Kathryn Davis - Duplex

“For heaven’s sake,” Blue-Eyes said. “Why don’t you just calm down?” She folded her hands in what looked to Marjorie like a parody of piety.

By now the sun had come all the way out and was shining brightly, setting sparks flying everywhere across the dancing waves. Brigadoon, Miss Vicks thought. Before the photographer appeared with his horse — before she got up on the horse and rode away — she had been listening to a group of girls singing as they walked along the street. “There may be other days as rich and rare,” she remembered the girls singing, “There may be other springs as full and fair. But they won’t be the same — they’ll come and go…”

“Please oh please!” Penny said. “Don’t eat it! I beg of you!”

The dining room was warm and she had thawed out completely. Marjorie Vicks, Miss Vicks, Vicks, M., Vicky Dear — whoever on earth she was she had never felt so hungry in her life, and despite her own worst fears she hadn’t melted away. When she picked up her fork, to her delight she saw that her hand looked the way it used to when she wasn’t much older than Penny and Blue-Eyes, the ropy veins and the brown spots gone, and in their place the creamy, hydrated skin of her youth.

Things couldn’t be more perfect, Marjorie thought, three girls sitting together in the sunshine, their lives ahead of them. By now the water had come so close to the hotel that if a window were to be opened she could reach out and her hand would get wet. The water was bright blue like the girls’ uniforms, the shade of blue in a regular-sized box of crayons. Luckily the windows weren’t open, though, because if they were, the water would be coming into the dining room and everything would end up soaked.

She could hear the same rattling noise she’d heard the night before that sounded like it was made by a dog collar. It seemed to be coming from the other side of the blue door leading to the hotel lobby. She took her first bite of pie. “If only I’d known they allowed dogs,” she said, “I’d have brought mine.”

“That is your dog,” Penny said. “You know that, don’t you?”

“My dog?” Marjorie started to get up but Blue-Eyes pushed her back down into her chair. “I thought by now he’d have been taken away to the pound,” she said. “I thought he was dead.”

Blue-Eyes started to laugh. “Just where do you think you are, anyway?” she said.

It was then that Marjorie looked up from her plate and saw the infernal thing. It was sitting across the table from her, hunched over and chewing with its mouth open, cherries spilling out of its mouth and onto the tablecloth. It looked just like Blue-Eyes — probably even its own mother couldn’t tell them apart.

EVERYBODY THINKS IT’S GOING TO BE DIFFERENT FOR them, Janice said. The dinosaurs thought so too. She was on the porch of her rental duplex, busy smearing her thighs with suntan lotion, her tan an enviable deep golden-brown. By this time Janice had been at the shore for a month. Golden-brown was the color everyone craved, not only for their body parts but for their food.

The dinosaurs had small brains, one of the girls said. All of us were older now; we’d learned things in school. Everyone thought the sun went around the earth, then every one thought the earth went around the sun. Who knew what they’d be thinking next? The moon came out of the place where the ocean is now. The moon came from outer space and the earth captured it in its orbit.

The moon, Janice said. The moon was what started all the trouble. She finished her thighs and started in on her arms. She took her time, squeezing the lotion out bit by bit and rubbing it into her skin in small circular motions; she was driving the little girls crazy. They’d promised their mothers they wouldn’t go to the beach without her. You couldn’t apply lotion on the beach — that was Janice’s rule. If you waited until you got to the beach, sand would get in the lotion, spoiling your tan.

Janice informed everyone that after her husband arrived Friday they were taking a moonlit cruise on a luxury sailboat. She hadn’t married the boyfriend with the two-tone car; he turned out to be unreliable, meaning he dumped her for someone better looking. The man she married was named Henry and everyone thought he was too nice for Janice. He had the appearance of an English gentleman, very delicate and pale, the way a hermit crab looks between shells. Henry treated everyone with kindness. One of the little girls said he asked to see her pee hole, but it was common knowledge he liked Janice best.

After two people got married everything that had formerly seemed interesting became uninteresting — this was common knowledge too. Once you were married, romance and heartbreak were no longer an option. Where were the surprises? When she wasn’t wearing a bathing suit, Janice wore a girdle under her clothes. She didn’t have a pussy anymore, she had genitals. Her nipples disappeared in one big thing called a bosom.

You girls know nothing, Janice said, lighting a cigarette and blowing smoke rings. The sky was the usual color, a solid shade of blue that suggested everything worth seeing lay behind it. This was also true of the houses on either side of the street, two rows of identical white duplexes, like the semidetached brick houses back home. The only way you could tell the duplexes apart was by their awnings — Janice’s was forest green with yellow stripes.

The curly-haired girl came walking down the stairs from the second floor with her raft under her arm. Have any of you ever looked at the moon? she asked. The raft was the same color green as the green of Janice’s awning, the canvas so old and dry that until the girl got it into the water it made her skin creep. If you look at the moon you see it’s something different from what they teach you, the girl said. She’d been planning to go to the beach alone but when she overheard Janice talking about the moon she couldn’t resist joining in. Stars around the silver moon hide their silverness when she shines upon the earth, the girl said, quoting her favorite poet. Upon the black earth.

It used to be too dangerous to go on moonlit cruises, Janice continued. Once she got started she was unstoppable. The thing about the moon is how it makes things happen just by being there, like the way it can pull all the water on one side of the planet into a big bulge and then let it go. That’s why there are tides.

I wish I could go on a cruise, someone said.

My dad says those cruises are highway robbery, said someone else.

It was a block and a half from the duplex to the boardwalk. The sidewalk was so hot the curly-haired girl could feel it through the soles of her flip-flops. The grass was yellow, the hydrangeas blue. The ocean was a wobbly sliver of light even brighter than the sky and shimmering like a mirage — she could hardly wait to get there.

The cruise is worth it, Janice corrected. Ab-so-tive-ly pos-i-lute-ly. She said it helped if you were a newlywed. She leaned forward to put out her cigarette on the sidewalk, and when she sat up everyone held their breath to see if her bosom was going to stay inside her suit. The thing I’m talking about happened long ago, Janice said. Not as long ago as the Rain of Beads but a thousand times worse. People used to think the Horsewomen were involved, only this was another group. They were older and they were human girls and they had a leader — they called themselves the Aquanauts. Their leader was a girl who no longer cared what anyone thought about her. She no longer cared if everyone thought she was weird. During the week there were only women and children at the shore, just like now. The men came on the weekends. If the men had been there probably none of this would have happened.