Kathryn Davis - Duplex

People went to the shore then? someone asked.

You think vacation is something new? Janice laughed the laugh she’d been working on, one that was supposed to sound musical.

If the men were there it wouldn’t have made any difference, someone said. I’ve heard about the Aquanauts. What happened had nothing to do with what sex people were.

Across the street the mother of one of the little girls had appeared in her driveway in a red bikini, a lit cigarette gripped between her lips as she hosed down her convertible. The mothers didn’t pay Janice for keeping an eye on their daughters, but they made it worthwhile for her, occasionally inviting her and her husband to their parties. Otherwise Janice wouldn’t have had any social life to speak of, she knew that, just as she knew the reason why had something to do with her being unsuitable in some way she couldn’t put her finger on, but that she suspected had to do with the fact that she, unlike the mothers, spent so much time with their daughters. It would be different when she had a daughter of her own.

In the beginning the group was like Pangaea, Janice said — that was how they got their power. They were like one giant lump of land surrounded by a single giant sea. It wasn’t until the lump broke into pieces that you could tell from the fossils how it used to be. One girl had a black locket that used to belong to another girl’s mother, one girl had another girl’s friendship ring. One girl had another girl’s hand-knitted argyle socks. One girl stole. She stole Blue Boy from Pinkie in the pack of trading cards in another girl’s cigar box, breaking up that treasured pair forever. Of course the girls didn’t like each other equally. When they played Nancy Drew someone always got left out, frequently the girl who stole, who refused to be Bess, while the girl who didn’t care what anyone thought of her was always George. She came from very far away and then one day she disappeared. In between she lived on the second floor of a duplex apartment at the shore.

When I say girls, Janice said, I mean teenagers.

How many girls were there? someone asked. By now everyone knew better than to ask their names.

What difference does it make? I don’t know, Janice said. Maybe four. Maybe five. Not a big group.

I have a black locket, someone said.

Do you think I’m blind? said Janice. And don’t everyone go telling me about your friendship rings.

A hot breeze gusted off the bay, riddled with flies. Janice swatted at them but they kept landing on her; they were attracted to the suntan lotion. If she knew who’d taken Blue Boy she wasn’t saying.

The Aquanauts always waited until the families had left the beach and gone home, Janice said. It added to the girls’ feeling of power to think of what was going on in the duplexes without them there. Everyone’s bathing suit had a crotch full of heavy gray sand and you had to be careful not to make a mess in the bathroom when you peeled it off. On weekends the fathers mixed cocktails and opened cherrystones while the mothers mixed cocktail sauce. During the week the mothers did it all themselves. If you were a good girl you sat on the duplex porch with your mother while she painted your fingernails bright red to match hers. She drank a martini and you drank apricot nectar. The little sisters played with their Ginny dolls, the Ginnies who couldn’t walk and the Ginnies who could, though you wouldn’t really call what they did “walking.”

By the time the girls got to the beach the sun was on its way into the bay on the other side of the island, and the shadows of the boardwalk shops and amusement park rides had grown longer and longer, making the sand dark and cool. The two lifeguards had turned over their chair and their lifeboat and taken off their whistles, dreaming of kissing the same girls they’d spent the whole day protecting. The beach was empty except for the gulls and the things people left behind accidentally like wristwatches and shoes or on purpose like trash. The sand castles had been swallowed by the sea. It was low tide, the shadow of the top car of the Ferris wheel swinging back and forth at the edge of the water.

I like the black-haired lifeguard, said one of the older girls.

He likes you, too, said another girl. I can tell.

What about the man with the metal detector? said the curly-haired girl’s little sister. The man with the metal detector was always one of the last people to leave the beach. Her heart went out to him, with his over tall red crew cut and the way the sleeves of his white short-sleeved shirt stuck out like fairy wings.

Don’t be stupid, said someone else. This happened before any of us were born.

What difference does it make? said the curly-haired girl. It could have happened yesterday.

Every night it was the same thing, Janice said. The girls would wait until the beach was dark and then they would walk straight into the ocean and swim away from shore until they disappeared. Afterward they would sit under the boardwalk and get so drunk that by the time they came home and went to bed it seemed to all of them that they were like clothes tumbling around in a dryer.

One night something different happened. The girls didn’t come back. The mothers were sitting on the duplex porches, smoking cigarettes and drinking cocktails. They were sitting in groups of two or three, the fathers still in the city. Some of the fathers also were sitting on their porches at home, drinking and smoking and listening to the hot summer wind moving through the crowns of the sycamore trees. The fathers weren’t in groups; aside from the ones having affairs they were alone. There was a feeling of melancholy everywhere, the melancholy of being in a place apart from the person with whom you normally spent your time, thinking of her sipping her martini, picturing the lit tip of his cigarette traveling in darkness away from his lips and toward the ashtray. The sound in the other person’s ears of a car turning onto the street where the two of you normally lived. The sound of the sea in your own ears. The feeling of melancholy was everywhere and it wasn’t, generally, such a terrible feeling. Because everyone knew they were going to be reunited with the person they were missing, they could throw themselves into their melancholy mood.

There had been warnings. But people never heed warnings.

No one listened, and as more and more people stopped listening, more and more people stopped telling the truth. Even Madame X didn’t tell the truth, having been designed that way by the chamber of commerce. Nothing will put a bigger damper on a family vacation than being told the world’s about to end.

You’ve seen how she just sits there in her glass case in the arcade, Janice said, with her big glass eyes and her little plaster hands lifted like the pope’s, waiting for the next coin to drop. That night she decided — no more lies. Supposedly it was one of the lifeguards who got the fortune, but he didn’t take it seriously. The only thing lifeguards take seriously is looking good for girls. You don’t belong here, the fortune said. You never have. Once the land stops getting in its way, the ocean is going to be everywhere.

Madame X told me I was lucky in matters pertaining to business and finance, someone said.

She told me I was going to meet a dark, handsome stranger, said someone else.

I bet she meant the lifeguard, said one of the little sisters.

Girls, Janice said, oh girls. For a moment she stared off into space like she was trying to collect herself. The parents didn’t realize anything was different, she said, and she sounded angry. Not at first. If they’d been paying attention to the moon they might have had a clue, but they were too filled with feelings of nostalgia and self-pity, the way adults become after they’ve been drinking. The girls knew it was going to happen that night though and they were ready. Their leader said she hoped they’d said their good-byes. Everyone had brought her air hose, for all the good it would do.