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“Frankie met Lucia in that summer …” If there’s a better beginning for that greatest of all genres—the summer romance—I don’t know what it would be. Add in an ice-cream shack, a beach, a thunderstorm, and some distracted parents—all of the irresistible ingredients are here in Ruby Opalka’s “Spit,” a short story published in The Atlantic this week.
Frankie, our teenage protagonist, lands a summer job scooping ice cream on the southwest English coast. That’s where she meets Lucia—and begins to understand herself better as well. I remember the rhythm of those sweet, repetitive, sleep-deprived days of summer: I spent my vacations working the front desk at the Golden lnn on the Jersey Shore. But I can’t say that I quite had Frankie’s exquisite receptivity to the world around her:
She loved the constant movement of the water and the sticky air, and she loved to see the layers of earthly time squashed up against one another in the Purbeck Monocline. A folding, suffocating, gorgeous grave.
Still, I think I know what Frankie means when, with all the intensity that long summer nights can inspire, “she looked at the shape of Lucia next to her and felt that she knew something real.”
“Spit”
By Ruby Opalka
Frankie met Lucia in that summer of tombstoners and storms, when the tomato plants got blight and the bean plants fruited early. She lived in a small cluster of houses just north of Lulworth, where the news consisted only of tomato plants getting blight and bean plants fruiting early. She was sitting in the dirt tunnel beneath the beans, which by now had shriveled in the sun like exhumed fingers, when she called up Beach Ices and it all began.
I saw the ad, she said on the phone, getting ready to say she had no experience but a wealth of enthusiasm.
Well, it’s a case of needing a body in the room, a woman on the other end said.
Okay, Frankie said.
Okay, the woman repeated. So you can do it?
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