and she’d doubled her chin with lard and butter and worst of all was that her expression, which had always tended toward the sweet distracted vacancy of the unself-consciously beautiful, had turned into a look-at-me-why-don’t-you wince.
Maggie might have fared better than her sister, but she worried about the effects of time, wind, and sun on her skin, surely sandpaper compared to the peach-fuzzy girls he’d been with. He’d been with a few, she could tell, though they had not taught him much. Or maybe he hadn’t been willing to learn.
Now he was willing, and able. He grew looser and a little more confident with each rendezvous, but she hated the way they had to hide and sneak, hated even more the sand and the heat and the godawful tempest of bugs.
“Why can’t we go to your place?” he asked when she mentioned it.
“I live with my sister.”
Boyd made a point of exaggerating his habitual, one-size-fits-all shrug. Whaley had surely caught wind of them—the island was too tiny for her not to know how Maggie was spending her evenings. But so far Boyd had not come by the house and she’d not asked him up there because she knew Whaley would disapprove, as she did of every man Maggie had ever brought by there even as she tried to rouse a flirt, pulling and patting at her dress to tighten it. The roles the two of them played were pathetic to Maggie mostly because they were predictable: tight, disapproving older sister; loose, boy-crazy younger one. Maggie longed for a little more originality, especially given the fact that they had a steady audience, that the whole island was a witness to their stale roles.
“You don’t know my sister,” she said.
“No, but I’ve seen her around. Down at the store some. Woodrow sells her fish.”
“Don’t say it,” said Maggie.
“Say what?”
“Whatever you’re about to say about her.”
That shrug again. To Maggie it was beginning to represent all the weighty things he knew were out there but, because of his youth, wasn’t up to shouldering, this gesture. But the thing she liked about him was that his heart wasn’t in this carefree ignorance. Hell, his shoulder was barely in it. The shrugs were mostly flicks and twitches, the blade shuddering from some rippling nerve.
“Just that y’all don’t much favor. That’s all I was going to say.”
Maggie looked out to sea so he would not see her gloat. She wanted Boyd kept separate from Whaley and all the silly childish things that had come between her and her only blood kin.
“Come on,” she said. As they stood there was a rustling in the sand a dune or two back from where they lay naked on the chenille. High helium squeals of boys, spying.
“Oh hell,” she said.
Boyd was struggling into his boxers, about to light out after them, but she stopped him.
“I know who they are. I’ll put the fear in them.”
“Don’t doubt that,” he said. He came at her, nuzzling her, half-interested, interest growing, but she turned away and dressed, a little bothered by