Southern Legitimacy Statement: All my writing seems to make a character out of place. My home is a character whose beauty haunts me always. Always, I return to West Virginia.
By the Bay
The Cassas girls keep a radio in the kitchen that spits static in syncopated waves. Jennie sits cross-legged on the living room couch, licking cheese dust off her fingers, putting her hand back in to fish out more puffs. The neighbor boy knocks on the screen door in the back. He’s brown-eyed and wears a faux diamond in his left ear.
Jennie gets up with orange stuck to her hands and swings the door towards her. “What you want, Cal?”
“Where’s Monica?” He’s two years older than Monica, four more than Jennie, and he does not sing. He does not ever sing.
“I said what you want?”
“I wanna take her to the pool.”
“We ain’t got money.”
He’s got a roll of quarters in his hand and puts it to his lips, raising his eyebrows.
“I’m commin’ too.”
He takes the quarters and breaks them over the door frame. He’s gentle when he does this, expressionless as if he were christening a ship, and coins drop to the concrete porch.
“Come on, Cal,” Jennie rolls her eyes. “Pick em up.” She lets the door slam as she backtracks through the kitchen shouting, “Monnie!” over and over. She calls up the stairs, “Monnie, Monnie. Your boyfriend’s here!”
“Coming, I’m coming.” Monica treads down the stairs and into the kitchen with a reserved smile.
“You got here quick,” Jennie says leaning in the kitchen door frame, “I’m getting’ my swimsuit on.”
Cal asks Monica, “We gonna have fun today?”
She tells him sure, “whatever you want,” and she bends down to pick up quarters. Her hands are wet with sweat but she tucks her hair behind her ears with her index fingers, coins clenched in both fists. She wears costume jewelry, a ruby in the left ear, a sapphire in the right, and they glitter in the sun.
“Are we really going to the pool?” Monica asks him and empties her fists into his outheld hands.
Cal puts his hands in his pockets and they sing with loose change.
Jennie runs back into the kitchen, “Good now?” she says looking to her sister, “I say I’m good now to go.”
“Lock the door,” Monica tells her, walking away, Cal’s arm across her sunburned shoulders. And she does not look back.
The screen door slams behind Jennie, running, “Wait up, guys, wait.”
“Hey,” she says catching up, “Monnie, where’s your swimsuit?”
“Under my clothes.”
“No it innt.”
“Yes it is.”
“Shut up,” Cal interjects, “shut the hell up. Jesus.”
They go in silence down Water Street.
“I’m hungry.”
“Sis, come on.”
“I want a milkshake.”
“I ain’t buying you two no milkshakes. Come on.”
“Wait up,” Jennie cries out, “way, way, wait, my shoes is rubbin’.”
They pause at the intersection and wait for the crosswalk to tell them when to pass.
“Hey, this ain’t the way to the pool.”
“Come on, Sis.”
“Why we goin’ to the river?”
“Got your swimsuit don’t you?” Cal asks. Then he turns to Monica, “Is she always loud like this?”
“Ya know I can hear you,” Jennie says, “I listen to everything.”
“Hey,” Monica says, “don’t it look like rain.”
The crosswalk sign switches and they cross to the other side of the road where there’s a row of faded houses before the river. They parade in silence through someone’s side yard. Jennie drags her hand across the chains of a swingset and Monica shakes her head. A kid must have lived there.
When they get to the clearing by the water, Cal looks to Monica. He tells her to sit down, and she sits next to him on the veins of a tree trunk.
“What you esspect me to do?” Jennie asks.
“Just wait,” Monica says. “You can go in the river if you want.”
“It’s dirty in there.”
Cal says, “Go wade out the water.”
“They put poison in there.”
“You ain’t know that.”
“Well,” Jennie turns from them, “I’m lookin’ for seashells.”
Jennie’s walking down the bank singing “Down By the Bay,” and getting the words mixed up. There are no watermelons but in the song she sings, they’re everywhere. Watermelons floating down bodies of water like balloons.
Cal empties his pockets.
“Is that–”
“It ain’t gonna hurt you, Mon. Aren’t you smokin’ cigarettes? Those are worse for you. All that.” He puts it to his lips, flicks the lighter. Inhale, exhale.
He hands it to Monica and she shakes on the exhale.
“Sorry,” she coughs.
“You’re good, girl. Good girl.”
They watch Jennie kicking stones into the river. How they sink.
“Hey, Cal,” Monica says to him, “you think you’ll ever go to the seaside?”
“I dunno.”
“Don’t you want to see it?”
He pauses, says he doesn’t know.
“I heard it goes on,” she tells him, “forever and ever.”
Jennie makes her way back, pockets clanging with rocks. “Hey,” she shouts, “they’re aren’t any sea shells here.”
Cal leans forward yelling. “This ain’t the beach, bi—”
“Hey—” Monica says and he hold her hand to the place where his heart might be. “Hey.”
And then, the clouds open up and rain pours down, down. Monica and Cal sit on the bank while Jennie wades into the water with her eyes welling and her pockets dragging her toward the bottom. They’re all staring up into the sky, all three of them, and Jennie lets herself slip in until her body disappears to the murk and her hair forms a dark halo, drifting soft in a downstream current.
