The Last Beach Bungalow

by Jennie Nash

  I signed up for stage crew for the spring musical and when the high school counselors asked me what I was thinking about studying in college, I did not say piano and I did not say singing. I said English. I said I wanted to teach English.

  When a young mother from the church slipped baby Jesus into the arms of the waiting Mary, I wasn’t the only one in the congregation with tears streaming down my face, but I was probably one of the few who thought the piano player had stolen the show.

  After church, Rick went on a run down to the beach. I paced around the apartment for a few minutes, picking up and setting down the paper, before I grabbed my purse and got in the car.

  I drove first to the twenty-by-thirty foot storage garage where most of our belongings were stacked in boxes against the cinderblock walls. In a large pocket left near the front of the space was the grand piano that had dominated my grandmother’s living room. It was a Bösendorfer 170 in high polish ebony. She had left it to me in her will because she knew I loved it. I loved the way it looked like a giant black bird taking flight; I loved the way it sounded, with its magnificent range of tone; and I loved the hours we had sat together in front of it, when she had taught me to play.

  My mother sold the house in New Hampshire after my grandmother died. We were living at that point in Houston, and it seemed too far to come to a cottage on a lake. She sold the house and the unwanted odd bits of china and wool coats with holes where the moths had gotten to them. She kept the silver and some paintings, and she had the piano shipped out to us. I’d already been taking lessons for two years by that point, practicing on a Baldwin spinet we’d bought from a neighbor whose kids had outgrown it. Switching to the Bösendorfer was like inheriting a whole country.

  I couldn’t sleep for the first week we had it in our house. I’d awake in the middle of the night and sneak out just to make sure it was still there, massive and shining in the dark. I’d awake early in the morning, touching the keys without depressing them so as not to wake my parents.

  It frightened me, in a way, having my dead grandmother’s piano in my house and knowing that it was mine. But I loved being frightened in that way. The piano stayed with my family while I went to college, while I worked as an elementary school teacher after graduation, and while Rick and I were living in our first tiny condo. As soon as we moved into a house big enough for a grand piano—the original ranch house at Vista del Mar—I had it shipped to me. It took up way too much space in our living room, I almost never had time to play and Jackie never showed any interest in doing anything other than banging on the keys, but I loved having it with me all the same.

  When it came time to move our belongings out of Vista del Mar for the remodel, the movers unscrewed the legs on the piano, then wrapped all the pieces in bubble wrap. They stood the main box on its side with the keyboard running from floor to ceiling, silenced under all that plastic. I took my car key and carefully sliced away the tape that held the bubble wrap. Crouching down, leaning sideways, I played the opening phrase of Bach’s Two-Part Invention, the one in F minor, which I’d played at my first big recital. I wanted to hear the sadness out loud that I felt so silently in my bones.

  I locked the piano behind the corrugated door, then drove up the hill to the mall. I walked past the beguiling smells of Williams-Sonoma’s food demonstrations and straight to Soothe Your Soul, where I walked the aisles and looked—at books, at Buddhas, at beads. I stuck my finger into the falling sheet of water that poured from a fountain at the front of the store because if Jackie had been with me, she would have done the same thing the moment she walked through the door. I finally stopped in front of the jewelry case and asked the cashier if I could look at something inside. She took out a necklace made of sterling silver. The chain was made of long links that looked like tiny twigs with hooks at each end. In the center of the chain hung a square charm, and on the charm perched a dove. I turned it over. Engraved on the back of the charm was one word: peace.

  “That’s from a series the artist calls his Soul series,” the cashier said. She was the same woman who’d sold me the Buddha. I could tell that she recognized me; something about the way she spoke included an acknowledgment of my having been in that store before, of her having helped me. I felt an odd affection for her.

  “I always wonder if an artist who makes something like this is searching for peace or if she’s already found it and the art is her way of passing it along,” I said.

  She shrugged. “I think it amounts to the same thing.”

  “How so?” I asked.

  “Just that everyone is searching for peace, or seeking to pass it along, sometimes both at the same time, or both on the same day. No one ever gets to stop and be done with it. We’re all in the mix, all the time. Artists have just figured out a way to make beauty out of the chaos.”

  I nodded. “I’d like one,” I said.

  “Would you like it gift-wrapped?”

  “No, thanks,” I said. “It’s for me.” While the shopkeeper rang up my purchase, I felt the familiar, strange affliction of wanting to tell every stranger my news. It had first struck me right after I was diagnosed. I told my news to the librarian at Jackie’s school, an assistant editor at a new magazine in New York, and the pharmacist at Rite Aid. Anyone who asked how I was doing wasn’t going to hear that I was fine. I wasn’t fine. I had cancer. It was a relief, in a way, when my hair fell out because I could step outside and my head would be a neon sign. “I just celebrated my five-year cancer-free anniversary,” I said, “and this is what I think I’d like to mark the occasion.”

  The shopkeeper smiled—a lovely, tolerant smile. “Congratulations,” she said. “I can’t think of a better gift you could give yourself.”

  I put my wallet in my purse, took the chain from her hand. “Well, actually,” I said, “I was thinking about buying a new house.”

  She laughed. “Why not?” she said, and lifted her hand in a formal flourish.

  Why not? Because I could do it, and it could all be for nothing. I could get inside that red living room with the Catalina tile fireplace, inhabit that perfectly proportioned space, and it could make no difference whatsoever. I would still be mortal, I would still be me. Plus there would be leaks in the plumbing and walls in the wrong places and floors that needed to be refinished. It could, in the end, just be wallboard and wood.

  “You know what?” I said, turning back to the cabinet with the necklaces, “I’ll take another one. And there’s no need for a box.”

  After I paid, I went out to the car. I hooked one of the necklaces around my own neck, then wrote a note on a piece of paper from a plumbing supply store:

  Mrs. Torrey,

  I felt something in your house I hadn’t felt in a very long time, and the only word I can think to describe it is peace. I felt peace in your house. Feeling it in your house made me see that maybe peace is somewhere inside me, too. I wanted to thank you for that, and pray that you find it, too.

  April Newton

  I drove down the hill and parked across the street from the bungalow, then sat there fiddling with the charm around my neck. I finally got out, crossed the street, opened the gate and walked up to the front door. I reached out and slipped the chain around the doorknob, then stood there a minute to fold the note around the chain. I finally turned, took a step down to the sidewalk, glanced up—and saw Rick standing on the other side of the gate with a flier in his hand.

  We always see the people we love at such close range—across bedrooms and kitchen counters. It was a shock to see him standing there in someone else’s yard, like a stranger who had just happened by. He was an attractive man with a friendly, open face. His skin was wet with sweat and his shirt clung to his chest. If I hadn’t known him, I might have smiled at him. We might have exchanged a few pleasantries. Perhaps, if the moment was right, we would have had a conversation where we made an actual connection, like the one I’d just had with the cashier at the store. But then we would pass out of each other’s lives, b
ack into the small circle of people whom we love but don’t necessarily see.

  Rick raised his free hand and waved sheepishly at me. I waved back and met him at the gate.

  “What did you leave?” he asked.

  I blushed and looked at the ground. “Just a note,” I said. I waited a split second to see if the half-truth would stand on its own but it wouldn’t. “And a necklace like this one,” I said. “They’re talismans of peace.” I expected him to tease me, or to ask how on earth I had come to be the owner of a pair of necklaces that were talismans of peace. We were, after all, still in the middle of a fight. Instead he nodded, as if, out of all the choices of things to bring the owner of a house I had fallen in love with instead of the one he had built, a necklace like mine had been a good one.

  “So you’ve met the owner?” he asked and glanced at the flier in his hands. “Peg Torrey?”

  “You learn a lot about her just by walking through the house,” I said. “She likes games and bright colors. There’s this huge fireplace in the living room made of the most gorgeous Catalina tile—reds and oranges. It reminds me of Gram’s.”

  “I’m sorry about last night,” Rick said. “I shouldn’t have teased you.”

  “I’m sorry about the house. Or the houses. I mean, I’m sorry about what I said about our house. And I’m sorry about this one. I didn’t plan on it. I never intended it to happen.”

  “You have to admit that this is a bit odd.” He swept his arm across Peg Torrey’s lawn and front porch, the front door and the transom windows with the arts-and-crafts flowers.

  “Haven’t you ever thought about living in another house—about what our lives would be like if we picked up and moved to a colonial in Boston or an adobe in Santa Fe or even just another house on another part of the hill? Don’t you ever just fantasize?”

  I hadn’t intended to use that word—the same word Rick had used the night before in the restaurant when he’d all but said that dreams about houses were as illicit as dreams of flesh—but I did, and in response, Rick laughed. It was a sickening sound like an inside joke you’re not in on.

  “Sure I fantasize,” he said. It was clear that he wasn’t talking about houses anymore.

  “Are you sleeping with someone else?” I blurted.

  “I fantasize,” he said coolly, “but I don’t act on it.”

  My mind reeled. I thought of my mother, silently waiting all those years for my dad to come back from Cincinnati or Chicago or Atlanta after a weekend leadership conference or sales meeting or incentive trip, waiting and knowing the whole time that he was with someone else. She would smile when he returned, ask how his trip was, serve a steak, a potato and beer in front of the TV if there was a game on. How could she have done it?

  “You’ve thought about sleeping with other women?”

  Rick shrugged. He had lush, curly hair, and on that day he was in need of a haircut. There was a place just behind his ear where his curls hit the soft skin of his neck, and I could see those curls, plastered against his sweaty skin. The thought skittered across my mind that I might never touch that place on his neck again. It was the corollary to a thought I had often had over the years when, at a party or one of Jackie’s sporting events, he’d slip his hand from the small of my back onto the rounded curve of my bottom, or place a hand around the knob of my bare shoulder in a gesture that was intimate and proprietary. He was allowed to touch me in those ways in public because I was his wife. The rules allowed for it. I loved that sense of privilege, and it had been so long since I’d felt it.

  “All guys think about it,” he said.

  “So what stopped you? Why didn’t you?” I expected that he’d say something vague about guilt or it just not being right. He was, after all, the kind of guy who wouldn’t cross a double yellow line even if there wasn’t another car in sight.

  “I love you,” he said, then smiled a wry, sideways smile, “and I thought that things would get better when we got into the house.”

  So that was the rub. I was thinking that things would fall apart in that house, and he was thinking that things would get better.

  The longest-running feature in an American consumer magazine is the Ladies’ Home Journal column, “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” It’s been a regular part of the magazine for fifty years. A man and a woman take turns saying what’s wrong in their relationship and then a counselor comes in to give her advice on what, if anything, they can do to move forward. People love it because it forces them to see all sides of a story in a three-page spread. Even without the astute therapist, I could see that ours was a marriage that could be saved. We both had faith in wallboard and wood to transform a life, it was just that our faith took a different shape.

  “It’s a beautiful house,” I said. “It’s one of your best.”

  “The movers come in two days.”

  “So we’ll move, then,” I said.

  “What about the talisman of peace?”

  I fingered my necklace. The cool hardness of the little square felt comforting. I could feel the place on the back where the word peace was carved into the metal. “We’ll just have to see.”

  Rick folded up the flier and slipped it into the pocket of his running shorts.

  “Can I have a ride home?” he asked.

  We walked to the car, but before we even got our seat belts buckled, my cell phone rang. It was Jackie, asking if she could stay at Max’s house and study.

  “Are his parents home?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Do you want to talk to them?”

  “I have to,” I said. “It’s my job.”

  A woman came on the line and said, “Hello? April? I’m Wendy Callahan, Max’s mom.”

  “Nice to meet you, Wendy. Are you sure it’s OK for Jackie to stay longer? I don’t want her to intrude on your Sunday.”

  “It’s no intrusion,” Wendy said. “We’re delighted to have her.”

  “And you’ll be home the whole time?” I asked, feeling like an actress reading a script.

  “Absolutely,” Wendy said, saying the lines of her script back to me in perfect time.

  When I hung up, I turned to Rick. “Do you ever get the feeling that Jackie’s already gone?” I asked. “I thought we got her for another year and a half, but we don’t really have her at all, do we?”

  “She’s supposed to be gone,” Rick said. “If she wasn’t gone, there’d be something wrong.”

  I took a huge gulp of air and let it all the way out. “Don’t you ever get tired of being so damn reasonable? Don’t you ever just want to do something that makes no sense whatsoever?”

  Rick looked at me and in a voice that was dead serious, he said, “No.”

  We spent the afternoon packing, exchanging excruciatingly polite questions and answers about where we were putting the linens and whether we thought we should leave out any pots to cook for the next few nights or if Baja Fresh would be nourishment enough. We exchanged masking tape and Sharpie pens as the stacks of boxes in the apartment grew like walls around us. At one point, Rick came and stood in the doorway of the bedroom, where I was packing up shoes.

  “Do we have anything for Jackie for Christmas?” he asked.

  “I was thinking we could do an extreme makeover in her new room—new bedspread, a new beanbag, maybe a desk. I’ve got stuff scouted out at IKEA.”

  Rick nodded. “That sounds good.” He paused several moments before talking again. “And what about you?” he asked. “What do you want?”

  I thought of a thousand things to say before I decided on the simplest version of the truth. “Surprise me,” I said.

  Late in the day, I went over to the house with the few remaining plants we had kept alive in the apartment. I slowed when I got to the driveway and saw Lucy, the young Mexican woman Rick used for his construction cleaning. She swept up the sawdust, scrubbed the new tile and mopped the floors of the multimillion dollar houses Rick built all over the South Bay. Sometimes other women worked with her—wom
en with brown skin and open faces—but often, she worked alone. She was reaching into her little pickup truck to set down her bucket of cleaning supplies, and the moment I saw her, she saw me. She smiled and waved—the boss’s wife.

  “All done!” she called. “So now you can be moving in.”

  “Thank you, Lucy,” I said.

  “It’s very beautiful,” she said, shyly.

  I could feel my throat begin to itch. I pushed my tongue against the top of my mouth to try to stop it, and my face screwed up in a kind of agony. I didn’t even know where Lucy lived—not the town, not the circumstances. I didn’t know where she worked during the day, whether or not she had family, whether or not they were in this country legally, if she was counting the dollars she could send home as she brushed and mopped and scoured. This spectacular house of glass and granite and bamboo was mine. I was the queen. This was my castle—and I was so ungrateful. I started to cry.

  “Señora?” Lucy asked.

  “It is beautiful,” I said, through my tears. “Thank you.”

  “Why do you cry?” she asked, and put her hand on my arm. Her hand was warm and plump.

  Lucy didn’t know a single one of my friends. I wouldn’t see her at church or at Jackie’s school, at the grocery store or the gym. She would never be at one of the parties we might throw in this house—cocktails at sunset, a dinner party for eight, a celebration for Jackie’s graduation. She was just a warm body, just someone standing there a few days before this house would officially be mine. “I fell in love with a house by the beach,” I said. “An old house being sold by an old woman.”