Free Outer Banks by Anne Rivers Siddons Page A

pinned and then married,” she would say. “You’ve just got that look about you, no matter what you say. It’s not that you don’t date. You just haven’t found anybody with any sense yet. Wait till you do.”
    â€œNot now,” I said. “Not yet. I date just for fun now. There isn’t anybody at Randolph I’m interested in. Besides, you date, too.”
    She did; and in spite—or perhaps because of—the Lee nose and the so-called Eastern la-di-da, so did I. They were, for the most part, as I had said: light, easy, spindrift alliances, borne up on gusts of laughter and music and the elaborately, ostentatiously romantic things we devised to do. We danced one night on the lawn of the president’s formal rose garden to the music of “Moonglow” on the car radio, and fell in love, not with the boys who had brought us there, but with the idea of it all. We drank Lancer’s and Mateuse and Rhine wine on blankets by the starprickedwater of Lake Randolph, and went to fraternity formals in clouds of net and tulle bellied out over clanking plastic hoops, and we got huge, bulbous yellow chrysanthemums on football weekends, with fraternity letters tricked out in scattered glitter on them, and purple and white orchids for our wrists on formal weekends, and went to Destin and Panama City for house parties, and we laughed light laughter and sang and danced, and kissed light kisses. And none of it touched us to our cores; all of it blew about us like feathers in a summer zephyr.
    A few times I got fairly serious about someone, most likely a brooding loner in the school of architecture on the G.I. Bill. Once I dated, for a quarter or so, the president-elect of the student body, and was so flown with myself that I went about mooing about first ladies, and bought a hideous lipstick called First Lady Pink. It took only one snort from Cecie to bring me out of that. I threw the lipstick away.
    But when the affair ended, as it was predestined to do, I was briefly and badly hurt, and took to walking the campus at night in the November cold, alone, my hands jammed in my raincoat pockets. Cecie may have wanted to snort, but she did not, then. On the night that the fever of sorrow snapped I prowled for hours in a downpour and Cecie walked beside me, hands jammed into the pockets of her yellow slicker. She did not snort and she did not speak. She simply matched me, stride for stride, which, considering her short legs, took some doing. Neither of us was unaware of the drama of it all. Finally I turned to her, water running down my face, and said, “This is really stupid, isn’t it?”
    â€œIt really is,” she said. “But it’s better than cancer.”
    I looked down at her, her face shadowed under the dripping rainhat, and then burst into laughter. She did too. We laughed until we had to hold each other up, and then we walked in the rain to Pennington’s Drugstore and had hot chocolates. We had to stop several times on the way, doubled up once more with laughter, and we were still laughing when we crawled, soddenand chilled, into our beds. It became the talisman we invoked whenever sorrow struck, or the abyss stirred and howled beneath our feet.
    â€œWell, it’s better than cancer.”
    Oh, Cecie. It is. It is.

Chapter Four
    A FTER Alan went back into the studio I stayed in the garden for another hour. It is a secret one now, walled away from the beach, the houses on either side of us, and the road in front by dunes and a weathered fence and tall shrubs and whatever else I could coax into life in the constant rush of salt off the Atlantic. I began the garden when we moved into the house in Sagaponack, the year after we married. It was just a small beach shack then, a weathered gray cube among far grander houses around it, and it sported not a petal or a leaf that was not wild. But it had a magnificent view of the entire sweep of the South Shore from the