She has been busy, the chairs are out, the cushions in place. The ice bucket is full, and she sends Libby to make drinks; their bags sit quiet in the dining room by the door, no rush, let us sit, quiet the errant hairs. Feel the sun, watch the lobstermen chug toward home and dinner.
“Like men in suits coming from the subway at 5:15,” says the friend. Libby’s mother imagines those men streaming toward lit doorways and set tables. Libby makes the drinks. Her mother sees the wedding ring on the friend’s finger, asks about her husband, her own suit streaming home to an empty house.
“How is it that you’re here and he’s still home?”
She is charming, the friend, and makes a sweet response; she has slipped away, leaving him to fend for himself. This friend is easy in the wicker chair, not too comfortable, but not stiff. She is complimentary.
“This place”—she sighs, looking around her—“there are no words.”
“Yes,” Libby’s mother says. She likes that this girl understands. “Words are too small for this place,” her mother continues, “and they don’t smell as good.” This one will fit in fine, she thinks. She can always tell in the first few minutes. Can they be a guest, respectful, thoughtful, always volunteer to do the dishes, while they are as relaxed as they would be in their own home? This is what it means to fit in here, to carry your own weight and still appreciate this sharp point piercing the waterway, making only the houses on the other side of the thoroughfare visible.
“Too bad your husband couldn’t join you.”
“He wouldn’t get this place; it would be all hassle, the car, the ferry, the boat.” Libby’s mother recognizes something. A distance she is familiar with.
“How long have you been married?”
“Two years.”
Two years and no honeymoon shine left on her is a bad sign. Again the friend says that she has escaped from her life, slipped under its slim gate, and stolen off to watch lobstermen work.
The friend is conspiratorial, the friend wants to bond with her, wives that steal away. But Libby’s mother only knows husbands that slink away, and even that was a long time ago. The girl is less charming every minute.
Libby comes with the drinks, with the ice tinkling soft in full glasses, and there she sees it. Her mother sees that thing that she once spent four years blind to, or closed her eyes upon. Libby hands her friend the glass, already frosted with the cool of the drink, the warmth of the sun. Her friend takes it with two hands, like they are passing a bird between them, holding it delicate and tight, wings in. The friend looks up into Libby’s face, and there between them goes something, a reddening of the lips, a widening of the pupils, and for a moment the sun moves, shines from a space between the two of them, above the folded bird of a glass. This is the moment, if they were alone, when they would kiss.
Her mother sees this kiss floating between them with the sun and the glass, this undone kiss is the soft bird they pass between them. It is the thing that shines so glaring to her mother’s eyes. It is a mirror reflecting the light back into her face. The glare makes her put down her own glass, stare intently at the cheese, cut a rough slice. She chews slowly and looks away from them over her shoulder, over the steps, the water, the other island, to the real sun, whose light, in comparison to theirs, is soft, full of honesty. It hides nothing. It will set, as promised. It will rise, as promised, over the eastern tip of their island. It will keep appointments, it will lay bare all, it leaves nothing in dark cabins or in the wet bottoms of unbailed boats or in black footprints on polished wood or unmentioned until it steps lightly from the ferry boat, lighter with the husband left at home.
The friend needs the bathroom, and Libby gives her directions, says her room is right next to the bathroom down the back hall. The friend takes her bag as well, will settle in and then be back to finish her drink. She goes smiling through the screened door, through the dining room and the china closet, toward the kitchen.
“She’s great, isn’t she? I knew you’d love her. What?”
Her mother looks as hard and gray as the pebbled beach by the boathouse, like she may be sick.
“Are you all right?”
“You should’ve asked, Lib.”
“I just figured, what’s one more person, one friend apiece, right?”
“She’s not your friend.”
With this Libby is brought up short. She doesn’t understand. Hadn’t she just seen, through the dining room window, her friend’s charm radiating from her like heat, and her mother basking in it? But Libby has somehow let it be known, some little unconscious action has revealed something meant to be hidden.
“You should have told me.” Her mother says it again, clearer this time. “She is not just your friend.”
“No, not just a friend.” Libby feels that she has been caught stealing from her mother’s jewelry box, a string of illicit pearls curled in her hand. She cannot put them back.
“She can’t stay. Tell her after dinner. We’ll eat, and sit by the fire, and in the morning she will go. On the early boat. Simply tell her that there isn’t enough room.”
To Libby these words seem to echo through the empty house. Rooms will be filled tomorrow, when the others arrive, but still more will be empty, still half her bed will be empty. She had thought that her parents would love her friend so much, that after the first few days, she would tell them, and they would embrace the whole thing, hustle her friend up from the lonely back hall. “No couple should sleep in separate beds,” they would say. She did not expect this. It is hard to keep back tears, to feel, in this moment, an adult.
“Are you sure?” she asks her mother, because she can’t believe that she is sure.
“She needs to go home to her husband, and you need to stay here. I’m sure.”
Libby sees. Her friend must go back to fucking men, and since there are no men for Libby to fuck at home, she must stay here, meet a nice lobsterman as her sister does every summer, every week; some weeks, every day. Better a slut than a dyke. She understands. Her mother’s certainty has been tied tight around her for years, ribbons pulled painful in her hair, around her neck. Her certainty has sat beside them at dinners in this house, another summer boy. He goes to St. Paul’s, Groton, Westminster, he plays lacrosse, crew, runs the paper, won a painting scholarship. This one will take what you have to give, what you have to lose.
The sun is low now, and her mother’s hair is fire lit from the side, what is dark as earth and slick as rain, goes red with the light. And here her mother earns her name, in all her beauty and fire and cruelty. Scarlet upon the rocky shores; Scarlet burning bright as the sun dims. Scarlet is the destroyer of worlds with a hand bent delicate at the wrist, a tan line white where her watch has been. Those stolen pearls burn in Libby’s hand, they have hung beside the heart of a dragon, she thinks, and I have stolen them and they will burn my hand forever. There is no letting go, they cannot be put back.
“We’ll go to town,” Libby says. “We’ll sleep in the inn there. I will not have her stay the night.”