Clouds piled noiselessly at the horizon, waiting to glove the sun. Dark shapes shrouded the warmth of the cliffs, sucking at the land, following the reaching and retreating of the waves. Shadows. Sheddos. Was that the spirit of men? I watched the dodging of light and dark on the sand around me. First you get it, then you don’t. See a window open, take a leap, get off the fence! Good girl, Leslie, you gave it a shot! So what if you mess up, you judge again. But don’t judge once and hang forever on the fence. Or else you stay an amoeba, oozing painfully into a dark, close and slippery place. The Land of Sheddo. Sheddos. Not just the spirit of men.
I walked faster. One, two, three, four, went my feet. I strode to the lapping of the water, its spidery froth foaming at the tips of my shoes. A golden retriever bounded in the distance, sailing and leaping for a ball. The yellow-green speck shot skyward, and smack—although you couldn’t hear the sound—it landed, bobbing in the waves. Again and again, the dog galloped forward, rushing into the breakers, paddling for the ball. I drew closer. Dogs could be so silly. Good-natured fools. They put up with the lawsa without a single bark. I watched the retriever clamber from the waves, fur dripping, water striping the ends of each tuft like a layer of runny molasses. And then up in a yellow arc the ball would be thrown again.
Thwack. This time it was a pebble, glancing off the stones to my right and tumbling to rest in the sand. I looked up at the lifeguard tower.
“Sorry,” said a dark-haired man, leaning over the rail. “I wasn’t trying to hit you.”
I smiled, moving a few steps closer to the water to continue to watch the dog. Somebody once said that I was like a golden retriever—at least the way I ran. I had never thought of golden retrievers as runners, but there was something about the way they moved—hair flying while they were in space, legs splayed like slow motion—that was kind of like me, or more like the way my life was, maybe. The frame-by-frame freezing you saw on the screen in the soaring of a peak moment … or a disaster. I shivered. It was as though somewhere there was a camera, stopping each frame of Leslie in midair, saying, Look, Leslie! Take a look! Segment by segment. Good and bad. The episodes. The retriever bounding up … and then frame-by-frame bounding down. I had never understood the comparison. And now, although it scared me a little, I liked it.
And suddenly I remembered who made it. When I first met him, Paul Reiter and I had gone to the beach for a run and he had sat down to rest at our towels while I continued on. As I jogged back a little later he said the thing about the golden retriever: “Boy, Leslie, with the tan and those strong muscles, you look like a golden retriever!” I had frowned. I thought it was an odd comment: retrievers were those smiling, bouncy dogs, furry and even kind of aimless, and the way I ran, I was convinced, had to be a lot more focused and directed. Anyway, that was what Paul had said. And now it was so strange to think of Paul.
Thwack. I looked up. It was a very little pebble, from the faint click of its sound.
“Hey, I’m really sorry,” the man said. “That one was an accident.”
There it was again, the word hey. He had a line of pebbles on the rail of the lifeguard tower. I shot him a doubtful little smile.
“I notice you’re watching the dog,” said the man.
I nodded.
“You like dogs?”
I shrugged. “No, not really.”
“So what do you find so interesting about the dog?”
The golden retriever was squashing water out of the ball as he ferried it back to his owners. “He walks sideways,” I said. “I guess all dogs do. Look at him. He’s moving forward, but his legs are going sideways a little.”
The man flicked a pebble way out across the sand. It landed just as the clear water of a lapping wave reversed and slid into the ocean. “That one was deliberate.”
“Why do you throw stones?” I asked.
The man shrugged. “I don’t know. Habit, I guess.” He stared at the dog leaping after the ball. “Well, it’s become habit. When I was a kid, my grandfather used to take me to the ocean. He would pick up a handful of stones and toss them onto the sand, one by one. He was counting his blessings, he told me. Each pebble was something he liked about his life. I thought it was kind of neat.”
I thought about that. “It is kind of neat,” I agreed. The man had dark brown hair that stood up on the back of his head in the breeze that blew up by the lifeguard tower. He had big hands, big and dry and open, and was wearing a dark blue sweatshirt. He had no sunglasses and was squinting into the sun.
I talked to him for a little while, and then I walked home.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Verse I
Dear Diary: He came to the beach that day. I really didn’t know if he would. I had seen him walking by the ocean a couple of times, and each time we had stopped and talked for a while, and he seemed all too nice, very open and friendly and calm. “Do you walk here a lot?” he had asked. And I said, yes, I do; and now that it’s getting so much warmer, I’m going to be spending even more time on the beach. I like to read and be by the water and run and walk. “That’s nice,” he had said, “I like to do that, too.” He was from northern California; he was working on a masters degree. He was selling real estate to get by.
I wondered about him sometimes, when I got home. Would this become a habit—running into this person every couple of weeks? And what was he like away from the beach? You know in the first four minutes, Larry had said. We had spent more than four minutes in the times we had talked, but it was always the same four minutes, more or less. A developer I once met at a party had told me that he only dated women who knew who Mario Cuomo was. I wondered if the dark-haired man on the beach knew who Mario Cuomo was.
He didn’t strike me as someone who might be in real estate. He seemed much too easy-going and introspective and calm. I know I said that before. Calm. It could be a danger signal—the fact that he was calm. I had seen him once or twice, more like twice, or maybe three times, and we both stopped and talked for a few minutes, mostly about the weather, and once we were looking at the surfers and I asked him if he knew why surfing was almost exclusively male, and he raised an eyebrow and looked into the sky like he was thinking and he said that he didn’t really know, but he agreed—surfing was almost exclusively male. Was it upper-body strength? he asked, turning to me. And then he laughed and said that maybe it had something to do with centers of gravity—that men might have one that made them look better on a surfboard. And I thought about that and said, yes, maybe women have too much weight in their hips and it makes them have to squat. And he looked at me again and laughed. But it wasn’t a nervous laugh or a too-loud laugh. It was a good laugh. I can’t really explain it any better.
And then the last time I saw him he said, “Hey, I always seem to run into to you when I have to go somewhere or you have to go somewhere. Do you want to meet at the beginning next time, instead of the end?” I thought that was a weird way to put it, but I said, okay, when? and we agreed to do it the following Saturday, at three. I remember the way he dropped a pebble from the handful he carried as he asked, “How’s three?” and I said, that’s fine, and then I heard the clack of another pebble as I walked off.
Acknowledgments
I am deeply grateful to Natasha Kern, Dorothy Wall, Martin and Judy Shepard, my parents and my friends—all of whom contributed in separate and wonderful ways to the creation of this book.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1993 by Sofia Shafquan
ISBN: 978-1-5040-28
63-9
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