Martie Calkins threw herself on the cool sand of the beach and gave vent to a long breath. Sidney, standing over her, wished she could do likewise with the same picturesque abandon. Mart was so splendidly “I don’t care a hang”; her tumbled hair now was thick with sand, across her tanned face was a smear of black, her shabby blouse was torn and open at the throat exposing her chest to the hot sun, her bare, hard-muscled legs were outstretched, the heels digging into the sand and the grimy toes separating and curling like the tentacles of a crab.
“Oh, this is the life,” she sang. “Sit down and make yourself at home. This beach’s yours as much as mine I guess.”
Sidney sat down quickly lest her companion guess how she was tied inside with the innumerable bonds and knots of conventions, century old, which Martie had somehow escaped. Of course Sidney herself did not think it that way; she only knew that she felt ridiculously awkward with Martie Calkins in spite of her growing determination to be just like her.
They had been friends now for two whole weeks, the shortest two weeks Sidney had ever known simply because into them they had crowded so much. She had met Mart the day after her coming to Sunset Lane. Mart had appeared at Aunt Achsa’s with some baking soda her grandmother had borrowed two months before. Aunt Achsa had said: “I cal’late you two girls better make friends.” That was so obviously sensible that Sidney quickly put from her the impression that Mart was the “queerest” girl she had ever met. She had seen queerer but had never talked to them. But Mart was young and frankly friendly and lived next door and, anyway, everything was so very different here that it was ridiculous to expect to meet a girl like Nancy or the others at school or perfect like Pola.
Before Mart’s experience, her knowledge of the sea and boats, her background of seafaring ancestors, her easy assurance, Sidney’s pleasant sense of superiority soon went crash. Too, Mart revealed a quality of strongheartedness and a contentment with everything as it came along that amazed Sidney at the same time that it put her own restlessness to shame. Why, Mart, in all her life, had never been farther than Falmouth and had gone there to a funeral, but she had none of Sidney’s yearnings to “see places.” Pressed by Sidney’s inquiries she had answered, with a deceiving indifference: “Oh, what’s the use of wanting to go anywhere, it’s nice enough here.” Nor did Mart’s multitudinous tasks embarrass her; she would keep Sidney waiting while she finished scrubbing the kitchen floor. And she had a way of swishing her brush that made even this homely labor seem like play until Sidney, watching from the safety of a chair, her feet securely tucked between its rungs, longed to roll up her own sleeves and thrust her arms into the sudsy water. Martie had to work much harder than any girl Sidney had ever known or heard about; she did a man’s work and a woman’s work about her home and did not even think it was out of kindly proportion to her years. “Oh, there’s just gran’ma and me and she has rheumatiz awful,” she had explained just once to Sidney. That was why, of course, Martie looked so unkempt and overgrown and had had so little schooling, but Sidney came to think these shortcomings and their cause made Martie the more interesting.
Though after a week Sidney could toss her head like Mart, run as fast, go barefooted, sprinkle her chatter with a colloquial slang that would have horrified the League, affect ignorance to anything schooly, she found that it was not easy to emulate Mart’s fine independence. There was always that feeling of being tied to the things ingrained within her.
Mart’s ease with everyone, young or old, gave her, in Sidney’s eyes, the desirable quality of grown-upness. Mart talked to the fishermen and the women who were her grandmother’s friends and the artists and the tradespeople exactly as though she were their equal in point of years; Sidney, marvelling and admiring, did not know that this assurance was really a boldness that had grown naturally out of there just being “gran’ma and me.” Martie had had to hold her own since she was six years old.
Though from the first day of her coming Sidney, moved by a sense of the courtesy to be expected from a guest, had insisted that they include Lavender in all their plans, at the same time she had wished that he would refuse for she could not conquer a shyness with him. He was a boy and she had never known any boys very well, and he was a “different” boy. But Mart did not mind him at all; she played tolerantly with him, quarreled cheerfully and bitterly with him, laughed with him and at him exactly as though he were a girl like herself or she the boy that she should have been, gran’ma considered.
On this day Mr. Dugald had taken Lavender to the backside. He had not invited the girls to join them which had roused Sidney’s curiosity. She had watched them depart, loaded down with books and stools and an easel and a box of lunch and had wondered what they were going to do all day, alone, in the dunes. She was soon to know that those hours were sacred to Lavender, that in the great silences of the sandy stretches he and his Mr. Dugald with their books went far from the Cape and Sunset Lane and the crooked body.
The girls, left to themselves, had decided to go clamming. Of all the novel things she had done in the last two weeks Sidney liked clamming best. It was even more fun than the Arabella for after all the Arabella was only pretend. She liked to feel her bare toes suck up the goosy sand as she stepped over the wet beds. She could never dig as fast as Mart or Lavender because she had to stop and watch the sky and the clouds and the moving sails and the swooping seagulls. “You’d never make a living digging clams,” Martie had scolded. (Mart herself could dig faster than old Jake Newberry who had peddled clams through the town for fifty years. Mart had sometimes sold hers at the hotels.)