When she smelled too strong for salt water to rinse the stink away, she walked into the gym of a fancy beachside condo complex in her running clothes. She waited for someone to yell at her, but nobody was watching. The bathroom was empty, and the vanities held baskets with lotions, tiny soaps, disposable razors. She stood in the shower and let her summer of loneliness wash away. Even before her boyfriend left her for a first-year master’s student, she’d withdrawn into herself. Her funding hadn’t been renewed, and she’d had only her TA stipend, which was barely enough for her half of the rent, let alone groceries. There was no going out, even if she could have swallowed her shame to look her funded friends in the eye. The boyfriend had taken everything with him: their Sunday brunches, the etiquette book he had unsubtly given her one Christmas, the alarm clock that woke them ten minutes before six every day. He had been a stickler for the proper way to do things—hospital corners, weight lifting, taking notes—and he’d stolen her routine from her when he left. Worst of all, he’d taken his parents, who had welcomed her for four years of holidays in their generous stone house in Pennsylvania. For weeks, she had expected the mother, a soft-haired, hugging woman, to call her, but there was no call.
The door opened and voices flooded the bathroom, some aerobics class letting out. She turned to wash her face in the spray, suddenly shy. When she opened her eyes, the showers were full of naked middle-aged women laughing and soaping themselves. They wore diamond bands and their teeth shone and their bellies and thighs were larded by their easy lives.
* * *
—
She woke to a hard rapping next to her ear and struggled up through sleep into darkness. She turned on her penlight to see a groin in stretched black fabric and a shining leather belt hung with a gun in a holster and an enormous flashlight.
Cop, she thought. Penis of death, penis of light.
Open up, the policeman said, and she said, Yes, sir, and slid over the backseat and rolled down the window.
What are you smiling at? he said.
Nothing, sir, she said, and turned off her penlight.
You been here a week, he said. I been watching you.
Yes, sir, she said.
It’s illegal, he said. Now, I get a kid once in a while doesn’t want to pay for a motel, okay. I get some old hippies in their vans. But you’re a young girl. Hate to see you get hurt. There are bad guys everywhere, you know?
I know, she said. I keep my doors locked.
He snorted. Yeah, well, he said. Then he paused. You run away from your man? That the story? There’s a safe house for ladies up in town. I can get you in.
No, she said. There’s no story. I guess I’m on vacation from my life.
Well, he said, and the looseness in his voice was gone. Get on out of here. Don’t let me see you back, or I’ll take you in for vagrancy.
* * *
—
She spent a few days on a different beach where people drove their trucks onto the sand and pumped out music until their batteries ran down. She dug again into the wagon’s seats to find change for a candy bar but failed, then she walked the miles into town to consider what she should do, her legs shaking by the time she arrived.
The buildings on the town square looked like old Florida—the tall porches with fans, the tin roofs—but everything was made of a dense plastic in shades of beige. There was a fountain in the center: a squat frog spitting up water and change scattered on the blue tiles under the water. She sat on the edge of the fountain and watched the shoppers in the boutiques and the people eating ice cream cones.
At one corner of the square stood a small brick church flanked by blooming crape myrtles. She didn’t notice the people gathering in front until they began to emerge with hands full of styrofoam clamshells and juice packs. Some were stringy, greasy, the familiar life-beaten people who lived half visibly at the edge of the university town she’d come from. But there were also construction workers in hard hats, mothers hurrying away with kids in their wakes.
She wanted to stand. To be in the line, to get the food. Her body, though, wouldn’t move. In the twilight, a family passed, and she thought how she had once been this blonde toddler on her tricycle, singing to herself while her parents walked behind her. How sudden the disturbance had been! Her father dead when she was ten, the struggle with money through high school, her mother marrying in exhaustion only to fold herself entirely away. The one safe place the girl had had left was school. But she’d been too careful in the end, unable to take the necessary scholarly risks, and they had withdrawn even that from her.
She sat like a second frog on the edge of the fountain, hunched over her hunger, until the clock clicked to an impossibly late hour and she was alone. She rolled up her jeans and stepped into the water. She felt along the bottom with her feet until she came upon a coin, and dipped her arm up to her shoulder, but almost all the change was glued to the tile. By the time she had gone entirely around, she had gathered only a small handful. When she peered at the coins in the dim light from the streetlamp, she found they were mostly pennies. Still, she went around again. She saw herself from a great distance, a woman stooping in knee-deep water for someone else’s wishes.
Most days, she found food—bread and bruised fruit—heaped, clean, in a dumpster behind a specialty grocer. She hid the station wagon at the far end of a supermarket parking lot, next to a retention pond and shielded by the low branches of a camphor tree. The smell entered her dreams at night, and she’d wake to a slow green sway of branches, as if underwater. There was a Baudelaire poem this reminded her of, but it had been erased from her memory. She wondered what else was gone, the Goethe, the Shakespeare, the Montale. The sun was bleaching it all to dust; her hunger was eating it up. It was a cleansing, she decided. If pretty words couldn’t save her, then losing them, too, was all for the best.
* * *
—
She was baking on the beach when a leaf slid up over her stomach. She caught idly at it and found that it wasn’t a leaf at all but a five-dollar bill.
That night, she went into the poolside showers of an apartment complex and washed herself carefully. When she caught sight of herself naked in the mirror, she could see the ribs of her upper chest and the pulse in the curve of her hip bone. But she blow-dried her hair and put it into a ponytail and applied makeup that she’d bought a few years ago. She no longer looked like herself: diligent, plump, prim. She looked like a surfer girl or a sorority sister, one of those quivering dewy creatures she had always silently disliked.
She walked three miles to a beach bar, listening to the ocean break itself again and again. The place was full when she came up through the back door, the huge televisions blaring a football game. Once, she would have been invested in the game, if only because it was the lingua franca of the southern town, the way to put a freshman comp class at ease, to converse with a dean’s vapid wife. But now it seemed silly to her, young men grinding into one another, war games muted with padding.
She ordered the dollar-special beer and gave the bartender another dollar for a tip. His fingers brushed hers when he handed her the change, and she was startled at the warmth of his skin. She peeled the label of her beer and took deep breaths.
Someone climbed onto the stool beside hers, and she looked at him when he ordered two gin and tonics. He was a sweet-looking sandy boy with large red ears, the kind of student who always got a B? in her classes, mostly on effort alone. He slid one of the drinks toward her shyly, and when he began to speak, he didn’t stop. He was a junior up north but had had to take a semester off and was working in his mother’s real estate office for now, which really pissed off the old agents there, because there were few enough commissions right now, real estate going to shit in this shitty, shitty time. And on and on. After three drinks, she was drunker than she’d ever let herself be. She wondered, as he spoke, what had happened to make him take a semester off. Drugs? A hazing scandal? Bad grades? When they stopped on the walk to his place and he pressed her shoulders against the cold metal of a streetlight and kissed her with touching earnestness, she felt the soft hair at the base of his neck and thought he’d probably had a nervous breakdown. He kissed like a boy prone to anxiety attacks.