An August Away: Part I

Margaret Johnson

I had my first view of the island from the ferry, a stout, iron-walled vessel with smooth plastic pews on two decks and a horn that sounded like an animal moaning in pain. Around it, the June evening light resisted darkness until the last possible moment, like a child struggling to staying awake until dawn.

“Where are we headed?” I asked Marin, who had come to meet my train and ride the ferry back with me. She was barefoot—“I never wear shoes here”—dressed in a pair of worn men’s khakis and a wife-beater over an absinthe colored bikini top.

“You can’t see it yet; between the two light houses.” She looked up and out with a sudden, radiant hopefulness. In the pale light between sundown and night, a tenuous filament of land became visible. Then came the faint outlines of two towers nearly a mile apart, and the swoop of their beacon lights, still dim in the remaining daylight. “That’s it. That’s Silvet. See the marina?”

Halfway between the lighthouses, I recognized a group of sailboats, masts swaying, bracketed by an L-shaped dock on either side, east and west. Silvet, the beach hamlet where my cousin Marin Wallerman had spent every summer of her life, lies approximately at the center of that frail barrier isle that stretches below Long Island like a crooked smile. As we got closer, a line of pitched-roof seaside cottages materialized at the edge of the corrugated bay like figures in a Polaroid, fading into being in the colorless space between sand and sky.

It was August of the summer they serialized Gatsby in the Times, the summer the City was making the rash Olympic bid that rivaled the World’s Fair in its financial delusion, the summer the Republican National Convention filled Peter Luger’s and Mark Joseph’s with pot-bellied delegates in navy sport coats with pert sweater-set clad Christian Feminists on their arms. At the end of July, with the influx of aliens imminent, New Yorkers were advised to take to the hills or the beach.

Having just completed my internship with Merriton Consulting, newly freed from my cubicle, I had every intention of sticking it out, taking in the spectacle. I was house-sitting for Harold Moses, my mother’s widowed step-father who was spending the summer on the ranch he had just bought in north central Texas. We bonded at a family reunion when I was sixteen, when he discovered me taking pictures of relatives when they weren’t looking. “Does she have a name for that thing?” he asked, scrutinizing my subjects, Great Aunt Florence and her oxygen tank, through his spectacles, electric blue frames with undersized, circular lenses. Harold, it turned out, was an amateur photographer himself, as well as the publisher of Liberal Life Magazine. “I thought you were a lyricist,” I said. Back in the seventies, Harold had written the lyrics for a smash hit Broadway musical and had presumably been living off the royalties ever since. He didn’t seem to have done much in the meantime, although he always claimed to be working. “It’s a new project. I have a friend who runs the Sierra Club, and they’re underwriting it. Circulation will be small at first—one or two thousand trial copies sent out to members of Audubon and Sierra Club, people who realize that environmentalism is integral to democracy. You ought to send me some of your photos.”

“You’d want animals and nature, though, right? I mostly take pictures of people.”

“Just send me a few, and we’ll see.”

I sent him a roll of film I’d shot on a weekend trip to Dauphin Island. He ended up putting one of my pictures on the cover of the second issue of Liberal Life. It was a picture of a brown pelican, that most comic bird of prey, pocketing a fish in its ample, distended jowls. “American imperialism in a nutshell,” said Harold. “Send more.”

He hadn’t used any more of my pictures in the magazine, but he did offer me his apartment for the summer. He and his dachshund Fitz would be herding cattle on the outskirts of Abilene until the end of August, and, as long as I continued to send him his mail twice a week—he couldn’t afford to disappear altogether into the sunset—I could stick around until I went back to school. Then my mother called.

A week before I stepped onto the ferry, her sister, Marin’s mother, phoned her with the news that Marin had deferred her law school matriculation and was spending all of her time out on the island. Aunt Julia was worried. She though Marin might talk to me and was at that very moment calling Marin to tell her to invite me to the island. I suggested to my mother that maybe Marin didn’t really want to go to law school and didn’t want any company, but she insisted that Marin didn’t know what she wanted and that this was all about that boy, meaning Drew McDonald, the guy Marin had dated since high school. He was also from Manhattan, also had a house at Silvet. His father used to own the meatpacking district, although the latest word was that he was gradually selling off those holdings and to buy up bits of the Lower East Side and whole helpings of Brooklyn. Drew hadn’t noticed Marin until the summer he was seventeen, she fourteen, when he began to court her quietly. “He was always so respectful,” she once told me. “He wouldn’t even sleep with me the first time I suggested it.” This surprised me at the time, but once I heard more about him, I understood that Drew would never have pursued a woman who allowed the other islanders to fumble with her in the dark.

Drew had joined the Marines as soon as he graduated from Bowdoin, which, according to Marin, he never found challenging. I only ever met him once, the Christmas before I went to the island, when he came by my grandparents’ house briefly to pick up Marin so that the two of them could spend the last two days before he left for the Middle East together. He sat down at the table for only a few minutes, but it was enough time to see what had drawn them together.

Marin had always been quiet in that way that makes everyone lean closer to hear what she has to say. It brings her many admirers, whom she usually rebuffs in her shyness. Drew seemed equally reserved. Tall and slender, his face pierced with eyes so blue they look dyed, the marine lieutenant exuded the sort of absolute self-control that marks a flask of anger hidden somewhere on the person to be guzzled in a moment of frantic fear or rage.

I remember that they didn’t touch each another from the time he entered the house until they left and hardly spoke to each another, except in murmurs and glances. The only glimmer of a bond was the way Marin’s eyes stayed trained on him when he rose to put his glass in the sink and the way they hovered near one another as they stood saying goodbye to relatives.

“Julia says she’s entirely isolated herself,”my mother said, calling from her office at Signature Interior Design in Mobile. “She needs company.”

“I think she probably wants to be alone. And what about Harold’s place?”

“Harold will understand. And just because someone wants to be alone doesn’t mean they should. Of course, it’s typical of the Wallerman’s not to invite you until they need you, but luckily we are not people to hold a grudge. Julia is going to tell Marin to pick you up on Friday. Just take the train to Bayview, and she’ll meet you there.” It was an old source of resentment on my side of the family that we had never been invited to the beach home where the Wallermans spent every summer. We had invited them to visit us multiple times, but it wasn’t hard for me to understand why they didn’t want to come to Alabama in the summertime.

I hadn’t spoken to Marin in five months, but she answered the phone like we had talked the day before. Maybe it was the fact that her mother had told her I was going to call, or just her general sweetness, which I had never been really motivated to achieve, but I felt instantly at ease, even as I reminded myself that this was the effect she always had on me. She was the same way when she met me at the Bayview train station that Friday afternoon.

“How are you?” she asked me. I believe that she was genuinely glad to see me.

“How are you?”I asked

“It’s been a weird summer. Did Mom call you?

“She and Mom think you’re depressed.”

“I probably am. But that’s okay.” She maintained her original smile, as though she was afraid of what would happen if she let it go.

I slung my bag over my shoulder, and Marin led me across the street to the place where we boarded the Silvet Star ferry. It was a double-decker. I followed Marin up the interior stairs and emerged on the top deck. “You’ll have a better view up here.” Once we were seated, I asked her if she was sure it was okay that I was coming.

“No, it’s great.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I’ll introduce you to everyone. You’ll get to meet Drew’s parents,” she told me as we boarded the ferry. “My parents are in Italy, but you’ve probably already heard that.”

“You didn’t want to go to Italy?”

“No. That was probably ungrateful of me, but I wanted to stay. I need a base. And Drew thinks of me here.”

“Tickets.” The thirteen- or fourteen-year-old kid taking the pink tickets from Marin’s hand looked at her a second longer than necessary. I kept my eyes on the horizon.

The closer the ferry brought us to our destination, the more glad I became that Marin had never been to the Gulf Coast town where I grew up. It was as beloved to me as this place that figured so prominently in Marin’s sun-bleached childhood. It would undoubtedly fall short of my descriptions of it, and Marin expected everything to be beautiful. Not just attractive—she did not place much value in things being pretty—but beautiful—nuanced, imperfect, and full. This faith might have been the result of the genetic success that awaited her always in the mirror, a perfect, effortless fusion of individually imperfect elements, but there was no entitlement implicit in this expectation. It was just that she could not believe the rest of the world might not be similarly blessed. Despite these expectations, or perhaps because of them, she never registered disappointment in inferior surroundings, as I surely would have been if I harbored similar expectations. Did she constantly alter her definition of beauty to fit what was offered, or was she simply the possessor of a vain optimism she could not allow reality to undermine? I still wonder.

The ferry drew up alongside the marina’s east dock just as its green starboard light began to glow in the falling dark. Marin waved over the rail to a middle-aged couple waiting on the shore. “Oh great. The MacDonalds came out to meet us.” I would have liked to take a photograph of the two of them, or, rather, the space between them. In photography, they teach you to think about negative space. How do you know if that space is just the space between two people who trust each other enough not to need to hold on or a space they could not ever close up if everything depended upon it? Like Marin, Drew’s father was barefoot, his cargo pants rolled up to the calves. His faded gray Deerfield sweatshirt fit tightly enough to reveal the sinewy leanness of his frame. Finished waving, Mrs. MacDonald stood with her arms folded, here wrists and neck wound around with strings of turquoise and tiger eye, her loose-fitting white linen pants and tunic fanning out in the breeze. I was curious to see how she treated Marin, who had told me stories of Drew’s mother walking in on them when she knew Marin was there. Did she hold Marin close like one of her son’s sweaters, because Marin had absorbed his smell, some sense of his shape? Or did she know that when her son came home, he would be returning to this other woman, this girl?

“It’s good to meet you, Charlotte.” Mr. MacDonald held out his hand. “I’m Drew’s mother,” his wife introduced herself. “We’re so glad Marin will have some company.”

“Is this everything?” Mr. MacDonald asked, lifting my bag.

“You don’t have to carry it,” I said, but Mr. MacDonald did not answer.

The couple set off down the dock, and Marin followed.

“Are they taking us to your house?” I asked.

“Oh, my parents’ house is being renovated. We couldn’t stay there. We’re staying with Drew’s parents. I do it all the time. They have plenty of room.”

Marin and I shared a room in the MacDonalds’ house, which resembled the bungalows on either side of it except for the absence of children’s bathing suits hung on the deck railing and brightly colored Schwinns leaning against the fence that enclosed it. There was only a single rusty bicycle abandoned against one wall of the house that had to be older than the two years they had owned the house. Their previous island dwelling had been on the bay side. The bike could have been something Mr. MacDonald intended to fix up, but I never saw him work on it. More likely, it was there to detract from the opulence of their weekend dwelling. The house featured more partitions than walls, many bearing modern paintings and aboriginal art. Across the back stretched a wall of windows, across which plain eggshell colored blackout curtains could be drawn. One storm could have wiped it all away, like a mandala of sorts.

“I’ll show you around the town as soon as I check my email,” Marin said, sitting down at a desk standing along at the end of the room, several feet from either the windows or the wall. The modem of her laptop emitted a static-y cough. “We only have dial-up here. Sorry,” she said without turning around.

“That’s fine.”

Connected at last, she hunched over, peering into the liquid-crystal display as into an oracle. After a moment, her shoulders relaxed. “There’s an email from Drew.” After she read it, she explained to me that email was the only way they could communicate. “He doesn’t really have access to a phone.”

“How often do you hear from him?”

“Once a week, maybe. He’s really good about it.”

“Where is he?”

“He can’t tell me specifically, but somewhere in Kuwait. Getting ready to go into Iraq.”

“Is he scared?”

“I think he’s more excited than anything. This is what he’s always wanted to do.”

“Aren’t you scared?”

“I’m terrified, but I have to support him.”

“But he doesn’t have to do this, right?” I was entering territory I had promised myself I wouldn’t. Marin had explained to me more than once the reasons that Drew joined the Marines and the rightness of his decision. He wanted to do something he believed in, something that counted, something that was hard. People like him, people like us, who had everything handed to us, had never known self-sacrifice. We had no notion of what it is to be noble. I said that sounded pretty arrogant to me. Marin said that it wasn’t and that Drew could explain it a lot better than she could.

“No, but it’s something he believes in, and I support that.” Marin controlled her tone carefully; she sounded only slightly defensive. Although I am not the type of person who reserves judgment—it is simply not one of my strengths—I told myself that last summer was the time for debate, before we were in a war in which people were dying and before Drew MacDonald had the opportunity be one of them. Now it was real, and it was my job to help beautiful Marin Wallerman bear the strain.