The Last Beach Bungalow

by Jennie Nash

  “Would you like to come by?” Peg asked.

  It took me a moment to process what she was asking. “Right now?” I asked.

  She nodded, waving her hand over her little wrought iron table and the empty coffee cup. “I was just about to walk home. I’d love the company.”

  I accompanied Peg back to her house on foot. It was about a ten-minute walk along the water, then the half block in. To this day, I don’t remember taking that walk. I don’t remember if we stopped at the stop signs, if the birds were singing or the waves were pounding. One minute, I was going to Starbucks because I could barely keep my eyes open, and the next minute, I was standing at the door of Peg Torrey’s house as she fumbled for her key.

  She led me into the dining room, where boxes were stacked along the walls and behind the long side of the big pine table. I turned and pointed toward the mantel, which was swept clean of all its decorations. “You had two mice bookends,” I said, remembering. “My grandmother used to have the same set. I loved to play with them. One year when I went to visit, my grandma had a copy of My Antonia propped up by the mice. I was too old to pretend the mice could talk and eat bits of cheese, but I still wanted them near me so I put them on the coffee table while I read Willa Cather.”

  Peg threw her head back and laughed. I could see her teeth, worn down on the tops, yellow, filled with silver. “Did your grandmother have the pig?” she asked.

  “No pigs,” I said.

  “Come this way,” Peg said, and just like with Manon at the lingerie store when she asked me to try on the chocolate-colored bra, I felt powerless not to follow. We walked down the hallway where the mounted board games had hung, and into the master bedroom. This was a place I hadn’t seen during the open house. It wasn’t a big room, but the walls were painted New Mexican turquoise, which made it seem like a little jewel. All the furniture in the room was a rich, dark brown, except for a chair in the corner upholstered in a wild, bright chintz, with dark brown piping.

  Peg closed the door behind us, and I felt my heart begin to beat faster, as if there were some kind of danger at hand. She pointed, and there, behind the door, was a little brass pig sitting on a doorstop, with his snout pushed out and his tail curled up behind him. His ears sprung out from his head just like the ears on the mice.

  “I found the pig first,” Peg explained, “at a bookstore in Aspen, Colorado. This was only about ten years ago. Harry was there for a medical conference. I was so taken with the pig, that I had to bring him home. Harry gave me the mice the next year for Christmas, though he never told me where they came from. It was one of the nicest presents he ever gave me.” I could see in her smile the years of gifts she and her husband must have exchanged—years and years of getting it right and getting it wrong and every so often getting it so precisely that the gift in question made the other person’s soul sing.

  “The nicest present my husband ever gave me,” I said, “was a CD player. One of those portable ones with the earphones. It was two weeks before Christmas and I was scheduled for a mastectomy. I wore out this one CD of Christmas carols by Manheim Steamroller. It was better than morphine.”

  “You beat the cancer?” Peg asked.

  I’d never thought of it that way—that I did anything other than what the doctors told me to do. I showed up for appointments, I took the pills they prescribed. “Yes,” I said, “I guess I did. I’m just past the five-year mark.”

  She clapped her hands together with delight. “That’s wonderful!” she said, and then a shadow passed over her face. “If Harry were still alive,” she said, “I’d tell him that story tonight. I’d tell him how I met you at the coffee shop and how you talked about your house being haunted and then I’d tell him that you’d just celebrated five years being free of cancer. He would have loved it.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” I said.

  “There’s not a day that I don’t miss him,” she said. “I imagine it will always be so.”

  I drove along the beach, then along the cliffs and past Portuguese Bend, where the road rippled like corrugated steel from an earthquake fault that ran straight out into the sea. Clouds shrouded Catalina Island and the water was clouded with churned-up sand. From the road you could look down and see the houses Rick was framing, rising in a row along the bright green of the seventh tee. Stacks of red clay tile were piled on each roof waiting to be cemented in place.

  I turned in on the main drive and wound past the clubhouse. I drove onto freshly black-topped road, and I stopped in front of the first of the new houses, just behind Rick’s truck. Rick looked up from the piece of plywood on which he was drawing a sketch. The two men who were standing at the tailgate looked up as well.

  “Hey,” he said, walking over to my side of the car. “What’s going on?” He was curious about what I was doing at his work site, but there was a heaviness to his curiosity—as if he feared I had shown up to deliver bad news, something to do with someone dying or someone being sick.

  “I wondered if you’d like to go to lunch,” I said.

  "What’s the occasion?” he asked, still trying to measure the situation.

  “No occasion,” I said. “I was just thinking about you and thought it might be nice.”

  He looked at his clipboard and hesitated. Perhaps he was trying to decide if I was telling the truth—that there was nothing wrong or nothing at stake.

  “Sure,” he finally said. “I’ll be ready in a minute.”

  TUESDAY

  Six Months Later

  Six months after the sale of the bungalow, I took a detour down Pepper Tree Lane on my way home from the dry cleaner when I saw it: a hole, a bruise, a gaping expanse of dirt where the bungalow had stood. There was a large gray Dumpster on the driveway and a chain-link fence around the perimeter of the property. The eucalyptus trees still stood in stately order along the back fence, and lemons hung off the branches of the trees along the fence, but the lemon tree where Peg had stood when I first spoke to her was no longer there. The avocado trees were gone, the salvia, the stained glass transom windows, the purple trellis—all of it, gone.

  I wondered what had happened to the Catalina tile on the fireplace. Had someone bothered to save it, or had it been crushed by an indiscriminate bulldozer and buried in some landfill along with the old copper pipes and the chunks of cement foundation? Some worm would be pleased to come across those subtle shades and intricate patterns.

  I pulled the car up on the opposite side of the street and sat there deciding whether or not to cry. There are times when you can do that. You can decide whether or not to step over the edge of your emotion. I wanted to cry, and so I allowed myself to do it. I blinked, and puckered my mouth, and tears streamed down my cheeks.

  When Rick came home that night, he asked if I was OK. He asked three separate times before I finally told him about the bungalow. He nodded, but he didn’t express any shock or even surprise. Later that night, when we were in bed and it was dark, I discovered why.

  “They asked me to bid on it,” he said.

  I breathed in and out, in and out, just waiting to see what he might say.

  “They came in, just like anyone else—they’d been referred by a client, they’d seen my work. They wanted a three-car garage, a granite island. The wife had a photo from Sunset magazine. I started sketching ideas, and I swear to you, April, all I could think about was that bungalow. I skewed the sink in the kitchen just the way the bungalow had it, and I sketched a fireplace just like the one in that front room. Of course the house in the magazine had been built on a half-acre lot, which is nonexistent in the South Bay, and the wife didn’t like my orientation. So I asked them if I could take a look at the property. He told me the address, and, well. . . .” He trailed off.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked. I had the wild thought that if I had known, I could have stopped it. I could have chained myself to the front door, or set up a platform to camp out in one of the lemon trees. I could have rallied the support of
all the people who had tried to get the house, whipped the media into a frenzy.

  “I felt like I was part of their shame,” Rick said. “I’m the guy with the bulldozer. If not that lot, then some other one.”

  “You’re not like them.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “You absolutely are not.”

  He shrugged. He didn’t buy it.

  “What I don’t get,” I said, “is how they could have done it.”

  “It’s not a registered historic property. There’s nothing that would bind them, legally, to preserve it.”

  “No, I mean, what kind of people could do something like that? What kind of people could win a house like that, accept it, and then tear it down? How can they even sleep at night?”

  “I meet them every day,” Rick said.

  WEDNESDAY

  It’s a short flight from Los Angeles to Oakland, and an even shorter drive into Berkeley from the airport. Our Daily Bread is located on a busy corner near Cody’s bookstore and a shop that sells fresh flowers. All three stores were crammed with customers by the time I arrived. There were lines outside both the flower store and the bakery, and when I took my place in the bakery line I felt like I was in Europe and would be heading to the butcher next for my cut of meat for tonight’s dinner.

  The bakery smelled of yeast and coffee. The walls were lined with shelves holding baskets of bread: seven grain, whole wheat, sourdough, sesame. At the front was a case full of éclairs and cookies in the shape of guitars. When I got to the front, I asked for a cinnamon bun and then I asked if I could speak to Sarah. When she came out, she smiled at me.

  “I know I know you from somewhere,” she said, “I just can’t place where.”

  “I tried to buy your mother’s house.”

  “Right,” she said.

  “You heard what happened?”

  “The neighbors called as soon as the demolition crew showed up, but there was nothing we could do.”

  “Is your mom OK?”

  Sarah pointed to a table by the window. Peg sat there much like she had sat at the Starbucks in Redondo Beach, with a cup of coffee and the paper spread out in front of her.

  “May I?” I asked, gesturing toward the table.

  “Go right ahead,” she said. She wiped her hands on her apron and went back to the kitchen.

  I walked over to the table with my cinnamon bun. “May I join you?” I asked.

  Peg startled, then looked at me in almost exactly the same way her daughter had a minute before. “You look familiar,” she said.

  I smiled. “I tried to buy your house. You showed me the mouse bookends.”

  “Ah,” she said. “You’re the one with the haunted house.”

  I laughed. “Yes,” I said. “That’s me. Do you mind if I join you?”

  “Not at all,” she said.

  I sat down and set my cinnamon bun in front of me. It was piled with pecans, dripping with syrup. “I saw what they did to your house,” I said, “and I wanted to say that I was sorry.”

  “You know what upset me the most?” she said. “It wasn’t so much what they did as it was the fact that I judged them so wrong. They weren’t who I thought they were. They weren’t anything close to who I thought they were. You’d think after seventy-eight years of life I’d be able to accurately judge another human being. I got it completely wrong.”

  “That would be very upsetting,” I said.

  She shook her head. “Yes and no. I got what I wanted from the sale of the house.”

  “What was that?” I asked, thinking of all the gifts that people brought her—the food and the wine, the toffee and the little lemon tree.

  “The will to keep living without Harry.”

  I breathed once, then twice, waiting to see if she’d go on.

  “On his last Thanksgiving, we wheeled Harry up to the head of the table,” Peg began, “but he didn’t eat a single bite of anything, not even Sarah’s pumpkin cheesecake. Everyone else just thought the obvious— that he was sick and tired—but I could see from the tilt of his chin and the set of his eye that his not playing and his not eating had a kind of defiance to it that hadn’t been there in the previous months.

  “ ‘So you’re not eating, then?’ I asked him later that night. I knew what he was up to. You can’t be married to an oncologist for almost fifty years and not know. He nodded in answer to my question.

  “ ‘How long do you figure it will take?’ I asked.

  “ ‘A week, maybe ten days,’ he said.

  “My throat constricted with panic, sadness and a strange gratefulness at his ability to know himself so well and to share himself in such a clear, straightforward way with me.

  “ ‘I wish I could come with you,’ I whispered.

  “And do you know what he said to me? ‘You know I’ll be waiting for you.’

  “Well, I took him at his word: You know I’ll be waiting for you. I took him to mean that he would be waiting— as if at an airport, or in the lobby of a theater where we had tickets to see a show. Waiting, as if he’d be glancing down at his watch, looking down the street at each car that came, scanning the crowd on the sidewalk for my face. I could feel the weight of all that waiting. I could feel it as if it were a physical reality.

  “There had been a lot of death in that house. There were the dogs, of course, and the goldfish and the hamsters, and the big pine tree in the back corner that fell during the Santa Ana winds one year and knocked out the electricity in the entire neighborhood. My life as a young wife died in that house, and my life as a mother of little girls, and finally my life as a married woman. It would have been fitting to die there, for good, among all those endings that had made up our life. I tried. It was easy enough for the widow of an oncologist to get pills. Who, after all, would expect me to be sleeping? I tried. But I simply couldn’t do it.”

  I looked across the bakery table and made some sort of sound in response—a kind of gasp or a sigh.

  “He told me he would be waiting for me,” Peg said, “but selling the house taught me that it was a different kind of waiting altogether. He’s not waiting for me to die. He’s waiting for me to finish living.”

  EPILOGUE

  Jackie got her driver’s license in May. Her scores, on both the written test and the driving test, were perfect. For weeks before the big birthday, I tried to talk myself into getting her a dog. I looked up dogs on the Internet— dogs from breeders and dogs from the pound, dogs that you could show and dogs that just wanted a warm place to lay their heads at night. Finally, in April, I borrowed a dog for four days, a neighbor’s mutt named Bo. I put his food and water dish by the refrigerator and his pillow in Jackie’s room, at the foot of her bed. The two days that Jackie was at school were horrible. Bo sat beside my chair in my office waiting for an opportunity to persuade me to play with him. There I was, looking up research on the psychology of gift-giving, trying to figure out what to say about the five reasons we give, for a holiday article that would be in next December’s Ladies’ Home Journal , and there was Bo, panting at my side, all but saying, “Play with me! Play with me!” When I went out to the grocery store, he whimpered. When I came home, he had piddled on the kitchen floor. Jackie played with him a little bit when she came home from school, then closed her door so she could get her homework done in peace.

  We walked Bo right before bedtime, all the way to the end of the street, so I expected him to sleep through the night. In the middle of the night, however, I was awakened by his incessant barking. I waited for Jackie to get up, but she didn’t budge. Rick seemed not to hear a thing. Bo was standing in the front hallway, barking furiously at the night. I peered out the window—and saw that I had left my car lights on. I was reminded of a story I once read in the paper about a woman in Florida with a Seeing Eye dog. One day, when the woman wanted to leave the house to do an errand, the dog refused to go. He would not let her put his leash on and would not move toward the door. He barked and barked, and finally, the woman
gave up. It was later revealed that an alligator had been sunning itself on the front walk; the dog had saved the woman’s life.

  Forcing Bo to stay back with one foot, I slipped out and turned off my headlights. I slipped back inside and knelt down to thank Bo for helping me. He hadn’t exactly saved my life, but he saved me from having to jump my car, and he’d saved me from having to pretend anymore that I could tolerate a dog. I tried to send him back to his pillow in Jackie’s room. He insisted on following me to my bedroom, and, I feel certain, he would have slept on my pillow had I allowed it. Instead, he slept curled at the foot of the bed. I, on the other hand, never really went back to sleep, and when it was time for Bo to go home, I was elated to be free. Whenever I saw him in the neighborhood after that, I would stop and rub him behind his floppy ears.

  When Jackie heard that the dog experiment had failed, she grew very quiet. For nearly three days, she hardly spoke. She was more devastated, it seemed, than she had been when Max broke up with her. I checked her e-mail once, just to make sure she was OK. She’d written a note to her friend Alyssa:

  My mom hated having Bo here. She hates dogs. I think it’s because she can’t stand the idea of unconditional love. She can’t give it and she can’t take it, either. I can’t wait to get out of this house.

  I have entertained the thought that Jackie found out I was reading her e-mail and wrote that note on purpose to teach me a lesson. The words might as well be etched on the backs of my corneas. I can see them even when I close my eyes. I like to think they’re no longer true.

  Under my beautiful Italian range hood, on the six-burner Wolf stove, I learned how to make chicken tamales with meat that has simmered in a mild tomatillo sauce. I peel the papery skin off the tomatillos by hand, and throw them in the pot with the chicken. After a few hours, the whole house smells good. Lucy tells me that this is the way every house smells in Cuernavaca, Mexico, her family’s hometown; to her, it’s the exact essence of home. In exchange for her teaching me about tamales, I am teaching her how to play the piano. She happened to come by on the day the movers set up my grandmother’s Bösendorfer beneath the big picture window in the living room. She knocked on the door just as the last leg was being screwed down.