CHAPTER 1
Hydroplaning

A novella by Lynn Hamilton

It may have been a bad idea to close the Bed and Breakfast for five weeks. One week would have been more like it.

It was a guest, Erika Jameson, who drove Veronica to declare a vacation for herself and Edwina. It went something like this:

"Edwina, if we don't close this joint, I'm going to kill you."

"We need the money," said Edwina.

"We've only had one guest in the last two weeks and look what she was."

"You must have known, when we opened a B&B, that not every guest was going to act like Eleanor Roosevelt."

"That's not what you told me. That wasn't the word picture you painted when you lured me into this sordid enterprise. You implied that our readers would come from all corners of the earth to sit at our feet, that they would be far too worshipful of our genius to leave their beds unmade and stray hairs from their combs on our carpets for me to vacuum."

"I do the vacuuming," corrected Edwina, always the stickler for accuracy. "You haven't vacuumed for 55 weeks."

"We-he-hell, we have been keeping track, I see. And this coming from the same woman who doesn't need a vacation?"

"We only have $3000 in our account."

"That's plenty to buy Christmas presents and unwind our nervous systems for a few weeks. I'll be honest with you, Veronica. I'm doing this as much for you as for me. You're getting that look in your eye."

"I'm not aware of it."

"I know. That's what scares me."

"Shouldn't we be saving for our old age?"

"Edwina, you're 59. I'm fifty. We're already old and poor. It's too late to prevent it. You can keep this place open if you insist, but in that case I will move to a hotel for five weeks‹a nice hotel with a heated pool and room service where, for money, some lovely, nubile young man can be persuaded to massage my every joint. That should pretty much wipe out our savings. But you forget your chief motive for vacationing."

"Remind me."

"Because otherwise I'll kill you."

With that incentive, Edwina agreed to a vacation of five weeks. That was on December 2.

On December first, Erika Jameson had checked out of her room in high dudgeon.

"I'm paying my bill under protest," she had said, raising her chin half an inch, an unconscious ruling class gesture. "Your brochure says . . .

"We don't really have a brochure," said Veronica, her hand twitching to rip the check out of Erika's hand. She saw that it was already signed and made out for the correct amount. What was Jameson raving about? That one-page form-letter they sent people who called or wrote in for reservations? Brochure? Piddle! No institution could be more poorly advertised than this one.

"Your brochure," Jameson repeated, "Claims that your accommodations are, I quote²‹she raised her chin another fraction of an inch "airy and well lighted. It does not reveal that your establishment is a cinder block bungalow with one bathroom."

The check was describing graceful arcs in the air as she gestured dramatically with the hand that held it. Veronica summoned all her will power to keep her eyes off it and on Erika's face, a pale, powdery face with too much eye make-up for a woman with that many wrinkles and that kind of money. Veronica forced an artificial smile to go with the coerced eye contact.

"Coastal Georgia is hurricane country, Mrs. Jameson. Our houses have to be built with that in mind. An island like this is especially vulnerable.

"This can hardly be called an island. It's separated from the mainland by a creek."

"Still, we cling to the misconception. It's sort of a mass madness, if you hadn't noticed. That's why it's called Tybee Island."

Edwina had been vacuuming Erika's iron gray hairs off the carpet of the guest room and couldn't hear the precise words, but she could tell from the rising tone of Veronica's voice that disaster pended. She grabbed the water glass off the dresser and cupped it to the wall, her ear following hard on it.

"Your brochure," continued Mrs. Jameson, unflaggingly, "says that your Bed and Breakfast is situated one quarter block from the beach. It does not mention that one must cross a four-lane highway to get to the aforementioned beach.

"One hundred dollars a night for a room with a shared lavatory can be regarded as nothing short of extortion under these circumstances. I'm not finished," she said, regally checking Veronica's impulse to justify.

"My chief disappointment, however, has been not so much in the material inadequacies of this establishment, grave as they are, but in the spiritual and intellectual impoverishment of its proprietors."

Ouch! Edwina winced. Long ago, she had tacitly agreed to do the vacuuming in exchange for not ever having to confront a guest with her bill. At times like these, she realized what a good bargain she had made.

"I have to say," Erika went on, in her perfectly modulated, League of Women voters voice, "that I expected a much loftier and more refined species of conversation from an internationally recognized naturalist and a prize-winning poet. Where you found inspiration to produce poems like

"Kitchen By the Sea" and "Dolphins Laugh In Passing" will be a life-long mystery to me. I'm tempted to believe that they were ghost written except that I know, from painful and first-hand experience, that no respectable ghost writer could endure a prolonged association with either of you.

"Your conversation at breakfast has consisted of endless, circular quarrels over how long the sausages should be cooked . . .²

I hope she gets trichinosis, thought Edwina, vengefully, centering her ear more precisely in the mouth of the glass.

". . . and recitations of every evening you ever spent drinking and dancing in one den of iniquity or another with blood-curdling details concerning the men you danced with total strangers as I understand and the quantities of alcohol you consumed. Evidently, your memories are photographic with respect to every margarita you have ever imbibed. No detail concerning the strength, number of ice cubes, and saltiness of the glass seems to be beneath your recollection. lf I especially desired to know where in Savannah and all its outlying communities one could purchase the best cocktails for the money, this past weekend would have been invaluable.

"To crown my disappointment, last evening, before I retired to that wretched little barrack which you persist in calling a guest room, I sat with you for exactly two hours in this very room, hoping against defeated hope to experience some of the intellectual atmosphere and stimulation, the desire for which brought me to this cultural wasteland. What could have been a witty and memorable fireside chat with two literary lionesses was utterly routed by, first of all, the lack of a fireplace, but never mind that, and second, by your and Mz. Curry's preoccupation with a commercial magazine featuring an article on bachelors in Savannah. You positively salivated over their photographs. Again, no detail of their physiognomy was beneath your attention. I listened to full-scale evaluations of their hair, teeth, and arm muscles. And I had so hoped to go to my grave thinking that poets and scientists were above such thoughts. I glean more insight and wisdom from the conversation of my gardener." She slapped the check into Veronica's palm, picked up her brocade overnight case, gathered her fur at her throat, and sallied out the door.

With her went all of Edwina's inspiration. As sure as if Erika Jameson had packed it into that elegant, designer case.

As long as they had had guests, Edwina had had literary ambitions, strokes of genius she chafed to pursue, brainstorms which she was tragically prevented from pursuing by demanding patrons who made a mess of their rooms and sometimes asked for dinner! As if there were no restaurants on the island, if they would just clear out of the house and go to them. With a self-sacrificing sigh, Veronica would go into the kitchen, set Edwina achopping she could handle that and prepare a mouth-watering meal for which they would add only $40 per person to the final bill.

As long as they had had guests, even as rarely as once a fortnight, Edwina burned to work on a new book Why Dolphins Jum in which she planned to explore the joire de vivre, the evanescent je ne se quoi, and the conjugal bliss of our watery friends in hopes of finding new paths of happiness that humans might tread. The first week of their vacation, she wrote one paragraph and dismissed the whole project as obsessive, eccentric, and unscientific.

Veronica, of course, was thriving. Well, she would, thought Edwina. It's her vacation. This vacation had crept up on Edwina like a mugger and had coshed and robbed her before she even knew what was afoot.

But Veronica. Veronica was up with the sun, writing reams of poetry. Their first week off, Edwina would haul her six-foot lumberjack frame into their kitchen about ten a.m. in an unwashed housecoat, breathing hard, trying to get some oxygen into at least the major organs (the heart would be nice), trying to unseal her right eyelid manually, and there would be Veronica, petite and bandbox perfect, fully made-up, sitting at the table next to a pitcher of orange juice, filling up page after page with those narrow columns of free verse.

"I've been thinking of what I should have said to Erika Jameson," said Veronica one morning, looking up from her prolific output.

"Oh, Veronica, please forget that woman," said Edwina, staggering to the coffee maker and prizing her right eye open. As soon as she reached for fresh grounds, it sealed shut again like a polyp. Veronica had been reliving the, admittedly painful, episode with their last guest for three days.

"Do you think those plastic magnolias in the bathroom window are what she's talking about? I took a good look at them this morning as I was evacuating. They're not in what the bourgeoisie would regard as good taste, are they?"

Edwina considered her roommate and business partner with one eye. If a china doll could be endowed with a really vicious sense of irony, Veronica would have a twin.

"Veronica, whether or not they're tacky, we can't very well chuck them. Those magnolias are all that stop the Fetters next door from watching us as we empty our bladders. Not that I care, especially, but you and the guests might find it inhibiting. You know as well as I do that's an irregular window. No shade can be found to fit it, and it would cost us hundreds to drape it." She popped open a new bag of cereal and a generous helping of it went flying through the air and rattling across the floor and counter. On the bright side, her right eye was admitting a slit of late morning light now, of its own will.

"Breakfast is a trial to you, isn't it?" said Veronica dryly, not looking up.

"Oh, shut up."

Edwina sat down to cope with her cereal, trying not to look into the mirror which was so unfortunately placed right there in the kitchen. She had given into looking like Gertrude Stein, at last, after a battle lasting fifty-six years. Right now, her butchered hair, still mostly dark brown, was matted flat on one side, the same side that was swollen and puffy. How did this happen to someone who slept on her back?

By contrast, Veronica looked refreshed, as if the previous night¹s sleep had taken another five years off her age. She could now pass for 39. Her hair, hennaed into a nearly mythical color somewhere between auburn and burnt gold was swept off her valentine-shaped face into a graceful French braid.

"What are you doing today?" Veronica asked

"Writing?" said Edwina, wretchedly.

"Dolphins?" asked Veronica, making piercing eye contact.

"Actually, I thought I'd look back through some of my old books, see if I can find some inspiration, something to follow up on."

"Bad idea, and you know why."

Veronica was right, of course. Maddeningly. It was gratifying to the vanity to peruse one's already published work. "To think I wrote that! How clever I must be," pretty much summed up that side of it, especially after the publisher had swept out all those pesky misplaced modifiers with a new broom (Why couldn't she see them? Clearly her high school English teachers had failed her) and off set it in big, clean type. It positively leapt off the page and caressed you with its lucidity and logic.

The problem was that shortly the delighted "I wrote that!" turned into a doubtful "How did I write that?" then spiraled fatally downward to "How the hell did I write that? I don't write that well anymore. Where did all my ideas go? Well, obviously, into this book. I'm dried up now."

Unknown to Veronica, Edwina had already broken into her former triumphs, had already begun that disaster course. Yesterday.

"Do you think plastic chrysanthemums would look better?" Veronica dogged on obsessively.

"Maybe the magnolias are too obvious for the south. They're awfully dusty, too. Do you think that's what she meant by material inadequacies?" She was still trying to rescue herself from Erika Jameson's scathing indictment.

"Veronica, that woman didn't leave any space between her lines for you to read. It's all there in the words. The old story. We weren't as interesting as our books. So who is? All the color drains out of us and onto the page. We're empty husks of former interest."

"That's a pleasant thought to start the day with."

Edwina raised an overflowing spoonful of cereal uncertainly to her face.

"Don't forget to feed yourself through the mouth," added Veronica maliciously. "I'm tired of picking cereal out of your ear."

***

Trimming the tree was the central activity of the first week of vacation, when they were still passing for stable. Veronica left Edwina in the living room wrestling a man-made tree branch into the socket of its acrylic trunk and went into their study to sort and untangle ornaments. She had just unknotted a string of popcorn when she spied a red ball that struck a sinister chord in her memory. Surely not. She lifted it by its hook and examined it from several angles. There in Gothic script was inscribed, "First Christmas Together." How had it eluded her all these years? She had searched every box for this one. Her eyes darkened as she thought about her ex-husband, Norm, and his assertion that she was wasting her time on poetry. She set the ornament gently on the floor and brought a tiny elfin boot down on it with all the might in her leg.

In the other room, Edwina winced. She knew what that sudden stamp meant. Veronica had only been married five years, but evidently she had run amuck, during that time, buying Christmas ornaments. She had carried out a stamping and crushing orgy when she came home with the divorce papers, but even so, one or two that she had missed turned up every Christmas.

Edwina sometimes regretted that Veronica was so ritualistic about Christmas. It locked them into a schedule and, worse, into a dubious aesthetic. That Santa's head ornament, for instance, that Veronica insisted on placing at the top of the tree. Crafted out of a tennis ball, colored cotton, and pipe cleaners, it looked like a goat's ass. But Veronica had fashioned it back when she was a stalk of thirteen.

"It's ugly," Edwina had tried, one year.

"It's traditional."

"But it's ugly."

"Go suck eggs, Edwina."

One of Veronica's Christmas obsessions was the Christmas tree skirt she had made twenty-five years ago.

"I spent days making that skirt. And the day I filed for a divorce against Norm, Mrs. Donner let herself into our house and took it out of my drawer. I know because people who have been to her house at Christmas have remarked what beautiful decorations she has, and I ask about the skirt, and they say, 'Yes, funny you should mention it,' and they go on to describe it, and it's my skirt exactly."

Mrs. Donner, Veronica's ex-mother-in-law, lived right there on the island, less than a mile away. Edwina had a sudden criminal inspiration. What the hell, she thought. It's going to be a long holiday, and I'll probably be doing weirder things than this before it's over anyway. She slunk into the guest bedroom, as quietly as six-foot tall woman, weighing in at 180 pounds can, locked the door, turned the television on low volume to drown her voice, and picked up the phone.

"Hello, Mrs. Donner. Hello. Mrs. Donner." Edwina practiced Erika's Jameson's god-like inflections until Mrs. Donner answered.

"Hello, Mrs. Donner. This is Ruby O'Hara from the Lutherans' Mercy Children and Bomb Shelter. We're seeking donations to our Christmas drive."

"Where did you say you're calling from?" replied Mrs. Donner. She sounded reedier and more fragile than Edwina had expected.

"Specifically, we are still urgently in need of the following items . . ." Edwina plowed on.

"There's no Lutheran Church on Tybee. Where are you calling from?" " . . . Eggplant recipes, modern verse translations of Asclepius, Christmas tree skirts, designer knee socks. First of all, do you even own any of these items?"

"I'm sorry. I have my own charities that I give to generously."

Dial tone.

Chapter 2