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Overview
This year, in this affecting, sly, bittersweet novel, they are gathering along with their husbands at Dune Ridge on the coast of North Carolina near the close of summer. Only this year their circle is incomplete. Because Ian―wildly irresponsible Ian, "the enigma" Ian―does not show. His young, new wife does, however, and no matter what romance Ian may have shared with Shotsie, Bess, and Claire in the past, it's the dewily beautiful Nina who is bearing his child.
For sure, a hurricane is heading menacingly their way, and neither friendship nor memory, any more than a creaky seaside cottage, can grant them safe harbor. In old stories new truths unfold.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781480437302 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Pegasus Books |
| Publication date: | 08/13/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | NOOK Book |
| Pages: | 208 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Susan Kelly is the author of the novels of How Close We Come, Even Now, The Last of Something, Now You Know, and By Accident. She lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, with her husband and three children.
Read an Excerpt
The Last of Something
By Susan Kelly
PEGASUS BOOKS
Copyright © 2006 Susan KellyAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4804-3730-2
CHAPTER 1
Wednesday, August 27
"Why not just rent a house?" Bess had said. And normally this is what we do, so that no one person bears the brunt of preparations or cleaning, but—"Not this time," I answered.
Claire thought we should rent as well. "Remember my china," she warned. "If something's going to get ruined, let it be someone else's." All of us were there the night her husband Wes had pushed through their swinging dining room door and accidentally dropped a tray stacked with china cups and saucers that had belonged to Claire's mother, who'd died when Claire was only eight. Every piece had shattered so irrevocably that Claire swears porcelain shards are still embedded in the hardwood floor. Hardwood that Claire and Wes had left behind when they had to downscale to an apartment.
"There isn't much to ruin at Mother's beach house anyway," I reassured Claire. She has to watch every penny, so she's keenly conscious of owing—of favors, however small, that she feels obligated to reciprocate.
Our gatherings began twenty years ago with a Beach Week trip after college graduation—if standing in a football stadium with six thousand other seniors wearing disposable plastic robes counts as graduation—when anyone with gasoline and guts caravanned to a couple of rode-hard-and-put-up-wet Ocean Drive condos so stripped of furnishings that the only available object to drink from was a bucket in the cleaning closet.
Then, we played a drinking game called sloppy sixties, which involved gulping shot glasses of beer every sixty seconds (until John Harris threw up so violently from a second-story window that his upper plate had fallen out and we'd sobered up to search for his teeth through the sand at four a.m.). Then, some of the females were looking forward to (temporarily) higher salaries than what our male classmates would be commanding in entry-level stockbroking or manufacturing or bank trainee positions. Then, job desirability included a WATS line, free long distance at the office. Bess and Claire and Lillian and I spent hours on the phone, on other people's bills. "Long distance jags," we called these conversations, related to eating jags, spending jags, crying jags.
Then, we got married. We gave each other cookbooks for wedding gifts because cookbooks were all we could afford and seemed to be the ultimate symbol of desired domesticity. We decorated our tables with spicy, stalky branches of dried eucalyptus and papered our walls with grass cloth because both, then, epitomized sophistication.
Our last couple of reunions weren't wholly satisfying because not everyone could come. Four years ago Bess and Laurence no-showed because their son Grant was swimming in a state meet. And for the mountain trip planned to coincide with the leaf-turning peak two years ago, Claire and Wes were absent because their daughter Emily had a part in Annie Get Your Gun at school.
But this year everyone's able to come, and though I'm pleased, I also suspect something sadly final about the weekend. I've a prescience of loss. Summer's end melancholy, I suppose; August angst. Or sheer sentiment. I'm prone to sentimentality; can place a particular day, a specific season, the contents of a room, even the way I felt about someone or something, by a song on the radio. "Jimmy Mack" conjures up an eighth-grade January day when, noses running, unwieldy skis dangling, a friend and I screamed out the song's satisfying lyrics all the way up the slope in the chairlift. "Abraham, Martin, and John" evokes a gloomy Sunday afternoon in high school, when Dion's mournful croon embodied not specific assassinations but nonspecific adolescent anguish. "With This Ring" raises visions of my husband Eric's fraternity house—dimly lit, tiled floor slippery with beer—when we were secretly engaged, and before I discovered I was pregnant.
No danger of that now. Unlike my fifteen-year-old son Kent, I have no hormones coursing through me other than artificially manufactured ones. I touch my shorts to feel the clear, oval patch that's busily, magically, transferring estrogen through my skin. I have an urge to take off the plastic patch and examine it the way I'd press a piece of clear tape to my forehead then pull it away when I was a child, at once fascinated and disgusted by the smeary blur of flesh cells stuck to its surface. Didn't I read something in the hysterectomy literature about "heightened emotions," some ironic counterpart to postpartum blues? Maybe the hysterectomy is responsible for my nostalgia. "Best asset equals worst liability," Claire and Bess and I often say. We've discovered this in our forty-two years: Someone's best asset—efficiency, gregariousness, intellect, tenacity—is also usually her worst liability. "Eric can fall asleep anywhere," I might say. "Talent or affliction?" Bess will answer.
Eric. Maybe it isn't sheer sentiment gnawing me. Maybe it's sheer rage.
"Can I drive now?" Kent asks as soon as his sister's waving hand and trembling chin disappears in the rearview mirror. We've left Bay, my seven-year-old, at Yaupon Beach, another stretch of shore an hour's distance from Mother's cottage at Dune Ridge. Bay's visiting her best friend Nancy for several days. Bay for baby girl, who suffers homesick stomachaches, but determined to ride out her fear said yes to the invitation.
"What if they have foam rubber pillows?" she'd worried aloud in the car. "Or casseroles?"
"You brought your own pillow," I reminded her. "And I talked to Nancy's mother about the food."
"Nancy knows I like the bedroom door closed at night," Bay reassured herself. She reasons that boogey men can't find her if the door is shut; that it's preferable to be closeted in the dark than exposed to gaping hallways filled with danger. I don't argue with her logic: Bad men come in varied guises.
"After we get gas," I tell Kent, who's newly endowed with a driver's license. His middle sister, Milly, is on a church youth-group mission trip this weekend. Kent is grounded, and grounded means he comes with us. Instead, I should have postponed his driving license as punishment.
Behind the Minit Mart counter, visible to anyone buying a pack of Lifesavers, is an astonishing selection of skin magazines surpassed only by the astonishing cover poses: two fingers over the pubic area in a come-on gesture, spread legs with a black whip curled at the crotch, three women straddling each other like circus contortionists. Five Penthouse issues are bound in a discount multipack; you can purchase crotch shots in bulk nowadays.
Incredibly, though, Kent is more interested in a large glass jar filled with colored capsules that crackle feebly and lurch sporadically. "Mexican jumping beans," Kent says, "Rad. How much?"
"Three dollars," answers the cashier, snapping her gum as rhythmlessly as the beans.
"They're a gyp, Kent," I tell him, "like mood rings and Ouija boards and ... ant farms." We are working on impulse control, Kent's advisor wrote on his final school report. "We?" Daddy would have joked. "Who's this guy We?" And then would have quoted Mark Twain: "Only presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial 'we.'"
"They gotta be warm to jump," the cashier says. "That's why we keep 'em by the register." As proof, she flattens four ring-choked fingers against the electronic warmth of the register, then returns to her Game Boy, its PAUSE light an impatient red dot.
Deaf to my advice, Kent buys three irregularly shaped peas and declares them "Phat," current superlative slang as doomed to extinction as the extinct equivalents of my day: groovy, outtasight, what a rush. He presses the radio's SEEK button, and when "Magic Carpet Ride" bursts forth, I flashback to a dorm room filled with bunk beds at tennis camp and to a frizzy-haired juking girl from Spartanburg. As though congratulating my memory, Sarah McLaughlin's "I Will Remember You" comes on next.
Kent instantly changes the station. "No Lilith Fair songs."
"What's Lilith Fair?"
"Femmes. Bees."
"What are 'bees'?"
"Lesbeeeans," he replies, and rattles his purchase like castanets. "Like that Lillian."
"Lillian's not a lesbian. She's divorced."
He shrugs, as if the terms are interchangeable.
"How do you know? When's the last time you saw her?"
Well.
In parking lots of highway emporiums, Confederate flag towels flap from clotheslines beside white towers of stacked Styrofoam coolers and inflated canvas rafts fading in the sun. Hand-lettered signs advertise supposedly fresh shrimp sold from battered pickup tailgates.
"Watch the road," I say automatically when a car cuts too closely in front of us. I make a mental note of its license tag for my middle daughter Milly's collection of vanity plates. ABLUECAR. NOFEAR. 2SMUV4YA. KLIMAX. N2FTNS! ABADZ4ME. And ILUVMUFF. I have to hope MUFF is a person or pet, not a thing. PERIL, the tag in front of us reads, and my stomach contracts a little.
The same cottages that have always lined the straightaway to Mother's house line it still. They stand in tacky contrast to the burgeoning development of Shoreside seven miles north. Shoreside is a gated planned community with pricey, palatial, building- coded homes outfitted with Jacuzzis, solar panels, sprinkler systems, and third-story kitchens. At Shoreside even contractor port-o-lets are enclosed in outhouse hideouts to avoid offending the eyes of homeowners.
Shoreside is gated and guarded. "Lexus Land" Eric calls it, and the expensive cars that pass through its portals bear windshield decals granting entry and exclusivity. But once it was only dunes and sea grass, ideal for bonfires and beach parties and losing your virginity to a boy you'd known only an hour. But as the twenty-five-year-old male TA informed my college creative writing class, no one cares about how anybody lost their virginity.
The houses at Dune Ridge are products of another era: simple, and in comparison to Shoreside, a trifle shabby. Few, though, are as shabby as my mother's. Hurricane Nell selectively battered this short section of coast four Septembers ago, ripping away stairs and shingles, snapping pilings and piers on the inlets, flinging walkways over dunes that themselves were nearly flattened. Some cottages had first stories washed away entirely by the storm surge, which left the bulks of water heaters and commodes standing high and dry on the road and second stories wobbling upon support stalks. Beneath them dangled defunct electrical wires and accordioned tubes of heating or air-conditioning ductwork. Loosened, flapping strips of black tarpaper left the cottages looking like bird- legged old women with their skirts hiked up, their private parts exposed for all the world to see. I'd felt embarrassed for them. Yet Hurricane Nell and nature's arbitrary destruction had left Shoreside's swimming pools and putting greens pristine.
Most Dune Ridge houses have now been restored to their stilts and redressed in louvered or latticed skirts. But homeowners remain jittery and gun-shy. Hurricane season begins in June and lasts through October, and specific storms become legend. People cherish their horrendous and/or wondrous personal lore of Hurricane Laura or Kevin or whoever. The close calls, the narrow escapes, what was lost, ruined, saved, spared.
Repairs to Mother's house have been haphazard and stopgap. After Hurricane Nell, when Mother was still compos mentis, she'd decided to "weather" another season rather than submit to the supply-and-demand, brutal whatever-the-market-will-bear prices of local contractors. It's been four years now, and in June of this summer I drove her to the cottage and suggested either repairs or an appraisal for possible sale. Something, some form of closure. I've wondered whether I could wrest legal control from Mother. Eric is a lawyer, after all. He could guide me through such a process if he isn't put in jail for violating legal ethics. Or as the newspaper termed it, "criminal activities."
At a traffic light on our way out I'd pulled the car beside a pickup in the other lane. A bronzed, bare-shouldered, cigarette-smoking carpenter had stared mildly at Mother in the passenger seat. "Quit looking at me," Mother had loudly directed, "you, you ... workerman."
An odd snobbery, since workmen were once her lovers of choice. And that laughable command, as if the carpenter would be wounded by her scorn, the way Bess and Claire and Lillian and I used to respond to any perceived insult by rolling our eyes and sarcastically saying, "Oh hurt me." So brave, we were then; so beyond being hurt.
And Mother's "workerman," instead of "work-man," like Bay's charming, and not-so-charming, malapropisms. "It's the twenty-twothed time she's invited me," she'd said of Nancy. "My mommy's having a lobotomy," Bay told her teacher when I was in the hospital for the hysterectomy.
The cottage driveway is cracked and tilting because Hurricane Nell flushed sand from beneath the concrete. But the flagpole is still erect, and—no rest for the tattered weary—a snow-white American flag atop it snaps in the breeze. Abused by year after year of wind and sun, seam stitches are the only remaining evidence of stripes on the flag. The banner's edge is raveled as evenly as hair bangs.
One foot still inside the car, I stand and stare as I battle a sense of place both comforting and smothering. Each time I arrive at the cottage a mixture of apprehension and happiness claims me. For it's only that: a decades-old, unpainted, unadorned cottage, about which I veer from a fierce determination to preserve, like the Corps of Engineers' beach erosion guardians, to a perverse longing for its destruction by an act of God or force of nature. Such as a hurricane. Yet ... palpable as the salt film glazing windows and walls and furniture, a sense of the indestructible clings to the cottage. As I'd told Claire, it can't be ruined because it already is.
The ground floor is little more than a barracks sleeping quarters now, with mildewed foldout futons, beanbag chairs spitting Styrofoam specks, two bedrooms lined with bunk beds. But I remember a kind of grandeur during the cottage's glory days, my childhood. Then, seated lunches were served by Thelma, who lived on the bottom floor and wore her tennis shoes mashed at the heels like slippers, with the canvas sliced to accommodate her bunions. Then, the cottage grew quiet between two and three every afternoon for a mandatory rest period. Then, while towels and linens thrashed in the dryer, I'd sit at the kitchen table with Thelma and watch Days of Our Lives on a countertop black and white portable TV.
Then, when I was seven and eight and nine, Mother dressed for evenings in flowy flowered skirts and loose pants in tropical hues, with matching sandals and earrings, and an air of expectancy suffused the cottage as distinctively as her perfume. Then, Mother was a different woman from the bitter adulteress she became. And now—with what is surely Alzheimer's—so different from the vivacious, laughing, teasing mother that Bess and Claire and Lillian had admired and envied when she'd sneak downstairs to smoke cigarettes along with us and tap ashes into the ashtray that Bess and Claire and Lillian had loved too. White ceramic with pink glaze. USE ME, its bottom coyly read. Mother had been the favorite of parents among us, for condoning our mischief without insinuating herself into our intimacy. Her zest and vibrancy had ebbed, though, gone rotten and sour when she was ... when she was about my age, come to think of it.
Even if I could remember how long I'm supposed to wait before lifting heavy items, I'm stuck with the bags. Kent has already bolted for the beach. It's been five weeks since "my surgery," as I term it to kindly well-wishers because I'm unable somehow to say "my hysterectomy." So prim, the term surgery. So user-friendly and benign, like the uterine fibroids themselves. I haven't told Bess and Claire because I always disliked the way classmates complained of cramps while clutching their stomachs and bottles of Darvon like badges of menstrual merit and talking of "Aunt Martha" and "my friend" as if they were members of some exclusive club of female suffering.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Last of Something by Susan Kelly. Copyright © 2006 Susan Kelly. Excerpted by permission of PEGASUS BOOKS.
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