I lie here forever at peace until a frozen walrus comes blowing up from behind, puffing and tossing sparks of icy water into the air. They hit my back like fat on a griddle and I turn to snarl at my beloved in wifely walrus-fashion.
Bert stands exultant above me, buffing his chest with a towel, shouting. “You’ve got to get in! It’s great!” He shouts this though I am lying right at his feet, directly, as it happens, in the wake of his spray, and drops beside me, joyous, panting with pride. “You need to get your head in. Everything is gone, the cold takes it all away, you feel great.” I tell him I feel just lovely already thank you and could he please move his frigid flesh a little to the right, if he would be ever so kind. He shakes his head in disbelief, spraying drops of glacial water in all directions.
Then he’s all over me, rubbing and bouncing with glee. “You are so sleek and soft and warm!” he declares, burrowing his head into my armpit, rubbing my naked back with his cold, wet, salty, seaweedy hand.
“And you smell like Charlie the Tuna.”
“Dolphin. I’m a mammal, you know. And you better watch out: sometimes they get very sexual with their trainers.” He rolls over on his back then, puffing out air, delighted with himself.
It’s July, but the water is still cold. The water on this shore will always be cold. I lie on the beach until my bones are hot and I can feel my eyeballs burn. I expect to cause a small explosion when I touch the waves, water hissing like lava, steam flying up around me. I hang back at the edge, letting myself in slowly, an inch at a time, cringing with an exquisite torture Bert can never comprehend. “You’ve gotta get right in!” he yells in an encouraging tone, as I measure millimeters of increment from hip to belly to breast, shuddering and turning back as a wave laps my shoulders. I don’t “gotta” do anything.
It is genius to nobly do nothing when to do anything more would be stupid. Try on a winter day to picture this scene, that the world is so forgiving you can lie almost naked with your eyes closed beside the brimming ocean. On a clear day, when the sun is low enough not to burn your eyes, look out to the horizon and feel how the earth curves out in a broad sweep away from you. Waves along the sand bar are breaking low—just folding over, the only flourish on the quiet water this afternoon. Scrunching up sand in handfuls, in fistfuls, let the golden grains of sand flow warm between your fingers—tiny fragments of world, come to this.
These beach days are brief. True summer on the back shore doesn’t begin until July and lasts eight weeks, nine if we’re lucky, from July Fourth to the soft close of Labor Day, when the September waters begin to cool and the sunlight stretches long and thin. For all the endless feeling of these days, they are few, though rich and wide inside. We feel a loosening and freedom of the body, a safety in the warmth of the earth against us, under blue skies. All summer under the great fire we worship memories of summer, of slow, languid water, sleepy afternoons, the drowsy wash of tides in the brain.
A wave falls forward and the water spreads itself flat, gently wavering with light, just a moment before the undertow returns and it is pulled back, sucked down to the cold depths. Everything stops a moment; there’s a tug, a hesitation. The sky is still; some high, thin clouds are moving out to the north, white whippy cirrus, mostly ice crystals. A slick of water glazes the shore where broken waves flow out across the flats, percolating down through the brown sand. Out past the sandbar a white boat is riding, rising and falling from sight, and a whale blows a spout of foam up to the sky. There’s a noise of engines offshore, a radio playing; and beyond us, at the edge of our vision, way up in the high, blue sky, there is nothing, and there it all ends.
Some afternoons we walk the two and a half miles to Race Point, and we “go to the beach” with the rest of the world. We arrive heavy-footed, without coolers, blankets, or radios, and join for a while in the summer festival, where children dig immense holes at the tide’s edge and leave them to fill with water, and frisbees and paddleballs fly back and forth. Hunkered down on the hot sand, I lust after my neighbors’ six-packs, their beer cans floated like wondrous icebergs in styrofoam chests, packages of chips that make an exaggerated crunch in the mouth, their wedges of cold, bright pink watermelon. Mick Jagger is singing, the whole London Bach Choir behind him, with an itchy, transistor urgency: ya cahn’t always get what ya wa-hant. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s cooler. I take a long swig from my canteen and look away from temptation.
This beach is noisy, littered with plastic toys and sandwich wrappers, herringboned with jeep tracks, jumpy with radios and absolutely redolent of coconut oil. The surf sounds like the hiss of a thousand pop-tops being pulled back, a continual party. It’s wonderful, a shot of pure adrenalin on those days when we visit as if dropped from the moon. The people are clean and pretty; they look delicate next to our tanned, salty skin and sun-washed shirts. Most have a flush of pink on their noses and shoulder blades, and the wide-awake air of visitors. It seems brighter here, hotter. I shade my eyes to follow a kite up into the sky—a yellow bird with an enormous tail and two shimmering threads holding it. A baby girl is making hand-drip castles, then sitting on them. In the waves a small boy paddles ecstatic, clutching a small surfboard. Two mothers trail their feet back and forth in the water, looking off to the horizon, scanning for children, speaking easily without looking at one another. Bert is scavenging at the high tide line, bending and dipping like a long-legged bird, a heron or crane, peering with scholarly precision at the sand. His hands are full of sticks and he has stuck bits of bright nylon rope into his baseball cap and generally he appears festooned and serious.
This going to the beach is something new under the sun. We have had to learn pleasure here. For centuries the beach was a place to walk and forage, to search the horizon for ships or weather, cast for fish or launch boats. It was a serious place, a work place. The water was for keeping out of; even the fishermen didn’t know how to swim.
Swimmers in the thirties swam, or sank, fully clothed in woolen shirts and knee-length pants, stockings, caps and rubber shoes. They were lucky to stay afloat at all when their clothes waterlogged and tangled, growing heavy as armor. Now in ceremonial attire, nearly naked, hugging the earth and wallowing in sand, we worship pleasure. Our vestments are little bits of cloth, stretchy material, and our skin glistens with precious tropical oils. We squint under our sun hats and wear dark glasses against the light we never turn to see. Where else do you see people lie down right on the earth? We lie on this new shore in our skin, red and brown and smeared with unguents, undefended and secure, and give in like animals to the heat. And though the waves scrub up on the sand and the wind blows over our heads, it may be that the beach will never relinquish its new odor of coconut and palm kernels, as Massachusetts dreams, briefly, that she is Tahiti before the missionaries.
We leave before the beach starts to empty, walk back slowly and let the pretty carnival get small and quiet behind. It feels a little melancholy to leave the people behind, to hear the human sounds grow small. Behind us, they pack up their cars and drive away to rented rooms; they walk down streets full of voices, past restaurants and bars with music spilling from their open doors. It is melancholy, and I know why melancholy can be such a sweet emotion, a thoughtful sadness made mostly out of pleasure but with more shadings than pleasure, something sweet set against deep shadows. The only sadness is the thought, a gloom back-lit by the low sun. It grows quickly peaceful as we walk along, and around a bend or two we have lost the feeling of that world. The empty beach lies before us; the shack sits up in the distance, small against the hill, and there’s a white line leading up to it, the little trail made by our own two sets of footprints, scuffed by us day by day as we go down to the beach and back.
FIFTEEN
At Evening
Evenings drying dishes by lamplight, the radio giving intimate details of weather. We pick up odd stations here, signals driven to this outpost thrust into the sea. Beneath the west window over the stove, a towel flaps on its hook. It gu
sts and falls, leaps and returns in irregular beats. We lower the window with a rope on a pulley as evening begins. The stars come out just as the fishing boats are lighting their lamps—they glimmer in the distance the same pure white. Watching them, I picture myself on the deck of a sailing boat, listening to high laughter, drinking from a glass with ice. Here in the privacy and shadows of the shack, I conjure voices and lighted places. But I know I would look back and crave the familiar secrets of this place, try to imagine myself here again.
I move around the room, putting away dishes, washing the glass chimneys and leaving them to glint on the counter as they dry. Sound of a cup lifted from the shelf and set down, the teabag ripping open. The washbowl rattles in the sink’s uneven bottom. Our routines here have become routine: hauling water, sweeping, washing dishes in a basin, setting them to dry in the old yellow rack: these echo with the resonance of habit and repetition. Brown shadows glide up the walls and a soft, rose glow lies along the dunes. The waves subside in a rush, sounding far away. Crackle of paper being wadded into a ball, pages of a newspaper turning. Shapes are distinct, then not quite so: the tilted deck post, the clothesline, appear in stark outline; then their lines are reabsorbed. Sand hills go ivory, ecru, brown. Four separate white lights appear at the horizon, off to the east, fishing boats anchoring for the night.
Light the first lamp: a flame catches the wick. It is contained, to-itself, a light so small and quick, upburning in space. Place the bowed chimney down though, and the light leaps into the glass, and flares and shines all around, throwing shelves and corners, tables and chairs, into new dimensions of depth and shadow. Just two or three small flames, each a wick dipped in oil, their light magnified, reflected, and sent out multiplied by blown glass. The red covers on the bunks glow like a king’s velvet. Stainless steel forks and spoons twinkle in the rack and the old wood warms to a deeper brown, crusted with scars and stains, the marks of old use.
I sit at the table writing in my journal. The book is filling with summer scenes, incidents, ideas—it pleases me to keep writing, to balance whole sentences on a thought or an impression, each one set down here and assigned a place. It gets darker and I begin to see my face in the window, translucent, like looking through water. Eyes, the darkest, catching light, a sweep of hair fallen over my forehead. Behind my eyes, across my temples, above my cheekbones, the northern edge of the water draws a line at the sky. My nose floats on the still, navy-blue water; my forehead is superimposed on the blue-grey horizon. I reach out my hand toward the glass and in my palm, exactly in the middle of my palm, is the first white star.
We do not talk. Bert lies on the bed, turning the pages of a book, the radio tuned to a whisper at his ear, a dream of baseball. In a single room, in separate pools of light, with not six feet between us, we make a spaciousness of the mind. The wind is wuthering across the dunes—a grating undertone of sand dragged across sand. I can barely hear the water now. New moon tonight: it will be dark and there will be stars. I’m distracted by a thunk-thunk at the window, and I look up. A brown moth bats at the pane, confused by our lights. Something creaks and cricks and scratches in the wall under the east window, some insect in the wood, a sound just at the threshold of hearing.
My hand pushes a huge, soft shadow across the page as I write. Look up. Now the window is blank and my face is a portrait lighted from one side. Nothing looks through me now—all that world is held behind my eyes, invisible, opening out behind. Another life, a deeper one, is there. On this side I cannot see it, except for that brief glimpse at dusk, in the momentary translucence of flesh and sky. How quickly it closes, uncertainly remembered. The flame jerks and straightens and my hand’s shadow flows over the page as I sit quietly writing at the end of the day.
SIXTEEN
Sanctuary
It is almost noon, warm and muggy, and the fog that has drifted in and out of the valleys all morning is breaking up and starting to blow across the sand in thin transparent ribbons. I’ve wandered back behind the second line of dunes, through marshes and scrub woods, led on by a quail whose cheerful whistle continually receded before me. Other sounds come from far off: a jeep takes the hill with a snarl and a clash of gears, and in the distance a crow protests some real or perceived invasion. Sight flies to the limits of the visible; the world closes in, bounded by haze. A bird dives into a patch of green and disappears.
On a grey day, the dunes are uninhabited. Even the old sun is absent, blanked out in a white sky. Sand dunes the color of clouds rise up in huge drifts, one beyond another, and flow away. The sand has a clean texture, swept by long, even winds. Small birds and insects scratch their marks across the surface. A vole swam up a bank ahead of me as I climbed, scrambling wildly as sand streamed past his claws; eyes closed, he willed not to see me. I passed a little downy woodpecker clinging to a stunted oak. Rabbit pellets marked the entrance to a bayberry thicket and there were deer tracks right out in the open, though the deer, as usual, were nowhere to be seen.
I know the deer walk here every day. Wholly ordinary, calm and free, they walk in their own lives as if there were only one world, as if history had never happened. In the hour before dawn, or at twilight, they might step fully into the open. Their wide ears quiver, their heads swing round, their soft black lips part inquiringly. By day they lie hidden in deep brush; they see us coming and quietly withdraw into the trees.
There is no path here; the country lies open, hot and still. In troughs between the dunes, sheltered from wind and salt spray, the sand grows stunted woods of pitch pine and scrub oak. Grey-green poverty grass sits up in tufts of its own root hairs, brandishing little yellow flowers, and the ground is crusted with ant hills, moss, pine needles decaying into earth. Lichens spring up underfoot: reindeer moss and old man’s beard, tiny elaborate structures that live a hundred years, making soil out of bare rock. The ones called British soldiers prick up their scarlet points.
These woods are poor, bent and twisted inward as if they would consume themselves. To enter them I have to stoop and duck my head, checked by branches at shoulder height. Woody fingers scratch at my face. A horsefly fumbles past, listing like an awkward spaceship, and disappears into the fissures of a dead tree. Then a blue jay hollers out his name like an insult: jaaaaay, and flaps off. And never the deer, in all my time here, never the deer, only their tracks that lead straight up the side of a hill, and step off into midair.
As I press ahead, the woods close up. I push into the tall trees and a red squirrel scolds get-get-get, stomps twice with all four feet, twirls his tail furiously, and flees into the undergrowth. I hear the woods calling to itself, crying warnings and diving under cover, and where I stand the branches have gone still.
The only thing for it is to stop and let the woods find me. I sit down with my back against the trunk of a pine, my feet in pine needles, the sun on my legs, and wait while the disturbance dies down. The woods come to me first as a smell of warm stone, dust, and the resinous odors of pine, fragrant and slightly bitter. I sit and examine the nearest tree, this one’s brother, with close attention. Its heavy bark is coated with a yellow fungus; breathing out oxygen, it twists upward to let the sun touch it. A gold light falls on the pine needles. A box turtle steps slowly, deliberately across the sand; I see its glittering red eye, its unhurried step, treading across a complete world. A woodpecker hangs upside down on a branch about eight feet up—he makes the tree sway back and forth as he drums it, raining down wood chips. He’s a head-banger, convulsive, his whole body contorted with hammering. Rat-a-tat. In the distance, a small plane dips low against the hill, circling in for a landing at Race Point.
If you look carefully at a patch of ground, a square yard or so, look long and carefully, you don’t soon run out of looking. Little brown ants, grains of sand, twigs and seeds and pine needles. Bits of curling bark. All along the ground, roots and stems and runners tether each plant to the thin earth, each live thing reaching into space, floating itself on the air. Under the dry pine needles
are wet, blackening ones, a little grainy soil under that, then sand again. A harvestman spider crawls over my shoe, lifting delicate, modular legs singly, light as a creature on the moon, holding on with sticky footpads lest a breath blow him away. That cigarette filter may lie there for two thousand years. Fecklessly dropped, it blew into this shade, finding refuge at the base of a pine. It is white, cylindrical, neat and oddly unobjectionable, taking up its small allotment of space without presuming. What is that bird? A sweet chirrup keeps darting in and out of hearing. Teasing, clear, it seems to come from first one side, then the other.
It was so quiet I could hear the leaves breathe. I heard the sea sucking far below, faint and constant, half a mile off; the sound came through the trees, a great current flowing across the land and into my body, its waves breaking up against whorls of brain matter. My blood lunged and raced down black tunnels of arteries, thrust from the heart’s sealed chambers. The tree at my back felt rough, marking my skin with the pattern of its bark. The trees live longer than we do, living more slowly. Light entered the slits of my eyes and I could feel the tree breathe behind me, riding the world around, gripping the earth, splitting upward.
If another presence came into my mind—a call, a touch—I might become the forest to be entered. Light flashed on every branch, but inside me it was dark. Shadows moved along the ground, leaves turned, and the little hairs on my arm stood up.
A thin boundary, finer than a bubble, thinner than a cell wall, stretched and pulled between inside and out, self and world. If this boundary is washed away I will disappear—that thought occurred and went under, like a bottle in a wave raised up and pulled down again. Rained on my head, the weight of sunlight, particles of odor, infinitesimal atoms of pine and salt and dust. The air leaned heavily against my skin, and then only a thin edge of me was left, a surface tension, an old loyalty of molecules to a remembered order. I could have let it go and never stood up again, it was that close. Then a shape flew past—so quickly, with such force—like something shot from the trees, a missile, a self-guided arrow, a blackbird calling.
The Salt House Page 9