Sea Glass

by Anita Shreve

  No, thinks Sexton. With any luck, it won’t be until next Wednesday or Thursday or even later. “Thank you very much, Mr. Rowley,” Sexton says. “Ken. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this.”

  “Not at all,” Rowley says, waving Sexton’s gratitude away. “My girl will get you settled on your way out.”

  He refills Sexton’s glass. He holds his own up. Sexton clinks Rowley’s glass and smiles, but he’s conscious now of only one thing. He has to get out of the room. He has his sale; if he lingers, Rowley might change his mind. “I think I’d like to get that money over to the contractor this afternoon before my wife and I leave for Taft,” Sexton says. “He says he’ll get a start on our project tomorrow if I can get the money to him.”

  “That so?” Rowley asks, furrowing his brow. “Over the weekend?”

  Sexton blinks and instantly sees his mistake. He’s moved too fast, and if he isn’t careful, he’ll lose the deal. He makes a show of relaxing. He crosses his legs, leans back in his chair, studies his drink. He lets the silence play itself out.

  “Say, did you read about that French airman yesterday?” Sexton asks. “The one who was forced down into the sea halfway across the Atlantic?”

  Sexton opens the door of the Buick so fast that Honora jumps. “Gosh,” she says, sitting up straight on the navy mohair upholstery. “You startled me.”

  “Oh, baby,” Sexton says. He kneels on the driver’s seat, leans over and kisses his wife so hard that he bends her neck back over the seat.

  “Well,” she says when she can breathe. “I take it your appointment went okay.”

  “Beautiful,” he says, twisting into his seat.

  “What did you sell?” she asks.

  “A Copiograph and two Eights,” he says.

  “That’s wonderful,” she says.

  Sexton puts the clutch in and adjusts the power lever. He pushes the starter button with his foot. Now if he can just make it to Franklin by four o’clock, he’ll be set. Norton will be waiting with the paperwork for the mortgage, Sexton now has the cash for the down payment, and with any luck, by four-thirty, he and his wife will own their own house.

  Honora

  When Sexton is away, Honora practices cooking. She plans a spring garden and walks to the store with a dime in her pocket to buy a dozen eggs. She darns Sexton’s socks and unravels a sweater she doesn’t like and begins an argyle vest for him that she hopes to finish before it turns too cold. She takes up yard work because she knows that he doesn’t enjoy it. She rakes years’ worth of leaves out from under the hedges and trims the bushes with a pair of clippers she found in the cellar. She tries to cut the beach roses back, but some of the thicker stalks resist the dull blades. She weeds the walkway and mows the lawn with a machine Jack Hess has lent them. She likes the dune grass out front because it doesn’t need tending. She studies the scarred patch at the side of the house. In its center is a marble bench. In the spring, she thinks, she might plant a rose garden there. The marble bench will make a pleasant place to sit.

  In the afternoons and early evenings when the tide has drawn off, Honora looks for sea glass. She finds a slim sliver of amethyst and a jewel-like bit of cobalt. She picks up a thick chunk that looks like dirty ice after a long winter, ice that has been skated on and has gone cloudy with use. She fingers a piece the color of young dandelions and finds shards that look like flower petals: hyacinth and wisteria and lilac. She puts the pieces in her pocket and takes them home and lays them on a windowsill.

  She finds a piece that once was a bottle neck. She picks up a delicate shell-like shape with scalloped edges. She touches a shard the color of mint sauce, another that is ice blue and reminds her of a waterfall frozen in winter. She finds an olive-green that resembles the state of New York, another shard that seems to be made of the salt film that once coated the windows of the house. She discovers whites that are not white at all, but rather blond and eggshell and ivory and pearl. One day she almost misses a piece because it so closely resembles sand. When she picks it up and holds it to the light, she sees that it is a translucent golden color, seemingly ancient.

  She finds scraps of celadon and cucumber and jade, specks of pea and powder and aquamarine. Once she comes upon a chunk that reminds her of dishwater in a sink. She doesn’t like the browns, but occasionally she collects a topaz or a tea. Sometimes all there is is brown, and she goes home slightly depressed. She never keeps a piece of sea glass if it hasn’t gone cloudy or if it still retains its sharp edges. Those she buries deep in the sand.

  The sea glass ranges in size from that of a broken cookie to slivered bits no bigger than a clipping from a fingernail. Sometimes there is writing. One says “OCHRANE,” another says “eder.” Another, simply, “to be.” One piece says “DOLPH,” as though part of a name. And is the 12-14 beneath it a date? Occasionally, the writing gives clues as to the origin of the shard of glass. The “WINE” is self-evident, the “LA” less so. But one day, when she takes down a jar of stewed tomatoes her mother gave her, she recognizes the letters L and A on the glass jar. She lays the piece of sea glass over the “ATLAS” of the jar and feels she’s solved a mystery.

  If she looks closely at the glass, she can sometimes see the infinitesimal nicks, the imprints of the sand and rocks that have buffeted it. There’s a lump with bubbles in it; another piece, blue violet, in the shape of a bird in flight.

  She prizes the oddities — a nugget of crystal threaded with rusted metal; a pale aqua rectangle the exact size and shape of a microscope slide; a shard that looks like ancient Roman glass, a lovely mottled green and gold. She finds a translucent ochre chip imprinted with a W, another bit that bears a thicket of white crosshatching, the paint still more or less intact. She finds larger pieces that are flat and guesses that they might once have been parts of windows, and that makes her think of shipwrecks. Once she finds a deformed bit of bottle, and that makes her think of Halifax. Is it too fanciful to imagine that a bottle melted in the aftermath of the explosion and then was swept out to sea on the tidal wave that followed? Was a whole city of shards made smooth by time and sand?

  Eventually, Honora collects so much sea glass that she has to put it in a bowl. But in the bowl, the colors jumble together and take on the hues of the bits below and, on the whole, don’t amount to much. She experiments by putting the shards on the bedsheet, spread apart, and discovers that their true colors emerge on a clean white background.

  In her housedress, she walks to Jack Hess’s store. When she arrives, she tells him she wants a white dish, good sized.

  He thinks a minute and leaves the room. He is gone a long time, and she can hear him moving from room to room upstairs. He returns carrying a white platter with a flat rectangular center and a fine crack running out to a corner.

  “My wife used it for roasts,” he says. “I’m never going to cook a roast.”

  “I won’t take something that belonged to your wife,” she says.

  “I’m selling it for fifteen cents,” he says.

  “You wouldn’t be selling it if I hadn’t asked you for it.”

  Jack Hess sets the platter down. “Fifteen cents,” he says.

  She smiles and relents and gives him the dime and the nickel. She holds the platter under her arm and walks home as fast as a schoolboy who has just bought a jar of marbles might. Once inside, she sets the platter on the kitchen table. She lays out her pieces of sea glass and studies them.

  Some are sturdy and some are paper thin. A few tell stories, while others seem more secretive. Many are as beautiful as fine jewelry; others are blunt and ugly. Honora arranges the bits of glass, trying to form a satisfying whole. She puts a dot of cobalt in the center.

  She tries to imagine where each piece has come from, who has used the glass and why. Is the blue-violet from a bottle of iodine that was once taken from a medicine cabinet and used for a scraped knee? Is the topaz from a bottle of whiskey tossed overboard by a rumrunner? How long does it take to make a piece of sea glass
, anyway — a week, a year, ten years? Was the glass originally that lovely aquamarine color or has the ocean imparted its own stain, as if spewing out calcified bits of itself?

  Sometimes she forces herself to remember that sea glass is only other people’s garbage. It is useless, of no value whatsoever. Trash, Sexton once said. And yet, when Honora comes upon a piece of aquamarine or cerulean lying on the sand, she feels she’s found a gem. She picks it up and puts it in her pocket, and on good days, she goes home with heavy pockets.

  For a time, Honora thinks about making an object with the glass. A mosaic on a tray of sand. A frame for a mirror. A necklace for her mother. Perhaps she could fill a jar with sea glass and use it as the base of a lamp. But after a few minutes, these ideas always lose their appeal. It’s the individual bits that interest her, the ability to pick them up and let them fall through her fingers and guess at the story behind each one.

  Honora cannot find a red, and so the idea of red consumes her for whole days at a time. Logic tells her red is out there, but though she finds pinks and lavenders and yellows, she cannot find a red. Sometimes the sea glass reminds her of gumdrops — grape and lime and lemon. Sugarcoated bits of jelly.

  “The only problem with looking for sea glass,” Sexton says one day when he and Honora are walking along the beach, “is that you never look up. You never see the view. You never see the houses or the ocean because you’re afraid you’ll miss something in the sand.”

  Vivian

  Fog smothers the horizon line, then the ocean, then the beach, until Vivian can hardly see beyond the railing of the porch. It moves as though racing and veers around the corner of the porch. Visiting ghosts, Vivian thinks as she reaches down and scratches Sandy’s neck. With Dickie gone, Sandy hardly ever leaves her side.

  Dickie fretted that Vivian would be bored, that she’d have nothing to do. Had to go, he said. Had to travel down to the city to restructure his holdings. The opportunities in the stock market were just too good to pass up right now.

  Shoo, shoo, Vivian said to him, pushing him out the door.

  A foghorn sounds, and Vivian sees a shape moving through the mist. A woman in a cloth coat.

  Dickie needn’t have worried, Vivian thinks. She has not been bored, not for one minute. When Dickie called her that first day to see how she was faring, she could hardly keep contentment from her voice. She hadn’t seen a single soul socially, she told him, nor had she once put on a decent dress. She’d read, she said. And she’d actually cooked a meal. (Not really, Dickie said.) She’d walked down to the general store, met the proprietor, and walked back again with milk and coffee. She’d spent hours on the verandah watching the water. (Are you squiffy? Dickie asked.) Not at all, she wanted to say. (Well, a bit, she said on the phone.) Last night, she had to feign disappointment at his news that he would be gone another day. (Oh, how boring, she said. Is that really necessary?)

  The woman in the fog seems to be searching for something in the sand. She moves in and out of visibility, and occasionally Vivian catches a glimpse of color, the faded loden of a cloth coat, a flash of blue in a head scarf. But then a mist surrounds the woman, and the colors subside, and it is as if the woman has never been there at all.

  The light reminds Vivian of mornings in Venice: the sun overhead doing its best to burn off the fog and produce a luminescence. Funny how this same view with Dickie in tow would bore her, would make her feel compelled to complain about the fog. About how they couldn’t go boating, couldn’t play golf. But without Dickie with her on the porch, whining about the fog seems absurd. The light is marvelous, really.

  The fog drifts a bit, revealing the woman in the cloth coat again. She still appears to be searching for something in the sand. Vivian stands up from the black wicker rocker and walks out onto the beach with Sandy following. “Hello there,” she calls. “Have you lost something?”

  The woman looks up and blinks, clearly startled by the apparition in front of her. “No,” the woman says. “I haven’t. I was just . . . I was just looking for sea glass.”

  Vivian is struck by the woman’s thick dark eyelashes and her squarish chin. Though her coat is plain and dowdy, Vivian can see a beautifully knit pink lambswool sweater under it. She takes a step closer. The woman pulls her kerchief off, revealing lovely dark hair that immediately begins to unfurl in the humidity. The woman’s skin is pale. She seems embarrassed, which produces a bit of pink in her cheeks.

  “Sea glass?” Vivian asks.

  “It’s just something that washes up on the beach,” the woman says. “I collect it. I’m not sure what for. It’s pretty useless. I just like the shapes and the way it looks,” she adds. She reaches into her pocket and pulls out a piece of glass. “Here,” she says, handing it to Vivian. “This is a piece I found earlier.”

  Vivian looks at the object in her open palm. It is apple green, so thin it feels like mica. Its light seems to come from within, like the fog. When she was a child, she used to collect shells and sand dollars, but it never occurred to her to collect glass. In recent years, the staff of the Highland Hotel has taken to raking the beach out front so that there’s no debris there at all. “It’s very pretty,” she says, returning the shard to the woman.

  “It’s trash, actually,” the woman says, pocketing the piece of sea glass. “People throw things overboard or their trash gets dumped at sea. The glass breaks and then takes a beating from the ocean and the sand. This is what washes up.”

  “My name is Vivian Burton. I live just here.” Vivian turns and points up to Dickie’s cottage, invisible now in the fog. She laughs. “It was there,” she says.

  The woman smiles. “I’m Honora Beecher,” she says. “My husband and I live at the end of the beach.”

  “Oh, really? Which house?” Vivian asks.

  “It’s white with black shutters. Three stories tall? They say it used to be a convent.”

  “Oh, yes,” Vivian says. She has an impression of an absolutely derelict house.

  “Do you live here year round?” the woman asks. “Cute dog.”

  Vivian wraps her cardigan across her chest. “No,” she says. “We’ll leave just before Thanksgiving.”

  “Oh,” the woman says. “We’re here for good now. We just bought the house.”

  “Congratulations,” Vivian says.

  “Thank you, but I’m a little nervous about winter storms. I’ve never lived on the coast before. They say the storms out of the northeast can be fierce. What’s his name?”

  “Sandy. Is your husband a fisherman?” Vivian asks.

  The woman tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. She’s hardly more than twenty, Vivian guesses. “He’s a typewriter salesman,” the woman says.

  “Oh,” Vivian says with some surprise.

  “He travels a lot. He’s away now.”

  “You don’t mind being alone?”

  “I miss him,” Honora says with a slight flush. “But I keep myself busy. There’s so much to do to get ready for winter.”

  “Where are you from?” Vivian asks.

  “Taft. It’s inland. How about you?”

  “Boston,” Vivian says.

  “We went there once this summer,” Honora says. “We had dinner at the Parker House.”

  “How nice,” Vivian says politely.

  “Well, I’d better get back,” Honora says, looking at the fog.

  “You’re sure you can do it? I can’t even see the water now,” Vivian says.

  “Oh, I’m fine,” Honora says. “How lost can I get? The ocean is on one side, the seawall on the other. And if I walk too far, I’ll hit the rocks. I’m bound to find the house.”

  “Well,” Vivian says. She wonders if she should invite the woman in. “I’m here until Thanksgiving,” she says. “If you’re ever at this end of the beach and feel the need for a cup of tea, just give a holler.”

  The woman smiles. “Thank you,” she says. “I’ll do that.”

  Honora disappears into the fog. Vivian feels, unus
ually, a sharp pang of disappointment. Beside her, Sandy is wrestling with a crab.

  “Sandy, stop,” she says.

  The dog, sheepish and obedient, trots along with Vivian as she walks to the water’s edge, guided more by sound than by sight. The tide is low, and it seems she has walked farther than she ought to when suddenly her feet are covered by an incoming wave. The shock of the cold immediately clears Vivian’s head, and she laughs. And now even the hem of her dress is wet, but she doesn’t care at all.

  Honora

  When the munitions boat caught fire, Honora was just eight years old and living with her family in her uncle Harold’s house overlooking Halifax Harbor. Honora’s three older brothers — Charles and Phillip and Alan — had already left the house for classes at the McKenzie Boys’ School in Armsdale, some two miles away. Honora’s cousin Emma, still a baby, was in bed. Honora’s one remaining brother, Seth, who was four, rushed to the window with his uncle Harold to see the fire. Honora briefly went to the window herself, ignoring the calls of her mother in the basement to help carry up the laundry before she herself set off for school, the opening delayed because winter hours had already begun. The column of smoke rose higher and higher, and already Honora could see dozens of children, on their way to school, gathering in the streets to watch the aftermath of what Honora would later learn had been a collision between the Mont Blanc from France and the Imo out of Norway.

  Uncle Harold knew, from the fiery smoke, that the Mont Blanc was burning fuel.

  “Honora!” he bellowed sharply as he bent to pick up Seth. “Go help your mother.”

  Reluctantly, Honora left the broad windows of the dining room of the house perched high above the harbor in a neighborhood known as Richmond. The windows had been built to Harold’s specifications so that he and his family might be able to watch the large ships come into port while eating breakfast. When his wife, Marguerite, died in childbirth, Harold had begged his sister — Honora’s mother, Alice — to come north to live with him and help him take care of his infant daughter.