Harriet Doerr (16 page)

Elizabeth interrupted. “How about the Mannings and the Scotts?”

Mr. Elby collected himself. They faced one another on the road, the level rays of the declining sun still bright on Elizabeth’s left side, Mr. Elby’s right.

“The Scotts, they’re gone. Haven’t seen the Mannings or the Millers or the what’s-their-names, the ones who had the boy that liked dogs. Seems like he always had a stray tagging after him.”

Mr. Elby was speaking of Billy Morton, and Elizabeth already knew what had become of Billy. His parents were among the friends she hadn’t lost.

“Do you remember the time you shot the skunk from that window?” She pointed to a corner of the house.

Mr. Elby flushed with anger. “I never shot a skunk,” he said.

Silence fell. Elizabeth picked a leaf of rosemary from a bush gone wild at the edge of the lane. She and Mr. Elby moved out of the way of a passing car. The driver waved and turned into the Potters’ drive.

“Another teacher,” said Mr. Elby. “Wait till the old wiring blows a fuse.” His voice grew firm in anticipation.

“I wanted to go up to the cabin,” Elizabeth told him, and corrected herself. “Up to where the cabin used to be.”

“I guess you heard about the fire.” Mr. Elby shook his head. “Some of these kids ought to be run in.”

Elizabeth rolled the rosemary leaf between her fingers and smelled it. Immediately, all her relinquished summers were restored, the ones before Greg, the ones with Greg, with one child, with two children. The cabin, built quickly and cheaply, had been a firetrap all along, she supposed. It was simple good luck that the place burned with no one in it. Even so, as she thought now of the sand between the children’s sheets, of the hermit crabs surviving overnight in jars, of the shells in a bucket and the sage in a glass, of the intimacy and isolation of the raw wood structure, Elizabeth suffered a pang. All four of them had been so young. For a second, looking backward, she believed she remembered exactly how it had felt.

But Mr. Elby was thinking about the fire. “These kids,” he said. “Do yours take drugs?”

“I’m not sure,” Elizabeth said truthfully. The sea shone silver blue between the pines. “I have to go now. I have to get down to the beach.”

Mr. Elby nodded, as if wanting to be on the beach was always reasonable, in any season, at any hour. “It’s low tide about now,” he said.

At the moment of parting, she remembered to ask, “How’s Mrs. Elby?”

“She’s gone.” Mr. Elby pulled his bicycle out of the honeysuckle. “It’s been seven years. Seven or eight.” His eyes began to water. “She’s in that new cemetery.” He gestured to an unseen location behind the hill. “Seems like I can’t keep flowers growing on her grave. The ground squirrels get them.”

His voice was shaking. Without saying goodbye, he mounted his bicycle, wavered, righted himself, and, sitting taller than Elizabeth would have thought possible, pedaled out of sight.

 

 

Half an hour was left before sunset. To save time she took a shortcut down the hill, through the canyon that was littered with eucalyptus pods and bark. At the intersection of Seaside and Pine, the business block on the west cast shadows halfway across the main street. Elizabeth tried to skirt the drugstore without being seen, but Mrs. Nye, on the lookout, tapped on the plate glass with her pen. Elizabeth turned back.

An apothecary jar, filled with amethyst liquid, stood as it always had in a curtained alcove to the left of the door. The changeless display of dark glasses and sand toys crowded the window to her right.

Inside the store, Mrs. Nye examined her through both the upper and lower lenses of her bifocals. “You’re looking pretty good, Lizzie. You’re young yet.”

Mrs. Nye had trapped her new permanent in a beaded hair net. “Are you back to stay?” she asked.

“How could I? Someone’s burned the cabin down.”

“No one burned it down,” Mrs. Nye said. “There was a brush fire up there.”

“I guess Mr. Elby forgot.”

“You’ve been talking to Bert.” Then Mrs. Nye, as though the month were June, carried a beach umbrella to the window. “Bert Elby hasn’t been the same since his wife died. Sometimes he can’t tell the difference between now and the year before last.” She passed Elizabeth a carton of chocolate bars and unwrapped one for herself. “They had to take his gun away after he mistook a kid’s loose hamster for a rat.”

Elizabeth supposed Mr. Elby was eighty. It was harder to tell about Mrs. Nye. She was one of those women, double-chinned and sane, who, once past fifty, never change.

“What did Bert tell you?” she asked Elizabeth.

“About everyone dying or moving away, the Scotts and Mannings and Mortons. I forgot to ask about the Potters. He spoke about college professors who live in the houses.”

“The Lord God sent those professors to keep us going,” said Mrs. Nye. “They don’t pack up and get out on Labor Day.”

Elizabeth deciphered the time from a wall clock painted over with a clipper under sail. “It’s late,” she said, and edged away. “I have to see the beach again, while there’s still light.”

Mrs. Nye stopped her. “Wait a minute,” she said. “I want to tell you what’s what.”

Leaning over the counter between twin pyramids of sun oil and shampoo, she brought Elizabeth up-to-date.

“Mrs. Scott’s here now with her grandson. Mrs. Manning came down in August with her nurse. The captain’s been gone a long time. Mr. Si Potter’s dead. His car hit a tree on a straight piece of road in broad daylight. He always did drive too fast.” Elizabeth had a second to think, He must have meant to die. Mrs. Nye passed the chocolate bars again. “Annie Potter, that friend of yours, comes once in a while with her two kids. When the marriage broke up, they split up four kids. He got two and she got two. She rents the loft over the Millers’ garage.”

Elizabeth, fleeing further news, had reached the door. She said goodbye. “Thank you for the candy,” she said, as she so often had in childhood. Her foot was on the sidewalk. The shadows of the stores had stretched across the road.

But Mrs. Nye had more to say. “You probably heard about the Morton boy. Hit when he was riding his motorcycle on the freeway.” She paused to remember Billy. “Whenever he came in here, he left some dog or other barking outside the door for him.”

Elizabeth stepped onto the sidewalk. Sunlight was fading from the roofs on the hill.

Mrs. Nye called after her. “I forgot to ask about your kids.”

“They’re fine,” said Elizabeth. But the children were thousands of miles away. She had no proof.

“And that Greg you married?” Mrs. Nye looked sharply at Elizabeth. “Are you two still married?”

Elizabeth nodded. “We live in Mexico,” she said, offering the remark as an explanation of anything and everything Mrs. Nye might want to know. She imagined Greg at tomorrow’s conference, in a room with tall windows, a French chandelier, and a tilting parquet floor. Behind him pressed the starving millions.

“What does he do?” called Mrs. Nye.

“Hungry people,” Elizabeth called back. She waved and walked into a gust of salt air.

Before arriving at the wooden stairs that led down the bluff to the sand, she had time to wonder if anything she had just heard was true. Mrs. Nye had made at least one mistake. Billy Morton didn’t die on the reaches of pavement of Interstate 10. Seven months after his high school graduation, he was killed in an ambush in Vietnam. The brief obituary named his parents as survivors. There would be no services, the paper said. Gifts to the Humane Society were suggested.

At the top of the steps, Elizabeth clung to the rusty iron rail. The Humane Society! she silently exclaimed.

 

 

The sun, round and huge and orange, was only inches above the horizon. Elizabeth left her shoes on the lowest step and walked barefoot toward the water across a gleaming landscape of wet sand, passing the exposed piles of what remained of the pier. She stood at the ocean’s edge while shallow waves rippled in and left circles of foam around her feet. Twisting, she looked back at the hill. Once it had been easy to see the cabin from here. She imagined she saw the chimney now, a blackened square against the sky.

Life on the hill had not been flawless. Elizabeth vaguely recalled the occasional tears of children and slammings of adult doors. But the immense peace of the place drowned out these events, leaving only a shimmering calm behind. Under its protection, summer days could scarcely be told apart and ran together. So that, even while being lived, they had seemed eternal.

From where she stood now, Elizabeth had watched another sunset fifteen years ago. Then she had a child at each side, with the shadows of giants lengthening behind them. Not far away, Greg talked to a lifeguard, who was scanning the surf with binoculars. A boat had capsized that morning, and two fishermen were missing. When seaweed drifted against Elizabeth’s foot, she started. She had expected a torn sock or the sole of a shoe.

Aside from that, it had been an evening much like this one, of singular perfection. Like now, the final second of the day hung on a sliver of sun. Sandpipers had tracked the margin of the sea. The lifeguard’s binoculars had tracked the breakers.

Now Elizabeth felt a sudden thudding on the sand. A few feet behind her, a solitary jogger ran north. Fifty yards farther up the beach, a boy carrying swim fins walked out of the waves and headed for the steps. She supposed he was Mrs. Scott’s grandson, aged about sixteen, lean of build and badly sunburned, his wet hair plastered to his face. Elizabeth saw him smile as he came near. Then his happiness spilled over, and he spoke.

“How about this?” he said. “How about it?” Turning, he lifted his hand to the sky, the shore, the water, her.

Sometimes in Mexico, summer rain can be seen falling, all at one time, on isolated patches of the landscape. This is selective rain, wetting the chapel in one village, the train station in another, a long empty stretch of highway in another. When these contained showers are distinguished against the mesas, people say, “It is raining in sleeves.” A sleeve for Jesus María, a sleeve for Guadalupe de Atlas, a sleeve for every village and farm, if there is any sort of order at all under the skies.

Lately my memory, like those storms in Mexico, has begun to rain on me in sleeves. Today, writing at my desk on a March afternoon in California, I am deluged, without warning, by the contents of such a sleeve. All the houses I’ve ever lived in are raining down on me.

Three of them, destined to be objects of lifelong passion, were places that I knew by touch. My childhood sleeping porch, for instance. Long and narrow, it had been built onto the exterior of our house as the number of children multiplied from one to eight. Three cots, set head to foot in single file, entirely filled the porch. At the far end slept my oldest sister, Liz, at her feet the next oldest, Margaret, and finally, third in line, came my bed, with me in it and my hand against the redwood shingles.

Now, falling from memory’s sleeve are three small girls with only a wire screen between them and wind, hail, new moons, and shooting stars. They breathe in the dark and cold, bound by blankets to hard mattresses, a chamber pot beneath each bed.

But why the hand on the shingled wall? Even now, seventy-five years later and possessing at last the long view, I cannot say whether I touched the wood to claim the house, to establish a connection, or simply for the sake of the shingles themselves, to feel their texture, to smell forest. I can resurrect them at will. I touch and smell them now.

Below the sleeping porch lay a garden, the nighttime province of gophers, frogs, and an occasional skunk. But when Liz was seventeen and had a party, Margaret and I watched shadows cross the lawn and listened to stifled laughter, urgent whispers, and an occasional silence so intense we almost heard it.

“They’re necking,” said Margaret, and together, two unseen, uncensorious witnesses, we moved closer to the screen.

For a better view, we looked down from the banister at the top of the stairs onto the heads and shoulders of dancing couples. “Moonlight on the Ganges” played a trio of piano, saxophone, and drums. “It Had to Be You.” Boys we knew, pretending adulthood in starched wing collars and black bow ties, gathered at the living room door.

“Stags,” said Margaret, and we gazed as, dancing in and out of the arms of these boys, girls drifted in pale chiffon with artificial flowers at the hip.

Margaret pointed to Allie Riggs and Babs Perth, two of Liz’s friends observed through the wide threshold to be sitting on a sofa just inside.

“Wallflowers,” said Margaret.

A few boys brought flasks and, at the height of the party, disappeared at intervals into the garden shrubbery.

Margaret said, “Bootleg,” and we continued to peer down as dancing couples began to Charleston. The band played “Ain’t She Sweet?”