“We have a lighter load today,” Ada said as the first clients climbed the porch. “I think you’ll be able to go to the beach this afternoon.” I tried not to smile too widely. The corners of Ada’s mouth turned down. “It’s a working trip,” she warned. “We’re running low on men. Ask that little friend of yours for any Jewish members of the beach patrol—or other friends he may have.”
“Can I borrow your lipstick to ask him?”
“No.”
The morning crept by, but it didn’t matter. I was going to see Freddy finally, and all would be right with the world again.
I crossed the dune path, a notebook and pen in my beach bag this time. If I failed, Ada would know and the jig would be up.
Instead of setting up my towel, I went straight to Freddy’s chair. He was sitting, his chin in his hands, his elbows resting on his knees, staring listlessly out at the ocean.
“Hey,” I said, coming around the side.
“Marilyn!” He jumped down, then picked me up and swung me around. “Where have you been? I thought you threw me off.”
“No. Ada kept pushing work at me. And I couldn’t exactly say I had to go to the beach.” Don’t say it, don’t say it, Marilyn, do NOT say it. But the words slipped out anyway. “I waited for you on the deck the other night. I hoped you’d come even though we didn’t have plans.”
“When you didn’t come to the beach, I thought—I’m sorry. I should have come.”
“Pick me up tonight?” I asked.
“Of course. Where do you want to go?”
I smiled. “Anywhere. As long as we’re together.” I started to walk away to set up my towel, but remembered my official reason for being there. “Wait, Freddy!” He had started to climb back up. “Ada sent me today because she’s running out of men. Do you have any friends who might be willing to go on a few dates?”
He shook his head. “She’s something. She won’t give you up, but I’m supposed to give you all my friends?”
“She’s not my father—remember that. I’m only living with her for the summer.”
“Yes, but I don’t want her poisoning your parents against me.” He sighed and turned to Louis, the other lifeguard on the chair. “Give the girl your number.”
“I don’t want to get married anytime soon,” he said, holding up his hands.
“No one’s saying you have to get married,” I explained. “But Ada is really good at this. I’ve seen her system. It works. Worst case scenario, you go on a couple dates. Best case scenario: the sky’s the limit!”
He hesitated for a minute, then wrote down his name and phone number in my notebook.
“I’m almost a little jealous,” Freddy said.
“Don’t be. Once their numbers go in this book, they’re off limits forever according to Ada.”
“Yes, but mine was the first one you got.”
“That just makes you all the more special.”
“Get a room, you two,” Louis grumbled.
Freddy and I both laughed.
When I got back to the house, Ada wasn’t downstairs. I went up, planning to shower, and saw the door to her bedroom was open. That’s new, I thought.
“Ada? You okay?”
“Perfectly so,” she said. I looked through the open door. She was seated in the window nook and for a panicked moment, I wondered if she could have seen me and Freddy from there. He had taken a break and come to sit on my towel with me and there had been some kissing. I craned my neck, but it was impossible to tell what her view was from there. “You can come in.”
An alarm bell went off in my head. I had been with her five weeks now and I had never been invited into her bedroom. I stepped in cautiously. She was holding a stack of papers, a pair of reading glasses on the bridge of her nose. As I approached her, I breathed a sigh of relief. The dunes blocked everything but the water.
“These are good,” she said, gesturing toward the pages.
“What are?”
“Your chapters.”
My eyebrows approached my hairline. “My what?”
“Unless someone else wrote them.”
I felt stripped bare, naked. I wasn’t ready for anyone else to see what I had written, and the audacity of just taking it— “How did you get that?”
She shrugged. “It was next to the typewriter. I was curious.”
“If you wanted to read it, you should have asked.”
“And if I didn’t want to read it, I wouldn’t have given you a typewriter.”
I could feel my chest heaving with righteous anger. How dare she?
But Ada swung her legs around to the ground and patted the seat next to her. “Smooth your ruffled feathers. If it wasn’t good, I wouldn’t have wanted to keep reading. And I did—enough to bring it in here and finish.”
That was enough to make me sit, invasion of privacy or no. “You really liked it?”
“I did. And I don’t typically read romances.”
“It’s not a romance. It’s going to be a comedy.”
Ada tilted her head. “I suppose I can see that.”
“They’re going to get married quickly—without meeting his family first. And they’re going to be simply awful. So they’ll have to navigate that.”
“Not writing from experience, I hope.”
“Yes. I’m secretly married.”
Ada smiled wryly. “You know what I mean.”
“I do. And Freddy gave us a couple of numbers and is going to work on more.”
“And how does he like my lipstick?”
She was watching me carefully to see if I had any tells. “I wouldn’t know,” I said. “But my secret husband loves it.”
Ada swatted me playfully with the pages. “Get out of here.” I took the papers, but she called my name at the door. “You know what it needs?”
“What’s that?”
“A sassy aunt.”
I shook my head with a small laugh, exhaling a huge sigh of relief as I reached my room.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
“I hate sneaking around like this,” Freddy said. We were parked down by the jetty at the north end of town and were in the process of readjusting our clothes in the backseat of the car.
“We’d be sneaking around no matter what. No one is letting us do this anywhere.”
“You know what I mean.”
I sighed. As desperately as I wanted to spend time with Freddy, I didn’t want him talking to my father. I didn’t want to get married and move to Philadelphia and keep house for a year while he finished school. If he wanted to transfer to New York, and we could keep seeing each other, that was one thing, but that didn’t necessitate a conversation with Daddy. I wanted to live first. And Freddy wanted a wife who was going to have dinner on the table for him.
But the only thing I could see in my future if I went that route was me sitting at a Formica-topped kitchen table trying to focus on the typewriter in front of me while a brisket dried out in the oven, a baby crying in the background.
It was the same future I didn’t want with Daniel. And I didn’t understand how these men could claim to be attracted to the fact that I was free, then try to cage me.