The Last Beach Bungalow

by Jennie Nash

  “She’s crazy,” someone said, from somewhere just outside my car. I flinched and looked out the window to see a white-haired woman in a pink sweat suit walking two small white poodles.

  “Excuse me?” I said. I wasn’t sure she had spoken to me, but there was no one else on the sidewalk.

  “Mrs. Torrey. The owner. She has some harebrained idea to sell that house to someone who won’t tear it down. Of course everyone else on this block has already torn their old bungalow down and made a fortune in the process. Peg Torrey doesn’t care about any of that. After Harry died—he was her husband—I’m afraid she’s gone ’round the bend.”

  I smiled. I had no idea what to say, and the poodle lady took my silence as an invitation to carry on.

  “The daughter just wants Peg out of the house before she hurts herself,” she said. “And all of us”—she swept her free hand across the street, taking in every house on the block—“would just like to see someone move in here who’ll keep the lawn mowed.”

  I smiled again, feeling like a prisoner in my own car.

  “I’d put in a good word for you, if I thought it’d matter, ” she continued, “but Peg Torrey doesn’t think much of me, I’m afraid, after that business with the fence in ’97.”

  I sensed my opening. “Well, thank you,” I said, quickly, and turned the key in the ignition.

  When I pulled away, the neighbor was standing on the curb waving to me as if I were heading out on a long journey.

  I’d only left myself an hour and a half to write a draft of the lingerie piece. I quoted a woman from the Organic Trade Association about how traditionally grown cotton is the most polluting crop on the planet, and then talked about the sportswear companies’ lead in creating a market for organic farming that had now trickled down to the lingerie niche. I talked about doing good, feeling good and looking good, and then headed over to the high school to watch Jackie’s volleyball game.

  I climbed onto the bleachers in the gym and took my place next to Gina, one of the other moms, whose daughter was the star setter for the team and who was expected to receive a scholarship to UCLA when recruiting decisions were announced next fall. I’d sat through hundreds of hours of volleyball with this mom. Our role was to sit and watch, and to know when a back row attack was illegal or when the players were running a five-one offense. The girls rarely looked our way. After the games, they headed for the locker rooms, and the cars of the kids who had their drivers’ licenses, and you’d think that they didn’t even know we were there, or care that we were there, but they did. Once, the coach yelled at Jackie for being in the wrong place on the final point of a tie-breaker. He towered over her—a large man with a loud voice, pointing his finger and barking at her for making a mistake in a ball game—and as I watched her eyes tear up and her shoulders slump, I decided I couldn’t stand the silent witnessing any longer.

  “What did he say to you?” I asked when we got in the car. I was picking a fight and she knew it.

  “Who?” she asked.

  “Coach Ben.”

  “When?”

  I took a deep breath. “When he benched you after the tie-breaker.”

  “That I’d been playing too long to make a stupid mistake like that.”

  “He can’t talk to you that way,” I insisted.

  “He talks to everyone that way, Mom,” she said. “You can’t take it personally.”

  “You’re saying it doesn’t bother you?”

  “Of course it bothers me.”

  “Then why put up with it?”

  “It’s part of the game.”

  “It shouldn’t be.”

  “Well, it is.”

  “Then it’s a part I don’t choose to watch.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning that if I have to sit there and watch him yell at you like that, I don’t know if I’m going to come anymore. I can’t stand it.”

  “Do whatever you want,” she said.

  But later that night when I went into her room to say good night to her, Jackie stopped me in the dark.

  “Mom?” she asked, in the voice of a little girl. “I like it when you come to my games.”

  And so I was there.

  Midway through the first game, Gina nudged my side. “Who’s the boy?” she asked.

  I scanned the gym and immediately saw who she was talking about. A tall boy with shoulder-length bleached-out blond hair was sitting alone on the bleachers near the net. He was following Jackie’s every movement with a look on his face somewhere between rapture and the way you look when you have the flu. If I thought my daughter was lovely, this boy was closer to something you would call glorious, if only because of the way he seemed to glow as he watched her. If I had been a photographer, I would have made a fortune capturing his profile for a Gap ad, or an Abercrombie billboard. If I had been a builder of boy bands, I would have tapped this one to be my lead singer, whether he could carry a tune or not.

  “I have no idea,” I said. I couldn’t take my eyes off the boy who couldn’t take his eyes off Jackie. I felt an odd affinity for him. My relationship with my daughter was mostly about my watching her. I sat on the sidelines at volleyball games, sat in the driver’s seat as we drove to the orthodontist or a tournament somewhere down in Orange Country. I sat on the periphery as she took tests and went to dances and went to the movies with her friends. Occasionally, I offered a suggestion about something—which colleges to put on the list of possibilities or which dress looked better of two she was considering— but mostly I just watched. I was like this boy: sitting on the sidelines, taking it all in, unable to turn away.

  “He looks like he’s in love,” Gina said.

  “Can you be in love at age fifteen?” I asked.

  “Romeo and Juliet were only fourteen,” she said. “Love at first sight knows no age limits.”

  Rick and I weren’t kids when we met—I was twenty-six, he was twenty-nine—and it didn’t take us long to realize what we felt for each other. After our third date, he took me to his parents’ house for dinner. I was fretting about what to wear and what to take as a hostess gift, when Rick just stopped, took me by the shoulders and said, “April. Listen to me. My mother will be making brownies from a box for dessert. She has pet ducks. It’s going to be fine.”

  It was more than fine. Julia Newton’s house was framed by beds of iceberg rose bushes, which she tended herself. There was a little gurgling brook with a pond for the ducks, who would parade around after her. She did, indeed, have a thing for brownies from a box and always had a row of Betty Crocker in her pantry. Her couches were all comfortable; her rooms were all large and airy. She had done the books for the family plumbing business when it operated out of one small warehouse and later ran the whole accounting department. I liked her from the moment I laid eyes on her, and I was desperate that she like me.

  I needn’t have worried. When it came time for dessert, she asked me to help her in the kitchen. The brownies had twenty minutes left to cook, but she pulled them out of the oven, took a tub of whipped cream cheese out of the refrigerator and said to me, “This is the secret family recipe.”

  “Cream cheese?”

  She nodded. “You swirl it through with twenty minutes left to go and the boxed brownies become instantly gourmet.”

  “Sounds good,” I said.

  “I thought you should know.”

  I had been dating her son for three weeks; I had met her less than three hours before. I was having trouble following what she was saying.

  “You and Rick are a very good match,” she said, and then I got it—and not only that, I agreed. I was in love, maybe not at first sight, but it was love with a good man who loved me back. I blushed.

  I turned from my trance back to the volleyball game just in time to see the tangle of arms and the ball come down on Jackie’s outstretched hand, and Jackie fall to the ground and scream. I got to her at the same time as the blond boy and the coach. The boy put his hand on her bare sweaty
shoulder. I’d like to say that I was focused on my child’s finger and the way it was bent and the wincing of her face, but mostly what I saw was that boy’s hand on her bare sweaty shoulder. His skin was darker than hers by several shades, and his hand was large and lean. He was gripping her so hard that I could see the white indentations underneath each finger pad.

  I had done exactly the same thing when, at the age of eight or ten, Jackie would throw a fit over having to brush her teeth or pick up her pajamas off the bedroom floor. She was too old for fits, but not yet old enough to know how to stop them, and her body was not yet so removed from mine that I couldn’t help. I would take each of her shoulders in one of my hands and squeeze, and as calmly as I could manage, I would say, “Jackie, stop.” It was usually more like a scream. It was me screaming at her to get her to stop screaming. I may not have mastered the voice, but the hands worked. And now this boy, whose name I didn’t even know, had his hands in the exact same place where I had so often placed mine.

  “It’s broken,” her coach said, turning his head my way. It took me a moment to realize that he was talking to me, that he was instructing me.

  “OK,” I said, and watched as the boy helped Jackie to her feet, his hand grasping hers, his hand under her elbow, her body leaning into his. “I’ll run and get the car.”

  He was sitting with her on a low wall when I pulled up next to the gym. She had an ice pack in her hand. The long strands of hair that had escaped her ponytail were wet and straggly. Her shorts were extremely short. He leapt up, opened the door and leaned down, his blond hair falling in front of his eyes.

  “I’ll call,” he said.

  She nodded. She probably smiled, but I couldn’t see her face.

  In the moment before he slammed the door, I almost asked if he’d like to come, but I knew he would say yes.

  “You OK?” I asked, as we pulled away.

  She leaned her head against the headrest and closed her eyes. When we hit the long stoplight at the corner of Anza and Sepulveda, she sucked at her teeth and made a kind of moan, but she didn’t cry and she didn’t offer any information about the boy.

  The emergency room was jammed. There were people sitting on every available chair and people sitting on the floor. There were women holding babies and whole families sitting together in grim rows. The strange thing was that no one looked like they were in trauma. We stood in line to speak to the intake nurse, and overheard the conversations: someone had a sore throat, another person had an ear infection. After we filled out the paperwork and called Rick, I found Jackie a place to sit in an orange plastic chair next to a tinsel Christmas tree and pushed her hair behind her ears the way I always did when she was throwing up.

  “Is that enough ice?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  “You’re not going to pass out, are you?”

  She shook her head.

  I put my hand on the back of her neck as if I could hold it in place. “Do you want me to call Mrs. Hennessy to see if you won?” I asked.

  “Max said he’d call,” she said.

  “The blond?”

  She nodded.

  Twenty minutes after we arrived, Rick sped in. He knelt in front of Jackie and kissed her forehead, where the sweat had dried and plastered her hair to her skin. “It hurts like hell, doesn’t it?”

  She smiled a little and nodded. “I had the spike, too,” she said. “That idiot Michelle stepped in front of me. It was clearly my ball.”

  Rick kissed her again, then turned to me. “How long do they say it’ll be?”

  “Forty-five minutes until she’s called to the back room, but from the look of this crowd, I’d say it’ll be double that time.”

  “I can’t wait that long,” Jackie whined. “I can’t. It hurts.”

  Rick jumped up and marched to the receptionist’s desk.

  “Oh, great,” Jackie said, “now he’s going to make unreasonable demands of the underpaid staff.” She dropped her head into her good hand, causing her ponytail to flop over and swing near the orange carpet.

  “How do you know they’re underpaid?”

  "A.P. Spanish,” she said, without lifting her head. “We had this woman come in and talk to us about immigration and the jobs the people from Mexico get in this country and how we exploit them so we don’t have to do any of our own dirty work.”

  I glanced at Rick, standing near the woman behind the desk. “That woman is African American,” I said.

  Jackie shrugged. “America is an equal opportunity exploiter.”

  “It looks like Dad’s got her attention.”

  She flipped her hair back in place and slumped back in the chair. “He does that at hospitals,” she said. “He makes a big fuss, and also he prays. You can’t tell about the prayer unless you know he’s doing it. He just sits there and closes his eyes and kind of moves his mouth like a fish. It’s pretty embarrassing unless you’re Muslim. I mean, Muslims are supposed to pray in public. Five times a day this bell rings and they drop everything they’re doing and everyone prays.”

  “Did you learn this in A.P. Spanish, too?”

  “History, Mom,” she said. She paused a moment, as if measuring the breadth and depth of my ignorance. “Do you believe that God really sent his son to earth as a poor fatherless carpenter three thousand years ago?” she asked.

  I was about to make a quip about the influence of The DaVinci Code on an entire generation of religious thought, but I stopped myself. Her questions had that ring of importance that moments with your kids can sometimes have, when you know it will matter more than the others. I’d been trying for years to understand the phenomenon so that I could write about it in a cover story for Parents or Parenting, or more likely Child, but I could never wrap my hands around it enough to make a convincing pitch. “No,” I said, “I don’t believe that.”

  “Have you ever believed it?”

  “I pretended to one summer at church camp when they asked everyone who considered Jesus their Lord and Savior to raise their hands one night during the campfire program. Jefferey Dobbs raised his hand next to me, so I raised mine, too.”

  “It’s hard to believe it really happened.”

  “But it’s such a nice story,” I said. “I love the innkeeper. I played Mary one year when we lived in Pennsylvania, and I got to wear the light blue satin headpiece, but I secretly wished I’d been the innkeeper.”

  “So you like the story and that’s why you believe in God and that’s why we’ve gone to church all these years?”

  “No,” I said. “I like the story and I also believe in God. But I’m not sure the story is true, and we’ve gone to church all these years mostly out of habit.”

  “That’s pretty lame, Mom.”

  I was about to say that I knew it was lame. I had, in fact, recently been struggling mightily with the fact that it was lame, but before I could make my confession, Jackie’s cell phone rang. I dug it out of her purse and handed it to her.

  “Sweet!” she said. Then, “Are you serious?” There was a moment of silence, then she said, “Both my parents, actually.” She listened again, then said, “That’s so sweet.” And finally, “I’ll call you as soon as I get home.”

  Ten minutes later, Jackie was called to an interior waiting room, and fifteen minutes after that, she went into the X-ray room. Rick stepped into the hallway to make a phone call. I picked up a battered copy of Woman’s Day and read about recipes for slow cooker suppers, then leafed through an old Car and Driver. A very large woman with a very large soda cup in her hand set down a copy of the Beach Reporter, our free local newspaper. I sometimes read it when I walk on the treadmill at the gym, mesmerized by poorly written stories about aging surf legends and health spa openings.

  “May I look at that?” I asked.

  "’S not mine,” she said. “You can do whatever you want.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  I scanned the headlines—a local boy had been killed in Fallujah; a sophomore from Hermosa
Beach was the backup kicker for USC’s Rose Bowl team—then I flipped inside. Someone had taken out a whole-page ad on page two. A moment after I registered the oddity of such a big ad in the Beach Reporter, I registered what it was: a photo of the house I had seen on Pepper Tree Lane. The elegant headline spread across the whole page:

  FOR SALE: THE LAST BEACH BUNGALOW

  The owner of this 1928 original bungalow is seeking a

  buyer with heart. What would you give—besides money—

  to live here? Bring your offers, your stories and a promise

  to preserve and protect. Winner will pay $300,000.

  Open House, Saturday 1 to 4

  My heart began to pound.

  I glanced at the fat lady with the Coke, who had her nose buried in a People with George Clooney on the cover, then I ripped the page from the newspaper, folded it and tucked it into my purse, where I now had a little library of stolen print. The fat lady didn’t even flinch, but my pulse was racing.

  Seconds later, Rick walked in.

  “You OK?” he asked.

  I shrugged, mostly to keep from squirming. I had that uncomfortable feeling I was about to be caught.

  “I’ve broken three or four fingers,” he said. “She’ll be fine.”

  The articles in my purse seemed like they were on fire. I could feel their heat and their danger, pressing through the leather that sat near my feet. “It’s not that,” I blurted, and the second I said it, I knew there was no going back. “It’s the house, actually. The whole thing is starting to make me kind of sick.”

  “People always feel like that toward the end of a project,” Rick said. “It’s like buyer’s remorse, only ten times worse, because you’ve bought all these parts hoping they’ll add up to a whole and you’ve never built a house before so you’re not sure they’re all going to fall into place. But it will work. Believe me.”

  “It’s no wonder your clients love you,” I said. “You’re smooth as silk.”