At the Outer Banks, on a muddy cliff, where grasses grow tall and sharp and thin to be whipped by the wind, there is a blue bungalow rental house. Three friends in it are sitting around and drinking. Out the kitchen window, they watch the sun set on the last of their four nights there.
“This one has some nice purples going on,” says Jeanie, sitting closest to the picture window.
“I’ve never seen a bad sunset,” says Rick. “Or a bad sunrise.” He leans back in his chair and puts his feet up on the table.
“It’s physically impossible,” adds Laura.
Jeanie gets up to go the fridge, avoiding the fake Tiffany light over her head, and takes out another Coors. “Good! The coldness window turned blue – that says it’s cold, so I can be sure.” The other two giggle.
She leans over the table and says, “Let me refill those,” picking up their sweating glasses to go refill with gin and tonics. This move, the arching, the gripping, the swooping away, comes naturally from her muscle memory after waitressing for more than five years.
Lamplight wraps them in a circle apart from the dusk outside. They will disband tomorrow, in just half a day: Rick to his big-city conservatory, Laura to her New England college, Jeanie to Minneapolis. This ritual of cohesion has been observed twice a year for the last three years, ever since high school graduation.
There’s the buzz of the drink and the buzz of expectations to pack up and melt away. But in this day, with its light-speed innovations, no true friends have to bear total absence. They walk out onto the house’s back porch.
Yesterday morning, Laura and Rick walked into town to get some food, and when they did, Jeanie laid face down at the house path’s end. It wound slightly up for a hundred feet above her. From here at eye level the grasses seemed to swell and shrink the house into a green haze. “So this is what life is like in the ocean’s seaweeds,” she thought. “I’m a seahorse and that anemone is my friend.”
And if your friend is a human, you can kiss the person with much less sting. Each of the three had done it to one another. Among their circle of friends, they were the trio closest to each other, the brightest constellation. When Laura showed up to them in Richmond, transplanted from Colorado, hadn’t Jeanie and Rick welcomed her with open arms? They couldn’t have been separated, for every passing moment together made the sacred glue stronger. All their jokes made an infinite pattern. They’d had ineffably perfect experiences. Nowadays, though, Jeanie has to initiate phone calls that usually get missed and not returned.
Drinks taste better on the house porch, they agree. Laura turns its light on, and Jeanie wants it off but she keeps quiet.
“Do you remember,” Rick asks, “when Steve put that rat in that girl’s bag because she’d laughed at him?”
Laura gives a loud and short laugh. “Yes! Oh my god! That was so great. And she had rotted guts all over her books. So messed up. Freaky-weird. Where is he? Is someone keeping an eye on him?”
Jeanie slumps a little. They didn’t have to bring up the schizophrenic ex. They’d stood by after months and months when Steve played cruel pranks on classmates, devised elaborate mind games to play with Jeanie and other girls, like claiming he had fatal pancreatic cancer. And he was still sewn into her life, in places.
“He said he’ll keep staying in New Mexico some more, I guess,” Jeanie says.
“I have to admit,” Laura says, leaning forward over the railing, “I never really liked him.” Rick murmurs his agreement. “What were you thinking? Really? He should come with a warning label. It’s like he was raised by aliens or something.”
“Oh, thanks for the news, thanks, you guys!” Jeanie bristles. “Thanks for warning me about him right away. So you’re too sharp to ever get involved with a creep? Cool, thanks, good to know. Must be nice hanging around with perfect people in perfect seminars.” She finishes off her fifth beer.
Rick tries to soothe her. “No, it’s not like that –” but Laura talks over him.
“No, don’t worry, you have plenty of great ideas,” she snaps. “All your plans are really great.”
“Fine. Whatever. Anyway I barely talk to him anymore.” Jeanie tries to remind herself that her move to Minneapolis was great, that being hostess at The Cheesecake Factory at the Mall of America is exactly what she needs, that the way the snow muffles life is perfect. It didn’t mean she was an illiterate idiot. She would work her way up to something better, she could make her own money, even if her friends didn’t need to.
They could once share secrets, the three of them. The other two were there when Rick’s uncle passed away, and they were aware of his excellent inheritance. Their quirks were familiar, like how Laura wore the same underwear for a week even after taking showers, or how Rick was afraid of pickles. And the other two were there when Jeanie’s parents split up and she and her mom had to get shelter at friends’ houses for a month, and she had to look after her mother’s alcoholic spells.
As the world starts reeling, they get into the surf. All their sunburns sting. Rick brings his vodka straight down and mixes the saltwater into it. Laura stumbles over the incoming waves. Jeanie splashes her in fun, but she won’t play, not like all the other great water fights they’d had. What about the pool party they’d put on once?
“Now, this ethics thing,” Rick announces, “so we read this – but I just play trumpet – but this textbook we have. Got a summer paper about some hypothetical situation.”
“Oh! We had to do Plato in a class,” Laura says, “he’s Plah-to? Play-to? That guy? Yeah, so -–”
Jeanie moves too far away to hear them chatter about their sameness. Why should she join in? She sits down; the waves rush over her at shoulder height, and she chokes a little on seawater. The stars are so bright here. Everything is bright. The sun shines unbearably bright. The water flashes bright, almost gaudy, under the moon. Getting a splinter hurts brighter here. And always the sharp heat that sweated you after the fact, that you’d find sticking to your scalp even indoors.
But somehow the water was too cold and they would have to go inside. And there would be a screaming fit over the starfish Laura, in all her affectation, had brought inside only for it to start decomposing and stinking, and some choice words would come out, and some snarls, and Rick would give her a look Jeanie knew only too well, and everyone would go to bed, and wake up to find things still ripped. So life must be pruned, then redrafted.
But Jeanie couldn’t know all this, minutiae that sloughed off her skin. And she could not see farther than the other two, so no one could see the accidental manslaughter Rick would commit in nine years, or Laura’s rejection of her family in a month so she could fail at being a playwright. I am as far from you as the east is from the west, Jeanie thought without realizing it.
Good to admit it sooner.
