She wiped her face. “Get up on the bow, hold on to the rail. Don’t let go. Watch the water, make sure we stay in the channel.”
“What happens if we leave the channel?”
“We could run aground. I don’t want to be out here in a storm.”
I thought I could see her shivering. “Go slow,” I said.
At the prow, I crouched low and held on to the anchor chain with one hand and the metal rail with the other. The water was a roiling black tangle streaked with white and gray, and I couldn’t judge its depth. Lightning flashed to the north. For an instant, I could see the whole Miami coastline, from the Everglades to Cape Florida, in one electric sweep. But then night fell again. Rain slid off my hair into my face. Every time I took my hand from the rail to wipe water from my eyes, the boat tipped and I stumbled. There was another flash of lightning, then another. I used the bright seconds to try to assess the depth of the water. The light silvered the slopes of the waves. “Frances!” called Marse. I couldn’t turn toward her without losing my grip, so I looked up instead. Something ahead of us caught my eye: a red light. “Took you long enough,” shouted Marse into the rain.
The red light approached, followed by the bright white of a boat’s deck, nestled in the night like teeth in a dark mouth. I stepped down and made my way to Marse’s side. Dennis’s boat came closer, and then we could make out the captain himself, a solid figure with one hand on the throttle and one on the wheel. Kyle huddled under a raincoat at the stern.
Four weeks from that night, on a clear evening salted with stars, Marse would attend the Vizcaya gala in an enticing black cocktail dress, and Dennis would dance with her on the mansion’s limestone deck while I watched from our picnic spot on the grass. The heels of their shoes would click against the stone, and over Marse’s shoulder Dennis would meet my eye, and wink, and my heart would buoy. Dennis would say that love is like the electric eel, coiled wherever it happens to live, unflappable and ready to strike. We want to mess with it but we can’t. On that stormy night, though, as the big boat drew nearer, I stood so close to Marse that the rain skated off us as if we were one person, and when we raised our arms to wave, Dennis could not distinguish my hand from hers.
1970
Six months after meeting Dennis, I stood over the kitchen sink in his parents’ home, washing dishes. It was January. Beside me Dennis’s mother, Gloria, smoked a cigarette. She held it more than she smoked it, and it burned away in her pale, thin hand. Although her mouth was closed, every few minutes her jaw worked, as if she were thinking aloud to herself. She tapped the ashes into the sink. This was the house where Dennis had been born and where he’d grown up. I’d been given the tour months earlier, including the room Dennis had occupied as a child, where neatly made twin beds lay under thin navy bedspreads and a University of Miami pennant hung on the wall.
Through the back window, I watched Dennis and his father, Grady, cross the lawn toward the canal that snaked along the back rim of the property. Dennis, slim in faded blue jeans, loped alongside his father in a way that drew attention to his joints. When they reached the short pier where Grady’s boat was moored, Dennis reached across his torso to scratch under his shirtsleeve. Grady was doughy where Dennis was lean; for every step Dennis took, Grady took a step and a half. Grady’s corkscrew sandy orange hair thinned at the crown of his skull; his gestures when he spoke were controlled and deliberate. Grady stood with his hands in his pockets, and after a few minutes—though they faced away from the house, I could tell they were talking by the way their heads moved—he stooped to wipe debris from the pier’s planks with the flat of his hand. Dennis reached down and without bending touched his father’s shoulder blade with his fingertips. When Grady stood again, Dennis’s hand briefly rested at his father’s waist.
Gloria whistled a long, low note and pulled a tea towel from her shoulder, where it had perched all afternoon. She dangled it over the sink and let it drop. “They’re like women, aren’t they?” she said. “The way they chatter.”
I smiled politely. Gloria had given Dennis his slender frame and light eyes. She was two inches taller than I was, at least an inch taller than her husband. I glanced her way and caught her staring: the blunt tip of her nose was pink and her eyes were damp. Unlike my own mother’s face, whose features were broad and suntanned and matted with freckles, Gloria’s face was delicate and pale. Her chin came to a point. Earlier, she’d served coleslaw and chicken salad on the back deck, then filled our glasses with fruity rum punch and returned to the kitchen. In the months I’d known her, I’d learned that she rarely ate a meal during the daytime. She ate breakfast and might nibble on a salad at lunchtime, but eating an entire meal in the afternoon nauseated her. I’d also learned that she thought eating outdoors was distasteful, but agreed to it because she knew other people found it appealing. She took a nap every day and always had, even when Dennis and his younger sister Bette were children. “She just lay down in the playroom while we horsed around,” Dennis had told me, “and a half hour later she got up again.”
Gloria said, “If you were expecting a quiet house, you were mistaken. My men are talkers.” She smiled weakly and turned away, and not for the first time I found myself unable to answer her. She had a dead-end way of conversing; no obvious next step presented itself. But as I watched her walk out of the room, then turned back to the window through which I could see Grady and Dennis standing together on the pier, separated from me by a wide expanse of unmowed green lawn, two thoughts crystallized in my mind. One thought was that, in spite of the fact that she considered it in bad taste to travel hundreds of miles to visit a boy one barely knew, Gloria liked me. The second thought was that Dennis was planning to propose marriage, and soon. This was the topic being discussed outside at that moment, under a sky dimmed by clouds. Dennis and Grady stood looking down into the well of Grady’s lapstrake boat—still the most impressive boat I’ve ever seen, with its polished teak hull and gleaming brass railings—which rested in its slip, laced by bright white mooring lines. Then Dennis stepped toward the house and Grady followed, and as they walked Dennis kept his eyes on the kitchen window—on me—and Grady continued talking, his hands in his pockets. By the time they reached the swimming pool, brief droplets had erupted into a rare winter thunderstorm. I swiped two towels from the laundry room, then greeted them at the back door and ushered them inside.
I’d been fired that week from my job at the bank. I’d missed so much work since meeting Dennis that the manager had called me into his office and asked me, not unkindly, to rearrange my priorities, which I’d promised I would. When I used the shared line in my apartment house to call Dennis and tell him I couldn’t visit for a while, he’d said, “Just come one more time, this weekend.” I suppose I knew then how it would go for us. Before I’d met Dennis, I’d liked my job well enough. I’d liked my small apartment and quiet neighbors and weekly dinners with friends and their husbands. I’d taken long walks on Sundays and spent weekend afternoons helping my mother in her garden. Some nights I opened a bottle of wine and cooked pasta for myself over a burner in the communal kitchen. But when I’d considered where my life was headed, I had not particularly liked the prospects. The men I dated did not woo me, the girls I knew who’d started families did not inspire me. My job, although wholly adequate, did not light anything akin to a fire in my gut. I was not yet sad, but I believed I was headed for sadness, and I blamed myself for having waited to be swept into a more thrilling life. For the first time, after meeting Dennis, I saw in my own future bright, unknowable possibilities. I’m a bit ashamed to have been a person without much agency in life, but I credit myself with knowing something special when I saw it.
In a period of six months, I’d visited Miami five times. I’d taken the train down twice, and three times Dennis had driven up to get me and stayed a night at the motel near my apartment house, then we had driven down to Miami together. During every visit, I saw Marse at least once or twice, for an afternoon shopping or on the boat. There are seven hundred miles of gray highway between Miami and Atlanta. The Sunshine State Parkway was barely a decade old, and it took more than twelve hours to drive each way. When I recall our courtship, I recall as much as anything else the landscape outside the windows of Dennis’s station wagon: the asphalt of the turnpike and the drone of the headlights and the stuttering orange groves. I’d fallen in love in Dennis’s car and under the fluorescent lights of truck stops. We’d spent so much of those six months in car seats that I knew his body as well seated as standing—the hard round caps of his knees, dimpled at the joint, and the bony elbows with which he jabbed me while shifting in his seat, unaware of his breadth.
Between visits, we’d had phone calls. The telephone I shared with the other tenants of my building sat on a wicker table in the hallway outside my room. The phone was butter-yellow in color, the handset heavy as a dumbbell, and when it rang the whole unit rattled as if mocking my heart, which lurched every time. He called most mornings before I left for work, and he would list for me everything he could see from his apartment balcony: two girls surfing, three men standing on the corner smoking cigars in the heat, an old woman wearing a housedress walking a poodle. Or he’d call in the evenings from the pay phone at the law library. “It’s a hundred degrees in the shade here,” he’d said once, “and everyone is studying without shirts on. Will you please tell me why I’m working so hard?” When Dennis spoke of school, he sounded drained.
“Even the girls?” I’d said. “No blouses?”
“Some.”
“Cover your eyes.”
“I’m wearing blinders, so I can see the books.”
He called late at night sometimes, too, and I dragged the telephone out to the porch so as not to disturb my neighbors. When we were together we spoke casually, about whatever happened to cross our minds, but on the phone he asked solemn, mining questions: What was my earliest memory? Did I prefer cats or dogs? Could I imagine myself living on a boat? What if it was a nice, big, clean boat? What was my favorite thing about my family? What was my favorite thing about him? Every thread of conversation stitched back to the topic of us.
I told him I remembered taking my father’s cigarettes from the countertop in my parents’ bathroom and bringing them to my nose—I liked the smell, even at age three. My mother found me and slapped my hand. Dennis remembered being carried on his grandfather’s shoulders through orange groves down south. His grandfather—Grady’s father—sang cowboy songs and whistled. Dennis remembered the smell of the fruit and the feel of the pomade in his grandfather’s hair.
I said I preferred dogs, and Dennis said he did, too. I said, “I would live on a boat for six months, no longer.” He said he would live on a boat for the rest of his life. “I’d like to fish for my dinner,” he said. “I’d bake in the sun until my skin looked like leather.” I told him that when I was a little girl, my father used to cook up reasons to take us for drives in the country, and my mother would let me wear some of her red lipstick, and my father would wave with one hand out the window at every car we passed. I told Dennis that I liked my father’s sense of leisure.
“I like my father’s patience,” said Dennis. “He’ll wait on the fish for hours. I don’t have the heart for it.” He said his father would come home from a day of fishing with small, exciting stories: He’d seen a barracuda jump across the surface of the water, its scales flashing in the sunlight. He’d felt a bump against the side of the boat, and looked down to see the domed back of a manatee. He’d seen a family of dolphins, the smallest no larger than his forearm. “My mother thinks he’s a bit simple, I think,” said Dennis, and I said, “He is simple.” I knew very little of Grady other than what I’d been told. Dennis knew I meant it kindly.
Dennis told me that his sister, Bette, younger by three years, used to sleep in the backyard in the summer. He’d come downstairs in the morning and find his sister and mother sitting outside on Bette’s sleeping bag in their pajamas, eating pancakes off Chinet.
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