Izzy and I worked on sculpting a giant sunbathing couple out of the sand. Izzy heaped mounds of sand for the woman’s breasts. I thought about making a penis for the man, then decided to make a Ken-doll lump instead. After last night, I felt confident that my initial urge to sculpt male genitalia didn’t make me a sex addict.
“That’s a funny penis,” Izzy said.
“It’s just a mound. We’re going to cover it with a bathing suit.”
We each took a bucket and walked along the beach collecting driftwood and shells for bathing suits. For hair we collected sea grass.
We were silently working on the seashell bathing suits when Dr. and Mrs. Cone approached, each carrying a chair. Mrs. Cone wore a giant hat and sunglasses. Her lips were orange and waxy. Her bikini covered so little, I wondered why she was wearing it at all.
“Look what we’re making!” Izzy said, and they both put down their chairs and came to examine the people.
“Beautiful!” Dr. Cone kissed Izzy’s head. She was sweating and her hair gleamed like a new penny.
“Amazing.” Mrs. Cone bent over Izzy and kissed her head too. “Everything okay?” She looked at me.
“Yeah. Everything’s good.”
“We had birds in a nest for breakfast and Jimmy made West Virginia steak for lunch!”
“Oh yeah? What’s that?” Mrs. Cone looked at me.
“Skinny, skinny, skinny meat.” Izzy went back to placing shells.
“Fried bologna. He said it’s what he ate for lunch when he was a kid.”
Mrs. Cone looked over at Jimmy and Sheba, who had barely moved. She turned back to me. “I’m sorry about what I might have said last night.”
I couldn’t tell if she was apologizing to me or just expressing regret. “It’s okay,” I said quickly.
Dr. Cone settled in his chair and opened his book.
Mrs. Cone forced a smile at me. She rubbed Izzy’s sweaty head and then went to her chair beside Dr. Cone’s.
Jimmy and Sheba woke up a few minutes later. I could hear Mrs. Cone apologizing to them, too. She claimed she was drunk and didn’t even remember what she had said, but that Dr. Cone had told her and “Boy, was it a doozy.”
“I’ve done way worse,” Jimmy said. But I thought he’d probably never said worse. Jimmy seemed to take good care of the feelings of everyone around him. He was always trying to make Sheba happy first, and the rest of us happy next.
If you’d been watching a film of us that last day, or over dinner that night, or even the next morning as we packed up the car, it wouldn’t have seemed that anything had changed. But something had. I felt like an invisible vibrating net had separated us into three alliances. The first was Jimmy, Sheba, Izzy, and me. The next was Dr. Cone, who had always remained outside everything anyway, as if someone had to be the real adult, the one in charge of keeping things aligned. And the third was Mrs. Cone. Mrs. Cone seemed slightly adrift and abandoned. She and Sheba chatted as usual, but their chumminess felt a little more stiff and guarded. Sheba wasn’t letting her in anymore. I knew she’d never again mention hotels in Antibes or handbags purchased at the flea market in Paris.
11
The time at the beach had gone quickly, but at the same time, it felt expansive. It was as if a whole season had zoomed by rather than a week. At home in my own bed, I missed everyone at the Cone house. With my mother, at breakfast, I felt like an imposter. Even my clothes were false, as I’d left the wardrobe Sheba had bought me at the Cones’ house, and promptly changed into a new outfit each morning right after I arrived. My mother, who had known everything about me since birth—what I ate, when I slept, who my friends were, what music I listened to, and what books I read—suddenly had a stranger at her table. But I was the only one who was aware of the change. I was now someone who had gone to family group therapy for sex addiction and knew the words to both the A and B sides of every Running Water album. Like Sheba in her wigs—I couldn’t wait to get to the Cones so I could rip off the false self and just be me. Barefoot. Singing. Cooking dinner. Wearing a bikini. Playing with Izzy’s hair.
Dr. and Mrs. Cone acted as if that night at the beach had never happened, but I noticed an effort in their relationship that hadn’t previously existed. They almost never touched each other, and when one spoke, the other shut up entirely as if to be careful not to interrupt or correct.
Three weeks after we’d returned from the beach, Mrs. Cone left the house in the afternoon for a hair appointment. Izzy and I were in the TV room, folding clothes. Laundry was one of Izzy’s favorite activities: every stage of it, from sorting to putting it away.