My wife and I were alone at a table for eight in this empty saloon on the coast one hot Sunday afternoon last summer.
The door banged open, and two linebackers strode in followed by a robust redhead escorting a spindly old woman with a wig like an eagle’s nest wrapped around her head. She careened over the threshold as if on the deck of a storm-tossed ship.
“Sweet (expletive) Jesus!” she shouted. Her escorts attempted to drag her toward some elevated booth behind us, but she refused.
“What am I, some kind of (expletive) mountain goat?” she bellowed.
Before I could affect a subtle escape, as is my wont at such moments, I heard my wife say “Come join us. We’re almost done and we’re quiet.”
“You kids are going to regret this,” said the woman as she was positioned into a chair opposite me. “I am the loudest (expletive expletive) you’ve ever met. Ha!”
She locked her eyes on my wife: “You look like a lawyer. I need a (expletive) good lawyer.”
My wife said she’d been a teacher for 34 years.
The woman threw up her hands. “Ha!” she shouted. “May all those (expletive) saints and ministers of grace defend you, my dear.” Then she turned to the redhead. “I’ll have what she’s having.”
The redhead demurred and our companion was served lemonade.
The woman glared at her glass.
She took the nest off her head and dropped it on the table. She was bald.
“It’s my 84th birthday, I’m down to one lung from cancer, it got to my spine, I can barely walk, and they want me to drink (expletive) lemonade.”
We nodded sympathetically. The redhead and the linebackers, her daughter and sons, as it turned out, nodded back, apologetically.
“Doctors! I want to sue every (expletive expletive expletive) doctor I ever met! How long have I got left? Ten years? Two? One? Ha!” she said, glaring at her lemonade.
“I still dream about smoking, you know. You can’t believe it. I’m on a sinking ship, and I’ve got a cigarette, and the water is coming up over me and I hold that cigarette up over my head so it’s the last thing to go down,” she said, raising her glass over her head.
My wife and I had been visiting this beach town periodically for 35 years. That means before we were married, before the dogs, then with the dogs, then with a son, and now after all of them have moved on. We always did the same things. Climb the lighthouse, visit the one-room museum, eat as many oysters as we could at as many places as we could, and then fall asleep in each other’s arms on the beach.
Only this time we didn’t.
We were too tired. Now in our sixties, everything we wanted to do was too much work. What was normal in our twenties didn’t seem, what? Possible? We sat on the couch in our rustic rented cabin and watched TV we didn’t want to watch. Like we do at home.
The redhead gave the woman a birthday card. It was one of those pop-up 3D things with rainbows and unicorns and penguins.
“Look at this!” she shouted at us. “Can you believe it? And they don’t even like me!” The redhead gave me a look and winked.
The woman noticed. “Can you believe I used to look like her once?”
“Absolutely,” I said.
“Ha! You’re the lawyer, aren’t you? Tell me you’re a lawyer.”
“I’m a journalist.” She rolled her eyes. “That explains it. May God have mercy on your soul,” she said, making the sign of the cross over me with the dregs of her lemonade.
Then she said, “You like stories? Here’s a story for you.”
The woman said she was the great-grand-daughter of the couple who founded our beach town. They’d filed a claim and platted it in the 1880s and built a hotel with 40 rooms and three saltwater pools. Our companion had done housekeeping there as a teenager until her mother sold it in 1961. It was demolished by developers.
“You can’t believe it,” she said. “I learned to swim in those pools, you can’t swim in the ocean. Tourists drowned in the ocean every year. They still drown. I live on the beach, and I don’t even go to the beach anymore. But when I did go we built forts with the driftwood, and then we’d go into the forts, and you know what? We’d just lie down with our boyfriends and look at the clouds and tell stories. You know what I mean? Ha!”
On the drive back to our cabin, I took the opportunity to search some online archives and was pleased to learn that everything our lunch companion had told us was true. I have refrained from using her name and other details because I did not ask her permission at the time since I didn’t imagine I would be writing about her.
That is until my wife and I got back to the cabin and then walked to the beach and lay down there together to watch the clouds and tell each other our stories.
Ted Olinger lives in Vaughn.
UNDERWRITTEN BY THE FUND FOR NONPROFIT NEWS (NEWSMATCH) AT THE MIAMI FOUNDATION, THE ANGEL GUILD, ADVERTISERS, DONORS AND PEOPLE WHO SUPPORT INDEPENDENT, NONPROFIT LOCAL NEWS
