Barnegat Bay - 2. Chapter 2

From soon after I met the gang, Al was trying to start something with Claire. She wasn’t interested, though I couldn’t see why. He was clearly the pick of the four. They were all smart, but Larry was a bit conservative, Mike was constantly joking, and Spence couldn’t always keep up his part of a quick conversation. By contrast, Al had all the answers, plus a goofy, really likable intensity. When he wasn’t dancing or at work, he often wore a bashed-in brown fedora, brim up, no style at all. And he’d casually take off his shirt – wearing nothing underneath – even in mixed company.

“It’s hot,” he’d say, shrugging. “And wearing those scratchy swim suits all day, I’m used to having my arms free. And what the heck – it’s the beach.”

Claire seemed all right with that, maybe because she’d never seen an intelligent man so comfortably underdressed. What she didn’t like about Al was harder to define.

She was from Toms River, so not exactly the city. But it was definitely more sophisticated than our tiny Barnegat Bay town of Point Pleasant Beach. Her family had a summer home here. She’d also been to college.

“A college,” she corrected, soon after Mary told me. “I learned a lot, and I’m glad I made my parents send me. But I’m sure any boy learns as much in his first year as I did in four.”

“From what you wrote,” Mary said, “it was mostly tea and manners.”

“It was harder than that,” Claire defended. “But I know you’re more interested in gossip.”

Mary made a face at that.

“Though even my best classes,” Claire went on, “the supposedly hard ones like bio and geometry, were so watered down that I had to go to the library to learn everything that was left out.”

“Too bad,” Al told her.

Claire just shrugged. “So many of the girls were so much brighter than our professors.”

“Maybe you should teach,” Al suggested.

“Is that all you think women can do?” she shot, pretending to be offended.

“Nurses,” Larry offered – grinning. “Mothers.”

Claire and Mary both made faces. Then they laughed, and Claire dismissed Al’s point. “I’ll probably have a business to run anyway,” she said. “It all depends on my brothers.”

Claire was the second of four children, the younger pair being boys. She’d told us that when they came back from their own – better – colleges, they might be too ambitious to run the family lumber yards.

“Would you really be interested?” Mike asked.

“Definitely,” she replied. “I grew up around them – always trailing my dad.”

Claire’s family’s money also gave her a veneer of good manners. She wouldn’t purposely embarrass herself, but because she had that self-assurance, she didn’t mind if Al tried. He’d tell mildly off-color jokes to please her, and she’d laugh while Mary disapproved.

“That was funny,” Claire would insist.

“I know,” Mary admitted. “But I’ll never be a farmer’s daughter. Or in a barn with a traveling salesman.”

“I’m sure Al’s never been in a barn,” Larry cracked.

“And you?” Al whipped back.

“I’m not the one telling jokes.”

When Al surrendered, everyone laughed.

Al would also do things like casually stand with his hands clasped behind his neck, absent-mindedly exposing his underarms.

“I don’t know what it’s like in the city,” Mary would poke. “But where we were raised, boys kept their arms at their sides.”

“And ladies crossed their ankles,” Al volleyed.

As Mary crossed hers, Claire purposely did the reverse. Al would then bow and kiss her palm.

“It’s supposed to be the back of her hand,” Mary teased. If I didn’t know better, I’d think she was jealous.

“I’ll kiss what I can get,” Al said, laughing. But as he leaned towards Mary, she clasped her hands in her lap.

“Her majesty,” Claire joked. “At least, in public.”

“Sometimes, you go too far,” Mary warned. And though she was smiling, her threat seemed real. Still, I couldn’t imagine either of them losing control. They were respectable girls. As we were nice guys.

Al seemed to know this, too, and I didn’t see him pushing. I also knew that – like the other guys – he occasionally saw a different kind of girl during the week.

Did Claire know that? Is that why she discouraged him? The guys all joked, not always privately, about women, and Mary and Claire weren’t stupid.

As for anything more serious: “Marriage! Yikes!” Mike gibed late one night. “Are you kidding? I’ve got six or eight years before I even start thinking about that.”

“You’re not gonna last eight years,” Larry insisted.

“I need to be established first,” Mike told him. “All guys do. Girls may be old at twenty-one, but guys can wait.”

Or simply ignore the situation. Late at night, the guys rarely talked about women, instead, focusing on school, jobs, and plans.

“If you could do anything you wanted,” Al might ask, “what would you pick?”

“My own business,” Larry said, “despite what happened to my father. And he didn’t do anything wrong – except follow stock tips from his wealthy customers. For the rest, he and my granddad, and my uncles and great-uncles are doing just fine. But even without the crash, they could’ve planned better.”

“How?” Mike asked .

“Well, none of them has any education – you know that. Nothing to fall back on. They paint apartments and houses and’ve never changed.”

“What’s there to change?” Al said. “You’re either good at it, or you’re not.”

“You can change the way you do business,” Larry pointed out. “I mean – just for example – no one in my family has ever gone after a customer. It’s all word-of-mouth. It’s what you said – they think good work’s enough.”

“Till everyone’s doing good work, and there’re no jobs,” Mike put in, and they all agreed.

“What kind of business do you want?” Al soon asked Larry.

“That’s the hard part,” Larry said. “I don’t know. So many things’re changing. There’s so much I need to see. What I can do. What I can learn. What happens when everyone’s broke.”

“I won’t be my own boss,” Mike said firmly. “There’s too much risk. I’ve got to work for a company.”

“And if you get laid off?” Al asked.

“First, I’ve got to get hired,” Mike said, laughing. “But I figure – at the beginning – if I work cheap enough, it’ll be too hard to fire me.”

“There is that,” Al acknowledged. “We’re all banking on our inexperience.”

He planned to study law – at night, while taking the best job he could find during the day. “It doesn’t even have to be a good law school,” he admitted. “I’ll make up the difference once I start to work.”

So if the guys had plans – and time – the girls didn’t. Like Claire’s older sister, most married right out of high school, and few thought of further education. That meant some girls weren’t really at Barnegat by choice, though I doubt many would have said, “Sure, I’ll spend the summer in the broiling city while all of you cool off at the beach.” It wasn’t safe to spend summers in the city, anyway – considering disease. So it’s not like their families would have left them.

The kinds of families who had summer homes at Barnegat were also the kinds where the only way for girls to leave was to die or get married. “It’s gotten better,” one of my cousins admitted. She was a year-or-two younger than I was but had only recently married. “We’re past being considered livestock,” she’d gone on, “but not by much.” Still, Claire didn’t seem immediately interested in marriage. Which was another reason she might have kept Al at a distance.

I wasn’t as sure about Mary. She didn’t seem set on working for her aunt for the rest of her life, no matter how much she liked her job. Mary was almost a townie – she’d been in Point Pleasant Beach every summer since fourth or fifth grade, helping her aunt run her seasonal store there. But for the rest of the year, she lived in Toms River, near Claire.

“I could raise a family in either place,” she told us. “I like them both.”

In the shop, Mary not only learned how to sell but also how to make alterations.

“I already knew about sewing. I learned that from my mother and sisters. But my interest in clothes caught my aunt’s eye.”

“Of course, all girls like clothes,” Claire explained. “And all little girls want to dress up. But Mary’s always made things on her own – where I buy mine in the city.”

“Sewing isn’t hard,” Mary insisted.

“It isn’t,” Claire repeated.

“I’ll trust you on that,” I told them both. “I can sew a button on – in an emergency. But I could never make much sense of the rest.”

The one place Al absolutely charmed Claire was on the dance floor. At Jenkinson’s, he’d drop his dopey fedora and show up looking surprisingly sharp – even more impressive since he did it on a budget.

“He’s a very good dancer,” I heard Claire tell Mike. “Does he practice?”

“Oh, yeah,” Mike answered. “Whenever he comes to our place, my kid sister teaches him. And she’s not the only one.”

Al made the girls he danced with look great, which is why he had his pick of the floor. Not Spence’s pick – not the prettiest ones. Though with Spence, girls always seemed to be more aware of who was watching them. They knew he wouldn’t be around forever. But he was good for making other guys jealous.

Claire was a good dancer but not up to Mary. Mary had an ease and innocence about her. “Am I really dancing?” she seemed to ask. “Did I just do that really tricky step?” Her movements seemed to follow the flow of her dresses, where Claire’s showed years of practice.

But Al took advantage of what Claire had and showed her off. And you could tell he’d much rather be with her. Though when he danced with Mary, they took each other to places the rest of us could only imagine – maybe even Spence. Claire didn’t seem to mind because – again – she knew her own strengths.

One of them seemed to be holding to decisions. Not only would she never get involved with Al, she wouldn’t lead him on – not even“for a walk” when he wanted “to catch his breath” after a dance. She also turned down going to movies without the group and didn’t like it when Al bought her something as simple as ice cream.

“You don’t have the money,” she’d gently joke.

“Then you buy me a cone.”

Claire would laugh at that, and Al would cock his goofy fedora. Then she’d eat his offered gift before it melted. But that was as close as Al – or any of the guys – would come to acknowledging Claire’s being different from the rest of them.

Still, she dressed better than anyone – more remarkably. Mary based her sound choices on her aunt’s safer ones. “What if I bought you a shirt?” Claire would tease Al. “Or had that thing you call a hat blocked?”

“If you tried to block this hat,” Al ribbed, “it would fall apart. You know I only got it when it blew off a horse.”

Claire spoke better than the rest of us, too, and had a wider range of resources. Mary was a little like Spence – they both led with their charm. Al had his intensity, Mike and Larry their jokes, and I landed somewhere in between – well-educated, but somewhat restrained.

“Claire’s had so much time to read,” Mary would say. “She’s always telling me things I didn’t know.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“Like about politics – or Europe. I have no idea what’s happening there. Of course, I read the papers. But I don’t even know what to ask.”

“Would you want to see Europe?” Al questioned Mary. “If you could travel anywhere?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted.

“I would,” Al said. “I’d work my way around the world.”

Even Claire’s family couldn’t afford that kind of travel, and mine wouldn’t consider it. Europe was the place our relatives left, a hundred years before. Who’d want to go back?

“What do you have against Al?” I once heard Mary ask Claire. “He tries so hard to please you.”

“Maybe too hard,” Claire answered quietly. “If he were as polished off the dance floor as on, maybe he’d have a chance. But it’s not really that.”

“Then what?” Mary went on. And she waited for Claire to explain. And maybe there was no answer because I was walking beside them.