What Burns

by Dale Peck

  In the car, Nathan had let her insult hang in the air for a moment (she, on the other hand, when he’d said it to her, had immediately thrown the printout of her story in the trash—a symbolic gesture, since they both knew the file remained on her computer). He’d closed his book and turned his phone face up and scrolled his way through his email or Facebook or one of the celebrity blogs he claimed he didn’t read; tapped out what couldn’t have been more than five words and laughed at his own cleverness and put the phone in the glove compartment and closed it. And then, a mile or two later: Abusus non tollit usum. Delivered in his Kosher-Canyon-by-way-of-Cambridge accent, consonants clipped but vowels just the teensiest bit nasal, as Paul said once (“Nasal” is a synonym for “Jewish,” Nathan told her, when Ellen told him what her brother had said, as if that hadn’t been the very reason why she’d tattled), and leaving Ellen with the damned-if-she-did, damned-if-she-didn’t choice of asking Nathan if he’d known what abuses-whatever-whatever meant before they got in the car, or if he’d just now culled it from Wikipedia’s List of Latin Phrases. By the time they arrived at Popham Beach they hadn’t been speaking to each other, and in many ways they never resumed the habit when they got back to Saratoga.

  Fast forward three years and here they were. Or, rather, here she was, at Popham Beach finally, but on her own. No family, no Nathan, no—

  No, she said firmly, cutting short the pity parade. No no no.

  She was about to head inside—maybe a shower would accomplish what Jackie’s coffee hadn’t—when a glint of light in the grass caught her eye. She smiled then, lingered a moment longer at the railing. The sparkle reflected off a sun-blanched soda or beer bottle—no one remembered which, if in fact any of the Baldwins had ever known. A good part of the family discussion around the vessel concerned whether it pre- or post-dated their tenancy of the Popham Beach house. Ellen insisted Paul had thrown it there when he was seven and she four, but over the course of thirty-plus years any memory of the incident had faded from her mind, and at this point she clung to her story solely for the sake of consistency. The bottle was part family joke, part family treasure; the fact that no one had ever trod across the protected patch of dune to remove it was less a testament to environmental ideals than to the fact that it provided an opportunity for the Baldwin men and women to act out one of their most beloved passion plays. At least once every summer, over an after-sailing before-dinner martini, Paul and their father (and later Nathan and Jackie’s husband, William) talked about rigging up some kind of telescoping Chaplin spike to fish the bottle out, maybe borrow the Wilsons’ pool skimmer, see if that would reach. But then Ellen and Jackie would protest, backed eventually by Paul’s wife, Lane, and Jackie’s girls, Chloe and Alison, little Paul always taking the men’s side, their mother abstaining in the kitchen. If the discussion hadn’t dissipated by the time Paul poured the adults their second martinis then Ellen would tromp to the bookcase and pull out the mold-spotted copy of Wallace Stevens and read aloud the “Anecdote of the Jar.” One of the men would point out that the object in the grass was a bottle, not a jar, another would object that Popham Beach wasn’t exactly the Tennessee frontier, but in the end Paul, first alone, later echoed by his son, would start chanting, Keep of the grass, keep of the grass: Lady Ellen was the Baldwin family’s keeper of the grass, and if Lady Ellen wanted the bottle to stay, it stayed, like the mislettered signs and unconnected phone jacks and bricks of salt in the cabinets.

  But Nathan, it seemed, wasn’t going to stay.

  The shock of it hit Ellen for the first time that morning. Not the ongoing series of spats and squabbles that had characterized their relationship since the beginning—and that she’d always rationalized as intellectually stimulating, a bit of barbed repartee to keep the fangs sharp or a way of venting steam so the pressure didn’t build to an explosion—but its simpering end, no less surprising for being totally predictable. The pain was physical and sharp, like a Chaplin spike in her gut, so violent that she actually hunched forward, spilling cold coffee over her fingers. She flung the remainder of the liquid in the grass (a twinge of guilt, followed by a twinge of don’t-be-ridiculous-Ellen) and went inside to get a rag to clean the deck planks, but as she passed the old leather sofa in the living room she sank into it (a flash of the summer it migrated here, jutting out from either side of the car’s roof like a bicorne—her father’s image, natch; the three children posing for a picture up top like the Beverly Hillbillies—also her father’s idea, surprisingly). She pulled the sofa’s dustcover around her shoulders. The radio was broadcasting something melancholic, neoclassical, Britten maybe. No, Barber, that goddamn Adagio for Strings. She could feel the musicians’ bows slide across their cellos and violins as though they raked over her own arms and legs. It had felt a little like that last night, incredibly painful yet almost sickeningly elegant too, as Nathan eloquently eviscerated the past ten years of her life. With the same passionate yet rational lucidity with which he might have flayed Milton’s “Lycidas” or Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” to one of his by-invite-only seminars, Nathan had outlined the death of their marriage, detailing the “insurmountable barriers” to their “renewed happiness,” not the least of which turned out to be Lucy Watkins, a visiting writer who’d been teaching an oversubscribed poetry workshop for the past three semesters, and sleeping with Nathan for nearly as long. With an almost horrific sense of detachment, Ellen noted that Nathan spoke for exactly fifty minutes, at the end of which he headed for the door with a brown leather suitcase only slightly larger than the valise he carried to and from the classroom. The idea that Nathan thought he could vet her from his life in the same space of time he might devote to the hog-slaughtering scene in Jude the Obscure so infuriated her that she snatched the car keys from his hand and took off herself. By reflex she grabbed her purse from the table in the foyer, but that was all she had: no clothes, no books, none of the papers she was expected to hand back, graded, Monday morning.

  The Adagio ended. There was a respectful pause, as if in remembrance of the war dead, and in the second of silence between the final decrescendo and a male voice overarticulating, That was Sam-u-el Bar-ber, Ellen heard a faint call through the open doors:

  Todd, you motherfucker!

  She almost laughed, instead started coughing when she inhaled the dust trapped in the blue-ticked sheet wrapped around her shoulders. Wearing the dustcover like a cloak, she made her way back to the deck. Four male figures in wetsuits were walking south down the beach. Three of them carried boogie boards and one held a long white surfboard under his arms, across his back, so that when he turned toward the ocean he looked (no other simile would do) like an angel with outstretched wings; another, noticeably rounder than his three companions and lagging behind them, carried a big white cooler slung over one shoulder. From this distance it was difficult to tell the walkers’ age—they could be thirteen or thirty—but from the messiness of their hair and the slight aimlessness of their gait Ellen thought they had to be teenagers. Townies, of course. It was too late in the year for weekenders. Their pale faces sat atop their black-suited bodies like lanterns, and occasionally one of them would stoop over something on the beach and exclaim Ew, gross! (perhaps it was the thing that smelled so bad, Ellen thought, catching another whiff of it) or would pick up a pebble and clock one of the others. She assumed they were pebbles—either that or the fat boy was an actor flinching from laser beams that would be added in post. The fat boy, Ellen learned, was the one who’d called Todd a motherfucker when he—the fat boy, not Todd—called Michael a bitch. Michael was the boy with the surfboard. Ellen watched until the fat boy’s roly-poly form disappeared behind the sharp cut where beach met bluffs south of the house. Her inner teacher told her it was wrong to mock, but really, the tubes of flesh inside the boy’s wetsuit made him look like a rubber chew toy.

  When she turned to go back inside she saw, just to the right of the French doors, a plastic yellow cat food dish. A few
grains of sand lay in each of the dish’s double compartments, and one of them was also encrusted with a dried brown residue. The dish had been tacked to the deck’s planking, which smacked of her mother’s thoroughness. Ellen could picture her mother coaxing some tent-shouldered tabby or calico onto the deck with a bit of leftover steak; and then the cans of cat food flashed in her mind. If she knew her mother, she wouldn’t have stopped there. She’d have bought the animal a flea collar, taken it to get its shots, had it spayed or neutered. It was just how her mother did things. When Ellen was eight, Mrs. Baldwin had once made her husband turn the car around an hour outside of Worcester and drive all the way back home so she could post a birthday card she’d left on the table in the front hall. The incident was legendary in the Baldwin family, even though the identity of the recipient of the card, like the provenance of the bottle in the dune grass, had long since been forgotten. There was a right way and a wrong way to live your life, her mother always said. Call it the corollary to her father’s core Baldwin belief, the praxis to the theory: you might only be able to understand the present through an understanding of past and future, but you could only experience it by going about your business as if time didn’t exist. Ellen supposed the current buzzword was mindfulness, or maybe it had passed on to living in the now—she heard both terms at least once a week in yoga, something else she’d done a lot of the past three years—but her mother just called it paying attention (although put a couple of drinks in her and she started calling it living in a way that let you know she didn’t think too many people knew how to do it as well as she did). It was a philosophy that had driven each of the Baldwin children crazy at one time or another, yet none of them could deny that their mother was not only successful but happy. She’d managed to hold onto her job at a Boston-based publishing company through two decades of mergers that made it part of the third-largest multimedia corporation in the world, only to resign after being asked to edit the self-serving autobiography of a tobacco industry executive; and she’d held on to her husband as well, a semi-retired professor of American history so disinvested in the now that the Baldwin children were convinced he’d written all of his second and wildly unsuccessful book (Pottery Without the Wheel: The Technological Successes and Failures of Native North Americans) at the dinner table. But, as Jackie had once observed, their mother never seemed troubled by silence on the part of a conversational partner. If anything, she preferred it.

  Ellen bent down now, flicked the little plastic dish. It responded with a timpani-like sound. The pale red polish on her nails, she saw, was cracked from six hours of biting at them on the road last night. The gnawed polish chastened her a little—a vile habit, her mother always said, painting your nails—but the dish hurt more. It had obviously been a part of Popham Beach for a while, and she had not. In fact, she’d only seen the family twice in the past year, at Christmas and at Easter, and the latter only because it coincided with Skidmore’s spring break. It had been Nathan’s idea they go, she remembered now—and then he’d gotten sick the day before the trip. Well, she supposed she knew what sick meant. And now look at her: bending over a cat food dish and flicking it with nails as chipped as the potsherds on her father’s shelf and wearing a dustcover as a housecoat—which, she saw when she looked down, was soaking up the coffee she’d spilled a few minutes ago.

  Sighing, she walked to the kitchen to rinse the sheet out, then dropped it in the washer instead, peeled off the stale-smelling clothes she’d driven up in and dropped them in as well. She set the machine to cold so her bra and undies wouldn’t come out pink, added soap, then let the lid fall closed with a bang. The washing machine was old and filled slowly, hissing loudly as though steam instead of water bled into the tub. After a few minutes the hissing stopped and something inside the machine clicked—Ellen could feel the ratchet’s pop in her right hand, still resting on the washer’s lid—and then the whole machine began to vibrate wildly as the drum and agitator began spinning. Jackie and Paul’s children loved to clamber aboard the washer when it shook like this, as the Baldwin children had loved the quarter rides in front of the A&P when they were young, but it wasn’t until Ellen smiled at the memory that she tasted salt and realized she was crying. Why now? was one of the few things she’d managed to say to Nathan last night. You said it’s been going on for a year and a half. So what made you decide to tell me now? For the only time the whole evening Nathan’s oratorical skills had failed him. Lucy . . . she’s . . . His mouth couldn’t give shape to the words but his hands did, holding it there like a sack of flour in front of his belly. No, Ellen had to admit. Not a sack but a pillow, a beach ball—something light, unburdensome, comfortable even. Nathan had shrugged then, but it was a hard shrug, as if he were shirking off his momentary wavering. It’s due in March, he said. I want this over by then. I want it to have my name.

  Ellen, naked, shivering in the cold kitchen, laid her head on the rattling machine as if it could shake the sobs from her, and it did. She could hear her wails over the machine’s rattle, feel its enameled surface grow slick with her tears. She sobbed and punched the hollow machine as if it and not Nathan had taken from her the illusion of her marriage, the possibility of bringing her own child to Popham Beach and holding his or her hand as they waded into the ocean, listening to his or her screams as the washer bucked him or her—it!—to and fro. She allowed herself a neat eighteen minutes of squalor and then, when the washer clicked again and fell silent, so did she. Beneath her cheek something sighed as the water began to drain from the tub, but Ellen felt dried out already. She stood up and wiped her face. She noticed the chill in the kitchen again, noticed also that she was naked. Jesus Christ, she said out loud, glancing through the open doors to the deck and the grass and the beach beyond. She wrapped her arms around her chest half in modesty, half in warmth, trotted upstairs to the bathroom and cranked both handles of the shower all the way open. The old pipes spat first, a little air, a little rust, and then a flood of clean warm water cascaded out of the oxidized spigot. Water and water and water, she thought, stepping into the tub. The ocean, the washer, her tears, the first two somehow producing the last. And now the shower, to wash her tears away. Water, water everywhere. Ellen stood under the warm stream for a good twenty-five minutes, not washing, just spinning slowly and letting the water erode what it could from her back, her breasts, her left shoulder, her right, imagining her body whittled down to a bony pillar, a cross between one of the hoodoos up the beach and the kaolin pipe in her father’s study. When the water started to go cold she turned it off and toweled herself dry and combed her hair, located in Jackie’s closet a blanched blue sweatshirt embroidered with a frayed golden lobster and, in Paul’s dresser, a pair of institutional gray sweatpants—the institution was Harvard, though the crimson H had long since abraded away—then headed downstairs to hang her clothes up. On the way out of Paul’s room she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror, sweatshirt sleeves pushed to her forearms, sweatpants rolled above stubbled ankles. Good god woman, she said, flashing her nails in the glass to reveal—revel in—the full horror. You look like a townie.

  Downstairs, the clothesline drooped off the summer beam like Christmas garland, and as Ellen pinned her things up she remembered the day her father had first told her the name of the massive wooden joist spanning the house’s central axis, studded here and there by rusted iron hardware still bearing the imprint of the hammer blows that had pounded it into shape almost two centuries earlier, along with hooks and bolts and O-rings that could have held oil lamps or cast-iron kettles or a person. A fucking bondage lover’s dream, Paul had quipped, but the story Ellen preferred was the first one, the day she’d learned the beam had its own name. This wasn’t a story like the story of the bottle in the dune. She could picture the event clearly, hear her father speak to her in his lecturer’s voice. Summer, from Old English sumter, meaning “pack animal” or “saddle-bearer”; or, alternately, sommier, the French for “rafter.” She’d been eight
; her father had stood on the three-legged milking stool she stood on now; and as she handed him one piece of wet clothing at a time he told her how the house’s post-and-beam construction rendered it a hollow shell whose only internal support was the summer beam spanning its width and, Atlas-like, shouldering the entire weight of the second story. Without it, he said, the house would collapse in on itself. Ellen, a little confused, a little distracted by the ickiness of handling grown-up underpants (or maybe, though she was loath to admit it, simply preferring her own version of things), had thought her father was referring not to the wood above his head but to the shaft of cathedral sunlight pouring through the leaded-glass window behind him. The light seemed solid, and it was easy to imagine that it held up the sleeping Baldwins in their bedrooms the same way a few grains of sand and strands of grass held back the ocean. Even after she’d realized her error (or conceded her folly, she might confess after one of Paul’s martinis, or two), she persisted in thinking of the summer beam as both insubstantial and solid, and later that year, when she saw shafts of Jesus light pushing through dissolving clouds over Popham Beach and the vast ocean beyond, she thought all of Heaven must rest upon those summer beams as on stilts.