“Don’t say ‘ain’t,’” I said.
The door slammed and the boys were gone.
“You know, my boys aren’t going to be happy until they know Kelly’s sign.”
“Honey? I predict she ain’t gonna be happy until she shows it to them.”
The evening was spent getting caught up with one another. Daphne and Kelly (both of whom seemed as innocent as the driven snow) and the boys had eaten quickly, washed all the dishes, and gone for a walk on the beach. Two casserole dishes of lasagna and four loaves of garlic bread had been summarily consumed. The hot dogs and chili brought less enthusiasm from the crowd and, for the most part, languished in an aluminum container on the back of the stove.
“Did you count the beers?” Eve asked Carl.
“Kelly doesn’t seem like the tattoo type,” I said.
“I know,” Eve said. “They’re both Lilly Pulitzer and pearls on the outside. Teenage girls are very deceiving.”
“No, I didn’t count the beers, but I know I bought a case of Amstel Light and a case of Beck’s,” Carl said, looking across the table to Adam and me. “It’s a whole new world this year. Let me tell you, a whole new world.”
“What do you mean?” Adam asked.
“I mean raising a teenage girl is like having a terrorist in your house,” Carl said. “I used to keep all kinds of medicine at home and now I have to lock it up in a vault.”
“Why? Is Daphne fooling around with prescription medications?” I said. “That sweet child? I wouldn’t believe it for a minute!”
“You don’t know girls,” Carl said.
Eve said, “We had a whole bottle of Vicodin go missing last month. She claimed to know nothing about it. I said, ‘Oh, so it was here yesterday and today it just grew legs and walked?’”
“It’s got some serious street value,” Carl said. “When I realized it was gone I told her that if she got busted for selling drugs I’d take away her car.”
“And send her to a Christian military school in Georgia where she would have to dig up onions and recite Bible verses before she would get to eat,” Eve said.
“Good grief! Does such a place even exist?” Clarabeth said. “That sounds like the Spanish Inquisition, like child cruelty! I mean it’s too much, it’s medieval, it’s inhumane, it’s—”
Cookie interrupted Clarabeth. “A good idea. It sure scared the bejesus out of her.”
“Heaven help us,” I muttered to no one in particular.
“Unfortunately, this school only goes to twelfth grade,” Eve said. “She’s going to Elon this fall.”
“She’ll be having more fun than our boys,” Adam said. “Luke’s going to Georgia Tech for civil engineering and Max is premed at Duke.”
Adam and I were very proud of our sons’ academic achievements.
“I was so glad he got in,” Carl said. “You know we’ll keep an eye on him.”
Carl had generously written a strong letter of support for Max’s application and he had the head of admissions, an old friend, shepherd his application through the process.
“And I hope you know how much we appreciate that,” I said. “Who even keeps Vicodin in their house?”
We never had anything stronger than Tylenol in our medicine cabinet.
“I get muscle spasms in my back,” Eve said. “You must be so proud of Luke and Max.”
“I am thrilled for them, but it’s going to be pretty lonely for me!” I said.
“I’ll bet so,” Eve said. “Well, I’ll come visit!”
“I’d love that!” I said.
“I told Eve to lock all the drugs away, but it’s not like she listens to me,” Carl said.
“Ow!” Adam said. “Muscle spasms are the worst.”
I thought, Whoa, baby! Vicodin? Muscle spasms? Swallow two with a glass of chardonnay and call me in the morning? Eve definitely has a problem. Carl has to realize this. Doesn’t he?
“Do your boys smoke weed?” Eve asked. “It seems like every single boy in Daphne’s class smokes weed.”
Cookie gasped and said, “Where are the parents these days?”
I turned bright red, thinking that the question was too personal to be addressed in front of Adam’s father.
“Listen, in our world? Our boys never had the time to get involved with all that stuff. I kept them busy,” Adam said.
“You sure did do that!” I said. “If they weren’t chasing a ball or something else, they were catching fish or birds or helping Adam.”
“Idle hands are the Devil’s workshop,” Clarabeth said. “That’s what my mother always said, and she was right. She also said, tell me who your company is and I’ll tell you who you are because birds of a feather flock together. Oh! She had so many sayings like that and they were all true! Kids today should have more supervision, if you ask me . . .”
“I agree!” Cookie said.
Ted reached over and gently patted the back of Clarabeth’s hand to make her stop talking. She does enjoy the soapbox, I thought.
“Come on, old girl,” he said, smiling at her. “Let’s let the young people have their night.”
“Who’s an old girl?” Clarabeth said indignantly. “Not I!”
“I may as well call it a night too,” Cookie said and got up. “Thank you for dinner, Eliza. Your lasagna is almost as good as Stouffer’s.”
For a moment, I thought she was kidding.
“Thank you,” I said, because what could I say?
“Don’t pay her no never mind,” Clarabeth said. “Your lasagna is incredible! Paula Deen would kill for your recipe!”
I hugged Ted and Clarabeth and blew an air kiss to Cookie. Adam walked them all to the door.
“See y’all tomorrow,” I said.
In due time, Carl and Eve reached maximum capacity in the department of stamina and announced they were ready to sleep.
“I’m sorry, but I can hardly hold my eyes open,” Eve said and yawned.
“Long day,” Carl said.
“Don’t worry. We have two whole weeks to solve the problems of the world,” I said.
We went through the motions of shutting the house down for the night. The boys drifted in and said good night, disappearing into their rooms. I set up the coffeepot for the morning and Adam turned off all the lights. It was eleven o’clock. That’s when the screaming started.
“Help! Call 911!”
It was a man’s voice. There was a man outside our condo, close by, huffing and puffing.
“Help! 911!”
“It sounds like Ted!” I said, panicked.
“I’ll go see what’s going on,” Adam said, opening the sliding glass doors.
I watched as Adam raced across the terrace through the pool area and I saw Ted coming off the beach with Cookie in his arms. Ted’s clothes were soaking wet. Cookie was naked and her leg was bleeding like mad.
“Get Carl! Shark bite!”
“Give her to me,” Adam said.
Ted was nearly out of breath and passed Cookie’s tiny body over to Adam’s outstretched arms. Adam, decades younger and more fit, ran with Cookie straight to Carl and Eve’s. I followed Adam, grateful that Cookie was unconscious. It didn’t seem like her injuries were life threatening and I knew it was better that she was not entirely aware that her clothes were nowhere to be found.
And Adam would tell me later that he had the fleeting thought that this was the woman who’d ruined years of his life and he should’ve thrown her back to the sharks. But, on the other hand, he would rather that she owed him one. When I asked why he said, “I’ll tell you the story someday.”
At that point, I was on Carl and Eve’s terrace. I ran to call 911. In minutes, Cookie was stretched out on Carl and Eve’s couch, a makeshift tourniquet of clean dish towels around her wound and a comforter covering her up.
“What the hell happened?” Carl asked.
Carl and Eve were in their pajamas and had been half asleep.
“What’s going on?” Daphne said.
“Go back to bed,” Eve said.
“Oh, my God! Cookie! Is she okay?”
“She’s going to be fine,” Eve said. “It looks like a shark took a little nip of her thigh.”
“Oh, Mom! Oh, no!”
“Calm down, sweetie,” Carl said. “She’s fine.”
“I just went out to the beach to get some air. Clarabeth had the thermostat up to eighty degrees and she was snoring like a bear. Don’t say I said that.”
Carl said, “Ted? Would you like a glass of water?”
Ted said, “Yes, I would. Thanks. I guess she decided to go skinny-dipping.”
The doorbell rang. Eve opened it and there stood two EMS workers with a stretcher.
“Hurry! My mother was bitten by a shark!”
“I never even heard her leave the house,” Carl said, filling a glass from the spigot and handing it to Ted.
“Thanks. I could see it was Cookie. She wasn’t that far out in the ocean. Anyway, I saw her get pulled underwater and I knew she was in trouble.”
“Wait two minutes. Let me get my clothes on,” Carl said, then turned to the EMS workers. “Take her vitals. I’m coming with y’all. I’m a doctor and this is my mother-in-law.”
Cookie was moaning as she was being loaded into the ambulance. Carl hopped in the back with her.
“I’m coming too!” Eve said. “I’ll be right behind you in the car.”
“Holy crap,” I said.
“Wait until I tell Clarabeth this one,” Ted said.
“We’re going to be chewing on this one for years, no pun intended,” Adam said.
“Worst joke ever,” I said.
chapter 9
eliza’s catching up
wild dunes, 2009
It was a mere ninety-four degrees in the shade, but there was not a breath of air to be found. Eve and I were stretched out under the fronds of towering palmettos on recliners by the pool at Wild Dunes drinking iced water and rehashing the year. Our husbands were engaged in an afternoon battle to the death on the tennis courts.
“I still cannot believe it was Cookie who took the Vicodin,” I said.
“And I can’t believe it’s taken me two years to tell you. I was so horrified. She had enough in her system to kill a person three times her size. Evidently she had built up quite a tolerance,” Eve said. “We had a terrible fight over it.”
“Who? You and Cookie?” I sat up, took a Ziploc of apple slices from the cooler, and offered it to Eve. “Here. Have a slice.”
“Thanks!” Eve helped herself to two. “Of course, I had it out with her.”
“It doesn’t really do any good to argue with your parents.”
“Well, it made me feel better. I’ve never been so angry. Don’t you remember she let me accuse Daphne? She stood right there while I read Daphne the riot act. But I also had the battle royale with Carl.”
“Tell me about Cookie first. What did she say?”
I wanted every detail. I was starved for gossip. It had been a slow year on the Stono. With the boys away at college, my pipeline to the latest dirt was shut down.
“I just said to her, I can’t believe you let me threaten my daughter with that horrible boarding school when you knew you were to blame all along. She got all weepy and dramatic and tried to say she couldn’t help herself and blah blah blah. It was really unbelievable.”
“Well, drug addiction is terrible. To say the least,” I offered. “It makes nice people do awful things.”
“Agreed. But Carl heard me going at it with her and jumped in telling me not to be so hard on her. He called me a bitch. I didn’t speak to him for a week.”
“What? If Adam called me that he’d be sleeping in the barn for a year.”
“I know! And I wouldn’t blame you one little bit! Anyway, it took three trips to Betty Ford to get her sober. To be honest? I liked her better drunk and high.”
Well, that’s a helluva thing to say about your mother, I thought.
“Oh no! Was she drinking too? I never noticed her drinking that much. Gosh!”
“Listen, Eliza, I like my white wine, probably too much, and I know that, but I don’t have bottles of vodka stashed in my closet and in the garage and under the sink and in more nooks and crannies than you’d find in an English muffin. She did.”
“No kidding. My God. I never would’ve suspected that. Never!”
“Oh, she was clever. She had it all worked out so that she never had to drive or do anything that might arouse the suspicions of the authorities and land her in the county jail wearing orange or whatever color they wear here. She had Ted picking up her groceries and her neighbor picked up her dry cleaning and so forth. She sat home watching The Golden Girls on television and drinking martinis and popping pills all day and night!”
“Do Ted and Clarabeth know she went through rehab?”
“Nope. She never told a soul. I knew and Carl knew, but that’s all. You know, in my blue-blooded family we don’t like to talk about such things. Only trashy people get drunk and do drugs. Not the highfalutin likes of Cookie.”
“Right. How in the world did you find out?”
“Well, it started with the shark bite. They discovered all the Vicodin in her blood. At the same time, they discovered elevated blood alcohol levels. The combination set off all the alarms in Carl’s mind. He didn’t say anything much at the time because Cookie was honestly traumatized. But it didn’t take long for her to fall apart after the shark. She went home, believe it or not, with a big fat bottle of pain medication.”
“Good grief! Didn’t they know she was abusing pain meds?”
“Honey, these days? In a huge hospital, it’s a miracle when the right hand knows what the left one is doing. The doctor who released her wasn’t the doctor who admitted her and didn’t make the connection in the records. And I think it’s probably fair to say she did have legitimate pain. After all, that shark took a hunk out of her thigh. Anyway, a few weeks later, her UPS delivery guy saw her dancing in her garden. It was ten in the morning. She was . . . well, she was as naked as a jaybird, dancing in and around the azaleas. They weren’t even in bloom!”
I was unsure of what to make of that last remark. Perhaps there was a special southern ritual of dancing with blooming azaleas that had escaped my attention. I thought, I am, after all and through no fault of my own, from the north. And at one time, Charleston did have a reputation for celebrating her eccentrics. Stories like this were not all that unusual.
“And he had a sense that something wasn’t right. Drugs and alcohol go hand in hand.”
“Uh, yeah, they do. He called 911. It was off to the Betty for Cookie!”
“Gee, that’s too bad. But she’s okay now?”
“If complaining and criticizing about every single thing under the sun is okay, then she’s okay. I’m telling you, you’re not going to like her like this.”
“Well, I guess we’re going to see what we see,” I said. “I’m just so glad we could get together again. This vacation is my favorite time of year.”
Eve leaned over to me and patted the back of my hand.
“Carl and I were so sorry to hear about your father,” she said.
I sighed, thinking about my father’s funeral, which was painful and sparsely attended.
“Thank you. He had a good long life, you know? And he died so suddenly, it was such a terrible shock.”
“Yes, but that’s better than some long-drawn-out illness where it seems like you’re dying one cell at a time.”
“No, that’s absolutely the truth. He had a heart attack in his sleep. Went to bed on earth and woke up in heaven!”
“That’s the way to go for sure.” Eve smiled at me.
“My boys hardly knew him. He didn’t like to travel and he wasn’t particularly interested in us, for reasons I will never be able to reconcile.”
We were both quiet then, Eve giving me a moment to reflect. I was dwelling on the fact that his death was so final and that I’d ne
ver have the chance to make him see me as a whole woman who was anything but another version of my mother. It was game over. To say my parental relationships had been less than satisfying would greatly understate the intense heartache and disappointment I felt. Eve finally spoke.
“Your mom passed away when you were young, right?”
“Yes, I was just eleven and it was terrible for all of us. I think my father never got over it. And I think one reason he ignored me is that I look exactly like her. My brother looks like him.”
“Well, we both know people love people for the craziest reasons. But I’m sure your father loved you, don’t you think so?”
“Oh, I’m sure he did. He was just very reserved, like my brother, who is a sweetie once you get to know him. But not a lot of juice, you know what I mean?”
“Yes. I know.”
“By the way, your flowers were gorgeous. Thank you again.”
“Oh golly, Eliza, you’re so welcome, but I wanted to be there with you. I felt so badly that we couldn’t come.”
“You know what? Let’s make a pact to come to our children’s weddings! Let’s celebrate the happy things!”
“I’ll drink to that!” Eve said. “And Eliza, how much weight have you lost? You look fabulous! What are you doing?”
“Just drinking a lot of water,” I said. I had dropped a few pounds.
We touched our plastic water bottles and smiled.
“And you know what else?” I said. “Cookie might have become a fussbudget, but at least you still have her. Let’s see what we can do to cheer the old girl up!”
“Good luck with that!” Eve looked over to the pool, which was unoccupied by any of the other guests. “Gosh, this is some summer without Daphne! Where are the boys this afternoon?”
“They’re down at Breach Inlet, kitesurfing or some sport designed to break their little necks,” I said. “How was Daphne’s year at college?”
“She did all right this year, but she didn’t exactly burn the town down.”
That was code for barely passed.
“So what’s she up to this summer?”
“Well, as usual, we’re rewarding her poor academic performance and assuaging our own guilt over Cookie’s drug debacle by allowing her to go with Kelly for a six-week cultural immersion in France. How about your boys?”