Call Me Zelda (27 page)

“Oh!” Zelda clapped her hands together. “Where shall we go, Goofo?”

“How about Bermuda?” he asked. “We’ve always wanted to go there, and it’s not too far.”

“Yes, some island sun would do us well,” said Zelda. “November is such a dreary month.”

I was delighted at the thought of spending a holiday in Bermuda. I’d never been there, and while the Fitzgeralds learned to love each other again I could do some sightseeing and sunbathing.

It was the first time we’d ever left therapy with Scott and Zelda holding hands, and it suddenly felt as if everything might turn out all right for them.

TWENTY

November 1933

Bermuda

Rain.

Dreadful rain soaked our skin as we ran to the hotel lobby. It raged outside the window while we unpacked. Whispered along the terrace where we drank sherry. Drenched us as we walked along Elbow Beach. Lulled us to sleep at night, but woke us in the morning.

The rooms were beautiful but damp, and soon Scott began to cough. He claimed to have suffered from recurring bouts of tuberculosis throughout his life. I did not know whether this was true, but his cough grew wetter and thicker with each passing hour. It sliced through the atmosphere and tensed our shoulders. The more he tried to stop, the worse it became, and I grew worried.

“I’m so sorry,” he wheezed. “This damned rain!”

“Perhaps we should call a doctor,” I said.

“It will clear up soon,” said Zelda.

“My cough or the rain?” asked Scott.

“Both,” said Zelda.

“I don’t want any doctor. I want a vacation from doctors.”

“At the very least,” I said, “you should rest.”

“Yes, rest,” said Zelda. “Anna and I will go biking.”

“In the showers?” he said.

“What do I care?” asked Zelda. “I didn’t come all the way to Bermuda to memorize the interior of our hotel, splendid though it is. I came here to make love to you and see the sights, and I intend to do both.”

He smiled a bit until he fell into another coughing spell. We left him on the bed, spitting mucus from his lungs into his handkerchief and drinking rum.

Once we resolved to spend time outdoors in the rain, it took on a thrilling, surreal quality, and that was how Zelda and I passed the rest of her and Scott’s vacation. We slipped over slick cobblestone roads and pedaled over the sand on our bikes in a state of near euphoria. Zelda laughed and sang and pointed at the places on the island that would have been beautiful under a full sun, yet were still interesting under the cover of clouds: vine-covered rock outcroppings, shallow tidal pools teeming with fish, sulking palm trees, endless stairways, pastel-painted houses, lush bougainvillea, bulky shipyard workers.

Zelda became fixated by the workers.

“Look at their musculature,” she said. “They move like dancers.”

We watched the island men as they wrapped coiled ropes on wood beams, and laughed and called to one another in the downpour. Then we pushed our bikes down to the beach, removed our shoes, and walked along the shore in the wet curve of sand. The beach held us like infants in its arm while we sat, still soaked, and watched a group of island girls and boys playing in the surf. Their sweet voices and laughter reached us between the raindrops and wind.

“These are the happiest children in the world,” said Zelda. “I envy them.”

“They are a snapshot of perfection, aren’t they?” I said.

One of the smaller girls cried out and limped out of the water. The other children ignored her. She plopped onto the sand and pulled her foot in toward her to see what had caused the hurt. I stood, walked over to her, and crouched next to her. She brushed her arm over her eyes to remove the rain or tears.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“I stepped on something,” she said.

There was a tiny dot of blood on the bottom of her foot. She had probably hopped on a piece of shell or rock.

“Let me have a look,” I said. “I’m a nurse.”

She stuck her small foot up in my face, nearly kicking me, and I pretended to fall over. She looked scared until I laughed, and then she pretended to kick me again. We played at this for a bit until she stood and started running around me in circles, encouraging me to chase her.

“I thought you hurt your foot,” I teased.

“It’s good now,” she said.

“It had better be, because I’m going to get you!”

I pretended to lunge at her and she squealed in delight and ran back to her friends in the water. I waved at her and returned to Zelda, who was now standing.

“You would make a good mother,” said Zelda.

I looked at the girl and tried to form the words in my throat. They stuck a little, but it was the right time.

“Zelda, I never finished my story with you that day. About my past.”

She looked at me, her face serene and inviting. “You are a mother,” she said.

I could not hide my shock. “How did you know?” I stammered.

“We’ve dressed together before, Anna,” she said. “The line on one’s stomach never fully fades, does it? The children mark us. We’re forever tethered.”

“Yes,” I said. “Are you upset that I’ve never spoken of it?”

“No,” she said. “There’s a right time for telling things.”

She looped her arm through mine and we began walking back to our bikes.

“Can you tell me what happened?” she asked.

The heavy thing in my heart suddenly became loose.

“Yes,” I said. “I lost her to pneumonia when she was five. Katie. Her name was Katie.”

“How sad, Anna. How terribly sad,” said Zelda. “And yet here you are. Upright. A pillar. A post. A trusty sidekick.”

“I wish I could agree with you. I seem to have a penchant for holding on to the past.”

“Maybe that’s why you cope so well,” she said. “Remembrance allows them to live on.”

“Maybe.”

Remembrance. Even more, confession. It did always made the heavy things come loose. Why did I always forget that?

We retraced our old footsteps in the sand, and Zelda took care to step into each of her old footprints.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“You’ve inspired me. I’m going back in time,” she said. “It makes me sad to see my old footprints in the sand from earlier, when I was younger.”

“It was mere minutes ago,” I said.

“But that was then, and this is now, and time soldiers on.”

“But now you are wiser. Wisdom is the gift of age.”

“Madness seems to be the only gift in my stocking,” she said.

“And beauty, and creativity, and a legacy,” I said.

“And Anna,” she said. “My greatest gift. A true friend.”

I squeezed her closer, and kissed her on the cheek.

When we reached our bikes I turned back to the beach, inhaled the saltwater smell, and threw back my head to take in the elements, feeling invigorated. When I opened my eyes, I saw Zelda smiling at me.

“Look at you,” she said. “Opening like a magnolia, spilling out sun instead of taking it in.”

That was just how I felt.

T
he three of us sat around our table of emptied cups and crumb-covered plates, captivated by the couple across the room.

The woman had the deepest shade of red hair I’d ever seen. The man had slick black hair and warm olive skin. Their feet rested between each other under the table. She held her face in the palm of her hand with her elbow on the table. He toyed with her hair and stole kisses from her between nibbles of tea and biscuits. She laughed—high and lilting—at everything he said.

“Do you see how their untarnished wedding bands catch the light?” said Zelda. “They haven’t yet lived in ‘for worse.’”

“Or in sickness, or poverty,” said Scott. He reached across the table and took Zelda’s hand.

“Half of me wants to run over and warn them,” said Zelda, “while the other half of me wants to erect a moat for them.”

“And plant giant arborvitae to block out the rest of the world,” I said.

“And poplars and sturdy oaks,” said Scott.

“We should have done that, Goofo,” said Zelda, cupping his hand with her other hand.

“We tried here and there,” he said.

“Exactly,” she said. “Here and there. Damn us for being so careless with the perfection we had.”

“But you can’t build a moat to keep out mutability,” said Scott. “Time knows no barriers.”

“Then we should have killed ourselves in youth, like we’d promised.”

“And leave Scottie?”

“Everyone loves her,” said Zelda. “Someone would have raised her up right and well.”

I hated Zelda’s talk of suicide. She spoke of it so freely that I’d stopped being ruffled by it, and that frightened me.

The couple across the room began to kiss passionately, and the man slid his arm down her back and pulled her closer to him. In spite of my embarrassment, I couldn’t stop watching them. Neither could my company. Finally, the man grabbed a wad of bills out of his pocket, dropped them on the table, and practically carried the woman out of the room and up the hotel stairs, where they would, no doubt, spend the rest of the evening in their room.

Zelda looked at Scott with open longing, and I did what I did best—slipped away from the table and faded into the wallpaper so that Mr. and Mrs. Fitzgerald could be alone.

T
he rain ceased that night.

Eager to escape the solitude of my room, I went to the bar. It was nearly empty at ten o’clock, except for a lone bartender, an island woman sweeping between the tables, and an aged man in a crisp suit smoking a cigar. The night and the bar were one in the open air, and moonlight spilled in through the porch.

I ordered a rum swizzle and read from a book Scott had recommended to me, Ernest Hemingway’s most recent volume of short stories,
Winner Take Nothing
. He had made me promise not to tell Zelda that he’d given it to me. He didn’t want to get her started on Hemingway again.

I read “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” a story of an old man and two waiters at a café in the night. The young waiter was
impatient to get home to his wife. The old waiter sympathized with the old man, a lonely projection of faded youth.

Mutability. The passage of time, or rather, the inevitability of the passage of time.

The story held shocking significance to me in light of my earlier conversation with Scott and Zelda and my current surroundings. I looked at the old man sitting at the table across the room, and wondered whether he did not want to be alone in his room the way that I did not. He did not look at me, but rather at the piano in the corner that sat silent.

In the Hemingway story there was no music, and because I was a little drunk and strongly wished for the story to not be about me and these people, I walked over to the piano bench and sat down. Also, since I was a newly opened magnolia, I wanted to play the piano just for the pleasure of the music and the living, and in no way because it connected me to the dead.

I looked at the old man and raised my eyebrows.
Is this okay?

He nodded and smiled a little.

Good, I thought. He made a wish for music and I made it come true.

The atmosphere was so sad from the dark and the solitude that I decided to play something quiet and pleasant. I settled on “Clair de Lune.” Once I was halfway through the song I realized the sadness hiding in its beauty, but it was too late to turn back. When I finished, the old man raised his drink to me. The bartender wiped the counter and did not look up. The woman sweeping had stopped to listen and stared out into the night at the dark sea.