The Beach Girls Read Free Page B

date, the same night Leo Rice arrived. I drove the little Volks out of the marina lot and went south on Broward, then turned left onto the approach to Beach Bridge with Anne Browder sitting demure and fragrant beside me.
    “Any special place?” I asked her. I’d borrowed the Volks enough times so that I was familiar with the shift.
    “Any place at all, Joe. But nothing fancy, the way I’m dressed.”
    She was in short shorts in a sort of nubby pink fabric, and wearing a sleeveless white blouse with her initials embroidered in pink over the pocket. One thing about D Dock, there are no anatomical secrets. When the gals in residence come back from work during the summer they waste no time changing into as little as the law allows.
    Anne Browder is the newest resident of D Dock. She moved in with Amy Penworthy last December, two months after she had moved from New York to Elihu Beach. Amy’s previous roommate, or houseboat mate, had gotten married and moved out. Amy works in the Elihu Beach Bank and Trust Company at the information desk. She is a jolly hearty gal of about thirty with pale brown hair, four million freckles and a sturdy figure. She originally came to Florida from Omaha to divorce a stinker named Milton. She and I have had a lot of good clean fun swapping horror stories about her Milton and my two expensivemarital mistakes. We both have some dandy anecdotes. I don’t recall how Amy met Anne Browder, but at the time she met her, Anne had found a job in the office of a Doctor Harrison Blalock, and she was glad to move out of a furnished room onto the
Alrightee
.
    It was agreed that Anne improved the scenery at the Stebbins’ Marina. Her hair is dark blonde and she wears it in a perfectly suitable coronet braid. She is tallish, with a fine though unremarkable figure, but with superb, un-forgettable legs—great long legs of particularly flawless texture, so perfect that they seemed to have a whole new range of little tender curvatures and ripenesses that you never notice on ordinary legs. As a confirmed voluptuary, may I merely say that they seemed to have more special places to kiss. Let me tell you those legs have walked through a lot of my frustrated dreams.
    Anne arrived after I’d had the
Ampersand
tied up at D Dock for just about a year. I zeroed in on her right away and got nowhere. It wasn’t a case of not getting to first base. I couldn’t even catch a ride to the ball park. I noticed one thing about her. She smiled briefly and infrequently. She had very little to say. Her every move was curiously controlled. She could make a five-second production out of lifting a cigarette or a glass to her lips. It gave her personality such a flavor of remoteness and coldness that all other hopefuls were chilled off. But I knew it wasn’t remoteness or coldness. I had seen it before. You see it in a special kind of female, the ones who are always on the borderline of hysteria. The ones with the fires well banked, but plenty hot.
    I went through my gamut, like they say, from A to B. She is about twenty-six. I am thirty-one. I am big, dark-haired and look slightly unkempt at all times. This awakens the mother in them. They want to sew on buttons and cook for me. I have brown eyes and I can look very hurt. I have various lines of patter and chatter that have proved out well. Also, I am a romantic figure. I am a writer who lives and works on his boat. They are inclined to sympathize with my creative urge to write a big novel. They are saddened that I must waste my substance by writing do-it-yourself books in order to support myself and my two ex-wives.
    I did all my tricks for Anne Browder and she looked right through me and out the other side, wistful and, damn it, bored. She used the brush like an expert. I did some spy work, trying to dig useful information out of my old pal Amy. But apparently Anne did not indulge herself in girl talk. Amy admitted she had done some prying, but all she could learn was that Anne