by Holly LeCraw
So she wasn’t sorry she had sent Jed away. Nevertheless, she lay in the dark and missed him, and wondered where he was. He would have gone back to Mashantum, of course. But it occurred to her he could go anywhere. He could have kept driving west, to New York. She did not like to think of him there. He would be so alone, lost on sidewalks thronged with people for whom it would be easy to imagine intricate lives.
She was beginning to get sleepy. She felt herself relaxing, her limbs growing heavy.
Across the hall, Toni made a noise in her sleep, a cooing and sighing. A comfortable sound. She thought again of Jed. She realized she was afraid not that he would be lonely in the city, but that he would look around at all the purposeful souls and begin to walk with them. He would see that was where he belonged, with other people, moving, moving away from her.
But Toni was here. In bed in the dark, alone, Marcella thought that she should have gotten Toni another pillow, or two. Maybe Toni had gotten them herself from the closet. She liked a lot of pillows, to go to sleep propped up like a princess—although she then slept like a wild thing, tossing and turning, and in the morning the pillows would be scattered on the floor. Marcella smiled to herself. See, she had that bit of knowledge. That, and much more. Toni would never believe it, but Marcella knew her better than anyone in the world; she knew her in her bones, the way mothers were supposed to. Yet she, Marcella, did not believe that her own mother had known her that way. And so that was what daughters did—disbelieved. Was that where it started? The yearning to be known? She would do anything to spare Toni that search. It was the desire that led to all trouble.
IV
As Marcella’s body healed from her fourth and final miscarriage, August stretched itself out and melded into September. The light deepened and the nights turned cooler, the Atkinsons went back to Wellesley, but still she could not shake her sadness. She had girlfriends but she knew they would suggest exercise or antidepressants or a spa, or the fertility doctors Anthony didn’t want. She was getting too old for that anyway, she was worn out. She did not want that exhausting hope to swell in her again.
She found herself, strangely, longing to go back to the Cape. Usually she felt it was Anthony’s place, not hers. Their house was full of his family’s spartan artifacts, ladder-back chairs and Latin dictionaries and old tennis trophies, strange things that had once charmed her but which she now found difficult to love. The appeal of the Cape had never really sunk into her—she thought the scrubby trees and the small-windowed houses were pinched and meager. But now she thought of the few times they had gone in the off-season, when it was still warm enough to sleep in the unwinterized house, and remembered that it was different then, still and quiet, the wildness of the place closer to the surface.
That evening after dinner, when Toni had left the table to go do her homework, she said to Anthony, “I was thinking of going to Mashantum this weekend. If I could arrange it—if it would be all right with you.” She found she could not meet his gaze, and got up to begin clearing the dishes.
Anthony raised his eyebrows for a moment in mild surprise but then he nodded. “Of course, Chella,” he said, and nodded again, definitively. “You need some time away.”
He said it almost as though he had proposed the idea himself and she had just agreed. When had he begun to use that tone? Condescending, but more than that—retreating? He wasn’t asking why she wanted to go, what she thought she was going to do with herself. Why being alone there would be different from all the solitude she had here, all day long. “Darling,” she said, surprised even as she said it, “perhaps—you could come too?”
“That would be fun. But, then, where would Toni go?” Anthony said jovially. He picked up his own plate and went into the kitchen, and almost reluctantly she followed. She set a serving bowl and glass on the counter and realized Anthony was moving toward her, and for a split second she had the urge to cringe, not from him but from a shadowy something else, waiting to swoop down on her. She held herself still, however, and Anthony took her in his arms, seeming not to notice her stiffness. “It would be a relief, to have a rest, wouldn’t it,” he said. He was patting her back, like she was a child.
“I don’t really need to rest,” she said in a small voice.
“Oh, you seem a bit tired. You need to get away from it all.”
She didn’t answer. She didn’t say, I don’t want to get away from, I want to go to. Right now he was being solicitous, even sweet; she didn’t want to ruin it. But he was the one who was relieved—she felt it relaxing him, this fresh conviction that she had some benign problem that a ladies’-magazine solution, a little getaway, would solve. Reflexively she tried to think of their vanished babies but their images were hazy, diffuse, and she knew for Anthony they were barely dots on some disappearing horizon; he was not even looking in that direction anymore, he had turned somewhere else, and though she knew it was her job to pick up and follow him, in her mind she squatted down and held herself stubborn and immobile while he kept moving, grew smaller and smaller. His arms were still around her but she could barely feel them. She stepped away and smiled, not meeting his eyes. “Thank you, darling,” she said. “It will be nice.”
“Sleep in. Do some shopping.” He was already turning away, just as she had seen in her mind.
“Yes. It will be lovely.” Terrified—because she knew she was causing it, her spirit suddenly dogged, inflexible—she felt something in her, the line from her to Anthony, stretch thinner and thinner, hairs-breadth fine, and then give way.
She arranged for Toni to sleep over at a friend’s and drove to Mashantum on a Friday midday toward the end of September. She went to the house, feeling like a trespasser, dropped off her things, and then went straight to the beach. It was high Indian summer, the sun warm and the colors rich. The parking lot, which required a permit during the summer and usually had a line of cars waiting, was unattended and nearly empty. The boardwalk had been taken away and she walked the uphill path barefoot in the warm sand. At the crest of the dunes, the beach and blue water and wide horizon were spread suddenly before her like a new world.
The beach was deserted, save for a few walkers with their dogs, rollicking faraway dots, and a lone man in a beach chair, his back to her. Marcella felt a lift of quiet elation. Alone, alone, no one expecting anything of her. Then the man in front of her shifted in his chair and she glimpsed his face, and realized that it was Cecil McClatchey.
She stopped dead in the sand, holding her own chair and towel and book. Her elation evaporated. She realized she could leave. She had only come to this beach, their usual one, where she was most likely to see someone she knew, by force of habit. Mashantum had dozens of beaches. She had forgotten that she could choose.
But she stood in the sand, unmoving. As she realized she had been undetected, she relaxed. Choice, indeed. She could choose to stay or go, to speak to Cecil McClatchey or walk away; she could be rude, but if no one knew, was it rude? And what, oh what, did it matter? She felt the sun, straight above her, warming the top of her head, her bare arms, and she could feel the fear—for that was what it had been—running off her like water after a swim. And then, as though it had been her plan all along, she found herself marching straight down to Cecil’s chair.
She stood next to him, as bold as a teenager, and he sprang up, grabbed her hand, and pumped it like she was a long-lost friend. “I thought I was the only soul left on the Cape, indeed I did!” he cried. Then he was unfolding her chair for her and settling it in the sand next to his.
“I don’t want to invade your privacy,” Marcella said. “One so seldom gets the chance to be alone.”
“Not at all! Not at all!” A look of distress came to his face. “But you probably don’t want to be stuck talking to me.”
“I don’t feel stuck,” Marcella said, and laughed, hardly believing it was her own voice.
And how was Anthony? How was her daughter? They were fine. She needed a little retreat, just a little quiet. “I
admire a woman who doesn’t need to talk all day long,” he said. “Going to do some shopping?” She shook her head. “No? Even better.”
He was courtly in an old-fashioned way; she saw he would give no hint of having a life of his own, would contentedly discuss her all day unless she gave him leave to do otherwise.
“Betsy’s not a shopper, I’ll bet,” she said.
“No, no. She’s a sensible woman,” he said, as though she were a character in a book.
Eventually he allowed that he had been in Boston for business and had decided to take the weekend. He’d wanted Betsy to come join him, but she’d already had some plans with her lady friends. “I guess you know how that is,” Cecil said. “But I’ll tell you. This empty-nester business is something. Both the kids off at school, and we could just take off whenever we want. We’re not used to it.”
“Have you traveled much?” Marcella asked politely.
“No. Not yet. I guess Betsy’s a homebody. I’m the one with itchy feet.”
Marcella pictured Cecil and Betsy in a sunny breakfast room, the morning paper strewn in front of them on the table, half-drunk cups of coffee—and a note of discord. This was something new. She imagined Betsy would be as calm as always, unmoved by her husband’s innocent, mysterious longings. Oh, men, Marcella would have said, if Betsy had been sitting there talking to her instead of Cecil. Agreeing with her. Men—aren’t they silly?
But it was not Betsy sitting there, it was Cecil, and she found herself being charming. The ease that always eluded her appeared from some unknown place—out of the warm sun, perhaps. “Do you ever go back to Italy?” Cecil said.
“It’s been years,” she said. “I have very little family there anymore. It is so hard to get away.”
“Brothers and sisters?”
She shrugged. “I come from a long line of only children.”
“Oh,” Cecil said. She saw that he thought this sad.
“Not by choice,” she said. “I mean—of course one doesn’t choose one’s family—I mean, no one meant to have one child. My grandfather died in the war, when my father was a baby. And then my father died in an accident, before I was born. And Anthony and I—” She raised her hands and opened them, releasing old hopes to the sky. “It didn’t happen.” She looked at Cecil and saw he was looking straight back at her, and she had the oddest sensation that she someday would tell him more, all of it, that maybe he could see the outline of it all in her eyes right now. That he saw.
And as they talked she also realized, in some part of herself that had been asleep for a long, long time, that she was being watched. It was surprising how quickly the girl’s tricks came back to her: smoothing back her hair, closing her eyes and turning her face to the sun, presenting Cecil with her profile. It was a part she was playing: she was gliding across a stage. He seemed to believe her life had an elegant, exotic shape, and she did not tell him otherwise.
As the afternoon wore on, the effort of pretending not to notice each other in anything other than an old-neighbor sort of way became delicious. They were beside each other in their chairs, not face-to-face, the convenient horizon in front of them. They could deflect desire, turn their longing out to the open sea, if this innocent pretending was desire.
Marcella looked sidelong at him when she could. She had always thought of him as generically handsome, but now his straight, prominent nose and strong chin seemed to her uncommonly distinguished. His thinning hair, once blond, was now almost completely gray, but still wavy, a little long at the back. How handsome he must have been when Betsy first met him, with his blue eyes and blond curls. She could see him somehow, years ago, when she herself had been a girl as well. They had all once been tender and inexperienced and unlined. She felt an odd, intense mourning that she had not known him then, that there was so much she would never know. “Did you and Betsy meet when you were young?” she said.
“Sophomore year of college,” he said. “In English class. Betsy was the smart one.”
And you the good-looking one, she almost said aloud—but that wasn’t fair, Betsy must have been striking in her own way. Confident and athletic, slimmer then (she wasn’t heavy now, Marcella reminded herself, only had a middle-aged thickness), with dark hair in a shining, perfect pageboy. “And you were smitten,” she said.
“Yes, I suppose I was.”
“So you have grown up together. In a way.”
“That’s about right. Not what they do now as much. Seems like people wait longer to settle down.”
“It was the same with Anthony and me,” Marcella said. “We met in university. I was terribly homesick. It seemed—”
She stopped. She had been going to say, It seemed like Anthony was the person I had been sent here to find. Instead she said, “He was so American, you know—so sure of himself.” She glanced at Cecil and saw one corner of his mouth twisted in a dry smile. His eyes met hers, then moved quickly away.
“It is best, don’t you think? To meet when you are young?” She heard the forced gaiety in her own voice. “Because you know each other so well. Inside and out.”
“Go through a lot of changes together,” Cecil said.
“Yes.”
Marcella gazed out at the water and dug her feet into the sand. She was aware of his eyes on her, aware that she was stretching out her leg in a way she ordinarily wouldn’t. She felt ashamed of herself but also defiant. “I am sorry I was so strange at your party,” she said. “I wasn’t myself.”
“I don’t remember you being strange.”
“Oh, of course you do.” She looked at him frankly. “I was sitting all alone.”
“Well, I just remember you looking lovely.”
“You are being chivalrous,” she said, but he didn’t answer, and she was sorry she had said it. She wanted to stay on the stage but it seemed to her that now he was standing in the audience staring at her, daring her to come down. Although of course she was imagining that too—all of it, all of it, in her head.
I don’t dream like you, Anthony had said.
“You’re shivering,” Cecil said.
“Am I?” She gazed appraisingly at the sun, as though she had not been tracing its path for the last hour. “It has gotten so late!” She glanced beside her at the long shadow she cast, and reached down and felt the shaded sand, sifted it through her fingers. It was cold. She said, “I suppose I should go.”
Cecil leaped up, just as he had first leaped up to greet her, and she thought, I have misjudged. He is tired of this, he wants me to go, he has been too polite to say. He is like this with everyone, anyone. “Let me carry your chair,” he said, and mutely she stepped back, let him fold it and pick it up. They made their way back toward the dunes.
The beach had been bathed in the late light, but on the other side of the dunes the parking lot, empty but for their two cars, was in shadow, and the road winding away from it was almost fully dark at the curve. “The sun goes down early up north,” Cecil said.
“Yes,” she said, and forced a smile back. “I suppose it does.” She couldn’t say why she both longed for the winter dark and dreaded it.
“Strange, isn’t it?” Cecil said. “The parking-fee girl usually sits over there. There’s a line of cars up thataway. There are people on those porches. I guess I’m not used to it in the off-season.”
“Do you think it’s lonely?”
He considered, and then said, sounding surprised at himself, “No. I like it.”
She looked up past the dunes to a row of three cottages, all with identical flagpoles out front, now empty, and with the same weathered shingle siding. Each house had different color shutters—green, then blue, then red, down the line. She wondered if they were rentals, or if they were all owned by the same harmonious family. The shutters were closed over the doors and windows. She had never noticed people in the cottages before, but they were now obviously, utterly empty.
She stood fighting the sadness but suddenly it overcame her—not self-pity that she was
going home to an empty house, but a sorrow she had felt before, she realized, one now fanned by the sight of the vacant cottages, by the thought of winter. It was the time of night when the lights should glow yellow in the windows, a time when she should be opening the door to a kitchen warm and full of people—a kitchen in her mind that she had never seen anywhere else, with a wooden table and baskets of bread and the cheerful bustle of adults and children together. In it, she was never sure if she was mother or child. “Why, Marcella,” Cecil said, “what’s wrong?”
“It’s—it’s just the hour when people go home.” She was sure he would not understand and she cringed when he opened his mouth to speak. She was not even curious what he would say, what he would make of her strange tears, she was just sure it would be wrong. She felt she had never been able to explain herself to anyone, and she cut him off. “Never mind,” she said, “oh, never mind.”
“You shouldn’t be so sad.” His face was no longer jovial, but gentle. His eyes took in her sadness and reflected it back to her, made it a softer thing, less frightening. When he moved toward her she thought, This is innocent, a hug from an acquaintance. Then, This is a mistake. And she thought, too many thoughts, but now not a cacophony, instead a song—I am safe now.
NEITHER OF THEM WAS THE TYPE: that was what they kept saying to each other. Their mutual bemusement became part of their bond. Cecil traveled often to Boston for business, Marcella had her days free, and at first it was amazingly simple to arrange. For a time, she was able to hold her guilt at bay.