Paullina Simons - The Summer Garden

Alexander told her he couldn’t stay in wintry Barrington any longer, couldn’t do snow, winters, cold. “Never again—not for one more day.” He wanted to go swimming for Christmas.

Whatever Anthony’s father wanted, Anthony’s father got. The sun still rises and sets on you, husband, she whispered to him.

Sets mainly, he whispered back.

They said a grateful goodbye to Esther and Rosa, and drove down past New York.

“Aren’t we stopping to see Vikki?”

“We’re not,” Tatiana said. “Vikki always goes to visit her mentally ill mother in California during Christmas. It’s her penance. Besides, it’s too cold. You said you wanted to go swimming. We’ll catch her in the summer.”

They drove through New Jersey and Maryland.

They were passing Washington DC when Alexander said, “Want to stop and say hello to your friend Sam?”

Startled she said, “No! Why would you say that?”

He seemed pretty startled by that . “Why are you getting defensive? I asked if you wanted to stop and say hello. Why are you talking to me as if I asked you to wash his car?”

Tatiana tried to relax.

Thank goodness he dropped it. In the past, he never used to drop anything until he got his answer.

Virginia, still in the thirties, too cold.

North Carolina, in the high forties, cold.

South Carolina in the fifties. Better.

They stayed in cheap motels and had hot showers.

Georgia in the sixties. Not good enough.

St. Augustine in Florida was in the seventies! on the warm ocean. St. Augustine, the oldest city in the United States, had red Spanish tile roofs and was selling ice cream as if it were summer.

They visited the site of Ponce De Leon’s Fountain of Youth, and bought a little immortal water, conveniently in bottled form.

“You know it’s just tap water, don’t you?” Alexander said to her, as she took a drink from it.

“I know,” Tatiana said, passing him the bottle. “But you have to believe in something.”

“It’s not tap water I believe in,” Alexander said, drinking half of it down.

They celebrated Christmas in St. Augustine. Christmas Day they went to a deserted white beach. “Now this is what I call the dead of winter,” said Alexander, diving into the ocean water in swimming shorts and a T-shirt. There was no one around him but his son and wife.

Anthony, who didn’t know how to swim, waded at the edge of the water, dug holes that looked like craters, collected seashells, got burned, and with his shoulders red and his hair sandy, skipped on the beach, singing, holding a long stick in one hand, and a rock in the other, moving his arms up and down to the rhythmic beat of the tune while his mother and father watched him from the water.

“Mr. Sun/ Sun/ Mr. Golden Sun/ please shine down on/ please shine down on/ please shine down on me …”

After weeks in St. Augustine, they drove south down the coast.

The Vanishing

Miami in January! Tropics by the sea.It was eighty degrees and the water was seventy-five. “Better,” said Alexander, smiling. “ Much better. Now we stay.”

Sprawled near the calm aqua waves of the Atlantic and Biscayne Bay, Miami Beach and South Beach were a little too … grown up for them with a small boy, with the rampant gambling casinos, the made-up, dressed-up women walking the streets, and the fanned, darkened 1930s Art Deco hotels on the ocean that looked as if men with mortal secrets lived there. Perhaps such hotels were rightful places for the Tatianas and Alexanders of this world—but she couldn’t tell him that. She used Anthony’s moral well-being as her excuse to leave. From South Beach, they drove twelve miles south to Coconut Grove, where it was calmer and neater. Cocoanut Grove, as it was called before the roads and the trains and the tourist trade came in 1896, was just a little town on Biscayne Bay with twenty-eight smart elegant buildings, two large stores doing whopping business, and a luxury hotel. That was then. Now the prosperity was like the sunshine—abundant and unabated. Now there were parks and beaches, marinas, restaurants and stores galore, all etched on the water under the fanning palms.

They stayed at a motel court inland but every day kept drifting out to the bay. Tatiana was worried about the money running through their fingers. She suggested selling the camper. “We can’t stay in it anyway. You need to wash—”

“I’ll wash in the ocean.”

“I need somewhere to cook your food.”

“We’ll eat out.”

“We’re going to go broke.”

“I’ll get work.”

She cleared her throat. “We need a little privacy …”

“Ah, now you’re talking. But forget it, I won’t sell it.”

They were strolling along Bayshore Avenue, past moorings that fingered out into the water. He pointed to a houseboat.

“You want to rent a boat?”

“A house boat.”

“A what?”

“A boat that is also a house.”

“You want us to live on a boat ?” Tatiana said slowly.

Alexander called to his son. “Anthony, how would you like to live in a house that is also a boat?”

The child jumped up and down.

“Anthony,” said his mother, “how would you like to live in a snowy mountain retreat in the north of Canada?”

Anthony jumped up and down.

“Alexander, see? I really don’t think you should be making all your life decisions based on the joy of one small boy.”

Alexander lifted Anthony into his arms. “Bud,” he said, “a house that is moored like a boat and sways like a boat, but never moves from the dock, right on the ocean, doesn’t that sound great?”

Anthony put his arms around his father’s neck. “I said yes, Dad. What more do you want?”

For thirty dollars a week—the same money they didn’t want to pay Mrs. Brewster—they rented a fully furnished houseboat on Fair Isle Street, jutting out into the bay right between Memorial Park and the newly broken construction site for Mercy Hospital. The houseboat had a little kitchen with a small stove, a living room, a bathroom with a toilet—And two bedrooms!

Anthony, of course, just like at Nellie’s, refused to sleep by himself. But this time Tatiana was adamant right back. She stayed with her son for an hour, until he was asleep in his own bed. The mother wanted a room of her own.

When an utterly bare Tatiana, without even a silk nightgown, lay down in a double-size bed in front of Alexander, she thought she was a different woman making love to a different man. It was dark in the bedroom, but he was also naked, no tank tops, no shirts, no battle gear. He was naked and on top of her, and he actually murmured a bit to her, things she hadn’t heard in a very long while, he took it a little slower, slower than he had in a very long while, and for that Tatiana rewarded him with a breathless climax, and a shy plea for a little more, and he obliged, but in a way that was too much for her, holding up her legs against his upright arms and moving so intensely that small thrilling cries of pain and pleasure drowned her parchment throat, followed by a less shy plea for some more … and he even opened his eyes briefly, watching her mouth moaning for him, Oh my God, Shura. She saw his searching face; he whispered, You like that, do you? He kissed her, but Tatiana unclasped from him and began to cry. Alexander sighed and closed his eyes again, and there was no more.

Alexander got ready to go look for work, Tatiana got ready to take their clothes to the Laundromat. There was no Laundromat nearby. “Maybe we should have rented a house closer to the Laundromat.”