by Anita Shreve
“Don’t know, Viv. What are we doing?”
“We’re behaving terribly. And we’ve only been here a day.”
“Isn’t that the point? To behave terribly? In the summer, I mean?”
“There has to be something better,” she says.
“Like what?”
“You have no imagination.”
“Possibly not.”
“Something that’s not such a waste. Not so self-indulgent.”
“We’re who everyone wants to be, Viv.”
“How sad,” she says, glancing out at the haze at the horizon. She loves diffuse light — light in which objects have no edges.
“Unbearably sad, really,” Dickie says. “You fancy a martini? Hair of the dog and all that?”
She digs her toes into the sand. “Go away.”
“Tea with ice?”
She shrugs. Dickie looks around for the waiter, catches his attention, and orders two iced teas. “About last night,” he begins.
Vivian puts a hand up. This is a conversation she doesn’t want to have. “Sorry to disappoint you, Dickie, but you’re not the first.”
He fingers a shell and begins to use it to scoop the sand between his legs. “Didn’t think so,” he says quietly.
“Nor the eighth either, if you want to know.”
He seems mildly surprised. “As bad as all that?”
“I’m afraid so,” she says.
“How come, Viv?”
She stretches her bare legs out and burrows her feet into the sand. “I’m twenty-eight. Twenty-nine in September. I’ve missed my chance.”
“Poppycock.”
“Besides,” she says, “I don’t believe in marriage.”
“Really not?”
“Name me a good one.”
He thinks a moment. “Jean and Eddie?”
“She’s a simp. Doesn’t count.”
Dickie ponders her question.
“See?” Vivian says.
“Brain’s not up to par this morning,” Dickie says. “You’ve had proposals, surely.”
“Oh God, yes,” Vivian says. And it’s true. She’s had dozens. Well, not dozens. Maybe six or seven. Two of them serious.
“You come across as hard-boiled,” Dickie says, “but I’m not sure you are.”
“Count on it,” she says.
“I have a girl,” he announces suddenly. “Actually, I’m engaged. To be married.”
A small jolt runs the length of Vivian’s spine, and she sits slightly forward. Dickie engaged? She monitors the shock. She ought to be upset. Furious, really. Should she act furious? But, oddly, Dickie’s announcement feels good, like diving into the ocean does. Painful at first and then refreshing.
She lowers her dark glasses and peers at the man beside her. “A small detail you forgot to mention yesterday afternoon, perhaps?” she asks.
Dickie looks away.
“I hope she’s liberal minded,” Vivian adds. “Who is she?”
“Someone I met in Havana,” Dickie says.
Vivian registers a small ping of jealousy and then a larger one of intrigue. Anyone in Havana is bound to be interesting. You can’t go to Havana and not be interesting. She lays her head against the canvas back of the chair, as if she might doze off.
“Not sure I love her, though,” Dickie says. “That’s the thing.”
“Don’t whine,” Vivian says. “I can’t stand a man who whines.”
Dickie throws the shell toward the water. “Just trying to explain about last night,” he says.
“Not loving someone is no excuse for being disloyal.”
“You believe in that, do you? Loyalty and vows and so forth?”
“Not sure,” she says.
“It was just that you looked so . . . so . . . I don’t know . . . smart standing there at the reception desk,” he says. “No one’s as smart as you, Viv.”
“Don’t be smarmy. It’s beneath you.”
“But it’s true,” he says.
She glances over at Dickie’s shins, long and bare and sandy. A waiter appears with two glasses of iced tea with lemon pinwheels on their rims. “I hope you’re not falling in love with me,” she says, sitting up. She takes her glass and sips.
“Don’t think so,” Dickie says honestly. Too honestly, Vivian thinks. “What’s your story, Viv?”
“How do you mean?”
“Rumor is that your mother went off with another man. A French industrialist or something.”
“A contradiction in terms,” Vivian says. “But yes. She did. When I was eight.”
“Poor Viv.”
“I hardly knew her, so don’t feel sorry for me.”
“Never feel sorry for you, Viv. You’re probably the last person I’d feel sorry for. I’d probably feel sorry for myself before you.” Dickie puts his glass in the hole he’s dug in the sand so the dog can drink from it.
“When are you getting married?” she asks.
“At Christmas.”
“I’ll send you a present,” she says. She thinks a minute. “A nice glass lamp.”
“Viv . . .”
“I’m quite serious,” she says. “I know where I can get some terrific glass lamps.”
“Want some lunch?” he asks.
“What’s on the menu?”
“Haddock, I think,” he says. “And strawberry shortcake.”
Vivian shakes her head.
“I’m sure we could get some sandwiches,” Dickie says.
“Cucumber sandwiches?” she asks. She pictures a cold cucumber sandwich.
“Your arms are getting pink,” he says.
She slouches back down into her canvas chair, and for a moment her head swims. “Yes, I do need something to eat,” she says.
Dickie stands and brushes off his trousers. He takes her hand, and she lets him help her up. She rests her forehead on his chest. “What are we doing, Dickie Peets?”
“I don’t know, Viv,” he says. “I just don’t know.”
Alphonse
Alphonse sits on the sand in his short pants and watches the dark-haired woman and the man lying on a blanket on the beach, though he has to turn his eyes away when the woman lowers the straps of her brown bathing suit over her shoulders. He digs his feet into the sand and buries them. He’s sweating so much that his skin is slick.
He watches the woman fix her straps and stand up and begin to walk to the water, slowly at first and then faster, so that when she gets to the water’s edge she is almost running. She stops and puts one foot in the water and takes it out immediately. The man calls out Honora, and the woman puts her arms out wide for balance and high-steps above the waves and then dives into the ocean. The cold is such a shock that she immediately stands up and hollers simply because she has to. The man runs to the water’s edge and dives in and swims toward the woman underwater. Alphonse wishes he knew how to swim and he tries to imagine what it feels like to hold your breath and plunge into the water. Do you close your eyes or do you look for fish?
The woman stands a moment, but a wave hits her and her knees buckle. She rubs her eyes and then begins to laugh. She laughs like his mother does sometimes when she’s on the verge of crying. Hysterically, the notes of the laugh rising into the air and then floating away. A wave carries the woman into shore, bumping her along the sand, and then begins to pull her out again. Alphonse pretends that the woman is drowning and that he will have to rescue her.
The woman digs her fingers and knees into the sand and holds on even though the ocean tries to pull her out. She crawls to the waterline. She turns and sits on the sand with her knees drawn up and her arms wrapped around them. Her dark wavy hair is straight now from the water and lies flat to her head like a cap. The boy watches the man point his body toward the woman and throw himself onto a cresting wave. He slices through the water like a shark.
Honora
After their swim, Sexton washes the salt from the first-floor windows while Honora scrubs the kitchen cupboards. She
gives him a broom with a cloth tied over it, and he sweeps the cobwebs away. As she bleaches the mildew from the walls, he uses a chisel to open the swollen windows. She rinses the grit from the radiators, and he rakes up coal that has fallen onto the cellar floor. She lays the tablecloth her mother made for her over an assembly of wooden crates and puts the mismatched plates and flatware Sexton bought at the local store on its surface. She arranges beach roses in a glass, and she and Sexton share the one remaining glass for drinking. For supper, they have tinned pork-and-beans and brown bread and Indian pudding.
In the days that follow, Sexton constructs a platform bed on which they lay the mattress. They use wooden crates for bedside tables, and Honora makes curtains from the fabric she found in the carton at the foot of the stairs. Sexton removes peeling strips of wallpaper, and Honora polishes an abandoned set of andirons.
Each evening, after they have done their chores, Sexton and Honora take their baths. Honora likes to bathe alone, but Sexton says he prefers company. He bends slightly forward, and Honora soaps his neck and shoulders and spine. As she washes him, she thinks about how fate contrived to have Sexton Beecher open a map and select a route and drive to Taft, New Hampshire, and walk into a bank and find Honora Willard on the other side of the grille. What if it had been her lunch break? she wonders. What if he’d seen the sign for Webster and taken it instead? What if he’d gotten waylaid in Manchester? What if his tire had gone flat?
One evening, after Sexton and Honora have bathed and eaten, they go for a walk along the beach. The sun, just about to set, lights up the cottages and the water with a rosy hue. The surf at the waterline is pink. Honora stops and bends to pick up a piece of pale blue glass. She rubs her fingers along the edges, which are smooth. The glass is cloudy, as though a fog were trapped within the weathered shard.
“What’s that?” Sexton asks.
“It’s glass,” she says. “But not sharp. Here. Feel it.”
Despite his bath, Sexton’s fingers still have white paint in the creases. He holds it up to the light. “It’s being in the ocean gives it that effect,” he says. He hands the shard back to her. “The color’s nice,” he says.
“Where do you suppose it came from?”
“It’s trash,” he says. “It’s garbage. Other people’s garbage.”
“Really?” she says. “I think it’s kind of beautiful.”
* * *
“I have to go back to work,” Sexton says early in July.
Honora has known all along that this will happen, but still, the announcement takes her by surprise. “So soon?” she asks.
“Someone’s got to make a living.”
This is said genially, without arrogance or irritation. Honora has worked, at the courthouse and then the bank, since she was fifteen, but there has been no talk of her taking a job. It is assumed by both of them that she will stay behind and make a home. There is enough work to occupy any woman for months.
“I could go with you,” Honora says.
“It’s against company policy,” Sexton says. “They would fire me.”
They are sitting at the kitchen table, having just eaten a turkey loaf and an onion pie. For practical reasons, she has replaced the embroidered tablecloth with a rectangle of blue-checked oilcloth bought at Jack Hess’s store.
“How will this work?” she asks.
“I’ll give you money,” he says.
She glances at the headlines of the newspaper beside his plate. CELEBRATION OF FOURTH COSTS 148 LIVES. She turns the newspaper around so that she can read the article. There is a grid next to the report. Seven people died from fireworks, seventy-one in automobile accidents, and seventy drowned.
“How much do we have?” she asks.
He looks up and thinks a minute. “Eighty dollars,” he says.
She reaches across the makeshift table and puts a hand on his forearm. “Just thinking about having you gone, I need to touch you,” she says, surprising both of them.
His skin is warm through his shirt. Already, she has washed and ironed the shirt several times. By her count, he has six dress shirts, two work shirts, two suits, one pair of work pants (stained now with paint), and a navy sweater that has pilled.
The touch seems to move him. “I could take you with me,” he says. She watches him ponder the idea as if it were his, as if he had just thought it up. “You could be my assistant. You know how to type, don’t you?”
“I had to learn for my job at the courthouse.”
“You could sit down at the machine and demonstrate,” he says, musing. “No one could resist those hands.” He thinks a minute. “I certainly didn’t,” he says.
“You didn’t?”
“The day I met you. When I walked into the bank. It was your hands I noticed first. Under the grille.”
As if to prove the truth of this assertion, he takes her hand and holds it above his empty plate. Her skin is only slightly roughened from the laundry soap. “You could use some Jergens,” he says.
Sexton likes to say he covers the three P’s — Portland, Portsmouth, and Providence — and everything in between. He shows her on the map exactly where they will go, and she traces the route with her finger. From Ely, they will drive to Portsmouth, then travel out Route 4 to Dover and to South Berwick and to Sanford. From there, they will take the 111 to Saco and then stay on Route 1 all the way to Portland. On the return south, they will head west by way of Hollis Center and Shapleigh and swing by Nashua and Lowell and Worcester. They’ll go to Boston and to Woonsocket and to Pawtucket and finally to Providence. After that, they’ll see.
“You can keep me in clean shirts,” he says.
“Where will we stay?”
“Cabins.”
Honora knows all about cabins. The one-room buildings with counters for kitchens and communal bathrooms out back are popular destinations with tourists visiting the lakes near Taft.
Still, though, it’s an adventure.
Sexton passes her off as Miss Willard, his assistant. She wears her butter yellow wedding suit and removes her ring. In a routine that takes shape as the days unfold, she shakes the client’s hand and very slowly draws off her gloves, finger by finger. She sits in front of the typewriter and feels the tiny ovals with their silver rings. She can type nearly as fast as Sexton can speak, and her hands are a blur over the keys. Her husband keeps up a running sales pitch with the customer, and when he is done, Honora offers up the beautifully typed page like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat. She will have typed a verbatim transcript of the conversation that has just taken place.
A thing worth having is worth having now, she will have typed.
The sooner you get it, the sooner it will start earning you money, Sexton will have said.
Putting it off is like paying more for it.
Decide now, when it will cost you the least.
Honora watches the customer’s face begin to work its way toward a purchase. No client fails to be impressed by the transcript.
“Which carriage would you prefer?” Sexton asks. “The wide or the narrow? Which stand do you think would be best — the high or the low?”
The customer chews the inside of his cheek, all the while watching Honora’s flying hands.
“Would you prefer to take a discount?” Sexton asks. “Or divide the amount into four monthly installments?”
Perhaps thinking about the uses of dictation for himself, or a pretty assistant of his own, the client is silent for a moment.
“This is a description of what you want,” Sexton says, moving in for the kill. “May I take your order now?”
Sometimes, however, a customer is recalcitrant. “Yes, but . . . ,” the customer says.
“That’s the very reason why . . . ,” Sexton counters.
“I’m not sure about . . . ,” the client adds, waffling.
“I’m coming to that,” Sexton says. And then, with precisely calibrated insistence, Sexton asks, “What’s the real reason for hesitating?”
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As soon as the client puts pen to paper, Honora rises and slips her gloves back on. The most important part of a sale, Sexton has impressed upon her, is to get out of the room once the deal has been made. Nothing is to be gained by lingering. The customer might change his mind.
Occasionally, Honora worries about Sexton’s sales pitch. Is it true, for example, that a thing worth having is worth having now? That the sooner one buys a typewriter, the sooner it will start earning money? It seems to her that there might be a flaw in this logic, that it might not be absolutely accurate that putting a purchase off is like paying more for it.
She worries too about the slow drawing off of the gloves and the absence of her wedding ring. When she and Sexton thought up the routine, it was fun and frivolous, a lark that made them laugh. But by the third or fourth time they perform it, the gestures seem to have grown more serious, and Honora feels uneasy. There is the undeniable implication that Miss Willard — or the idea of Miss Willard — might go with the typewriter.
On their first road trip, Sexton sells twenty-three machines for a total sales commission of more than $135. It seems to both of them a fortune. In the cabins, in the afternoons, with the smell of mildew in the blankets, Sexton and Honora make love to the sound of the occasional car passing by on Route 4 or 111. The beds sag in the middle, the pillows are as thin as quilts, and when they are finished, they have to sleep squashed against each other because the beds are so narrow.
“You’re very long,” Sexton says to her one afternoon.
Honora feels his breath at the tip of her ear. Her nightgown is rucked up and down so that it seems that only a flimsy bit of cloth covers her stomach. When she shifts position even a little, fluid spills from her body and onto the sheets. She is awed by the intimacy, something her mother, even if she had wanted to, could not have told her about.
Sexton
“They say that Bill Stultz was drunk when his plane crashed,” Rowley says. “You ever been up, Mr. Beecher?”