Osprey Island

For an elongated second Lorna looked truly gleeful, and then the joy on her face swerved into fear as the plastic legs of the chair began to bend and buckle beneath her. She went over awkwardly, slowly enough that the impact didn’t hurt her, just elicited a short “Oh!” of surprise. Squee looked on, frozen: he’d set this terrible domino-train of events in motion and was powerless to stop it now. Lance, too, was halted for a moment by incomprehension. But as his wife tumbled over before him, his confusion turned to anger. He flashed his young son an accusing glare. Then he bent over to help Lorna up off the ground.

Bud Chizek wore a chef’s hat to scoop the potato salad and coleslaw onto Styrofoam plates. Bud and his wife, Nancy, owned and ran the Lodge at Osprey Island and had been doing so since Bud inherited the place from his father almost forty years before. Bud had learned early that housekeeping girls could be imported very cheaply through an overseas Irish employment agency and that a dining room could be quite adequately staffed with college boys who were thrilled to settle for low wages in exchange for a summer at the beach with an in-house stable of attractive, young, and impressionable lasses eager to experience the American way.

Once upon a time the Lodge’s season had run Memorial Day to Labor Day; now there weren’t enough guests to make it worth Bud’s while to open earlier than Fourth of July weekend. The staff arrived on Osprey mid-June and spent the rest of the month getting the lay of the land, getting the Lodge ready for guests, and getting good and drunk most every night. At the barbecue to welcome them to Osprey the Irish girls held their hot dogs awkwardly, as though unfamiliar with the concept of the frankfurter. They sipped generic colas and orangeades and sat tentatively on the grass as if afraid to muss their shorts. The boys—the waiters—clustered by a large trash can like hobos around an oil-drum fire, as though it gave them a greater sense of purpose to guard the garbage, keep tabs on the rate of paper plate discard, see who might fail to heed Nancy Chizek’s infamous sign: DON’T HAVE EYES BIGGER THAN YOUR STOMACH—TAKE ONLY WHAT YOU WILL EAT.

“Is the food this brutal as a rule, do you think?” said one of the seated Irish girls, a buxom, redheaded Dubliner called Brigid. She poked suspiciously at a stewy splotch of potato salad, yellow with unidentifiable flecks of red and green. The other girls shrugged blandly, unwilling to pass judgment just yet on this strange new place and its American accoutrements. They were jet-lagged and knew they’d do better to hold their condemnation until they’d had a good night’s sleep, or at least a pint of beer.

Brigid’s new roommate—with whom she could look forward to sharing, for the duration of the summer, a shoddily wallpapered heat trap on the first floor of the staff house—was a girl from County Cork named Peg who was neat and mousy with smooth skin and thin lips that she pursed as though in great distress. Brigid’s sister, Fiona, had worked at the Lodge the previous summer, and Peg reminded Brigid of her, which was both comforting and repellent. Had they been back at home in Ireland, Brigid and Peg would have loathed each other on sight—an arrogant Jackeen from the city! a bloody mulchie!—but as it was, in this new place, the girls would likely cling to the familiarity of their own until they’d gotten steady enough to detach from the clan.

As paper plates mounted in the trash can, Bud Chizek climbed atop a picnic table, tapping a plastic spoon against the side of a Styrofoam cup. “Hello,” he said. He raised his voice: “Hello and welcome!” He swept a hand out at the panorama of sea and sky before him, a gesture at the crescent that was Sand Beach. “I couldn’t have ordered a better sunset for you tonight,” he said, and his wife, Nancy, applauded softly, proud as a grandmother of that pink-plumped sky. The evening was indeed exemplary, the western horizon streaked like a tropical drink. Seagulls flew in from the beach and lit upon the Lodge lawn to poke their beaks at fallen hot dog buns and discarded melon rinds. And in its nest atop a utility pole near the shoreline, a lone osprey stood displaying its profile to the crowd as if aware of the dramatic silhouette it cut against the horizon.