CHAPTER 5
Hydroplaning

A novella by Lynn Hamilton

At two that morning, Veronica rolled over in Belmont Mayhew's bed.

"My. That was good exercise," she said.

"Thank you for not making me chase you for three months."

"Would you have?"

"You bet. I'm no fool."

The next week, Edwina and Veronica made a pilgrimage to southside Savannah, to the mall. They had to buy Christmas presents.

Edwina wore a pair of muddy brown sweat pants, badly creased around the hips and well pummelled at the knees. She piled a black turtleneck and orange cardigan over them. It was uncharacteristically cold for the deep south, and she didn't intend to suffer for glamour. She brought her own shopping bags-a large canvas tote filled with plastic grocery bags from Tybee Foods.

Veronica was even more than usually chic in a pink cashmere pullover, stone- washed jeans, and her little elf boots, she carried her checkbook and emergency make-up in an eelskin bag.

"You've seen Belmont. Don't you think he would look good in a smoking jacket?" Veronica asked.

"You've only known the guy a week. Shouldn't you get him something for under $50?"

"I promise not to marry him, Edwina. So what's the point of knowing him for five years? Just so you know if there's schizophrenia in the family, right? Because whether you can get along with someone? You can tell that in ten minutes. And I've slept with him for the past five nights."

"Don't gloat."

They passed an imports shop, a brasses shop, and a luggage shop.

"Oh, look, Edwina." Veronica detoured sharply off into a toy shop. "Belmont would love this." She stroked a four-foot tall stuffed giraffe.

"That giraffe has the stupidest expression I have ever seen," said Edwina.

"You're such a dream killer."

"Look at it. It's eyes are crossed, and it's got its tongue stuck out."

"I'm getting it for him."

It only cost $80.

While Veronica was shopping for Belmont's sweater in Elk's Department Store, she heard Edwina ordering truffles at the candy counter.

Like she really needs those, Veronica thought. If she would get laid once in a while, she wouldn't have such a craving for chocolate.

"Three brandy, one amaretto, I'll take that last double Dutch chocolate you have there. . ."Edwina's clarion voice drifted across the racks of men's clothing.

Is she getting an entire pound? Veronica fingered a wine-colored sweater. Would it make him look sallow? She pushed it aside and looked at the next one. No, not black. He wore enough of that. Hmmm-this grasshopper green was interesting.

Edwina stopped the candy clerk as she was reaching for a bag.

"Would you put them in this please?" Edwina handed her a plastic Tybee Foods grocery sack.

"This isn't an Elk's bag," said the clerk, full of wonder.

"That's okay. Just put them in there. We're saving on resources and landfills today."

"I can't put Elk's merchandise in anything but an Elk's bag."

"Don't be silly. Of course you can. Just take your two hands and pile them in there."

The clerk picked up the phone. "Manager to the candy desk," was broadcast throughout the store.

It took a few uncomfortable minutes in which the candy clerk pretended she had something to do and Veronica paid for the bright green sweater, but at last a brisk woman in a khaki suit and sensible, orthopedic shoes marched up to the counter. She gave Edwina a troubled once over as the clerk filled her ear with the story.

"Um," the manager said. Clearly, her province was not the visible one of charming customers. Edwina guessed that she ran the scenes from one of those bleak customer-service corners that you try not to end up in while shopping.

"The problem is," said the manager, her eyes glancing over to Veronica who had just approached, Elk's bag cooperatively in hand, "that we're required to give out an Elk's bag with every Elk's purchase."

Veronica was wearing her best I'm-a-saint-to-endure-you look. It consisted of a hint of smile, forced sharply up at the edges, and wide-open, patient eyes.

"I tell you what," she said, flashing the manager with a full, belle smile. "Why don't you put the candy in Edwina's bag-just to make her happy-give her the Elk's bag separately, and then let her give it back to you.

The manager nodded efficiently. "You can do it that way," she told the clerk. She stayed to supervise the transaction.

As the writers were walking away, she smiled graciously at Veronica and said, sotto voce, "It's so nice of you to take in one of our homeless during this holiday season."

"Don't scream till we get out to the parking lot," Veronica ordered as they swept past the perfumes.

Christmas came and went with a minimum of elation. Edwina gave Veronica two new cotton bras, for which she was grateful, and a dozen "X-tra Lite Tutch" condoms in party colors, at which she raised more than one eyebrow. Veronica gave Edwina a vibrator, for obvious reasons, and a heavy-duty horse shoe magnet, because she had found Edwina, one morning, intensely applying the refrigerator magnet, a particularly odious version of Minnie Mouse from which some of the paint had chipped, to one empty can after another. Veronica had watched in a silence that couldn't really be described as spellbound, as Edwina placed the magnet on a can formerly full of green beans up until the previous night's dinner. It clung there to the side of the can. Then she tried making it stick to the side of a diet coke can, but the magnet refused to adhere and fell, instead, to the table.

"Edwina, what the hell are you doing?" Veronica had finally asked.

Edwina, who had been entirely unaware of any audience, cleared her chair by two inches.

"Don't do that," she implored.

"I will repeat myself. What the hell are you

"Separating metal and aluminum."

"God, Edwina, are you really obsessing over garbage this early in the , morning? I haven't even had breakfast yet."

"Only steel cans are magnetic. That's how we can tell the steel from the aluminum cans."

"Correction, Edwina, that's how you can tell."

"It'll be easy to separate them. You just flip the magnet at it. If it clings, it goes in the steel bin. If it doesn't, it goes in-"

"What steel bin? Edwina, we don't have room in the kitchen for any more bins."

"I'll set up a table above the ones we have and then we can fit two or three more."

"Edwina, I am doing my share in a backward little island town that makes about one change per century and only under protest. I will continue to keep my diet coke cans separate. If you want to go rummaging among the wet paper towels and egg shells for last night's soup can-"

"I think I'll set up a box for styrofoam, too."

"We don't use styrofoam, fool!"

"There's always the stuff I find on the beach."

Veronica decided to work in their study that day. Specifically, she stormed into their study and locked the door. She didn't think it was possible to be much more pissed off with Edwina until the next day when she realized that she had missed an appointment to have her hair colored. She found the memo which was to have reminded her, on the kitchen floor where it had dropped when Edwina plucked the magnet off the refrigerator.

She was actually pleased when Edwina announced that she would be making a recycling road trip, leaving at sunrise and getting back well after nightfall.

Good, thought Veronica. I can have Belmont over and we won't have to sneak around her edges.

She declined to get up at 5:30 and help Edwina pack up their Ford with boxes full of styrofoam (the accumulation of several days worth of beach combing), plastic, cardboard (mostly boxes in which Christmas gifts had been packaged), and steel cans.

When she heard her roommate shuffling through refuse and slamming car dors in the wee hours, she rolled over, irritably, and fell promptly back into the sleep of the guiltless.

Belmont came over at ten by which time she had shaken off the morning lethargy that smites middle age more ferociously than youth. She had washed and braided her beautiful hair-in need of touching up, but still lovely-had breakfasted lightly on an ounce of shredded wheat and large quantities of orange juice, and had donned a diaphanous and elegant dressing gown., a calculated message, designed to eliminate confusion.

It worked well. After she had fortified his strength with a cup of coffee and some whole grain toast, they got straight to business.

Presently, when they had recaptured their breath, he said, "Let's go to the river, get in some trouble."

They both laughed easily which was a blessing and created around them a bubble of illusion that they were paired souls-Frieda and D. H., Edward and Zeida, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett-untouchable by common domestic misunderstandings.

Veronica gazed contentedly out the window of his Volvo as they sped by the marshes. Winter had turned the swamp grass a burnt, almost orange tone. Against it, the water looked like sky, deep and transparent blue. "We have our wheat fields and sky mottled beneath our feet," she thought.

Out loud, she said, "Shouldn't you slow down, Belmont? The water's over the road again."

The tide had risen troublesomely, in the way that so often made Veronica sigh with relief that she lived in the inelegant middle island. And there were two inches of water covering the road just a hundred feet ahead of them.

"God, no," said Belmont. "I haven't flirted with danger for over an hour."

They hit the puddle at 65 miles an hour and Veronica could feel the exact moment that Belmont lost control of the car. For two seconds, she saw him revolving the wheel around in sickeningly easy circles, first right, then left as they veered toward the swamp. She saw that his foot was off the brake. Well, he was doing everything right. Not that it made a fucking bit of difference. Just before the second wheel left the road, the car responded, slightly, to Belmont's persistent efforts to steer and went into a head spin. The air bags bloomed, forcing Veronica's head up, so that the only view she got was of the skylight framing the same patch of sky in rapid, circular motions.

They reared to a graceful stop on the thin strip of solid ground separating road from swamp. A car honked, reprovingly, as it passed at a cautious 34 miles per hour.

They burst into laughter. Veronica boxed her air bag.

"What's this, Belmont?"

"Safety feature."

"Kind of futile, wouldn't you say? For someone with a death wish?"

When they had mashed and folded the air bags back into place, she asked, "What did you do an hour ago that was so dangerous?"

"Don't you remember? You're more fatal than anything I can do in a car, lady."

At Kevin Barry's, she took a sip from her margharita and smiled a lot as an acceptable substitute for not drinking more. When Belmont excused himself for a minute, she dashed down the ingredients for a V-tonic on a cocktail napkin and handed it to the bartender.

"Gotcha," he said in a pleasant baritone and winked at her. With a speed and panache that surpassed even Margot's, he juggled bottles from hand to hand, from hand to glass, and replaced her potent margarita with a non-toxic ringer, heavy on the green.

"Are you this nice to all the alcoholics?" she asked.

"You'd be surprised how many I know."

Belmont didn't notice a thing.

Veronica couldn't bear for a man she liked to have no ambitions, but it appeared Belmont had none.

"I bet you write music," she said, while the bartender told a joke to the "lads" on the other end of the bar.

"Nope."

"Play an instrument?"

"Just my radio."

She got that look on her face. If only he had known her as well as Edwina, he would have known to make something up. Bluff. Fast. It was her look of polite thwartedness.

He looked like one of those SCAIM students. How the hell could he have no talent?

Internally, she slapped her forehead. She would never act out such a gesture. That's how Edwina smeared her make-up. On the few days she bothered to wear any.

"I bet you inherited the artistic eye from your father."

He cleared his throat. "To tell you the truth-"

"No, of course, you can't admit it. No one wants to be like their parents. But if you have a gift, you have to use it, you know."

She tried to engage him on the subject of Warhol, Kandinski, Munch. He managed to keep an interested look on his face until his attention was diverted by a pink drink the bartender was concocting.

"Excuse me," he said. "Was that maraschino?"

"Yes," answered the bartender.

"I didn't recognize the drink," Belmont hinted, wistfully.

There was a pause during which Veronica hoped it was fair game to change the subject.

"Now Munch-" She pronounced it "munch."

"Munk," corrected the bartender. "You like the screamer? There's this wonderful painting he did‹but I can't remember its name. Next time you come in, I'll remember it." He smiled at her.

Belmont was still looking longingly at the pink drink.

"It's called a 'Cool Fire Hydrant.' My own invention. You want one?"

"No-the recipe," said Belmont.

"Belmont's a bartender, too," Veronica explained. "At least for now," she added, threateningly.

Chapter 6