“You can go,” Biddy told the deliveryman. “We’re all paid up, aren’t we?”
“Just hang on one minute,” Winn said. “Let me finish here.” Biddy gave up replacing lobsters, and she and the deliveryman watched in silence until Winn pulled out the last one and waved it at them. “Now,” he said, “aren’t we glad I checked? This one’s dead.” The lobster’s claws drooped limply, swinging from side to side like a pair of oversized boxing gloves. Setting it on the ground among its living brethren, Winn straightened up and put his hands on his hips, victorious. They all looked down at the lobster.
“That’s so weird,” the deliveryman said. “I’ve never heard of someone getting a dead one. These things could live on the moon.”
“He just moved,” Biddy said. “He moved his antennae.”
“No, he didn’t,” said Winn.
But Biddy was sure. The lobster had swept his antennae to the side. As they watched, the long, whisker-like appendages flicked again. “See?” she said.
Winn nudged the lobster with his toe. It didn’t move. “It’s sick in any case,” he said. “We don’t want to eat a sick lobster.” He picked up the lobster and held it out to the deliveryman. “How about running back and getting us a replacement?”
“Well,” the guy said, “that might take a while. I have a few other deliveries to make first.”
“Not necessary,” Biddy said, reaching out and seizing the invalid from Winn. “We have more than enough. Winn, Dicky doesn’t even eat lobster.”
“But we paid for twenty,” Winn said.
“I can write you a credit,” the deliveryman said, eying the lobsters, which were slowly migrating off the path and into the grass.
“Fine,” Biddy said. “That will be fine.”
“I don’t know,” said Winn.
“It’s fine,” Biddy assured the deliveryman.
Agatha and Piper emerged from the side door, Piper catching it before it slammed. Both were in their bathing suits, and the men were, for a moment, too startled to remember to hide their interest in the girls’ breasts and legs.
“We heard the lobsters were here,” Agatha said. “Can we help?”
“Good girls,” Winn said. “You can catch the runaways.”
“You don’t have to,” Biddy said.
“No,” said Agatha, “we’ll do it.”
Winn touched Agatha’s elbow. “Sorry about earlier,” he said quietly.
“What happened earlier?” Biddy asked.
Winn and Agatha looked at each other. Agatha laughed.
“I’m afraid I barged in on poor Agatha in the bathroom,” said Winn.
“Oh, Winn,” Biddy said, “you know the lock’s broken. You have to knock.”
“It was my fault,” Agatha offered. “I should have—”
“No,” Winn interrupted, “no, I was careless. I accept full responsibility. Absolutely my fault. I’m not used to so many people being around, that’s all. Won’t happen again.”
“All right,” Biddy said. “That’s enough, Winn.”
“No big deal,” said Agatha with an ingratiating wink at Biddy. She bent to catch a lobster, her bikini nestled fetchingly in her butt crack.
As the deliveryman wrote up a receipt for the price of one lobster, Biddy held the dead or dying crustacean in one hand and, slipping the other into her pocket, found the bobby pin there. She rolled it between her fingertips as the laughing young women collected the other lobsters, scooping them up and daring each other to kiss the rust-colored noses while the creatures flipped their petaled tails.
THIS IDEA of her father’s to cook a lobster dinner for seventeen struck Livia as ill conceived but also immutable. She accepted, too, that he would want her to be his sous-chef and that she would not be able to get out of it. He received the shucked corn without thanks and sent her around to the outdoor shower with a salad spinner, four heads of lettuce to wash and tear up, and an empty laundry basket in lieu of a colander. Agatha and Piper had been in the kitchen in their bathing suits for some reason, padding around like nudists, and Daphne and Dominique came in from outside as Livia was heading out. Daphne had a red sarong tied below her belly. “Daphne,” Livia said, hefting the basket of lettuce, “you must be really stressed out, what with the wedding being so close and all. So much to do.”
“Leave me alone, I’m pregnant,” Daphne said sweetly, reaching to accept a glass of iced tea from Piper.
The shower, a stall of cedar planks around a showerhead that stuck out from the side of the house, was near the back door. Livia turned on the water and picked up a head of lettuce, holding it under the spray while she tore apart the leaves and dropped them in the spinner. She felt the way she always did after she talked about her pregnancy: a little embarrassed and slightly unclean, like she had told a crude joke at a party. The sight of Agatha in her bikini had done nothing for her mood. She found herself imagining Agatha and Teddy together, and, arbitrary though the pairing was, the thought sickened her. She had heard about two or three girls he had been with since the breakup, and she thought of those girls with Teddy, too, fragments and pieces of bodies, the whole too gruesome to contemplate. Teddy was still the lone notch on her pathetic bedpost. She dug her fingers into the lettuce, making ragged rips she knew her father would not like, and then she clapped the lid on the spinner and pulled its cord, yanking as though starting an outboard motor.
“Teddy got me pregnant”—that was what she said even though the bulk of the blame was hers. Pills either nauseated her or caused insupportable mood swings; diaphragms caused constant infections; she was afraid to get an IUD; the shot had made her roommate gain fifteen pounds. That left condoms. She fell into a habit of chancing a few days around her period when they could skip the part where Teddy picked at the foil wrapper with his thumbnail, tore it open, held the small jellyfish close to his face to see which way it unrolled, and finally applied it, like some ludicrous hazmat suit, to his penis, which all the condom-related exertions of his brain had robbed of some tumescence. Her gamble succeeded for eight months or so and, with discipline, might have lasted longer if she and Teddy had not hit a rough patch, caused, like all of their rough patches, by his attention to another girl. In the relief of their reconciliation, Livia allowed herself to imagine that they were in the green-lit pastures of the safe zone.
A week after the breakup, she had decided one night to get roaringly drunk alone in her room and dress up in pearls and a party dress. Snow was predicted, but she chose a summer dress patterned with large, old-fashioned roses. From her roommate’s closet she fished out high, spindly heels that would have frightened her had she been sober, especially given the iciness of the brick sidewalks. She could not get the zipper in back all the way up, and, for one moment, as she stretched and strained with one elbow poking toward the ceiling and the other bent behind her, she was overtaken by wretchedness and sat down on the futon to shed a few tears. Then the gin kicked back in, and she was out the door without a coat, teetering around patches of snow toward the Ophidian, a few inches of her spine framed by the V
