Love in Atlantis

By Bonnie L. Barrett

“In this world there is love, there is fame, there is wealth, but the glory of the glories is to be a new girl in a little beach town in June.” The girl is Virginia and this is the story of her sexual awakening and admission into the never-changing mysteries in a southern California seaside town in the golden, long-ago summers of the 1930s. The little beach town is San Soleo (not to be found on any map), jerry-built just in time for the Great Depression, where time stopped when the money ran out. Virginia, in the course of the novel, evades rape, seduction, and drowning to reach a higher rung on the ladder of maturity. Bonnie Barrett has taken the oldest of themes and closed the time gap: she has caught the period and place with the fidelity of an old Glenn Miller recording, yet made it new, eventful, spicy, funny and harrowingly true. But more than that, she has evoked the bittersweet redolence of lost summers, lost youth, lost love, the time that for all of us lies drowning like Atlantis, now in a sea of changes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 5, 2015
• ISBN: 9781504012317

Book preview

1.

When I was fourteen we moved to the beach. I never considered why, yet doubtless it had to do with some all but mortal crisis between my parents. They may have hoped by a change of scene to find each other again after some breach, or perhaps this interlude was an actual separation. Certainly my father was away more than not, since his work remained in the city. My mother’s face forms before me, and it is plain enough to me now, written upon it, that she was heartbroken. But then, at fourteen, it concerned me not a whit if we had come to the beach to break or to mend my mother’s heart. I had other fish to fry, and in any case would have reasoned there must be some mistake, as she was of an age (she was thirty-seven) for her heart to have atrophied except as an organ of duty. Such was my view.

This was in the thirties, when radio and airplanes and movies were still play-pretties from God, rewards for being in the main good children, so we believed. Rumor reached us from the future that the world was shrinking, but no one then, not even Chicken Little, viewed with alarm the meager acreage of earth. Certainly no one did in the town we moved to, where a sign by the highway said: Bienvenido! You are entering SAN SOLÉO BY THE SEA. Elev. 100. Pop. 687.

That place is gone, drowned like Atlantis now in a sea of changes; but San Soléo was the prettiest town then. It was like a sand castle. It had just that charm. To put it plainer, the place was a casualty of the crash and crooked contractors. The trees were stunted from being planted cramped in the nursery cans they came in; there were walks and walls made of a scandalous red brick that came apart like sugar in the hands; the streets were split and pitted and flowing away into the fields like watercolor; and there was a long, white, graceful, lamplighted pier that broke in two one night in a giant surf and simply sailed away. We moved there in June after school let out, into a rented, furnished house that I loved at sight, principally for the romantic feature in my bedroom of glass doors that gave onto a balcony, the smallest possible, but a balcony nonetheless, which, inspecting it at once, I found to overlook a portion of driveway, a front yard of geraniums in bloom, and summer fields sloping to a shiny edge, the sea. There I stood a moment, resting a hand on that prophetic ledge, in a brief service invoking Juliet, fourteen like me with a balcony like me. Then I hung my clothes in the closet, put on my bathing suit, and went to the beach.

In this world there is love, there is fame, there is wealth, but the glory of glories is to be a new girl at fourteen in a little beach town in June. In twenty minutes I had learned my legs were pretty, my lashes long, my breath sweet (this last from Kenny Peach, who forthrightly sniffed and gave his verdict), and daily thereafter all summer we met on the sand south of the pier, in number about a good-sized litter of us, comprised of two sexes, on the one hand, boys, on the other, girls, and if this sounds dull to anyone, my condolences. We did not find it so: on the first night, straight from supper I withdrew to my balcony to dote on the bewitching Kenny Peach.

It is true, I had guessed at sight that here was a specimen pure of a fresh boy, but at sight can be too late. To the last freckle, Kenny Peach was formed to please … fresh boys generally are … and, still in my bathing suit, I sat a long while. The fields turned an astounding pink in the sunset. My mother came out and stood for a time on the driveway below. The coastal dew began to fall. Still I sat, clasping my knees on my balcony.

My thoughts were chaste, for I was a virgin and could not feature being otherwise. Oh, I knew the Facts of Life, which my mother claimed would some day with the right man seem less freakish to me, and I believed her, reasoning it must be so, but reason does not count for much, and I could not feature how two people got that well acquainted. Some day a rocket with life aboard might join our planet with the moon, but as for me, I had not seen Rome, Paris, or New York—that is to say, I had not even been kissed yet, and my speculations centered on this nearer and not unthinkable event. The first star appeared, and I wished on it, and went to bed then, grateful to God for the turn my life had taken, while from a house not far the trill of a clarinet pierced me with desire. Well it might, though I was still to learn who played it. I dropped to sleep in a very swoon of satisfaction with the premonitory strangeness around me: the strangeness of the room, the house, the balcony; the town; the day’s events; of the bed I lay in, higher and softer than I had known, with carven garlanded dancers at head and foot; the toodly-ooh of that clarinet, straying over the darkening fields of San Soléo; and the omnipresent, peppery strangeness of my own flesh, for I was sunburned. That was the last time I went to bed at dusk that way like a child, as if with the end of daylight playtime were over.

Next morning my mother entered my room and, finding me awake, seated herself at the end of the bed, took one of my feet into her lap, and after a prolonged, indecipherable gaze informed me I had had three callers the night before.

I sat upright. You don’t mean boys!

Mama nodded. She was utterly solemn. One in white flannels, one with a stammer, and one—she itemized—with an odd name. Shatto. He brought you this.

I cried out, and seized what she was holding. Shatto was the lifeguard, and I have never since felt so signally honored. It was a bitters bottle from his mother’s kitchen containing a homemade lotion for my sunburn, and I was disappointed, of course, in a gift so practical and kind. But it was a present from a boy, my first, and a luscious shudder passed through me as our eyes locked, Mama’s and mine, as they never had before: woman to woman.

Mrs. Tenney had a patch of broken veins on her left thigh. It was a smallish, pale blue spider, like one my mother had in the same place, and with my twenty-twenty fourteen-year-old vision I spotted it from well off as she descended the ramp from the pier. I mention this more to describe myself than her, for it was a negligible blemish, and there is a whole discourse on the subject of young girls in the fact that that was what I noticed. Certainly the boys, elbow-propped in a row to either side of me on the hot sand, got a more generalized first impression: at sight of her, as she came down the ramp they struck up that immemorial sidewalk salute, chanting it in time to her springy walk …

Do you ever think

When a hearse goes by

That some day you-oo

Are going to die?…

at which I recollect I scanned the horizon hunting a fit subject for their tribute and, seeing only this grown lady, treated Kenny Peach, who was conducting, to a severe look: I had strict views, among them that youth owed respect to age. But Kenny, as deaf to preachments as Huck Finn, kept on leading his boys’ choir—The worms crawl out, The worms crawl in—while Mrs. Tenney crossed before us unaware. If she had heard the song she would have favored the singers with a smile. Her views were not strict, like mine.

I was yet to learn this, of course, but I realize now my feelings toward Mrs. Tenney were censorious long before I knew her to do anything out of order. I felt a spasm of disapproval at the outset, noting her blue spider; I suppose because my mother with a mark like that never came to the beach. And, too, the bravura of her carriage in a bathing suit made her suspect. Bathing suits those days had nothing in them to keep you in, or out, or up, or even reasonably in place. There was nothing in them but you, and anybody with any shape or shame to speak of kept her arms crossed.

But Mrs. Tenney marched across the sand, flawed thigh, bosom-sag and all, chin up, chest out, shoulders back as if she intended at once and literally to breast the waves. Her bathing suit was a splashy island print with an apron front fetchingly draped to a fist of gathers at one hip; her hair, brown and shiny, though not thick, she wore limply waved from a middle part like Carole Lombard and pinned behind one ear to accommodate a full-blown, bright pink hibiscus; she gleamed with lotion and swung a large, embroidered, yellow straw bag … the total effect, in brief, was so cheerily, candidly sensual, in retrospect it is obvious to me she knew, among other things, her Margaret Sanger. But though the boys, bless them all, were simply acknowledging a greeting, at the time I thought it coarse, bad-mannered, and surpassing strange of them to sing dee-dum-dee-dum in jog-time as she walked. In that department, I judged Mrs. Tenney as no more to be reckoned with than Dame May Whitty. Merely the blot on her thigh placed her, like my mother, out of the running, and the glad grooming that might have given me pause instead classed her in my mind with those enigmatic grandmas one saw on buses who used bluing in their hair.

With that decisiveness of people who have come to the beach expressly for a tan, Mrs. Tenney put down her towel, choosing from leagues of sand a six-foot plot as if it were bought and paid for. She kicked her sandals off, disposed herself at full length on her back, and, with an arm shading her eyes, thus more or less remained all that summer and most of the next. It turned out she was a friendly, down-to-earth, approachable person, but it is true that girls are stupid: we all snubbed her (in the course of two summers I spoke to her twice, both times under duress) and it is idle now to speculate what she might have confided to us of the lore girls need that mothers may not tell them.

Well, she managed without us. There was always someone passing the time of day with her. Mysteriously she made friends just lying on her back, and the boys fetched and carried for her as if indeed she were unable to get up—behavior I approved in them as being in the best boy scout tradition of conspicuous gallantry toward the old, the halt, the blind, and, by extension, the blemished. Meanwhile, the sun shone on Mrs. Tenney as upon us all; but long after the spoil-spot on her thigh had disappeared under a rich tan, to me it remained in view—evidence of a truth that canceled her: she was not young.

An hour or so after Mrs. Tenney’s arrival, Mr. Tenney arrived. Yes, there was a Mr. Tenney then, who was as much a sight to see in his own way as Mrs. Tenney in hers, and for the second time that day the entire beach reared on its elbow. He was an old, brown, emaciated man with a rigid abdomen and a military bearing; he walked so straight he looked sprung, raising his feet high—signs of Hodgkin’s or Parkinson’s or one of those diseases, but we didn’t know that and we nicknamed him among ourselves the Crazy Major. He came to the beach daily—as did his wife—but later than she, and since they never sat together or left together, it was a while before anyone perceived they were married. The first to spot his arrival would announce as a thing not to be missed, Here comes the Crazy Major! and there you would see him, in his leather bedroom slippers, raising them high, with his ancient personal effects more or less collected in those sagging blue wool-jersey trunks he wore that made me think of my old jacks bag. He carried one of those little dogs with the shakes in the crook of his arm, and a chauffeur in livery marched behind him, at sight of whom (of the chauffeur) Kenny chirped, Drive me over the cliff, James; I’m committing suicide! They made quite a pair … unsettling in some way: the one in all that gear chauffeurs wear, and the other with scarcely a string around him.

Choosing a spot in his wife’s environs—neither near her nor far off—Mr. Tenney spread his blanket and poured water into a Thermos cup for the dog, while the chauffeur struck a parasol into the sand, secured the