An Enlarged Heart

by Cynthia Zarin

  The house was grotesque. There was nothing wrong with it except it was lit up like a light box and our faces and even the tanned faces of the children took on the waxen look of the dead. The sun in the room was so strong our bones shone through our skin. There were no curtains on the windows. Why aren’t there curtains? I remember thinking, and their small heaps of belongings, things that although I didn’t know them well I would have been able to identify as belonging to them (a watch, some necklaces, a beach towel) looked like leavings.

  We stayed for a while on the deck with our drinks. The sun set over the harbor. When I went in to use the bathroom the front room was blood red. The children were disappointed that their children weren’t there. They had gone, by themselves on the bus, to spend the day in Provincetown and weren’t back yet, and their covert glances at each other—communicating that there was no circumstance in which they would have been allowed to do this—summed up all the ways in which we, as parents,were below regard. Then we left and returned to our musty house on the hill, with its damp bathing suits and bowls left in the sink, its sunset.

  So the morning when I drove my husband to the Provincetown airport we passed those houses, white as bleached fish vertebrae on the east side of the highway. On the right was the lake, flat as a drawing of a lake, and when the water ended were the Province Lands dunes. I dislike those dunes and, as always, as we passed, I doled out for myself, from an infinite store, a little dollop of horror. Years ago I had a friend who had a fascination with the dunes, and now and again he would convince me to walk out into them, to cross the two-mile expanse of sand as a prelude to a day on the beach. No matter how fine the day began, before we had walked more than a quarter of an hour the wind would come up, first in a series of slaps, and then insistently, hurling sand without ceasing into our faces. We always came equipped with handkerchiefs to put over our mouths, so that conversation, too, ceased, which in any case had consisted only of my friend’s exclamations of pleasure over the scenic, barren beauty of the dunes: It looked like Africa, he would cry, did it not? Now and again he would take a bottle of water from his knapsack and hand it to me, and I would rip the bandanna from my face and gulp furiously.

  Here and there on the undulating hills of sand were what looked like gnarled old roots, but were, instead, the top branches of scrub pine trees that had been covered over by the sand. My friend thought this was poetic. Imagine, he often said, the fossil of the tree, but to me this idea only deepened my distrust of the dunes and my feeling, quite apart from my annoyance at the wind, the pinpricks of sand, the grit, that in only a moment we too—or at least I, for I was certain my friend was too perspicacious for any calamity to befall him—would either be buried under the sand too, or lose my way.

  Most people who walk in the dunes take a compass. I have never found it possible to read a compass; it skitters in my hands, a hot star, a Ouija board planchette. In the Province Lands, the dunes rise up and down twelve or thirteen feet, with declivities between them: the horizon is as elusive as a dream. I do not have a compass. If I ever had a compass, I am sure it was a Cracker Jack affair, a plastic prize from a children’s birthday party, easily and inevitably lost. My friend—of course—had no need of a compass. Set down anywhere on earth, he knew, like a bird or an animal, exactly where he was, and navigated faultlessly, finding, in a city he had been to exactly once, a decade ago, at night, the bar where his uncle, now dead, had bought him a beer. I, on the other hand, can be lost even in my own city, the city in which I was born and where, now, I live only three blocks from where I lived as a child. Coming up out of the subway I try to hold in my mind the direction in which I was traveling when I left the train car and every so often I have to ask a passerby to point me in the direction I should be going. I find this vaguely humiliating, and reproach myself with visions of intrepid Victorian travelers, leaving Portsmouth with only a satchel, on their way to serve as governesses to the children of the Raj.

  My friend had a compass nonetheless. It was a handsome one in a leather pouch which, when we were walking in the dunes, he sometimes consulted sagely. In the dunes, time, like the horizon, had little meaning. A few minutes can and does seem an hour. Even if we walked steadily in a straight line to the back shore, even if the wind—as it rarely was—was still, it seemed to me an age as long as the time since the Payomet walked with their arrows and chalk, before the water (which one moment ago was nowhere to be found) loomed like a cloud bank in the east, we unpacked our towels and sandwiches, and, still swathed in my gritty clothes, I began the endless debate about whether or not I would strip down to my bathing suit and go in.

  The morning I drove to the airport I had not walked in the dunes for almost twenty years. The last time it was winter. It was New Year’s Day. My friend, who by then was my first husband, had invited another couple to spend the weekend with us. It had snowed the night before, and the locusts and pine trees that line the back roads were covered with frost. The trees on the Cape are small trees, because the high winds keep them from growing very tall, and the woods have the dollhouse proportions of a children’s story. After lunch we drove to the shoulder of the highway near Pilgrim Lake, and began to walk to the sea. As usual, I had little interest in going. It was cold, for one thing. But our guests had been cajoled by the idea of this outdoor adventure: it was a wonderful way, everyone agreed, to begin the year. It was an arctic landscape. The sand, usually a very pale biscuit brown, was white. We were wearing warm hats and gloves and heavy shoes that sank into the snow, which wasn’t very deep, an inch or two, and the lugs of the soles made marks on the snow. When we lifted up our feet we could see the cold sand. The tops of the strangled trees were black against the white, the limbs like ink drawings. As we walked, one of our friends, a Chinese historian, told us about a buried city in China: a sandstorm had crept over the city at night, and the only people who survived were the servants of the grandest houses, who slept under the eaves. Overnight, the city became a graveyard. The servants opened the painted shutters of the attics, climbed out, and walked over the buried houses and the hidden bodies of the dead. As we traipsed through the cold I imagined the light steps of the servants edging over the sand. It was springtime—I thought—in the Chinese city, and the people on the crest of the terrible wave of sand stood in their kimonos and silk sandals. It was a holiday. In the far distance from the top of the sand hill they could see another village, one not covered in sand, and they began to walk toward it, taking with them small things they could carry: vases and bundles of clothes. I think that later, when I chose a lining for a jacket printed with images of Chinese peasants, I had that story in mind.

  It was windy. It began to snow again. The flakes came down softly at first, then harder. The wind which arrived with the snow began to twist and turn the flakes. Specters of snow, ghost white in the white landscape, began to follow us. No one else was distracted or concerned. They called to one another over the wind: Albert Pinkham Ryder had painted the beach in a snowstorm! The snow stung. It was impossible to see where we were. I had been tramping over the dunes a little behind the others.

  On the two-lane highway into Provincetown the road curves slightly at the entrance to the Province Lands dunes. In the lay-by where we left our car that New Year’s Day was a sign printed with the combination of welcome and warning that is usually found in wild places that have been domesticated. BRING OUT WHAT YOU BRING IN, the sign reads. WELCOME TO OUR FRAGILE LANDSCAPE. There is an illustration on the sign of a huge land mass festooned with ice, like a huge chunk of dirt a bulldozer might rip out of the earth to make room for a skyscraper, and beside it the legend reads, THE LEGACY OF THE GLACIER.

  Two of my children were in the back of the car, and I told them how exactly the same the landscape looked as when I was a little girl and drove with my mother to take my father to the Provincetown airport so that he could fly to New York. The other place I have seen a landscape that resembled it—the scrub and the
rolling hills, and the places where the sand has worn away, leaving striations of clay the color of sulfur dioxide and ferrous sulfate—is in New Mexico, where recently a man who has once been and will probably be again the governor of Nambé Pueblo told me that he had found seashells in the dirt where he is irrigating, a thousand miles from the ocean.

  What am I thinking? The landscape, the shells, the Nambé Indians who are not the Indians of Corn Hill, the sense of trying to hold on, of trying to find a thread that will hold no matter how far it is unwound, zigzagging through the pines. When a friend of mine was small—is it part of the story that she is deaf, was born deaf, or not? what is and isn’t part of the story?—her mother organized treasure hunts in the woods. Lines of string wound through the branches, and each child followed a string, which unspooled to a treasure: a little tin toy, a whistle, a compass. Is it part of the story that the woods behind the house were full of brambles? What does it matter that in New Mexico, in the mountains, you can find blue columbine and delphinium, their starry blossoms the exact color of the kettle ponds in Truro two thousand miles away?

  The beach we go to is the most beautiful beach in the world. What can that mean? Who is we? This winter, because family life as I had known it seemed to be ending—the web of string stretching over the small forest, uprooting trees, as we looked for clues and treasure—I drove the route over and over again to Truro. If you get lost, go to the last place where you knew where you were, we told the children. We once found Rose in the butterfly house, covered with butterflies. Don’t move. I hadn’t spent a winter in Truro there for twenty-five years. The storms had so abraded the back shore that the dunes were cleft. It was as if the dunes, fighting back like Cuchulain, had become waves and were throwing themselves into the sea. I wasn’t sure all winter that we would be able to go to that beach again. When we went to look in March, my daughter and her friend, and my oldest friend and his children, the path down to the shore had caved in. But by May the town took itself in hand and trucked in sand to fill the gaps. In June we could walk single file down the steep slope, more than usually full of stones, to the beach.

  Over and out. Later in the day, when my children and I get down to the beach—their father has his wallet, his keys, he has now landed in New York—we will spread out our towels, which are still slightly damp from the day before, which smell of salt. At a glance we know if the tide is coming in or out. The children will look for the break—the place they will paddle out on their surfboards to wait for waves. When they were small I spent every day in the summer counting heads. The girls wore the same bright bathing suits so I could see them in the water. When they were very small I spent the summer up to my waist in the water so that I could swim and fetch them out if they went under. In snapshots on the bookcases in New York the light around them shimmers. The light peers over the dunes, then disappears. I have sunspots on my right hand and on the right side of my face from sitting on the beach year after year in the late afternoon; at high noon it is as bright as the light in the house in Provincetown that so frightened me, a light without shadows. I wonder if I would be as frightened of it now.

  When we are older perhaps the light is not as frightening, we are perhaps less interested in the past because the house that we carry around is ourselves. It is not as necessary to see ourselves everywhere; we have seen worlds upended and then slowly, gradually reconstitute themselves. In August, at the beach, my children will look for the break, and I will sit by the water at low tide pretending to read, looking up every few words from the page to find them in the water. When our friends come down the hill to the shore with their towels and bags of chips, with their car keys strapped to their beach bags to keep them from being lost in the sand—friends who rent other houses, under the trees—the first thing they will ask is: Are you going in?

  Are you going in? Have you been in? Do you want to go in? A friend who is now dead—who lived in the woods that we love, too, the woods on the way to the beach, the trees that I picture wrapped in their web of string, gnarled, full of bayberries, the woods that have yielded their treasure—would say to us when we were young and unsure, yet surer than we are now, “You never regret a swim in the ocean or another child.”

  What is regret? I lost a house, one that I loved, we are going into the interior; inside a house of wattles is a tiny shell, on the shell is a sail, inside the walnut is the fairy tale child. This is where I am now: DO NOT PASS GO, DO NOT COLLECT $200. When a child we know was very small and unhappy she was too little to play, she announced, “The pink money is mine.” What is mine? When the children were younger they played Monopoly games that when it was raining went on for days, until someone tilted the board on purpose and the houses fell from the board. Are you the shoe, the dog, the rocking horse? Once I found a field mouse in a kitchen matchbox coffin, dry as a twig. When it stopped raining the children played at walkie-talkies under the window, tin cans attached by eight feet of string. Can you hear me? Over and out. Darning needles stitch the air. On our part of Long Nook Beach, the shelf splits off. A few steps and you are in the water. Are we going in? Where are we going and from where do we leave?

  Mary McCarthy’s Chest

  One day many years ago at the magazine where I then worked, an envelope crossed my desk. It was an airmail envelope, the kind seldom seen anymore, but then it meant news from afar. The envelope was blue, like a scrap of sky. Chevrons, red and blue, marked the corners, suggesting a shot arrow, which, in a way, it was. The postmark was Paris. The letter was addressed to me. My name, and the address of the magazine, had been typed on a manual typewriter. The lines of the address were indented, one stepped under the other. It looked at once elegant and slapdash. For some reason this entranced me. The return address, typed in the upper left corner, was Rue ——, Paris. The sender was Mary McCarthy.

  At that time, I was working as an assistant in the Fiction Department. It was my second year at the magazine, and my second job there. Or, really, my third, if I count on my fingers. My first job, in the typing pool, had lasted three days. It had come about circuitously, almost haplessly, the way many things happened at the magazine, although I didn’t, of course, know that then. But haplessly as a paper boat circling a pond is drawn by the current. I had graduated from college the year before, and after a certain amount of to-ing and fro-ing had returned to New York, where I was living in an apartment with a Dutch door and a leaky skylight over the bathtub. When it rained the tub was splotched with dark spots, as if a dog had shaken himself off on the cracked porcelain. The apartment was twenty-eight blocks south of the apartment where I had lived until I was five, and two blocks from the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument, on Riverside Drive and Ninety-second Street. When I was a little girl I had walked with my father on a winter’s day from our apartment to that monument, and that event—the long walk, the snow, my attempt to keep up with him, uttering no complaints—had become mythic in our family. After I had lived in that apartment for some years, it occurred to me that besides the low rent, and the fact that it had fallen into my lap, and the equal fact that it wasn’t on what we then called “a drug block” because this was the eighties, and blocks near the park were either drug blocks, or not—was that it was as far as my journey from childhood could take me, as if that distance had been foreordained. I would lie in bed at night and try to imagine the house as it had once been. When I flicked at the marred whitewash on the wall with my fingernail, blue and silver wallpaper rose up under the paint. Sometime during this period, of peeling the paint with my fingernail and peering up at the bathtub skylight, rereading Ngaio Marsh, I realized that I had almost no money at all, beside what my grandmother slipped into my pocket when I visited her in Chelsea, and I needed to get a job.

  At that time the magazine was located in a large, nondescript office building on Forty-third Street, distinguished in that you could cut through from Forty-third Street to Forty-fourth, by cutting through the lobby. A number o
f years before, a writer affiliated with the magazine had made his way without touching the sidewalk from the office to the Chrysler Building, six blocks away, through a series of catwalks, overpasses, and tunnels: in the lore of the magazine this was viewed as an enviable, even emblematic, achievement, as then a reigning idea behind the magazine itself, implicit in its character, which reflected the life of its editor was the primacy of secret routes and power of the inner life, which was viewed as an Escher landscape, with stairways that went nowhere, punctuated by moments of transcendence in which life, usually opaque, opened by means of a hidden switch. In the lobby there was a tobacconist and a dry-cleaner and a luncheonette. You could also get your shoes shined.

  The letter that I had written to “The Editor” requesting a job was not my first correspondence with the magazine. For over a decade, since I was twelve, I had been sending poems to “The Editors.” These had been returned. Tucked inside the typewritten pages was a small note on good-quality paper, with The New Yorker colophon, a man with a top hat and a monocle. The paper hovered between yellow and ecru, and the colophon was black. The preprinted note thanked me for my submission, but regretted the impossibility of publication. I received forty-two of those notes. I kept them in a shoe box, which one way or another has disappeared. When I dropped the letter into the mailbox on the corner, I had no expectation of a reply; then it seemed to me uncertain that any person actually worked there. This was before the Internet but not before celebrity; nonetheless the staff of the magazine, and its mysterious editor, were absent from the annals of people-watching. One of the most famous writers for the magazine had not been seen in public for almost twenty years. That this was caricature or simply an extension, played out to an extreme, of a policy I sensed I did not yet understand, nor of course could I know the effect this policy had, or would have on me, or on people that I loved. But there it was. The magazine seemed to emanate from a small, urbane, luminous planet—vaguely resembling the planet belonging to Saint Exupéry’s The Little Prince (again, this stab in the dark was not far wrong) in which people spoke courteously and often mirthfully to each other, and in which most of their shopping needs—for embossed neckties and fly-fishing rods—were catered to by shops which advertised, discreetly, in four-point type, in the magazine’s back pages.