Sullivan's Island Read online

  “Ride me! Yes! My tiger!”

  Then an all too familiar voice said, “I’m gonna give it to you like you want it! Tell me you want it!”

  “Oh! Yes! Please!”

  It took me about one split second to realize I was about to confront some major bullshit. My heart sank. I could’ve walked out of there and maintained my dignity, but oh, no. Not me. Something made me open the door. The tiger—whose bare backside faced me—was none other than my husband, Tom. The female he rode—whose ankles he held high in the air while she clung to my headboard—was the chemically enhanced and surgically improved young woman who ran the New Age bookstore on St. Phillip’s Street. I stood there in the doorway with the poker, anger rising like a geyser, waiting for them to realize they had company, thinking for a split second that a poker was a rather Freudian and humorously named weapon to have at the moment. I cleared my throat as loudly as I could when it was clear my husband and his love puppy didn’t have a clue. She was the first to react.

  “Tom!” she screamed. “Stop! My God!” She scrambled to cover herself with my sheets.

  He turned around to face me and started screaming, “What are you doing here?”

  “I live here,” I said. My voice sounded weak. “I forgot some papers.” I couldn’t move.

  “Well, go get them,” he said, “and close the door!” He sounded cold and foreign. Not like the man I had shared the last sixteen years with.

  His dismissal finally infuriated me beyond reason. “Get out of my house,” I said, “both of you.” I crossed the room and raised the fireplace tool over Tom’s head. They were suddenly horrified and begged me to put it down. They scrambled to the other side of the bed to escape, caught in the sheets, knocking a lamp from the end table, sending it smashing to the ground.

  “Please, Susan! I can explain! Don’t do this!” Tom was pleading with me and, thank God, I heard him. I would’ve hit them both, bashed their brains in. I dropped the cast-iron poker to the floor and began trembling. I’d never hit anyone in my life and suddenly there was a raging murderer inside of me.

  “Get out,” I said to her in a low voice. My heart pounded so hard I thought I might have a stroke. She slipped out of the bed, naked and wet with perspiration, her blond hair all matted in the back from her tiger ride. Her dark pubic hair was shaved into a heart shape. “Who do you think you are?” I hissed at her. “You’re not even a real blond!”

  “Go downstairs, Susan,” Tom said, “try to pull yourself together.”

  “Really?” I said. “Pull myself together? You’re in my bed with this slut and I should worry about how I behave? This bitch is screaming ‘Ride me like a tiger!’ and I should compose myself? I’ll tell you what, Tom Hayes. You get that cheap whore out of my house and get your ass dressed and downstairs in five minutes. If you can’t give me the apology of your life, I want you out of this house today. Is that clear?”

  I didn’t even know if he answered me. I slammed the door so hard behind me that it thundered all over the house. I don’t remember going to the kitchen, or lighting the cigarette I found myself smoking a few minutes later. I heard the front door close. Silence. I waited for Tom to appear. Silence followed by silence. I went back to the foot of the stairs.

  “Tom?”

  He was gone.

  I called my office after some time and apologized, saying that I had become ill, asking my boss to do the presentation. My illness wasn’t a lie. The room spun around me as I fed the support material for the presentation through the fax in Tom’s study. I pulled the sheets and pillowcases off our bed and flipped the mattress. I got a sponge and wiped down every square inch of my bathroom and dusted every surface in my room. It wasn’t until I put the linens in the washer that I began to cry. I saw by the kitchen clock that it was afternoon—it was two-thirty. Beth had cheerleader practice and she wouldn’t be home until five. What would I say to her?

  I debated calling Tom’s office but before I could think of what to say, I heard the front door open again. In a matter of seconds I turned to see Tom staring at me. I knew I looked horrible. My eyes were all swollen and red. Somehow the favorite dress I had chosen to wear to work now seemed frumpy and dowdy. I stood there in my stocking feet. I felt a run growing by my big toe on my left foot—it ran right up the front of my leg. I had to wear black pantyhose today? It came to me in a rush that my nails were chipped and my hair hadn’t had a professional cut in six months. Needless to say, I was twenty pounds overweight.

  I looked hard at Tom. He was tan and fit. He stood quietly in the doorway to the kitchen. His teeth were perfect, his stomach was as flat and hard as Formica and his loafers were shining from diligent polish. He pulled off his tie and began to roll it around his hand.

  “We need to talk,” he said.

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “I’m sorry you found us, Susan,” he said.

  “Wait a minute. You’re sorry I found you? Shouldn’t the first thing you apologize for be that you betrayed me?” I began to panic all over again.

  “Of course I’m sorry I betrayed you,” he said quietly, looking at the floor. “We had it good together for a long time.”

  “What are you saying, Tom?” My breath was uneven.

  “I’m saying I think we should try living apart for a while,” he said.

  There it was. The hideous truth. He wanted out.

  “Why? Tom, why? Look, I know things haven’t been great between us lately. I mean, I know we haven’t been as close as we used to be, but I can change. I can try harder.” I was pleading and I could see from his expression that he was embarrassed by it.

  “Please, Susan, don’t make this any harder than it is,” he said.

  “Don’t make it harder? What does that mean?”

  “I just need some space, some time to think,” he said. “It has to be this way.”

  “Why?” I began to cry. “What about Beth? What about our family, Tom? What about me?”

  “Look, I just came back to get some things. You know I’ll take care of you and Beth. I’ll talk to her. I just have to have some time, Susan.”

  “Look at me, Tom. Look at me in the face and tell me why this is happening, because I don’t understand.”

  When he looked at me I knew all at once why it was happening. He didn’t love me anymore. He didn’t even look guilty. He looked relieved. He cleared his throat.

  “Where is my black hanging bag?” he said.

  “Find it yourself,” I said. It began to sink in that he was really leaving. Nothing I could say or do would change that. “And while you’re finding your black hanging bag that I worked overtime to buy you for Father’s Day last year…oh, God. It’s on the third floor in the hall closet.” I was going to tell him to go to hell but I couldn’t get the words out of my throat. What difference would it have made? Father’s Day. I watched him leave the room and listened to his quiet footsteps on the stairs. I heard him walk overhead and up the steps again to the third floor. I couldn’t move. I felt like someone had died and it was such a shock that I couldn’t absorb it. Suddenly I started thinking about seeing him in bed with that woman and then I started getting mad again.

  I went upstairs and found him lifting stacks of shirts from his drawer and putting them on the bed. His hanging bag was spread open and held several suits. I sat on the other side of the bed and tucked my feet under me.

  “What’s her name, Tom?” No answer. “Come on, Tom, she must have a name.”

  He opened his sock drawer and stopped. “Karen,” he said.

  “How old is she? I mean, she’s obviously younger than I am. Just out of curiosity…”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Nineteen? Twenty?” I was being a bitch but, hey, I figured, why not? “So, do you think she loves you for yourself?”

  “Susan, she’s twenty-three and yes, she loves me for myself.”

  “And you love her too. Is that right?”

  “Yes, I think so,” he said
in a whisper.

  “What was that? I couldn’t hear you, Tom. Did you say she’s closer to Beth’s age than to yours and that you are in love with her?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “I see. Well, we may as well be civilized about this, to the extent that’s possible for me anyway.” I got up from the bed and went to the bathroom. He closed the drawer to let me pass without touching him. That act of avoidance infuriated me further. “No sense in prolonging the misery,” I said, “I’ll pack your shaving kit for you.”

  “Thanks,” he said.

  I closed the bathroom door behind me, locked it and looked in the mirror. I had never been so furious in my life. I ran the cold water, took off my glasses and washed my face. When had I stopped wearing contact lenses? Ten years ago? When had my teeth started turning yellow? Five years ago? I pulled his leather bag from the cabinet under the sink and opened it. Condoms? How old were they? I took his razor from his medicine cabinet and dropped it in the bag, along with his shaving cream and the Colgate. Reaching for his toothbrush, I looked at it and realized he’d been brushing his teeth for somebody else for a long time. I don’t know what possessed me to do it but I dunked it in the toilet. That pleased me so much that I rubbed it around the inside rim. That seemed so pleasant I then scrubbed up under the rim, good and hard, where no toilet brush could’ve reached in weeks.

  “Tom, do you want a hair dryer?” My heart was pounding as I put the toothbrush in its holder and dropped it in the bag.

  “No, that’s okay,” he said.

  “I’ll be out in a minute,” I said. I pulled off my pantyhose and threw them in the wastebasket. I took his aftershave and cologne out of the medicine cabinet. It occurred to me that he’d been wearing these for Karen. I peed in the bathroom glass, drained the Aramis and poured urine into two of his cologne bottles. “Up yours,” I said quietly. I dropped the bottles in his bag and zipped it closed. Once more I looked in the mirror. I wondered what had become of the nice girl I once was.

  When I went back to the bedroom, his suitcase was gone. I took the shaving kit downstairs and met him at the door.

  “Where can I reach you?” I said, handing it to him.

  “I’ll call you,” he said.

  We just stood there looking at each other.

  “I’m sorry, Susan, it’s not you, it’s me,” he said. He turned and left.

  “Yeah,” I said. I watched him go to his car, the same way I had a million other times.

  One

  The Porch

  1999

  I began putting my life back together at the feet of my older sister and her family. She lived in Momma’s house—the family shrine—on the front beach of Sullivan’s Island. Every time I went over to the Island—which was frequent in the first months after Tom left—I tried to leave the harsh realities of my new life behind me.

  My old station wagon rolled slowly across the causeway, liberating my daughter and me from the starched life of the peninsula to the tiny dream kingdom of Sullivan’s Island. Black magic and cunja powder swirled invisibly in the air. The sheer mist became the milky fog of my past.

  From within the pink and white branches of the overgrown oleanders, which lined both sides of the road, floated the spirits of decades long gone. The haints were still there, just waiting for us in the tall grasses and bushes. Suffice it to say that everything in the Lowcountry was just a-wiggling with life and it wasn’t always a warm body.

  The spirits urged me to roll down my windows and breathe in the musk-laden drug of the marsh. The scents of plough mud and rotting marsh life filled my senses like a warm shower of rare perfume. Then the sirens sounded their cue and the drawbridge lifted up before us to allow passage for a tall-masted sailboat. We would be detained on the Charleston side for fifteen minutes. I left my car to stand outside and feel the air. Beth stayed in the car listening to the radio.

  I walked to the edge of the marsh. The full force of the salty air washed my face and, in an instant, I was a young girl again.

  I was hurrying home to my momma and Livvie, my heart already there. The sweet steam of Livvie’s simmering okra soup beckoned in a long finger all the way from the back porch. In my mind I heard the voices of my brothers and my sister as we converged on the supper table, all of us bickering in Gullah over the largest piece of cornbread. Livvie ran interference, telling us to hush, warning us that Daddy was coming.

  It was odd what I remembered about growing up. My first associations were tied into the smells of the marsh and the aromas of the kitchen. Maybe I should have done fragrance research instead of planning literacy programs at the county library, but I was always more inclined toward saving the world. One thing was for sure, I needed a job that would let me offer my opinions because, according to everybody I knew, that was one area where I excelled.

  Livvie. God, not a day passed that I didn’t remember her. She raised me—all of us, actually. Here was an old Gullah woman who put her own five children through college working as a housekeeper. Just when she should have been thinking retirement, she took on the notorious clan of Hamilton hardheaded ignoramuses. She was the captain of our destiny, redirecting our course as often as needed. With every snap of her fingers we woke up to the truths of life and our own potential a little more. It was because of her that we all loved to read. She’d shake her head and lecture. “Feast your hungry brain with a good book,” she’d say. “Quit wasting time! Life’s short. Humph!” Humph, indeed. Who was I kidding? It was because of her that we were not all in some treatment program. She had taught us how to think—no small feat.

  She’d probably have had plenty to say if she could have seen Beth and me right now, playing instead of working. I’d told my boss I had a doctor’s appointment. A tiny lie. But I had an excellent excuse for playing hooky on this particular weekday afternoon. Heat. Over one hundred degrees every day since last week. We were having a heat wave, Lowcountry style. It felt as if old-fashioned southern cooks were deep-frying us in bubbling oil like a bunch of breaded chickens. One flip of the wrist and the whole of Charleston and its barrier islands sizzled in a cast-iron skillet. We’re talking hot, Bubba. Take it from an old Geechee girl. Geechee? That would be someone born in the Lowcountry, which extends from the Ogeechee River down in Georgia clear up to Georgetown, South Carolina. I was raised in the downy bosom of the Gullah culture, as opposed to a Charlestonian reared in the strictures of the Episcopal Church. Big difference. Gullah culture? Ah, Gullah. It’s Lowcountry magic. That’s all.

  Coming to the Island made me feel younger, a little more reckless, and as I finally went back to my car and closed the door—pausing one moment to lower the audio assault of the radio—I realized the Island also made me lighthearted. I was willingly becoming re-addicted. As we arrived on the Island, I pointed out the signs of summer’s early arrival to Beth, my fourteen-year-old certified volcano.

  “Oh, my Lord, look! There’s Mrs. Schroeder!” I said. “I can’t believe she’s still alive.” The old woman was draped over her porch swing in her housecoat.

  “Who? I mean, like, who cares, Mom? She’s an old goat!”

  “Well, honey, when you’re an old goat like her, you will. Look at her, poor old thing with that wet rag, trying to cool her neck. Good Lord. What a life.”

  “Shuh! Dawg life better, iffin you ask me!”

  I smiled at her. Beth’s Gullah wasn’t great, but we were working on it.

  “This ’eah life done been plan by Gawd’s hand, chile,” I said.

  It was a small but important blessing how the Gullah language of my youth had become a communication link to her. A budding teenager was a terrible curse for a single parent, especially given the exotic possibilities of our family’s gene pool. But speaking Gullah had become a swift ramp to her soul.

  Gullah was the Creole language developed by West Africans when they were brought to the Lowcountry as slaves. While it mostly used English words in our lifetime, it had a structure and cadence all its own and
most especially it had many unforgettable idiomatic expressions.

  It was spoken by Livvie, taught to us, and we passed on the tradition to our own children. We used it to speak endearing words to each other, to end a small disagreement or to ignite memories of the tender time we spent with Livvie. When I was Beth’s age every kid on the Island spoke Gullah to some extent, at least those lucky enough to have someone like Livvie.

  I stopped at the corner for some gas at Buddy’s Gulf Station, the Island institution renowned for price gouging on everything from gasoline to cigarettes. We got out of the car, I to perform the elegant task of pumping the gas and Beth to get a cold Coke. A group of old Island salts were ogling the thermometer in front of Buddy’s store. One of the old men called out to Buddy.

  “Jesus! If it’s this hot in June, what’s August gone be like?”

  “Gone sell y’all a loada ice, ’eah?” Buddy said.

  “Gone be hotter than the hinges on the back door of hell, that’s what!” the old man shot back. “Humph!”

  I smiled, listening to them. They sounded the same as Islanders had sounded for generations, same accent, same lilt in their speech. Traces of Gullah phrasing. It was my favorite music.

  As we drove down the Island I decided to take Atlantic Avenue to check the horizon, watch the shrimp boats and container ships. Today’s slow ride did not disappoint us. Boats were everywhere. I pointed them out to Beth. It was the whole world, these container ships, coming and going from our busy port as they had done for centuries. She nodded with me in agreement. First, that it was beautiful, second, that we were lucky to be there.

  Along our drive by the water, we passed ten or so young mothers pulling their offspring home in wagons from the sweltering beaches, hopping from one bare foot to the other on the blistering asphalt roads.

  “How stupid is that?” Beth said.

  “What?”

  “Shoot, Momma, even I know not to go to the beach without flip-flops or sandals! God, they must be dying!”