The Variety Girl
by Willie Fitzgerald
Somehow Rachel knew it was going to be a busy summer. She had nothing to base this on, just a gut feeling—what her father would have called her shopkeeper’s intuition. She needed someone she could trust. And so in May, when she put out her usual call for summer help, she listed a high school diploma as a requirement, with some college preferred, something she’d never done before.
Rachel’s parents had opened Howard’s Variety in 1951, intending to cater to the ferry-riders bound for the Delaware beaches or Ocean City. Initially they sold toys and magic supplies, but gradually they expanded to include a small pharmacy section behind the register, where they stocked aspirin, Band-Aids, Midol, tampons, condoms—things the harried vacationer might have left behind. Elsewhere in the store you could find kitchenware, cleaning supplies, a small amount of canned goods. In the back of the store, Rachel’s mother had installed a crafts section, where they kept materials for homemade Halloween costumes: bolts of felt, chenille stems in countless colors, sequins, face paint, cotton batting in cloud-like rolls. Toys and magic sets still had pride of place, however, and everywhere you looked, there were plastic army men, rubber balls, white mesh bags of marbles, jacks, model airplanes made from balsa wood, toy dinosaurs with red-painted mouths, cup and ball sets, long strands of multicolored silk ribbons, child-sized top hats with secret compartments, red foam balls that could be compressed and palmed, wands, capes, handshake buzzers. After her father died, Rachel and her mother had a life-size wooden cutout of him made, using a picture that had appeared in the newspaper shortly after he’d opened the store, in a magician’s cape and top hat. One arm pointed to the door, the other clutched a crystal ball caked in silver glitter. Rachel wheeled him out each morning. Julie Plunkett, the college girl she hired, wheeled him in every night.
Most people in Battlement knew Julie as Terry Plunkett’s girl. In Terry’s youth, he had been a bold and indiscriminate fighter. He had fought people outside football games, at parades. Lately he had cleaned up, but history stuck to you in Battlement, and to the people around you. Rachel knew this well.
The locals sauntered in to ask about Julie. They would claim to be looking for Barkeeper’s Friend, kitchen twine, or an Inky-Pinky, then linger by the wire postcard carousel next to the register, glancing at the tall girl sweeping the aisles in her purple apron. The town was named Battlement for a stone parapet above the dock built in anticipation of the War of 1812. The war took place one bay over, in the Chesapeake, but Battlement’s watchfulness remained, as though every resident was huddling beneath a rampart and peeking over, eager to open fire. When Julie drifted to the back of the store, they would turn to Rachel and ask in a whisper how that one was working out.
“She hasn’t given you any trouble, has she?” they asked eagerly.
Rachel always smiled and told them the same thing: “My store’s still here. That’s all I ask.”
This was in May of 1983. The store would not last another year.
“He looks a bit shabby,” Julie said at the end of one shift. She ran her finger along the edge of the cutout, where the wood had turned gray and started to swell. Rachel’s father had been young in the picture the sign-painter had used, and so now he was young every day. Only the weather showed how long it had been. His face was pale, ghostly; his cloak faded from midnight blue to a washy slate.
Julie was twenty and had just finished her second year at the University of Delaware. She was on scholarship, thanks to a stellar academic career at St. Catherine’s School for Girls. She wore a Dorothy Hamill bob that Rachel thought was too dainty for her wide hips and broad shoulders. She was tall and stood with a slight hunch. Large eyes and a small, round nose, a thin set of lips. Curious, even nosy. Rachel had long ago learned not to pay too much attention to anything a person bought, but Julie divined whole lives in every purchase.
“That one earlier this afternoon,” Julie said. “Buying a plastic tea set. He’s got two sons, near my age. Prince and Billy Garland. So who’s he buying a tea set for?”
“I don’t know,” Rachel said, turning off the tape player. Silence, at last, settled over the store. Even thirty years on, Howard’s Variety still trafficked in the decade of its founding. There was a painting of a girl in a pink poodle skirt on the wall above the toy aisle, and all day they listened to the same songs: Bill Haley & His Comets, Ritchie Valens, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis in eternal, relentless rotation. Rachel barely heard it anymore.
Julie stood at the mouth of the cleaning aisle, arranging the cans of Comet so their red logos all faced out. She looked up, as though struck by a revelation. “I bet he’s cheating on his wife.”
“What?”
“He bought gum. The tea set’s a gift for some woman’s kid. Gum to cover up his old man’s breath. It’s not hard, Rachel.”
Often her deductions were sordid, melodramatic. A woman buying several Kotex from behind the counter—what Rachel’s mother had called an item of discretion—was not on her period but had suffered an early miscarriage. A man buying new shoelaces was preparing to interview for a job he would never in a million years secure.
They were fantasies, but Julie defended them as fiercely as observable truth. If Rachel asked her how she could know all that from a little purchase, Julie would look at her pityingly, a look, Rachel thought, they must teach people at college. “It’s certainly possible,” Julie would then say, referring to the slogan Rachel’s father had painted on the store’s front door: In Every Aisle a Possibility.
Despite all this, Rachel liked Julie. Her stories about people gave the days a sense of unsettledness. Plus she was good in the store, fastidious, punctual. She knew where everything was within the first week, something some of the high school girls Rachel had hired in years past had not learned until the middle of summer. She kept novels and poetry beneath the register, and would sometimes read aloud to Rachel in a steady, high voice if she found something particularly moving. (Rachel’s father had often read to her from the newspaper, usually articles about train derailments, corruption, medical anomalies.) Julie never complained about having to stay late to sweep or help with inventory, never had a party or boyfriend to get to.
Rachel had a boyfriend, a married man named Mendy Hass. She had known him since she was thirteen years old. She was now thirty-four, still pretty as a teenager behind the register, Mendy liked to say. She had long, dark hair that she patrolled ruthlessly for gray hairs, and a fondness for lipstick in candy-apple. She and Mendy had been seeing each other in secret for three years. He did not ever come into the store, something Rachel had always found insulting. Now that Julie was working there, she was glad he stayed away. She did not want to hear what sort of story Julie would cook up about him.
One afternoon the priest came in with his mother. They were looking for paint stripper.
“Someone painted the grit onto the windowsills,” Anne Riordan said. By someone she meant her son, Father Daniel. He was a tall, handsome man, with his mother’s long, pale face. His reddish-blonde hair was cut in a style five years out of date, parted at the side, with bushy sideburns. He wore a tan sport coat over his black shirt and collar, black pants, brown leather shoes. He seemed unbothered, even mildly amused by his mother’s criticism, and fingered a display of model airplanes while she talked to Rachel. The airplanes came in a plastic sleeve with the word Starfire down the front in red cursive.
“Julie’ll show you the way,” Rachel said. “Julie!”
Julie emerged from the craft aisle holding a broom in front of her like a shield, both hands gripped tightly around the shaft. She had a few sequins in her dark brown hair.
“Father Dan here needs paint stripper,” Rachel said, smiling. Anne sniffed. She hated when Rachel called her son that.
“Hi Julie,” the priest said. “I didn’t know you worked here.”
“I just started,” Julie said quietly.
“Lead the way,” he said, sweeping a hand forward graciously.
Anne watched her son go, then turned back to Rachel.
“Her father comes to the Latin Mass every Tuesday,” she said approvingly. Then she began to explain, in great detail, how Daniel had managed to paint several of the upstairs windows shut. Rachel offered consoling noises. St. Patrick’s and its rectory were in what locals called the cobblestone part of town: four or five blocks of old buildings, some dating back to the Revolutionary War, among them the bank with a green copper dome and a black clapboard inn now refashioned into the town museum, where one could view a wide array of correspondence, deeds, and rusted ordnance. St. Patrick’s Church dated to 1830. The building that housed Howard’s Variety was nearly as old and had once been a dry-goods store; the apartment above the shop still had warped, springy flooring from the mid-nineteenth century. The people who lived in these buildings belonged to a proud and long-suffering fraternity, bound by stories of faulty wiring, drafty windows, cracked foundations.
Julie and the priest emerged from the tools and cleaning aisle. He paused and pulled a model airplane off the display near the register and read aloud from the packaging.
“Boys of all ages love the Spitfire glider.” His voice was pleasant and assured, tumbled smooth by countless homilies. He put the plane on the counter along with the paint stripper. Julie lingered by the register, sweeping at something that did not need sweeping. The priest called out “See you, Julie,” on his way out the door, and then they were gone. Julie went back to sweeping.
“He hates his mother,” she said after a little while. “She’s the one who forced him into the priesthood.”
“He knew you.”
“He used to teach at my high school. Latin. English, too. Everyone had such a crush on him.”
Julie rarely mentioned her time in high school.
“Did you?” Rachel ventured.
“Oh, of course.”
Rachel was taken aback. Not because she couldn’t imagine it—the priest was handsome, after all—but because Julie had admitted it so freely.
It was a little after midnight, and Rachel was sitting up with Mendy Hass, listening to the radio. Rachel didn’t like the term “boyfriend” and knew Mendy didn’t either, but she did not know what else to call him. “Lover” was too dramatic, “paramour” out of the question. Boyfriend would have to do. She and Mendy had dated in high school and then for two years after graduation, until Rachel’s father died and she had had to return to work with her mother. By the time her mother died, a few years later, Mendy had married someone else.
Now he came over once a week or so, usually on Thursday nights, when his wife worked the overnight at the hospital. Mendy would bring over a bottle of gin, and he and Rachel would make love, then listen to the late-night radio, which at that hour had the wandering, barely stitched-together texture of dreams.
“On the other side of the street there’s this woman, older woman, pushing a pram,” the DJ said, picking up a story he’d started earlier, before a Pink Floyd song. His name was Sam Forum, and he was on every Thursday from midnight to four. “Not a stroller—a pram, the kind with big wheels. I look in, expecting to see a baby, and instead there’s a pet iguana wearing a blue leash, eating from a bowl of ground beef. Up next, we’ll hear ‘Knights in White Satin.’”
Mendy laughed and then rattled the ice cubes around in his glass.
“I want us to do something,” Rachel said.
Mendy laughed. “We just finished.”
This was Mendy’s way—whenever Rachel dared to be serious, he would say something glib. He was a short, powerfully built man, with olive skin and coarse black hair all over his body; he liked to say he was the Greekest German who ever lived. He had been a fullback in high school, and Rachel still remembered him whipping off his helmet after one game and scanning the crowd, looking for her. When he’d smiled, she’d seen that his mouth was full of blood. He worked now at one of the Dow Chemical plants.
“I want us to take a trip.”
“A trip?” Mendy said. He turned the radio down. The windows were open, and she could smell the brackish, muddy river a few blocks away.
A few days earlier, Rachel’s cousin had called her and offered her the run of a beach house her husband had rented for the week after the Fourth of July. Her son had just broken his leg, and now the family was canceling the trip to the beach, only they had canceled too late, and the rental office wouldn’t give them their money back. This cousin wanted to know if Rachel wanted it.
“Free of charge,” Rachel said now to Mendy. “That’s the sort of money she married into.”
Mendy rattled his drink again and clucked his tongue.
“It sounds great,” he said. “A weekend,” he said, then trailed off.
“When’s the last time we saw the sun?” Rachel said.
“It’s not that simple,” Mendy said.
“It’s two nights.”
Mendy rose and walked out of the bedroom, toward the bathroom. The apartment was the same dimensions as the store below it, and Rachel could easily imagine its ghostly aisles superimposed onto her living room. Now Mendy was passing the toys, now the crafts corner. She heard his urine gurgling in the bowl. He began to whistle the melody from the Moody Blues song he’d just moments ago turned off. The least he could do was pretend his time in her apartment was special. Like so many people, he’d come into the store as a child, and like so many men, he’d remembered her as a girl—Rachel sitting behind the counter, working the register while her father prowled the aisles in his magician’s costume, doling out clumsy sleight-of-hand to whomever he could find. The first night they were together in the apartment over the store, Mendy had admitted that in high school they’d called her The Variety Girl. Rachel had known it was meant to be cruel, demeaning—boys didn’t give a girl a title unless they thought they could get something from her—but nevertheless she’d felt special. Chosen. Now even that dismal reputation had faded. Their relationship grown predictable, merely useful. She heard Mendy shake out the few last drops then flush. When he came back to the bedroom, he wore a tired, sheepish expression.
“I need to steal a bit of sleep before she gets home.”
“Think about a weekend,” Rachel said as he pulled on his pants. “Two nights.”
“I will,” he said, not looking at her. “I will think about it.”
Then he kissed her, and she tasted the plasticky smell that seemed to come from the back of his teeth. At least tell me no, she thought. At least give me that. But he didn’t, and soon the apartment was empty again. She listened for his car as it rattled down the cobblestone street. She turned the radio back on. She would not be able to sleep without it.
“Do you have a boyfriend?” Julie asked. The two were dressing the store in red, white, and blue. It was the week before the Fourth of July, always the busiest time of the year. Rachel had already stocked an entire aisle with party supplies in patriotic colors, and had set up a pyramid of sparklers and poppers by the register. Each year, she dressed her father for the occasion, with a floppy Uncle Sam hat on his head and lawn flag taped to his outstretched hand. Now she was taking inventory, while Julie marked each item with a bulky yellow plastic pricing gun. The gun made a heavy clunking sound as it applied each sticker.
“No,” Rachel said. She wanted to unload some of her frustration about Mendy onto Julie but didn’t trust her to keep any of it a secret. Still, she was furious and ashamed at having to lie, and to someone so much younger than she was. “Do you?” she said.
“Sort of,” Julie said. “A boy I knew from high school. We never could find time to be together then, and now that I’m back with my father, it’s more of the same.”
“When I was fifteen,” Rachel said, “my father caught me kissing a boy in the back staircase. Joseph DeWitt. His younger brother drowned in the reservoir, which is why you can’t swim there anymore.”
“What did your father do?” Julie said.
“He made him tell me what he was doing.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Neither did Joseph. My father made him say, ‘I, Joseph DeWitt, was kissing you.’ Like an oath of office. Repeat after me.”
Rachel still maintained it was one of the worst things her father had ever done. He had left her the store—had bound her to it—but she could not be angry at him for that; it was too large a burden. When she wanted to be angry with him, it was easier to imagine his pale, shocked face, staring down at her from the top of the staircase.
Julie thunked one price tag after another. Rachel was no longer looking at her inventory. Instead, she was back in that dusty staircase, wearing the baggy denim smock her mother had made her, the front full of pockets. She’d complained about that dress every day, until her mother had told her that only a dumb bunny needed everything to be pretty.
“I wasn’t allowed to look away, either,” Rachel said. “I had to look right into his eyes while he said it. You can bet that was the end of that.”
Julie continued pricing. Julie’s reticence, her lack of sympathy, embarrassed Rachel. And what had that story accomplished, anyway? She’d meant to show Julie how things might get better, and that her confinement was just a product of her age, her living situation, and that this too would pass, but had things really gotten any better? Rachel still slept above the store, while Mendy slept in a townhouse with his wife. They were watching the Phillies game, if it was on, or they were fighting, or they were making love. Or Mendy had taken her out in his car. Or they were ignoring each other altogether. Mendy’s wife had access to the whole banal spectrum of life, whereas Rachel only got lust, longing, and “Knights in White Satin” played at two in the morning.
“If my father caught me doing that, he’d throw me into the street,” Julie said. She handed the pricing gun back to Rachel, then put her hands on her hips and looked around the store. “What’s next?”
Rachel’s parents had opened Howard’s Variety in 1951, intending to cater to the ferry-riders bound for the Delaware beaches or Ocean City. Initially they sold toys and magic supplies, but gradually they expanded to include a small pharmacy section behind the register, where they stocked aspirin, Band-Aids, Midol, tampons, condoms—things the harried vacationer might have left behind. Elsewhere in the store you could find kitchenware, cleaning supplies, a small amount of canned goods. In the back of the store, Rachel’s mother had installed a crafts section, where they kept materials for homemade Halloween costumes: bolts of felt, chenille stems in countless colors, sequins, face paint, cotton batting in cloud-like rolls. Toys and magic sets still had pride of place, however, and everywhere you looked, there were plastic army men, rubber balls, white mesh bags of marbles, jacks, model airplanes made from balsa wood, toy dinosaurs with red-painted mouths, cup and ball sets, long strands of multicolored silk ribbons, child-sized top hats with secret compartments, red foam balls that could be compressed and palmed, wands, capes, handshake buzzers. After her father died, Rachel and her mother had a life-size wooden cutout of him made, using a picture that had appeared in the newspaper shortly after he’d opened the store, in a magician’s cape and top hat. One arm pointed to the door, the other clutched a crystal ball caked in silver glitter. Rachel wheeled him out each morning. Julie Plunkett, the college girl she hired, wheeled him in every night.
Most people in Battlement knew Julie as Terry Plunkett’s girl. In Terry’s youth, he had been a bold and indiscriminate fighter. He had fought people outside football games, at parades. Lately he had cleaned up, but history stuck to you in Battlement, and to the people around you. Rachel knew this well.
The locals sauntered in to ask about Julie. They would claim to be looking for Barkeeper’s Friend, kitchen twine, or an Inky-Pinky, then linger by the wire postcard carousel next to the register, glancing at the tall girl sweeping the aisles in her purple apron. The town was named Battlement for a stone parapet above the dock built in anticipation of the War of 1812. The war took place one bay over, in the Chesapeake, but Battlement’s watchfulness remained, as though every resident was huddling beneath a rampart and peeking over, eager to open fire. When Julie drifted to the back of the store, they would turn to Rachel and ask in a whisper how that one was working out.
“She hasn’t given you any trouble, has she?” they asked eagerly.
Rachel always smiled and told them the same thing: “My store’s still here. That’s all I ask.”
This was in May of 1983. The store would not last another year.
“He looks a bit shabby,” Julie said at the end of one shift. She ran her finger along the edge of the cutout, where the wood had turned gray and started to swell. Rachel’s father had been young in the picture the sign-painter had used, and so now he was young every day. Only the weather showed how long it had been. His face was pale, ghostly; his cloak faded from midnight blue to a washy slate.
Julie was twenty and had just finished her second year at the University of Delaware. She was on scholarship, thanks to a stellar academic career at St. Catherine’s School for Girls. She wore a Dorothy Hamill bob that Rachel thought was too dainty for her wide hips and broad shoulders. She was tall and stood with a slight hunch. Large eyes and a small, round nose, a thin set of lips. Curious, even nosy. Rachel had long ago learned not to pay too much attention to anything a person bought, but Julie divined whole lives in every purchase.
“That one earlier this afternoon,” Julie said. “Buying a plastic tea set. He’s got two sons, near my age. Prince and Billy Garland. So who’s he buying a tea set for?”
“I don’t know,” Rachel said, turning off the tape player. Silence, at last, settled over the store. Even thirty years on, Howard’s Variety still trafficked in the decade of its founding. There was a painting of a girl in a pink poodle skirt on the wall above the toy aisle, and all day they listened to the same songs: Bill Haley & His Comets, Ritchie Valens, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis in eternal, relentless rotation. Rachel barely heard it anymore.
Julie stood at the mouth of the cleaning aisle, arranging the cans of Comet so their red logos all faced out. She looked up, as though struck by a revelation. “I bet he’s cheating on his wife.”
“What?”
“He bought gum. The tea set’s a gift for some woman’s kid. Gum to cover up his old man’s breath. It’s not hard, Rachel.”
Often her deductions were sordid, melodramatic. A woman buying several Kotex from behind the counter—what Rachel’s mother had called an item of discretion—was not on her period but had suffered an early miscarriage. A man buying new shoelaces was preparing to interview for a job he would never in a million years secure.
They were fantasies, but Julie defended them as fiercely as observable truth. If Rachel asked her how she could know all that from a little purchase, Julie would look at her pityingly, a look, Rachel thought, they must teach people at college. “It’s certainly possible,” Julie would then say, referring to the slogan Rachel’s father had painted on the store’s front door: In Every Aisle a Possibility.
Despite all this, Rachel liked Julie. Her stories about people gave the days a sense of unsettledness. Plus she was good in the store, fastidious, punctual. She knew where everything was within the first week, something some of the high school girls Rachel had hired in years past had not learned until the middle of summer. She kept novels and poetry beneath the register, and would sometimes read aloud to Rachel in a steady, high voice if she found something particularly moving. (Rachel’s father had often read to her from the newspaper, usually articles about train derailments, corruption, medical anomalies.) Julie never complained about having to stay late to sweep or help with inventory, never had a party or boyfriend to get to.
Rachel had a boyfriend, a married man named Mendy Hass. She had known him since she was thirteen years old. She was now thirty-four, still pretty as a teenager behind the register, Mendy liked to say. She had long, dark hair that she patrolled ruthlessly for gray hairs, and a fondness for lipstick in candy-apple. She and Mendy had been seeing each other in secret for three years. He did not ever come into the store, something Rachel had always found insulting. Now that Julie was working there, she was glad he stayed away. She did not want to hear what sort of story Julie would cook up about him.
One afternoon the priest came in with his mother. They were looking for paint stripper.
“Someone painted the grit onto the windowsills,” Anne Riordan said. By someone she meant her son, Father Daniel. He was a tall, handsome man, with his mother’s long, pale face. His reddish-blonde hair was cut in a style five years out of date, parted at the side, with bushy sideburns. He wore a tan sport coat over his black shirt and collar, black pants, brown leather shoes. He seemed unbothered, even mildly amused by his mother’s criticism, and fingered a display of model airplanes while she talked to Rachel. The airplanes came in a plastic sleeve with the word Starfire down the front in red cursive.
“Julie’ll show you the way,” Rachel said. “Julie!”
Julie emerged from the craft aisle holding a broom in front of her like a shield, both hands gripped tightly around the shaft. She had a few sequins in her dark brown hair.
“Father Dan here needs paint stripper,” Rachel said, smiling. Anne sniffed. She hated when Rachel called her son that.
“Hi Julie,” the priest said. “I didn’t know you worked here.”
“I just started,” Julie said quietly.
“Lead the way,” he said, sweeping a hand forward graciously.
Anne watched her son go, then turned back to Rachel.
“Her father comes to the Latin Mass every Tuesday,” she said approvingly. Then she began to explain, in great detail, how Daniel had managed to paint several of the upstairs windows shut. Rachel offered consoling noises. St. Patrick’s and its rectory were in what locals called the cobblestone part of town: four or five blocks of old buildings, some dating back to the Revolutionary War, among them the bank with a green copper dome and a black clapboard inn now refashioned into the town museum, where one could view a wide array of correspondence, deeds, and rusted ordnance. St. Patrick’s Church dated to 1830. The building that housed Howard’s Variety was nearly as old and had once been a dry-goods store; the apartment above the shop still had warped, springy flooring from the mid-nineteenth century. The people who lived in these buildings belonged to a proud and long-suffering fraternity, bound by stories of faulty wiring, drafty windows, cracked foundations.
Julie and the priest emerged from the tools and cleaning aisle. He paused and pulled a model airplane off the display near the register and read aloud from the packaging.
“Boys of all ages love the Spitfire glider.” His voice was pleasant and assured, tumbled smooth by countless homilies. He put the plane on the counter along with the paint stripper. Julie lingered by the register, sweeping at something that did not need sweeping. The priest called out “See you, Julie,” on his way out the door, and then they were gone. Julie went back to sweeping.
“He hates his mother,” she said after a little while. “She’s the one who forced him into the priesthood.”
“He knew you.”
“He used to teach at my high school. Latin. English, too. Everyone had such a crush on him.”
Julie rarely mentioned her time in high school.
“Did you?” Rachel ventured.
“Oh, of course.”
Rachel was taken aback. Not because she couldn’t imagine it—the priest was handsome, after all—but because Julie had admitted it so freely.
It was a little after midnight, and Rachel was sitting up with Mendy Hass, listening to the radio. Rachel didn’t like the term “boyfriend” and knew Mendy didn’t either, but she did not know what else to call him. “Lover” was too dramatic, “paramour” out of the question. Boyfriend would have to do. She and Mendy had dated in high school and then for two years after graduation, until Rachel’s father died and she had had to return to work with her mother. By the time her mother died, a few years later, Mendy had married someone else.
Now he came over once a week or so, usually on Thursday nights, when his wife worked the overnight at the hospital. Mendy would bring over a bottle of gin, and he and Rachel would make love, then listen to the late-night radio, which at that hour had the wandering, barely stitched-together texture of dreams.
“On the other side of the street there’s this woman, older woman, pushing a pram,” the DJ said, picking up a story he’d started earlier, before a Pink Floyd song. His name was Sam Forum, and he was on every Thursday from midnight to four. “Not a stroller—a pram, the kind with big wheels. I look in, expecting to see a baby, and instead there’s a pet iguana wearing a blue leash, eating from a bowl of ground beef. Up next, we’ll hear ‘Knights in White Satin.’”
Mendy laughed and then rattled the ice cubes around in his glass.
“I want us to do something,” Rachel said.
Mendy laughed. “We just finished.”
This was Mendy’s way—whenever Rachel dared to be serious, he would say something glib. He was a short, powerfully built man, with olive skin and coarse black hair all over his body; he liked to say he was the Greekest German who ever lived. He had been a fullback in high school, and Rachel still remembered him whipping off his helmet after one game and scanning the crowd, looking for her. When he’d smiled, she’d seen that his mouth was full of blood. He worked now at one of the Dow Chemical plants.
“I want us to take a trip.”
“A trip?” Mendy said. He turned the radio down. The windows were open, and she could smell the brackish, muddy river a few blocks away.
A few days earlier, Rachel’s cousin had called her and offered her the run of a beach house her husband had rented for the week after the Fourth of July. Her son had just broken his leg, and now the family was canceling the trip to the beach, only they had canceled too late, and the rental office wouldn’t give them their money back. This cousin wanted to know if Rachel wanted it.
“Free of charge,” Rachel said now to Mendy. “That’s the sort of money she married into.”
Mendy rattled his drink again and clucked his tongue.
“It sounds great,” he said. “A weekend,” he said, then trailed off.
“When’s the last time we saw the sun?” Rachel said.
“It’s not that simple,” Mendy said.
“It’s two nights.”
Mendy rose and walked out of the bedroom, toward the bathroom. The apartment was the same dimensions as the store below it, and Rachel could easily imagine its ghostly aisles superimposed onto her living room. Now Mendy was passing the toys, now the crafts corner. She heard his urine gurgling in the bowl. He began to whistle the melody from the Moody Blues song he’d just moments ago turned off. The least he could do was pretend his time in her apartment was special. Like so many people, he’d come into the store as a child, and like so many men, he’d remembered her as a girl—Rachel sitting behind the counter, working the register while her father prowled the aisles in his magician’s costume, doling out clumsy sleight-of-hand to whomever he could find. The first night they were together in the apartment over the store, Mendy had admitted that in high school they’d called her The Variety Girl. Rachel had known it was meant to be cruel, demeaning—boys didn’t give a girl a title unless they thought they could get something from her—but nevertheless she’d felt special. Chosen. Now even that dismal reputation had faded. Their relationship grown predictable, merely useful. She heard Mendy shake out the few last drops then flush. When he came back to the bedroom, he wore a tired, sheepish expression.
“I need to steal a bit of sleep before she gets home.”
“Think about a weekend,” Rachel said as he pulled on his pants. “Two nights.”
“I will,” he said, not looking at her. “I will think about it.”
Then he kissed her, and she tasted the plasticky smell that seemed to come from the back of his teeth. At least tell me no, she thought. At least give me that. But he didn’t, and soon the apartment was empty again. She listened for his car as it rattled down the cobblestone street. She turned the radio back on. She would not be able to sleep without it.
“Do you have a boyfriend?” Julie asked. The two were dressing the store in red, white, and blue. It was the week before the Fourth of July, always the busiest time of the year. Rachel had already stocked an entire aisle with party supplies in patriotic colors, and had set up a pyramid of sparklers and poppers by the register. Each year, she dressed her father for the occasion, with a floppy Uncle Sam hat on his head and lawn flag taped to his outstretched hand. Now she was taking inventory, while Julie marked each item with a bulky yellow plastic pricing gun. The gun made a heavy clunking sound as it applied each sticker.
“No,” Rachel said. She wanted to unload some of her frustration about Mendy onto Julie but didn’t trust her to keep any of it a secret. Still, she was furious and ashamed at having to lie, and to someone so much younger than she was. “Do you?” she said.
“Sort of,” Julie said. “A boy I knew from high school. We never could find time to be together then, and now that I’m back with my father, it’s more of the same.”
“When I was fifteen,” Rachel said, “my father caught me kissing a boy in the back staircase. Joseph DeWitt. His younger brother drowned in the reservoir, which is why you can’t swim there anymore.”
“What did your father do?” Julie said.
“He made him tell me what he was doing.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Neither did Joseph. My father made him say, ‘I, Joseph DeWitt, was kissing you.’ Like an oath of office. Repeat after me.”
Rachel still maintained it was one of the worst things her father had ever done. He had left her the store—had bound her to it—but she could not be angry at him for that; it was too large a burden. When she wanted to be angry with him, it was easier to imagine his pale, shocked face, staring down at her from the top of the staircase.
Julie thunked one price tag after another. Rachel was no longer looking at her inventory. Instead, she was back in that dusty staircase, wearing the baggy denim smock her mother had made her, the front full of pockets. She’d complained about that dress every day, until her mother had told her that only a dumb bunny needed everything to be pretty.
“I wasn’t allowed to look away, either,” Rachel said. “I had to look right into his eyes while he said it. You can bet that was the end of that.”
Julie continued pricing. Julie’s reticence, her lack of sympathy, embarrassed Rachel. And what had that story accomplished, anyway? She’d meant to show Julie how things might get better, and that her confinement was just a product of her age, her living situation, and that this too would pass, but had things really gotten any better? Rachel still slept above the store, while Mendy slept in a townhouse with his wife. They were watching the Phillies game, if it was on, or they were fighting, or they were making love. Or Mendy had taken her out in his car. Or they were ignoring each other altogether. Mendy’s wife had access to the whole banal spectrum of life, whereas Rachel only got lust, longing, and “Knights in White Satin” played at two in the morning.
“If my father caught me doing that, he’d throw me into the street,” Julie said. She handed the pricing gun back to Rachel, then put her hands on her hips and looked around the store. “What’s next?”
*
On the Fourth they set up a table with a jug of lemonade and a few wooden crates full of reliably popular items: rubber balls, cap guns with their rings of red plastic ammunition, glow sticks. The two stood side by side, Rachel selling the toys, Julie filling small dixie cups from the large jug of Country Time with a spigot at the base. Julie had bitten the rim of her own cup so that the waxy coating had started to fray.
The parade started at the Veterans Hall and made its way through the cobblestone part of town, where it ended at the ferry dock. Later, when the sun went down, they would shoot fireworks out over the water. Leading the parade was the Tide Queen, which this year had been awarded to a girl named Rita Gansevoort. Julie remembered her from high school.
“She was frisky,” she said as the lead float passed. Frisky was Julie’s word for loose, slutty. On the float, Rita was flanked by muscular boys dressed as mermen, each wielding a flimsy plastic trident.
“Her mother’s an alcoholic. That’s what people said, at least. Terrible, really.” Julie said all this in a frank and pitiless tone while she handed out cups of lemonade.
The crowd was thick on the sidewalk, and Rachel could only see the top of the floats as they passed. People drifted away from the crowd now and then, giving their children quarters or dollar bills and telling them to ask Rachel for what they wanted. Rachel would smile and nod and take their money ceremoniously. This was how she had spent every Fourth of July she could remember. Her father had not believed in holidays, nor in religion; the store was all the sacred place he needed. She scanned the crowd for Mendy, wondering if he might use the anonymity of the holiday to come by. If she got him alone, she would tell him that she was going to the beach house with or without him. She had already packed. Julie had even agreed to man the store so Rachel could have a real vacation for once. But Rachel didn’t see Mendy anywhere.
“Could you handle the table for a second?” Rachel said, unbuckling the zippered hip pouch she wore. It was heavy from all the change inside it, and the strap dug into her hip. “I have to use the girls’.”
“Fire away,” Julie said, buckling the pouch across her hip. Rachel went inside, then went not to the small half-bathroom at the back of the store, but up the stairs that led to her apartment. She walked quickly to her bedroom. From there, she could see the parade as it passed, the Shriners in their ridiculous fezzes and tiny cars, their cheerful, jowly faces jiggling as they passed over the rough cobblestone.
From above, Rachel watched a few people approach the table and take lemonade, buy toys. A boy just a few years older than Julie stopped by and said something, and Julie handed him a cup. Rachel imagined he might be the boyfriend Julie had mentioned the other day, but they parted without so much as a backward glance. The Shriners had passed, and now there was a battalion of men dressed in Revolutionary costumes, each holding a musket on their left shoulder. She recognized the curator of the town museum at the front of the group, marching proudly, his face drenched in sweat. She looked for Mendy’s dark, wavy hair, for his wife, who Rachel had seen just once before, a pretty but plain woman with freckles. She felt foolish. She slipped her hand under the waistband of her long skirt and pinched the tender skin over her hip until she knew there would be a small bruise there tomorrow.
Below, the priest separated himself from the crowd and came over to the table. Rachel saw him point at a few glowsticks, then pull a dollar out of his wallet. Julie took the dollar and made change from the gray zippered pack, then dropped the coins into his outstretched hand.
The parade started at the Veterans Hall and made its way through the cobblestone part of town, where it ended at the ferry dock. Later, when the sun went down, they would shoot fireworks out over the water. Leading the parade was the Tide Queen, which this year had been awarded to a girl named Rita Gansevoort. Julie remembered her from high school.
“She was frisky,” she said as the lead float passed. Frisky was Julie’s word for loose, slutty. On the float, Rita was flanked by muscular boys dressed as mermen, each wielding a flimsy plastic trident.
“Her mother’s an alcoholic. That’s what people said, at least. Terrible, really.” Julie said all this in a frank and pitiless tone while she handed out cups of lemonade.
The crowd was thick on the sidewalk, and Rachel could only see the top of the floats as they passed. People drifted away from the crowd now and then, giving their children quarters or dollar bills and telling them to ask Rachel for what they wanted. Rachel would smile and nod and take their money ceremoniously. This was how she had spent every Fourth of July she could remember. Her father had not believed in holidays, nor in religion; the store was all the sacred place he needed. She scanned the crowd for Mendy, wondering if he might use the anonymity of the holiday to come by. If she got him alone, she would tell him that she was going to the beach house with or without him. She had already packed. Julie had even agreed to man the store so Rachel could have a real vacation for once. But Rachel didn’t see Mendy anywhere.
“Could you handle the table for a second?” Rachel said, unbuckling the zippered hip pouch she wore. It was heavy from all the change inside it, and the strap dug into her hip. “I have to use the girls’.”
“Fire away,” Julie said, buckling the pouch across her hip. Rachel went inside, then went not to the small half-bathroom at the back of the store, but up the stairs that led to her apartment. She walked quickly to her bedroom. From there, she could see the parade as it passed, the Shriners in their ridiculous fezzes and tiny cars, their cheerful, jowly faces jiggling as they passed over the rough cobblestone.
From above, Rachel watched a few people approach the table and take lemonade, buy toys. A boy just a few years older than Julie stopped by and said something, and Julie handed him a cup. Rachel imagined he might be the boyfriend Julie had mentioned the other day, but they parted without so much as a backward glance. The Shriners had passed, and now there was a battalion of men dressed in Revolutionary costumes, each holding a musket on their left shoulder. She recognized the curator of the town museum at the front of the group, marching proudly, his face drenched in sweat. She looked for Mendy’s dark, wavy hair, for his wife, who Rachel had seen just once before, a pretty but plain woman with freckles. She felt foolish. She slipped her hand under the waistband of her long skirt and pinched the tender skin over her hip until she knew there would be a small bruise there tomorrow.
Below, the priest separated himself from the crowd and came over to the table. Rachel saw him point at a few glowsticks, then pull a dollar out of his wallet. Julie took the dollar and made change from the gray zippered pack, then dropped the coins into his outstretched hand.
*
Mendy changed his mind after all. On the fifth, he called her at the store, something he never did, and said he’d told his wife that a friend had rented a fishing cabin for the weekend.
“You don’t mind me crashing your party?” he said. In the background, Rachel could hear an announcement over a loudspeaker, but could not make out the words. He was calling from the Dow plant.
“Of course not,” she said. She had been prepared to go to the beach alone, to prove to Mendy and to herself that she could. Now she felt an intense, almost vertiginous relief at not having to do that.
The day before she left, Rachel walked Julie through the inventory process and told her where the spare keys to the register were, in case she lost the main ones. The back door was to remain locked all day. There was nothing she would need from up in the apartment. Julie nodded through the entire explanation, almost impatiently. Finally, she blurted out: “Could I stay at your place?”
Rachel thought about it for a moment. She knew what Julie and her boyfriend would do in her apartment if she let Julie stay. She figured it was better than doing it in some dingy motel room, which neither of them could afford, or in the back of a car. She liked the idea, too, that her apartment might become a part of Julie’s history, a memory that she could look back on years from now. She told her that was fine, and that she’d be gone two nights.
“Strip the bed when you’re done,” Rachel said. “And if he’s coming over, wear protection.”
Rachel had never seen Julie blush, but now she turned scarlet.
“You don’t mind me crashing your party?” he said. In the background, Rachel could hear an announcement over a loudspeaker, but could not make out the words. He was calling from the Dow plant.
“Of course not,” she said. She had been prepared to go to the beach alone, to prove to Mendy and to herself that she could. Now she felt an intense, almost vertiginous relief at not having to do that.
The day before she left, Rachel walked Julie through the inventory process and told her where the spare keys to the register were, in case she lost the main ones. The back door was to remain locked all day. There was nothing she would need from up in the apartment. Julie nodded through the entire explanation, almost impatiently. Finally, she blurted out: “Could I stay at your place?”
Rachel thought about it for a moment. She knew what Julie and her boyfriend would do in her apartment if she let Julie stay. She figured it was better than doing it in some dingy motel room, which neither of them could afford, or in the back of a car. She liked the idea, too, that her apartment might become a part of Julie’s history, a memory that she could look back on years from now. She told her that was fine, and that she’d be gone two nights.
“Strip the bed when you’re done,” Rachel said. “And if he’s coming over, wear protection.”
Rachel had never seen Julie blush, but now she turned scarlet.
*
Rachel arrived alone at the beach house at three on Friday afternoon. The house had five bedrooms, three bathrooms, and a large deck with a partial view of the ocean. The bathrooms smelled like coconut suntan lotion and sweet orange cleaner. The furniture was all upholstered in scratchy pastel fabrics and made of white painted wicker, beveled glass. A round kitchen table with a white tile top sat in a bay window looking out onto the sawgrass. The house was so large she almost didn’t hear Mendy’s knock. He laughed when Rachel brought him inside.
“People live like this,” he said.
They made love straightaway, then wandered the house naked before tumbling into one of the narrow twin beds where Rachel’s cousin’s children would have stayed. Rachel grabbed a children’s book from the nightstand between the two beds.
“Read to me,” she said. Mendy took the book and looked at the cover, then tossed it on the opposite bed.
“No thanks.”
“Come on,” she said.
“It’s already all the way on the other bed,” Mendy said. “My hands are tied.”
They walked to the beach and washed the smell of each other off themselves. Mendy was a strong swimmer. He shot a stream of seawater at her through the gap in his front teeth. Water sparkled on his stubble. She had not spent so much time with him during the day since they were teenagers. She remembered sitting with him at the dock and watching the ferries come in across the Delaware Bay, their backs leaning against the old stone parapet. The steady, simple heat of his body next to hers. They used to stuff trash and cigarette butts into the gaps where the mortar had fallen away.
They left the ocean and walked sluggishly back to the towels they’d arranged. Gulls hovered over a picnic a dozen yards away, calling mournfully. Gray beach-fencing, woven together with rusty wire, slouched through dunes capped with ragged sawgrass. The smell of salt and sand and rotting things, cigarettes and hairspray. The afternoon was winding down, and people were picking up their towels, umbrellas, and magazines. Rachel was happy. She could have stayed there until the sky turned dark and the stars came out, but Mendy wanted to explore.
The two drove up and down the main drag in Mendy’s car, another thing Rachel had never done. It was a wide, copper-colored two-door Mercury Marquis that he took great pride in. The interior smelled like musky leather and the top of the dash gleamed as though it was wet. She saw a distended version of her face in the spotless chrome latch of the glove compartment.
In town there was a lighthouse, a marina, and a few beach-themed restaurants. A mini golf course, three tackle shops. At a toy shop, they sold inflatable rafts, water wings, cheap snorkels. Rachel bought a pair of plastic sandals. Mendy made a big show of crossing the state line into Maryland. Once across the border, he pulled into a gas station to buy a Coke. While he was inside, Rachel opened the glove compartment and found a tortoise-shell barrette. She palmed this the way her father had taught her, tucking it into the channel made by her thumb. When they drove back north into Delaware, she held her hand out the window and let the barrette drop, then watched in the rearview mirror as it tumbled along the asphalt, the silver fastener flashing in the sun.
That night, they ate together at a crab shack Mendy had spotted earlier. They were seated next to a family visiting from Germany, whose children were all identically chubby and blonde. The boys kept offering to crack Rachel’s crabs with their little wooden mallets.
“You like this place? You come here a lot?” the mother said. She had a wide, sunburned face and flaxen hair cut in a young girl’s bob.
“We love it,” Mendy said. “We’re here every summer. You gotta look us up next time.”
He grinned at Rachel and gave the German couple the address of their rental. The Germans kept buying rounds of beer, and soon they were all drunk. The lights were blurry, the music just the right amount of loud. Mendy drove home very slowly, laughing to himself the entire way. He said they were the Germanest Germans he’d ever seen. Once they were back at the rental, they sat on the deck looking over the ocean and opened another bottle of wine. Here and there people shot off their leftover fireworks. Moonlight spilled across the dimpled table of the sea. The night, Rachel thought, was perfect, but then Mendy got too drunk to get hard. They lay beside each other in the king-size bed, Mendy stroking her thigh and playing with himself listlessly. Soon he was snoring. She tried to fall asleep so that they could wake up together, but the wine had made her jittery and nauseous. Mendy snored with great, heaving breaths. Tomorrow night would be different, Rachel told herself, and went into the children’s room, where she fell asleep on one of the narrow twin beds.
She woke up the next morning, hungover and alone, having kicked all of the bedding onto the floor. Downstairs in the kitchen, she saw Mendy scrambling a half-dozen eggs. He was dressed already, his little duffel bag packed and resting by the door. He was leaving, he said.
“I told Kate I’d be gone just the one night.”
Rachel was still wearing the green satin skirt she’d worn the night before. Looking at it now in the daylight she saw there were grease stains on it, no doubt from the crab shack.
“I didn’t want to tell you yesterday,” Mendy said. “You were having too much fun.”
He pushed some eggs onto two plates, but Rachel wasn’t hungry. She turned around without another word and went back upstairs. She splashed her face with the cold, slightly sulfurous-smelling water in the bathroom. She took a hand towel and twisted it around until the cords in her neck were taut from the effort. Then she put on a bathing suit and her sunglasses, a big straw hat. When she came back downstairs, Mendy was finishing her portion of eggs. She poured herself a cup of coffee.
“I could claw your eyes out,” she said, holding the mug with both hands.
“I know,” Mendy said. “I know it.” He leaned forward when he ate, so that his mouth was almost on top of the plate.
“I could tell Kate,” Rachel said.
Mendy chewed, nodding. “And what would that do? Make everyone unhappy. You, me, her, your store. Everyone loses.”
He picked up his plate and brought it to the sink, rinsed it off.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Despite all he had done, and all she knew she would let him do to her in the future, there was only one thing on the tip of her tongue: Stay. A single, pathetic syllable, without even the dignity of a hard consonant at the end. Stay was a word that one didn’t say so much as let slide from one’s mouth. It would have been so easy to give in, but Rachel could not, did not say it.
Rachel went to the beach, thinking a plunge in the ocean would make her feel better. It did, somewhat. She bobbed up and down in the saltwater and let the sun lie heavy across her neck and shoulders.
But then when she was lying on her beach towel she began weeping and found she could not stop. The tears ran down from the outside edges of her eyes, down her cheeks, and into her ears. She gathered her things and shook her towel free of sand and was all the way to the edge of the dunes before realizing she’d left her sandals on the beach. She didn’t go back to get them, and instead walked gingerly along the hot concrete back to the house. As she stepped carefully over wayward pieces of gravel and bottle caps, firework casings and cigarette butts, she knew two things: he would try and resume things as they had been, and she would not let him. She felt calm, sad, a little dizzy. That era of her life was over, and a new one had just arrived. What it would look like, she did not know.
She got back to Battlement after eight, having lingered for a while in the beach house cleaning and drinking the last of the wine she and Mendy had split the night before. Instead of pulling into the alley behind the building, she drove through the cobblestone part of town, past the town museum and the tall, looming houses that had stood there for centuries. Her storefront was dark, the cutout of her father visible just inside the door. The lights were on in the apartment above the store. She was sorry to cut Julie’s stay short, but she had given the girl a night, and she wanted to be home, in her own bed, with the radio on.
She parked in the back and went up the back stairs. Light came through the gap below the door. She took out her keys and then stopped, remembering Julie and her boyfriend could be in there in some state of undress. Classical music wavered through the door. It would be like Julie to listen to classical music while she was with a boy. Julie wanted significance, gravity, a cinematic kind of love. Rachel had wanted that once, too. She knocked on the door three times and waited. When there was no answer, she turned the key in the lock and pushed it open.
Father Daniel Riordan, wearing just a white ribbed tank top and a pair of trousers, emerged from the bedroom just as she walked in. He was not wearing shoes or socks, which seemed a more unnerving kind of nakedness. His hair was mussed, his lips were raw. From the radio in the bedroom came the murmuring, apologetic voice of the classical DJ. “Brahms,” the DJ said. “Isn’t Brahms lovely?”
Rachel set her bag down on the couch. Her apartment felt smaller with Father Riordan in it, fragile. Liable, at any minute, to collapse, to fall through the floor and into the shop below. The priest licked his lips and squinted at her.
“You’re here!” he said in a baffled, nearly cheerful voice. Then he leaned back into the bedroom doorway. “Turn that off.”
Julie came running from the bedroom, holding a towel up to her chest. Underneath the towel, she appeared to be wearing white cotton underpants and nothing else. Julie’s nudity, the pale skin flashing from gaps in the towel, was commanding, and made Rachel feel like an intruder in her own home. Julie took a step toward Rachel and put herself between her and Father Riordan.
“You’re not supposed to be back,” she said. “You’re coming back tomorrow.” She wore a firm, officious expression, as though this whole situation was Rachel’s fault.
“There was a change of plans,” Rachel said. “This is your boyfriend.”
The priest winced and went back into the bedroom. Rachel heard the bed creak as he sat down on it, heard the racket of his shoes as he pulled them across the uneven old floor. Julie turned back toward the bedroom.
“We’ll figure this out,” she said. “I know, Rachel.”
He emerged from the bedroom, buttoning up a pale yellow short-sleeve shirt, the sort a tourist might wear. Rachel had never seen him in anything besides his priestly costume, and the effect was disorienting. His head looked too large for his body—his skin paler, drier, older.
“You ought to get dressed,” he said. Julie shook her head and put a hand on his arm.
He looked at Rachel, such a paternal, conspiratorial glance, as though Julie was the child the two of them were struggling to raise. He removed Julie’s hand.
“Stay,” Julie said. She twisted the towel in her hands. “Stay.”
“It’s alright,” Rachel said. She took Julie by the shoulders—her bare skin was feverishly hot—and guided her back to the bed. She expected some sort of resistance, but Julie was pliant, dazed. Rachel guided Julie down to the bed and tucked her under the sheet, then went back to the living room. The priest stood, abashed, by the door.
“It’s best this stays a secret,” he said. “You understand, don’t you? You’ll make her understand?”
There was a little bit of frothy saliva in the corner of his mouth. She thought of his pious, idiotic little mother. How would she ever talk to that woman about drafty windows again? Men just went on, thinking the world would figure itself out after them. And usually it did. Reluctantly she nodded at the priest, then listened as he closed the door behind him and walked down the stairs. She could have given him her father’s treatment. She could have made him announce—confess—what he’d done. But she hadn’t even managed that. She went back into the bedroom, where Julie lay on the bed, crying. She sat on the edge of the bed.
“How long?” Rachel said.
“Since high school,” Julie said. “Sophomore year.”
“Oh. Julie.”
“He said he loves me, he hates the church, hates his mother. He told me all that.”
“I’m sure he did,” Rachel said. She scooted closer to Julie and put her hand on the girl’s back.
“He said he wants to be with me.”
“Julie,” Rachel began, then stopped. She hated herself for what she was about to say. “You shouldn’t tell anyone. Not a soul.”
Julie was quiet, tense. “He’ll tell the truth.”
Rachel stroked her naked back. “You’re wrong.” It was the most compassionate thing Rachel could think of at the time. Julie’s back spasmed as she cried but she did not say anything, and Rachel read this as acceptance, as wisdom bitterly earned. Eventually Rachel lay down and pressed her face into the back of Julie’s neck. She smelled like sweat and the priest’s cloying aftershave and like something sweeter, too: youth, which not even the priest’s selfishness could entirely scrub away.
They woke up like that early the next morning. Outside, a thin mist had come in off the river and crowded the cobblestone streets. The stone gutters along the sidewalk were still brilliant with red, white, and blue tinsel left over from the parade.
The priest denied it. He claimed Julie Plunkett was making up a wild story, that she was desperate for attention. To an unusually crowded church one Sunday he gave a homily on the dangers of bearing false witness. By that time, Julie had already gone to a local newspaper and told them the relationship had started when she was fifteen. She produced a series of little notes he had written her that, while chaste, seemed undeniably improper when quoted in a newspaper. “You have a very pretty mind.” A reporter called Rachel and asked her to confirm the story, or at least the part she was involved in, and Rachel felt she could not say no.
In the end, the priest and his mother were transferred, quietly, to a parish in Indiana. Julie Plunkett stopped coming into work at the variety store; her father would not let her out of the house. When Rachel went to drop off Julie’s last paycheck, he answered the door brandishing one half of a broken broomstick. Rachel fled and kept the paycheck by the register in case Julie stopped by the store one day. She never did. The envelope with Julie’s last paycheck, in the amount of almost three hundred dollars—a pay period that covered Rachel’s trip to the beach with Mendy—stayed by the register for another nine months, until the store, which by then was inextricably linked to the story of Julie and the priest, went out of business. People talked sadly about going there as children, how Howard the Magician used to pull nickels out of your ear. And now this. People still went in, but never to shop. They wanted the story. Some impudent ones even asked if they could have a tour of the apartment upstairs. Rachel sold the building that spring and moved to Washington, D.C., but not before donating the wooden cutout of her father to the local history museum, where it resides today. A display card describes this wooden magician, with his faded painted features and swirling crystal globe, as a friendly character from a less complicated time.
“People live like this,” he said.
They made love straightaway, then wandered the house naked before tumbling into one of the narrow twin beds where Rachel’s cousin’s children would have stayed. Rachel grabbed a children’s book from the nightstand between the two beds.
“Read to me,” she said. Mendy took the book and looked at the cover, then tossed it on the opposite bed.
“No thanks.”
“Come on,” she said.
“It’s already all the way on the other bed,” Mendy said. “My hands are tied.”
They walked to the beach and washed the smell of each other off themselves. Mendy was a strong swimmer. He shot a stream of seawater at her through the gap in his front teeth. Water sparkled on his stubble. She had not spent so much time with him during the day since they were teenagers. She remembered sitting with him at the dock and watching the ferries come in across the Delaware Bay, their backs leaning against the old stone parapet. The steady, simple heat of his body next to hers. They used to stuff trash and cigarette butts into the gaps where the mortar had fallen away.
They left the ocean and walked sluggishly back to the towels they’d arranged. Gulls hovered over a picnic a dozen yards away, calling mournfully. Gray beach-fencing, woven together with rusty wire, slouched through dunes capped with ragged sawgrass. The smell of salt and sand and rotting things, cigarettes and hairspray. The afternoon was winding down, and people were picking up their towels, umbrellas, and magazines. Rachel was happy. She could have stayed there until the sky turned dark and the stars came out, but Mendy wanted to explore.
The two drove up and down the main drag in Mendy’s car, another thing Rachel had never done. It was a wide, copper-colored two-door Mercury Marquis that he took great pride in. The interior smelled like musky leather and the top of the dash gleamed as though it was wet. She saw a distended version of her face in the spotless chrome latch of the glove compartment.
In town there was a lighthouse, a marina, and a few beach-themed restaurants. A mini golf course, three tackle shops. At a toy shop, they sold inflatable rafts, water wings, cheap snorkels. Rachel bought a pair of plastic sandals. Mendy made a big show of crossing the state line into Maryland. Once across the border, he pulled into a gas station to buy a Coke. While he was inside, Rachel opened the glove compartment and found a tortoise-shell barrette. She palmed this the way her father had taught her, tucking it into the channel made by her thumb. When they drove back north into Delaware, she held her hand out the window and let the barrette drop, then watched in the rearview mirror as it tumbled along the asphalt, the silver fastener flashing in the sun.
That night, they ate together at a crab shack Mendy had spotted earlier. They were seated next to a family visiting from Germany, whose children were all identically chubby and blonde. The boys kept offering to crack Rachel’s crabs with their little wooden mallets.
“You like this place? You come here a lot?” the mother said. She had a wide, sunburned face and flaxen hair cut in a young girl’s bob.
“We love it,” Mendy said. “We’re here every summer. You gotta look us up next time.”
He grinned at Rachel and gave the German couple the address of their rental. The Germans kept buying rounds of beer, and soon they were all drunk. The lights were blurry, the music just the right amount of loud. Mendy drove home very slowly, laughing to himself the entire way. He said they were the Germanest Germans he’d ever seen. Once they were back at the rental, they sat on the deck looking over the ocean and opened another bottle of wine. Here and there people shot off their leftover fireworks. Moonlight spilled across the dimpled table of the sea. The night, Rachel thought, was perfect, but then Mendy got too drunk to get hard. They lay beside each other in the king-size bed, Mendy stroking her thigh and playing with himself listlessly. Soon he was snoring. She tried to fall asleep so that they could wake up together, but the wine had made her jittery and nauseous. Mendy snored with great, heaving breaths. Tomorrow night would be different, Rachel told herself, and went into the children’s room, where she fell asleep on one of the narrow twin beds.
She woke up the next morning, hungover and alone, having kicked all of the bedding onto the floor. Downstairs in the kitchen, she saw Mendy scrambling a half-dozen eggs. He was dressed already, his little duffel bag packed and resting by the door. He was leaving, he said.
“I told Kate I’d be gone just the one night.”
Rachel was still wearing the green satin skirt she’d worn the night before. Looking at it now in the daylight she saw there were grease stains on it, no doubt from the crab shack.
“I didn’t want to tell you yesterday,” Mendy said. “You were having too much fun.”
He pushed some eggs onto two plates, but Rachel wasn’t hungry. She turned around without another word and went back upstairs. She splashed her face with the cold, slightly sulfurous-smelling water in the bathroom. She took a hand towel and twisted it around until the cords in her neck were taut from the effort. Then she put on a bathing suit and her sunglasses, a big straw hat. When she came back downstairs, Mendy was finishing her portion of eggs. She poured herself a cup of coffee.
“I could claw your eyes out,” she said, holding the mug with both hands.
“I know,” Mendy said. “I know it.” He leaned forward when he ate, so that his mouth was almost on top of the plate.
“I could tell Kate,” Rachel said.
Mendy chewed, nodding. “And what would that do? Make everyone unhappy. You, me, her, your store. Everyone loses.”
He picked up his plate and brought it to the sink, rinsed it off.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Despite all he had done, and all she knew she would let him do to her in the future, there was only one thing on the tip of her tongue: Stay. A single, pathetic syllable, without even the dignity of a hard consonant at the end. Stay was a word that one didn’t say so much as let slide from one’s mouth. It would have been so easy to give in, but Rachel could not, did not say it.
Rachel went to the beach, thinking a plunge in the ocean would make her feel better. It did, somewhat. She bobbed up and down in the saltwater and let the sun lie heavy across her neck and shoulders.
But then when she was lying on her beach towel she began weeping and found she could not stop. The tears ran down from the outside edges of her eyes, down her cheeks, and into her ears. She gathered her things and shook her towel free of sand and was all the way to the edge of the dunes before realizing she’d left her sandals on the beach. She didn’t go back to get them, and instead walked gingerly along the hot concrete back to the house. As she stepped carefully over wayward pieces of gravel and bottle caps, firework casings and cigarette butts, she knew two things: he would try and resume things as they had been, and she would not let him. She felt calm, sad, a little dizzy. That era of her life was over, and a new one had just arrived. What it would look like, she did not know.
She got back to Battlement after eight, having lingered for a while in the beach house cleaning and drinking the last of the wine she and Mendy had split the night before. Instead of pulling into the alley behind the building, she drove through the cobblestone part of town, past the town museum and the tall, looming houses that had stood there for centuries. Her storefront was dark, the cutout of her father visible just inside the door. The lights were on in the apartment above the store. She was sorry to cut Julie’s stay short, but she had given the girl a night, and she wanted to be home, in her own bed, with the radio on.
She parked in the back and went up the back stairs. Light came through the gap below the door. She took out her keys and then stopped, remembering Julie and her boyfriend could be in there in some state of undress. Classical music wavered through the door. It would be like Julie to listen to classical music while she was with a boy. Julie wanted significance, gravity, a cinematic kind of love. Rachel had wanted that once, too. She knocked on the door three times and waited. When there was no answer, she turned the key in the lock and pushed it open.
Father Daniel Riordan, wearing just a white ribbed tank top and a pair of trousers, emerged from the bedroom just as she walked in. He was not wearing shoes or socks, which seemed a more unnerving kind of nakedness. His hair was mussed, his lips were raw. From the radio in the bedroom came the murmuring, apologetic voice of the classical DJ. “Brahms,” the DJ said. “Isn’t Brahms lovely?”
Rachel set her bag down on the couch. Her apartment felt smaller with Father Riordan in it, fragile. Liable, at any minute, to collapse, to fall through the floor and into the shop below. The priest licked his lips and squinted at her.
“You’re here!” he said in a baffled, nearly cheerful voice. Then he leaned back into the bedroom doorway. “Turn that off.”
Julie came running from the bedroom, holding a towel up to her chest. Underneath the towel, she appeared to be wearing white cotton underpants and nothing else. Julie’s nudity, the pale skin flashing from gaps in the towel, was commanding, and made Rachel feel like an intruder in her own home. Julie took a step toward Rachel and put herself between her and Father Riordan.
“You’re not supposed to be back,” she said. “You’re coming back tomorrow.” She wore a firm, officious expression, as though this whole situation was Rachel’s fault.
“There was a change of plans,” Rachel said. “This is your boyfriend.”
The priest winced and went back into the bedroom. Rachel heard the bed creak as he sat down on it, heard the racket of his shoes as he pulled them across the uneven old floor. Julie turned back toward the bedroom.
“We’ll figure this out,” she said. “I know, Rachel.”
He emerged from the bedroom, buttoning up a pale yellow short-sleeve shirt, the sort a tourist might wear. Rachel had never seen him in anything besides his priestly costume, and the effect was disorienting. His head looked too large for his body—his skin paler, drier, older.
“You ought to get dressed,” he said. Julie shook her head and put a hand on his arm.
He looked at Rachel, such a paternal, conspiratorial glance, as though Julie was the child the two of them were struggling to raise. He removed Julie’s hand.
“Stay,” Julie said. She twisted the towel in her hands. “Stay.”
“It’s alright,” Rachel said. She took Julie by the shoulders—her bare skin was feverishly hot—and guided her back to the bed. She expected some sort of resistance, but Julie was pliant, dazed. Rachel guided Julie down to the bed and tucked her under the sheet, then went back to the living room. The priest stood, abashed, by the door.
“It’s best this stays a secret,” he said. “You understand, don’t you? You’ll make her understand?”
There was a little bit of frothy saliva in the corner of his mouth. She thought of his pious, idiotic little mother. How would she ever talk to that woman about drafty windows again? Men just went on, thinking the world would figure itself out after them. And usually it did. Reluctantly she nodded at the priest, then listened as he closed the door behind him and walked down the stairs. She could have given him her father’s treatment. She could have made him announce—confess—what he’d done. But she hadn’t even managed that. She went back into the bedroom, where Julie lay on the bed, crying. She sat on the edge of the bed.
“How long?” Rachel said.
“Since high school,” Julie said. “Sophomore year.”
“Oh. Julie.”
“He said he loves me, he hates the church, hates his mother. He told me all that.”
“I’m sure he did,” Rachel said. She scooted closer to Julie and put her hand on the girl’s back.
“He said he wants to be with me.”
“Julie,” Rachel began, then stopped. She hated herself for what she was about to say. “You shouldn’t tell anyone. Not a soul.”
Julie was quiet, tense. “He’ll tell the truth.”
Rachel stroked her naked back. “You’re wrong.” It was the most compassionate thing Rachel could think of at the time. Julie’s back spasmed as she cried but she did not say anything, and Rachel read this as acceptance, as wisdom bitterly earned. Eventually Rachel lay down and pressed her face into the back of Julie’s neck. She smelled like sweat and the priest’s cloying aftershave and like something sweeter, too: youth, which not even the priest’s selfishness could entirely scrub away.
They woke up like that early the next morning. Outside, a thin mist had come in off the river and crowded the cobblestone streets. The stone gutters along the sidewalk were still brilliant with red, white, and blue tinsel left over from the parade.
The priest denied it. He claimed Julie Plunkett was making up a wild story, that she was desperate for attention. To an unusually crowded church one Sunday he gave a homily on the dangers of bearing false witness. By that time, Julie had already gone to a local newspaper and told them the relationship had started when she was fifteen. She produced a series of little notes he had written her that, while chaste, seemed undeniably improper when quoted in a newspaper. “You have a very pretty mind.” A reporter called Rachel and asked her to confirm the story, or at least the part she was involved in, and Rachel felt she could not say no.
In the end, the priest and his mother were transferred, quietly, to a parish in Indiana. Julie Plunkett stopped coming into work at the variety store; her father would not let her out of the house. When Rachel went to drop off Julie’s last paycheck, he answered the door brandishing one half of a broken broomstick. Rachel fled and kept the paycheck by the register in case Julie stopped by the store one day. She never did. The envelope with Julie’s last paycheck, in the amount of almost three hundred dollars—a pay period that covered Rachel’s trip to the beach with Mendy—stayed by the register for another nine months, until the store, which by then was inextricably linked to the story of Julie and the priest, went out of business. People talked sadly about going there as children, how Howard the Magician used to pull nickels out of your ear. And now this. People still went in, but never to shop. They wanted the story. Some impudent ones even asked if they could have a tour of the apartment upstairs. Rachel sold the building that spring and moved to Washington, D.C., but not before donating the wooden cutout of her father to the local history museum, where it resides today. A display card describes this wooden magician, with his faded painted features and swirling crystal globe, as a friendly character from a less complicated time.