The One True Ocean

by Sarah Beth Martin

  I wonder how Paula and I will be—she with her homemaker life, me with my damaged, empty one. There were few similarities in the past; our gatherings were always accessorized by wine or dinner, something to take the edge off. We never got together without something there to distract us. I wonder if we will clash in our sober adulthood and have made sure to bring a bottle of wine.

  When I pull up Paula’s driveway I check the street number twice; this house does not seem like her, with its pinky tone and garish lawn ornaments. Standing amongst the daffodils by the front door is a life-size silhouette of a man cut from black metal or wood. The dark figure is vivid against the pale house, like the shadow of a killer creeping across the flower beds. It looks so bizarre to me, this faceless, two-dimensional man amongst the yellow and green of Paula’s garden. It reminds me of my dream, of Montigue.

  I get out of the car and head up the paved walkway, then step up and ring the doorbell. I feel silly, like a stranger standing on her front step with a bottle of wine and the wedge of smoked Gouda tight against my chest. A cardboard cutout of eggs and Easter bunnies stares out at me from the glassed-in outside door, all baby blue and sickly sweet pinks. Suddenly the door opens and there is Paula behind the glass, with her expansive, thin-lipped smile and her wide, overeager brown eyes.

  “Hi,” I say.

  “Jenna!” Paula opens the door and we hug—a stiff, anticipated hug. “How are you?” She looks heavier than the last time I saw her, or maybe it’s just the outfit—the baggy canvas pants and thick embroidered sweatshirt. Her dishwater blonde hair is ragged-looking, trying to escape from her ponytail. I’m surprised she didn’t get dressed up to impress me—to compete the way she used to, and I’m glad I wore jeans and a sweatshirt.

  “I’m fine,” I say. “How are you doing?”

  “No, I mean, really.” Her face bows down, her eyes still looking up at me. “Are you okay?”

  Perhaps Paula wants to clear the air of Seth, get him out of the way so we can talk and be normal. Or so that she can have license to talk about men in general, which she inevitably will do.

  “Really,” I say. “I’m okay.”

  “Come in,” she says.

  I step up and into Paula’s front entrance, see striped wallpaper walls decorated with religion and art: a sad-faced Jesus on a jewel-encrusted cross, a frosted gold, recessed Virgin Mary, like a glittery Jell-O mold. Down the hallway there is framed art: a metallic-looking world map, a Norman Rockwell, and right next to me, a large wood-framed print of a farmhouse by the sea. This one is an original, with vivid detail in the tufts of grass that sprout from white sand.

  “This is nice,” I say. “Egg tempura, isn’t it?”

  “God, I don’t know,” Paula chuckles. “And don’t ask me who painted it, either. Some dude named C.K.”

  Back in art school Paula didn’t pay much attention to paintings. She preferred colorful graphics, the bold letters of advertising, and chose the precision of layout work to the meditation of drawing and painting. When it came to paintings I’d seen her match them to couch fabric or a patterned rug; I’d even heard her comment on the blue sky in a landscape, how it must match the nearest stick of air freshener. The muted, teal green of the ocean in the farmhouse painting does indeed match the furniture I can see just around the corner in the living room. Alongside it are four silhouette portraits of each Smith family member, a green-marble background with black inset. Black and featureless, like the silhouette in her yard.

  “That figurine in your yard,” I say. “What is that?”

  “You mean the Shadowman,” Paula says, motioning me to follow her to the kitchen. “Everyone’s got one.”

  I picture more of them in the neighborhood—perhaps I just didn’t notice, imagine them scattered on the lawns like militiamen. Like the man with the red hat next to my own lawn. “I’ve got a live one in my yard,” I joke, but Paula doesn’t ask me what I’m talking about.

  I follow her around the corner and through the living room, which reminds me of the waiting room at the doctor’s office back in Massachusetts, with its dull mauves and teal blues, all that brass and glass. We enter a bright white kitchen, where little Josh sits at the table with crayons and a coloring book, and baby Erica sits covered in pea-green mush in her high chair, slapping her fat, dimply arms on an oatmeal-scattered tray.

  Both of the children have small, marble-like eyes—more like Gerard’s, and low, pouchy cheeks. Erica smiles at me, but Josh looks up in a guarded stare, his crayon stopping on the coloring book page. I have no idea what to say as I bend down to Erica.

  “Well, hello there,” I say, my voice coming out lighter, higher pitched than usual, sounding silly. Erica’s face puckers, her mouth and nose caving in as if she just ate a pickle, her forehead and temples turning pink, then red at the edges. I wait for the cry but it doesn’t come. Paula breathes out a sigh of relief. “I hope I didn’t scare her,” I say.

  “She’s fine.”

  Josh still is staring, his fat crayon stuck on the page. His eyes are pried open, watchful of me, as if I am some kind of intruder, some adult monster. Or maybe he’s aware that I am uncomfortable around small humans like him.

  “Hello, Josh,” I try.

  “My sister only likes Daddy,” he says and slides off his chair, picking up his book and crayons and carrying them into the next room.

  “That’s not a nice thing to say,” Paula calls after him, but she is apathetic in her tone; she lets it go. “Kids are difficult sometimes.”

  She doesn’t seem like the same Paula from college: Paula the Party Animal, the one always wilder than me. But she is the same person—here with children, a full house, the delicate cross like Mom’s around her neck.

  There are no religious pictures in the kitchen, only four fruit prints that hang in a square arrangement above the stove. White canisters stand in rank along the fake white marble countertop, and matching creamer, sugar, and salt-and-pepper shakers gather beneath the cupboards. I imagine matching white handles on the silverware within the white drawers, and white Rubbermaid racks holding alphabetized goods behind the white cabinets.

  White.

  There is some color in here, though. A glass stands on the windowsill holding bright, open flowers—a marigold, two tiger lilies. It’s early for these; I walk over and inspect them more closely, see no water in the glass. They are indoor flowers—fake plants, like Mom’s. Until I was this close, I couldn’t tell the difference.

  “We gonna open the wine?” Paula asks.

  “Sure.”

  I wasn’t even sure if wine would be a good idea; so much has changed since our college days, our late-night talks over cheap white and red. I hand Paula the bottle and she opens it. I unwrap the cheese and slice off delicate bites of it, like I used to do when we first discovered such glamorous food.

  “So,” Paula says, “you were saying something about a man in your yard.”

  She was listening after all. Why didn’t she at least respond when I first said it, and put me on hold for a minute? I wonder. But that’s just like Paula, to assume others will wait for her. Something that hasn’t changed. “Yes,” I say, “there’s this guy I saw at the edge of the yard. He was just standing there, staring. He seems harmless enough.”

  “How do you know he’s harmless?” Paula chuckles, any chance to laugh at me. Her mouth is full of cheese, and she is refilling her glass already, so I gulp mine down and refill. I feel the tingle of alcohol in my head and neck.

  “I guess I don’t.”

  “How many times have you seen him?”

  “Just once.” I should probably downplay it; Paula will go on and on this way if I don’t change the subject soon. “Like I said, it’s probably nothing.”

  “Is he good-looking?”

  “Oh, please.”

  “Oh, please yourself,” she snaps.

 
“So,” I say, deciding to change the subject, “you pretty much know how my life’s been over the past few months. What have you been up to?”

  “I might be pregnant,” Paula says.

  I think of the same words coming from her mouth years ago. “You’re kidding,” I say.

  And I remember what followed—how she decided to go through with it, how she couldn’t see it any other way. But then when she finally got married and had the baby, she seemed to change. It was like she succumbed to something mysterious, something I couldn’t put my finger on. I never told Paula I was pregnant. By the time I thought about telling her it was too late and there no longer was any need to tell.

  “Hey,” Paula says. “Don’t get too excited for me or anything.”

  “No, that’s great,” I say. “Congratulations.” I want to be happy for her. I want to believe she’s happy. But there’s something weary behind her eyes; these babies that make her so happy are wearing her out. But then I could have ended up like this too—if my own baby was alive now and seven years old.

  “I’m not positive,” she says. “I need to take a test. But I missed my period two weeks ago, so I’m pretty sure.”

  “You’ll have to let me know,” I say and point to the wine glass in her hand. “But should you be drinking that?”

  Paula lifts her glass in a salute. “Hey, like I said—there’s no proof yet.”

  I watch Paula drink, watch as her eyes move to the window in thoughtfulness—hope, despair, whatever. What is behind those eyes? My brain floods with images—an egg, a seed growing inside, a tiny mouth and fingers forming, a twisted chord. Peachy skin and tiny, wrinkled eyes, crocheted booties and blankets, white cotton balls, white sheets. A bright light overhead.

  Blood.

  And suddenly I want to escape and go back to the house without babies where I can be close to Aunt Adeline—someone like me, who never had any.

  twenty-two

  The floor in my old bedroom is littered with newspaper flooring and rags, and the acidic smell of wallpaper remover permeates what little air there is, making the room seem smaller somehow. I feel claustrophobic, the way I sometimes felt as a child in this room, when I was sad or lonely or confused, or whenever my stomach got that tight, twisting feeling. I would lie on the small twin bed and stare up at the ceiling, thinking of how the room also had been Mom’s—how Mom had awaken to the same pine ceiling with the knots. For a few minutes, I would actually feel close to her.

  I open the shade and window, and the bright April Fool’s sun pours onto the wood floor. As I look outside I see the flicker of a shadow just beyond the tall hedge of budding lilacs and crabapples. There is a speckle of red, the flash of pale roundness—a face perhaps. It may be the strange little man in the yard, either him and his bright red blob of a cap, or the cardinal I hear each morning but never see. When I look out the window to the front yard, nothing is there.

  Under the thick skin of dust, the wallpaper is a brighter peach than I originally thought—an apricot, almost. The green beneath it is crustier, almost breakable, but with my chisel and Unglue Magic it peels off more easily. Still, I am careful, tearing from the bottom corner up.

  It’s coming off in strips and scraps. The pieces are sticky from the twenty-year-old glue, damp from the humidity that has seeped in between the bubbles and cracks. There are those odd square pieces of white beneath the green paper; I pry the chisel beneath one and pull at its corner. It comes right out—I must have torn it, but when I pull back the green and peach I see there is no more to this tiny white slip of paper. This paper was torn before it was put on the wall.

  I look closely, see how the paper is bluish at the edges, and with pale striations—perhaps ruled lines that have faded, blended with the white. Notebook paper, college ruled, with blurred ink that seeps through to both sides; it’s difficult to see on which side the ink is written. The letters are a smear of black ink, washed to a blur. But cursive letters, I can tell, seeing the curve of an S, a U, an M.

  summer, it says.

  I peel another piece of peach and the green stuck to it. There are more of these white pieces, the corners here and there, behind where the top layer is lumpy next to the warped seams. The wallpaper is coming off more easily now; the top layer is softening, loosening, and the green seems to come with it. One piece tears as I pull, leaving hair-like tendons at the edges, but I manage to not destroy the next one. A white sheet dangles from the wallpaper in my hand, begging me to remove it.

  The hint of blue lines across the page are more evident on this one: lined paper, for sure, perhaps stationery. The writing is wet and bloated, fat cursive, but it is clearer than the last. I hold it up to the light.

  miss you

  A note to someone, a letter of some sort. I search for more words, find two pieces that seem to belong together, each with a brighter, bluer pen than the last—two pieces with saw-blade edges like teeth, cut to match. They do go together—they do, because the letters are large and frantic and line up at the same angle, dragging the word parallel to a straight edge of page.

  Dear Renee

  My heart stops and sinks into my belly. Heat rushes to my forehead as I lean close to the floor to look at the words.

  Dear Renee

  This could be Aunt Adeline’s cursive, which I used to inspect on old notes, years after she died—the Christmas cards, the postcard from Hawaii. I always found her handwriting on them to be ragged, erratic, like this. If I were to look at those same notes now—knowing suicide would be her fate, I would examine them more closely. I would scrutinize the curve of each letter—the sweep of the “y,” the hard, frustrated crossing of the “t”— searching for some key to Adeline’s pain.

  She may have written letters to Mom, then regretted it. I wonder why they ended up here, under the wallpaper she put up just weeks before she died. Is this how her madness manifested itself? Is this another one of those things she left behind for all of us to see?

  Or perhaps not all of us. Perhaps in her secret insanity she bought the green wallpaper just to leave these notes, knowing Mom would live here one day and tear it down.

  There are many other white pieces to pull off—some in tiny shreds, some two-ply that I may not be able to pull apart without tearing. Many of the pieces I manage to pull off are so blurred with writing that I cannot read them. They might not be illegible if they weren’t so wet; perhaps if they were dry I would not see clear through them. I will try drying the pieces I’ve removed, lay them out in the afternoon sun of the floor. Then maybe later I’ll be able to read them, all of them, piece them together like a puzzle.

  If Seth were here he’d say these scraps were nothing but random pieces of paper. Old letters, yes; old notes, perhaps—but random notes merely here to fill cracks or to smooth out the plaster beneath. Maybe they’re Adeline’s, he would add, so as not to destroy all of my theories. Then he would smile and comment on my vivid imagination and how desperate I am for family history, for some kind of connection.

  ***

  I drive down to the arts and crafts store for more tools, eye the paints and chalks and pencils instead, the wonderful blank papers and canvases. These creative tools make me hungry to do my art again, but I know I’m not ready. I’m like someone on a diet eyeing the bakery goods, knowing it would be silly to buy them; the paints would go unused, dry up in the hallway closet. Or if I did use them, the paper would be dribbled upon, spilled upon—then perhaps stabbed. The paints would be thrown across the room. How I envy the other artists who are in here now, thriving on their ingredients, knowing they still can do it.

  I imagine myself dressed in a smock before a deep-angled easle, standing on the bare wood floor in the north light of the living room window, my hands conducting before ivory paper that is textured like a cobblestone street. The brush sweeps lightly, the paint flowing from my brush like a stream—absorbed into the weave wher
e the water hovers, swept away where it moves. I see leaves and flowers, the perfect points of petals and stamen, the reflective edge of a summer wave.

  Suddenly a young man is leaning over me, his breath like old coffee, his face pale and pimply, the hair dyed black. “Can I help you?” he asks.

  “Just looking,” I say, embarrassed, wondering how long I’ve been standing here, wanting to escape.

  ***

  At the farmer’s market I look at wildflower seed packets, notice they’re using photographs on most of them now, not like the old Burpee collections, the antique ones I have framed. There also are large bags of wildflower seeds—a variety pack, with healthy dirt thrown in. On the front of the bag is a photograph of the perfect garden, a wildflower Eden. But this batch of dirt and seeds came from a bigger batch of dirt and seeds, most likely. There could be anything in here; could all these flowers really exist in this bag?

  As I read the label I hear a voice and a name, coming from a young man standing a few feet behind me.

  Hunter Jones, he says.

  Behind a pyramid of metallic-red tomatoes stands an older woman with stormy-colored hair that is molded into a mound of waves. “He’s one of our boys, yes,” she says to a dark-haired man standing next to her, an Italian-sounding accent. “He’s working at the farm today.”

  “Will he be coming in?” The man is wind-burned and sporty-looking. “I’m a friend of his. We worked together last summer.”

  “They’ll be making a delivery today, yes.”

  As he walks away I approach the tomato stand. The woman is short and plump, with olive skin that is wrinkled but has a supple, mediterranean sheen. “Excuse me,” I say. “Did he say Hunter Jones?”

  “Yes.” The woman smiles, her lips full and rubbery, her ivory-blue teeth glossy in the overhead fluorescent lighting. “He and the other boys bring us the produce.”