Toby Olson - Seaview

She said she wasn’t afraid of dying anymore, when she got close to it, because she had known me. We cried together when she said that. I gave her wet washcloths for her forehead when she started to get fevers. We liked to hold hands in bed like schoolgirls and giggle. She liked to cradle me in her arms. We chewed the same pieces of gum; I used her toothbrush, and she used mine. There were times we washed each other with our tongues, wiping each other down with a dry towel afterward. I put a wet towel, heavy with water, on her stomach sometimes to ease her pain. I liked to call her Little Baby, though she was bigger than I was. She called me Honey and Sweetheart in very natural ways and without blushing. I gave her a bar of soap, lavender and hard milled. She gave me serious God-bless-yous when I sneezed. She liked to wear my underwear tight against her body and walk around. I slept with pieces of her underwear between my thighs. I wiped her after she had relieved herself when she got weak and sick. I took nothing from her that she did not wish to give.

She gave me a pretty garter she had made from a broken bra strap and a piece of lace. I gave her warm milk laced with nutmeg when she woke in the night in pain. I liked the way she smiled up from under her half-closed lids. She said she wished things had been otherwise, and I needed to hear it. We liked to talk about imagining cooking for each other, whole meals eaten by candlelight, with fresh fruit and cheese for dessert and cool white wine. She tore a fingernail, and I sucked the blood away. She gave me a barrette with a small enameled bird on it. We sang each other to sleep. I gave her whatever I could bear to give to her, which was everything. She asked for nothing. And she opened the floodgates of my heart.

THEY CAME UP FROM BEHIND THE CLUBHOUSE IN THEIR two motorized carts. There was a brief line up in front of them. Eddie Costa, who was their fourth and carried his sticks, had made it through, and they could see him above the crowd now as he trudged up past the putting green and toward the first tee. When the Chair reached the cart in front of him, he locked his brake and got out, leaving Campbell sitting in the passenger seat. He went to the back and got a seven-iron out.

The thick and ragged line of beachgoers numbered in the hundreds. Some carried signs and the makings for signs: free beach, free the skin beach, freedom now , etc. Men, women, and children, some in swimming suits, others in street clothes, young women in long colorful gowns, men in old army fatigue jackets. None seemed aggressive, but there was no break in their mass, and the carts couldn’t get through. A Seaview Township police cruiser was parked along the clubhouse side of the road, and a young officer stood beside it, involved with a group of golfers. They were talking about the look of some of the women passing by. When the Chair got to the side of the front cart, he rapped his seven-iron against the tire.

“Let’s get the hell on with this,” he said, and he walked over to the cruiser and began talking heatedly with the young officer, pointing over at the crowd with his golf club as he talked. After a few moments, the officer nodded, pushed off the side of the cruiser where he was leaning, and walked over to the crowd. The Chair walked over with him, but halfway there the officer stopped and motioned for the Chair to move away. He returned to his cart, jammed his seven-iron into his bag, and got in. In the cart behind him, Allen could hear him speak.

“This is some damn business; this is some crap!” Allen turned to Melinda and smiled, and she smiled also.

The officer stopped the line briefly, and the four carts started up and then moved their way through to the other side. The first two turned off and headed for the fifth tee. The Chair and Allen steered theirs over to the first. Eddie Costa was waiting for them, sitting with legs crossed on the park bench to the side of the tee.

“What kept you,” he said. He said it dryly, and he was not smiling.

“Some crap,” the Chair said. “Okay, okay, let’s get going boys, let’s go.”

The tournament was a metopolitan scramble, and the Chair had selected the teams the night before. He had needed an A, B, C, and D player for each. He’d figured himself for B, and he had put Commander Wall down for his C. But Wall had called in the morning, something had come up about hang-gliders and motorcycle gangs. Allen had come in and signed up on the previous morning, listing himself as a scratch player. The Chair had liked the way he looked and had selected him for his team. Art Campbell was a tourist who had not played at Seaview before either. He’d said he wasn’t very good. The Chair had figured him for a twenty-three handicap. Eddie Costa had been his substitute for Wall. The rules for the metropolitan were simple. Each player drove from the tee, and then the team selected the best drive of the four. The other three players then picked up their balls and brought them to the place of the drive they had selected. Then all four hit second shots from that place and again selected the best ball. This way of playing continued right through the putting that finished each hole.

Melinda stayed in the cart when the others got out and began organizing their gear for play. The sun was hard and bright, but there were a few heavy dark clouds coming in, and large shadows were falling in various places down the fairway. The sun hit Melinda’s face, and it was clear, both because of her posture and the chalk whiteness of her skin, that she was not well. Only Allen looked at her. The others were embarrassed by her presence, because of her ill look and the fact of the oddness of her being there at all. This was the way men had behaved toward her when she had started to work on her father’s boat. But she had no urge to somehow go below and write or draw now, and she just sat in the cart. When the Chair had first seen her in the cart with Allen, he had started to object, thinking that to bring one’s wife along was unprofessional, but her look had prevented him from speaking out.

From where she sat she could see across the golf course toward the lighthouse and the cliff. She felt in the way the men excluded her a kind of comfort and freedom from them, and she gave her attention to those things in the distance.

The line of beachgoers had turned at the lighthouse and were moving in the seaside rough of the sixth fairway, down over the edge of the cliff, heading for the beach below, halfway between the lighthouse and the Air Station property. Their line had thinned out, but it was long and continuous, and there didn’t seem to be any end to it. The women in the line stood out sharply in their colorful clothing, and those who wore only swimming suits had bodies that were tanned, hard, and shapely, and the men in the line tended to recede and pale in the comparison.

As women in the line reached the cliff’s edge, some would pick up small children, holding them in their arms as they started down. The hair of some of them lifted and caught the light as they stepped over and descended. The signs and the sign makings that were carried flapped like injured birds might, and the line seemed to get slightly frenetic just before it dipped over the edge. There were men carrying outdoor cooking implements, and some carried long objects wrapped in tarps. The people wearing street clothes (she could see four of them, three men along the line, one woman now stepping over the edge) seemed as if they had been transported here from another activity. They were not wearing skuff-arounds but garments they might have used for business. Three men, it looked like in slacks and jackets. One wore a snap-brimmed hat. The woman stepping over the edge was dressed in a tailored suit. Details from old post cards from a time when people dressed up even for the beach.