There’s an Amtrak station in town, not too far from the beach. A half mile, a quarter mile, I don’t know. I can’t say. Just on the other side of the sand-strewn beach parking lot. It’s small, a waiting area and the ticket booth, with a few bike racks that remain empty at this time in the morning. There isn’t even a john. The train passes through a couple times a day heading one of two ways: Grand Rapids—eastbound—or Chicago—westbound. Today it’s eastbound, the Pere Marquette to Grand Rapids, Michigan. I’ve never been there before.
The station is quiet when I pass by on my daily morning trek to work, only a couple riders climbing on board for the two-and-a-half-hour ride. Another stepping off, having just arrived from Chicago. They carry duffel bags and suitcases in their hands. Some have hands that are empty, just a purse strung over the shoulder or the wallet in the pocket of their jeans. It’s a short commute either way, the kind you can pull off, round trip, in a day. There and back again in the very same day.
And that, it seems, is just what Pearl’s done as I watch her drop down the large steps of the Superliner and set foot into town.
Again.
She’s gone and come back again, and it seems that I’m the only one who knows.
Turns out, I’m none the wiser for it, though I can’t help but wonder why.
*
I wait all morning at the café for her to show.
The day is generally quiet. The morning crowd—a word I use loosely, crowd—is made up of old folks mostly, those who don’t have to scurry off to work or school. In time they disappear and are replaced with the school district’s bus drivers who, in time, disappear, too.
And that’s when Pearl appears.
It’s all as it was the day she first arrived. She stands with poise, waiting for a table, and then, when it’s her turn, asks for a spot by the window, out of which she can watch and stare, taking in Dr. Giles’s office across the way, the few, random pedestrians who come and go up and down the street.
I surveil her as she peels the scarf from around her neck and removes the hat, setting them both on an empty chair to her left. She shakes out of a coat and drapes it over the back of her chair, and I think to myself: Don’t stop there, imagining the way that on the lake’s shore she stripped down to her underwear. But of course she does. She asks for coffee when Red arrives, sits in her chair and crosses her legs at the ankle, the Ugg boots wet as if she’d been foot-slogging through the lake all day. There’s sand on them, too, wet sand, adhered to the sheepskin like burs.
Red is a big girl, her arms squashy like bread dough, a chalky white that’s been hidden from sunlight by a cheesecloth towel, the yeast inside making it rise. Her voice, her mannerism, everything about her, is raunchy and crass. And then there’s the smell of her, something along the lines of feet, stinky feet, a miasma of feet. Her thighs rub against each other as she walks, overlapping.
But then there is Pearl, the antithesis of everything Red is, whether or not she’s as mad as a March hare. She’s older than me, but that doesn’t matter these days. Five, maybe ten years older. Enough that she carries a poise and finesse about her that most eighteen-year-old girls don’t have.
But not too old that it’s weird for me to stare.
As Red passes by again, Pearl orders her meal. Her voice is quiet, nothing more than a whisper. Red leans in close to ask what she said. From where I stand I tune out all the other noise so I can hear Pearl’s somnolent voice over the chaos of the café—the ding of a cash register, the opening and closing of a door, hushed music coming from a CD player. It’s not that she’s shy. No, that’s not it. Instead, it’s an act of diplomacy, a subtlety, tact. Not screaming over the noise, because that would be crass.
Red disappears to shout the order to one of the short-order cooks—her voice all gritty and gravelly like someone who smokes too much, which, like Braids, she does, the two of them teeter-tottering outside all day on their rotating smoke breaks—while Priddy gives me the death stare, telling me to get to work. Talk about ironic. Sexism is what it is. I’m being harassed. I should sue. And yet, I return to wiping tables down, swiping the dirty dishes off and into a dishpan where they plink, glass on glass, silver on silver.
The November sun blazes through the window as it so often does around this same time every day, at noon, crossing over the meridian at its highest peak and right into our space. I watch as patrons’ placid faces begin to glare, eyes squinting, hands on head as if in salute, blinded by the light.
If it weren’t for the sun I wouldn’t have approached the window in the first place. But I do, crossing the room to tug at the strings on the Venetian blinds, lowering them just enough to keep the sunlight at bay, and yet not restrict Pearl’s view of the street. That’s the last thing I want to do. To take away her view. I know how much she likes it, staring out the window, monitoring Dr. Giles’s office from here.
It’s her shampoo that I smell first—or lotion, maybe hair spray, how the heck would I know?—some sort of blend of grapefruit and mint that stings my olfactory receptors. Truth be told, it also makes me weak in the knees. I’m not one to swoon. But this time I do. My hands tremble, glassware jiggling in the dishpan so that I set it down so nothing will break. I wonder to myself if she could be the woman, the ethereal figure, living at the periphery of my dreams? The one who comes to me at night and begs of me, Let’s go...
“I’ve seen you before,” she says as I approach, her words halfhearted and meandering, her eyes never looking at me.
Is she talking to me? I look around to be sure.
I’m the only one here.
She says it again, different this time but still the same. “I saw you the other day.”
“I know,” I say, my voice flickering like a lightbulb that’s about to conk out and die. A tiny voice inside my head reminds me that I’m a chicken. A loser. A pansy. The closest I ever get to beautiful women are the nudie girls from magazines who live in my closet so that Pops can’t see. I’ve dated exactly three girls in my life, not a one that lasted for longer than two weeks.
“By the beach,” she says.
“I know,” I say. “I saw you, too.”
It’s the best that I can do.
From behind me, I hear a little boy’s mother tell him to sit down and eat. I turn to see. As he leans across the table to touch his mother’s hand, she pulls back quickly, and snaps, “Don’t touch me.” It’s emphatic, the way she says it, a proclamation that reminds me of my own mother. Don’t touch me, Alex. But this mother’s words come with a postscript. “Your hands are covered in syrup,” she says, handing the boy a napkin.
My mother never told me why she didn’t want me to touch her. It was simply, Don’t touch me.
“You could have said hi,” Pearl tells me then, drawing me away from the memories of my mother. Her eyes run this time from down to up, taking in my black gym shoes, my cheap pleated work pants and uniform shirt and bow tie, and I think, What do I say to this? All logic would have me ask why she was swimming in the bitter cold lake in the middle of November. Why she didn’t have a bathing suit, a beach towel? Doesn’t she know about hypothermia and freezing to death? Frostbite?
But that would be lame.
“Do you have a name?” I ask instead, trying hard to play it cool, and she says, without ever once looking at me, “I do.”
And then I wait, on the edge of my proverbial seat, for her to tell me what it is. I wait so long that I start to form ideas in my head: Mallory, Jennifer, Amanda.
But then her food arrives—Red elbowing me out of the way to get through with the hot plate—and just like that she starts to eat, staring out the spotted window at pedestrians on the street, completely incognizant of the sun in her eyes or me, lingering a half step behind her, waiting for a name.
She has a name.
But she doesn’t tell me what it is.