She walked down to the edge of the sea and splashed water on her face and over the back of her neck. She drew herself up and turned and walked with as much confidence as she could muster. At the seawall, she climbed the stairs and went to a bench, where she sat and adjusted her expression and set herself to appear purposeful and at peace. She crossed her right knee over her left and when the skirt drew up to reveal her legs, she left the skin exposed. She raised her chin and extended her arms out across the back of the bench, a posture, it seemed to her, of ease and openness. As if she might be thinking about the beauty of that strange dark blue sea, or waiting for a lover, or for her children and her husband.
Now the sun was low and the wind had come up. The sunbathers returned their sunscreen and magazines and books to their bags. They pulled on their shirts and dresses and hats. A thin girl leaned over so that her long light hair hung free. She sprayed it with something from a bottle and then pulled a brush through over and over. Between the brushstrokes, the sunlight came and went, came and went.
Jacqueline waited, leaning back, with her arms still spread out behind her—a young woman come to sit and watch the sunset. Two policemen walked along the sidewalk. She felt sick again and concentrated on the mast of a sailboat gliding around the point from the direction of her cave.
They didn’t stop and when she saw their backs, and could no longer hear them speaking, she returned her foot to the ground and leaned forward with her elbows on her knees, chin in her hands.
The beach was emptying and she was strong enough to stand and return to the sand, but now there were sturdy, handsome men coming out to stack the chairs and clear the trash. They took their time as the sun continued to fall, stopping to talk to one another, scooping up half-empty bottles of water. They collected grease-stained paper bags and soda cans, both of which appeared heavy in their hands. Nothing looked empty to her and the slowness of the men made her angry. She could not wait any longer. She stood up too fast and steadied herself on the railing. When the world came back to center, she prepared to walk.
It would be a stroll along the shoreline. She would be reflective. A thin woman recovering her life.
She descended the steps and walked onto the black sand, which was still very warm. All along the beach, the men were stacking the plastic chairs. She went to the edge of the sea and walked with her feet in the water. The trash bags were in piles. There was a woman and a man, an older boy chasing two young girls running figure eights in the shallow water. Jacqueline stopped and looked at the sea. There were more boats now. Sunset cruises. Music rose and fell, warped by the wind.
She did not look at the family.
Please leave.
Please go.
Please leave something. Please leave something, she thought. What she meant was, please leave me something, but she would not say it, not even to herself. She set her eyes on a sleek speedboat tearing across the horizon, its bow rising and then falling to slap the surface of the water.
Please.
Prayer, her mother said.
She turned and they were gone and Jacqueline saw that they’d left something.
Answered.
She would not race to anything. Or from it. That was more important. She would be slow in all things.
She sat in their depressions. Then, as if it had been hers all along, she reached over and took the bottle and unscrewed the top and turned it to her lips and drank. The water was warm and as it filled her mouth and ran down her throat, she began to cry. She felt something solid pass across her tongue, a piece of bread maybe, or a bit of onion.
It was so often relief that made her cry. Not pain or disappointment or horror or terror, but instead it was relief from those things. Relief and, sometimes still, love. She drank it all, nearly half a liter. She knew to drink bit by bit, but did not, so the water hurt her throat and then there was a twist of pain in her stomach, and then that sick hollowness at the top of her chest.
Patience, her mother said. And faith.
Jacqueline reached for the bag and laid it on the sand between her feet and tore it open. Inside was crumpled foil lined with white wax paper and when she’d spread it all out, she found a piece of flatbread the size of her palm and there were also scraps of roasted lamb. They’d been salted and rubbed with thyme leaves and in brighter light they’d have shone. She counted the pieces of meat. Seven of them the size of her fingertips and an eighth piece as long and thick as her little toe, which was there on the sand for comparison. She touched the bread and found the side on which the sauce had been spread. She tore it in half and collected the meat from the paper and made a sandwich, and then she ate with as much control as she could find in herself. She chewed the first bite and counted her jaw closing twenty times before she swallowed.
To be elegant, to be graceful, to be beautiful, we must do everything slowly. Nearly everything. There are some things that require us to be quick. But those things are powerful only because we do everything else slowly. One thing makes the other. Count if you’re not sure.
Jacqueline counted and looked at her mother, but it was not the counting that put her on the sand, made that narrow face, those soft black eyes appear before her, made her speak, made her raise her chin, made her laugh, it was not the counting. It was the thyme.
Thyme was in her jollof. Heavy in it. Heavier than anyone’s. It did not disappear behind the tomato paste, beneath the ginger. Less salt, more thyme. You roast it dry in an iron pan first with the black pepper and the chili seeds and salt. Roast it dry just until it begins to smoke and then add the oil and the onions. Then you start the rest. You do everything slowly, her mother said.
Cooking, the only domestic work her mother allowed herself.
Jacqueline’s stomach twisted and cramped. Still, the pleasure. She hated the stale and acrid taste of her own mouth. It was the taste of hunger and now it had been replaced by flavors of fat and salt, bread and thyme. It was not enough, but now she had eaten, she had had some water. Now she could get control of herself. Now she could see what was there.
There was nothing to see in the sun or the water. Maybe there was something in the boats, she thought. Maybe there was something there. She liked boats, though she knew nothing about them and had traveled on only a few in her life and most of those, recently. She found them exotic and mysterious in their simplicity. It was that a boat rested on the surface of the water. That was all. Just that it did that. It was not the traveling or the adventure or the freedom. She was not interested in sailors or fishermen. Just the objects and the way they floated. She watched a small yacht pass across the wide bay. Then she turned away.
There were people crowding the sidewalk. There was music playing. The sound traveled across the sand and through the wind. Jacqueline stood up. All along the beach were stacks of chairs. The men were gone. She put the empty bottle in the plastic bag, which she held by the handles, and she carried it along the beach as if it were her shopping. She dropped the foil and paper into the bin at the bottom of a set of concrete stairs and when she came to the top she began to walk, swinging the bag like it held a new dress wrapped in tissue paper.
She went to the far end where there were hotels and nightclubs and swimming pools. Across the street, lining the wide sidewalk, were tables beneath awnings. The people cheerful and attractive, washed and tanned. It was just after sunset now and the restaurants were mostly full.
There were men standing outside holding menus and slapping them against their palms, smiling at the passing tourists, encouraging them to come and eat and drink. A tall man, handsome in a loose white shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbows, with his hands clasped behind his back, bowed slightly to Jacqueline.
“Hello,” he said to her.
She met his eyes. “Hello.”
“Please, you come have a drink.”
“No.” She shook her head. “Another time.”
For a moment, she wanted to ask for his help. Something in his face had stopped her. No, it was onl
y that he’d spoken to her. Met her eyes. She would ask nothing of him. She smiled and then looked toward the end of the road and the gates of a large hotel.
“Have a drink,” he said. “Dinner. Not expensive. Cheap.” He nodded to a large chalkboard menu propped against a planter.
She knew better than to look at menus. “Another time,” she said and walked on.
She would have to eat again. She needed more water. She could feel it coming on, the lightness, the trembling. At the end of the sidewalk, across from the hotel, there were three thin African men standing in front of a blanket spread out over the concrete. She hadn’t seen Africans since leaving Spain and now she did not know what to be. It was good they were there. It meant less danger than she’d imagined. It meant permission. It meant tolerance. It meant possibility. But what should she be to them?
One of the men was squatting barefoot with his toes on the edge of the blanket, his hands clasped between his knees, while the other two stood quiet and stolid. They all three watched her come. Jacqueline stopped in front of their blanket. “Hello,” she said. The man who’d been squatting stood. None of them spoke, so she looked down at the rows and rows of sunglasses. There was a stack of DVDs in plastic sleeves and animals carved out of wood—zebras and giraffes and elephants.
Not knowing why exactly, she knelt and picked up a pair of black sunglasses. She looked up at one of the men. “How much for these?”
“Ten,” the one who’d been squatting said.
She nodded, picked up a wooden elephant, and turned it over. There was a small gold sticker on its back left foot.
“You want to buy?” the man said.
She shook her head and stood up. “No.”
All three of the men were watching her. For a moment she thought she might fall. There were points of black spreading across the air. She had to close her eyes tight and reopen them to see clearly.
“Tu viens d’ou?” one of the other men asked.
She should not understand French. Not with these men.
“What?” she said.
“Where you come from?”
“The United States,” she told him.
The man smiled. “You stay here?” he said and raised his chin at the hotel across the street.
“No,” Jacqueline said.
“Where then?”
The others, who’d been distracted by a group of chattering American women in bikinis standing in front of the hotel gates, now turned their attention to her.
She looked toward the other end of the beach, at the massive outcropping of black rock. Beyond was her cave, the low sun filling it now with light.
“I’m not staying on this side. And you? Where are you three staying?” Jacqueline looked the tall one in the eyes.
“The other side?” He smiled again and, ignoring her question, said, “What other side?”
“In another town,” she said, drawing herself up as straight as she could stand. She was angry now and was happy to feel it. “Have a good evening. Good luck with your giraffes,” she said and met his eyes again, this time with a slight grin of her own, and then turned away. She began to walk and the man called out to her, “Where you stay, madame? Where you stay? In the big hotel in another town?” The men all laughed and she kept walking.
That weary arrogance. That chill grin.
Her anger kept her standing, kept food from her mind. Her mind. A thing she’d come to despise as much as the damp dust taste of her own mouth.
TWO EVENINGS LATER, two evenings since she’d last found food, light-headed and dizzy, she saw the tall man in front of his restaurant. He stood with a stack of menus in his hand. He was calm the way people are when they’ve eaten, when they’ve bathed, when the night is beginning. For a moment, she could smell the wet earth, see the waving palms from the porch, feel the cool air on her clean neck, hear the thrumming rain.
I must eat. She felt again a slight fissure, a rise of desperation.
“Hello.”
She was more than twenty feet away, but the man spoke with an enthusiasm and volume that embarrassed her.
“Hello,” he said again, accent on the second syllable, as if he’d been waiting for her all day. “You are returning.”
Jacqueline smiled with a closed mouth and nodded. “I am returning.”
“I’m happy for that. Thank you for returning.”
She laughed at this and then, as if the energy she’d used to open her mouth and bring the sound out into the day had been her last, she stumbled. Had it not been for one of the lampposts, she’d have fallen. Before she could see again, the man had crossed the space between them, bent slightly at the waist, and inclined his head toward hers—a gesture of intimacy that, if she’d been fully aware of it, would have moved her. Still he hadn’t touched her. He extended his hand as if inviting her to dance, and in a low voice, he said several times before she could see, or make sounds into words, “You are fine? Lady? You are fine?”
It had been only a few seconds, but she did not know how long she’d been hanging on the pole, how long the spreading white had been white, or even if she’d fallen to the ground and pulled herself up. Her first concern was being conspicuous and she was grateful for the man’s manner.
“You will come? Please.” Now he extended his right arm so that his fingers pointed in the direction of the empty restaurant and beyond to the bay.
She could not stay clinging to the metal post like a drunk. It would be better to go with the man. This was a decision. Between two things, this was the better thing. She could not risk the attention. “I’ll come,” she said and took the man’s arm, which was warm and solid in her hand. The feeling of his skin against her palm brought a jolt of pleasure, which left her even weaker. As if now, with that arm—and it seemed then that it was not connected to any person, just a warm thing to hold, to pull her along—she could give in, leave it all up to someone, to something else. The making of decisions, the relentless arguing with herself, with her mind.
She had felt this way in Spain, sitting across from that woman in the café eating the magdalenas. Take care of me, please. Take care of me. But it lasted only until she’d finished her coffee. Eaten. It was not enough food. But it was enough food to drive away her awful mewling, her pathetic need, enough to stand up and say gracias, gracias, and walk out of there as if she had a place to be. A place in mind. But that was on a Spanish beach and she had been younger by months. She did not know how many.
From the moment she’d landed in Málaga, she hadn’t bothered to count time. She’d realized as she stood up from her seat and begun to walk up the clean blue aisle, it was the end of luxury. The end of Bernard’s cheap benevolence, the end of the cool cabin and its thin, dry air, the carts of water and food, the sharp-edged magazines, the solicitous flight attendants, messieurs, mesdames.
Since then, she hadn’t bothered, hadn’t considered it—the whole thing artificial and unnecessary. Get somewhere and live there. So what difference did it make? But she could not avoid it. Time was measured. Memory was present and there was a chronology. She knew where she was in that chronology, where she’d been: what came before Spain, what came there, and what came after. She could break it up again and again, make it smaller and smaller. All the increments of a life. She wanted to guard it all. It was just that counting time was no longer of use.
The man was guiding her to the restaurant. She wanted to say, Too much sun today. I’m dehydrated. I always forget to drink enough water. Somewhere in her stale mouth, she was turning the words into a sentence, but she could not speak.
She held on to the man’s arm as he took her into the restaurant and lowered her gently into a chair. There was a hand at her back and then a cool glass before her. She drank and he, standing at her side, that warm arm drawn behind his back, the plastic bottle in his right hand, refilled the glass.
She was a customer in a restaurant. Gracious waiter. Sunset on an island. People walking along the beachfront. Holiday. What would th
ey know, these passersby? This and the third glass of water and the man at her side brought her calm.
Now she leaned back in her chair. “I can’t pay you,” she said. “I don’t have money with me.”
“You are okay?”
“Yes, fine, thank you for the water. I should get back now.”
He’d come around the table and was leaning forward, his clean hands flat on the paper tablecloth. “Stay,” he said and smiled. “Stay. A little while, yes? Wait.” He raised his left hand and showed her his palm. “Stay? Yes?” He smiled and left her there.
She picked up a silver knife and then returned it to the table. Hanging from the back of one of the wood and wicker chairs was her plastic bag, and in it the empty water bottle. She looked away, and out at the sky. She should leave here, gather herself up and get back before it turned any darker, but she was tired and weak, the chair was solid beneath her, and she could not make herself move. Just a few minutes longer and then she’d go. She wanted to cross her arms on the table, lower her head, and rest, but if she were to stay she must do so upright. Stand and leave. Stand and leave. But she could not. The chair was a bed. She closed her eyes.
The arm passed in front of her. Then there was a plate. A large tomato, a green pepper. Both had been stuffed and baked, the caps leaning against their respective fruit.
“Yemista,” the man said and poured olive oil from a glass bottle in a green stream three hundred degrees of a circle around the plate. “Pepper and tomato. Made with rice. Eat, please.”
Jacqueline looked down. There was the smell of garlic and mint.
The man had come around to the other side of the table, brought the chair out, and sat sideways, as if he wouldn’t stay long.
“Please,” he said again.
She shook her head. “I have no money. With me. I have no money on me now.” Vapor rose from the food. It was very close to her, the smell made her dizzier. Such desire was beyond her experience.
This is God, her mother said. Take what He gives you. Don’t be stubborn, young woman. Eat.
A Marker to Measure Drift Page 2