by Mary Morris
I get up to see if I can locate the bird and maybe throw a beach clog at him or something. Down in the yard I see Arthur, the revolutionary with four kinds of pie in him, going at it with Angeline, who’s afraid of intimate contact with mosquitoes. The top of the sleeping bag rises and falls, and Arthur’s plump backside moves up and down.
The bird finally stops, but I can’t go back to sleep. I should have insisted on sleeping in the little room, though I’m not sure I could have handled anyone else sleeping in our bed. But the backyard was our territory too. We’d staked it out long ago, one weekend, when Robert and I had the house to ourselves. It was a cool, green summer’s night with an orange moon, and we went outside to check on the vegetables. It was a cloudless night, and I remember it perfectly because Robert dropped his head back and said, “God, look at those stars.” Then he pulled a beach towel off the line and stretched it on the ground. “We should stay outside. Here. We should lie down and look.”
I stay in bed until late in the morning. When I finally get up, I stumble down into the den and find Marilyn rummaging through the locked closet. “What’re you doing?” I’m somewhat aghast. The locked closet has always been the locked closet.
Marilyn shrugs. “I found the key.”
“We’re not supposed to go in there. You know that.”
But Marilyn has surrounded herself with memorabilia. “Look what I found.” She shows me tiddlywinks and pickup sticks, pinochle, and some card game we can’t figure out, all from about 1934. She shows me a stack of photographs. Some of these things I’ve seen before, but there are other things I haven’t.
Marilyn plunks something down in front of me. I see a leather-bound book, and I open it up. It is somebody’s postcard collection. It’s much older than the games, and we flip through slowly, removing some of the cards to read what’s written on the back. They are from all over the world. From Africa and South America, from the United States and Europe, from China and Japan. I see a statue of a rhino in front of the Eiffel Tower; the card reads, “Edie, you must visit this tower. It’s completely ridiculous.” Or “Dearest, we are traveling through the Sudan, but the heat is becoming unbearable. I’ll write more from the Nile delta, where, we’re told, it will be cooler. All our love.”
All the cards are addressed to Edie. We know who Edie is. She is Richard’s wife. Edie is the mother of the man, Mr. Wendell, who owns the house. It is Edie’s picture that is above the mantel in the dining room. Richard and Edie have been dead for many years, and Alex Wendell has been renting to us for the past five years. We find it strange that Alex has left behind so many of his parents’ things. Last year, for instance, we found a photograph of Edie and Richard in which Richard was stooped over with, we learned from a neighbor, some rare disease.
I’ve gone through some of the memorabilia before on my own. I’ve used the old sewing kit to fix a blouse and in the garage I’ve sat on the rocking horse that Richard carved out of wood. The garden supplies we use are antiques, and the man at the hardware store laughed at me when I came in with a scythe I wanted sharpened.
I feel odd as I go through the postcard collection, and finally I tell Marilyn, “We’d better put this stuff away.”
That night I wake up and feel certain I’m not alone. I feel someone lying beside me. There’s a warmth to the bed, and I can hear breathing, even, next to me. I think that I should be terrified, but for some reason I’m not. Instead, I’m oddly comforted. After a few moments, just as it begins to get light, I reach out and I feel a blank space, colder than any empty space should be.
In the morning I go to the store to buy things we need, like toilet paper and sugar. Cindy is in the kitchen as I unpack the groceries. She picks up the Charmin. “What’s this?”
I say, “It’s four rolls of Charmin.”
“Do you plan to take it back to the city with you?”
So I say no, I think we’ll use it in the course of the summer, but she shakes her head. “Perfume,” she says. “It’s got perfume in it. You should only buy Scott. No perfume in Scott. Do you mind if I return this?”
“You’re gonna return toilet paper? Sure, return it.”
I’m heading out the door. “Oh, by the way,” Cindy says, “I meant to tell you. I ran into Robert on the bus. I guess he’s got a place in Water Mill this summer.”
“Oh,” I say, moving closer to the door.
“He looked good.” She smiles. “Nice and tan.” She’s trying to figure out why I’m not asking more questions about Robert. “He said to say hello.”
“Thanks,” I mutter and walk into the yard.
I get my bike out of the garage and take the road to the shore. I ride with the breeze from the potato field blowing through my hair. I’ve told myself the same story many times now. How Robert and I never had a ghost of a chance. How it wasn’t meant to be. But for some reason it’s never occurred to me that he is out here, going to other beaches. That he is simply going on while I somehow seem to have stopped. I remember everything vividly, though I’ve tried hard to forget. I remember us jogging in the morning to the beach, holding hands. How we raced for the water. Or getting tipsy in the outdoor shower. The vines of the vineyard covering our heads like a quilt, the amber light from the candle shimmering on ripened grapes. I keep thinking as I ride how these things should be fading, but each moment is as clear as if it had happened the night before.
I ride my bike past the pond where the swans crane their necks and even lift their great fat white bodies off the surface of the water and fly, those same swans we tossed bread to the summer before. I want to look at the swans and think “Those are nice swans,” not “Those are the swans I fed with Robert last year.”
I feel as if the devil has entered me. It is not something I say lightly. As if something has found its place in my body and is taking over. In a way it’s as if I am never alone. I have this thing living inside me. When I spoke to Robert on the phone last month about picking up some of my things, it sounded as if something had died inside him. Yet in me it lives. It has a life of its own. I feel that if I let it, it could occupy my entire being.
When I get back to the house, Jed and his friends are playing badminton and they’re taking up the backyard. Marilyn is painting a picture of the magnolia tree in the front yard, and I sit down next to her in a chair and ask her what the plans are for dinner. She tells me that Cindy is going to eat the fifteen leftover ravioli from last weekend, Arthur is going to a Thai restaurant in Sag Harbor, and Jed is having his badminton partners for dinner and we aren’t invited. “We aren’t invited? In our own house?” She shrugs. We both know that this has never happened before. We decide to go to the Busy Bee.
It is Sting Hour at the Busy Bee when we get there, and everyone is getting two for the price of one. The tables are crowded, so we start at the bar. A guy comes over and introduces himself to us as “Eric, in advertising,” and we introduce ourselves accordingly. When Marilyn tells Eric she’s in charge of New York City bat patrol, he’s interested but cautious. She explains to him how bats carry rabies, so she has to go to abandoned buildings and find the bats. “Bats don’t hang out on Park Avenue, you know.” Actually, Marilyn is a fairly accomplished biologist, and the bat patrol is just a sideline. Usually it is good for conversation openers or stoppers. In this case, it’s a stopper, and Eric quickly moves on to the next.
When he walks away, Marilyn shrugs. “Men,” she says. “Who needs ’em.”
The waitress seems to keep bringing us two of everything. We drink vodka tonics, then wine. We gobble down cheeseburgers and a few more glasses of wine and head out into the night. It is warm and misty, and the moon seems hidden behind clouds, but Marilyn tells me it is the best week of the year to see shooting stars, so we flop down on the wet grass in a field and stare at the sky, and occasionally, in a clear spot, we do see a star shoot by. “Cindy ran into Robert on the bus,” I tell her during a pause in meteorite activity.
Marilyn sits up. “I was never crazy ab
out you guys together. I don’t think he was for you.”
I sit up too. “I thought I’d be married by now.”
“So did all of us.” Marilyn puts an arm on my shoulder. “Maybe it’s just a quirk of history. Like being born before the invention of penicillin or being in Poland in 1939.”
We are silent again. “We need massive amounts of love,” I say.
Marilyn pats my hand. “It’s like dependency on foreign oil.” We’re both drunk. She continues, “We should be able to live alone, even if we don’t want to.” I nod, but I know I don’t want to live alone. I want to pursue this matter in greater depth, but before I’m able to, Marilyn leaps up and swears we’ll see more shooting stars from the beach, and for reasons that remain obscure, I believe her.
We get a ride with a potato truck and lie in the back, potatoes rubbing into our legs, bruising our spines. I am surprised at how tough these potatoes are. Sturdy Long Island potatoes. I put one in my pocket for good luck. We wave at the farmer as he drops us off on a black strip of beach. The beach looks dubious. The moon is hidden behind moving clouds. The ocean is black, except for a mist that seems to be coming in. We take off our shoes and socks and leave them near the road and walk out barefoot on the beach.
I follow Marilyn’s lead down to the water. When we get there, she says, “Come on, let’s bury each other.” I don’t feel like being buried, but she is adamant, and I’m in no shape to argue. We furrow out little graves and then we sit in them, awaiting burial. Slowly we pour sand back over each other until we’re covered to the waist. It takes much longer than I had imagined. I’m tired when we finish, and I don’t like the cold dampness of the sand. “So now what do we do?”
Marilyn shrugs. “Just sit, I guess.”
I’m sitting looking at a pitch-black sea with my legs buried in sand, and Marilyn starts talking about giant squids. She says that up until recently they haven’t found any squids alive. They’ve found them dead, she says, at up to ninety feet, but not alive. Marilyn says they find them attacking ships, but the question has always been why a squid would attack a ship. It’s not going to eat the ship. So what’s it doing? Marilyn claims to have figured it all out. The giant squids live in the coldest waters of the ocean. If something happens to stir up the water, they’re forced to rise to the surface. But when they get into warmer water, their blood boils. You can’t imagine what that must feel like, she tells me. So when the water gets stirred up and the giant squids come up to the top of the water, their blood is boiling. That’s why they clutch on to the ships. “Because they’re in agony.” She sighs. “They’re in agony.”
I stare into the ocean and think that I did unimaginable things near the end to keep Robert from going. Once I blocked the door with my naked body, and even when he threatened to hit me, I didn’t move away. I pleaded with him, wrapped my arms around his knees. Suddenly I’m standing up, sand dribbling down my legs, leaving behind my little grave, tears in my eyes. Marilyn leaps up and runs after me. “Hey,” she says, “did I do something wrong?”
I shake my head. I tell her I made a mistake. I should’ve gone somewhere else this summer. “Robert and I,” I tell her, “we had something.”
I’m not sure how we got home or how I got into bed. I don’t remember taking my clothes off and putting on my nightgown. I’m pretty sure I passed out. I’m wakened when it is still dark by a tapping at the window. I look out and in the moonlight I see a branch, banging in the wind against the windowpane. I stumble out of bed, still half asleep, to open the window and break off the tip of the branch. As I move closer, the branch begins to take on a new form in the moonlight, and just as I reach the window the branch does a strange thing. It beckons to me. It seems to shape itself into fingers on a withered hand and seems to want me to let it in.
I’ve had other strange dreams since Robert moved out, so this one doesn’t surprise me, but I can’t go back to sleep. The mattress of my bed, the bed I shared with Robert, is old, and even though we’d put a bed board under it, I can’t get comfortable. I remember when I just used to slip into the curve of his back. I’m not sure how I ever slept in this bed before.
I go downstairs and sit in the rocker in the dining room. I feel as if I’m not alone, and when I look up, the eyes of the picture above the mantel seem to be watching me. I look back at Edie Wendell, the woman who owned this house and who kept the postcard collection, and I wonder if she doesn’t miss what she’s left behind.
I decide to check the vegetables to see how they’re doing. I grab a flashlight from the back porch and, standing in the garden in the dark, I shine the light on them. They seem to have grown during the night. The zucchini look bigger than before. The little snow peas have stretched their tendrils farther along the vine. My flashlight finds the beer dishes, and inside dead or drowning slugs stagnate in a murky, viscous solution.
I move the light away, along the ground, and see something fat and thick and pink, pulsating. It is wet and it moves with great enthusiasm. Two earthworms are making love, and they are engrossed for a moment, but the light of my flashlight startles them and they shoot back into their separate holes. I stand dead still in the garden for an instant, catching my breath.
Robert is standing behind me. He has come to check the garden. I can feel him the way I felt him the night we watched the stars. He is so close, I can just reach out and touch him. I tell myself to turn around slowly, but as I do I hear the rustle of leaves, the sound of the wind, and inexplicably he is gone.
When I get back to bed, I see the impression the body has left on the bed. This time I don’t bother to smooth it out. This time I let my head slip into the mark on the pillow. I let my legs fold into the creases made by the legs. And when I have fitted myself completely into this impression, this hollow carved-out place, I am finally able to go to sleep. I don’t know how long I am asleep when I hear a call of the bird who drives me wild and feel a strange breeze blowing through the room. Though no one is holding me, I feel as if I’m being held.
In the morning I wake to the smell of coffee and wander downstairs. Jed sits at the dining room table, working on the finances with his calculator, and Cindy is adding up the grocery slips.
Jed says, “Patsy, did you take money for briquets out of petty cash?” I haven’t even had my coffee yet, so it takes me a moment to understand what he means. I nod yes. Jed says, “Well, briquets aren’t like toilet paper. They’re individual, not house. So you owe petty cash $5.73, but everyone owes you $2.07.” He pauses, perplexed, then annoyed, realizing that he’s going to have to redo his calculations because I charged briquets to petty cash.
Cindy looks up. “Be sure you don’t charge me for coffee. I’m only drinking tea.”
“What about these calls to Tulsa?” Jed asks. “Nobody knows anyone in Tulsa.”
Jed gives up on house finances and begins reading the stock reports. Cindy does sit-ups and Marilyn is making eggs. Arthur and Angeline are occupying the living room, engrossed in the paper. Nobody notices me as I walk through the room, but I pause and look at them. They seem strange to me. Though they’re only one day older, I can see the difference from the day before. I’m in my swimsuit now, and I move past them, invisible as I float through the house.
Copies
BEVERLY stands at the model 2200, wondering why Doug hasn’t looked at her all day. Doug, the man Beverly has been dating for the past six weeks, is busy at the color Xerox. He is her third boyfriend this year. That is one less boyfriend than last year, but it is still more than she wants.
Beverly always meets her boyfriends on the job. She met Andy, the one before Doug, at the Actors’ Hotline, where they sat side by side, answering the phone for other people who were getting jobs. One day Beverly answered a call and handed the phone to Andy. “It’s for you,” she said. It was a producer he’d met at a party a long time ago who had found just the right part for him, and he moved to L.A. in a matter of days. A week after he moved he sent her a postcard of the hills of
Hollywood, saying he knew she’d get there some time.
Beverly met Doug after working at the copy center for a few hours. He is a tall, skinny Columbia dropout who is “trying to find himself” and who sits at the edge of her bed at night, playing the guitar while she sleeps. Beverly learned to sleep through anything when she was a little girl and lived with her parents in a small split-level just beyond the northeast approach runway at LaGuardia. Her father wasn’t a pilot but a sales representative for a shoe company, and she hardly ever saw him.
Beverly hates the 2200 because there is nothing to do but watch and make certain it doesn’t break down. The 2200 can print a hundred pages a minute. When it breaks down, it is a disaster. The Ektaprint is much better than the 2200, but Doug always works on the Ektaprint. Her favorite machine is the binder. She likes the way the frayed edges of paper fall like confetti into the little pouch at the back of the machine. Beverly collects this confetti. She plans to give a party when she leaves the copy center and toss these bits of paper into the air.
It is a Monday morning and there is already a long line of customers with numbers in their hands, waving them at the people who work behind the pale oak counter that separates customer from employee. They wave their tickets as if they were seeing people off who are about to depart on a long cruise. The copy center is done in California-style oak paneling with neatly painted signs that read EXPRESS PICKUP or TAKE A NUMBER, PLEASE. When Beverly came to work here six months ago, she thought it must be a very orderly place, but it isn’t very orderly at all.
A nervous homosexual has already been in to complain about the quality of the copies of his last teleplay. Every Monday he comes in to have something copied. He always refuses to drop it off, and sometimes he will wait an hour. Usually he wants thirty copies of everything, done by hand, collated, bound, with a two-tone cover. He is a tedious client, and Doug gets his jobs. But it is Robert, the store manager, who listens to the complaints.