Padgett Powell - Edisto

Taurus stands up and takes her hand and bows to kiss it, and she snatches it away with a laugh and sort of slow-motion socks him in the arm. Then she wiggles around like a tail wagging a dog. Her uniform rear had some jelly on it, which she might have already had or got wiggling, I don’t know, but it was funny the way she moved sideways to him but watched him straight with large eyes. In fact, they were the largest eyes I had ever seen that weren’t in a calf, and very blue or gray. I think I had a romantic stirring.

"Are we all set?" Taurus asked.

"I don’t know," she said.

He doesn’t say anything. She fiddles with the table a bit. "She’s never been on a date, T."

Who? T.? I was figuring a bunch of things at the time, like the eminent sensation I had that this female third party had a lot to do with me, so I missed for a time the significance of 'T'." That’s what she called him for short, I guessed, and it became my only clue to his real name, because that’s all she called him and I never asked. But could he really have been named Taurus?

"Well,” he says. "Simons here is just starting out himself.”

"Oh, good." Then she adds, "That’s romantic," almost so quiet you can’t hear her.

"You get off at eleven? We’ll be down there on the green."

We got those country-gentleman breakfasts with pork chops that had about an ounce of paprika and pepper on them, very tasty, and cut them up in white-sided chunks and pushed the rich broken egg yolks around, making the meat yellow. I was all of a sudden hungry as hell.

"What’s happening?"

"We’re going sailing," he told me. "With a boatful of willing gentlewomen from the low country."

"Ho1y God."

"Holy God is right."

Suddenly great old patinaed John Calhoun and the green shutters all vanished before what I was sure was the dawning of the real, present South, a new land full not of ghosts but of willing gentlewomen.

* * *

It didn’t turn out so marvelous. It’s like water-skiing, which is no fun until you know what you’re doing. Same with kissing, etc. We picked up this girl from a house on the Battery. She was cute all right, a regular button of a girl. She jumped down the steps in blue tennis shorts and a white cotton shirt with a tiny monogram, her hair pulled back, making her face shinier than it might have been without the tension, which was, I suspected, plenty shiny. She had on blue Keds that looked tight too and little pom-pom socks. She jumped in the car. For some reason, before I could look at her face all I saw was those cinched-up shoes, brand-new and looking as firm as shoe forms or hooves. I wondered if I was going to be a blockhead.

The trouble was, Taurus’s girl was shabby where mine was shiny, loose where mine was tight, and I had already taken a heavy fall for her because of those jaw-breaker eyes. And she was developed out. Now, I didn’t hold that against mine, because my burning worm was nothing to call the bureau of standards and measures about either, but the whole effect of this big-eyed, wobbling, nervous girl with giant bazongas had got to me, and what I wanted was a little one just like her. What I had looked like something at a recital.

"Oh, wait!" she cried, clapping her hand to her mouth. "Hi," to me. "I forgot" to them. She dropped a pink orthodontic retainer from the roof of her mouth and was out of the car and up the steps and back, smiling, in one motion. "All set."

She and I got through names and grades before we reached the water. We were about even on names — she was a double Jenkins and I had my one-"m"

Simons, plus the Manigault — but on schools she had the edge, being at Mrs. Oldfield’s famous institution for landed white girls, while I was in Bluffton Elementary with the people. I was going to display some Great Books stuntwork if she pressed about my not going to Cooper Boyd Academy. But she didn’t. She was nervous and smiling so hard about nothing at all that every time I looked at her, it sort of hurt my face. I hoped a little weather and salt on the boat would knock the shine off and we could be regular. Her name was Londie. Short for Altalondine Jenkins Jenkins.

At the yacht club we met a gigantic fat dude who was breathing with difficulty. He outfitted us with his boat, an air of a favor he owed Taurus about the proceedings. He made sure to impress Taurus with how irregular lending his boat was without his going. And then Taurus’s girl came out of the yacht club changed into a purple swimsuit with plenty of everything very obvious and she a little self-conscious, which made her smile and do that dog-wobble ever so slightly. On the front of the suit was a brilliant whale dancing on its fluke and spouting white spume, the figure made of inlays of nylon stitched together in colors resembling a parrot. The fat guy stopped talking when he saw her.

I watched him while Taurus rigged the boat. He had been blubbering about tightening this and battening that and rules of the road, but now he was mostly pointing and grunting, half at Taurus and half at his girl. His wheezing picked up.

He stepped over to Taurus and said, "My health."

Taurus looked up.

"I’m worried about my health.”

"What about it?" Taurus said.

He sucked in a big load of wind and said, "It’s deteriorating ."

Taurus was holding a broken halyard and standing in three inches of stinking bilge water in the open ribs of the cockpit.

"What isn’t? " he said.

"Good point! Very good point! Ah, sir!" shouted the wheezer. He laughed and then charged Taurus’s girl, virtually shouting, “Young lady! There’s a whale on your stomach!"

She bit her mouth sideways, stretched her suit outward a bit, and looked down at the colorful whale.

"Are you a" — he almost choked—"a swimmer ?"

With reverence in that word.

She looked at him and then at herself again, up and down, her legs, the whale, the bosom she could hardly see over. Now I was excited too, but the big guy was, I swear, fixing to collapse drooling, and she was getting red in the face. He was about two inches from her and standing like Santa Claus, rocked back on his heels with an enormous gut stuck out, which he rubbed absently with tiny hands, and he looked at her through eyes squinted shut with fat, seething, when Taurus said to her, "In the boat." And to me, "Cast off." She did, I did, Londie jumped in as light and precise as a fawn, and we motored out of the club.

That was about the biggest adventure of the day. It got a little rough, but nobody puked. We kept our stomachs full with cold Coca-Cola and nice big chunks of ice. Coke can taste very good in salty conditions, I’ve noticed.

We went to Fig Island, which is one island too small for the Arabs to bother to take. It was nice. We played in the water. Londie and I worked on our kissing nerve by trying to swim at each other underwater and embrace and then kiss, but each time one or both of us burst out laughing in embarrassment before we got our lips situated, big blasts of bubbles obliterating the target and the moment, and we’d have to surface for air and laugh and laugh more to conceal how scared we were to actually do it. And then I saw something that really took the wind out of my sails.

There was Taurus and his girl about a hundred yards away in chest-deep water, and she had her arms at full length draped on his shoulders, and maybe it was a trick of light and water or something but I swear I saw large pale surfaces between them and I thought it was her tits floating. It destroyed our game, made it so silly. I don’t even know if it was her tits, if boobs even float like that, if it wasn’t a fish belly. But the idea was enough. Me and old A’londine was way down in the minors, so I suggested we walk the island.