The Stingray Shuffle Page 9

  Samantha had a growth spurt when she was thirteen, and she would always be among the tallest in her class, either sex. By high school she found an outlet in girls’ basketball. She became what’s known as an “enforcer,” delivering retribution for rough play against her smaller teammates, fouling out of every game.

  “You elbowed me on purpose! That’s not fair!”

  “Life’s not like that.”

  In Daytona Beach, another nine-year-old girl, this one named Teresa, sat in her classroom drawing airplanes. It was the first day of the new school year.

  “And what do you want to be when you grow up?”

  “Fireman.” “Football player.” “Nurse.” “Mommy.”

  “Teresa, what do you want to be?”

  Teresa looked up from her planes. “A pilot.”

  “You mean a stewardess.”

  “I don’t want to be no stewardess.”

  “I don’t want to be a stewardess,” said the teacher.

  “Me neither,” said Teresa.

  “No, I mean you used a double negative.”

  “I’ll be a stewardess,” said a boy named Billy, whom the teachers were already concerned about.

  “Boys can’t be stewardesses, and girls can’t be pilots.”

  “I’m going to be one,” said Teresa, coloring in the airplane and nodding with conviction.

  “But you can’t, dear.”

  It came out of the blue. Teresa threw all her crayons on the floor and ripped up her picture and knocked over her desk. The teacher tried to calm her, but Teresa spit at her. She was still stomping and crying when they led her to the principal’s office.

  Compared with Teresa, Samantha was living a fairy tale. Teresa’s mother and stepfather were called in for a conference, and they decided to put her in a special school. Nobody could understand it. Teresa had been such a marvelous child the previous school year, before the incest had started that summer.

  “Do you have any idea what might be causing this?”

  “Not a clue,” said her stepdad.

  They tested for dyslexia, tried some autism drugs, sent her to camp, where a counselor fondled her. Funny, but she was only getting worse.

  Teresa began smoking when she was twelve and drinking at thirteen. Her stepfather was out of the picture now, and her mother blamed Teresa for the breakup. He left them with a pile of bills and without warning. Teresa’s mom took up a minimum-wage job and sudden fits of hysterical crying. Teresa became fat.

  She stayed away from the house as much as possible, becoming what you’d call a loner, hanging out next to the airport and watching the planes land, cutting herself with razor blades.

  Nobody saw the warning signs because her grades had rocketed to straight A’s. Everything had to be exactly right, and once it was, it wasn’t good enough for Teresa, who worked some more.

  Teresa didn’t become promiscuous, but she wasn’t frugal either. She was more or less desensitized, losing her virginity at fifteen to a boy who was also a virgin, behind a movie house, in a defining moment that was memorable for its clumsiness.

  “Is this it?” Teresa asked herself, although the boy seemed to be having an out-of-body experience: “I can’t feel my legs!”

  “Do you want to stop?”

  “No!”

  Meanwhile, an undersized child named Paige was growing up in Okeechobee, near the lake. She didn’t speak much.

  Paige kept bringing home stray and injured animals.

  Her mother had died from postdelivery infections that would mean a seven-figure malpractice verdict today. Her father was killed by a drunk driver when she was two. She lived with her grandparents. They were nice, but man, were they old. They took lots of naps and didn’t have any idea what Paige was talking about half the time. But Paige rarely spoke as it was, and nobody seemed bothered by the arrangement.

  Her grandparents were understanding enough with the little birds and frogs, which she kept in boxes on the porch, but a dog or cat was out of the question, because they had heard something on Paul Harvey about germs. Paige loved her grandparents, who weren’t permissive as much as just plain tired. By the time she was nine, they were going to bed before she was, and Paige stayed up late watching Laugh-In and Carson.

  Children are natural explorers, and they’re influenced by the media material they discover around the house. Paige grew up in a museum. What were these records? Guy Lombardo and Mario Lanza? There was also about nine hundred pounds of old Reader’s Digests and a few stacks of Life that her grandparents wouldn’t throw out. They never threw anything out. It had something to do with the Depression.

  They left Paige to the orphaned and wounded animals in her room, which was crowded with fish tanks and terrariums and plastic turtle ponds and hamster wheels and a maze of interconnecting gerbil tubes that ran all over the place like berserk plumbing.

  When Paige was fifteen, her grandparents died within a month of each other, and Paige was passed around the family, attending four different high schools in four years, and she started talking even less. There are many roles in a high school: star quarterback, prom queen, class clown, brain, stoner. Paige was an extra.

  Maria’s parents would have loved Paige.

  Maria learned to talk early, and she never stopped.

  “What’s this?” “What’s that?” “Why is that?” “Can I have one of those? What is it?” “You know what I think?…”

  It accounted for her parents’ permanent expression of having teeth cleaned.

  Maria demonstrated at age four her talent for mismatching clothes. “Can I dress myself?” “I want to dress myself.” “I’m going to dress myself now.” She ran into her bedroom and came out in a raincoat and bikini bottom. “I’m ready to go to school now.”

  Maria had lots and lots of accidents, big scary-looking tumbles, skinned knees, twisted ankles—her parents awakened every other night by a loud thump, Maria falling out of bed in her sleep again, then yelling down the hall, “I’m okay!”

  They thought she might need glasses, but the tests came back twenty-twenty. The spills seemed to bother Maria less than her parents, who would jump out of their chairs on the porch and grab their hearts before Maria dusted herself off and guaranteed nothing was broken. It finally dawned on them that Maria never cried, no matter what, going over the handlebars of her bike, popping right up, “I’m okay!” Jumping back on the bike and taking off again into the side of a parked van. “I’m okay again!”

  Maria seemed to have a high threshold for pain, and she could definitely take a punch, which were administered by boys everywhere. Ooomph, the wind leaving her. “I’m okay!”

  Maria’s true passion lay in the arts. Maria was a frustrated painter, a frustrated musician and a hopeless romantic. She tried oils, pencils, watercolors, all to no avail. That hemisphere just wasn’t firing. Same problem with music, made that much more glaring by her fondness for the tuba. She was an open book, all things to all people, wanting to be liked and trying to become whatever you wanted, except quiet. She dated a lot, but was saving herself for marriage. Trying to at least. But boys will be boys, and there were lots of struggles in backseats of cars outside dances and burger joints, a car door finally popping open and the other students seeing Maria tumble out of the car with a broken bra strap. “I’m okay!”

  You couldn’t help but like her. And hate her. She was the kind of gentle person who made you feel horribly guilty every time you lost patience with her. She made the other members of the pep club suicidal. Then there was the cheerleading squad, where her natural zest won her the top position on the human pyramid—each game the parents pointing in alarm, “Jesus, did you see the fall that girl just took?”

  “I sure hope she’s okay.”

  “She said she was.”

  Rebecca had talent coming out her ears. Her first teachers couldn’t believe it. They quickly took her off finger paints and gave her oils and acrylics. Everything was a photograph. Same with music. She skipped r
eading sheets and mastered the scales by ear—piano, flute, guitar.

  Rebecca was one of the most well adjusted children you’d ever meet, which meant she was weird. Her parents were semiprofessional folk musicians, playing in bars and coffeehouses in the Tampa Bay area, taking Rebecca along since she was five.

  The nightclub experience made her a bit precocious, and life in the sandbox was never quite as exciting after that. She spoke a different language from the other children, refusing to play dodge ball because it was “too much like Vietnam.” But she was able to duck the menu of neuroses that afflicted her peers, mainly because her parents were so well adjusted and weird, too.

  Her friends’ bedrooms were covered with the usual teeny-bopper pinups, but they didn’t recognize any of the posters on Rebecca’s walls: Dylan, the Mamas and the Papas, Donovan, Joan Baez. “Who are all those old people?”

  It was a stress-free life, and Rebecca was content to just lie in a field and watch the clouds. That was Rebecca all over, ephemeral and surreal, like some kind of unicorn.

  Not quite of this world, catch it while you can because it won’t be here for long, and it definitely can’t be possessed.

  “Daddy, how come poor people are poor?”

  “I don’t know, dear.”

  “But that’s not fair.”

  “Life’s not fair.”

  “It should be.”

  “I know, dear.”

  Her parents were remarkably youthful and good-looking, and you could tell that she was going to be beautiful, too. Rebecca was one of the few individuals who actually deserved to be pretty, because it wasn’t going to make her full of shit. She took after her parents that way.

  People generally hated the whole family.

  12

  A de Havilland twin-engine turboprop banked at four thousand feet over the turquoise water of Florida Bay and lined up its approach. Samantha Bridges pressed her face to the window and looked down at the A1A traffic, moving only slightly slower than the plane.

  Samantha felt a Bogart sensation of intrigue as her plane landed on the single, short runway with faded markings, bleached and hot, carved into the salt flats and coconut palms. The terminal was smaller than some houses in her neighborhood and needed paint.

  Key West International Airport. International—they used to fly to Havana once upon a time. Propeller plane was the only way in now; local ordinance prevented jet noise from disturbing residents and wildlife.

  Stairs flopped down from the side of the plane, and Samantha appeared in the hatch. Two women waited on the edge of the runway outside the Conch Flyer Lounge, grinning, hoisting fruity drinks in toast. Sam almost didn’t recognize Teresa in the lavender dress. She was thin. And blond. Maria looked great, too, despite the fashion error of matching vertical stripes with gila monsters.

  A pair of Beechcraft B 100s landed in quick succession, Paige and Rebecca, and suddenly they were all there, piling in an airport shuttle van.

  It started two months earlier, a chance occurrence. Samantha Bridges was now an assistant state attorney in Miami, and her youngest daughter had just left for Florida State. She turned the extra bedroom into a home office with a new computer and AOL account.

  Sam began fooling around with search engines one Sunday evening. Midnight came and went. She still couldn’t believe her screen. She had plugged in the names as a lark, and it had become a chain reaction of long-distance phone calls. Then they all hung up and hopped back on their computers, five women typing nonstop in the new Books, Booze and Broads chat room. Layoffs, surgeries, relocations to Boston and Belgium, a total of four new marriages that had gone south. Then, full circle, all back in Florida and single again. With one big difference. Empty nests.

  “Let’s revive the book club.”

  “Have a reunion.”

  “What do you want to read?”

  “Where?”

  “What?”

  “The reunion.”

  “Slow down!”

  “Let’s pick a book and visit where it’s set.”

  “Or pick a place and find a book that’s set there.”

  “I like the first idea better.”

  “They’re the same.”

  “No they’re not.”

  “Whatever.”

  First stop: Key West, Cayo Hueso, The Rock, Island of Bones. Rebecca had recommended the book, passed along by her parents. It was about a bunch of Jimmy Buffett fans on a pilgrimage to the Keys, and they spend the whole trip wasted on frozen drinks until they’re mysteriously murdered one by one. Parrot Droppings, by Ralph Krunkleton. The women liked it so much they had torn through four other Krunkletons before boarding their planes.

  The courtesy van pulled up in front of the Heron House on Simonton Street. The women wheeled luggage through the orchid garden and past the mosaic of a big wading bird tiled into the bottom of the swimming pool. They entered their suite through the sundeck, and there was no doubt where they were. Watercolors everywhere. Paintings of tropical plants, bedspreads with tropical fish. Rattan, marble, French doors, stained transoms. They crossed “the fulcrum”—that long-anticipated turning point when you’re traveling to a party town and finally get in your room and drop the suitcases, and it all lifts off your shoulders with a sudden buoyancy. This called for a meeting of the book club. They headed out the door to find one of the taverns in their Krunkleton paperbacks.

  The five started north on Duval Street, past the Lost Weekend Liquor Store, into the drinking district. Freaks on the street, squares in the bars. Bars with plastic bulls crashing through walls, parrots and flamingos on the counters, sailfish over the taps, pinball machines in back and pitchmen out front barking about double-jointed strippers upstairs. People who should never limbo doing so, reggae bands joined onstage by bald drunks from Cincinnati, derelicts riding bicycles with iguanas in the baskets and big snakes around their necks, drunk couples necking, transvestites on stilts, dogs wearing sunglasses, college students falling off mopeds and vomiting all over their SEE THE KEYS ON YOUR HANDS AND KNEES T-shirts.

  The women came to the end of Duval and headed up a twisting garden path behind the Pier House, through schefflera and hibiscus, onto a boardwalk next to a lagoon where hotel guests were throwing Chicklets to a school of feeding tarpon, then winding back to the patio until they finally stood near a hall tucked under the hotel by the supply rooms and the mops.

  “This can’t be it,” said Teresa.

  Sam pulled a paperback from her purse and opened to a bookmarked passage. “That must be the door.” She grabbed the handle.

  A row of faces along the bar squinted at the silhouettes of five women backlit by bright sunlight. The BBB stood still in the doorway a few seconds—that awkward, territorial moment when newcomers first set foot in a regulars’ bar. They started moving again toward a table in a corner of the tiny room, hanging purses over the backs of chairs.

  “So this is the Chart Room,” said Maria, shifting in her seat, straightening panties. She looked around for a waitress.

  “I think this is the kind of place where you have to go to the bar,” said Sam, getting up.

  Teresa turned her paperback over, scanning blurbs on the back—“…Stunning…” “…Dazzling…” “…Important…”—the kind of terse praise surgically lifted from the bodies of damning reviews. Sam returned with a pitcher of Michelob. They poured, clinked glasses and checked out the interior, mostly bare, except for a pair of nautical charts and a black-and-white photo of an early Key West street scene. But there was all kinds of stuff on the wall behind the bar, overlapping Polaroids of bent patrons making faces and hugging, business cards, newspaper clippings, scribbled-on dollar bills and a handmade sign: TIP BIG.

  Maria reached out and touched the plain cinder-block wall. “So this is where Buffett got his start?”

  “Right here in this corner,” said Paige, referring to her own paperback. “Arrived with Jerry Jeff Walker. Played six-string for tips while writing his early songs.”


  “Wow,” said Rebecca, and they all gazed at the ground under their feet with a sense of reverence usually reserved for mangers.

  Teresa stood up. “I’ll get the next pitcher.”

  And so it went. Another pitcher. Then another. Then liquor.

  “How’d we get so drunk?”

  “It’s a fuckin’ mystery,” said Rebecca, slamming a shot glass down on the table.

  “Sam, how come you aren’t drinking as much as we are?” asked Teresa.

  “Lost its luster. Half the men I prosecute are wife-beating alcoholics.”

  “Prosecute? I thought you were a public defender.”

  “Was. But I kind of got tired interviewing clients in jail who asked me if I liked to take it in the ass.”

  “I can see how that would get tedious,” said Rebecca. Then she asked if any of the others owned an SUV. They said they didn’t and asked why. Rebecca wanted to know if anyone else had a problem with men who liked to pull up at stoplights next to female drivers in taller vehicles so the women have a clear view of them beating off.

  “How often does this happen?” asked Maria.

  “More like how often doesn’t it happen.” She turned to Paige. “So what kind of work do you usually get as a vet?”

  “Patch up cats shot with BB guns and dogs set on fire and pelicans who’ve been thrown fish filled with needles and M-80s.”

  “Who would do such things?” said Teresa.

  “Obviously the work of women,” said Sam.

  “I wouldn’t necessarily go easy on our own kind,” said Maria.

  “You’re right,” said Sam. She raised her glass for a toast. “Fuck Dr. Laura.”

  “Hear! Hear!”

  The alcohol got the best of Maria. “Do you remember…” she said, then stumbled into forbidden territory.

  The other four glowered at her. “We never talk about that!” snapped Teresa. The others nodded.

  “Excuse the hell out of me.”

  They all sighed and sagged.

  “Nothing exciting ever happens to us,” said Rebecca.