Helen of Sparta

Abstract

Laney Beck came to stay with us the autumn that my older brother, Darren, turned sixteen and insufferable. It had been a torrid sum mer?the second hottest on record along Florida's Gulf Coast?so dry that the freshwater pond behind our motel withered into caked, cracking earth. Carcasses of alligators and armadillos lined the parched drainage ditches along the roadbeds. Sea grapes shriveled in black clusters. But Darren's fixation that August was the shape of his ears, how one curved up gently like the sheath of a fig shell, while the other rose to an elfin point. He studied his reflection at every opportunity: in shop windows, swimming pools, the Plexiglas faces of vending machines. He tried to cure the deviant ear with a convex brace fashioned from pipe cleaners. My brother's other obsession was driving, and he was all too willing to chauffeur me to junior tango practice and oboe lessons as a pretext to borrow Mama's Taurus. Or, if it meant extra time behind the wheel, to pick up Laney Beck from the airport in Fort Myers. So that's how it happened. Darren volunteered and I went with him. Not by choice, of course. But the day after Columbus Day was Superintendent's Conference Day in the Lee County schools, which meant that big brothers all over Cormorant Island were saddled babysitting their twelve-year-old sisters. Mama had wanted to drive out to the airport herself?Laney Beck was her oldest friend, after all, her only real friend?yet with Papa still up in St. Petersburg, tending to Aunt Pricilla, she didn't trust my brother to man the motel office solo. Especially not on a Tuesday, when the linens went out. Darren drove for speed, not accuracy. At the traffic lights, he flipped down the ceiling mirror and scoured his face for blemishes. At the longer lights on Nautilus Boulevard, he filed his fingernails. I've always felt a twinge of terror crossing bridges, and cruising over the causeway to the mainland at twice the posted limit, I dug my fingernails deep into the vinyl upholstery. But I knew not to beg Darren to be careful. That was a guaranteed way to make him hit the gas.