you swim?”
He nodded.
“I can’t,” said Shelby.
This seemed incredible. “For real?”
Shelby reached into her big bag and pulled out a bottle of lotion, the contents of which she proceeded to languorously apply to her arms and face. “Me and daddy haven’t always lived with Gum, you know,” she said, “I lived with my mother until I was about four,” Shelby gazed grimly at the horizon. “We never stayed in any one place for very long, so I never had a chance to learn a lot of things. I don’t even really remember going to school very much until my mother left me with Gum. And by that time Granddaddy was dead and Gum had to start running the restaurant full-time, and she never had time to teach me to swim. So, even though I’ve always been around the water, I’ve never learned. Ironic, isn’t it?”
Victor wasn’t sure, exactly, what the word ironic meant. Shelby finished slathering her skin, drew up her knees, clasped her forearms around them and continued. “My mother didn’t really leave me with Gum. She lost custody of me, then she kidnapped me, and then she brought me back here to live when it got too hot for her. Daddy divorced her, or she divorced Daddy, when I was about three. I can’t even remember them ever being together. After that she started doing a lot of drugs, and I guess Daddy started to do a lot more drinking than he had before. He was still in the Coast Guard then, stationed in Charleston. My mother and me lived just about everywhere in the state, even Raleigh for a little while. She took me wherever whatever loser she was with took her. Eventually someone reported her for leaving me alone too much while she was out doing god knows what, so she left me with Gum. My mother’s very beautiful,” Shelby paused and looked out to sea. “She’s Lumbee.”
“Huh?”
“Lum-bee,” Shelby rolled her eyes and enunciates. “Lumbee Indian. Haven’t you ever heard of the Lumbee tribe?”
Victor shrugged. If he had, he couldn’t remember. But that explained, then, his cousin’s rose-copper coloring. Her mother was an Indian. Victor wondered what his grandmother thought of that.
Shelby sighed and spoke with the weary tone of one obliged to explain the obvious to an idiot. “We’re the largest Indian tribe of east of the Mississippi. But no one knows anything about us, because we don’t have federal recognition. Some people say we’re the descendants of the Lost Colony, mixed with the Native Americans. That may be true, but there’s also African blood in us. No one is really just one race, I don’t care what anyone says. You can be racist against yourself, you know. You can deny who you are. But the fact is, we’re a coat of many colors,” Shelby looked at Victor as if she expected him to contradict her. Then her look changed, as if he had suddenly come into focus for her.
“Hey, you know, I’ve never even met your mother,” she said. “I know that Gum likes her. I know they talk every now and then. What’s your mother’s name?”
Victor picked a handful of sand up from beside their bed sheet and let it sift through his fingers. “Veronica,” he answered. “But she hates it. She won’t let anybody call her that. She calls herself Ronnie.”
“Veronica,” Shelby said it musingly. “What a beautiful name. So European. I wonder why she doesn’t like it….”
Victor shrugged. “She really hates it,” he said. “What’s your mother’s name?”
“Tanya,” Shelby said this as if the sound left a bad taste in her mouth. “Your mother’s Italian?”
“I guess so. Her family name was Bassano. I think there’s some French, too.”
“Mediterranean,” Shelby nodded approvingly. “Southern Europe is a mixture of all kinds of people, too. Like I said, no one’s really any one thing. Certain people just want to think they are. Gum’s like that,” Shelby unclasped her knees and stretched her legs out in front of her. “Have you noticed that? That she’s kind of racist?”
Victor nodded.
Shelby’s lips, usually so full, compressed into a line that looked very much like their grandmother’s habitual expression of grim forbearance. “It bugs her that I’m not white. It always has. She was brought up that way that people shouldn’t mix, and she’s never really gotten over it. I guess there was never any reason for her to try, until I came along. And she’s tried, in her way. But I know it still bothers her. Some things you just can’t change about yourself, even if you know you should,” Shelby reached behind herself, untwisted the knot of hair at the nape of her neck, and let the sea breeze whip her thick, dark, rusty curls about her face. “It only bothers her, though, when she thinks about it. And she doesn’t think about it, at least not nowadays, unless someone else does. That’s how I can deal with her. Because deep down, it doesn’t make any difference to her any more. It’s just habit, that she says the things she does. She’s a product of her environment. Just like the rest of us.”
Victor looked down at his legs, long, thin, and pale, with fine dark hairs just beginning to coarsen near his ankles. With his dark eyes and hair, he favored his mother in looks, he had none of his father’s sandy coloring and stocky build. His mother had mentioned to him once, long ago, that of all the people in the family, he most resembled her brother Anthony, who was evidently some years older than her, and who died in Vietnam, when she was just a little girl. Anthony was, in fact, Victor’s middle name, and a name he liked much better than Victor, but when years ago he asked his parents if he could go by that name, his mother, though she said nothing, stiffened like a corpse and continued, as if he had said nothing, to call him by his first name, Victor.
While he remembered these things the wind that came in from off the water picked up, and the two cousins sat silent for awhile, listening to the sound of the breeze against their ears and the raucous cries of the seagulls and the crash of the waves and the squeals and shouts of the children running to and fro on the sand and splashing about on the water. The sense Victor had when they arrived, that the beach was as much of a participant in itself as the birds and the people inhabiting it returned to him with renewed strength. He had a sudden urge to walk out into the water, and he was about to stand when Shelby spoke again. “So, if your Mom is Italian, are you Catholic?”
Victor had a sudden image in his mind’s eye of the tiny gold crucifix his mother habitually wore around her fat white neck. “I’m not anything,” he said.
Shelby knocked him lightly on the shoulder with the back of her hand. It was the first time she touched him. “You know what I mean,” she said. “If you were some kind of religion, that’s what you would be, right? You get your religion from your mother. So, would you be Catholic?”
“I guess,” said Victor. Though he could not specifically remember ever having been inside of a Church, he knew, in some vague way, that he had been, and that the Churches he had been inside were Catholic churches. He knew that his mother, for all that she had not attended a church service since long before her divorce, still considered herself a Catholic, and received newsletters and other mailings from at least three of the Roman Catholic Churches in the city. He also knew that he was baptized in a Catholic Church in New York, and that before they moved to North Carolina he was in classes being prepared for his first communion. He had, then, a very vague memory of those preparations, of being herded every week or so with other children into a brightly painted classroom, then herded back out again to present some piece of artwork to the adults congregated in a dark and fragrant sanctuary. All of this ended with his families move South, this and other, more meaningful but sketchy scenes of being one among a dozen or so children at large gatherings of what might have been his mother’s extended family, of sleeping in the backseat of
