by Gail Godwin
“Why do they call it Grief Cottage?”
“A family was lost there in Hurricane Hazel. A boy and his parents. The parents were out desperately searching for him, when all the while he may have been in the cottage. Anyway, none of them were ever found. Some of the locals think the boy may have been hiding in the house somewhere smoking. They thought it might have been a cigarette that started the fire that burned down the south end of the cottage, but they never found a body. Others think that when he realized his parents had gone out searching for him he rushed out searching for them and got swept out to sea. But his body never washed up either.”
“Maybe it still could.”
“I don’t think so. It was fifty years ago. I can show you the last Grief Cottage I painted—I mean, on my computer screen. As soon as I get this commission out of the way, I’ll give you a tour of my online gallery. But now I must earn my bread and butter while the north light is still strong.”
III.
“Walk up there and see for yourself,” Aunt Charlotte had said, and I had the rest of the afternoon ahead to do it in. I sprayed myself with sunscreen, marched down the rickety boardwalk that bridged the dunes between the cottage and the beach, descended the wooden stairs, and before heading north stopped for my usual inspection of “our” roped-off hatching site with its big red diamond-shaped warning sign. LOGGERHEAD TURTLE NESTING AREA. EGGS, HATCHLINGS, ADULTS, AND CARCASSES ARE PROTECTED BY FEDERAL AND STATE LAWS.
The eggs buried in our dune had already survived their first catastrophe. Back in mid-May, just before my arrival, the people renting the cottage to the right of Aunt Charlotte’s had been negligent about smoothing out the sand at the end of their badminton games, and that night a mother turtle had mistaken the hilly clump for a dune, laid her eggs, and departed. The Turtle Patrol had to dig them out, a “clutch” of 110 eggs, tenderly transfer them into buckets lined with wet sand, and re-bury them in a suitable spot. The patrol knew Aunt Charlotte’s way of life and could depend on her boundaries to stay untrammeled and safe.
I kept my sneakers on because my beach walks had taught me you made better progress on sand with rubber soles. Aunt Charlotte hadn’t said how far the north end of the island was but surely she wouldn’t have said I could walk there if she had judged it too far.
Before I came to live with her I had never seen the ocean. Mom and I had lived first in the North Carolina piedmont, which was a long way from the coast. After she had to leave her job at the furniture factory, we moved west to the mountains, which was even farther from the coast. Although I was a competent swimmer in a pool, I was still nervous of the ocean. After being knocked down about twenty times, getting water up my nose and sand in my eyes, I postponed trying to master the waves and took to walking on the beach. There were new ocean things for me to discover every day, comparisons to be made, conclusions to be drawn. Everything I encountered seemed to be sending me some kind of message. Some of the messages made me feel good, others not so good. The patterns made in the sand by the outgoing wash redrew themselves again and again, different each time, and would continue to do so after I was dead. The stately pelicans flapped in a single line toward their destination, while the skittish gulls zipped and zapped, shrieking at one another and getting diverted. When the tide went out, as it was starting to do now, it left behind these tiny-shelled creatures frantically trying to dig themselves back into the wet sand before the birds ate them. Some made it, some did not. And on top of that, all the birds I saw, plus all the crabs that came out at night, were already programmed to gulp down the tasty defenseless little loggerhead babies when they hatched in mid-July and raced for the sea.
I knew why the tides rose and fell; it had been part of seventh-grade science. I also knew that we were composed of seventy-eight percent water when we were born, though it went down to sixty percent as we got older. Our brains remained eighty percent water, however, and the ancient part of our brain remembered that when we were formed many millennia ago, we swam before we could crawl or walk. Even now we began our lives immersed in the waters of our mothers’ wombs.
Children playing in the shallow waves screamed with exaggerated terror while mothers hovered close by. There was this one mother sitting in a low chair near the surf. She wore a straw hat and oversized sunglasses. Her toddler, about three, was carefully transporting a shovel full of water from the receding ocean to pour on her feet. By the time he reached her, the ocean had all spilled out and he emptied a waterless shovel on her painted toenails. But then I saw her raise her eyebrows at him behind the oversized sunglasses. Her glossed lips gave him a special ironic smile, meant for just the two of them. Better luck next time, the look said. Meanwhile, I’m staying right here. There were little eddies of security going back and forth between them and it wrenched my heart.
Yellow trash barrels were placed at regular intervals along the beach border where the grasses and dunes began. To date, I had walked north as far as the fourth yellow barrel beyond Aunt Charlotte’s cottage. The barrels stretched ahead of me, getting smaller and smaller in perspective toward the island’s north end until I could no longer count them.
But today, even before I reached the third barrel, something horrible happened. It was like I had been turned upside down. Everything was so terrifying it stopped me in my tracks. My heart was pounding a mile a minute and, worse than that, I found I no longer knew how to walk. Somehow I found myself sitting down in the sand—it must have been abrupt because my bottom was stinging. A couple in bathing suits passed by and the man looked over and acknowledged me with a man-to-man wave. After lifting my hand in return, I quickly unlaced a sneaker, pretending there was a pebble inside it and that was why I needed to sit. I turned the sneaker upside down and made a big deal of shaking out the pebble. I put the shoe back on but when it came to tying the laces in a knot I couldn’t remember how. The boy whose stepfather had smashed his face in had lost his memory for weeks. “A whole bunch of my life was just wiped out forever,” he went around bragging to anybody at the foster home who would listen. Maybe I was going insane. When Mom was still working at the furniture factory, a woman who worked in the sanding department “lost it” one day and never came back. Two men had to carry her from the floor. She had to go to a mental hospital. This sometimes happened to people, Mom said, either because they couldn’t endure their life anymore or because, through no fault of their own, something suddenly went haywire in their brains.
I didn’t think it was the first reason, because I could endure life at Aunt Charlotte’s much better than the foster home, where nothing was private and you never had a moment alone. At Aunt Charlotte’s I had plenty of time to myself and didn’t have to listen to platitudes about how everything horrible that happens to us is part of “God’s plan.” I no longer had to share a room with a boy who made noises under the covers. At Aunt Charlotte’s I had my own room and could listen to the ocean at night, just as my mother had done as a girl that time she had visited here.
If it was the other thing, and something in my brain had suddenly gone haywire, what would happen to me? At the very worst, I would be discovered insane on the beach, unable to remember anything or tie my shoe, and sent off in an ambulance to a mental hospital. If the brain somehow righted itself and I made it back to the house, what then? If I told Aunt Charlotte about the panic, she would get on the phone and call in another grief counselor, if I was entitled to any more of them—or did you get to start all over in a new state?—or I’d have to go to a therapist and Aunt Charlotte would resent having to drive me there and we would be diminishing the money in the trust.
It took some rude plops of water on my head to remind me that if I was using my brain well enough to figure out possible outcomes of my madness I probably wasn’t mad. The skies had opened and people were fleeing the beach or sheltering under umbrellas. The woman in the big sunglasses and her little boy had vanished. I looked at my feet and saw that both sneakers were tied. Walking home in the pouring rain, I deci
ded not to mention anything to Aunt Charlotte.
“That’s the trouble with afternoon walks,” said Aunt Charlotte. “In this season you can depend on it to rain. Sorry it spoiled your adventure, but I’m glad you changed clothes. I had a productive afternoon. I’ve laid in the sky over my McMansion, and tomorrow I’ll tackle the shrubbery. It’s not there yet in real life, but I’ll duplicate what’s in the architect’s drawing.”
“Maybe I’ll go the whole way to the cottage tomorrow morning.”
“It’s a fair walk, but you’re young. I haven’t done it for a while. The last time I went up there to take some new photos of Grief Cottage I drove north as far as Seashore Road goes, parked in the turnaround, and then fought my way on foot up through the dune grasses and Spanish bayonets.”
“What are they?”
“Very prickly plants. They look like succulent bayonets sticking up from the ground. You don’t want to sit or fall on one.”
Supper was the only meal Aunt Charlotte and I ate together. I did not mind this. I liked making my own breakfast and having a sandwich around midday on the porch. Mom and I had never eaten all our meals together because of her jobs and her different shifts. Aunt Charlotte wasn’t a cook and didn’t aspire to being one. The foster mom made a big deal about her cooking and baking, but everyone had to sit down together for every meal and we had to take turns praying and then we each had to tell what we had learned that day. As soon as I was old enough, Mom and I had shared the cooking. Spaghetti sauce was her masterpiece (her secret was clove powder), and she made a fabulous thick soup from her own combination of cans. I could fry hamburgers and scramble eggs and do pulled pork in our slow-cooker. For the rest, we got our stuff from delis.
Or went out to pick up a pizza.
No wonder Aunt Charlotte was so skinny. All day she snacked on bananas and crackers and little cartons of yogurt, and at supper she picked around the edges of her meal and kept refilling her wineglass. She ordered her wines and had them delivered in cases. The store on our island had a deli with salads and cold meats and kept a spit going that roasted chickens all day long. So far we had not risked shrimp again and I didn’t want to be the first to suggest it.
At our shared meals, she gamely dredged up things to talk about. I could feel her reluctance to probe into my past. After downing several glasses of wine, though, she loosened up a little. What had she done when she ate her suppers alone? There was an old TV in the kitchen, she had probably watched it. Or just sat comfortably, enjoying her solitary life and sipping her wine.
She saw me staring at the TV and asked if I would like to order cable. “I can get old movies and the networks, but maybe you and your mother had other favorite channels. Should I look into it? All the neighbors are already hooked up. I’m the last holdout.”
“Mom and I never had cable. They had it at the foster home because the state paid for it. There was this two-year-old boy who sat strapped into his little swing-chair and watched it all day long.”
“Is that a yes or a no?”
“Only if you want it.” As this sounded rude, I added, “I mean, I can do without it if you can.” One less expense to take out of the trust.
“Look, Marcus, we’re both new at this. If there’s anything missing here, something you’d like to have to make the summer go faster, you need to tell me. I won’t know otherwise, I’m not a mind reader. Would you like to have a look at those boxes waiting in the garage, or is it still too soon?”
“Maybe it’s still a little too soon.”
“Well, you set to work on them when you’re ready. School starts at the end of August. You’ll be with people your own age. These days won’t last forever. No days ever do, though sometimes it’s hard to convince oneself of that.”
IV.
At night, the tides washed in and out. I did not think I would ever get tired of that sound. It felt like the watery part of the earth taking regular breaths in your ear. Thud-wash, thud-wash, never stopping, doing its job with the same rhythm as millions of years ago when the little loggerhead turtles were waiting to hatch and begin their race for the sea. (“It’s their Normandy,” an old-timer on the Turtle Patrol told me, “only in reverse.”)
My mother had slept in this room before she was my mother. Her young head, like mine, had been divided from the ancient tides by a mere cottage wall and a few dunes. Where had my critical grandmother (“Brenda”) slept? Now that I asked that question, it seemed likely she had shared the bed with my mother while Aunt Charlotte slept in her studio. When Mom used to tell me how nice it had been to lie in bed and hear the ocean so close, I had always imagined her alone in the bed. But maybe she had adapted her memory of that night when telling the memory to me. As someone who had slept all his life with his mother, I could identify with that. Whenever I was telling my best friend, Wheezer, about a dream I’d had, I pictured an alternate vision of myself alone in a bed, the way Wheezer, who slept alone in his bed, would naturally be picturing me.
That is, until the unlucky day he came to our apartment and found out the truth.
My shoelaces were tied this morning and like the straight-flying pelicans I had a goal: Grief Cottage. In my backpack I had my lunch and a bottle of spring water. Aunt Charlotte reckoned it would take me about forty minutes each way at a normal pace.
“When I first moved here I was in an ecstasy of freedom. I hardly touched the ground, my first year on this island. I was in my early thirties, which may seem decrepit to you, but I had never had so much energy before in my life. Nobody could tell me how to live anymore; nobody could criticize me or lay a hand on me. I spent all my savings on a beach shack. It was even named Rascal Shack. The young scions would gather here when they wanted to get drunk. It didn’t even have an indoor bathroom when I bought it.”
“What is a syon?”
“Offspring. Usually meaning the offspring of privileged families. You put a ‘c’ after the ‘s’ when you’re writing it. S-C-I-O-N. When I first came here I walked to the north end of the island every day. Forty minutes each way. The walk north was exactly the right distance to make me walk out of myself. And then that desolate cottage at the end, falling in on itself and all its secrets. What better spot for sorting through the debris of my own history?”
“If you walked out of yourself going north, what did you do on the return walk?”
“Enjoyed my emptiness. Or sometimes just congratulated myself for escaping.”
“Escaping what, if it’s not rude to ask?”
“Escaping the kind of life I’d always felt trapped in. But that’s another story. Do you know, Marcus, it was Grief Cottage that started my painting. One day there was someone else in my lonely spot. This person had planted an easel in the sand and was painting the cottage. At first I assumed it was a man but when I got closer it turned out to be a woman in a hat and trousers. She was a cheerful tourist, staying for a short time, and I watched her mix her colors. It was fascinating. It was a competent little painting; I could see it hanging on a wall and pleasing someone, though she had missed the mood of the place. I could do that, I thought. I bought some paints and some canvas board and a book called A Beginner’s Guide to Landscape Painting. It took me a while to figure out how I could capture the mood she had missed. But first I had to teach myself the most basic painting skills. Later I borrowed books from the library to see how the masters had done their skies. Constable would spend hours sketching clouds and skies. He called this practice his ‘skying sessions.’ ”
“Constable?”
“John Constable, English. Late eighteenth, early nineteenth century. Look at his skies up close—he loves approaching storms—and you realize clouds don’t have outlines. He works them up from within. Clouds are brushstrokes. Constable is the king of clouds.”
Today the rising tide had covered the spot where I had seen the mother and the little boy yesterday afternoon. By afternoon the waters would have receded again and maybe the happy pair would come back. Perhaps they had thei
r own family routine in one of the beach houses behind the dunes. Was a father with them, or was he somewhere else, or was he one of those secret fathers nobody gets to know about?
I was walking up closer to the dunes because of the incoming tide when a neat white dump truck stopped alongside me. A sunburned man in shorts jumped out and gracefully upended a yellow trash barrel into the truck’s bin. “Disgusting!” he called to me over the sound of the waves. “What people will put into these things!” Without waiting for a response, he asked where I was headed. When I said I was walking to the north end of the island he said, “I’d offer you a lift but it’s against regulations. I could lose my job.”
“That’s okay. I want to walk.”
“Well, dude,” he said, looking me over, “I’d take it easy if I were you till you get back in shape.” As he raised his sunburnt arms to swing the empty barrel back onto its concrete platform, a pungent man-smell issued from the wet underarms of his T-shirt. “You have a good day,” he called over his shoulder, springing up into the truck and setting off northward to the next yellow barrel.
Already I was tired and hadn’t yet reached the spot where I had panicked and turned around yesterday. But I had to keep walking north till the trash-barrel man finished his round and passed me coming back or he’d see how out of shape I really was.
After Mom left her job at the furniture factory and we moved to the mountain town of Jewel, I entered fifth grade. Then at the end of the year the teacher told Mom I was ready to do seventh grade work if she had no objection to my skipping a grade. She didn’t—it made her proud because she had helped me study that first lonely year in Jewel. She asked me my opinion and I said it suited me. But the seventh grade kids were more developed and must have looked on me as a freak: here was this kid still built like a child and piping up with the right answer every time the teacher called on him in class. At first they called me Baby Wonk. Then when I began to gain weight, they called me Pudge. (“Boy, Pudge sure makes the most of the Reduced Price Lunch Program, doesn’t he?”)