The Watery Part of the World - Michael Parker [34]
It was herself too that she didn’t trust. She had a history, and he did not understand nor want to learn to understand history. No one does when they’re young. Whaley loved to talk about how her namesake was so well versed in Latin and Greek, could read old dead poets in French, knew by heart the names of the British royalty and all the stories from the Bible. Maybe that’s where Whaley got her taste for all the ancient things she lived to tell the Tape Recorders. But Whaley wasn’t ever young, really. Not that Maggie was ever so young as Boyd. When she was his age exactly, she was stringing around with a married man as much older than her as she was to Boyd. But there was enough youthful innocence left to remember what it felt like, having to deal with the fact that this man she fancied she loved had slept alongside a wife he swore he could not stomach the sight of (how incredible she found this notion, how oddly repellent, so much so that she would not let herself ponder it even though her mind wanted to go there, like the sight of some washed-ashore half-pecked-apart tern you can’t not look at) and had children in a world that should have been slate clean for their own offspring. She knew that sooner or later, her history would get to Boyd.
And perhaps there was something of the island itself, the fact that every second it was being taken away by wind and water at the same time it was being added to, grain by grain. This place seemed to have something against the notion of forever. Everything felt so borrowed; it was hard not to be skeptical of anything lasting longer than a season. But she got around to this reason lastly and treated it lightly, preferring to blame herself over geography and nature.
It wasn’t that she was a bad person; it was that there was something bad wrong with her. Sometimes she felt like the wind blew right through her. The strangest things made her cry—the yellow suds ebbing around some storm wrack, a dead snake, the first few bars of a song overheard from someone’s window as she passed by at night—but let someone she’d known all her life swell up with a tumor and she paid it no more mind than a mosquito bite. Her sister was always calling her selfish, but that was too easy. She cared about other people so much that she wanted to see inside them, to think their same thoughts. She just did not care to sit for hours in their stuffy parlors, talking about couldn’t that new preacher hear their stomachs growling, why were his sermons so long?
Boyd, by comparison, was noble and believed in people’s goodness. He wasn’t so good he was boring, but he was a fine thing in this world and she got quickly to where it seemed just wrong to think she could have him.
Doubt kept at her, a whining bug in her ear even when she tried not to consider it. Still, when they were lying in bed, or walking along the island in the after supper settling down of day, talking their playful, idle talk, everything went away. Then there was only the two of them, standing alone and indomitable in the slight spray from the surf.
One Sunday six months after Boyd arrived on the island, he announced he was taking his boat across to Morehead that weekend to attend his cousin’s baby’s christening. This was the first time he’d left the island and would be the longest they’d been apart.
“Your cousin’s baby?” she said. A breeze batted the curtains she’d sewn for the summer kitchen, where they lay sweaty and entwined.
“Yep.”
“Sounds kind of distant to me.”
“Y’all don’t have cousins who have babies over here?”
“I doubt I’d cross the creek to go to their christening if I did.”
“You don’t want me to go,” he said.
“Go on across,” she said in such a sulky voice that Boyd laughed.
“Why don’t you come with me?”
“What, as your date?”
“Yes, as my date.”
It was her turn to laugh at the thought of tagging along behind him through a gauntlet of family, like some schoolgirl he’d met in the parking lot of Dairy Queen.
“What’s so funny?”
“I don’t think your cousin’s baby’s christening would care to be upstaged by you showing