“So we’ve got a suit all ready for you in our changing room. If you’d just be so kind as to follow me, I’ll show you to it.”
Kenny directs her past three long benches to the rear of the shack, where a curtain hanging from the ceiling separates a small room into two smaller cubicles. In one of the cubes is Donna’s wet suit, dangling from a rusted nail pounded into the wall. Next to it stands a mirror.
“I’ll leave you to it, then. Just come on out when you’re ready,” Kenny says, closing the curtain behind him.
Donna removes the wet suit from the hanger. Inspecting the tiny openings where she’s meant to squeeze her arms, her legs, her neck, she’s sure there’s been some sort of mistake. A Cabbage Patch doll couldn’t be expected to fit into this fistful of neoprene, let alone a sixty-three-year-old woman. How much did Henrique tell them she weighs? Seventy-five pounds? Eighty? My God, she thinks. Two months ago she was standing in a dressing room at Nordstrom’s worried that she looked unpresentable in a purple dress, and now this … this wet suit. What was the salesgirl’s name? The one in the black pants with the terrible tattoo? She can’t remember now, and it’s hardly the point. Briefly she considers calling Kenny over and asking him to bring her a larger size. But then, what if Henrique heard her? What if he saw Kenny rummaging through his bin for a suit that was more appropriate for Donna, something roughly the size of a manatee? Would he suddenly lose interest? Realize that she’s not the nubile young thing he met thirty years ago? Call this dreadful kayaking trip off? The sheer prospect of it has her sweating through her blouse, which is the exact thing she told herself she must not let happen: she must not let him seduce her. Her daughters’ reincarnation of feminism was meant to solve these problems, she thinks. In the sixties women were freed from the home; now, they’re meant to be free from men. And yet, here she is, standing barefoot in a shack in Dorset, wondering if her ex-husband—a man who left her for a Spanish au pair—will think she looks fat. Really, Alice and Eloise must try a little harder.
“Oh, fuck it,” she says, and rips the wet suit from the hanger.
To her delight, it slips on easier than she expects. There are a few moments where she’s got to stuff herself into it, where she’s got to pull, and pinch, and stretch, and cajole, but for the most part the suit’s forgiving; it works with her in wondrous and surprising ways.
“How’s it going, love?” Kenny shouts through the curtain.
“Just another minute,” she shouts back.
A long zipper runs down the back of the suit, from the base of her neck to the top of her ass. Reaching around, she takes hold of the frayed lanyard attached to it and tugs. As the suit zips, she feels it compress her body, flattening any lumps into solid, sturdy plateaus. Her body now confined, she ventures a breath, and the fabric expands and contracts against her rib cage. She looks like a seal, of course—this much is confirmed when, breath held, she turns to face the mirror—but then, she suspects (hopes?) that most people do when they’re clad only in black neoprene.
“Donna!” Henrique bellows once she emerges. “How gorgeous.”
“Oh, shut up, Henrique.”
He, to Donna’s dismay, looks fantastic. Whereas Donna’s suit merely contains her body, Henrique’s accentuates his. The brand name stenciled across the suit’s front stretches across his chest, giving the impression of muscles that she suspects disappeared decades ago. Long, ropy legs suddenly seem taut, athletic. Even the suit’s color—black, with off-white streaks on each side of the torso—teases out the gray in his hair in irksome and flattering ways. The brief, elusive confidence she felt moments ago fades.
She stands by and watches as Henrique helps Kenny load the kayaks onto two rolling trolleys, which the three of them then begin to guide down a steep pedestrian walkway toward the beach. The tourists around whom she helps Henrique maneuver the boat seem conspicuously undisturbed by her presence, and she wavers back and forth between wanting to thank them for being polite and hating them for not joining in on the joke with her. She wants them to confirm the craziness of all this. To laugh with her and at her, and to agree with her that, above all else, this is absurd. They don’t, though. They just go on buying towels, and beach balls, and ice cream, and rubbing suntan lotion on their pink arms.
The beach to which Kenny directs them sits on the south end of a large, oval-shaped cove. A few sunbathers have ventured out onto the sand, which is more a field of pebbles than a proper beach. For the most part, though, people stand at the end of the small road down which Donna has just trekked, staring at the shore like it’s a circus act that they sense should excite them, but that, in reality, just confuses them. Kenny and Henrique haul the kayaks off the trolleys and drag them past a rotting skiff and a few knots of seaweed, right up to the water’s edge. Donna pads after them, dodging a toddler in diapers making failed castles out of rocks.
“Right,” Kenny says. He’s slipped on a life jacket, and he tosses two others to Donna and Henrique. “A few quick safety announcements, and then we’ll be on our way.”
She struggles to get the life jacket around her shoulders, then gets her arms caught in its nylon straps. Once she’s finally figured it out, she clips it across her chest.
“Water’s typically pretty calm,” Kenny continues. “So won’t do much good to be worried about waves and such.” He cracks his neck and puts his hands on his hips. “In the event that you do get tossed around a bit, don’t panic. Just stay calm and ride it out. And if you capsize—”
“That could happen?” Donna asks.
Kenny raises both of his palms, like he’s pleading the fifth on the ocean’s behalf. “The sea can be a mighty mistress, Donna.”
“But, like, how many times has that happened? Has someone … flipped over?”
“Oh, just a handful per week.”
“Per week.”
Kenny laughs and grabs hold of her shoulder. “Don’t worry, love! The water won’t kill you. If you flip over, you just climb back on. Like this.” He belly flops on to the kayak and wiggles his way toward one of the seats. “Then, you just flip around. Like you’re a pancake.”
“Like you’re a pancake,” she says back to him.
From behind her, she feels Henrique wrap a hand around her waist. “I’ll help you.”
The water bites her toes, and she gasps. Gently, Henrique pushes the kayak into the surf, and she wades out with it, guiding it, steadying it, holding her breath as the ocean seeps and swirls in the space between her skin and the neoprene.
“You get in first,” he says, “and I’ll keep it upright.”