Playworld

—

Our suite at the ’Tween Waters Inn was on the second floor of the Gumbo Limbo building—a long, blue-roofed stucco building with two floors—and it had a view of Manatee Cove, Roosevelt Channel, and Pine Island Sound.

“I figured it would be like this,” Oren said with amazement, “but I didn’t know it would be better!” We stood in the walkway’s shade and leaned on the railing, feeling the wet-warm breezes.

We each had a map of the resort the concierge had given us, and pointing to our left, Oren shouted back into the room, “Dad! I can see Adventure Sea Kayak Rental.

Can we rent kayaks today?” To which Dad said, “We just got here, cool your jets!” And then Oren said, “I can see Captiva Watersports too! Can we rent Jet Skis today?” To which Mom said, “First you can unpack your clothes and put on your bathing suit.” But now Oren was pointing out past the sailboat slips at the humped backs and dorsal fins of a pod of dolphins wheeling far off on the water.

“Look,” he said, “there really are dolphins at Dolphin Lookout!” And then he raced off—“I’m going to go swim with them,” he shouted.

When I shouted back, “Wait for me,” he said, “Look who’s talking,” and disappeared.

Left to my own devices, I put on my swimsuit and slathered myself in tanning oil, since Tanner, who spent every spring break in Barbados, said the worst thing you could do on the first day of a tropical vacation was get badly sunburned.

I grabbed a towel from the bathroom, took my map, told my parents I was going to have a look around, and then left our room.

Tweenie’s Pass looped through the resort, and I walked it past the dock at Manatee Cove, down among sailboats’ masts that gonged and pinged in the marina, and eyed the price lists at Captiva Watersports, which offered waterskiing instruction and catamaran rentals, and since Dad had been in the navy, I figured that he could maybe take us all sailing to save some money.

I peeked in at the Pelican Roost Boutique and Snack Center, which had diamond-encrusted seashells and dolphins in jewelry cases, sunsets airbrushed on coral, Kadima paddles, and baseball caps and sunhats that read Captiva Is for Lovers or My Parents Went to Captiva and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt .

I spotted the Gulf twinkling in the distance.

I crossed Captiva Drive, a busy two-lane road whose noise, I realized, I’d mistaken for the surf.

I admired the palms that lined the beach, their leaves clacking in the wind.

The umbrellas set up by the shore were a darker turquoise than the water, the water an opal I had never beheld in person.

The waves were more wavelets when I got to where they broke, and after taking off my flip-flops, I let them lap and purl at my feet.

The only ocean I’d ever been in was the Atlantic, which, even in late summer, held beneath its waves a threat of cold.

But the Gulf’s waters were the temperature of a warm bath.

And considering this contrast, one I’d liked to have shared with Oren, with Mom or Dad, with anyone—a pair of twin boys built a sandcastle to my left—I thought, There it is again.

That feeling I’d had at the commercial shoot.

I decided to go find my brother.

On my way back to the resort, I ran into my parents on their way to the beach.

My father, who hated to take off his shirt because of his chubby breasts, was wearing his khakis rolled up well above his ankles and a shell-pink polo.

He was also carrying his leather satchel, as if he’d just been teleported from an audition in Manhattan.

Mom wore a bikini with a floral wrap around her waist, her bug-eye sunglasses, and a big, floppy sun hat, which she clutched to keep on her head; in her free arm she carried a pair of novels and a yellow legal pad with notes for her master’s thesis.

“Where’re you going?” she asked me, to which Dad, with some annoyance, said, “Let him go.” I crossed Captiva Drive again and then took the path toward the Crow’s Nest Bar I figured that Oren would know.

As I walked toward the tennis courts, I thought I heard my brother’s voice, and when I spotted two boys playing, I was sure one of them was Oren.

But when I walked up to the windscreen that surrounded it, I saw this girl instead.

She was a brunette like Carol Alt, but her hair was straight and slicked back in a wet ponytail.

She was tan, like she’d already been here several weeks, and was wearing a white tank top, which revealed two pink circles on each of her shoulders where she’d been sunburned and had already peeled, but looked like scars where wings had been torn off.

Her long legs were lustrous and brown down to her ankles, which were delicate and pretty, cupped by her blue pom-pom socks.

She was playing with a woman I guessed was her mother because they so strongly resembled each other.

What was even more impressive about both of them, the whole time I hung on the chain-link fence, which I soon realized was probably long enough to be creepy, was that during their cross-court rally, they not only managed to keep a single ball in play but, even after I’d left them to go find Oren—someone, anyone—to tell of what I’d just seen, I could still hear the ball tocking regularly behind me on the Har-Tru like the beating of my heart.

“Griffin!” Oren shouted as I walked by the pool.

He was sitting at the bar with another boy.

Two years younger than me, and he had no problem getting served.

Oren wore a bucket hat with a palm tree insignia stitched into it.

On his face: a pair of Ray-Ban Aviators that he’d bought for the trip.

His friend was a hulking kid with long hair almost down to his shoulders that half covered his eyes and who was wearing a T-shirt with cut-off sleeves and basketball shorts.

When I got a little closer, I noticed that his diminutive right hand was curled violently at the wrist, and his fingers stuck out stiff and pinched together at the tips, so that elbow to digits the appendage resembled the inverted neck and head of the Loch Ness Monster.

Both of them were drinking pina coladas.

“Cocktail?” Oren said.

“Sure,” I said.

“Virgin or regular?”

“What’s the difference?”

Oren looked at his friend.

“A cherry,” he said.

And they laughed.

“My brother, Griffin,” Oren said to his friend.

“He goes to the best private school in New York City.

How he got in and I didn’t is a complete mystery.

Although Mom says his grades were so bad, they probably didn’t think I could cut the mustard.”

“Frazier,” Frazier said to me, and stuck out his Plesiosaur hand, which I, stung by Oren’s jab, pulled at twice in greeting.

“Frazier’s from Dallas,” Oren said.

“His family comes here every year.” Then Oren said to the bartender, “Hey, Kessler,” who looked up from the glass he was cleaning.

“A Bacardi colada for my brother, please.”

“I just saw the most excellent girl,” I said.

“Where?” Oren said.

“Tennis courts.”

Oren squinted like he knew something.

“What was she wearing?” he asked.

I told him.

“What color hair did she have?” he asked.

I described it.

“She could really play, right?”

“Like Chris Evert, but if she looked like Brooke Shields.”

Oren glanced at Frazier, then nodded seriously.

“I saw her too.

That’s Regina Goodman,” Oren said, “she goes to my school.”

I got my drink, took a long suck on the straw.

“Go slow,” Oren said, “those are one-fifty-one proof.”

I waved him off and said, “Tell me everything.”

To Kessler the bartender, Oren said, “Gumbo Limbo 225, please,” and then slid him a five-spot.

“Take care of me this week,” he added, to which Kessler winked back; and then we three went to sit by the pool under the blazing sun and cloudless sky and the log-drumming of the palm leaves, and Oren, who was covering himself in Coppertone, told me all about Regina Goodman, with whom I was falling utterly and completely in love.

I took off my shirt as he spoke, squirted some more Hawaiian Tropic on myself, which pooled in my belly button and made my pasty skin look like it had been rubbed in chicken grease.

“You missed a spot,” said Frazier, pointing at my shoulder.

I hung on my brother’s every word.

Regina was a sophomore at Ferren and a tennis star.

She was from a really rich family.

“You know Bergdorf Goodman?” Oren said.

“You mean across from FAO Schwarz?” I said.

“She’s that one,” Oren said.

“What grade is she?”

“Sophomore.

But here’s the thing about her,” he continued.

“This is top secret, okay?”

“All right,” I said.

“I mean if you’re looking to get with her,” he said.

“I’m listening,” I said.

“She likes younger guys.” She’d even dated his best friend Matt this year.

“But he’s in eighth grade,” I said.

“No shit, Sherlock,” Oren said.

“And she always makes the first move.” In fact, he explained, she only made the first move.

“Don’t even bother asking her out if she doesn’t ask you.

Maybe it’s a rich-girl thing,” Oren figured, “who knows? But if she approaches you, you’re in like Flynn.

She wrote Matt a letter.

He found it in his locker.

‘Maybe sometime we could get milkshakes,’ she said, ‘and by sometime I mean tonight.’?” They met up at Baskin-Robbins that day, Oren said.

Matt got a cookies and cream shake, Regina got cherry vanilla, they walked straight back to her apartment in the Dakota, and then bingo: “Matt lost his virginity to her that night.”

“Cherry vanilla.” Frazier chuckled and shook his head.

“This is unbelievable,” I said.

We each drank two more Bacardi coladas, during which time I thought about how Bridget had that funny run but was fun to talk to, while Deb Peryton and I could barely carry on a conversation but she was a good kisser, whereas Regina was clearly a great athlete and I was a John McEnroe fan, so probably we had plenty to talk about between wrestling and tennis while we held hands and walked along the Gulf, once I got her to notice me.

This was the last thing I remember thinking before I woke up to discover Oren and Frazier were gone, the pool’s surface was littered with palm leaves, and my skin, pink as uncooked pork, felt like the heating element under a stovetop’s glass.

—

The next few days were miserable.

My sunburn was so bad that by the first evening my nose, chest, and shoulders had blistered.

That night, Mom made me take a cold shower and then slathered me in Solarcaine.

“Stops sunburn pain,” Dad said, peeking in my bedroom, “when someone you love is hurting.” The next day, Mom insisted that if I wanted to go to the beach or pool, I had to don a long-sleeved shirt and a hat and apply zinc oxide to my nose and lips.

The tops of my feet were so badly burned they hurt too much to wear flip-flops.

“Maybe he should wear socks,” Oren suggested, a little cruelly.

I couldn’t do any of the things the rest of the family was doing.

Or, in the case of my father, wasn’t doing.

He could not bring himself to sit still on the beach.

When he joined Mom and me—I had to remain in the cabana’s shade—he did not read like her or even swim with his shirt on, like I had to, because he never took his shirt off.

“The sand gets stuck between my toes,” he said to Mom.

His black bathing trunks showed off his pelican legs.

He nodded at the water.

“Beautiful view,” he said, rattling the ice cubes in his plastic ’Tween Waters Inn cup.

“What are you reading?” he asked Mom.

“The Portrait of a Lady,” she said.

He said, “Hemingway loved Captiva, didn’t he?”

“That was Key West,” Mom said, “and this is Henry James.”

He sang a few notes from his new musical.

Mom said, “Why don’t you go get your tape recorder and flash cards.

You can put on your headphones and learn your songs.”

Dad said, “Think I’ll go for a walk instead.” To which Mom, resting her open book on her belly and folding her hands over it, said, “Why don’t I join you?” To which Dad said, “You stay. Relax. ”

Then he marched down the beach until he was inches tall, until he disappeared.

He stayed gone for a while.

Then I saw him returning, his mite-sized silhouette growing like Ant-Man.

When he got back, he said, “Fabulous shells,” and then fell asleep on a chaise with a towel over his face.

When he woke, he said, “Think I’ll go back to the room and check my service.”

“What are you going to do if you get a booking,” Mom said, “fly home?”

My father shrugged.

“Think I’ll go for a drive then,” he said.

“Why don’t I come with you?” Mom said.

“Get some reading done.

Enjoy yourself.”

“Why don’t you take a ride with your father?” Mom said to me.

“I’m gonna find Oren,” I said, and hurried after Dad, who was trudging across the sand to the resort’s parking lot.

He didn’t notice me until he was in the driver’s seat of our rental car.

“Sure you don’t want to come?” he asked.

I told him no thanks and went exploring.

It was midday and the tennis courts were being watered.

Our room, whose terrace curtains ballooned in the warm breeze, was chillier because of my sunburn.

The fishing boats had long ago abandoned their slips for their day trips.

Neither Oren nor Frazier nor Regina were anywhere to be found.

Over those several days, when I wasn’t dreaming of Regina (as we sailed on a catamaran, when we caught a sailfish, when we went to a clam bake, when I bought her a necklace with a diamond-studded dolphin pendant), I stalked her all over the resort.

I followed her if I saw her headed somewhere.

I sometimes ran around buildings so that I might walk directly toward her and catch her eye.

When I did, I’d nod.

If she nodded back, which she did, occasionally, and giggled, I figured maybe it was because there was an attraction, but it also could’ve been my zinc-slathered face.

Either way, I was encouraged.

I spied her once leaving her room, which was, to my surprise, in the Sea Grape, which had a view of the Gulf but was also right on the road.

Once I saw her and her mother exiting the spa—a typical rich-girl thing to do.

It was on this occasion that she looked at me and really smiled, and when I told Oren about it that night he said, “I don’t believe you.”

“Why?”

“You’re not her type.”

“What’s her type?” I asked.

“Not sunburned,” he said.

And on these recon missions I often found Oren and Frazier doing everything Oren had hoped to on vacation.

From the room’s walkway, I spotted them jet-skiing on Roosevelt Sound.

I could hear Oren scream, “Woooohooooo!” as the machine punt punt punt ed atop the water.

How did he get so good so fast? And it was amazing to watch Frazier balance on the machine, his hand like a trained pet riding alongside him, while he used the other to clutch the handlebars.

In my broad-brimmed hat and sunglasses, my long-sleeved shirt and sweatpants, my socks and laceless sneakers, my nose and lips zinced, I might stop by the courts to watch Oren and Frazier play tennis.

Frazier’s forehand was a cannon.

His one-handed backhand was a thing of beauty too, finishing his swing with both arms outflung.

When he served, he pinched both the ball and racquet handle in his good hand and, with the wrist of his bad one, brushed his bangs from his eyes.

He tossed the ball in the air, and as it hung above him at its arc’s zenith, he readjusted his grip, twisted with all his big-bodied torque, and sent a kicking serve into Oren’s court.

Somewhere, somehow, and without my knowledge, Oren had managed to learn to hit very respectable strokes in return.

He and Frazier could not kayak, but they did take out a catamaran, which Dad had said he knew how to sail but maybe next year.

And on the second-to-last day, just when my burn had healed enough that I could wear shorts and short sleeves and hang with my brother, Frazier and Oren departed at the crack of dawn for an all-day deep-sea fishing trip with Frazier’s father.

That was when I got the note from Regina.

I was applying sunblock in the bathroom.

Mom was out collecting seashells.

Dad, who was listening to the music for his show’s songs and singing the verses, stopped and said, “This came for you.” It was a pink ’Tween Waters Inn envelope with my named double underlined, and inside, on ’Tween Waters Inn stationery—also pink—in a bubbly, girly-girl script of fat g ’s and b ’s and hearts dotting the i ’s, read:

Dear Griffin,

Your brother and I go to the same school and he suggested I write.

I have a tennis lesson at ten this morning but was thinking you could meet me when it’s finished and we could take a walk down the beach? Maybe go for a swim? Explore Manatee Cove? I’ll wear my bathing suit underneath my skirt.

Maybe you could bring the towels and the tanning oil?

OXOXOX,

Regina

“Oh my God!” I said to my reflection, to the air.

“What is it?” Dad said.

“Did you get a part in a movie?”

“I have to take another shower,” I said, and closed the door on him.

I bathed again in order to remove the zinc from my face.

After I toweled the steam from the mirror, I noticed there was a bright pink stripe from my nose’s bridge to its tip.

But the peeling wasn’t so bad, especially on my shoulders and across my chest after I used Mom’s Oil of Olay.

From the kitchenette, Dad sang a song from his show, “You’re the birdsong, you’re my morning, you’re the sun on the leaves…” Then he rewound the tape, consulted his flash cards, and sang the same three lines again while adding another.

I brushed my teeth twice to get rid of my coffee breath.

From my father’s Dopp kit I borrowed his dental excavator, scraped some plaque from between my bottom teeth, and then, after rinsing the tip carefully, used it to pop an unripe zit on my chin.

I spent the next fifteen minutes dealing with this crisis, since a perfect globule of blood kept forming atop the puncture no matter how much pressure I applied to its crater.

Dad sang, “You’re the flowers, you’re the pollen, you’re the buzzing of the bees…” and then rewound the tape.

I put on my Jensen’s Marina I waved to her once.

Indicated: No rush.

A couple entered the court.

The pro said, “David, Alice, I was just finishing up.” Regina waved goodbye to the pro and, racquet pinched under her arm and a towel wrapped around her neck, walked toward me.

She opened the gate, smiled, and then, as she closed it, said, “Hello.”

“Hello,” I said.

As she turned and began to walk toward the beach, I said, “I brought some towels.”

She smiled.

“I have one, but thanks.”

When I said, “Okay,” she started to walk toward Captiva Drive.

The Gulf sparkled in the distance.

My mouth was so dry I couldn’t swallow.

I was about to speak, but at the Sea Grape suites, Regina turned and began to walk up the steps leading to the building’s second floor.

“Should I come with you or wait down here?” I asked.

She turned to face me and smiled.

“Do I know you?” she said.

“I’m Griffin, Oren’s brother.”

Silence.

“You wrote me a note,” I said.

“To meet you after your lesson and go to the beach together.”

“I think you have me confused with someone else.”

“You’re not Regina?”

“I’m Meredith,” she said.

“And I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Then she hurried upstairs, her sneaker soles scuffing each slightly sandy step with the sound of a struck match.

I found Oren and Frazier at the bar later that afternoon.

They were celebrating their last day together and their fishing trip.

Oren was wearing a shell necklace he’d made on the ride back; his aviator sunglasses hung at the bottom of his collar’s V.

He and Frazier were drinking daiquiris.

When I joined them, Oren said, “I caught a sand shark! It’s almost four feet long.

It’s in a cooler by the dock if you want to see it.”

“Congratulations,” I said.

“I’m gonna release it later if you want to come.” When I didn’t answer, he said, “I could use your help.

Because it’s so big.”

“I’ll bet it’s a whopper,” I said.

Frazier took a long pull at his drink.

“How was your date?” he asked.

“Ha-ha,” I said.

“Very funny.”

“Admit it,” Frazier said, “your brother got you hook, line, and sinker.”

Were it not for his hand, I’d have punched him square in the mouth.

Oren could tell I was crushed.

“We have to meet my parents at the Crow’s Nest Grille for dinner,” he told his friend.

So, I thought, no e.

Frazier got up.

“See you next year,” he said.

“Yeah,” Oren said, and poured his daiquiri’s remainder down his throat, “don’t count on it.” Then he knuckle-bumped Frazier, and they parted.

Oren watched him go and then said to me, “Want to see the shark?”

We settled up and left.

To my dismay we walked past Meredith and her mother on the way toward the docks.

“Hi, Griffin,” she said.

“Hi, Oren.”

As we passed the sailboats, Oren couldn’t stand the silence any longer.

“It was Frazier’s idea.

At least the part about the note.”

“Whatever,” I said.

“You’ve got to admit the handwriting was convincing.”

I was so mad my eyes were welling up.

“Who’d have thought Frazier was such a good forger,” I said.

“His sister did it,” Oren said, as if this were a consolation.

The sailboats’ masts clanged when a gust kicked up.

Kerosene rainbows slicked around the fishing boats.

A stray cat crossed our path.

An osprey flew low over the bay.

I looked around.

So far as I could tell, we were alone.

Oren noticed this too.

At the end of the dock, beneath a winch for weighing fish, with a huge hook attached to a rope, was a large cooler.

Oren opened it.

The sand shark lay half submerged in the water.

It was big enough that it could not completely straighten out but was curled uncomfortably, like a cramped muscle.

When the sunlight hit it, as if sensing the bay beyond its confines, the fish thwapped and thumped its tail against the cooler’s walls, swung its head, and sent its saving element splashing.

We stood looking at the fish as it struggled, and then it stopped.

Oren said, “I’m really sorry.”

I said nothing in response.

“Please,” he whispered.

I grabbed him by the collar and foot swept him.

I followed him down to the deck, so that his head slammed against the dock.

I pinned his biceps beneath my shin so he couldn’t cover up, and I grabbed his throat.

I pulled his necklace’s fishing line till it snapped; when it did, the shells skittered.

I punched his aviators on his chest once, twice, until both lenses shattered.

I grabbed his hat and chucked it into the bay.

I grabbed a fist of my brother’s hair, right at the forelock, lifting him until he stood.

Then I pushed him off the dock, into the water.

There was a splash.

And when he surfaced—he was coughing—I lifted the cooler over my head and flung it at him, the shark, midair, flung from its confines, landing with a great smack, the cooler’s base donking Oren directly on the head.

And then the creature disappeared into the depths while Oren treaded water and stared at me, red-eyed, but did not cry.