and had nine children with my grandma and four with the one after her. He fathered a child at the age of seventy-one, can you beat that? That was my aunt Millicent, born when I was already thirteen. I’ll have to take you to meet Millicent, she lives down east.”
Victor looked at the old man in the picture with renewed curiosity. Ancient as time, yet he had not yet, when this image was captured, planted his last seed. “What was his name?” Victor asked.
“Carlos,” his grandmother said, musingly, “Carlos Blattery. I always wondered, and never did ask him, or anybody, how come it was he had a Spanish name. The Blattery’s as far as I know, come here from England. Maybe his mama just liked the sound of it. But that was his name, anyway. Not Charles, but Carlos. As mean as a snake, too, I never saw him smile for anything. But he provided for his family, that’s for sure.” With this she walked into the kitchen, but after a moment she came back. “You see how chipped the varnish is on that old frame? I’d take it down and put something else up there, but Shelby loves it so, I figure it don’t hurt to leave it up there….”
“It’s nice,” said Victor. “It’s probably worth some money.”
His grandmother snorts. “Well… I don’t know about that,” a whistle that rapidly grew into an insistent shriek issued from the kitchen, where his grandmother had put on a teapot to boil. She went back in there to attend to it, and from the other room called out, “It’s something to look at, anyway. Every picture tells a story, I reckon.”
When breakfast was ready Victor’s grandmother left the kitchen and rapped on Shelby’s bedroom door and screeched for her to wake up, but she left her son alone. “He can’t eat breakfast, and he can have his milkshakes anytime he wants them,” she explained.
Shelby shuffled into the kitchen puffy eyed and yawning. She wore an enormous t-shirt that reached to her shins with a picture of a cartoon Tasmanian devil on the front of it. “Morning,” she said to Victor, sounding as if she was speaking through a mouthful of glue. “Dang! I forgot you were here until just now!”
Victor was not used to eating breakfast, and left half the bowl of grits, though he finished the eggs and toast. Morning seemed to be a fairly relaxed time of day in the house, for a few minutes after the three of them were all finished eating, they lingered at the table, each with a refilled cup of coffee and a cigarette. Nobody said anything, but the silence was not awkward, and Victor unselfconsciously watched the play of cigarette smoke in the very bright morning sunlight that streamed in through the windows across from his seat at the table.
“I thought I’d show Victor around today, take him to the beach,” said Shelby after awhile. “You put him to work before he even had a chance to get any culture.”
“Just be back by quarter of three,” said their grandmother.
“We’ll need some money to take,” says Shelby.
“What for? The beach don’t cost anything!”
“We’ll need lunch, won’t we?”
“Then you better fix some. I’m not made of money.”
“I can’t drive yet,” Shelby explained as she zipped the lid of the polyester cooler that held their food. “So we’ll have to walk. You don’t drive yet, either, do you?”
“No,” Victor said, and he wondered just how much his cousin knew about his life. He assumed she must know, that his grandmother must have mentioned to her, over the years, that he had problems. And yet, he had to admit, she did not act as if she knew. Neither one of them did. It was as if, like Uncle Buzz’s obviously uncontrollable alcoholism, the grandmother’s guileless bigotry, and Shelby’s mysterious, evil mother, Victor’s hospitalization was just one of those things that happens in families.
“I took the road test in the spring, but I failed it,” Shelby said. “I was supposed to practice some more with daddy, and take the test again on my birthday, but then daddy got worse. So it’s on hold. My best friend has her own car, so I get around that way. You’ll meet her pretty soon. She’s a summer person, but we keep in touch when she’s at home. She’s from Raleigh, too. Her name’s Dora.”
Shelby handed Victor the little cooler, and shouldered her own enormous black tote bag, and they set out. Once outside the door, the heat of the sun smote them, but Shelby marched on as if in rebuke. Victor wondered if he would ever get used to the relentless, aggressive quality of this coastal sun; only a couple minutes out of the air-conditioning and the top of his head felt like it was being slowly eroded away by a laser beam. He had to work to keep up with Shelby’s pace, which, despite her boxy stature and shape, was long and swift; she moved like a ship in a favorable wind, her long light skirt sometimes brushing the hot asphalt.
“It’s about a forty-five minute walk,” she said over her shoulder to him. “When we get to the highway, we go down that about half a mile, then we get to the bridge. Then we have to cross the bridge, and that takes about ten minutes. Then we’ll be on the island, and it’s about a twenty-minute walk from the bridge to where I like to go. If you need to stop, just let me know.”
“I’m all right,” Victor said, though he was already dizzy with the heat.
They did not talk much as they made the long, hot trek to the oceanfront. Victor found himself absorbed with the sights and sounds and smells along the way; the landscape was another world to him, for all that he had evidently been to the beach as a small child. There was a strip of sidewalk across the length of the bridge over the sound, and he stopped, for a moment, in the middle, and leaned over the railing to look down into the sound as the strong warm wind whipped his hair to one side. Shelby sensed that he wasn’t right behind her and doubled back.
“Don’t even think about diving,” she said, “you’d break your neck. It looks deep, but it isn’t really. And it’s full of disgusting eels and jellyfish.”
They walked on. When they came to the island, Shelby veered to the left, and they walked along the main drag, which was flanked on both sides with cheap motels, cheap but overpriced seafood and fast food restaurants, convenience stores, and dock houses. Shelby turned into one sandy parking lot and onto a wooden walkway that led over a set of dunes. They passed a shed that held changing rooms, and then Victor saw the ocean for the first time that he could remember. Inexplicably, the sight made his heart race. He shaded his eyes with one hand and looked out as far as he could to where the ocean and the sky merged into one hazy line. The crash and hiss of the surf was as rhythmic as a pulse. The sense Victor had that what confronted him had a life of its own was so powerful that he was compelled to speak. “Wow,” he said, and as this expression seemed inadequate, he said it again. “Wow.”
Shelby, in the meantime, trudged several yards ahead, and laid down a green bed sheet that she carried along in her black bag. Victor stood stock still at the foot of the dunes until the intensity of his encounter with the ocean passed through him. Once he situated himself next to Shelby on the bed sheet, his astonishment faded, but he could not dismiss his sense that the two of them, along with the dozens of other visitors to this particular stretch of beach, were there at the mysterious, innocent pleasure of the place itself.
“I like it here,” Shelby said. “People don’t come here because it’s so close to the piers. They think the pier draws sharks. It does, but the sharks it draws are too small to hurt anybody. Besides, I don’t go in the water anyway. Do you?”
