CHAPTER 2
Hydroplaning

A novella by Lynn Hamilton

Their second week off, they started fragmenting‹visibly to anyone who knew them well. Edwina took to clawing the air shamelessly for a book idea.

"People misunderstand about writers," she raved over morning coffee. "They think you have to write, because you have all these ideas bursting to get out." Who the hell does she think she is, telling me about being a writer? thought Veronica.

"Writing is like a drug," explained Edwina trying not to spill coffee on herself or the table. "You don't have to write. Ideas don't surge inside you like the tide. But you need the drug, so you search for them, desperately. Without them, you turn weird and depressive."

"Speak for yourself," snapped Veronica.

"I am, Veronica. You're not blocked. God, woman, you have diarrhea of the pen. John Updike is lucky if he wrote a letter last week, and you've knocked off fifty new poems. I'm telling you this because you know how hard it is. Other people think all you have to do is pick up the pen."

"Picking up your pen is a start," said Veronica, adding a word to one of her columns. "That pink blouse you wore last week looks great on you," she added, meaningfully. Meaning that the crumpled red and black check flannel shirt and faded black cotton pants Edwina had on now looked like shit. Veronica wore pristinely ironed, form fitting new blue jeans and a white cashmere sweater that set off her olive skin. A hint of gold flashed here and there.

Edwina thought if she walked on the beach to her favorite restaurant, called Breakfast of Champions, that she might find something to write about. It was a bright day, cloudless and warm with a stiff, freshening breeze blowing off the Atlantic. The water chopped itself into interesting configurations. The sort of day that's heartbreaking to a writer with block, the way it ignores her ennui and despair. It ought to have been decently overcast and gloomy, she considered. On a day like this, nature was sort of slapping you in the face and saying she didn't intend to organize the weather around you.

The sky refused to darken in sympathy with her mood. Seagulls hopped around on one foot. Why didn't they use both feet when they were on the ground? One of them pecked at the remnants of a fast food burger, seduced and abandoned on the beach in its styrofoam house. She drove the gull away and picked up the styrofoam. Over the next mile, she also picked up a brown glass beer bottle and a plastic bag. Who was trashing her island? Look at this! She found a soda can and picked that up as well.

When she got to "Champs," as the locals called it, the waitress looked at her sympathetically and said, "Would you like me to throw those out for you?"

Edwina looked down at the refuse she was carrying. She had forgotten all about it in her new absorption with the seagull question.

"Certainly not. These are all recyclables." Out of respect to conventional sentiment about the garbage of strangers, she set them on the floor at her feet instead of the seat next to her.

She was, as usual, unnerved by the life-size papier mache reproduction of herself sitting in the east corner of the restaurant. It was the work of Arlo Mahew with whom she had shared a row in fourth grade. Arlo's career had peaked in an exhibit, held over for six months at the Guggenheim, before he settled back into the dignified anonymity of Tybee. The Champs sculpture was called "Island Writers" and captured Veronica and Edwina as they had looked ten years ago in all their odd couple glory‹Edwina as tall and broad-shouldered as a good-sized man, Veronica small and jewel like. They had, at that time, developed a habit of breakfasting every morning at Champs and working on their writing for two or three hours at one of the big, vinyl tables next to a window that admitted a cheerful, encouraging light.

That was where we peaked, Edwina thought, lamenting lost vigor. That had been the year of Veronica's lauded Volume Three: Poems for Half Way There and Edwina's famous Sea Shells: A History of Collection. That was also back when Veronica still smoked and in Arlo had rendered her taking a deep drag off a Camel. She had boycotted Champs after one look at that sculpture.

"My nose looks like a ski slope, and I would never wear chunky jewelry," she had pronounced. "And if my mother saw me smoking, she would die."

Arlo may have gone a little out of his way to make them tacky and eccentric, but there was still something alarmingly truthful about his work. Lately, Edwina had noticed an undeniable age difference between herself and art. She looked more haggard now‹sweeter in papier mache. Though in point of fact, at 49, she had been brittle, sharp-edged, uncompromising. She had let almost no one and nothing off the hook. The relative life of ease she now led, running a bed and breakfast (and she had to admit, in saner moments, that it didn't really work her that hard), Veronica, and a proximity to the Atlantic Ocean had all contributed to grinding off the Emily Brontesque roughness of her personality. Funny how one grew inwardly seraphic as, outwardly, she seemed to become grimmer and harder to please.

While Edwina was breakfasting at Champs, Veronica was balancing her checkbook. When she came upon a stub that was utterly and completely blank, her heart started hammering at once. She looked at the irises on the wallpaper. She looked back at the check stub. It was still blank.

"Okay. Don't panic," she said aloud to herself.

She looked in the mirror next to the table. Ordinarily the sight of herself looking neatly dressed with every hair in place would have been reassuring, but now it was to no avail. A wave of panic crashed over her. Could someone have let himself in through a window, shuffled through her checkbook and torn out this one check, near the back? Had he cleared out her account weeks ago? She rarely checked her statements. She had only about $400 in her personal account, but to someone with only $400, that's a lot of money. She took deep, slow breaths to keep from hyperventilating. Maybe she had paid for something with a check and forgotten. She made a list of all the things she had bought recently:

€Ten ballpoint pens for a dollar at "Nothing Costs More Than a Buck."

€Velcro, at $2.50, to replace the snap on a dress her mother had bought her fifteen years ago.

€One pair of pink nylons for $1.50 to accent her pink cashmere sweater, a gift from her mother, just weeks before she died.

€Chocolate chips for $2.20 to make those cookies Edwina whines for.

She read the list over and over. Nothing looked like an item you wrote a check for, but she was not above writing one for fifty cents, if caught out with no cash. In all her life, though, she had never left a check completely unrecorded. She couldn't believe it of herself. It must have been a thief. But who? She never left the checks anywhere but in her purse. And that hadn't been out of her sight except around the house.

Dammit! She should have blown it on a string of pearls like she had thought of doing.

Erika Jameson. The name suddenly popped into Veronica¹s mind.

She checked the date of the check. Yes. It coincided with Erika's visit. She felt an overflow of sweat from under her arm trickle down her side. Was this the revenge of Erika Jameson? And what would she consider appropriate restitution? Her bill for two nights plus one dinner came to $240. That was more than half of Veronica's balance. Had she awarded herself damages, as well, for breach of artistry? Another trickle wet Veronica's silk blouse, another gift from her mother who, upon giving it to her, had said something like, "I can't die until I see you decently attired for the rest of your life. You have absolutely no taste. Buy nothing new. Be buried in this blouse." Where, where, where had she written that check?

Erika Jameson.

No. Impossible. The woman was a pillar of the literary and social world.

The first thing Edwina saw, as she walked in the door, was Veronica, bent as intensely over a poem as her friend had ever seen her.

This is it, Edwina thought. She'll be named Poet Laureate for this one, and I'll be lucky to publish a letter to the editor of The Island Shopper.

On seeing Edwina, Veronica screamed and ran to place her head on Edwina's capacious bosom. Veronica hadn't needed a hug since they had been seniors in high school when neither had gotten asked to the prom, so Edwina knew something was cataclysmically wrong.

"Quick," said Veronica, her pupils constricted to pinheads. "When was the last time you saw me write a check?"

Edwina indulged in one of those long, aggravating silences that made people think they should repeat the question, or say some inane thing like, "Hello? Knock, knock? Anyone home?"

"When you ran to the store for egg beaters,² Edwina said at last. ³Remember? Erika thought we were trying to give her a heart attack with your sour cream chicken and started carrying on about cholesterol. I went with you just to get out of the house, and to buy aspirin because she was giving me a headache. Hey, do you know anything about styrofoam?" Edwina asked, waving a styrofoam hamburger-to-go box.

Veronica had unspilled tears standing in her eyes.

"Styrofoam? What are you raving about? I've just had the scare of my life." She exhaled some oxygen that had accumulated dangerously in her lungs and sat down to fill out her missing check stub with the cost of a dozen eggs at Tybee Foods. She happened to know it was exactly $3.45 including tax.

"This container is claiming to be 100% recyclable," Edwina said, bringing the box closer to her naked face and honing in on the small print. "'Where programs exist.' Well, where? some county of ten in the north of Maine, probably. Nobody here is going to bother themselves till the junk is bursting open their back doors."

Veronica resumed her cool and arched an eyebrow at the garbage Edwina had brought in.

"Been housecleaning on the beach, have we?"

"These things are all recyclable."

"Yes, but as you pointed out‹Okay, test." Veronica crossed to where Edwina had lined up the can, bottle, box, and bag. "Which of these items can be recycled in your community?" She smiled glaringly, like a game show hostess and moved from bag to box to can to bottle, gesturing at them with exaggerated poise like Vanna White. Except that, compared to Veronica, Vanna looks a little ungainly.

"These"- she picked up the box and bag- "can be recycled in some progressive rural community in California. You propose to mail them there?"

"There must be someplace that takes cardboard and plastic," Edwina insisted.

"Yes, if you want to drive out to the wilds of Vidalia, get lost for three hours, be escorted to the nearest highway by a local police officer with a vocabulary of three words, blow a tire on a piece of glass from an unrecycled bottle, and probably if you found the place, they'd tell you it's the wrong kind of cardboard. They only take the other kind."

Edwina doggedly set up two new boxes in the kitchen for cardboard and plastic; combined with the boxes for aluminum, paper, and glass that were already there, they took up the entire west wall. Then she called her publisher from their study. As the personnel at World Wonder Books reconnected her through a hierarchy of staff, she glanced around at the shelves‹lined floor to ceiling with their own books and those of authors they admired. This was the only comfortable room in the house with its wine and beige oriental rug and its black stuffed chairs with matching ottomans‹imitation leather, but nonetheless warm and inviting. The light from two deep-set windows glanced off gilt edgings on spine after spine. The books were set far back on the shelves, while in the foreground of lesser used volumes stood kaleidoscopes, tiny brass and ceramic figurines, stuffed animals, and paperweights, many of them gifts from envious and contemptuous friends, and a very few from satisfied guests.

A long, dark writing table with narrow drawers took the place of desks, though Veronica usually wrote at the kitchen table. On bad days, Edwina thought she did it to taunt her (Edwina) with her (Veronica's) prolixity at breakfast.

"Hello, Edwina," echoed the voice of her publisher, always sunny and patronizing. She was a genius, his tone seemed to say, but a moron in the arena of business and grammar into which she had now stumbled, babe in the woods that she was. "Writer's block?"

"Arlington, are you God or something?"

A patronizing chuckle assailed her ear.

"No, dear, but writers at work usually write to me. You do it yourself. They're at their typewriters, anyway, so it's less trouble. The fact that they've strayed to the phone is a bad sign."

"My telephone is only four feet from the desk."

"It's mental distance we're talking about, dear, not physical. How go the dolphins?"

"Lucky you didn't give me an advance."

"I would never give you an advance, dear. I'm not that foolish."

"I'm kind of stuck on dolphins. I've been looking at seagulls lately, thinking along the lines of their corruption by junk food, the way they hop around on one foot. Call it something like ³Why Seagulls Hop, Instead of Walking."

There was a diplomatic silence, followed by a clearing of the throat on his end.

³They stand on one foot to conserve body warmth, dear. One less appendage exposed to the harsh winter elements, you see.²

³Did everyone know that but me?²

³Well, among naturalists, perhaps . . . At any rate, seagulls are a bit tired, don¹t you think? Jonathan Livingston Seagull pretty much killed that market for the next century. I'm sure you have a new slant on it, but‹"

"That was literary. You're a science publisher."

"Soft science, dear. We're not that far apart. Chatty, popular science. Otherwise I would have to send you under water with instruments."

Edwina pushed her broad shoulders back and straightened her long spine. "Are you saying I'm not up to it?"

"No, no, dear not at all. Not that. I just thought at your age . . . ² Edwina growled softly into the receiver. "Last time I checked, I was not bed ridden, Arlington."

"Well, dear, if you want to line up a boat and some gear, I could try to authorize a small expense account‹"

"Oh, never mind, but if you don't like the seagull idea, I'm lost."

"How is the hotelier business?"

"God, Arlington, it's a bed and breakfast, an unpublicized one, thanks to you."

"Edwina, you can't really expect me to attach a reservation request form to the jacket of your books."

"I never suggested that. I just wanted you to print, 'Call (912) 555-5950 for reservations' in my bio."

"Edwina, I already compromise my sensitivity when I have you photographed in front of your house, air brush out the cinder block lines, so people think it's stucco, etch in creeping roses gracefully framing one window, and print 'Edwina Curry runs a bed and breakfast on Tybee Island, Georgia with her fellow writer, the award-winning poet Veronica Able.' But surely you don't have trouble filling the place?"

"Arlington, we have one guestroom. One guest and we're filled. In the summer, we're booked every night. Every one is. You don't have to be an artiste. The American Bald Eagle and Owner motel is full every night during the summer and its owner has tattoos and a hard time reading your application form. In winter, this place is dead. We had one guest in two weeks, and Veronica decided to close for five."

An alarmed, tentatively disapproving murmur filled her ear.

"Was that wise, dear? Don't you need some structure . Eventually, Arlington managed to get her off the phone, on the grounds that she was such a busy person. He had given her absolutely no ideas, no direction for her work. She stood looking out a window, entirely free of any floral obstructions. The view pretty much consisted of old Mr. Fetter, in a pair of check shorts the elastic waist of which was badly strained and a tee-shirt, finishing off a domestic beer and tossing it with a basketball player's flourish at a full wastebasket. It missed and rolled against two other empties that had met the same fate.

"Pig," said Edwina, softly, in case her voice carried through the two windows. "Landfill monger."

Veronica popped her head into the study and arched a brow drawn in a perfect bow curve.

"Talking to ourselves, now? I'm going up to get our mail. Be back in a few minutes." Edwina wandered into the kitchen where Veronica had left the three poems she'd produced, just that morning, on the table.

Chapter 3