JEANNETTE THOMAS DIKE
LOW TIDE The man at the shell shop wore brown loafers and a bright green tie. His sleeves were rolled up at the elbows – as well they should have been in this heat – mother would later say. Rita stooped over a bucket of bleach water fishing out sand dollars the size of quarters. Every time she righted herself she’d either be watching his brown hands picking through her postcard rack or my sand-caked feet dragging in the whole outside. He didn’t belong here. The oystermen had all left and the colored had their own beach, their own stores, probably their own shell shop. I wasn’t supposed to be here either. Momma sent me to the grocers for aloe and ice cream. The chill of Momma’s Neapolitan felt good against the crook of my arm but my knees ached from the saltwater and the scraping. And that’s why girls have no business sliding, Martha Jo, Momma would say. Better a story about baseball than letting on I’d been crawling around underneath the stilted beach houses again, shelling in the pitch-black before-morning with Daddy’s flashlight and a bread bag. “Mister, you need something?” Rita called, holding two flesh-colored conchs at her shoulders like weights and eyeing him as if he might ask for more than he deserved. “Yes’m,” the man said brightly, “All these cards a nickel?” A short they is was all she could manage before turning her back and setting the conchs on a high shelf behind her.
53
