by Gail Godwin
He knew the story of Grief Cottage, though Hurricane Hazel was long past before he and his family started coming here. He belonged to the faction of locals who wished it had been leveled decades ago. (“It’s one more disaster waiting to happen.”)
I had not gone to Grief Cottage on the Fourth, which fell on a Sunday that year. All day long the beach had been thick with tourists, and I knew from Mr. Bolton that the north tip of the island was a traditional spot for serious firework displays, with preparations starting early in the day. With so many people milling around, I would surely be seen defying the CONDEMNED and KEEP OUT signs as I crawled under the wire fence. I might become the agent of immediate demolition. (“If that boy is crawling under that fence with us watching, isn’t it time we get moving on the safety measures and level that thing to the ground?”) I tried to imagine how the ghost-boy marked such occasions. Did he enjoy watching the spectacle, or did he hide out from the noise in some safe corner?
But here I was crossing a line again. Hadn’t I reached the limits of imagining what he could do without me? By now I had more or less accepted that we worked in tandem: to a great extent he was dependent on my awareness of him. Since ghosts didn’t have living brains, the work must be done by the living person. The living person had to offer his brain as the dwelling place for the ghost. Once again I reminded myself how imperative it was to my mental health to keep the different levels of reality separate.
I did not go to Grief Cottage on Monday because it rained in the morning and in the afternoon Aunt Charlotte decided to rearrange her studio and asked for my help. She wanted to take down the items pinned on her wall-high cork board and then completely clear her two trestle tables and move them to the middle of the room. “I’m going to try some experiments while sitting down.” When I asked her about the experiments, she said she didn’t want to talk about it. (“In case I fail. So you’ll just have to contain your overdeveloped curiosity, Marcus.”) She allowed me to dust and vacuum and change her sheets, as I had been doing since her fall. She also talked me through changing a washer on the big laundry sink in her studio, which she used for cleaning up after a day’s painting. But after praising my work, she announced in a cordial but no-nonsense voice that I was to stay out of her studio until she invited me in again.
“Maybe I’ll finish off my boxes from the garage,” I said, anxious to remain in her good graces. The “overdeveloped curiosity” remark was not exactly a compliment. “I need to rearrange my room, as well.”
“That’s a good plan,” she said.
The next box I tackled contained our “linens” on the top, towels and sheets so worn that they went straight into the black trash bag. Underneath those I found Mom’s old GED Practice Test Manuals. I started leafing through them, testing myself on various questions, until I became sucked down into not-so-happy memories of our last years together, things I hadn’t thought of since coming to live with Aunt Charlotte. I heard conversations between me and Mom that made me wince with shame, and I recalled humiliating instances of our “downsizing,” as Mom jokingly referred to it, with forced courage in her voice.
After she lost her job when the joinery in Jewel went out of business, she returned with a vengeance to her GED hopes. (“It’s now or never, Marcus. You must support me in this, make me do it even when I’m tired.”) Many were the nights I quizzed her out of these practice manuals while she lay on the floor, her legs up against the wall to reduce the swelling in her ankles. First the test-taker had to read a passage “for comprehension” and then pick the right answer from the multiple choice questions below. (“Who were in attendance at Oliver Twist’s birth? A. grandmothers, B. doctors, C. nurses, D. a slightly drunk woman and a parish surgeon.”) “That was too easy,” Mom had said from the floor, “almost insulting.” And I had agreed with her: Any moron who had read the passage would know it was D. The way we did it, she would first read the passages to herself silently in a particular area of testing—literacy, math, social studies, science—hiding the questions and answers with a piece of paper. And then she’d lie on the floor with her legs up while I quizzed her. (“Unemployment now has less severe effects than it did in the 1930s. Why?”) When she got an answer wrong she would ask me to put a checkmark by the right answer so she could come back and review it. (“I should have known that! ‘No countervailing social programs!’ With the many social programs that keep you and me afloat, how could I have missed that one?”)
From her preoccupied air at supper I sensed that Aunt Charlotte had begun the experiment that was to keep me out of her studio. But now, having discovered the GED practice manuals, I was caught up in my own private quest. The manuals had been given to Mom by the teacher of her first night course back in Forsterville. They were used, but he knew she couldn’t afford to buy new ones. (“He was a wonderful teacher, devoted to us. He had been teaching Latin and Greek at a nearby private school until he got fed up and quit. He said his heart would always be with the strugglers rather than the already-haves. But then he got sick and died.”
“What of?”
“He didn’t take care of himself. He fell into destructive habits and there was no one to guide him out of them. It was such a sad waste. Later the class was moved to another location, to suit the convenience of the next teacher—otherwise she wouldn’t come. I kept going for a while, though it was a forty-five-minute commute each way. But the new teacher, you could tell her heart wasn’t in it. She did it for the extra income. She despised us. She was one of those people who fight their way up the ladder and then have contempt for others trying to follow her. Finally I lost faith and decided to leave well enough alone. I had my good job with full benefits at Forster’s. And then you came along. What more did I need?”)
XXI.
I stayed up late into Monday night, obsessed with Mom’s GED practice tests. I would close my eyes, stab at one of the four manuals, open it to a random page, and test myself on the first question that swam up. In a free market what are some of the ways in which prices can be fixed? What distinguishes the skeleton of a pterosaur from that of a bird? What conflicting impulses can be seen in the democratic ethic? (Correct answer: duty to self vs. duty to society.) When I got one wrong, I would pencil my initials beside the right one. As the night wore on, I entered a manic state. It seemed totally possible that I could pass these tests now. Though I always got A’s in math at school, the math part of the GED tests would bring down my total score because I hadn’t studied geometry or advanced algebra yet. But if I aced the other parts I could balance out the low math score. If I put my mind to it, I might attain high school equivalency without ever going to high school! I could head straight off to college and Aunt Charlotte would have her privacy back and look forward to seeing me on the holidays. She would be proud of me and might even miss me.
When I woke up next morning, it was much later than usual: I could tell from the position of the sun hitting the front of the house. Long gone were the hours of the capering unleashed dogs and the stalwart seniors with their sleeves and sunhats. I lay hating myself for missing my favorite part of the morning, but also struggling to remember the dream I had waked out of. I heard Aunt Charlotte in the kitchen, foraging in the refrigerator, then hopping back to her studio and firmly closing the door (Keep out until further notice. This means you, Marcus). I made my bed as soon as I got out of it, a habit begun long ago to save Mom the trouble and to keep our small space looking neat. Now I did it so Aunt Charlotte wouldn’t think I was a slob if she decided to take a peek into my—her former—room. Dressing quickly, I wolfed a handful of cereal in the kitchen, swigging it down with milk.
Riding north past the third or fourth yellow trash barrel, I remembered my dream. The whole thing came back in a single whump, like a fist to the stomach. Finally I had dreamed about my mother. It was the first dream in which she was facing me. This was Mom at her best, smiling and opening the door to me. Inside was an apartment better than the ones we’d lived in. It was spacious and fi
lled with light and everything in it was clean and new. My mom looked clean and new, too. She looked refreshed and young, freed of burdens.
“Marcus, I never told you this,” she said excitedly, “but I have another son. He’s your half brother.”
“Was Mr. Harshaw his father?”
“I don’t think that’s important, do you?”
“Is he older or younger?”
“Older. Oh, Marcus, he’s the most wonderful man. He’s going to take care of me now. I wish you could meet him, but he’s sleeping. He works so hard.”
“Is he—in your room?”
“Goodness, no, why should he be in there? He’s got his own room.”
How dense people are when they reassure you it was “only” a dream. Never in my waking life had I felt such wretchedness as when my refreshed, excited mother, surrounded by the security provided by another, informed me she had a better son sleeping in his own room. In the dream I experienced the castoff’s full horror of realizing he has been supplanted and is no longer the main object of someone’s love. And then the frantic disbelief (“It’s not true, it’s not final, I can still win her back!”) followed by an agony of hopelessness and the wish to die.
That night last September in Jewel when Mom arrived home triumphant over the life insurance policy she had just bought in honor of my eleventh birthday (“It’s twenty-four dollars a month, but now I know you’ll be okay whatever happens”), what was my unsporting reply? “Too bad kids can’t take out life insurance. If I died first, you could stop cleaning bathrooms.”
And then in the winter—which was to be our last together—when she was working day shift at the new Waffle House near the interstate and cleaning the County Housing Authority offices at night, she had prophesied with her forced cheer: “Things are going to get better from now on, Marcus, I feel it.” And what was my smartass comeback? “That must mean we’ve finally hit bottom and there’s nowhere to go but up.”
Our first year in Jewel while Mom still had her nice job oiling and lacquering furniture at Mountaintop Joinery before it closed, she came home one night in a kind of ecstasy. “Oh, Marcus, I wish you could have heard the song they just played on the radio. I was so moved I had to stay in the car till it was over. Do you remember Captain Kirk?” (How could I not remember Captain Kirk? Wheezer had made me a present of the entire set of the original Star Trek. He had got it on eBay for VCRs because that was all Mom and I had.) “Well, he’s made a new album under his own name, William Shatner. It’s called Has Been, and there’s this heart-stopping song called ‘It Hasn’t Happened Yet.’ I got chills all over, because he was expressing exactly what I was feeling. It Hasn’t Happened Yet! He speaks the song in his rumbly Captain Kirk voice against this background of haunting music.” Deepening her own voice, she chanted snatches from the song: dreaming of success … I would be the best … what I might have done … falling, falling … I’m scared again.
“Isn’t it wonderful what art can do, Marcus? It was so sad, I saw my life in every line, but at the same time it made me feel part of the human family—it made me feel so alive.”
Later, as things got progressively worse in Jewel, I would resort to those phrases as a teasing form of recrimination. Every time Mom came home and broke the news of another “downsizing” in our lives I would deepen my voice to a Captain Kirk rumble and chant: falling, falling … I’m scared again. Or: It hasn’t happened yet. She always laughed, but I could tell it hurt her.
Pedaling faster to get ahead of the rising midmorning tide, I was already talking to the ghost-boy, filling him in on everything that had happened since the last time I was there. (“No wonder she had to go and find herself a better son. Here’s what worries me, though. What if—however bad a son I was—I loved her as much as I am ever capable of loving anyone? Did you ever feel like this? Did you love any special person when you were alive? Did you ever worry that you weren’t capable of loving enough? But it’s all over for you. Your life is a complete thing. I envy that. Is it worth it to go on living, knowing I let my mom down and dreading the new school and worrying how long it will be until Aunt Charlotte tires of my company and gets rid of me? Why not save her the guilt she’d feel after she kicked me out? And, I mean, what’s the point of ‘climbing the ladder’ when you know you’ll never fit in with the already-haves at the top? Did you think things like this when you were alive?”)
A temptation presented itself. Then it morphed into a dare and then into a compulsion, something I knew I had no choice about doing. Today would be the perfect day for me to go up on the porch of Grief Cottage and sit down facing the door.
If you have reached the point of wishing your life was completed but knowing you haven’t got the guts to complete it yourself, wouldn’t the next-best thing be to seek out something that might do the job for you? Today I would face the door of the cottage and stay facing it, inviting annihilation. Surely I wouldn’t be the first person to die from fright.
But my plan was aborted when I rounded the last curve of beach and saw the group gathered around Grief Cottage. Charlie Coggins, the realtor, was with two men wearing some kind of summery uniform with shorts. Coggins’s weird-looking amphibious vehicle that Lachicotte had helped him assemble was parked next to a white truck bearing an insignia. The men in shorts were looking through instruments on top of tripods, while Mr. Coggins hovered near them. I could either conceal myself behind some dunes and wait them out, or go home before high tide forced me to return by the road. The mood was all wrong now. It would be better to come back tomorrow at my early hour and have the place to myself.
Ed Bolton’s jeep with its wartime camouflage was parked in front of our dunes when I got back to Aunt Charlotte’s house, and there he was in his squashed sun hat crouched reverentially beside our loggerhead site.
“Just checking,” he said, knees cracking as he rose to greet me. “All that rain we had yesterday could make a difference to our countdown. Where are you coming from?”
I told him I liked to ride to the north end of the island every morning to sort out my thoughts. “But I got a late start today, and people were already poking around Grief Cottage. There was this realtor I know, Mr. Coggins, and two other men with tripods, measuring things. They were wearing some kind of uniform with shorts and they had instruments on tripods.”
“Dark shorts, gray shirts, and blue caps?”
“How did you know?”
“Army Corps of Engineers. Coggins knows he’s never going to get rid of that real estate until the erosion experts have weighed in.”
“But there was a man from Chicago who seemed interested.”
“He pulled out. Nobody wants to start building a beachside inn and have it falling into the ocean before it’s finished.”
“How do you know all these things?”
“Everybody knows everybody’s business here. Our cottage is only four doors south of Grief Cottage, so naturally we keep our antennae on the alert. What’s probably going to happen, the Army Corps will do their deformation survey and recommend we invest in geotube bladders. They’re expensive as hell, so all us owners at the north end will have to vote on it in a referendum. Coggins will be stuck with those lots unless someone’s foolish enough to buy with no guarantee of future shoreline protection.”
“What are geotube bladders?”
“They’re like great big culverts made of special textiles and buried beneath the high tide line. They’re filled with a sand-and-water mixture and can usually block immense waves caused by hurricanes. Note I said usually, not always.”
“How will the rain change our countdown?”
“It will have cooled the sand. The embryos prefer warmth at this stage of the game. That’s why we always detect a rapid rise in temperature with our little thermocouple gizmos when hatching time is imminent. Yesterday’s rain may set it back a few days. What’s the matter? You look troubled.”
“I just wish I knew more about how things worked in the world. The way you
do.”
“Give yourself a break, son. If you keep on asking questions at your present rate, you’ll be a downright sage before you reach thirty.”
XXII.
Cleanup was in full force at the house next door. A team of guys shaped hedges, whacked weeds, mowed and raked the sparse patches of grass on the sandy lawn, hosed down stairs and walkways. One was down on his knees, hand-clipping the overgrown path that led to the beach. Another was planting a last-minute border of hardy annuals. From inside the house came the high-pitched whine of several vacuums going at once.
“That’s the life, isn’t it, Marcus? You’re ninety-five in a wheelchair and won’t be going anywhere near the beach but you maintain a full retinue to prink up your paths and grounds and boardwalk so everything will look the same as it did seventy-five years ago.”
“Seventy-five years ago?”