Although Tipper spends her days making piecrusts and peeling asparagus, for me, she wants college. A life of the mind and achievement. She is unmovable.
I walk a path of my parents’ making. I walk it the same way I walk the wooden walkways they’ve made that stretch across Beechwood. I do not see how to step off.
If I exit the walkways into the bushes, under the trees, or onto the sand—it doesn’t matter.
I am still on their island.
* * *
—
PFEFF ACTS AS if we never quarreled, and I act as if I never cared. We hang out in the same room, but we don’t really speak to each other. The situation is tolerable.
Night after night at Goose, the boys turn the music up loud. R.E.M., Prince, and the Talking Heads. We play Scrabble, or poker for pennies and dimes. One night we watch Ben-Hur and another, Mary Poppins. The living room is cluttered with bags of chips and empty cans. When the night air is warm, the boys run fearlessly down to the Tiny Beach and throw their bodies into the black night water.
Some evenings, Penny and Erin come to Goose, as well, but they have taken to walking the island’s perimeter path together, smoking clove cigarettes that Erin brought with her and talking endlessly. “We’re doing the walk-and-talk,” says Penny, shaking her head when one of the boys asks her if she’s coming to Goose.
One evening, about eight days after Pfeff and I went to Edgartown and argued, we are in the sea, up to our chests. Me, Pfeff, Yardley, George, and Major. The night air is muggy and the waves gentle.
George: “Let’s play Sausage.”
Yardley: “Oh, not again.”
Me: “What is it?”
Yardley: “The stupidest game. We played it the other night after you went home.”
George: “Stupid is the joy of it.”
Pfeff: “I’m in.”
Major: “I’m in.”
I am conscious of Pfeff’s body in the water. He trails his hands across the surface, making small waves. My eyes are drawn to the definition of his shoulder muscles, the line of his neck.
George: “Loser is the person who laughs. Or gives an answer that’s not sausage.”
Major: “All right. Yardley, you’re it. You have a new gentleman companion. Oh yay: he has an eight-inch…”
Yardley: “Sausage.”
George: “What comes out of a dog’s butt?”
Yardley: “Sausage.”
Me: “They used to build log cabins out of logs, but now they build them out of…”
Yardley: “Sausage.”
Pfeff: “Plop plop.” He jumps up and down in the water, ridiculously.
Yardley: （laughing） “Oh my god.”
Pfeff: “Ha! Got you.”
Yardley: “Why are you plopping? You were supposed to ask a question with the answer sausage.”
Pfeff: “I know. But if you laugh, you lose. Or if you say something that’s not sausage. Right?”
Yardley: “Plop plop. You’re terrible.”
George: “Accept defeat, Yardley!”
Yardley: “Okay, Carrie’s turn.”
I glance at Pfeff. I don’t want to glance at Pfeff. I don’t want to be thinking about him, and the way his neck felt under my hand when he kissed me, and the way his lips were surprisingly soft. I don’t want to think of it, but I’m nearly naked in the water and he’s only four feet away, and I can hardly think of anything else, even though he’s an inconsiderate dick and I’m not interested.
Me: “Sausage.”
Major: “I have one. You go swimming and it feels like there’s a ton of water in your ear. You shake your head, you know, like you do. And what comes out?”
Me: “Sausage.”
Yardley: “You shoot a wild boar and take it home. What do you do next?”
Me: “Sausage.”
Pfeff: “Beans!”
Yardley: “Pfeff, you are so random.”
Pfeff: “Toothpaste!”
George: “Okay, let’s see. You have a baby and you need to change its diaper…”
Yardley: “George. The baby one is the same as the dog one.”
George: “No, no. It’s totally different.”
Yardley: “You can’t do the same poop joke over and over.”
George: “If it makes Carrie laugh or break into speech, then it counts for the game. That’s the only measure.”
Yardley: “Disagree. Then we could just be having a Make Carrie Laugh contest.”
“Sausage,” I say, very seriously.
“You have to mix up the poop jokes with other things,” says Yardley. “Otherwise they lose their tang.”