Or would he?
Maybe he’d been that way from the start. Maybe Adrian had it right: what annoys you most, later on, is the very thing that attracted you to begin with.
For her trip to the beach she bought a suitcase-just a cheap one from the dime store, big enough to hold her straw tote. Belle was driving her over early Saturday morning. Noah was still home when Belle honked out front (he’d be leaving for camp around noon), and Delia gave him a quick goodbye hug, which he put up with. To Joel she said, “Don’t forget to feed Vernon.”
“Who’s Vernon?”
She couldn’t think why he asked, for a moment. Then she said, “Oh! I meant George.” Silly of her: George and Vernon were not at all alike. She said, “George the cat!” as if it were Joel who had been confused. “Well, so long,” she told him, and she rushed out the door, her suitcase knocking against her shins.
Belle wore enormous sunglasses, the upside-down kind with the earpieces hitched at the bottom. “I have the world’s worst hangover,” she told Delia right off. “I never want to see another drop of champagne as long as I live.”
“You had champagne?”
“Did I ever. A whole entire bottle, because last night Horace proposed.”
“Oh, Belle!”
“But he couldn’t drink any himself because he’s allergic,” Belle said. “Just sat there watching me glug it down, following every swallow with those hound-dog eyes of his. Yes, that’s the way we do things, we two. Still, it made a nice gesture. Champagne, a dozen roses, and a diamond ring: the works.” She lifted her left hand from the wheel to display a tiny, winking glint. Then she pulled into the street. “Near as I can recall, I must have accepted. Think of it: Belle Lamb. Sounds like a noise in a comic book: Blam!” She was keeping her face expressionless behind the dark glasses, but there was something complacent and well-fed in the curve of her lips. “I guess now I’ll have to go through with it,” she said.
“Don’t you want to go through with it?”
“Oh, well. Sure.” She turned onto 380. “I do care about him. Or love him, I guess. At least, if he bangs his head climbing into my car I get this sort of clutch to my stomach. You reckon we could call that love?”
Delia was still considering this question as Belle went on. “But I can’t help noticing, Dee: most folks marry just because they decide they’ve reached that stage. I mean, even if they don’t have any particular person picked out yet. Then they pick someone out. It’s like their marriages are arranged, same as in those foreign countries-except that here, the bride and groom are the ones who do the arranging.”
Delia laughed. She said, “Well, now I don’t know what to say. Am I supposed to congratulate you, or not?”
“Oh, well, sure,” Belle said. “Congratulate me, I guess.” And her left hand rose swaybacked from the wheel for a moment so she could admire her diamond.
The Mermaid’s Chambers was a peeling turquoise motel on the wrong side of the highway, between a T-shirt shop and a liquor store. But Belle had got her a very good discount, and Delia wasn’t planning to spend much time in her room anyhow.
Each morning, she crossed the highway carrying her tote and a motel bedspread, along with a Styrofoam cup of coffee. She rented an umbrella on the beach and settled herself amid a crowd that thickened as the day progressed-squealing children, impossibly beautiful teenagers, parents in assorted weights and ages, and stringy white grandparents. First she sat drinking her coffee as she stared out at the horizon, and then, when she had finished, she pulled a book from her tote and started reading.
Here in Ocean City she was back to romances, an average of one a day. They seemed overblown and slushy after her library books, and she read them almost without thinking about them, paying more heed to the yellow warmth soaking through her umbrella, the cries of gulls and children, the sunburned feet scrunching past her in the sand. One day, she started a book about a bride who was kidnapped by her fiancé’s brother, and she realized partway through that this was what she’d been reading on last year’s vacation. She checked the title: yes, Captive of Clarion Castle. She gazed toward the ocean. A mother was holding her diapered baby just above reach of the surf, and the radios all around were playing “Under the Boardwalk,” and Delia fancied she caught sight of her own self strolling south alongside the festoons of sea foam.
Toward noon she would stand up and head toward the boardwalk for lunch. She ate in one or another rinky-dink café-a sandwich shop, a pizza joint-blinking away the purple spangles that swarmed across her vision in the sudden dimness. Then she returned to her umbrella and napped awhile, after which she read a bit more. Later she took a walk down the beach, just a short walk because her ankle still sent out a little blade of tenderness every time she put any weight on it. And then she went for her one swim of the day.
She spent forever submerging, like someone removing a strip of adhesive tape by painful degrees. Arms lifted fastidiously, stomach sucked in with a gasp, she advanced at a gingerly, crabwise angle so as to present the narrowest surface to the breakers. Finally, though, she was in, and not a hair on her head was dampened if she’d played her cards right. She floated far out with a smug sense of achievement, sending a lofty, amused glance shoreward whenever the swell she bobbed on crashed against the shrieking throngs in the shallows. And she always waited for the most docile wave to carry her back to land-although sometimes she misjudged and found herself knocked off her feet and churning underwater like a load of laundry.
Then she staggered onto the beach, streaming droplets and wringing out the skirt of her suit. By that time all her sunblock would have been washed off, and her face grew steadily pinker and more freckled over the course of her vacation. Her first act when she returned to her room at the end of every day was to check the mirror, and every day a more highly colored person gazed back at her. When she peeled off her swimsuit, a second suit of fish-white skin lay beneath it. In the shower her feet developed scarlet smatterings across the tops.
She lounged on the bed in Sam’s beach robe and toweled her hair dry. Filed her nails. Watched the news. Later, when the moldy-smelling, air-conditioned air began to chill her, she dressed and went out to dinner-a different restaurant each night. Her Sundays at the Bay Arms stood her in good stead, and she dined alone serenely, making her way through three full courses as she surveyed the nearby tables. Then she sat on the boardwalk awhile, if she could find an empty bench. The racket of video games and rock music pummeled her from behind; in front stretched the empty black ocean, fringing itself white beneath a partly erased disk of moon.
She was back in her room by nine most nights. In bed by ten. She turned off the air conditioner and slept under just a sheet, lightly sweating in the warm air that drifted through her window.
One day was cloudy, with scattered, spitting rain, and she stayed inside and watched TV. Talk shows, mostly: a whole new world. People would say anything on television, she found. Family members who hadn’t spoken in years spoke at length for the camera. Women wept in public. By the time Delia turned the set off her face ached, as if she’d attended too many social events. She went out for a walk and bought a new book to read, not a romance but something more serious and believable, about poor people living in Maine. For her walk she wore her Miss Grinstead cardigan, which clung gently to her arms and made her feel like a cherished child.
Twice she sent postcards to Noah at camp. Nice weather, nice waves, she wrote. That sort of thing. She bought a card for Joel too but couldn’t decide what to say. In the end, she wrote Belle instead. This was a really good idea. Thank you for setting things up for me. Belle’s friend Mineola, a dyed brunette in pedal pushers and stiletto heels, always greeted her amiably but otherwise left her alone, which suited Delia just fine.