June 23, 1971
Mid-week, the wide beach is near empty, just a scattering of mothers and their children.
Dark oval sunglasses, bought an hour earlier at the Woolworth's down the street, hide Cassie’s bruise. This morning the eye was ringed in black, the side of her face puffy and red.
She lays down her towel on the soft sand sheltered along the beach grass, nearer the dunes and farther from the water, where the wild wind whips the sand ceaselessly across the beach and sprays mare’s tails across the post-storm rollers. Even in her protected inlet, an occasional blast sends a sting of sand against her skin. She turns her head leeward. These early summer rays are almost medicinal and she drinks them in, always, when she is on the beach, thinking of the winter and the store of sun she’ll need to take her through the dark months.
This morning, up early in her empty kitchen, her head ached and she knew she’d have to wait until at least tomorrow to try the running shoes.
But on the bike ride to the beach, over the long cool road shaded by grand old trees and then past the sparkling green marsh of the estuary, she felt as if she were pedaling air. And now, her body on the warm sand, eyes closed, with only the wind and the breaking waves to listen to, she feels on the edge of the world and falling toward sleep, all of yesterday and tomorrow gone and only her breathing, here, now.
Cassie isn’t sure how long she’s been asleep when she turns and stares up to see a stranger, long blond hair billowing out from her face like Medusa and her head of silky snakes. Next to the stranger is Teri, whose groomed hair slices into the cobalt sky like a face cut out of a photograph with a razor. They both carry aluminum lawn chairs, brightly colored bags and the stranger, this Nina, carries a large plastic thermos.
“New sunglasses?” asks Teri.
Nina, quickly out of her clothes, stands in her minute white bikini and surveys the beach, which curves miles in both directions. “There’s no one here.” She bends over to open up her chair and, briefly, it appears as if she’s lost the top part of her bathing suit. Where’s Stu, thinks Cassie with a smile. He’s missing all the fun.
“Nina,” snaps Teri. “No one promised you the Riviera.”
Nina angles her chair to face the sun, takes out a bottle of baby oil and rubs generous amounts onto her skin. “I’ll go for a walk later,” she says. “If there’s anyone here, I’ll find him.” When her body’s oiled, she takes out a radio, tunes it close to her ear and then places it by her chair. The wind’s blowing the music away from Cassie, but snatches of what sounds like the Fifth Dimension drift in her direction.
Teri peels down to a demure, navy blue bikini dotted with white daisies. She leaves her chair and lays her towel down next to Cassie. “What happened to your face?” she whispers.
“Huh?”
“Come on, Cass, I bet you’ve got a contusion four inches in diameter under those sunglasses.”
Cassie glances at Nina. Her head tilts back, face toward the sun, chair angled away from their towels. She wonders if Teri would believe the freezer story and then wonders why she just can’t tell Teri the truth.
“It was an accident.”
“Well,” she laughs. “I certainly didn’t think you were in a fistfight.” She reaches into her bag for a tube of suntan lotion, the oily bronze kind with a distinctive scent. For the St. Tropez Tan! it says on the label.
“It was a freezer at work.”
“I love that smell!” gushes Nina. “Hand it over when you’re done.”
“A freezer?” asks Teri.
“There’s something wrong with the handle. It doesn’t always catch right when you open it and I opened it wrong. Don’t worry, though. George is ordering a new one. This was the last straw for him.”
“It’s pretty swollen. Did you ice it?” Teri sits up to rub the lotion on her legs and Cassie is suddenly glad for her lie.
“I iced it.”
“You should have iced it longer.” She hands the tube to Nina, who squeezes liberal globs onto her chest.
“I love this song,” shouts Nina. She turns up the volume of her radio, sings and snaps her fingers. “’Busted down in Memphis, waitin’ for a train, feeling near as faded as my jeans.’”
Cassie doesn’t know which is worse, that she and Nina both love the same song, or listening to Nina sing over Janis. She rolls over and joins in. “’Bobby hailed a diesel down, just before it rained, we rode it all the way to New Orleans.’”
“Sing it Cassie!” Nina calls out.
“’Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,’” Nina and Cassie sing the song through together and by the end Teri too rolls onto her back and sings to the sky with them: “I’d trade all my tomorrows for a single yesterday, when I was holding Bobby’s body next to mine . . .me and my Bobby McGee.”
The guitars and drum and Janis end with a thump, and Nina quickly turns the radio down. “Can’t stand to pollute Janis.”
Cassie smiles.
“I forgot you two had that in common,” says Teri.
“What?” says Nina. She kicks Teri’s leg with her foot. It slides a bit along her calf in the suntan oil.
“The worshipping dead singers thing.”
“Not any dead singer.”
“Just Janis.” Nina holds up her fingers in a “V” and waves her hand from side to side and smiles at Cassie. Cassie smiles back, without the “V.”
“She’s still just a singer.”
“Yes sir, Dr. Pinter,” says Nina.
“Dr. Pinter,” says Cassie. “That sounds right.”
“You better believe it,” says Nina.
Warm in the sun, Cassie takes off her shorts and her shirt. She rolls off her towel and onto the sand so that her skin can drink up the warmth of the millions of grains beneath her.
“That’s the same suit you wore last year,” says Teri. “You need a new one every year, I’ve told you that a million times, Cassie.”
“With those muscles, she can wear anything,” says Nina. “Where did you get all those muscles?”
At first impulse Cassie wants to ignore the question, but the spirit of friendship demands otherwise. “I don’t know,” she answers. “Working, most likely.”
Nina reaches into her bag and pulls out cups. “Anyone want some?”
“No,” says Teri.
“I will.” Cassie reaches over as Nina hands her a paper cup filled with cold red liquid. One sip tells her that it’s koolade spiked with vodka.
They lie still for a while, and then Nina stretches out of her chair, fingertips raised toward the sky. “Time to explore.”
Once she’s out of earshot, Teri says, “You don’t want to drink that.”
“It’s just got some vodka in it.”
“That’s what you can taste, but seriously Cass, you don’t know what else she put in there.”
Cassie sniffs at the cup. “I could ask her.”
“She won’t tell. She claims it’s about trust.”
“She’s not so bad after all. She’s kind of fun.”
“I’m just not sure why she’s still here. She says she wants to work with my father every day. They think she’s great, everything I’m not, outgoing, charming, a go-getter.”
“Forget your parents. She’s your friend.”
“I did get lab work, though, in Cambridge. The commute’s gonna be a nightmare.”
A seagull cries above them, a splash of white and sound in vast blue. “I got new running sneakers. They’re the latest technology and this guy I met in the store told me that some schools have spots for girls who will run for them. So I’m running again.”
“You don’t need to run to go to college. You just have to decide to go and find a place where you can transfer credits. Or just forget the credits and find a place.”
“I like to run.”
“You were really good at it,” Teri concedes.
“At Cosmo’s . . .”
“Cass, Cosmo’s is just a job. You need to get out of that place.”
Just a job, being a doctor is just a job, Cassie could respond. But she knows Teri means well. Balls of sweat condense and roll behind Cassie’s knees and under her arms. She sits up, drains the paper cup and heads for the water. “I’m boiling. I need to go for a swim.”
She heads across the soft sand above the high tide line toward the water. Sand stings her ankles and legs in the steady breeze. Below the high tide line errant loose sand skitters along the hard-packed surface, and the wind sends shimmers over the shallow waters that pool in the bowls after the waves break. No sandpipers dart in and out of the shallows on their spindly legs today and only the gulls ride the high drafts above her.
The water’s always cold. Except for late August and early September, any dip is bracing at best. Now, June, the water is frigid and as she passes over the wet sand she is less inclined to want to step in. An icy wave catches her toes and she jumps back. The only way to do this is to dive straight in, so she trots back ten feet, takes off her sunglasses, holds them in her hand and runs hard, letting the chilled water splash up to her knees before she dives in head first. Breath held, sounds muffled, motion fluid, any immersion under water is a visit to a place of solitude and then, with a gasp of air, she’s up again, shivering. She jogs through the surf back to dry sand.
“Jesus, what happened to you?”
Cassie blinks in the sun. It’s Nina.
“Wait right here, don’t move,” she says, running back to the towels.
Cassie twists the water out of her hair, gently rubs the salt out her eyes with the pads of her fingers and faces the sun.
“Look over here.”
Nina is back, and Cassie turns, face over her right shoulder, hands up by her neck, caught by surprise. Nina cradles a camera and with alarming rapidity clicks off a series of shots as she turns the camera from side to side and walks around Cassie. No, Cassie thinks, stop, but she is too taken aback to find her words. Cassie turns to follow the camera, shaking her head, and then she thinks to put her sunglasses back on. Nina takes a few more shots and lowers the camera.
She peers through the view once more and recaps the lens. “There’s so much ambient light here, I had to set the speed faster but I can’t be sure of the shadows, you know? You never know the whole story ‘til you see the negative.”
Cassie’s heart beats in gallops. The wind gusts and she shivers, rubs her hands over her upper arms. Nina holds up her camera and takes a few more shots. “Being all wet like that, it’s like you’re naked or something. These’ll be great.”
“What?” Cassie finally manages.
“Oh,” says Nina. “You wouldn’t know. For my portfolio.” She turns a knob on the camera. “I’ll let you know if I mount them in a show or something, you know, pain into art and all that.”
Anger carries her. “That’s bullshit.”
Nina holds the camera down and looks straight at Cassie. “You know what’s bullshit? Letting someone smack you around, that’s bullshit.”
“No one smacked me around.”
Nina glances up toward the dunes. “She may believe that freezer crap. You could at least come up with something better. Unless it’s your first time and you can’t think of anything else.” She turns back to Cassie and tilts her head toward her shoulder. “Try again. What happened?”
Cassie’s mood lurches between loathing and a desolating feeling of loneliness. She looks out through the sunshine over the waves to the horizon—sky over water, blue over blue, motion over motion, light over dark, and air over water. Where would she begin? From before, just to kiss him and ride around in his old car together? From when his number was called and he never, not for a second wanted to go, but he went? From the way he runs at her and away from her since he came home? From the way he handled her in the alley by the river?
“He didn’t mean to hurt me. He was asleep and his arm just swung out from a nightmare.”
“Who?”
Cassie focuses. If only she could get the story out in a sentence maybe then she could look at it for a while and know it for what it was.
“Mark. I used to be with him, but then he went to Vietnam and now…” She snorts. “He’s kind of a mess. But he’s only been back a few weeks or so.”
“What did he say when it happened?”
“He doesn’t know.”
Nina is surprised. “He’s gotta know.”
“Like I said, he’s pretty much upset all the time anyway.”
“Too bad for him.”
Cassie starts walking back toward her towel.
Nina walks along with her. “Look. He was probably into some evil shit over there, but that’s not your problem.”
Teri sits up.
Cassie turns toward Nina. “They fight for us over there.”
Nina holds up her palm. “No one’s fighting for me.”
“He didn’t want to go.”
“He could have gone to Canada.”
He could have gone to Mars, thinks Cassie, but she’s tired again and lies down on her towel.
“Look,” says Teri. “My mother made us sandwiches. I think she put mayonnaise on them so we should eat them soon.” Teri unpacks three square packages wrapped tightly in tin foil, opens them up, and puts one on Cassie’s towel, one on Nina’s lap, and keeps one for herself. Cassie turns her head, sniffs at the efficient sandwich cut evenly into four, and rapidly chews one triangle after another.
Nina pours koolade into a cup, nibbles at her sandwich, and then hands it back. “I think there’s sand in mine.”
“Maybe you would have gone to Canada,” says Teri. “Maybe I would have gone to Canada. But some people can’t pack up and leave everything they’ve ever known.”
The sandwich Cassie just ate propels itself back up her throat and she sits up quickly. Mark would never have gone to Canada and left her. And she never made it easier for him, offered to go with him. They had never even talked about it.
“Are you OK? Are you dizzy? Maybe you got a concussion.”
Cassie shakes her head, “the sandwich.”
“Forgodsakes, I told my mother to put mustard on them.” She turns and stretches out her hand toward Nina who’s picked up her camera again. “I’ll rip the film out, I swear!”
Nina laughs.
“I’m going for a walk,” says Cassie.
Teri gets up. “I’ll come too. Diane Arbus can stay here.”
Nina, her head back and her eyes closed, doesn’t respond.
They walk southward along the shore that goes miles along the ocean before it reaches around like the bend of an arm into another river and spreads its fingers through the marshes. The wind blows alongside and sends the cold tide over their feet at uneven intervals. The day is sunny and beautiful and quiet. After a mile or so, they head up into the soft sand and lie down on their stomachs.
Cassie thinks, I could tell Teri anything here, but she can’t begin to find the thoughts, can’t bring herself to relate the details, any one of which would make Teri tell her to run, run hard in the other direction, away from Mark, away from here.
She puts her cheek in the warm sand. “This is the real reason I won’t leave,” says Cassie. “This beach, this sun, this quiet. It’s all I really know.”
“This place just gives you the illusion that nothing changes. But things are always changing.” Teri turns on her back and tilts her face to the sun. “Plus, Ipswich’ll still be here when you come back.”
“But will it be the same for me? If I leave it?”
She sighs. “Cassandra Anne Leahy, homebody.”
“Teri Swanson Pinter, world traveler.”
