At this time on this August day in 1939, I call up my interior reserves and gather strength from my blood and bones. Exerting the full force of my will, I command the earth to leave off circling long enough to hold up the sun, hold back the wave. Long enough for me to paint and frame low tide.
3
Like Heaven
Late on a September afternoon, with barely time for a side trip before dark, Elizabeth Troy left the main highway and followed a winding road to a seaside town she used to know. Once there, she found its light and sound, its single wooded hill, its mile of beach, now widening at low tide, so improbably familiar that at first she thought she was lost. The rack of sunglasses in the drugstore window, the flag on the grocery, the pines and eucalyptus on the hill across the road, the whole look of the place, struck her as magic, a triumph of recollection over reality.
Standing on the cement walk that ran for only a block and a half, breathing air that came quick and blue from the sea, she was glad she was here, a few miles west of the freeway, in a place she hadn’t seen for fifteen years.
She parked in front of a vacant lot, in case the Alvarado brothers and Mrs. Nye still owned their stores and might notice and recognize her, then waste time talking. She thought she had glimpsed a dark Alvarado head behind the meat counter of the grocery and Mrs. Nye’s glasses gleaming behind the drugstore counter.
Beyond Elizabeth, the pink stucco post office was closing for the night. A border of nasturtiums erupted against its side in hot reds and lemon yellows, the intense shades that figure more often in memory than in fact. Elizabeth turned to face the ocean.
Here there was a change. The end of the pier had broken off and taken with it four fishermen’s benches and a bait house. A life preserver still hung from a loose guardrail. Elizabeth watched a jogger run north on the beach and two others pass him, running south.
Footsteps approached and stopped. It was an Alvarado brother, the oldest one, Juan, who had never learned much English.
“Juan,” she said, and shook hands.
Juan said, “Welcome,” and smiled the wide smile she remembered.
“I’m only passing through,” she said.
“Then you live here now,” said Juan.
“I have to leave before dark.”
“Which is your house?”
“No, I’m just passing through.”
“Welcome,” said Juan, and they shook hands again.
Now there was less than an hour of daylight left. Elizabeth crossed the street, passed the closed Unitarian church and the closed real estate office, and walked down Seaside to Pine. Pine Street climbed the hill in the rough shape of a question mark and shone with a recent coat of tar. Unpaved lanes ran off it.
At the second crossroad, Elizabeth turned right. This had been a street of garage studios and houses split into apartments. Couples halfway between her age and her mother’s used to rent here by the month in the summer. During the week, the wives took care of one or two small children, rinsing sand from their hair, pulling up blankets at night. The husbands came for weekends, and on Friday night and Saturday, couples went from house to house, carrying corn chips and glasses out of which martinis splashed to dot the dust of the lane. Sometimes, over the weekend, the composition of the couples changed and new pairs formed, only to regroup by six o’clock Sunday into the original pairs—the father and mother of the child who, bathed, combed, and bearded with cookie crumbs, was already learning to survive.
Sometimes the halves of couples failed to rejoin. This happened in the case of Elizabeth’s cousin Jane, who left her new husband for someone’s houseguest so suddenly that her eggplant casserole was still in the oven and her wet two-piece bathing suit still on the line.
Today, towels hung from the balcony of one apartment. A motorcycle stood at the front door of another. Four had signs offering them for winter rent, and a converted garage was for sale.
Elizabeth, continuing up Pine, paused on the curve to look back at the cobalt sea, then turned in the direction of the house where she had spent her summers as a girl. Scuffing through pine needles, she passed a row of compact new houses before she came to one she recognized. It had belonged to Captain Benton-Smith, who was. wounded in the first attack on Gallipoli in 1915 and spent twenty-four hours bleeding on the beach. The captain’s scars were visible when, before taking his swim, he sat on the sand in his panama hat and the black trunks that came to his knees. His cheerful nature and reasonable attitude toward the rout (“We should have given the buggers a shot at the generals”) turned the white cavities carved out of his neck and shoulders into metaphors of scars, acquired without pain or fear.
The captain spent all his summers here, attended to by Irish Meg, a woman of such a frank green gaze and broad white smile that everyone assumed he loved her and, hale as he was, took her regularly to bed. Now ice plant overran Captain Benton-Smith’s lawn, and ivy wound its way through the louvered shutters of his house.
Beyond two more new cottages, Elizabeth came to the Scotts’ and the Mannings’ houses. Mrs. Scott and Mrs. Manning had been amateur botanists. They spent their summers hatted and scarved, on top of the hill or on the slopes behind it, carrying sketch pads and crayons and, in a hamper, watercress-and-cucumber sandwiches and a flask of sherry. At the end of the summer, one year in one house, the next in the other, they exhibited their drawings, spidery and faint, of blossoms, nettles, and varieties of sage.’
The Potters’ house stood on a rise above a canyon that was dense with underbrush and the shade of trees. Annie Potter and Elizabeth had been best summer friends in the years before college. Then one went east and one went north and they began to like other people. Annie became a painter and eventually married one. Now she lived in Napa Valley.
There had been a time when Elizabeth and Annie Potter, day after day, had stretched out, wet from the ocean, to lie for hours on adjacent towels on the sand. They had spent a large part of ten summers this way, flat on their stomachs or their backs, in talk, in silence, and in talk again.
Annie’s uncle Si, her father’s handsome younger brother, had usually spent August here and was the second hero on the street. Uncle Si went into World War II a year before necessary. At twenty, he flew a Spitfire for the British over the Sussex Downs and Kent. The next year he was with the Americans over North Africa. He was shot down twice and came home with medals and oak leaf clusters. Once, when Elizabeth was sitting with Annie on the Potters’ fringed porch swing, Uncle Si happened to say, as if the strip of ocean he could see between two pines had reminded him of it, that he had known one or two American pilots who tried to shoot down their own fighters. He said he was almost picked off by a flier in his squadron who wanted to claim a hit on a German bomber as his own. “To improve his score,” said Uncle Si, “and get home sooner.” He said this and laughed. Uncle Si’s looks set him apart. And when jokes were told, it was Uncle Si who always laughed the longest.
Beyond the Potters’ rambling one-story, in front of the house where she herself had spent so many summers, Elizabeth came face-to-face with Mr. Elby. She remembered him, a master of ingenious household repairs, as if they had met yesterday. He was pushing a bicycle that he appeared much too old to ride. His nose was thinner than when she had seen him last, his eyes hollower, and his ears almost transparent.
With his faded stare on her, Elizabeth stopped and said hello.
“You’re Lizzie,” Mr. Elby said, and she saw that a front tooth, missing fifteen years ago, had never been replaced.
This meeting would delay her. Now she might not get to the top of the hill and down to the beach before dark. “How are you, Mr. Elby?” she said.
“Good,” he said. He examined her for changes—a few white hairs, perhaps, a thickening waist. Then he said, “You look all right. You’re still wiry.” He held his bicycle, ready to mount. “How’s that man of yours, what’s-his-name?”
“Greg,” said Elizabeth, and paused. She had lived too close to her husband for
too long to sum him up on such short notice. Without speaking, she continued to stare at Mr. Elby, who had once shot a skunk from her mother’s bedroom window. (“I can get a better bead on it from here.”)
“Well, Greg, how’s he?” Mr. Elby persisted.
When she still stood silent, Mr. Elby made a guess. “He’s gone,” he said soberly.
“Not really,” she said. “But he’s away. He’s in Mexico.”
“One of them places,” said Mr. Elby. Then, “I never got to know him like I do you.”
“Perhaps you will sometime.” She might as well have said, Perhaps a tidal wave will leave fishes gasping on Pine Street. “He has to be at meetings,” Elizabeth told Mr. Elby, and could have added, My husband is trying to save the world. She placed Greg in conference, this time in a colonial building that had an interior carved stone balustrade and carved lintels at its windows. Under the windows, starving people lined the curb.
“What kind of meetings are those?”
“Scientific,” she said. “Better ways to grow food.”
“I lost all my tomatoes to the beetle,” said Mr. Elby. “Where’ve you been, anyway? How are the kids?”
Elizabeth answered the questions in order. “Lately in Mexico,” she said. Then, “They’re both in college and fine.” She silently added, I hope. There was no way of telling how they were, out of sight and growing up too fast.
“You living here?” Mr. Elby asked with suspicion. If she had rented one of these houses without telling him, he would resent the lost chance to check the gas outlets and get the rust out of the pipes.
“I wish I could.” Then she spoke to Mr. Elby as she once would have to Annie Potter. “It would be like heaven.”
“Like heaven,” he repeated, and was silent for a moment. “Maybe so, maybe not.” He propped his bicycle against the choked honeysuckle on the fence. A light fragrance rose from the matted flowers. “What did you come for?” he asked.
Elizabeth sensed that she was under interrogation. “Why did you do it?” prosecutors asked criminals, parents asked children. “Why?” Greg had asked. “Why do you count the beggars and not the free breakfasts in the schools? Why mourn all the losses and never celebrate the gains?”
She had tried to answer. “Because people in rags pray in churches decorated with gold leaf, because little boys fight to clean your windshield for five cents, because families gather to sift the garbage heaps,” she told him.
Now here was Mr. Elby asking why she had come back. She told the truth. She said, “I don’t know.” Then added, “Who knows when I can come again? We’re in Mexico to stay.” She superimposed on the hillside where she stood a different landscape, a waste of depleted earth and shriveled grain. Greg had taken her to such places and later to an experimental patch of fertile ground, where he stripped an ear of corn and exposed the fat, even kernels.
“Look at this,” he told her, as if this single ear could multiply until it fed every man, woman, and child on earth.
He watched her face. “You don’t believe it will happen,” Greg said. “Why?”
Elizabeth only said, “Remember the summers at the beach? Everyone in town had enough to eat. They were all happy,” and she thought of ocean sunlight on a hundred happy faces.
But the last time Greg tried to convince her of the approaching utopia, she had answered, “Someday you’ll make me believe it,” and, standing between the rows of corn, had flung her arms around his neck.
To Mr. Elby she said, “Greg is inventing a new kind of corn.”
Mr. Elby had nothing to say about the diet of Mexico. He nodded as if, all along, he had expected her to settle there.
Elizabeth gazed at the gray-shingled house, the summer site of her growing up. It needed repairs. Paint, at least. Perhaps a new roof.
“Is it empty?” she asked.
“There’s a lease on it,” he said. “One of them teachers from the new state college down the coast.” A smile struggled to lift the corners of Mr. Elby’s mouth. “And the heater leaking water and the oven leaking gas and the faucets …” He was approaching a delirium of satisfaction.
Elizabeth interrupted. “How about the Mannings and the Scotts?”
Mr. Elby collected himself. They faced one another on the road, the level rays of the declining sun still bright on Elizabeth’s left side, Mr. Elby’s right.
“The Scotts, they’re gone. Haven’t seen the Mannings or the Millers or the what’s-their-names, the ones who had the boy that liked dogs. Seems like he always had a stray tagging after him.”
Mr. Elby was speaking of Billy Morton, and Elizabeth already knew what had become of Billy. His parents were among the friends she hadn’t lost.
“Do you remember the time you shot the skunk from that window?” She pointed to a corner of the house.
Mr. Elby flushed with anger. “I never shot a skunk,” he said.
Silence fell. Elizabeth picked a leaf of rosemary from a bush gone wild at the edge of the lane. She and Mr. Elby moved out of the way of a passing car. The driver waved and turned into the Potters’ drive.
“Another teacher,” said Mr. Elby. “Wait till the old wiring blows a fuse.” His voice grew firm in anticipation.
“I wanted to go up to the cabin,” Elizabeth told him, and corrected herself. “Up to where the cabin used to be.”
“I guess you heard about the fire.” Mr. Elby shook his head. “Some of these kids ought to be run in.”
Elizabeth rolled the rosemary leaf between her fingers and smelled it. Immediately, all her relinquished summers were restored, the ones before Greg, the ones with Greg, with one child, with two children. The cabin, built quickly and cheaply, had been a firetrap all along, she supposed. It was simple good luck that the place burned with no one in it. Even so, as she thought now of the sand between the children’s sheets, of the hermit crabs surviving overnight in jars, of the shells in a bucket and the sage in a glass, of the intimacy and isolation of the raw wood structure, Elizabeth suffered a pang. All four of them had been so young. For a second, looking backward, she believed she remembered exactly how it had felt.
But Mr. Elby was thinking about the fire. “These kids,” he said. “Do yours take drugs?”
“I’m not sure,” Elizabeth said truthfully. The sea shone silver blue between the pines. “I have to go now. I have to get down to the beach.”
Mr. Elby nodded, as if wanting to be on the beach was always reasonable, in any season, at any hour. “It’s low tide about now,” he said.
At the moment of parting, she remembered to ask, “How’s Mrs. Elby?”
“She’s gone.” Mr. Elby pulled his bicycle out of the honeysuckle. “It’s been seven years. Seven or eight.” His eyes began to water. “She’s in that new cemetery.” He gestured to an unseen location behind the hill. “Seems like I can’t keep flowers growing on her grave. The ground squirrels get them.”
His voice was shaking. Without saying goodbye, he mounted his bicycle, wavered, righted himself, and, sitting taller than Elizabeth would have thought possible, pedaled out of sight.
Half an hour was left before sunset. To save time she took a shortcut down the hill, through the canyon that was littered with eucalyptus pods and bark. At the intersection of Seaside and Pine, the business block on the west cast shadows halfway across the main street. Elizabeth tried to skirt the drugstore without being seen, but Mrs. Nye, on the lookout, tapped on the plate glass with her pen. Elizabeth turned back.
An apothecary jar, filled with amethyst liquid, stood as it always had in a curtained alcove to the left of the door. The changeless display of dark glasses and sand toys crowded the window to her right.
Inside the store, Mrs. Nye examined her through both the upper and lower lenses of her bifocals. “You’re looking pretty good, Lizzie. You’re young yet.”
Mrs. Nye had trapped her new permanent in a beaded hair net. “Are you back to stay?” she asked.
“How could I? Someone’s burned the cabin down.�
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“No one burned it down,” Mrs. Nye said. “There was a brush fire up there.”
“I guess Mr. Elby forgot.”
“You’ve been talking to Bert.” Then Mrs. Nye, as though the month were June, carried a beach umbrella to the window. “Bert Elby hasn’t been the same since his wife died. Sometimes he can’t tell the difference between now and the year before last.” She passed Elizabeth a carton of chocolate bars and unwrapped one for herself. “They had to take his gun away after he mistook a kid’s loose hamster for a rat.”
Elizabeth supposed Mr. Elby was eighty. It was harder to tell about Mrs. Nye. She was one of those women, double-chinned and sane, who, once past fifty, never change.
“What did Bert tell you?” she asked Elizabeth.
“About everyone dying or moving away, the Scotts and Mannings and Mortons. I forgot to ask about the Potters. He spoke about college professors who live in the houses.”
“The Lord God sent those professors to keep us going,” said Mrs. Nye. “They don’t pack up and get out on Labor Day.”
Elizabeth deciphered the time from a wall clock painted over with a clipper under sail. “It’s late,” she said, and edged away. “I have to see the beach again, while there’s still light.”
Mrs. Nye stopped her. “Wait a minute,” she said. “I want to tell you what’s what.”
Leaning over the counter between twin pyramids of sun oil and shampoo, she brought Elizabeth up-to-date.
“Mrs. Scott’s here now with her grandson. Mrs. Manning came down in August with her nurse. The captain’s been gone a long time. Mr. Si Potter’s dead. His car hit a tree on a straight piece of road in broad daylight. He always did drive too fast.” Elizabeth had a second to think, He must have meant to die. Mrs. Nye passed the chocolate bars again. “Annie Potter, that friend of yours, comes once in a while with her two kids. When the marriage broke up, they split up four kids. He got two and she got two. She rents the loft over the Millers’ garage.”
Harriet Doerr Page 11