Three Women at the Water's Edge Read online

  His body was beautifully proportioned. He looked solid and lean and strong and powerful; he had to be some kind of athlete. His hair was dark brown, and slightly wavy; she could not tell what color his eyes were. But his eyebrows were exquisitely arched, and his cheekbones high. His movements were those of a man of greatly controlled energy.

  “Listen, did you get into my Preludin?” Carol asked. Carol was two years older than Dale. They had met at Williams when Dale was a freshman and Carol a junior, and had become close friends. It was Carol who had encouraged Dale to come back from Europe, to settle down to “real life,” to take the teaching position in Rocheport. She had even arranged for Dale to move into her apartment for the first year, until she got used to the long winters and the quietness of the small town. Carol was a good, smart, efficient woman who managed both to withstand all foolishness and to be generous and warm. She had short brown hair, rimless glasses, spreading hips. She was teaching history at the high school, but it was obvious that her talents were administrative, and because she was from the region and was so tactful yet so sharp, people were already saying that she would be the next principal of the high school when Loren Hansen, who was in his late fifties, retired.

  Dale did not know that Carol had any Preludin; she couldn’t imagine why Carol would ever need them. But the question caught her attention. She forced herself to take her eyes off the man across the room, to bring them to Carol’s face. “No,” she said, “of course I didn’t. To be honest with you, I’m just—well, that man over there. He’s really so—Who is he? Do you know him?” She had to look back at him, to be sure he was real, that he hadn’t vanished. “Is he a teacher? Where does he teach? Is he married?”

  Carol looked over at the man, who by now had sat down at the table with some other teachers. He was talking and smiling, totally at ease. He rubbed his ear.

  “That’s Hank Kennedy,” Carol said. “He teaches up at Shelton Academy for Boys in Portland. I think he comes down to our school to teach a course in history on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Is it history? I can’t remember. He isn’t from this area originally, I think he was always a summer resident, came up from Boston or somewhere with his family. Then he took a job up here and he bought himself a little farm. I don’t think he’s married, but I really don’t know that much about him. Would you like me to introduce you to him later?”

  “Oh, God, no,” Dale said, horrified. “I just wondered who he was, that’s all. There aren’t that many attractive men wandering around here this time of year, as you know.”

  “I know,” Carol said. “Believe me, I know.” But her voice did not carry any emotional weight; she was firmly engaged to her childhood boyfriend, who was in Massachusetts finishing up his D.V.M. He was smart and capable and calm like Carol, and no one doubted that eventually they would marry and be pillars of the community.

  The meeting had started and carried forth into the September night—it was raining, and everyone was eager to accomplish as much as possible on this damp evening so that other, crisper fall evenings could be free. People talked, put forth proposals, made suggestions, made objections. Even Dale talked, discussing the idea for a film series, reading figures she had found, answering questions. She was pleased that so many people thought her idea a good one, and they voted unanimously that she should work up a definite schedule with realistic cost figures, and they asked her if she wouldn’t be the chairman of the committee, since it was her idea. Several people volunteered to be on her committee, to assist her, but Hank Kennedy was not one of them. Throughout the evening, Dale was very aware of herself, especially when she was standing up in front of the group, talking. She could not keep herself from doing sexually suggestive things: tilting her head to one side as she spoke, so that her long light-brown hair fell silkily about her shoulder, like a light cloak; slowly licking her lips (she hoped people would think she was nervous); leaning forward, hands on the table—as he had been doing when she first saw him—so that her high large breasts were emphasized against her sweater. She was dismayed at herself, but could not control her body; she might as well have been a peafowl in heat. But because of her excitement she did speak eloquently for the film series, and so she refused to feel guilty about what she felt was her almost wanton display.

  So she was devastated when at eleven-thirty the meeting ended, and Hank Kennedy went out the door without a backward glance at her. The room closed in, was suddenly a bleak gray cafeteria with stale cigarette smoke circling up toward the fluorescent lights and all the metal and plastic chairs in disarray. Carol was busy gathering up her papers and folders, and was so thoroughly involved with the meeting that she had completely forgotten Dale’s interest in the man.

  “Come on,” she said. “We’ve got to teach tomorrow. Let’s go home and get some sleep. God, these meetings. They should pay us extra for them.”

  “Umm,” Dale said, and followed Carol out the door.

  Somehow she had gotten through that night, and then through several long weeks with no sign of Hank Kennedy. She was too cautious to ask Carol about him again; she knew Carol, knew what Carol would do—she would insist that she introduce Dale to Hank, or she would carelessly mention to another teacher, “If you ever run into Hank Kennedy, tell him Dale Wallace would like to get to know him.” Dale decided there was nothing she could do about it but to forget him, and after three weeks, it seemed that forgetting him would be easy. She had seen him only for a few hours across a large cafeteria, after all; she was beginning to lose the outlines of his body in her mind’s eye. Still the feeling, the glorious rush of thudding joy, remained. She could remember it easily; it was the first thing she thought of when she awoke in the morning. And she dreamed about Hank almost every night. He was always approaching her in her dreams, always coming toward her, looking right at her, smiling, and she would moan and sigh with excited anticipation. But that was all that happened in her dreams; he never managed to get close to her; he never touched her.

  And then today, when she had been walking down the hall to the principal’s office with her attendance sheets, not even thinking of him, not really thinking of anything except that she was tired and ought to go to the laundromat that evening, just then as she was about to go into the principal’s office, the door opened, and Hank Kennedy walked out. In fact he almost walked into her. He was busy talking to another teacher, had pushed the door open with one hand, but was looking back over his shoulder, saying something that was making the secretaries laugh, and he nearly walked right into Dale, who was just moving to open the door to walk in.

  “Oh, excuse me,” Hank said, and stopped so suddenly that the man behind him smashed into his back. He looked at Dale, who had gone into a state of semi-shock at having him materialize so suddenly before her. “Hi,” he said, almost as an afterthought.

  “I—I was just going in,” Dale said weakly, almost inaudibly.

  “Well, I was just going out.” Hank smiled, and stepped back to hold the door for her.

  For a moment Dale could not move; she was frozen with delight—there he really was! Hank Kennedy: lean, powerful, dark, fine. He was wearing jeans, Frye boots, a plaid button-down shirt, a pullover sweater. His dark-brown hair was parted on the left side, and some of it fell over his forehead. His mouth was finely chiseled and long and exquisite. His eyes were green and long-lashed, thick-lashed; Dale’s heart leaped and spun.

  “Thank you,” she said at last, and walked into the office, and Hank and the other man walked out. Dale could not bring herself to close the office door; she stood there dumbly staring, holding the door open, watching as the two men walked down the hall. She could not force herself to stop staring at him; she was too hungry for the sight of him. And she liked so well the sensation of desire which ran through her body so fiercely it bordered on alarm; she felt totally focused on the moment, on the reality of his presence. She did not want the moment to end.

  Hank continued to walk down the hall, and then, casually, he stopped talking to the
other man, and looked over his shoulder, and looked right at Dale. Their eyes met. For a moment Dale thought he would surely leave the man and come back down the hall to her—she wanted that so much. But he only looked at her, and then the other man said something to him, and Hank smiled and turned away and went around the corner, out of sight.

  There was nothing more she could do. She handed in her attendance sheets and chatted with the secretaries automatically, then returned to her classroom to do the necessary things that the end of the day required. Finally she was through, she was free. She walked with great control to her Beetle convertible, and drove immediately to the ocean, and tore off her shoes and socks, and ran. She ran and ran. She ran for joy, she ran for love. She ran wildly at the edge of the surf because Hank Kennedy’s eyes were green.

  She ran, thinking how drab the rest of her life seemed in comparison to this moment, how the rest of her life had not prepared her for this. She was full of such joy, such energy, such elation, simply because one man lived on this earth and had stopped for a few moments to meet her stare. And he would call her now, she was sure of it. If she had learned nothing else during her two years in Europe, she had learned how to say, merely by the way she held her body and her mouth, by the way she held her eyes: I am interested in you, or leave me alone. Of course in the high school office, her brain had short-circuited, and she had done nothing intentionally, but everything in her body had been tingling, moving outward toward him, and surely, oh, surely he could read those signs. And she was not unattractive, she had learned that, too. She had grown up thinking that her older sister Daisy was the beauty of the family and that she, Dale, was the brain, mainly because Daisy had blond hair and blue eyes, while Dale had light-brown hair and hazel eyes. But in college, and in Europe, she had discovered first to her delight and later to her disdain that she had something that attracted many men: large breasts. During her last six months in Europe she had gotten so tired of it all, of the fuss men made over her breasts, that she had gone to a surgeon in Paris to see about having her breasts reduced. But the cost was prohibitive, and the surgeon, a woman, had warned her against it. “You wait,” she had said, “you’re young, you’re not married. You wait.” Dale had bought looser and looser sweaters and shirts, and that had become a sort of style for her: jeans, high boots, loose sweaters or shirts, loose dresses. Her one vanity now was her hair, which was a rich, soft brown with auburn lights, and which she had let grow during the past two years so that it now reached below her waist. She could not quite sit on it, but in another six months she would be able to. Her hair was beautiful, and she liked the feeling of it sweeping protectively across her back like a cloak, or pulled straight back and tied with a striped ribbon into a single luxurious fall. So she had that, her hair, and she had her large breasts, and the bones of her face were good—no, she was not unattractive. She was attractive. Attractive. Would she attract him, would Hank Kennedy have been attracted to her by those few minutes in the high school office? She thought so, she hoped so, she hoped so desperately. Because underneath the free flow of joy which now surged about inside her, a thin line of tension was running, the tension of desire.

  The sun went down finally, and as it did the luminescence went out of things. The sky, the water, the sand, went from silver to gray. It was really quite cold on the beach. Dale’s feet and ankles had gone numb. Still she kept moving along the line of the water, not running now, but walking, hugging herself for warmth. The tide was beginning to come in, and it gradually pushed her closer and closer into the shore, up toward the solid world where there were houses and cars and people and telephones. Dale did not want to leave the edge of the ocean, she did not want to leave her pure wild sense of ecstasy—she did not want to face the rest of her life wondering if she would ever see the man again, wondering if he would ever call. He had to call. She willed it. If he did not call, if she did not see him again, her life would seem as bleak and cold and gray as the world did right now, and she could not bear that. Better to walk and walk, savoring the last shivers of joy and desire; while she walked on the beach she still had it all, there was still hope.

  But when her teeth began to chatter, she knew she had to go home. As she sat down inside her car, she realized how weak she was, how tired. She could not stop shaking, she was so cold. She managed to pull her socks on, but her wooden clogs felt too heavy to pick up, to attach to her feet. She drove home with the car heater on full blast, her sock-covered foot occasionally slipping off the gas pedal. It was quite dark by the time she arrived at the colonial house where she and Carol shared the large second-floor apartment. Carol was home, and had all the lights on, and apparently had fixed dinner, even though it was Dale’s night to do it. The apartment smelled of the good thick beef stew that Carol loved to make. Dale yearned for its warmth and substance.

  “My God, where have you been?” Carol said, springing up out of a chair when she saw Dale walk in. “You look like a drowned cat.”

  “I’ve been walking by the beach,” Dale said. “It was so beautiful, so fantastic, I can’t describe it. But I’ve gotten so cold. I can’t stop shivering.”

  “Get in the bathtub right away, get in the hottest water you can stand. Hurry up, take those clothes off, they’re soaked. Walking on the beach at this time of year? You’re crazy. What’s gotten into you? Look at your hair, it’s marvelous the way it goes all curly and fuzzy when it’s damp. Go on, get in the tub, I’ll bring you—what? What should I bring you, what would be good for you? What do we have in the way of liquor? Here. How about a nice stiff scotch? That’s as close to brandy as we can get. What in the world were you doing out there on the beach anyway?”

  Dale went into the bathroom and started the water into the tub. She poured in a great dollop of bath oil. She piled her hair on top of her head and held it there with two wooden prongs, then peeled her wet jeans and sweater off her body; the jeans were almost iced. Her skin had gone very white, and she was covered with gooseflesh. The hot water on her cold skin was painful, a sort of shocking burn, but she forced herself into the tub, down into the hot foamy depths, so that only her head was above the water. She could hear Carol going on and on in the other room, and she smiled to herself. Carol was the most perfect person to live with at times like these, because she excelled in taking charge, taking care. Carol would make a fine mother, Dale thought, Carol should have ten children. Carol made taking care of people an art. In fact, Carol reminded Dale of her mother—at least of her mother as she remembered her. Dale hadn’t seen her mother since the divorce, since her mother had undergone her mysterious and unexplainable transformation; she could not believe her mother had changed as much as her father wrote she had. Dale could not imagine her mother being any way other than she had been the twenty-four years Dale had known her: warm, generous, kind, thoughtful, always ready to help.

  “Here,” Carol said, coming into the bathroom. “A nice neat scotch. No ice, no water. Have a sip. You need it.” She handed the glass to Dale and then put the lid of the toilet seat down and sat down on it, crossed her legs, and looked at Dale affectionately. “Feel better? At least your teeth have stopped chattering.”

  “God, Carol, I’m sorry about dinner,” Dale said. “I forgot it was my turn to cook tonight.” She sipped the scotch. It burned. She could feel it burning all the way down through her chest and into her stomach.

  “Oh, heavens, don’t worry about that,” Carol said. “I was in the mood to make a beef stew anyway. Smells good, doesn’t it? I made enough so we won’t have to cook tomorrow night, we can just warm it up. Oh, by the way, Hank Kennedy phoned. He called twice, once when I just got home and then about fifteen minutes ago.”

  “He did?” Dale tried her best to sound casual, and she was astounded that she did not drop the glass of scotch into the tub. “Did he say why he was calling?”

  “No, he just said he wanted to talk to you. I told him you would be home any minute. He said he’d call you back. Hey, the scotch is working. Your c
olor is returning, you’re beginning to look human again. Shall I go put dinner on the table or would you like to soak some more?”

  “Yes, I’d like to soak a few minutes more,” Dale said. “I want to get thoroughly warmed up. Even my bones got cold out there. That beef stew smells better than anything I’ve ever smelled before in my life. I’m so hungry, I can’t tell you how hungry I am.”

  “Well, you should be, after running around on the beach at the end of October,” Carol said sensibly, rose, and left the bathroom. “Call me when you’re getting out, and I’ll dish up the stew.”

  Dale sipped more of the scotch, and reached out to set the glass on the bath mat, her arm dripping water and suds onto the floor. Then she sank back into the heat of the water and pressed both hands against her heart, and thought: she would lie in the tub until she was completely warm, and then she would put on her warmest nightgown and robe and slippers, and then she would eat the beef stew, and drink a glass of red wine, and then she would help Carol with the dishes, and then she would grade papers, and eat a crisp pear and drink coffee. And when would Hank Kennedy call: when she was tying the sash of her robe? Or biting into the sweet white flesh of the pear?

  —

  He called just as Dale had finished grading all the papers, when she had almost given up hope. When the phone rang, she nearly screamed. “I’ll get it,” she said to Carol.

  His voice was very low, very male. “Dale Wallace?” he said. “This is Hank Kennedy. I’m not sure you know who I am—”

  “I know who you are,” Dale said evenly. I know who you are: I’m in love with you.

  “Well, then,” he said, “I was wondering—I’d like to see you sometime.”

  “Yes,” Dale said. “I’d like that, too.” Was she being too obvious, too forward? She didn’t care.

  “When?” he asked. “I mean, when would be good for you?”