Nantucket Blue

Ten





BY THREE O’CLOCK, I was ready to throw in the cleaning rag. Vacuuming was no big deal—kind of satisfying to push the heavy thing (it was mustard yellow and dated back to the 1900s) across the floor and leave those stripes on the carpets. And dusting was a piece of cake. Changing the beds wasn’t so bad, either; people had been sleeping in them for two days at the most. But I hated cleaning the bathrooms. There were certain smells, certain unmistakable dribbles and marks that inevitably evoked mental pictures of what had left them. The more I tried to block the pictures, the faster and stronger they came on. A few times, I thought I was actually going to barf.

And on the seats, in the bathtub, on the floor, and in the sink was hair. Hair, hair, hair! It was everywhere, and nine times out of ten, it was not the kind that grows on the head. I couldn’t help but wonder what people did to shed so much in this region. Were they combing it daily, letting the hair just fall where it may? Did everyone do this but me?

The best part was checking the little tip envelopes on the dressers. Liz had drawn cartoon pictures of whales on them, with smiles and water spouting out their blowholes. Usually there were just a few dollars inside, but sometimes there was a five or a ten. We’d made nineteen bucks apiece in tips, and on top of my twelve dollars an hour, I’d made almost a hundred bucks in one day. It was no eight hundred a week, but it wasn’t so bad, either. Liz warned me that the tips today were especially good; we’d had a lot of turnovers.

“Don’t get too used to it,” she said. “Usually we’re lucky to get ten apiece.”

We locked the last door at three o’clock, and flipped a nickel we’d found in the hallway for the first shower. Liz snatched the nickel in midair and slapped it against the back of her hand. “Heads, I win,” she said. After her shower she was going to see her boyfriend, Shane, who worked at a bar on Jetties Beach. “He’s twenty-three. An older man,” she said as I followed her down the back steps to where our rooms were. “A tall, dashing Irishman who gives me free whiskey sours, calls me ‘sexy delicious,’ and reads Yeats in his free time.”

Liz had a definite swagger. She was not a skinny girl; her boobs were big and unwieldy, and she had mom thighs with cellulite. She was wearing short shorts and a baby T anyway. She sauntered down the steps like a perfect hottie even though her pudge was poking out the top and bottom of her shorts. I felt a little rush of admiration for her confidence. I hated to admit it, but I couldn’t imagine not caring what people thought about how I looked. It almost scared me to contemplate it.

“Shane sounds rad,” I said, using a classic Jules word. We passed through the hallway where the supposed ghost liked to hang out, pausing in front of our bedroom doors.

“He’s an absolute dream,” Liz said, and went into her room.

I wondered what Jay read in his free time. I didn’t know much about Yeats, but I knew it was impressive that Shane read him. If Shane called Liz sexy delicious, I bet they were having sex. It was too ridiculous a thing to say to someone if you weren’t. I wondered if Jay and I would be having lots of sex by the end of the summer. I wondered what he’d call me. Was I sexy delicious? I worried I wasn’t. Partially it was the word sexy, which just seemed funny, not real, not connected to an actual way of feeling.

“You want to meet me at the beach later tonight?” Liz asked, poking her head into my room without knocking. “It’s really fun.”

“Thanks,” I said. “But I’m going to a party.”

“Suit yourself,” she said. “But Shane has friends.” I doubted I’d be interested in anyone over eighteen.

When Liz was done, I took a long shower, using so much soap that it was a mere sliver at the end of twenty minutes. Then I took a two-hour nap.

I texted Jules twice and she didn’t respond. She’s busy, I thought for the first hour, wondering if she’d gotten her job back at Needle and Thread, one of the high-end boutiques on Main Street. She’s definitely mad at me, I thought around seven o’clock, when she didn’t respond to my second text. I walked to the pizza place near the ferry because I wasn’t sure what else to do for dinner. After I finished my pizza, I called her. I felt desperate, a feeling I hated. Jules didn’t pick up. “Can I get a ride to the party with you?” I said to the dead air of her voicemail.

It was almost nine by the time she texted me back.

There’s no room in the Jeep.

I felt a flash of anger, could almost hear it, like a sizzling pat of butter on a skillet. What the hell, I thought. She’s blowing me off so hard that I’m getting windburn. There was another text:

Sorry .

I gave the phone the finger, then took a deep breath. You’re thinking like a desperate person, I said to myself. You’re thinking like a Nora. Maybe there really is no room in the Jeep.

Besides, I didn’t do anything wrong, I told myself as I clasped a necklace around my neck and squeezed into my nice jeans. I unpacked a green tank top that had once made a random guy stop me on the street to tell me my eyes looked like emeralds. I pinched my ears with delicate gold hoops. I blew out my hair and swiped on shimmery lip gloss. I dusted my cheeks with some blush.

No room in the Jeep, no problem. Gavin had said it would be fine for me to borrow one of the inn’s bikes as long as a guest wasn’t using it, and ’Sconset was only six miles away by Milestone Road. It would probably only take me a half hour at the most. I chose a blue bike with a big basket. It looked kind of old, but it was the only one with a low-enough seat. As I rode the bike out of the garden, Gavin waved to me from the kitchen window, where he was cooking ratatouille for his chiropractor girlfriend, Melissa, a glass of red wine in his hand.

The moon was so bright, I had a shadow. There was something freeing about the whole thing, about getting myself there without waiting for someone to take me, about the air, which felt soft and smelled like hay, and listening to the invisible insects. Jeeps and mopeds sped past me, some of them blasting music, but there were long stretches of road that were quiet, just me, my breath, my shadow, and the sound of the wheels whirring on the pavement. The best part was that I wasn’t afraid of being alone at night. This is why people come to Nantucket, I thought. So they don’t have to be afraid at night.

I coasted around a rotary; ’Sconset was its own little town with a coffee shop, market, and the smallest post office I’d ever seen. I was in front of some kind of country club, the flags out front snapping in the wind. I remembered that I needed to bear right to get to Sand Dollar Lane. It wasn’t long before I found it. It was pretty obvious where the party was, from the sounds of kids talking. The conversations were clear even a few houses away.

I hopped off of my bike and walked it down a driveway. My legs were wobbly and I was thirsty. My heart was beating fast, snapping like that country club flag, and my pretty green tank top was sticking to my back. I wished I’d brought a sweater. I wanted to cover up. As I was looking for a good place to put the bike (against the house? Inside the half-open garage?) I stumbled, my ankles suddenly soft as custard, and dropped the bike. It bounced off of a rock. Shit. I picked it up and placed it gingerly against the house. Pull it together, I thought, and applied more lip gloss. You’re fine.

I heard Jules’s laugh, her unmistakable “ha,” and a chill went through me. I should’ve gotten back on the bike and turned around, because I actually did know then, the way you just know sometimes, what was about to happen. You didn’t need a worry doctor to know that’s what jelly legs are all about. But for some reason, even though it was blasting as loudly as a mattress commercial, I just couldn’t hear the truth. So I straightened up and walked right into that party, practically begging for it.