Cabbageheads
Sea and sky form an unbroken gray. Not the calming bottle-green sea and azure blue skies Janie had envisioned. Glistening blobs the size of plastic grocery bags wash ashore. Litter the wet sands. They resemble something a child might have spat out.
“Cabbageheads,” Janie’s mother says. Gayla’s gray hair flips in the wind.
Screaming gulls ride the wind like white skiffs. Others gulls at the beached blobs. Some blobs, Janie notices, smaller, shimmer iridescent purple. “Cabbageheads?” Janie says, shifting her baby from one hip to the other. Unaccustomed to wind, Preat gulps. He’s an early walker, but too unsteady to manage loose sand.
“Jellyfish,” Paul says.
“Some Portuguese man-o-wars, too,” Gayla says. “Be careful with the kids. They have tentacles you can’t even see. Venomous all the same.”
Three-year-old Ann cries, “Hair! Hair, Mommy!” and presses her hands to her head. The child hates wind-tangled hair. Janie passes the baby to her mother and gives her daughter two quick braids.
Unaccustomed to holding weight, especially squirmy weight, Gayla hands back the baby. “Healthy boy,” she says. She could have handed Preat to Paul.
“I wanna see the ’abbages,” Ann says.
Paul scoops her up before she bolts and sets her on his shoulders. “Down,” Ann cries, and Paul clasps her ankles. She’d only get stung by man-o-wars.
“Driving six hours for this,” Gayla says. “I did wonder why y’all wanted to be here during a jellyfish bloom.”
Jellyfish bloom? “Mom,” Janie says, “you could’ve said something.”
“Thought you knew.”
She’d grumbled about Galveston Island not being so charming, but Janie had heard the usual bitching, not a warning.
Paul suggests walking, keeping to the dunes.
After a few yards, Gayla’s winded. “Y’all go ahead,” she puffs. “I’ll get us settled in the house.”
They all trudge back. Janie wants to make sure her mother doesn’t grab the biggest bed for herself. Before the kids, Gayla might’ve paid for an outing. She still acts like she does, grabbing the nicest room or the one with its own bath. “Well, I cut the check,” she’ll say, and if Janie says, “Actually, Mom, Paul did,” Gayla will pout for days.
The rental’s one of three look-alikes on stilts. Stairs up to a wide deck. Janie puts away the groceries and scouts the cabinets for white vinegar or tenderizer, should anyone touch a venomous tentacle. Nada.
Paul offers to go to the store. “Should I take the kids along?” he says.
When Janie suggests he take Mom, he chuckles.
Ann and Peart have found the rental’s stash of beach toys. Peart hugs a pink plastic pickup the size of his torso.
“Here,” Janie says, “let’s put on your sandals.
“Stay close to the house,” she adds as Ann clatters down the stairs, braids flipping and a red bucket swinging in her plump little hand. She runs straight to a half-buried driftwood log that’s as smooth and silvered as the horizon. The wind lashes tufts of dune grasses growing alongside it.
Janie sits on the top step. Peart’s content to push the pink truck back and forth on the deck, the plastic wheels rattling over the wooden planks. The baby’s vroomvrooms punctuate an enchanting lullaby of crying gulls and distant waves. What else besides jellyfish do the waves carry? What might lurk beneath the water’s surface?
Gayla stays inside. Perhaps she’s napping. Long car rides, small children, and the palpable mother-daughter tension—however baseless yet ubiquitous—drains Gayla. When Janie rented this place, she invited her mother along only because she knew Gayla would decline. Now, here they were.
A woman appears upon the deck next door, the wind nearly flattening her afro. She holds a glass of wine and says in a calm drawl, “A rattlesnake was sunning itself on that same log yesterday.”
Janie stands immediately. “Ann, sweetie,” she calls, “come on inside.”
“I’m pwaying.” She rubs her palms free of sand on the log.
Janie might see a burrow among the tufts of dune grasses. “Now,” she says firmly.
Ann pours a bucket of sand, Christ Almighty, right into that burrow.
“Ann!”
The child drops the bucket, the handle clattering. “Mommy! Don’t be like Granma!”
Janie snatches up Peart, presses his head to her chest, and rushes pell-mell down the stairs. His fingers dig into her fleshy underarms, and he drops the pink truck. It tumbles down the stairs, and she almost trips on it. Preat begins to howl.
Like a mama cat, Janie’s on the scruff of Ann’s neck, grabbing her T-shirt to pull her away from the log. She nearly drops Peart.
Like a kitten, Ann goes limp, and Janie glances up at the neighbor. The woman’s leaning on the rail. Mild expression, red lipstick, matching nails. Empty wine glass. Similar age—early thirties. Here for a weekend tryst? A quick escape from a messy life? Or has the woman kept her life tidy? Childless.
Gayla appears, her white hair whipping around her drawn face. “What in the world are you doing to my grandbabies?” she calls. “Traumatizing them?”
Janie closes her eyes for a second. The neighbor woman steps from sight. And above Gayla, gulls hover as if the wind holds them in place. Are the birds at war with the elements or exploiting them? One swoops past Gayla head, awfully close.
A white rental car pulls up, parking under the house’s stilts—the rental car. It’s Paul, empty-handed.
Meredith Wadley is an American-Swiss living and working in a medieval micro town on the Rhine River. Her writing has been anthologized and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Read her latest work in Keeping It Under Wraps: Bodies Uncensored anthology, The Disappointed Housewife, Mediterranean Poetry, Subnivean, The Woolf, and forthcoming in Across the Margin and The Vincent Brothers Review. Her monthly musings about life and writing plus her publication links appear on her website, www.meredithwadley.com. Twitter: @meredithwadley. Instagram: @meredithkaisi.