They chanted the code and then they were running down sun-toasty stone steps and into what Jules could only describe as a room. Made with living walls. He knew they must be close to the big garden—he smelled the grass he’d cut that morning and the tree sap oozing from the trees he’d downed. He ran his hands across the eastern wall knowing that, on the other side, his precious garden waited for him.
“I cut the grass myself,” Leslie said as she unfolded the quilt, lifting it so the fabric ballooned before settling on the chopped grass.
“With what?” Jules said. “Scissors?”
“Shut up.” She giggled. “It was hard. I had to use the hand mower so it would stay a surprise.”
She shimmied out of her silk dress. She was naked underneath and the revelation made his breath catch. He threw his towel aside. She hung her dress by its thin straps on a twig sticking out of the wall, and then she lay on the quilt, her body still and pale as marble. His Aphrodite.
She filled her mouth with him and the square of grass became a green undulating sea. Her body shimmered in the late sunshine, the sky above striated pink and orange, and as she rode him, his hips bucking to match her time, it was as if she was made of light.
She moaned, “We’re home.”
The quilt grew wet under his back, with dew and come, and after they were done, a stain the shape of his long body stretched across the quilt.
How had he gone so long, he wondered, without the scent of dew in his life?
6.
Leslie
She lost the first baby when she was nineteen. Two years before she’d meet Julius—named for a dictator, born with the soul of Saint Francis.
It was her sophomore year at Marymount, the only college her father would pay for. An all-women’s teaching college with curfews, prayers twice a day, and elocution classes.
The rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain. Your father was a peer, my dear—remember who you are.
She wore spotless white gloves. Memorized the place settings of a formal dinner table. Learned to pour tea with a steady hand. This was the education of a proper young lady. Refine. Constrict. Tighten that girdle. Suck it in until you were fit to burst. Sit like a lady. Eat like a lady. Talk like a lady. Think like a lady.
The girls were kept busy. Candle-lighting ceremonies where they wore crowns of flowers and white dresses that were more like nuns’ habits than party frocks. Hoop-rolling races—the winner, it was predicted, would be first to find a husband. More prayers. Before class, and vespers after dinner. God forbid they should have too much time to think. Look out their barred dorm windows and take notice of the war stealing America’s poor young men.
The baby’s father was a boy named Tracy she’d met at a Champagne party with their brother college, St. Thomas Aquinas. She hadn’t wanted his baby, or any baby, and so when she woke six weeks after her missed period, the white sheets of her dorm bed stained brown with clotted blood, she’d been relieved. Her roommate Beverly Schneider slept deep and didn’t stir as Leslie balled up her sheets, crept down to the basement, the cement floor cold under her bare feet, and tossed it all into the cafeteria dumpster.
She bled for weeks. Went through boxes of maxipads. Even had to hitch a ride to the small-town drugstore near the college to buy more. The nuns who taught the girls noticed how pale she was, arranged to have liver and onions served at her table. An extra dose of iron that made the girls wrinkle their noses in disgust. She didn’t think to go to a doctor. Then there’d be all that explaining to do. And she was sure that was the end of it. What was it that her mother always said?—When life gives you lemons …
She tried to believe she was lucky. A problem had been solved. But then she’d have to run to the stark dorm bathroom with its many stalls, all without doors—Heaven forbid a girl should have an iota of privacy—and put on a fresh pad, wrap the blood-soaked one in toilet paper, and reach down into the trash so no one would find it. The nuns were militant about keeping watch and she wouldn’t have been surprised to find Sister Mary Bartholomew rummaging in the wastebasket.
Like all the girls she knew, she avoided talking about the messiness of the female body. What her mother called “woman’s problems.” As if the ability to create life were a curse. A disease. Is that what they wanted Avalon’s little girls to think, she wondered. Did they hope smearing womanhood would make the island girls less likely to drop their panties in the dunes for a Tom, Dick, or Harry?
How her mother had known about Leslie’s first period, she would never figure out. She’d been dressing for bed in her pink bathroom in the Castle, the shelves lined with porcelain poodles with blue sequin eyes and fringed lashes, when she saw the dark stain on her girdle. She stuffed a wad of toilet paper between her legs and then tossed and turned all night with cramps.
The following afternoon, when she came home from a tortured day at school, hours spent fearing her blood would leak onto her desk chair, she found the kit outside her bedroom door. It was a long, rectangular cardboard box. Unmarked. Inside, a bunch of thick cotton pads to be attached to a plastic belt with a tiny silver buckle. There was a pamphlet. What It Means to Be a Woman.
Years later, when she carried Brooks to term, she’d know every word in the pamphlet had been a lie.
7.
Maddie
The kids started the night at Singing Beach. Gerritt and Spencer and the boys found a bunch of seaweed-stringy lobster traps washed up on shore, and Maddie and the girls watched them stomp on the weathered wood so it splintered with pops and cracks that echoed off the pink clay cliffs. The boys’ faces grew sweat-slick from the effort and Maddie saw how the destruction made them buzz like it was a drug. Boys always got to do the fun stuff, it seemed, while the girls watched. Or, she thought, cheered the boys on, which is exactly what Bitsy and Vanessa and Gabrielle were doing. Hooting and applauding while lit Parliament Lights dangled from lips glossed with Kissing Potion roll-on in Orange Squeeze.
The boys stacked the wood in a towering pyramid and soon a bonfire blazed so tall and hot Maddie was sure it would keep the caterpillars away.
John Anderson drove his Bronco into the dunes and blasted Beastie Boys. “Brass Monkey” came on and everyone sang along, Rolo the loudest (and, Maddie saw, the drunkest), dancing like a spastic robot when the honking horn bleated between refrains so the rolls of fat under his snug tie-dyed Grateful Dead tee jiggled.
Brass Monkey, that funky monkey Brass Monkey junkie That funky monkey.