Cape Cod Noir

SPECTACLE POND

BY LIZZIE SKURNICK

Wellfleet



Albert was going to clean out the house. This had been decided weeks ago by his aging aunt June, although if you asked Albert, which it was unlikely anyone would, the circumstances that sent him—not his older brother Mark, or even Mark’s nineteen-year-old only daughter Ludi, whereabouts undetermined—from Queens to Cape Cod had been set in motion decades before, perhaps by his and Mark’s dead parents, or even, Albert suspected, when Aunt June’s husband Travis first bought the house as an investment property, then decamped immediately for parts unknown.

As June rattlingly related to Albert from Horizon Wind, her active seniors community in Charlotte, North Carolina, in the last three years his older brother had joined an actor’s collective in the Appalachians—although on more precise details she was spotty. In the wake of his wife Susan’s tragic death, Albert had made a habit of calling June every two weeks. When she moved to Horizon Wind, he drove down to Charlotte to help carry the few treasured possessions—June was not one to treasure—from her ten-room Larchmont Georgian. Then June rebuffed his offer of one last nice dinner out. Surrounded by new social possibilities, like a gawky teenager in a college dorm, his seventy-three-year-old aunt was vaguely mortified, he realized, by his presence.

Ludi’s coordinates were less certain. After the accident that killed Albert’s wife, she returned to her mother; how often Mark had visited the girl during this period Albert did not know. He himself descended into a stinking waste of bourbon for a few years, abetted by a job that required little more effort than showing up. No one was riding a telemarketing firm’s accountant. Yet it was partly his money that, years later, allowed Ludi to debark from her small liberal arts school in New Hampshire to communicate, Albert understood from June, primarily with her father only by the occasional phone call or e-mail from abroad. June too claimed she was the recipient of a stray postcard from Barcelona or Kharkov, although Albert was dubious. But despite the improbability of the situation, despite the fact that the girl throughout her life had been removed from their family’s orbit for jarring and indeterminate periods of time, June had always claimed Ludi as her own.

The house ex-Uncle Travis purchased on Chequessett Neck Road in Wellfleet was not beachfront property. Set back in scrubby pines, it was enclosed in near twenty-four-hour darkness that Albert, clutching a small overnight bag and a paper tray of clam strips he’d purchased on Route 6, was relieved he could find.

The patch of bare needles they called the driveway was a ringing, chill silence. During the summer, that road had enclosed them in sleepy, chattering darkness, like voices from a party in another room. In late October, the air was a wall built to expel intruders. He approached the screen door, hoping, though the catch had been broken for at least twenty years, he might find it locked.

Travis bought the house before Mark and Albert’s parents died in a train accident. June handled this well. The boys were fourteen and fifteen, she reasoned, not five. Albert remembered standing by the grave after the funeral, feeling that he should ape June’s matter-of-fact behavior, click-clacking in mourning black out the door to the funeral home. She’d arranged a double ceremony with black coffins Mark said looked like cannons. Albert heartily shook everyone’s hand until June took him aside and placed him on a chair near the door.

Inside the house, Albert put his bag down and flipped on the lights. The sepia floral sconces seemed defeated by the redwood walls. Even from across the room, Albert could see the skinlike layer of dust covering the green couch. June had seemed confident that he could simply remove her personal items, give the house a scrubbing, and hand the keys over to a realtor, who would sell the place for enough money to keep her at Horizon Wind for another twenty years.

Albert didn’t doubt the house would sell, but he understood now that a simple cleaning would not suffice. During his bourbon months, he had seen “staging” makeovers on home improvement shows. This place was in such disorder it would be faster to empty it, have it professionally cleaned, and let the buyers, who would certainly knock it down and build one of the new sandboxes lining the road anyway, have it for cheap. June wouldn’t like it, but she would have no choice. “You have to forgive, Albert,” she had said when Susan died. “We’re family, and you have to forgive.” Now, June would have to forgive too.

Albert remembered the loop of summers. First, the beach at Newcomb Hollow, then Long Pond or Great Pond, followed by sandwiches from the Box Lunch, and lobsters—when June allowed—grilled by the porch. He and Mark would run on the bay side, by the house, where they once, at low tide, tried to swim across to Indian Neck Beach. June shouted until they gave up halfway, returning in slimy bay silt.

Rainy days, they went to Provincetown. This, in the 1970s, was truly the land of the “boys.” Mark stared openly. Albert was ashamed—not for himself, but for the men, whom he obscurely felt needed his reassurance. Later, in college, he realized his reassurance was not needed in this or any other areas. June had started to rent the house during the high season and go to Boca. Mark began a series of wanderings from California to India to South America, which even Albert knew enough to dismiss as the check-off destinations of their generation.

When he was in his early twenties, the family began spending Augusts at the house again. Albert married Susan. But Mark had a child. Aunt June liked Susan, yet seemed faintly astonished that Albert had a managed to get a wife at all, as if he’d suddenly revealed a secret mastery of the grand piano, or invented the Post-it. Mark was friendly to Susan, but when was he not? He was so friendly that he had brought home girlfriend after girlfriend from the time Albert was seventeen, culminating, around the time of Albert’s marriage, with a black woman named April.

April was a tall and somewhat forbidding professor of English. Always a little distant, always a bit apart. Albert could never tell whether this had to do with character, intellect, or was simply a defensive reaction to his strange family. There was June, a distracted, wizened chain smoker; the birdlike, chattering Susan, incapable of not flirting with Mark, whose appeal to all women Albert had long since accepted. Albert had difficulty gauging his own presence. He would have liked to think of himself as a comforting figure, calm and self-contained, but in her two Thanksgivings and one Easter with the family, April had barely said two words to him. She had a son from an earlier marriage whom they never met, and shortly after giving birth to Ludi, she kicked Mark out, only releasing the girl at Mark’s insistence after a year.

Given free rein, June revealed a maternal nature that had heretofore found no avenue for expression. Ludi, at age two, had a face like a beautiful smudge, almost a thumbprint of itself, and June delighted in pulling her black silken hair, which April had delivered braided, into soft pigtails that helped frame her gap-toothed grin. Those summer years, in Albert’s memory, seemed almost a constant series in partial visibility: Ludi in profile, bent over with a book in June’s lap, or departing, held aloft in June’s arms, head on the middle-aged woman’s shoulder.

Once, when April was living in New York and Mark was held up somewhere on unspecified “business,” Albert and Susan picked up the girl to drive her to the Cape. Albert was shocked at her surroundings. He’d pictured April in a bohemian but charming area, someplace in the city that would be new for him and Susan, different from their three-bedroom in Forest Hills. Instead, deep in Brooklyn, it was the kind of neighborhood where playgrounds were made of steel piping and concrete, as if to emphasize their durability. There was charmless green paint over all the streetlights.

“I have her bathing suit in her bag,” April said pointedly. Last year, it had been nowhere to be found, a brief matter of contention when Ludi was returned with a pink flowered bikini Mark had picked up in a roadside shop.

“She’ll have a wonderful time,” Albert said, grasping the girl’s hand. Ludi seemed to know him, looking up with a smile. He was shocked to find himself rocked with a wave of protective affection. He squeezed her hand and Ludi forgot immediately who he was. She ran to the car, where Susan opened the door to welcome her with outstretched arms, then waved to April.

“She’ll have a wonderful time,” he said to April again, who was looking at him skeptically. She had aged very little but looked far less happy—unsurprising, Albert thought, if she had been brought low enough to live in this place. Mark’s bootless wandering certainly couldn’t have been contributing to the household. Albert thought again how stupid a name Ludi had been to give to the girl, a play on Liudmila, a favorite character of April’s from some Russian novel. It was one of the many crimes his absentee brother had helped visit upon his daughter.

“I’m sure she will,” April said, making to close the door, then paused. “Tell Mark I say hello,” she added carefully. It was always hard to grasp the essence of any couple, but for Albert, April and Mark were harder than most.

In the morning, Albert awoke and immediately felt glad of the silence and the lack of tourist traffic, which would make it easier for him to get the furniture hauled away and clean the house. He fished out one of June’s phone books from under the filigreed, fake wood counter. It was ten years out-of-date.

He decided to walk into Wellfleet. The Bookstore Restaurant, where he and Mark had once fingered stacks of overpriced vintage comics, was closed for the weekend, as was the small ice cream and candy stand at the end of the dock. Galleries had begun to spring up on Water Street toward the center of town, but Albert was not moved to examine them. It was the kind of thing Susan had liked.

The summer she died, she had taken to making flowery observations about the region, hauling out maps to show a now-gawky Ludi that the ponds—Great Pond, Gull Pond, Long Pond, Spectacle Pond—looked like fingers, as if God had pressed His hand into the damp ground and let the impression fill with mud, then water.

Albert had wondered whether Susan thought of these things in advance to announce to the girl, or if they sprung from her on the spot. Toward the end, it seemed a kind of mania, to be so lyrical about everything. Put it in a poem, he felt like saying. Once he had actually said it. Ludi and Susan had spent the weekend writing just such poems, and when Mark returned Sunday from wherever he had gone, he had them framed. This was exactly the type of item, Albert assumed, June wanted removed before he handed over the keys to Chequessett Realty.

Susan’s death was an accident. Albert was told this, in the moment, so frequently, with such calm assurance, by so many faceless authorities, that it was only when he had roused himself from grief, and then paralysis, that he found to his surprise he could nominally agree.

Mark had not been drunk, or returning late from one of his trips, or any of the many things it would have been easier to blame him for. He was picking up Ludi from the parking lot of the Great Island Walk. She was allowed to take the hike partway alone, now that she was fourteen.

Albert and Susan had gone on this very walk with Ludi many times, although they seldom made it to the end of the three hunchbacked mounds that stretched out to the ocean. Ludi liked to haul herself over to the oceanside a mile in and pick through rocks, even when she was old enough, Albert felt, to be beyond such things. At least she had stopped examining hermit crabs. It was not uncommon for Susan and Ludi to gather a pound of unvariegated shards and give them to Albert to carry up the dirt-cut stairs when they were done.

That summer, relations between Susan and Ludi seemed strained. Albert had chalked it up to Ludi’s adolescence. He noticed it particularly on a trip to Provincetown the weekend before the accident. Instead of raiding jewelry shops with Susan, Ludi stuck close to Albert. He would have thought she’d take interest in the drag queens who had begun to pop up in abundance, but instead she was fascinated by the lesbian couples, especially the biracial ones.

“Why do you think so many of the girl couples are black and white?” she asked Albert when Susan, after many unsuccessful attempts at conversation, darted off to find a bathroom.

It may have been the first serious question Ludi had ever asked him, and he was surprised to find himself with an answer. “I guess after you cross one boundary, it doesn’t matter if you cross another one,” he said.

Had this hurt the girl’s feelings? It was only later that night that Albert remembered Ludi herself was biracial, something he knew, of course, but had failed to associate with the girl. At fourteen, how sensitive would Ludi have been?

Susan returned from the bathroom and linked her arm with Ludi’s. “There are all kinds of families,” she told them. “All kinds of different constellations.”

Albert hadn’t known she was listening. Maybe she was referring to their own childless state. That summer, their lovemaking also bloomed into a kind of mania, Susan frantically assuming new positions, climaxing so loudly he’d shushed her once or twice, afraid she would wake up June or the girl. Was she, at thirty-seven, desperate to have a baby, or had she abandoned the idea, and was trying to make do with what was left?

“You just like to come,” she accused him. It wasn’t untrue. He couldn’t decide a position on children either, and was happy for Susan to lead the way. Then, around the time of the trip to Provincetown, Susan relaxed, a catlike smile spreading across her features. It was in this mood that she approached Albert and Ludi, and it was probably the same mood in which, not long after, she ran out to greet Mark and Ludi as they pulled into the parking space.

In the slight wood surrounding the house on Chequessett Neck Road, around four o’clock every day, a sharp needle of light appeared as the sun set over the bay, sliding to midpoint on one of the larger trees until it was eaten by the dusk. It was this needle that hit Mark directly in the eye and blinded him as he pulled in with the car. Three hours later, Susan was dead, and another twelve hours after that, the coroner told Albert that his wife had been seven weeks pregnant.

Albert was weeping. He wasn’t sure why he’d thought gathering the paltry leavings of his scattered family wouldn’t set him off, but it had been a long time since he’d cried for Susan, or any of them.

There was a picture of Ludi’s graduation. The sight of the girl—now tall, almost obscenely comely, with ripe lips and languid, sleepy eyes—made Albert draw back with physical distaste. Since Susan’s death, he hadn’t seen her. Ludi looked both like Mark and like her mother, who had elected to attend the ceremony in a different portion of the seating and take Ludi for a dinner with her friends the night before.

He placed June’s few wall hangings and prints in a box, then pulled a stack of photo albums off the bottom of a bookshelf filled with paperbacks he would not bother to save.

He knew what was in the albums. On rainy days, when they were teenagers, he and Mark would look at pictures of their parents: his mother’s high school graduation photo, with the black velvet sweetheart neckline over her shoulders; the wedding photo; some early shots of the family on the lawn of their house in Edison, New Jersey; his baby picture and Mark’s. At some point, June had added a series of Ludi to the album, and Albert was shocked to see how much she resembled his own mother also, of whom he rarely thought. How strange not to remember one’s childhood. But Albert was beginning to feel that, in his case, it was more a matter of failing to pay attention. His life—his attentiveness—seemed to have begun only at his parents’ death, and culminated with Susan’s. Perhaps that’s why Aunt June had backed away from him, and Mark, who had maintained a decent tether throughout their twenties and thirties, absented himself completely. Perhaps Albert’s lack of attention was prescriptive.

He was cramming a stack of maps into a garbage bag when he realized they were the ones Susan and Ludi had used to write those poems so long ago. He took the sheaf of poems, now removed from their frames, and placed them carefully in a neat stack. There were odes to Long Pond, Great Pond, even Indian Neck Road, some in Ludi’s careful, halting hand, and the rest in Susan’s confident, round script. Spectacle Pond: You can barely see the forest for the trees. That was Ludi. This road leads only one way, but the sand leads two. Vintage Susan. Where else would the sand be but on two sides, on the Cape?

He turned the poem over.

All my love, Your Susan, it said.

Susan was the one who had wanted to go to Spectacle Pond. “It’s the only one we haven’t seen,” she’d said.

Albert knew Spectacle Pond. It was barely good for swimming, just two flat rounds of shallow water off Long Pond Road. He had been there once as a teenager with Mark, who found it beautiful. Albert preferred Great Pond, which by that age he had mastered swimming across.

The road to Spectacle Pond was not paved. It was deep, hardened mud, and several times Albert had to back the car up to keep the tires in the grooves. “I hope you like it,” he said. There was no answer, and for a moment he felt certain that Susan was restraining herself from telling him to shut up.

At the pond, there was no proper beach, only the same gaping mud, stringy with reeds. “Come in, darling,” Susan said to Ludi. “It’s creepy,” the girl replied. Finally, she joined Susan in the center, where Susan held her, as if she were still two years old. “Look up!” Susan urged, pointing at the enclosed circle of sky. “Isn’t it beautiful? From above, it looks like eyes!” On the shore, Albert heard Ludi either snort or murmur something like agreement.

Ludi had refused to step in the other pond. “It’s exactly the same!” Susan exclaimed. “That’s what I mean,” Ludi said, her voice filled with that quiet Albert had only begun to learn, in children, meant terror. “Go wait in the car,” Susan said, suddenly impatient. “I’m going to go under, and so are you, Albert.”

How angry had he been as he waded out into the water and dunked his head? He couldn’t remember. He only knew that when they returned to the car, Ludi’s face floated out at them, ghostly, accusatory. She was in his seat. “Don’t be afraid,” he said.

All my love, Your Susan. On the back of the poem that Mark had had framed. He looked at that a long time.

But Ludi hadn’t answered that she wasn’t afraid. She had said: “I can drive.”

He could see them, even now, as he walked by the bay, hovering over his wife, June emerging from the house, cigarette in hand. Was there any chance she hadn’t known? It seemed unlikely. She would have colluded immediately, as would Ludi, who, after all, would only be continuing in her mode of silent and opaque adolescence. By the time Susan was in the morgue and her death dispatched as accidental manslaughter, Mark had disappeared with the girl. June had, with relief, seen her younger nephew off. Now he understood.

Now he understood a lot of things, all the signals that he’d missed. Such as Uncle Travis’s departure, for instance, which had coincided with the arrival of two teenage boys, or Mark’s abiding distance, which seemed less a rejection of his younger brother than a rejection of their relations at the core. They had known—they had all known—and not only had they not protected Albert from their knowledge, he had barely figured in their calculations. Even Susan, no blood relation, still carried more weight in his family than he.

It was dark. He left the house. He was in Spectacle Pond, staring at the water, in the far pond, where Susan and Ludi had looked at the sky. His stomach rose before him like a white moon.

No. There was the actual moon, a delicate, high-set orb, stars twinkling all around it like the crystal earrings Susan often picked off the black velvet trays of vendors in Provincetown. His own stomach was a slab of green cheese, buoyant, like the half-eaten Styrofoam below a float.

He was surprised to find that he was crying again, tears running down his face in hot straight paths. When Susan died, he had cried for years, it seemed—for the first months, vast bellowing gasps of bewilderment, and then a stretch of shamed whimpering that emerged while he was waiting in line at the grocery store or standing in an elevator.

These tears were different—less bewildered and more astonished, as if he had suddenly learned he was adopted, or born on a distant planet. As if this world was the distant planet. This was, he supposed, the moment when he was meant to give up, to leave his corpse, his white bloated body, washed up on the needled shore. Or maybe he could seek out Mark, and gun him down in the middle of a performance of Our Town. Then he would track down Ludi in whatever hovel she was in, remind her of the many dinners Susan had cooked on her behalf. For a moment, he saw himself dragging her into a cab, shouting orders as some Spanish boyfriend gesticulated in the distance. Albert had never been to Spain.

He was not going to do any of these things. The black sky over the pond was a lid, he suspended in its jar. Through a conflagration of circumstance and other people’s will, he was floating alone two miles from a dark small road smack in the center of a barely peopled peninsula, with nobody to know or care. He was not angry or murderous. He was lonely, merely lonely—or at least, he thought, lonelier than anyone like him had right or reason to be.