No wonder Aunt Charlotte was so skinny. All day she snacked on bananas and crackers and little cartons of yogurt, and at supper she picked around the edges of her meal and kept refilling her wineglass. She ordered her wines and had them delivered in cases. The store on our island had a deli with salads and cold meats and kept a spit going that roasted chickens all day long. So far we had not risked shrimp again and I didn’t want to be the first to suggest it.
At our shared meals, she gamely dredged up things to talk about. I could feel her reluctance to probe into my past. After downing several glasses of wine, though, she loosened up a little. What had she done when she ate her suppers alone? There was an old TV in the kitchen, she had probably watched it. Or just sat comfortably, enjoying her solitary life and sipping her wine.
She saw me staring at the TV and asked if I would like to order cable. “I can get old movies and the networks, but maybe you and your mother had other favorite channels. Should I look into it? All the neighbors are already hooked up. I’m the last holdout.”
“Mom and I never had cable. They had it at the foster home because the state paid for it. There was this two-year-old boy who sat strapped into his little swing-chair and watched it all day long.”
“Is that a yes or a no?”
“Only if you want it.” As this sounded rude, I added, “I mean, I can do without it if you can.” One less expense to take out of the trust.
“Look, Marcus, we’re both new at this. If there’s anything missing here, something you’d like to have to make the summer go faster, you need to tell me. I won’t know otherwise, I’m not a mind reader. Would you like to have a look at those boxes waiting in the garage, or is it still too soon?”
“Maybe it’s still a little too soon.”
“Well, you set to work on them when you’re ready. School starts at the end of August. You’ll be with people your own age. These days won’t last forever. No days ever do, though sometimes it’s hard to convince oneself of that.”
IV.
At night, the tides washed in and out. I did not think I would ever get tired of that sound. It felt like the watery part of the earth taking regular breaths in your ear. Thud-wash, thud-wash, never stopping, doing its job with the same rhythm as millions of years ago when the little loggerhead turtles were waiting to hatch and begin their race for the sea. (“It’s their Normandy,” an old-timer on the Turtle Patrol told me, “only in reverse.”)
My mother had slept in this room before she was my mother. Her young head, like mine, had been divided from the ancient tides by a mere cottage wall and a few dunes. Where had my critical grandmother (“Brenda”) slept? Now that I asked that question, it seemed likely she had shared the bed with my mother while Aunt Charlotte slept in her studio. When Mom used to tell me how nice it had been to lie in bed and hear the ocean so close, I had always imagined her alone in the bed. But maybe she had adapted her memory of that night when telling the memory to me. As someone who had slept all his life with his mother, I could identify with that. Whenever I was telling my best friend, Wheezer, about a dream I’d had, I pictured an alternate vision of myself alone in a bed, the way Wheezer, who slept alone in his bed, would naturally be picturing me.
That is, until the unlucky day he came to our apartment and found out the truth.
My shoelaces were tied this morning and like the straight-flying pelicans I had a goal: Grief Cottage. In my backpack I had my lunch and a bottle of spring water. Aunt Charlotte reckoned it would take me about forty minutes each way at a normal pace.
“When I first moved here I was in an ecstasy of freedom. I hardly touched the ground, my first year on this island. I was in my early thirties, which may seem decrepit to you, but I had never had so much energy before in my life. Nobody could tell me how to live anymore; nobody could criticize me or lay a hand on me. I spent all my savings on a beach shack. It was even named Rascal Shack. The young scions would gather here when they wanted to get drunk. It didn’t even have an indoor bathroom when I bought it.”
“What is a syon?”
“Offspring. Usually meaning the offspring of privileged families. You put a ‘c’ after the ‘s’ when you’re writing it. S-C-I-O-N. When I first came here I walked to the north end of the island every day. Forty minutes each way. The walk north was exactly the right distance to make me walk out of myself. And then that desolate cottage at the end, falling in on itself and all its secrets. What better spot for sorting through the debris of my own history?”
“If you walked out of yourself going north, what did you do on the return walk?”
“Enjoyed my emptiness. Or sometimes just congratulated myself for escaping.”
“Escaping what, if it’s not rude to ask?”
“Escaping the kind of life I’d always felt trapped in. But that’s another story. Do you know, Marcus, it was Grief Cottage that started my painting. One day there was someone else in my lonely spot. This person had planted an easel in the sand and was painting the cottage. At first I assumed it was a man but when I got closer it turned out to be a woman in a hat and trousers. She was a cheerful tourist, staying for a short time, and I watched her mix her colors. It was fascinating. It was a competent little painting; I could see it hanging on a wall and pleasing someone, though she had missed the mood of the place. I could do that, I thought. I bought some paints and some canvas board and a book called A Beginner’s Guide to Landscape Painting. It took me a while to figure out how I could capture the mood she had missed. But first I had to teach myself the most basic painting skills. Later I borrowed books from the library to see how the masters had done their skies. Constable would spend hours sketching clouds and skies. He called this practice his ‘skying sessions.’ ”
“Constable?”
“John Constable, English. Late eighteenth, early nineteenth century. Look at his skies up close—he loves approaching storms—and you realize clouds don’t have outlines. He works them up from within. Clouds are brushstrokes. Constable is the king of clouds.”
Today the rising tide had covered the spot where I had seen the mother and the little boy yesterday afternoon. By afternoon the waters would have receded again and maybe the happy pair would come back. Perhaps they had their own family routine in one of the beach houses behind the dunes. Was a father with them, or was he somewhere else, or was he one of those secret fathers nobody gets to know about?
I was walking up closer to the dunes because of the incoming tide when a neat white dump truck stopped alongside me. A sunburned man in shorts jumped out and gracefully upended a yellow trash barrel into the truck’s bin. “Disgusting!” he called to me over the sound of the waves. “What people will put into these things!” Without waiting for a response, he asked where I was headed. When I said I was walking to the north end of the island he said, “I’d offer you a lift but it’s against regulations. I could lose my job.”