“Sure. We can try.”
“All right. Want to play Kings in the Corner?”
Ugh. I have so many emotions churning through me, because of the trip to Edgartown.
“It’s a short game,” adds Rosemary.
I can’t pretend to enjoy a card game. I just can’t. “I’m beat,” I say. I put on an old tank top and pajama pants.
“Just one round? I’ll let you win.”
“No, buttercup. Let me brush my teeth and I’ll snuggle with you.”
I take a Halcion and braid my hair loosely. I open one of my windows wide and turn on the fan. When I finally get in the bed, Rosemary turns her back to me and I spoon her fuzzy cheetah self.
She breathes slowly. We listen to the fan whir in the window. We can hear waves hitting the shore.
Rosemary’s hand grows limp beneath mine. She seems to be falling asleep.
“You know what would make this better?” she says softly.
“What?”
“If we were watching Saturday Night Live,” she says.
“You’re terrible,” I say. “I thought you were sleeping.”
“Picture it. Snuggle snuggle, plus TV.”
“Not happening.”
“?’Kay, not that,” she says. “Oh. Know what else would make it better?”
“What?” I wonder if she is trying to tell me what she needs. Why she’s here. Haunting me.
“If Wharton got a cheetah suit.”
I laugh. “Wharton dressed as a cheetah?”
“She would love it,” says Rosemary. “She wants to be a cheetah.”
“All three dogs in cheetah suits.”
“No, no. Albert and McCartney don’t want to be cheetahs. They don’t have any aspirations.”
“Big word.”
“You taught me that in Scrabble.”
“I did?”
“Mm-hm. Oh, wait. I have a better idea.”
“Better than Wharton in a cheetah suit?”
“Yes, better.”
“Okay. Don’t keep me waiting.”
“If you had a cheetah suit.”
“That would be a definite plus to this situation,” I tell her.
“So go get one.”
“Now?”
“Yuh-huh.”
“Okay,” I say. “I’ll just go down to the dock, start up Guzzler, drive an hour—no, wait, Edgartown will be all shut. I’ll have to go another hour to the mainland, then get a taxi, go to a twenty-four-hour K-Mart somewhere on Cape Cod, and buy a cheetah suit, right?”
“Yup.”
“Then I can come back and snuggle with you. It’ll take five hours, but that’s okay.”
“It’ll take six hours,” says Rosemary. “But it’ll be worth it.”
“The double-cheetah-suit snuggle,” I say. “I can’t wait.”
“Oh, you know what would make this even better, even better?” she asks.
“Go to sleep.”
“No, seriously.”
“What?”
“If we were playing Kings in the Corner,” says Rosemary.
“That is not happening,” I say. “We are sleeping now.”
“You’re sleeping,” she says. “I’m a cheetah. I barely need to sleep because I’m the fastest animal that lives on earth.”
“And what you like to do is play Kings in the Corner?”
“Yah-huh,” she says. “With other people in cheetah suits.”
“You mean other people who are cheetahs,” I say, beginning to drift off.
“Yup, that’s it.”
31.
EACH NIGHT THE boys are here, my parents fixate more and more on colleges and their expectations for me. “Amherst has a great history,” my father says, glancing to be sure I’m paying attention. “Robert Frost taught there. Lived there, too. A great poet.” And quoting: “?‘But I have promises to keep / And miles to go before I sleep.’?”
The boys contribute gamely to this line of conversation. They ask Harris about his time at Harvard, his sports, hijinks he got into with the members of his house. Tipper contributes with cute college-days anecdotes and asks the boys about their plans of study. Harris points out subjects that sound interesting and activities I might want to join. He muses on what schools take women’s softball seriously.
I take codeine to get through these evenings. It is better to be medicated. I don’t want to feel the full force of what my parents want from me.
I already know what it’s like to live in a dormitory. I know the grand library and the fifteen-page paper. I’d rather go to nightclubs and wander through museums and have an ugly walk-up apartment with some friends. I want to find someone to love and wait in line with on a cold night to see pieces of strange theater. I think I’d like the hustle of a city that’s dirty and chaotic and poor and wealthy, that’s chic and strange, where people are different from me. Maybe I’d like to make something with my hands.
Although Tipper spends her days making piecrusts and peeling asparagus, for me, she wants college. A life of the mind and achievement. She is unmovable.
I walk a path of my parents’ making. I walk it the same way I walk the wooden walkways they’ve made that stretch across Beechwood. I do not see how to step off.
If I exit the walkways into the bushes, under the trees, or onto the sand—it doesn’t matter.
I am still on their island.
* * *
—
PFEFF ACTS AS if we never quarreled, and I act as if I never cared. We hang out in the same room, but we don’t really speak to each other. The situation is tolerable.
Night after night at Goose, the boys turn the music up loud. R.E.M., Prince, and the Talking Heads. We play Scrabble, or poker for pennies and dimes. One night we watch Ben-Hur and another, Mary Poppins. The living room is cluttered with bags of chips and empty cans. When the night air is warm, the boys run fearlessly down to the Tiny Beach and throw their bodies into the black night water.
Some evenings, Penny and Erin come to Goose, as well, but they have taken to walking the island’s perimeter path together, smoking clove cigarettes that Erin brought with her and talking endlessly. “We’re doing the walk-and-talk,” says Penny, shaking her head when one of the boys asks her if she’s coming to Goose.
One evening, about eight days after Pfeff and I went to Edgartown and argued, we are in the sea, up to our chests. Me, Pfeff, Yardley, George, and Major. The night air is muggy and the waves gentle.
George: “Let’s play Sausage.”
Yardley: “Oh, not again.”
Me: “What is it?”
Yardley: “The stupidest game. We played it the other night after you went home.”
George: “Stupid is the joy of it.”
Pfeff: “I’m in.”
Major: “I’m in.”
I am conscious of Pfeff’s body in the water. He trails his hands across the surface, making small waves. My eyes are drawn to the definition of his shoulder muscles, the line of his neck.
George: “Loser is the person who laughs. Or gives an answer that’s not sausage.”
Major: “All right. Yardley, you’re it. You have a new gentleman companion. Oh yay: he has an eight-inch…”
Yardley: “Sausage.”
George: “What comes out of a dog’s butt?”
Yardley: “Sausage.”
Me: “They used to build log cabins out of logs, but now they build them out of…”
Yardley: “Sausage.”
Pfeff: “Plop plop.” He jumps up and down in the water, ridiculously.
Yardley: (laughing) “Oh my god.”
Pfeff: “Ha! Got you.”
Yardley: “Why are you plopping? You were supposed to ask a question with the answer sausage.”
Pfeff: “I know. But if you laugh, you lose. Or if you say something that’s not sausage. Right?”
Yardley: “Plop plop. You’re terrible.”
George: “Accept defeat, Yardley!”
Yardley: “Okay, Carrie’s turn.”
I glance at Pfeff. I don’t want to glance at Pfeff. I don’t want to be thinking about him, and the way his neck felt under my hand when he kissed me, and the way his lips were surprisingly soft. I don’t want to think of it, but I’m nearly naked in the water and he’s only four feet away, and I can hardly think of anything else, even though he’s an inconsiderate dick and I’m not interested.
Me: “Sausage.”
Major: “I have one. You go swimming and it feels like there’s a ton of water in your ear. You shake your head, you know, like you do. And what comes out?”
Me: “Sausage.”
Yardley: “You shoot a wild boar and take it home. What do you do next?”
Me: “Sausage.”
Pfeff: “Beans!”
Yardley: “Pfeff, you are so random.”