Sullivans Island, a land washed in mystery and populated with the kind of characters Tennessee Williams would have loved to have known.
They were on the island then, and Beth was straining her neck to read the leash laws that were posted on the huge sign on the right. She didn’t want Lola to get busted by the dog police for dropping her carte de visite in the wrong spot.
She rubbed her eyes. What was this? Oz? Perhaps it was the time of day but the houses seemed brighter, more well-defined, and the palmettos and oleanders seemed greener, their branches and the edges of their fronds were sharper. The sky seemed to be a more vibrant shade of blue than she could recall. She took a deep breath and even with the van’s air-conditioning running full blast she could still smell plough mud, which was an acquired taste and dangerously addictive. In her dreams she actually smelled plough mud.
Despite the economy, there was gentrification everywhere, but the kind that pleased her. Most of the old migrant worker cottages that flanked the road onto the island had been resurrected and transformed into million-dollar futures with colorful lush window boxes of fuchsia geraniums, hot pink petunias, and bushy asparagus ferns to prove it. It was amazing, she thought, what you could accomplish with the combination of elbow grease, a little money, and a clear vision.
They came to the corner and she noticed that the gas station was under new ownership, gouging its customers an extra twenty cents per gallon for the privilege of convenience. That would never change no matter who owned it. The patrons of Dunleavy’s Pub, noisy families and happy dogs, spilled out onto the sidewalk picnic tables, laughing, talking, and having lunch. Her stomach began to growl when she thought about their quesadillas. Judging from the parking lot, Durst Family Medicine appeared to be doing a brisk business. Probably legions of poison ivy and sunburn victims, she thought. People were walking to the beach pulling wagons loaded with gear, toddlers, and ice water in their coolers, and Beth thought she might like a walk on the beach that day to introduce Lola to the ocean.
The dependable rolling panorama of robust life gave her some relief. For as much as Beth embraced the twenty-first century, like all true Charlestonians, she hated change of almost any kind. Commercial development made her suspicious and she generally ignored its creeping advance, hoping it might go away. If she had lived there full-time she would have fought it with all her might. They could build all the Starbucks and Sonics in the world on Mount Pleasant and the adjoining island of Isle of Palms, but something deep inside of her depended on the peninsula of Charleston and the entire length and breadth of Sullivans Island to remain the same. So far it was reasonably so.
They turned right on Middle Street, the Champs-Élysée of the island, and began to head toward her house. In the time it might take to swallow a pill, she would be back, perched on the threshold of her childhood. Her stomach began to flutter.
Memories flooded her mind—all of them together, cousins, aunts, uncles, all of them. She could see herself and the others as children, running around in their pajamas, spinning like helicopters in the silver dusk, fall down dizzy, chasing lightning bugs, scooping them into mayonnaise jars with holes punched in the top. The holes were made by her Uncle Grant’s ice pick, which they were forbidden to touch.
“Don’t you children even think about laying a hand on that thing,” he would say in a very stern voice to his boys. Then he would turn to Beth with a wink and she knew he wasn’t so very mean as all that.
Summers! Searching the thicket for wild blackberries in the full sun of the day, filling coffee cans with them, and later, sunburned and freckled, how they feasted on hot sugary blackberry dumplings that her Aunt Maggie whipped up in her copper pots. There were literally