Karolina Waclawiak: The Invaders

I took a towel from the waiter and felt thirsty. I couldn’t carry both a towel and a drink. I couldn’t anymore. I had to carry one or the other. Or try to lasso it around my neck. Or tuck the towel under my arm and squeeze it tight while I tried to maneuver the spout of the water tank to spill water into the plastic cup and nowhere else. It all seemed impossible. I thought, This is how it’s always going to be. I would only ever do one thing at a time.

I tried to lay the towel down on the chaise with the wind blowing; I almost had to ask for help. I pulled off my shirt and felt people watching me, as if they wanted to see how I would do it. I kicked off my shoes and leaned back on the chaise. The sun was nice and for once I felt safe. I closed my eyes and listened to the children scream and play.

I saw a shadow cross over me and I opened an eye. It was Jill, folding a towel down over the chaise next to me. She was already stripped down to her bathing suit. I felt my penis move. I was getting aroused and became very self-conscious. A girl once told me that the best way to get rid of a hard-on, or to make one last longer, was to think about ham sandwiches. Build the layers — the pieces of bread, slices of ham, cheese, tomatoes, lettuce, the mustard on top — and get really involved in the ingredients. Visualize putting the thing together. You could go on making ham sandwiches for minutes, then look down and realize you were all right. I looked down. There was hardly a stir. Jill turned around and looked at me and I saw the white part of her breasts, the part that hadn’t tanned this summer. I wanted to cry.

“I didn’t see you there,” she said.

She flopped down next to me and tried to assemble the pool toys at her feet. Foam noodles and plastic throwing stars, shit I used to play with as a kid, too.

I tried to shield the sun from my eyes so that I could get a better look at her. She looked tired and annoyed, not like the other times. She had a trashy book beside her. The cover had a man grasping at a half-naked woman with plump lips and huge breasts.

“Is it any good?” I asked.

She looked down at the noodle, then her book.

“Lots of heavy petting,” she said.

“I figured,” I said.

She stared at the book, and I knew she felt the need to defend it more.

“Sometimes you just need to shut your brain off.”

Then she stared at the pool and her children flapping around with their swimmies on.

I wished that she could have come up with something more insightful, but this was it. Tired housewife who may or may not have hated her kids. There was no forced sandwich-making necessary. I closed my eyes again. I could hear people talking, but they weren’t talking to me, so I fell asleep.

• • •

I felt my face burning hot and someone shaking me awake. I opened my eyes and saw Jill there.

“How long have I been asleep?” I asked.

“About fifteen minutes,” she said.

Why had she shaken me awake? She smiled when I asked her.

“I was bored by the book,” she said, and then, “So few weekends left to sit out here.”

I groaned because the summer was ending. It was over. It would get cold soon.

The bored women would go back into their houses, shut themselves in, and wait for next summer when they could take off as many clothes as possible and try to make a go of it. Take chances again. She was quiet for a moment. I pushed myself up trying to wiggle the back of the chaise up; she leaned over and tried to help me.

“You don’t have to,” I said, feeling like a child.

“Why don’t you come watch me anymore?” I thought I heard her say.

I turned to her and she smiled. “I kept hoping you’d come back,” she said.

I felt a buzzing in my ears and I wasn’t sure how to answer.

We both stared at the pool.

“Do you love your kids?” I asked.

“Of course. What kind of question is that?” she asked.

“Would you ever leave them?”

She looked at me and laughed. She said, “For you?” Jill put her sunglasses on and waved to her children, who waved back with a lot of excitement. She was waiting for me to say something else. I could see her little smile from where I was sitting. I didn’t want to sit there anymore. I started getting up.

“Don’t go,” she said quickly.

I slid back into my seat. People were looking at us, or was I just being paranoid?

“Why are you doing this?” I said.

“I’m not doing anything,” she said.

“I wasn’t watching you,” I said.

“You were.”

She put her book down.

“You’re reading too much of that shit,” I said.

She was quiet for a moment and then slid the book under her seat.

I closed my eyes, hoping she’d disappear. I didn’t want her to start telling me about loneliness or missing husbands or shitty kids. None of that. I didn’t want her to talk anymore.

“What do you want me to do?” she asked.

I didn’t know how to answer.

Leave me alone, stay, touch me again.

Things like that popped into my head, but I didn’t say them.

“Nothing,” I said finally.

We lay there, side by side, staring at the pool full of children.

I opened my eyes and Jill smiled at me and said, “Let’s go to the rocks tonight. I’ll get a babysitter.”

I said okay and she left and I had to go wait for her. Hours still.

When I got home, Cheryl was in the garage, shuffling around. I asked her what she was doing, but she didn’t answer me, didn’t even register that I was there. I called out to her again and she finally looked up. I didn’t feel like telling her about my ordeal. I didn’t want her to think I was a fuckup again.

“What are you trying to do?” I asked.

“There’s a hurricane coming.”

“Maybe we should call Dad,” I said.

The phone in the kitchen was off the hook.

I ran back outside.

“I need help with these boxes if you have a second.”

It was so bright outside, but in the garage she had found the shadows and was hovering in them.

“Maybe you shouldn’t open those,” I said.

“It’s all just junk.”

I stared at her, trying to get rid of it all. She told me, “We have to board up the windows.”

Cheryl came into the light and she was smiling. She put her hands on her hips and looked around the garage.

“Spring cleaning a season late,” she said.

I asked her if she had talked to my dad and she said she had and he was going to try to make it back before the storm. I was glad there was something that was actually making her worried and that she wasn’t acting crazy because she was going crazy. Everyone on the shoreline was afraid of storms.

She held up some Playboys and Hustlers , my father’s collection, and said, “Maybe we could board up the windows with these?” She was smiling when she said it, like everything was a big joke.

“We could show them what it’s all about, right?” she said.

She flipped through a Hustler magazine. “Why are they always wearing pearls?” She looked at me as if she expected an answer. She held up the magazine and showed me a woman with her legs spread wide, no underwear but with a bra on and a long string of pearls around her neck. I had no idea, but the magazine had to be from the early ’80s. They still had hair in dark Vs.

“You should probably put that down,” I said.

Cheryl continued to thumb through the magazine.

“I remember them being worse,” she said.

She put the one she was holding down and picked up another one, a Playboy from a long time ago.

“We always had these around the house when I was a kid,” she said.

She hardly mentioned her past and I wanted her to say more, but she never did. When she first came home with my dad, I had no idea where he had found her, and at the wedding no one came for her at all. My dad had told me that her family was poor, broken apart, that she had risen above it all .