WE’RE SEVEN EIGHT nine ten eleven twelve and our mother is driving us to Galveston. Every August we’d stay in a beach house on stilts that our Nana owned. Galveston is no fancy-pants like Corpus Christi, our Nana would say. It’s real. Things get washed away here. When we see the city limits signs, we sing the Glen Campbell song until we’re hoarse. Around the tenth time our mother says if we don’t stop she’ll turn around, head back to Austin, where it’s sweltering and there is no beach. She means it, she says. She’s got a splitting headache because she and Ray have been fighting. Another of us, the horsey girl, is in the front passenger seat, but our mother just ignores her like she does. She’s made her a white space on the wall because it’s just too much, she says. But we say it isn’t enough. We’re together, we say. She pokes at us in the backseat with an old umbrella and we say, Oh, wow, thanks, Mom, you punctured a tendon in our arm or something. But then we quiet down and hum the rest of the Glen Campbell song to ourselves and watch her eyes in the rearview. Weather her mood. It rains as it always does here in the afternoon, and the water branches out in little rivulets on the backseat car windows, like arteries or roots feeding something or nothing. Behind these, turquoise, violet, orange wooden beach houses flicker by, and we think how beautiful it all is. That even if it was all made up, we’d want it anyway. Like looking forward to watching a terrific movie again even as you’re watching it. The Birds is our favorite. Have you ever seen so many gulls? What do you suppose it is? We scream every time just before the dumbass blows himself up at the gas station. Laugh until ginger ale comes out our nose. Watching our mother’s eyes in the rearview, we can tell she is thinking of the Halloween we dressed her up as the actress Tippi Hedren, papier-maché crows with wire feet perched high in the blond wig we got from the school’s theater prop room. Shut the door, we hear our mother say in her spunky Tippi Hedren voice. They’ll get in. Shut the door!
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You’re leaving out so much.
What about the part when we went to Galveston when the girls were small and my mother answered the door and she pretended not to know them? I don’t know any Zadie or Elizabeth, she said. Their names don’t ring a bell. Maybe you can describe them for me? And the girls turning to each other, round-eyed in amazement.
IV
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THE WEEK AFTER the Christmas party, Kate had driven by Jack Dewey’s house dozens of times. Parked outside, some nights. Watched him disappear and reappear in windows that he seemingly never bothered to cover. Once she fell asleep in the driver’s seat and was startled awake when the paperboy missed his aim and struck her car with a thwack. She’d been dreaming of the girls again. They were being disagreeable. She’d said some terrible things to them, had woken up ashamed. In the dream, she was letting out their prom dresses, using a seam ripper with its tiny sharp hook along the stitching. The girls stood on chairs in the kitchen, which was also Kate’s mother’s kitchen in Galveston, except for some reason the floor had a funny slope to it so all the fruit rolled up the counter. Kate’s mother sat at the kitchen table in a blue flowered dress, playing Scrabble, ignoring them. Every time Kate tried to get her girls to stay put for a new measurement, they’d shift their feet or add a few pounds or begin to crumble and smoke there on the chairs with their arms out to their sides. Kate’s hand shook. How thoughtless. Didn’t they know she had better goddamn things to do with her evenings? She threw the seam ripper and it stuck in the wall by the calendar, a tiny harpoon. Her girls looked at each other with round eyes, stifling a laugh.