strength of the sun had lulled them all into afternoon naps, even Mary Frances in her rented beach chair. Her magazine would fall open on her lap, her mouth would goggle a bit, and she would doze, waking suddenly, embarrassed, to say, “My, but it’s warm.” Mary Frances was not entirely comfortable with her granddaughters—she had been the youngest of nine children, and was accustomed to being the baby herself—and she did her best to hide it by playing the role of grandmother the way she expected Billie Burke or Spring Byington would. She affected a sort of breezy elegance, which usually consisted of wide eyes, a half-smile, and the phrase “Well, girls?” all accompanied with a slight sideways tilt of the head. Maggie had once seen a movie starring Greer Garson and had become indignant at the way Greer Garson had imitated her grandmother. It was only in the last year or so that she had realized that Mary Frances herself was doing the imitating.
On the beach, Maggie had listened to the radio and lain on her back on a towel. The air was white with unalloyed sunlight, and her lips tasted like salt from the sea, and from her own sweat. Around her were girls sparkling with baby oil, their hands always busy with their hair, their eyes moving back and forth along the horizon for some boy or another, their nipped-in waists the perfect counterpoint to their bosoms and their hips.
And then there were the littler girls, the ones Maggie had been like the summer before, shrill and jumpy, smelling of Coppertone, wet white T-shirts over their cotton suits to keep them from burning, their plastic buckets beside them on their blankets. And the middle-sized ones, like her cousin Teresa, still digging for sand crabs at the water’s edge, still wearing her shapeless nylon tank suit, although she had to slump to keep her nipples from poking its navy-blue surface. Maggie felt as if she belonged nowhere, and to none of them. “Roll over, roll over,” the deejay sang every hour, parroting the children’s song to warn his listeners to tan evenly, but Maggie stayed on her back, afraid that if she lay on her stomach she would dent the top part of her bathing suit.
Monica was sitting under an umbrella; she tanned only an hour a day because she had read in Seventeen that too much sun gave you wrinkles. Occasionally she got up to stroll down the beach, her pink eyelet suit hugging her body, and Maggie would watch her stop at the lifeguard stand and talk to the two young men who sat there, their zinc-oxided noses two white flags on the horizon. Other boys would stop by, and Monica would swivel from one to another. Finally she came back to lie under the umbrella.
In midafternoon, when Maggie was falling asleep, the voice on the radio said, “I’ve got a special request here from the guys in the sophomore sports club at Fordham. This one goes out to the beautiful, the untouchable, the incredible Helen. No last names, please.” Then he played a song Maggie had never heard before, by Johnny Mathis, whose voice kept breaking on the high notes. When Maggie looked up at her cousin, Monica was staring out to sea, her eyes narrowed. “Untouchable my ass,” she muttered.
“What, dear?” Mary Frances said pleasantly.
“Nothing, Grandmom,” said Monica, and she got slowly to her feet and walked back to the lifeguard stand.
When Monica was gone, Maggie gingerly turned over onto her stomach. She lay flat for a minute, the sand shifting slightly beneath her cheek, and then she propped herself up on her elbows and looked down. Sure enough, her convex top was now concave.
“Oooh,” she moaned.
“What, dear?”
“Nothing, Grandmom,” Maggie said, pushing out the cups with her finger.
“I love your bathing suit, Maggie,” Teresa said with a giggle. “You look like a cancan dancer.”
“Watch your mouth, dear,” said Mary Frances.
When they were not at the beach, they strolled along the boardwalk, played miniature golf while Mary Frances watched, ate surf and turf at restaurants with imitation fishnets on the walls. Mary Frances told the same stories every year, and over the years Maggie had begun to think there was something sad about them, as though what Mary Frances didn’t discuss was somehow different and darker than these pat anecdotes.
Maggie knew very little about her grandmother’s past life, except that Mary Frances still mourned Elizabeth Ann, the baby who had died, and Maggie sometimes