Author's Note: I used to churn out a short story I was pleased with every couple of months, but since I started at West Point, haven't had the kind of free time I used to. Since this is the first one in a little over a year, I feel incredibly rusty, so any suggestions are more than welcome. Thanks for reading!
Beach Boys Kind of Girl
**
Our daughters look just like you.
Maybe not carbon copies, but close enough that I can come into the kitchen and find one of them nursing a bowl of cereal and holding her spoon exactly the same way as you. Or walk past the other working on Fur Elise and squinting at the sheet music, curling her nose precisely the same way you used to.
Maureen’s gotten tall. I took her to buy new pants for school and Anna found one of your Beach Boys CD’s in the car on the way to the store. She slipped it into the CD player before I’d noticed, and I almost had to pull over to keep from killing us all when it started to play.
“Oh I like the Beach Boys!” Anna said, turning up the volume.
“Me too,” Maureen agreed from the backseat. “How come we never listen to them anymore, Daddy?”
My knuckles were white on the steering wheel. I started to speak, then cleared my throat.
“I don’t know.”
“Let’s listen to them all day today,” Anna decided.
“Can we?” Maureen asked.
I tried to smile. “Just a few songs for now,” I said. My cell phone rang. I slapped the volume control knob, and the music ended abruptly. “On the way back,” I told them before I answered the phone and kept the conversation going until we pulled into the parking lot.
By the time we stepped into the store and the air-conditioning blasted the August heat off the backs of our necks, I thought they’d both forgotten about the Beach Boys.
“Daddy,” Maureen began, wiping the slight sheen of sweat from her nose. “What’s your favorite Beach Boys song?”
“Are these your size?” I asked her, pulling a pair of khaki pants off the rack.
“I don’t like those,” she told me, nudging my hands back toward the rack.
I hung the pants up and pulled off another pair. “How about these?”
“Those are okay. What’s your favorite?”
“My favorite is when you don’t grow at all, and then you get to wear the same pair of pants to school in the fall as you did in May.”
She wrinkled up her summer-freckled nose. “Daddy,” she said, exasperated. “That never happens.”
“It might someday,” I said, “if you’d ever listen to me and stop growing up.”
She sighed. “Fine. Don’t tell me. My favorite is the one that’s about getting your hair cut.”
I frowned and pulled a third pair off the rack, laying them all over my arm. “Which one’s that?”
“You know,” she said, impatient with my apparent lack of Beach Boys expertise. “It goes ba ba ba ba bar barberin’, and the girl won’t cut her hair, but he wants to be a barber. Like in the book you read to me, where on Main Street all the people go to get their hair cut and their faces shaved. The barber.”
I laughed loud and hard, until the people around us stared and Maureen flushed pink and tugged at my hand and tried to get me to stop. I picked her up and balanced on her my free hip, even though she was going into second grade and too tall to be carried around anymore, and her legs dangled down close to my knees, and planted a big kiss on her cheek.
“Dad, why are you acting so weird?”
“Because I love you,” I told her, “and boys always act weird when they love a girl, even if it’s your daddy. Remember that, okay?”
“Okay,” she said, chin drawn back and one eyebrow raised doubtfully.
“Okay,” I said, and set her back down. “Let’s go find Anna and see what kind of pants she’s picked out.”
Maureen followed me as I weaved my way toward where I could see Anna’s head a little ways away, and just before we reached her older sister, slipped her little hand into mine. I squeezed her fingers gently and felt an infinite sense of sadness when she smiled up at me so sweetly, because it was another smile that you had missed.
**
“Do you want to dance?”
You were wearing a red and white floral sundress that swished around the bottoms of your knees when you walked, and the sun was going down behind me so that when you turned to answer you had to squint.
“Hi Dan,” you said, and smiled.
“Hi,” I said lamely, preparing to repeat the question. They were playing Beach Boys—Good Timin’. Had I butted in on a conversation? I had. You were going to say no.
“Yeah, sure. I like this song.” You passed your drink off to that blonde girl you were always with whose name I didn’t know and followed me to where everyone was dancing in the grass nearby.
You’d shed your shoes and pulled your hair into a ponytail to get it off your neck. Pearls hung from your earlobes and neck, and I loved that when you wore them they looked classy, not snobby.
We talked about the philosophy class we had together that we both hated, and mocked our professor’s essay prompts and Aristotle fetish until the song ended, and I let go of your hand and waist and we wandered around the lawn until the sky was full of stars and the air began to cool.
“I have a test tomorrow,” you told me, wrinkling up your nose, “so I’m going to get going. Thanks for the dance though. I’ll see you around campus, I guess.” You smiled a little, and started to back away. “I have to find my shoes,” you said sheepishly. “I don’t remember where I took them off.”
“May I call you?” I blurted.
Your smile widened a little and you nodded. “Sure,” you said. “Can I just give you my number in class on Monday?”
“Yeah, no problem. Have a good night...studying?”
She nodded. “Yep. Biochem final.”
“Oh yeah. Definitely good luck with that then.”
“’Night, Dan.”
“See you Monday.”
I watched you walk away with a huge grin on my face, and didn’t snap out of my trance until one of my buddies came up beside me laughing, and slapped me on the back.
“You’ve got it bad for her, dude,” Sam said.
“Yeah.”
“She’s kind of out of your league, isn’t she? She's going to med school, right?”
I shrugged. “Doesn’t really matter. I’m going to marry that girl.”
He laughed and took a swig of his beer. “Right. Sure you are. Where’s she from? San Diego?”
“Yeah. I don’t know why you think this is so funny. I’m going to marry her.”
“Well good for you, buddy,” Sam said, and laughed again. “Good luck with that.”
“Thanks,” I said, “but I don’t need it.”
**
Sam was at the wedding, and asked the band to play California Girls. He found me later in the evening and shook my hand and called me a lucky sonofabitch and said he figured we’d be happy forever, since I was like some kind of damn fortuneteller or something.
**
We spent our honeymoon in the Bahamas, drunk on love and rum and the postcard-perfect scenery.
We watched the sun come up and the tide go down and you laid on my chest and sang a soft, slurred medley of Beach Boys songs.
“Don’t worry baby, everything will turn out all right…let me go home…I feel so broke up, I wanna go home...”
I kissed your sunburned cheeks and you wrapped your arms around me and told me you loved me.
I pulled you to your feet and we danced without rhythm, our sandy-skinned legs brushing past each other. Your makeup was long gone, and I could see the blonde tips of your brown eyelashes and all of the freckles on your nose and cheeks.
I started singing Kokomo, and you swayed, delighted.
“Thaaat’s where we wanna go,” you sang, throwing your arms in the air and tossing back your head. “Way down in Kokomo.”
We tripped over each other’s feet and fell into the sand, cursing and laughing, and we kissed again and rolled down the beach until the waves washed over us and we felt like the sun was rising over the horizon just because that’s what we wanted it to do.
**
“Seconds, Sam?”
He laughed. “I think that if I took another it would make fourths. Thanks, though. Everything was great.”
“Can I have Sam’s piece, Mommy?” Anna asked.
“No, ma’am, you’re finished for the night. Help me clear the table. You too, Maureen.”
Maureen licked the last of the frosting from her fingers and hopped down from her chair.
Sam and I rose to help, but you shooed us outside, insisting it wouldn’t take long to clean up. We retreated to the porch with a couple of beers, and stood in silence for a few minutes.
“You’ve been sort of quiet tonight,” I said. “Everything okay?”
Sam cleared his throat and switched his beer to the other hand, then sighed and switched it back. “This may not be the best time to talk about it, but…well, honestly, I don’t know when it would be a good time.”
“What’s up?” I asked, frowning and leaning against the house.
He hemmed and hawed his way through a story about you and a surgeon from San Diego, about how he’d heard you’d been meeting him for months. He said he didn’t believe it until he saw you picking him up at the airport, embracing and kissing at the baggage claim.
Enraged, I told him to leave.
“I’m not telling you this just to cause trouble, Dan. I saw her—I saw her myself.”
“You don’t know what you saw!”
“Dan, you know I love her, just like you do, but—“
“She—is—my—wife. I won’t listen to you talk shit about her.”
“It’s not henpecking gossip—it’s the truth. I heard about it, and didn’t believe it either, but then, that day at the airport, I saw them together. Right there in the open, like they’d been together for years—and damn it, maybe they have been! I couldn’t not tell you anymore—you deserve to know. I’m not telling you what to do. I just wanted to make sure you knew so you could deal with it however you thought was best.”
I stood listening, growing angrier and angrier by the second. I set my bottle down hard and liquid splashed out; I’d only taken a few sips.
“I didn’t want to tell you, Dan. And I’m sorry. I’m so sorry—but you have to face it one way or another—your wife is having an affair. She’s been having an affair, and she’s going to keep on having an affair—“
I hit him.
I balled up my fist, sent all my rage into my arm, and punched my friend in the face like we were idiot college kids brawling in a bar, not grown men carrying on a serious conversation.
He reeled, shocked, touched his face, face red, prepared to fight back, then retreated, restrained himself, tried again.
“Dan, I’m telling you as your friend,” Sam said sadly.
“You’re not my friend—get off my porch—get away from my house! Get the hell out of here!”
“Dan—“
“Bastard—“ I took another swing at him, but he was ready this time and deflected the blow.
He seemed shocked that I hadn’t believed him. He kept looking over his shoulder at me as he walked to his car and got in. I didn’t bother to wait for him to drive away.
You were singing Help Me Rhonda and loading the dishes into the dishwasher on the other side of the house when I cam back inside. Anna sang along loudly, passing forks and spoons to you after she rinsed them in the sink. Maureen was making up lyrics to fill in for the words she didn’t know, spinning until she was too dizzy to keep up with you and Anna, and she plopped down on the kitchen floor and giggled uncontrollably, tugging on one of her braids with both hands and swaying back and forth.
Later you crawled into bed wearing one of my t-shirts as I came in from kissing the girls goodnight and pulled off my shirt. “Why did Sam leave without saying goodbye?” you asked, and yawned.
“We fought.”
“About what?”
“You.”
You frowned and propped yourself up on your elbows. “What?”
“Don’t worry about it. He just said some things and I told him to leave.”
You scooted a little closer as I sat down on the edge of the bed. “What did he say?”
I told you the story, and you shook your head sadly. “Why would he say those things? That’s...that’s so terrible.”
I agreed, tense and distracted, and you coaxed me into bed and leaned over me to turn out the light, and five minutes later I had forgotten all about Sam’s lies because I was lost in the truth of your lips.
**
After Sam and I talked, I started to see the signs. The white lies began to add up, the inconsistencies mounted, and eventually, I just knew, even if I hadn’t come face-to-face with it the way Sam had.
Something was wrong, I knew, but you were my wife, and nothing else mattered. I made a promise: to God, to myself, to you. In good times and bad, in sickness and in health, till death do I part.
And if everything was perfect, well, wouldn’t it be nice?
**
I hurried the girls to the car that morning.
“We’re going to be late, Maureen, come on, honey, we have to go.”
“Bye Mommy!” she said, hugging you around the legs. You hugged her tightly and kissed her goodbye, told her to be good and have a good day at kindergarten.
Anna was next for a big hug and kiss and you helped me herd them into the car and reminded them buckle up.
“I’ll be late tonight,” you said.
Even though we were late, and now it was our daughters who were yelling at me to hurry up from the backseat, I stopped rushing, put my arms around you, and looked into your eyes.
“Don’t worry, baby,” you said, flippant and smiling as you kissed my cheek and pulled away.
You were already gone.
You left your wedding band on the kitchen counter, where it could have fallen into the sink and disappeared forever, just like you wanted to do.
I begged you to come back until it was past three in the morning and you stopped picking up the phone each time I called back after you hung up. I left thirteen messages, some short, some long, but at the end of each one I always said, “I love you. Please come home.”
**
I still miss you every morning, when I wake up alone.
I think it would be easier if you had died. It would have been easier to grasp that you’d been stolen from me, and had no life to give to anyone anymore, instead of living with the knowledge that you just didn’t want me anymore, and could give all of yourself to some other man, to some other children that didn’t have your eyes and your smile and your laugh and the freckles on your shoulders.
I know you’re the loser here, though. Our children are a privilege to raise, an honor to love. You didn’t get to see Anna win her first race when she started running track in middle school. You never heard Maureen’s sweet voice bring tears to people’s eyes the first time she sang a solo in a school play. You didn’t see them running the backyard, leaping over the sprinklers in the grass, or tuck them in that night when their eyelashes fell down to caress their sunburned cheeks.
You didn’t make them dinner and watch Maureen sneak her carrots to Anna under the table so she wouldn’t have to eat them. You didn’t draw a smiley face on Anna’s cast when she broke her arm, or spend Sunday afternoons listening to one daughter’s fingers coax melodies from the piano while the other sang along.
You were a Beach Boys kind of girl, with your pearls and laughter and the sand between your toes and the alcohol on your breath. When you left, life and light went out of everything. But I know now that you left the best parts of yourself in Anna and Maureen, and when I’m with them, I can hear music again.
But I have to admit it took me a little while to figure out the time shifts - present, then past, then present again. If I were you I'd try to make those transitions just a little clearer. Also, the two daughters seemed to come out of nowhere. Can we see a little bit more of them? How his relationship with his daughters affected the relationship with his ex-wife, the conflicts that arose... you get the idea. 