The Watery Part of the World - Michael Parker [75]
Here they were, still sisters, all that was left of the island, sent to spend their last days on the mainland. Woodrow gone, the island run by the Park Service, half the houses rented out to hippie-looking things, come to rough it for the summer. Back to the land, they declared. Most of them lasted a month or less. Mosquitoes got to them. She knew a dozen ways to ward off bugs but wasn’t about to share them with any stranger trudging up the beach road pulling along a generator on a child’s red wagon. She wouldn’t even share her bug secrets with Liz or Dr. Levinson; do, they’d turn around and put it out there to the public, and the bugs were the only thing keeping people off the island now. Lack of electricity didn’t seem to stop them, nor storms.
Little Liz would be wanting to talk about Woodrow and them, their so-called social dynamic. Whaley told her on the phone, Sure, honey, come on down, I’ll tell you all about it, but when she mentioned to Maggie what Liz was after, Maggie turned sullen and cold and had kept it up for a full week now. Though they’d been known to go months coddling hurts, had even let some things fester for years without talking them over (Sarah’s death, for one; Maggie’s next-to-last trip off island, for another), lately they’d both been trying harder not to let things get away with them so bad. Part of it was just being so old, not having the energy to go around holding in hurt, real or imagined. Most of it, though, was that it was just the two of them now, and even though they were off island, across the water in a place she’d always said she’d as soon die as settle over here with all the others who turned tail and left over not much of nothing but a squall, they were the island, only bit of it left, two old sisters so far from their cottage on the briny deep, precious close to their time to die.
Whaley thought the only way to keep the island alive was to tell about it: how it was. Maggie disagreed—said she’d rather sit in the dayroom watching Dialing for Dollars with the droolers than hear her sister expound on the Social Dynamic of Yaupon Island in Its Very Last Days, Home Only to Two Old White Women and a Black Gentleman. She said she’d stick her head in and say hey to little Liz, who wasn’t so little anymore—it’d been ten, fifteen years since she showed up on the island toting Dr. Levinson’s fancy recording equipment around, a tiny thing studying for some degree or another up at Chapel Hill. She was married now and had two or three children, and her husband let her pick right up and drive by herself down to Morehead to spend a couple days tape-recording an old lady in a nursing home. Whaley couldn’t say she understood it over here, the way people acted. She couldn’t say she liked it either. Morehead was loud and dusty and ugly as sin, laid out like it was along a road so busy they split it into two halves and run train tracks down the middle. The town was built back up off the water so there wasn’t any breeze and the houses lining the sound were built so close you couldn’t park a skiff between them. Across the water lay Bogue Banks, overrun with tourists for whom they’d ruined the island with tall hotels and a trashy boardwalk and something called putt-putt, a game you played with golfing sticks and balls and two-story plastic alligators. Good God, the houses over there. People called them cottages, but wasn’t any cottage to it. They looked like they’d sleep a third of Yaupon in its heyday, some of them. The doctor who came by to check on her claimed he owned one. Whaley asked did he stay over there all year long, doctor said, Tell you the truth Miss Whaley I don’t get over there near as often as I’d like. Four or five