Jackie Davis Martin: I was the first to spot them

I was probably the first one to spot them. As a couple, I mean. Me and Lila were crashing the party, sort of, not exactly not wanted but not begged to come either. So, we put on our new sundresses, hers modest as all hell around the flouncy skirt part but then clinging like a sinking skin to her bosom which seemed too heavy for the strings that were the straps. We laughed they might pop. Mine was a halter thing, bright red, sort of like the picture we’d seen in the frame at the Ocean City gift shop, Monroe or somebody, and my tanned shoulders gleamed, I thought, seductively. We were going to try the booze, too, when no one was watching.

But I saw her Dad—Roger, I always called him Roger—with Mrs. Higgins laughing together in a corner of the deck. Roger liked to joke with us, to make us laugh, I always felt that Lila was the best thing that ever happened to him and anyone Lila liked—which was me—was wonderful too. With us he always did a ha-ha laugh, sort of from his face, but there on the deck—I can’t explain it—his laugh came from somewhere inside, soft and gentle, and his eyes looked dreamy and soft, too, as Mrs. Higgins smiled across the rim of her wine glass.

We all knew Mrs. Higgins—the wife of Doctor Higgins; they had the summer home five houses down to the right and had someone to watch their kids—four of them all around six years old—to keep them from drowning in the ocean. Mrs. Higgins was a joke to me and Lila—someone absolutely strapped with stupid responsibility even though she had help with it. On her own she looked frazzled, her hair falling in strands from a careless pony tail, her grappling with a stroller at the shopping center or chasing a toddler. She was always wiping and sighing.

Now Mrs. Higgins was sighing in a new way over her wine glass. Her hair hung to her shoulders, shiny and bouncy, and she said something to Roger who leaned forward to hear. Leaning forward he enfolded her hand in his, almost hidden in the folds of her skirt, a sort of peasant thing which you can bet cost a lot, and she kissed him on his ear! Briefly! The whole scene dissolved in two seconds and they sort of each took a step back.

I looked wildly around to see who else saw that. Lila was over by the punch bowl, furtively adding vodka to the two glasses of pink punch in front of her. She was a great friend. By the time she got to me her shoulders were looped with those thin straps and her bosom distinctly sagging. “Hold these,” she said, boosting the arrangement back into place. “See anything?”