The Other Mother

collecting. I would walk for miles, looking at each shell that had washed up overnight, squatting beside it, deciding whether or not to pick it up. Some shells would look perfect until you dislodged them from the sand and you’d see they were broken. I didn’t want any broken ones. There were pebbles that looked shiny when they were wet but which turned dull when you took them away from the water. I liked the long dark-blue shells, but they smelled. My favorites were the curved conch shells that you could hold up to your ear and hear the ocean, but I hardly ever found any of those that weren’t broken. I liked the idea that I was becoming a collector the way Daddy collected antique cars and Mommy collected matchbooks from fancy restaurants that she kept in a big brandy snifter in the foyer.

By the time I got back to the house, Mommy would be up and reading the New York Times, which she had delivered from the local grocery store. There’d be coffee but not much else because Mommy was on a diet and only drank special shakes she mixed up, so I would bicycle into town and buy doughnuts at the grocery store and eat them all in the parking lot because if I brought them home Mommy would tell me I was going to get fat.

Only that was the summer I got really thin. All that walking on the beach and bicycling to town, I suppose.

When I got back Mommy would be napping so I’d go down to the beach for a swim. I had an inflatable raft that I’d take out. It was always a challenge to get it out beyond the breakers and sometimes I’d get hit by a wave and suddenly I’d be under the water, turning over and over again like a shirt in the washing machine. Later I’d find bruises and scratches on my arms and legs and a gallon of sand in the crotch of my suit.

Once I was past the breakers I would belly flop on the raft and ride the waves in. I became really good at judging just the right moment to catch the wave, but sometimes I misjudged and got pummeled in the surf. One time I was just lying on the raft daydreaming about something—I used to make up stories in my head about wild horses or living in the woods and how I could survive on my own in a tree house in the Adirondacks where Grandma and Grandpa had a “camp”—and suddenly I noticed that I’d drifted far away from the shore. I could barely see the lifeguard station. Usually the lifeguard would have blown his whistle if I went out too far but he must have been talking to one of the leggy girls who hung around the lifeguard station all day and not noticed me.

At first I wasn’t scared. It was kind of peaceful drifting on the water with the sound of the surf like the sound I heard inside the conch shells and the people on the beach looking soft and blurry like old pictures. I figured eventually the lifeguard would notice how far out I was and come get me and then I’d be that girl who was rescued and Mommy would come running down from the house and make a fuss and she’d feel bad for leaving me alone so much.

But the people on the beach got smaller and smaller, the sound of the surf fainter and fainter, and still no one blew a whistle or came swimming for me and I realized that I’d better start paddling in. It was harder than I thought it would be. There was a current pulling me out to sea that I had to fight against and if I let up for a second I drifted backward. Every time I looked up the shore looked just as far away and the people on it just as small and blurry. Finally, I just gave up. I lay back on the raft and looked up at the sky and watched the clouds and thought about what Mommy would think when I didn’t come back and how she would cry and feel bad and wish she’d spent more time with me . . . and then all of a sudden the surf was loud again and I was being pulled under the water and thrown around like a piece of trash.

I finally dragged myself onto the beach and up to the house and when my mother saw me she screeched. I thought she was upset because I’d almost drowned. But it was because my hair was so tangled. “Look at her,” she cried, waving her glass at me. “That’s what comes from giving her a Jamaican nanny; she’s got dreadlocks!”

The truth was Nanny was the one who always brushed my hair. I didn’t know how to. When Mommy tried she pulled my hair so hard I screamed, which only made her slap my leg with the brush.

I learned to stay in the shadows during cocktail hour when Mommy had her friends over. They’d sit on the deck, drinking G&Ts and rum & Cokes and pitchers of margaritas the hired girl made up. I’d sit under the deck in the sand, drinking plain Coke and eating the raw vegetables—crudités, Mommy called them—and potato chips that the guests sometimes brought. I’d listen to the swells of conversation and laughter drifting across the sand and out to sea. Sometimes the hired girl would slip out to smoke a joint with her boyfriend and I’d watch them from my hiding place, pretending to be a spy. I was reading Harriet the Spy that summer and I liked the idea of being a spy, of watching people to figure out how to speak and act and dress.

It’s funny thinking about that now because it’s kind of what I’ve been doing with Daphne. I like to watch her with Chloe because when I