The Last First Day

by Carrie Brown

  She walked toward the bright light, waving over her shoulder at Charlie, knowing it would all be just as she had left it, the impression of her head on the pillow and Peter somewhere nearby, still in the world.

  PART II

  The First Day

  7

  Ruth was twelve years old when she and her father arrived in Wells, Massachusetts, just before dawn on the morning of July 4, 1945. In her memory, they had never lived anywhere for longer than a few months. She did not know how often they had moved in the time before she could remember, through how many streets, in how many cities—over how many fields or across what bodies of water—her infant self might have been carried, wide-eyed and seeing but without knowledge or consequence.

  She had been born in Detroit, her father said.

  After that?

  He shuffled a deck of cards, dealt them each a hand. It would be impossible, he said, for him to recall exactly the sequence of their moves.

  Ruth understood that her father had been spared military service during the war because he was her only parent. He was an auctioneer, running farm and home and business sales for people in straitened circumstances, families that had lost their men overseas or whose fathers and husbands had returned too shattered to work. Auctions, Ruth had learned, often followed in the wake of defeat or death. Standing with her father at fences inspecting pastures or barns, or walking with him through dusty, darkened stores or hushed houses, she heard the stories about foreclosure and ruin, the men found swaying from barn rafters. The years before and during the war had been a time of loss and a terrible privation, she understood. The stories behind an auction were rarely happy ones, and her father did not talk about them.

  But you are helping people, Ruth said, wanting to understand his work in this light.

  He hesitated. In a way, he said.

  But sometimes, he said, people hated the man who sold everything they’d spent a lifetime working hard to acquire.

  A town gets used up, was how he always put it. Time to move on.

  Yet she knew that it was not just this that made her father come home one night in place after place and announce that they would leave that evening or the next one, that he had a new home for them, a better prospect. There was something wrong in her father’s life, in their life together. She understood this, but being so close to it perhaps, she told Peter later, she had not been able to see it clearly. Its presence was felt but invisible, a disturbance in the air like a cloud of tiny insects, buzzing a warning.

  There would be work in Massachusetts, her father said. The town of Wells was near both Boston and Providence, close to the sea and to farmland, to country and city, and he had sent away for a local newspaper from there in order to find a place for them to live, to make necessary arrangements. In the car on the long trip from Roanoke, Virginia, where they had been living, to Massachusetts, Ruth studied the map, holding a flashlight over it. Wells did not appear to her to be near anything except the Atlantic Ocean, on the map an expanse of pale blue emptiness.

  They drove all night, but the sky was still dark when they pulled onto the street where the house her father had rented was located. He stopped the car under a tree, a deeper darkness, and took off his glasses. He made a sound of fatigue, leaned his head back against the headrest, and closed his eyes.

  Are we going in? Ruth asked.

  He did not open his eyes. We don’t want to disturb people in the middle of the night, he said.

  Ruth rolled down the car window. Her father had been smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee to keep awake, and the inside of the car smelled sour. She wanted to get out. She thought she could hear the ocean a few blocks away.

  Go ahead, her father said, as if he could read her thoughts. But he didn’t move, didn’t rummage for a key in his pocket and hand it to her. The dark house with its aluminum awnings over the windows appeared forbidding, like a place where something bad might have happened. Ruth knew that her father understood she wouldn’t go in without him. He slept, his bottom lip sucked in, as if he had no lower teeth.

  It was rare for Ruth to see her father asleep. In whatever place they were living, if she woke at night and came out of her bedroom she would find him reading, or laying out games of Pyramid on the kitchen table, or she would smell cigarette smoke from the back steps or the porch or the fire escape, where he sat in the dark. Occasionally on weekend afternoons he would lie down on the bed to rest, an arm over his eyes, his feet—still in his shoes—held off the edge of the bed so as not to soil the bedspread. He never put on pajamas at night, as she imagined other fathers did.

  She did not have much experience with other families, but she knew that her family—such as it was; it was only ever her and her father—was not like other families.

  There was a sudden movement in the side yard of the house in front of which her father had parked the car. Startled, she turned quickly to look, but it was only bedsheets on a clothesline, she saw, the wind inflating their ghostly expanse in the darkness. For a moment, through the open window of the car, the sound of the ocean reached her distinctly, the scent of it present on the breeze.

  Nothing moved on the front lawns of the houses. Here and there the yellow eye of a porch light illuminated a circle of colorless grass, the black shape of a shrub, a silver milk box on a stoop. In the tunnel of trees along the street, she watched the leaves shifting overhead, listened to the quiet rustling of their movement. She had been staring all night at the dark road, a procession of taillights and headlights, but somehow now she could not close her eyes. From time to time she heard the distant, rhythmic crash of the surf, waves breaking along an invisible shoreline somewhere nearby.

  She gazed at the white line down the macadam. Then she saw something—a flickering shape—in the dim light at the end of the street. She sat up straight.

  A moment later, the image became clear: it was a boy on a bicycle, sitting upright and steering with his knees, coming toward them. He rode like a circus acrobat, no hands on the silver handlebars, his bicycle weaving down the center of the street. As he approached, she saw him tossing rolled newspapers onto the front walkways and heard the thud as they landed against the concrete or in the damp grass. High up within the cool, bell-shaped darkness of the trees the streetlights shone in hazy rings.

  The idea of the ordinary, settled life of a boy who had a paper route filled Ruth with longing. She would love to have a paper route, she thought.

  The boy neared their car, his knees pumping and his back straight. It was still too dark to see his face clearly, but as he passed under the streetlights she caught the shine of his hair, the line of his shoulders, the gracefulness of his posture. He looked to be about her age, she thought. He went past their car in an instant, but Ruth heard the soft ticking sound of his bicycle tires against the pitch of the blacktop. He was whistling. The sound seemed close to her ear, as intimate as breath against her cheek.

  She turned in the car in time to see the boy lean into the curve and veer onto a dark side street. Then he was gone.

  Ruth turned around again to face the empty street. She knew that she and her father had come, as they had done so many times before, to another place where they would not stay, where whatever promises her father might make would not be kept. They would be strangers here, as they had been strangers everywhere.

  At the far end of the street through the tunnel of trees, patches of watery radiance bloomed low in the sky along the horizon.

  She could feel it before her, the repetition of what had come so many times before, the beginning of something inevitably interrupted, ended, when her father came home to say they would be leaving again.

  The boy on the bicycle would go home after his papers were delivered, Ruth thought. She imagined him leaning his bicycle against the wall of a garage that smelled of engine oil and fertilizer. He would lift the empty sack from around his neck and swing it over his shoulder. Inside his house, his mother would be cooking breakfast for him, eggs and baco
n, perhaps. She would smile when he came through the door. Ruth imagined a bird in a cage, singing. There would be the smell of coffee, and, on the windowsill, a plant in flower, the reflection of its blossom hovering against the dark pane.

  Over the years to come Ruth thought often about the strangeness of this unceremonious moment in time when Peter crossed her path without seeing her in the dark car, this moment when they were so close and yet unknown to each other. In a few years, and then for so many years to follow, they would be entwined in the intimacy of marriage. But that morning the distance between them was oceanic. Their meeting—though perhaps it could not even be called a meeting—was utterly brief and accidental. Peter passed her on his bicycle close enough that she might have put out her hand and brushed his leg with her fingertips, but of course she did not.

  How haphazard and arbitrary life was, she would think later. And yet didn’t it seem, as well, that there was determination to it all, lines being drawn, vectors measured? Peter believed in God, trusting to purposefulness in their lives, in how things worked out. Ruth was less sure, especially about God. Yet how artfully the world was made, she thought, people moving innocently toward each other along invisible paths, surrounded—just like actors on a stage—by scrims of painted scenery, by special effects like snowfall and rain, the impression of dawn light shining through a window, the sound of thunder in the distance. She rode in an airplane only once in her adult life and could not stop looking out the window at the landscape below. The higher the airplane climbed, the less real the world below her seemed. When the world was so big, how could it be that her path, which had wound such a complicated and difficult route, had somehow intersected exactly with Peter’s stationary place on the map?

  On a January afternoon four years from the day of this first accidental meeting between them—this meeting that was not, actually, a meeting—the Atlantic Ocean was full of whitecaps from a winter storm, and Ruth and Peter walked along the beach following the shoreline. They wore heavy coats, wool hats pulled down over their ears. Ruth’s hands in her mittens were buried under her armpits. As they walked, Peter explained about the storm moving toward them. It was called an Atlantic clipper, he said. Ruth watched his hands as he tried to illustrate the giant movements of the air around them, the massive front that had formed east of the Canadian Rockies and was headed south down the New England coastline, gathering moisture as it came from warmer air streaming up from the Gulf of Mexico.

  Sixteen years old, she and Peter had been walking the beach together for weeks by then, side by side but not touching. Occasionally they had stopped for Peter to heave things into the water—driftwood, shells, an old shoe discarded by the tide. Ruth had stood behind him, admiring him as he threw, the stance of his long legs, the muscles in his arms, his hair whipped by the wind.

  Later, Ruth would think that it was the snow falling that day—on the sand and out across the ocean, too, a melding of sky and water—that hid them from the world and made their first kiss possible. In the cold, snow-filled afternoon, it became impossible to tell where the sky ended and the water began. When they stopped finally and turned to each other, Ruth saw snowflakes on Peter’s eyelashes. On the sea behind him, the horizon had disappeared. Peter’s lips against her cold cheek, her mouth, her neck, were warm. When he took off his gloves to hold her face in his bare hands, she felt the heat of his palms.

  On that first early morning, however, as Peter pedaled his bicycle down the street away from her, Ruth knew nothing of what was to come, of course, nothing of the strange way in which she and Peter would finally meet, nor the way in which they would find and lose and then find each other again.

  The boy who was Peter simply vanished on his bicycle into the pre-dawn darkness, and finally Ruth fell asleep, slumped against the armrest in her father’s car parked under the trees.

  When the sun rose, she woke, blinking. Her father stirred beside her, the sunlight slanting in through the leaves of the trees reaching his face. He groaned, an arm across his eyes. Then he glanced across the seat at Ruth.

  All right, he said. He sat up and put on his glasses. Let’s get inside.

  In daylight the house was revealed to be an undistinguished stucco bungalow with weeds in the flower beds on either side of a short front walk. A lilac bush with dusty leaves leaned over the sidewalk. Ruth stopped to read one of the paper flyers tacked to the trunks of the trees along the street: a fireworks display would be held that evening on the beach. She had forgotten that it was the Fourth of July. Tonight’s celebration, she thought, with Germany’s recent surrender, would be enormous.

  She followed her father up the front path under the branches of an overgrown viburnum that buzzed dangerously when she brushed against it with her suitcase. She hurried along; there must be a bees’ nest somewhere nearby.

  A key had been mailed to her father, and the house had been rented to them furnished, as was always the case, wherever they lived. Standing in the front hallway, Ruth recognized its nature. Like other places in which they’d lived, this was the house of an old person who had died recently, she thought. That person’s children, usually grown daughters who Ruth knew from experience would appear instinctively to disapprove of Ruth and her father, had come through the house and taken away everything of value or sentiment, leaving behind faded slipcovers and stained mattresses, drapes with transparent patches like decaying leaves, dented pots and pans, and a smell of mustiness and closed rooms.

  How did her father choose such places? She had no idea. A wall in the living room bore the ghostly rectangular imprint of a picture or a mirror, something that had been lifted free and borne away. Had it been a sailing ship? A landscape of ruins, Carthage or Athens? A photograph of solemn-faced people in dark coats standing before the plate-glass window of a shop or under a weeping willow? She felt she knew the tastes of the house’s former occupants, could construct an imagined life for them from the sad details of what they had left behind. She had seen so many other houses like this one.

  In a dresser drawer in the room she chose as her bedroom, a dormered alcove whose peeling, garlanded wallpaper was stained brown in the corners, Ruth found a key with an elaborate head like a ram’s horns. She put the key in the pocket of her skirt. She struggled to raise the sash and open the window. It would be better if she could smell the ocean, she thought, but she could not make the sash come free.

  Over the next few hours, Ruth put away their clothes and made up beds for her and her father. He unpacked their boxes of dishes, washing and drying them all again. He was fastidious about the plates from which he ate, the cups from which he drank. In restaurants he always wiped the rims of glasses with his handkerchief.

  Finally, near noon, they left the house to find food, walking toward town on the sidewalk in the shade under the trees. Ruth looked at the houses as they passed. In one, a woman sat before a set of opened French doors at a piano covered with a fringed shawl, leaning forward and making notations with a pencil on sheets of music propped before her. Ruth felt the familiar envy always inspired in her by porch swings and pretty curtains, the sound of a dog barking, a sprinkler spinning a glistening dome over a lawn.

  At the first street corner, someone had abandoned a bicycle, and it lay fallen over on the grass. Ruth remembered the newspaper boy from earlier that morning, the happy boy, as she thought of him.

  Though it was the Fourth of July holiday, stores on the main street were open. Tables set up on the sidewalk were stacked with goods, shoes in boxes and women’s hats, tools and cartons of nails and roof shingles, boxes of canning jars and big pots her father told her were for cooking lobsters, everything on a special sale. One table in the shade of a tree held cages with brightly colored parakeets in them, hopping from perch to perch. Ruth glanced at her father; he had always said no to a dog or a cat, but maybe he would let her have a bird.

  He shook his head. Cruel, he said, to keep a bird in a cage.

  They went into a place with a lunch counter. The so
unds of conversation and clinking dishes, the smell of hamburgers frying, raised Ruth’s spirits. She was glad to be around people. She liked this place, she thought, this small town with the sound and smell of the ocean nearby and the air of celebration in the street. She and her father ordered milk shakes and grilled cheese sandwiches. A boy working the soda fountain, his white hat perched like a paper boat on a heap of bristly red curls, his cheeks blazing with red splotches, spooned maraschino cherries into a dish. When her father wasn’t looking, the boy quickly pushed it along the counter toward Ruth. He caught her eye and smiled; she smiled back, embarrassed.

  The sun was high overhead when they finished eating, the sky a steady blue. Outside on the sidewalk, Ruth felt the pleasant pressure of heat on her head and her bare arms. She and her father walked down the street toward the water, its sparkling line visible beyond the roofs of the buildings. At the bottom of the avenue across a parking lot, a stretch of dunes rose up, thick with prickly beach roses and run through with narrow paths.

  Ruth and her father climbed the sand in their slippery shoes. When they crested the dunes, the water ahead of them was enormous and blinding, full of flickering silver. Ruth, who had seen the ocean once before, when she was much younger, was stunned by the size of it, its glare. She looked at the sailboats and the sunbathers, the tiny, dark heads of the swimmers, some women in flowered bathing caps. A heavy-bottomed ferry crossed slowly against the horizon.

  After a minute, though, she became aware that people on the sand below had noticed them standing there in their street clothes, her father with his dark suit jacket folded over his arm.

  Ruth understood that her father did not like his work. The way he spoke occasionally about the lives laid bare for his inspection and calculation revealed his distaste for the weary, mud-spattered livestock and the sad troves of battered possessions, chipped drinking glasses and forks with bent tines, old chenille bedspreads and clumsily sewn quilts, heavy, ugly furniture so admired by its sentimental owners. He was careful in his own dress and habits, reserved and polite, gazing without expression at horses and bony cattle, looking dispassionately at furniture and weighing its value. But Ruth knew he did not like dirt, the insult of other people’s smells or hair or skin. She noticed that his habit of waiting for others to speak made people voluble, a little uncertainty mixed in with their deference to him.