Beach Town

Beach Town

By Jane Tolman

         Liz kicked up a cloud of dust with old Toyota as she skidded into the dirt parking space in front of the old general store. She got out and walked across the creaky boards of the front porch, in through the cliché swinging doors of the old place. The light that streamed in over her shoulders lit up all the dust she had set flying, which was just now settling back down.

         “Hi Hank,” she said to the leather-skinned guy behind the register. “Looks like another hot, dry day in Great Falls, eh?”

         “Is there any other kind? Christ, it’s Montana!”

         She smiled. He was right.

         “I just need some eggs, and some soda, today. And oh yeah, do you still have any of that cheese?”

         “Yeah, it’s in the back of the fridge, but don’t get used to it. You’re the only one who buys it, so I’m not getting’ no more.”

         Liz left the store and sat on the bench outside to drink one of the sodas she’d bought when she heard a song in the distance. As the tune came closer she recognized it as a Jimmy Buffett song.

         “Who the hell is listening to Jimmy Buffett way out here?” she said aloud.

         “We are!” yelled some suntanned 20-something yahoo, wearing a tropic weight shirt with only one button buttoned so it billowed like a sail. He hung off the side of a bright yellow Jeep Wrangler with a beer in his hand. His girlfriend and another couple were in the Jeep.

         “We’re spending a few days at Camp Wanachawbe at the old Indian reservation down the road and they sent us this way to get some provisions.”

         “Well turn off that music. It’s asinine!”

         “Hey, girlie. We’re just having some fun. What’s wrong with Jimmy Buffett? He’s not outlawed in Montana, is he?”

         “No, but he should be. I came here to get away from everything like him! And it’s been working. Until now that is, thanks a lot.”

         By now they’d turned off the music, but it was too late. Without explanation, Liz gathered her groceries, threw them in the back seat of her car and wheeled out of what was as close to a center of a town as she wanted. She fish-tailed off down a one-lane dirt road into the hills toward her cabin.

         When she got home, she’d calmed down, but her thoughts had been set in motion by that song. She grabbed another soda, pulled her dirty blond hair back into a pony tail and settled in sideways across her comfy, oversized chair. She stared blankly out into the distance, remembering the guilty details of how she’d ended up in Montana in the first place.

* * * * *

         “Let’s live at the beach.” That was the name of the tape her then-boyfriend had made for her birthday oh-so-long-ago. And then, there they were. Married and living in a beach town. Liz let the sandy thoughts of those days sift to the surface of her mind as she sipped her soda. She wondered where that tape was now.

         Liz and John had a small house in Hampton Bays, NY. Hampton Bays is a working man’s town. It’s smack in the center of the illustrious Hamptons on the East End of Long Island, where New York’s City’s richest and most-celebrated people spend their summers trying to have the most talked-about party of the season. Hampton Bays is where the help lives - those who clean the houses, cook the food and tend the yards of the very rich. They do their jobs and then disappear so that everything looks perfect and effortless in East Hampton, Westhampton and almost everywhere in between.          Despite its reputation, Liz and John liked Hampton Bays. It was equidistant from Westhampton and East Hampton and minutes from more than one spectacular ocean beach. There were bays everywhere and people often went crabbing and fishing and clamming and scalloping and boating and water-skiing and everything else one can do in a bay. Hampton Bays had a nightlife and plenty of restaurants. It had a pulse.

         What was most important about Hampton Bays was that because both Liz and John had high profile jobs in the area - he was a town councilman and she was the managing editor of the local paper - they needed to be where the locals could see they weren’t just fly by night representatives of the area, living in the happenin’ part of the Hamptons, just using its reputation as a stepping stone to greater things. The people in Hampton Bays wanted their time and effort year-round and they were the ones made sure John and Liz got their winter paychecks signed as well as the summer ones.

* * * * *

         Before they settled down in Hampton Bays, John and Liz were themselves the summer weekend beach house renters. Or more likely, they would use their vacation days from work and spend whole weeks at island resorts. Liz would buy a new ankle bracelet with dolphins or palm trees on it, and John would buy a new silver hoop and re-pierce his ear. They would go swimming in water that was the perfect temperature, the perfect color, and then lie on the beach drinking frozen drinks while men and ladies in sarongs walked around cooling their skin with spritzes of ice water from spray bottles. When the sun and the drinks had combined to turn each them into one big cocktail each, they would laugh their way to their room. Invariably they would end up either tangled in the sheets in some very funny, very delicate sex as they discovered some newly sunburned areas, or cozied up together in the cool sheets of their air-conditioned room for a quick rejuvenating nap.

         Then it was out for a night on the town. Transformed from their afternoon beach bum personas, Liz would usually wear a cute little short skirt and tank top or a flowery sundress, and John would be in some madras shorts and a polo shirt - they usually looked like they’d just stepped off the pages of a Lands’ End catalog.

         Each night seemed to end as great as the day had begun, each vacation as great as the last, or at least that’s how the memories stacked up. Eventually they were all condensed into one hopeful cassette tape that evolved into Liz living a pretty nice life in the Hamptons, just steps from the Atlantic Ocean.

         One great bonus that came with her job at the paper was that the publisher gave everyone Wednesday afternoons off, since many of them often had to work holidays and weekends. Since the Town Council met on Fridays, John could arrange his schedule so he could take his Wednesday afternoons to go to the beach with Liz. It was perfect because most of the locals were still at work and the weekend vacationers hadn’t arrived yet. They could have much of the beach to themselves to go swimming or walking or just sit in the sun, digging their toes through the hot sand. Every once in a while, she’d dig an ankle bracelet out of a drawer or unearth an old earring for John to wear and bring a spray bottle to the beach with them, re-enacting the not-so-old days.

         Then it happened. A red algae hit the bays, wiping out the entire ecosystem that depended on its waters for survival. With that went the livelihood of all the bay fishermen in the area, easily a third of the total economy of the East End. The town council was swamped with requests for relief, both economic and ecological. No one knew what was causing the red algae, so it couldn’t be stemmed. People were going broke and looking to the town for answers. Forget lazy Wednesday afternoons. Now Liz was lucky if she was still awake when John came home at night.

         Liz became resentful at their disrupted Wednesday afternoons, especially since she was working double-time at the paper covering the red tide and managing all the extra stories that had bloomed from it. She needed a break, so she decided to start going to the beach again, even if she had to walk it alone, or sit in the sand by herself, staring at the horizon, lost in a dream.

         A few weeks after she began her solitary trips to the beach, Liz was walking along the water’s edge one Wednesday, past the same row of beach houses she always passed, when she noticed a man watching her from a floor-to-ceiling window in one of the them, just beyond a weather-beaten, second-floor deck. She waved, he waved back, and she kept walking. When she walked back past the house the window was empty.

         She noticed the man in the house once or twice more over the next few weeks, but didn’t think much of it. She thought he was probably some rich summer renter who had one of the expensive beach houses for the whole summer, not just the weekends. One Wednesday, she found out exactly who he was.

         As Liz strode along the water’s edge, staring deeply into the sand where the water began its retreat, she noticed a shadow in her path. When she looked up, she recognized the man from the beach house window.

         “I figured it was time for a proper introduction,” the man said, extending a large, tan hand. “I’m Evan.”

         Evan wore white linen pants that billowed on the windy beach and a close-fitting, almost tailored, gray t-shirt. His curly brown hair swirled appropriately in the wind. He shook Liz’s hand.

         “I’m Liz,” she said cautiously, feeling for the keys in her pocket. She’d learned from a friend that if you put a key between each finger and make a fist you can surprise an attacker with a nasty blow. She fumbled with them in her blue jeans pocket, trying to hide what she was doing under her oversized pink t-shirt with the words “Southampton Press” on the back, from the newspaper’s softball team.

         “I don’t mean to scare you, but I just for the life of me couldn’t figure out where someone would be walking to along a beach every Wednesday afternoon. I had to ask.”

         “Why is it your business?”

         “It’s not. And you don’t have to tell me. But since you had waved to me, you seemed approachable enough to at least come down and ask.”

         “Nowhere.”

         “What?”

         “I’m going nowhere. I just come to the beach on Wednesdays and walk along the water and back to get my head on straight. Something about the water…”

         “I know what you mean. Why do you think I have a place on the beach?”

         “What do you do that lets you stay in a beach house all summer long, if I can ask you a question?”

         “Fair enough. My family was very wealthy. You’ve heard of U.S. Steel? My father founded it. Well anyway, I still have a hand in the family business, but to tell you the truth, I inherited most of my wealth. I own this house actually. It’s quite wonderful to come out for a weekend in the winter every once in a while, too, and watch the waves crashing so violently.”

         “Well, I should get on my way, Evan. It was really nice to meet you. I’m glad you weren’t and axe murderer or anything.”

         He laughed. “No, not an axe murderer. Just someone looking for an acquaintance now and then. Maybe some time, if you’re comfortable with it, I can show you the house. He shook her hand again and headed off.

         Well that was innocuous enough. Liz looked at her hand and realized that she’d actually taken her hand out of her pocket, forgetting about the keys, while they spoke. Some about him was very un-threatening.

         For the next several weeks, she continued her Wednesday walks, always checking the beach house window. Sometimes Evan was there, sometimes not, sometimes he was down on the beach waiting for her, where they talked about the beautiful day, the sun on the water, how it was that her job gave her Wednesdays off. Eventually, Evan began going on walks up and down the beach with Liz. On their very first walk together, she stopped and looked at him.

         “I need to be honest with you, Evan. I’m married.”

         “Yes, I saw your wedding ring the first day we met. I’m comfortable with having a casual friendship if you are.”

         “I…I suppose I am. I mean, I suppose I have been or I wouldn’t have let it get this far along. And I suppose you would have made a move by now, so to speak, if you were going to. So I guess it’s okay.”

         But she knew it wasn’t. She knew she had deliberately never been missing a Wednesday afternoon at the beach, always going at the same time, pretending to herself it wasn’t because she hoped he might be there.

         Eventually, fate intervened.

         One day, on one of their traditional beach walks, Liz and Evan arrived back in front of his house. He turned to face her.

         “You know I’m being very unfair to you, Liz.”

         “Why.”

         “To be honest, I think, I’m falling…well, no…I’ve fallen for you.”

         Silence.

         Liz stared hard at the ground. The sun scorched her neck, beaming down from a cloudless sky.

         More silence.

         “Well?”

         “I was so hoping it wouldn’t go this way, but I’ve been falling for you for a while now, too. I kept thinking it was a schoolgirl crush, that I was just liking the attention I’ve been missing from my husband, with his being at work so much these days, but…”

         “But what?”

         “It’s more than that. I guess I’ve known that for a while, and it just took you saying something to give me the courage to say it out loud.”

         “Well, what do we do now?”

         She couldn’t play the casual friendship game anymore. A coy look overcame her.

         “How about you finally show me your house?”

         Evan’s eyebrows sprung up. He grabbed her hand and together they ran up the beach to his house.

         Once inside, Evan didn’t bother with much of a tour past the living room, where he pointed out the infamous glass door from where he first saw her. She looked around at the spotless white furniture with the palm frond ceiling fans turning slowly overhead. Soon she would take note of the strong beams above her as she and Evan fell to the floor, her bikini top and short shorts falling off almost effortlessly. Not much later she would notice the bleached-blond wood floors, as they continued. She couldn’t believe she was doing this, but it just seemed…well, right. But she knew it wasn’t.

         She had pulled off his clothes almost as effortlessly as he had hers, and in short order they frantically made up for days and days of time spent walking up and down the beach, being “friends.”

         She woke up on the couch. Evan was out on the deck in a pair of shorts. She wasn’t wearing a stitch.

         Ugh. I smell like sex. Then, Omigod, did I just have animal sex with a stranger on his living room floor? What have I done? Then, Omigod, what time is it?

         Liz dressed quickly and went out to meet Evan on the deck.

         “What time is it?” she said, sliding her arms around his waist from behind.

         “I’d say about 5-ish. There’s a clock in the kitchen.”

         “We never got to the kitchen.”

         “Oh yeah.” He smiled.

         “I have to go. I’m meeting my girlfriend for dinner at six.” Then she turned him around.

         “You know, I’ve never done anything like this before.”

         “Well I sure hope you consider doing it again.”

         “I’ll really, really, have to think about that one.”

         Had she just begun an affair? Or had a fling? Or ruined her marriage? She had to go.

         “When will I see you again, Liz?”

         “Some Wednesday on the beach, I guess…”

         Her voice trailed off as she headed out of the house, jogging along the beach to her car. She got home just in time to shower and change by the time Kim showed up, and she had thrown all the “evidence” in the washing machine. This was going to be her secret alone. It was too touchy to trust with even the closest of friends.

* * * * *

         “Get dressed. In a dressy dress,” John said over the phone. “We’re going out to dinner!”

         “Fantastic! What’s the occasion?”

         “You should know. That friggen’ red algae is receding and I’m getting my first night off without half the East End on my ass in ages. Let’s go to The Dock House for fish. Shellfish. Just to prove to these people I’m not afraid to eat it. Then after, who knows.”

         Who knows? She couldn’t remember the last time she and John had had sex. Now, she started to wonder how she would react if they did.

         Liz hadn’t seen Evan since their encounter. It had only been a few weeks, but he hadn’t been at his house any time she’d walked the beach. She figured it was probably for the best anyway. For now.

         At The Dock House, Liz and John both ran into their share of acquaintances and exchanged niceties with friends as they sidled through the crowd to a nice table on the deck. The Dock House was one of the nicer restaurants in town, but no so pricey that it kept the locals away.

         Liz had the local blue crabs, John had the scallops, probably caught by someone he knew. They were halfway through dessert when Liz saw Evan across the deck. He wasn’t alone. A woman was feeding him mussels with one of those tiny seafood forks. Liz’s eyes widened.

         “What’s wrong, Liz? Did you get a bad crab? Oh no. That damn red algae.”

         “No, no, I’m fine. Something just went down the wrong way.”

         “Oh, okay. Well, let me know if you start to feel funny. You still don’t look right.”

         Liz wasn’t listening anymore. She was watching Evan’s fingers stroke this “other” woman’s arm while he let her feed him promiscuously. The two smiled at each other, not seeming to notice anyone else was even around them. Liz began fuming. How dare he wine and dine this bitch around town after he had secretly whored Liz around his private beach house, leaving her naked in his living room when he was “done” with her. Oh, how things could turn on a dime.

         “You know honey, I don’t think I do feel right. Do you mind taking care of the check while I go straight to the car and wait for you there?

         “Of course not, Liz. Oh I hope I didn’t jump the gun with this shellfish thing.”

         Liz got up and wove her way out of the restaurant, making sure she passed by Evan’s table on her way out. As she went by, Liz “slipped” and steadied herself by grabbing the arm of the “other” woman. The woman’s hand still held the seafood fork and Liz “accidentally” rammed it forward, stabbing Evan in the upper lip, drawing blood.

         “Oh I’m so sorry!” Liz cried out, almost smiling. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

         When Evan saw that it was Liz, he immediately covered the wound, and his eyes, with a cloth napkin and waved her away, almost pushing her. A crowd surrounded him and a waiter saw her out. When she was out of the restaurant, she stormed to the car, opened the passenger door and dropped down hard into the seat. Liz was furious. Then, for the first time, she began to think about John, about how he had done nothing and was probably inside right now trying to pay for her lover’s bill. He was the one who really got screwed. She had to tell him. But not tonight.

* * * * *

         The following Wednesday was the first in ages that John didn’t have a special council meeting scheduled. It had been nearly a week since the restaurant scene.

         “Let’s go to the beach! It’s been ages since we’ve had our special Wednesdays together. We can sneak some champagne down with us and toast to getting our old life back!”

         “Uh, okay. Let’s go.” Liz’s heart began to race as she put on her bikini with shorts and a shirt, oh, no, not the “Southampton Press” one. She threw it aside and grabbed one of John’s t-shirts.

         This is it. I have to tell him. I’ve already ruined our Wednesdays together, and time at the beach will never be the same with him. Why not tell him on a Wednesday at the beach and not ruin anything else? Maybe then, we can carve out a new, different life together.

         Twenty minutes later they were at the beach as if it were old times.

         “Come on babe, let’s walk,” said John, standing facing the water with his arm around Liz’s neck, obfuscating the small, half-bottle of champagne from view.

         “Let’s go the other way for a change.”

         “But we always go that way, so we don’t have to walk back with the sun in our eyes.”

         “Listen John, there’s something I have to tell you, and all I can say is it would be a lot better if I told you while we were walking that way.”

         So they headed down the beach the opposite way from Evan’s beach house. Liz took a big swallow of champagne and started to talk.

         “You what?!!! Where?!!”

         John glared at her, then immediately started scanning the beach, looking at the rows of houses. He’d never know which one it was. She’d never tell him. He’d burn the house down. His entire face was strained and red. He looked at her again. He threw the bottle of champagne as far as he could into the ocean and then ran as fast as he could down the beach, eventually falling to his knees crying. Liz could only watch.

         They drove home in silence. It was the longest ten minutes of her life.

         “I want you out.”

         “But John…”

         “No. No but John, no cooling off, no second chances. Just leave. We’ll pretend everything is normal until you can get yourself packed up and find a place to live, far away, then you can just go. Until then, I think you know the couch folds out.”

         Liz was silent. There was nothing she could do. John had made his decision. He never changed his mind.

         Wednesday afternoons were different now. John found things to do at the office while Liz spent time at home, hurrying to pack her things into a corner for the time when the moving truck came.

         She put a map of the United States on the wall and drew a circle around the approximate area of states where she could live and not possibly stumble upon the ocean. Liz no longer wanted to live at the beach and was now glad that that tape of beach music was long gone. She closed her eyes and threw darts at the map. After three or four tries, she hit the map, then hit one of the states inside the circle - Montana. After a few calls to a few newspapers, she found herself a temporary job and was about to make a new home in Great Falls, Montana.          

         Her departure was quick and unexplained. She told her boss and her best friend, Kim, only that something had changed suddenly in her family and she had to leave immediately. She was gone the same day. She left John a forwarding address, but she never heard from him again. The day she left he stayed at the office.

* * * * *

         Liz shook herself to her senses and sat up straight. Her neck hurt from laying sideways in that chair for so long. And her soda, mostly full, had grown too warm to drink.

         She got up to get another soda and brush the pony tail dent out of her hair. Even though it was Saturday, she had some editing to do over at the newspaper. Since she lived on the fringes of Great Falls - her hamlet actually was named Fringes - it took more than a minute to get there, so she figured she might better get going if she was going to get it out of the way today. Anyway, she had to get those old cobwebs out of her head somehow.

         As she drove down that dusty, rocky lane of a road, she wondered what had changed in that town since she left six years ago. Did John still live there? Did he still live at the beach anywhere?

         Her beach days were over. She could never go back. She had done him so wrong, she deserved it. She just hoped John had a place by the water somewhere. He never deserved to lose his beach town.          



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