Playmate
We stayed in the Uber during the ferry ride. The driver sweated and kept looking at me and Grace in the rearview – but he didn’t try to banter. My daughter and I give off an air of self-containment, I suppose. Something about us does not invite conversation.
Her shorts were too short. She kept lifting herself and pulling down the hem. We’d been in cars and planes all day and I hadn’t noticed until now.
“How’d you get so tall all of a sudden?” I said.
Grace looked down, her thick hair shifting onto her face. I tucked it back behind her ear and she smiled, but it was that long-suffering smile I cannot bear.
I sighed and looked out the window. All the nearby cars were empty, the passengers gone to the deck or the little concessions area, trying to make the most of the ride.
“This ferry used to stop at the little island too,” I said and caught the driver’s eyes in the rearview.
Did he know anything more than I did? He only squinted.
I said, “There’s a bridge, but it might be down for good by now. But there used to be a man who rented little boats….”
“What are you saying?” said Grace.
“That there might not be a way to get where you’re going,” said the driver. He let out a tortured sigh.
There was a way, though. We drove through town and out in the country ten miles or more, circled around a bit, and finally found the bridge. A crooked line of orange cones blocked one lane, but there were no workers and no signs. I watched sweat roll down the driver’s forehead and felt the vinyl seat slick under my legs. Grace had stopped fussing with her shorts. She was limp, done for.
A rocky, curving road came next and then a smoother road overhung with trees. The air felt cooler.
“I always thought this part was so beautiful,” I said. I’d never taken Grace home to see my people, not once, and I was ashamed of that. There was no great falling-out. We’d just been busy.
And my mother had never called me home before.
I think Grace wanted to ask if we were almost there. Instead, she said, “It’s pretty.” What did she think of this place? All the fanciful tales I’d told of it, she must have felt she’d come through a portal into fairyland.
The road pitched up again. We saw water below us – and the stark pale beach.
“The house is right down there,” I said.
But it wasn’t.
We drove the low road parallel to the beach, drove it twice. The two dozen houses that had stood there were missing. They hadn’t left holes like you see when houses are moved, not rubble like you’d see after a tsunami. Fences still stood, trees and bushes stood. The places where houses had stood were just low piles of dirt, or mounds of uprooted beachgrass, cast gravel, or nothing at all.
I was crying. I had a feeling of fate, of doom.
I was thinking of a hand made out of sand, a child’s hand reaching up out of the ground and taking my beach toys away. Was that one of the stories I’d told Grace? It was hard to say, now, what I’d made up and what I’d lived.
“What happened? Was it a storm?” the driver said.
“Maybe you lived on a different road,” Grace said. She touched my shoulder, and I leaned away.
“There are no other roads,” said the driver, who was looking at his phone.
“But she called me,” I said.
“Who?” said the driver.
“My mother. She said the power was out, but she called from the big island, from town.”
He pulled over, finally. “What do you want me to do?”
I tipped him well. All the time I was getting our bags together, Grace was up in my face saying, “Let’s go back with him. Let’s just….”
Go back to our little life?
My mother called me home after all these years. I wasn’t turning back.
The car waited a long time as we walked the beach road, then he left. Yes, it was hot. I hid our bags in a blackberry thicket and went on, feeling unhinged. Grace was wailing by then.
We walked the road again and again. Our legs began to ache.
I stood in the spot where I swore the house had been. I’d described it to Grace so many times. I didn’t have it wrong.
Without warning, all the memories came back. Playing outside with the other children who lived on this street. An image of a little dust devil sprang to mind, and I pushed it back. A sharper image of a child’s hand cast in sand, gripping on to a red plastic spade.
Most of my time here was just playing on the beach and hiking up into the…I looked up toward the green hills and caught the glint of glass in the trees.
“Is there a house up there?” I said.
“I don’t think…” said Grace. Her eyes were better than mine, but she was a skeptic. She always said no first. Maybe one day she would be sorry she’d lived her life that way.
“It is,” I said.
“No,” she said, and then after a moment, “yes.”
* * *
I knew it once we’d gotten to the base of the hill. Not a house but my house – the house where I was born. It had been repainted sometime, a mossy green with raspberry trim. I remembered it yellow and white. Well, it had fit with the beach and now it fit with the hills.
Our clothes snagged on berry thickets and shoes scuffed against the rocks. By the time we met the door, we were drenched and raving with thirst. I couldn’t speak for Grace, but my head throbbed. Even then I saw the signs of wrongness. The house had been moved – impossible enough on this
island – but how had the house been moved?
It was recent. The shreds of vine that had pulled up with the deck had not yet lost all their green. I tapped at the door.
It all felt too surreal, like a death can feel, like a noonday dream.
I tapped the door, and it swung right in. The house was that far off level. The floor was sloped and broken.
“Hello?” Grace called.
I couldn’t speak. “Mother?” I tried to say, but no sound or air came out.
We saw straight through the house – it was that small – straight through to the kitchen windows. The forest moved beyond them like a quick breeze on fur. Something shifted against the wallpaper inside, but it was too dark, and it was all beyond me anyway. By then, I’d fainted.
* * *
I lay on the bed, my mother sitting on one side of me and my daughter on the other.
Mother bent down to hug me and kiss my cheek. A strange waft of vinegar, or was it wine? Standing, she said, “I shouldn’t have called.”
Her face was more haggard than I’d expected, but the light made her seem warm and welcoming. I focused past her to the dresser, where perfume bottles and beaded necklaces were displayed along with my baby picture and Grace’s most recent school photo. Everything was so real and mundane. There was nothing outside the window, only sky. We might have been back at the beach except for the sounds. No music of surf. Different birds too, and something more.
I clutched my head.
My mother smiled and left the room.
“There’s something wrong with her,” Grace whispered to me.
I rose. “Mother?” I called, suddenly panicked that she’d disappeared, but she rushed back from the kitchen with an aspirin and a warm can of beer.
“No water. I’m sorry,” she said.
A rumble came like an earthquake, and Mother eased us down to the floor. A deep, dark shadow fell across us and then passed. Mother hushed us with her finger, and when she took her hand away from her face, she was smiling broadly.
“What the fuck was that?” said Grace. She was flat to the floor, and Mother helped her ease up. The ground still rumbled, though it no longer felt so urgent to stay low.
“It’s a…giant, I suppose,” said Mother.
And I knew before she said.
“Your little playmate, you remember?” said Mother. “She grew all at once. A week ago, maybe? It was all a big mess. I didn’t even know what was happening. But she asked for you, in her way. She wanted you back.”
The rumbling hadn’t stopped. It was slighter now.
“You’ll see her soon. Look out the window,” said Mother.
Grace began crawling toward the window.
“No, don’t,” I said.
“I want to see.”
Mother said, “I thought she wiped them all out. I didn’t mind. But last night, after she put the house up here, I got out on the roof, and all along the hills I saw candlelight in windows. I think a lot of people were spared.”
“Oh my god,” said Grace.
“Get away from the window,” I said. I couldn’t move.
“Remember you used to talk about her? No one believed,” said Mother.
“I see her, all of her,” said Grace.
“Please,” I tried to say, but my throat was too tight. I barely breathed, and so all I could do was hear:
Gunshots, a deeper rumble.
Distant screams, the sound of a house dashed against rocks.
My mother – quite drunk, I realized now – was saying, “She’s like the wind, I think, but magnetic. She calls things
to her. Makes herself. Sometimes she’s sand, and sometimes she’s trees and rocks, like now. But never water.” Mother laughed, an awful drunken cackle. “We thought she was afraid of the water. Isn’t that funny? We thought how good she’d never leave, because she wouldn’t—”
“But you were wrong,” said Grace.
Mother only laughed. Maybe she would never speak again.
The window where Grace watched filled up – and it was beautiful – it filled with an eye. The tree forms of the hazel-colored iris were made of uprooted trees and earth and strands of moss and beachgrass, the narrowing pupil the black rocks of the cliffs, the whites were our soft pale sand, and over it all hung a glassy orb of water. Enough to fill a pool.
“She controls the water just the same as anything else now,” said Grace.
Paralyzed as I was, terrified as I was, I marveled a moment at Grace’s calm and her swift intelligence.
The eye was gone, and Mother still laughed. She began to sound like she might vomit.
“Come,” Grace said, beckoning toward me. “Come see.”
And I did. I crawled, uphill it seemed – the floor had shifted again. I crawled to the window and saw the giant still full-bodied, very far from us, only for a moment. Like a statue chiseled from the cliffs and grown over with ferns, she stood still. It seemed she stared at me.
I caught the rubble of the cast-down house and looked away quickly, back at her.
She’d turned. Her steps were light now. We didn’t feel them.
“I know what she’s doing,” said Grace.
I didn’t, and then I did. She was heading into the water. Her toes came apart when they touched it. We saw the rocks and trees and earth crumble and float.
Her ankles came apart as they met the water, her calves, her knees.
“I can’t believe this,” said Grace.
Mother had stopped laughing. I didn’t turn to see her. I had to watch the giant.
When her hips fell away, she paused. She dived forward, and yes, there was a great splash that should have killed everyone. It didn’t quite reach us, though, so far up in the hills we were.
Every Day’s a Party (With You)
Morning goes like a dream, just a nice hunk of quiche and a coffee with my favorite person. Frost and Christmas lights wreath the diner’s dark window. We lean in and whisper because the handsome mystery man is stealing glances at us again from his booth in the back of the room.
“Looking at you,” she whispers, her breath all warm and coffee-bitter.
“No, you,” I say.
It took a long time to find my best friend, but I’ve found her. Gloria. She’s divorced like me. She has a teen daughter like me, though her Mira is away at school.
Her song plays – that Laura Branigan song – so low you can’t make out the words. I always thought Gloria was a name for a blonde, but my Gloria’s colors are Snow White’s. Her perfect little nose is red from her walk over here.
The handsome man stares again and we whisper, we giggle.
The song’s changed to that one that goes, “Every day’s a party with you, with you.”
“So how’s Char been?” Gloria asks.
I sigh. “Not so bad last night, really. The other day she called me a monster, though. ‘Mom, you’re a fucking monster.’ That’s what she said.”
“Don’t swear, dear Sara,” Gloria says, leaning back with a smirk.
“You’re unattractive when you swear, dear,” I say. Gloria’s mother said that to her one time when I was over. We laugh now, remembering that, and then the tabletop vibrates.
“Got to go,” Gloria says, checking her big black pager and rising from the booth.
“Your dad?”
“Who else?”
I stay a while longer nursing my coffee, but it’s still dark when I leave Jack’s Diner.
* * *
Moss Park. The town is shaped like a Venn diagram. The park is the shape of a cat’s pupil, a long, pointed ellipse carpeted in an odd verdant moss. The pointy ends of the park are treed, but at the center is just the moss crossed by walking paths and a tall, white-painted gazebo in the center.
I pass through the gazebo. The Christmas lights inside it are cherry and teal and lemony-green just like everything else in Moss Park.
So beautiful, the big bulbs and tiny ones, all throwing their colors onto the white ceiling and the beams. Everything’s bathed in these colors.
The town wasn’t always this way. When Char and I moved here, it was all brown and gray and…poor. I remember the first day here, walking lost, looking for the post office. Rain and dullness. I stopped for directions in a cruddy little convenience store in what amounted to a garden barn. I don’t even think that store is still here now.
I cut across the park to the bookstore where I work. The owner, Mrs. Sylvester, is my landlady too – Char and I stay in the guesthouse behind her big Victorian. The old lady’s so absent from my days I seem to have taken over her place. It’s like I am the owner of the bookstore now. Everyone treats me that way, just as everyone treats Gloria like she, and not her father, is the owner of Glories, the swanky jewelry store across the park.
And whenever I go into the big Victorian to make dinner or to take a long candlelit soak in the big downstairs tub? I feel I am the sprawling house’s mistress, not Mrs. Sylvester. The feeling I get from that is complicated, a little guilty and a little blessed. I suppose the young do overtake the old at a certain point and that’s natural.
* * *
Mrs. Sylvester and Gloria’s broad-shouldered old dad are having words across the street. I can’t hear what they are saying. She’s just parked, must be coming into the bookstore to do an hour or two of paperwork, and he’s caught her. Their stances are stiff like cats. I imagine growling.
And then Char comes up behind me. She must have sneaked in the back way, but she was so silent.
“Get a room,” she yowls, looking out at the old folks, and we laugh.
“Why aren’t you in school?” I say, but she only scoffs and sprawls on the settee, taking out her sketch pad. The inside of this place is all warm wood and book smell, and the windows are wreathed with frost and colored lights like all the windows in Moss Park.
The handsome mystery man walks past the bookstore just then. It seems he’s deciding whether to open the door, but Mrs. Sylvester pushes by him muttering like a crazy thing; he flinches back away from her, and he turns and walks past. I catch just a flash of his baffled, sweet face.
“That was close,” says Char, but I don’t have time to ask her what she means.
The doorbells are jingling. Mrs. Sylvester’s sweeping in on a cold breeze, already complaining. She’ll want tea.
* * *
The days go harder then. It’s almost Christmas, but we can’t seem to find fellow feeling. It’s because of Christmas – all this mess. The people on their side of the park want white lights, the people on our side want to keep the cherry and teal and lemony-green lights that we’ve always had, and that is the root of the strife.
Gloria and I shop our way around the park, catching glimpses of the mystery man here and there. Tourists have invaded Moss Park. There’s no seat to be had at Jack’s. We look in at the strangers all cozy in their sparkly red vinyl booths until Jack brings us travel cups of coffee.
Last night Char said, “You are a monster.” She rolled her eyes when I told her I’d called my mother a bitch once or twice, too—
“Not a bitch, a monster,” she said.
The point was that she hadn’t invented being a horrible teen. It’s natural, normal.
But is it, though? Maybe that’s why I’m not telling Gloria. Her daughter rides horses at boarding school and goes overseas on vacations.
My daughter, I see her doing something normal for a change, I see her coming in from a run and say, “It’s so nice you like
running, dear.”
She says, “I wouldn’t say I like running. It’s more that I want to keep this body functional for as long as I can. Don’t you?”
Is there something really wrong with Char?
And why am I not sharing any of this with Gloria? It feels like the Christmas light argument has spilled over to us somehow. I notice when we’re on her side of the park, the shopkeepers aren’t as nice to me as they used to be.
We’re looking at sweaters for the girls when we bump into him. The handsome man from the diner’s back corner. He’s just on the other side of the table, touching the sweaters. I look up straight into his face, and I think there will be a spark, but there’s nothing.
“Oh hello,” says Gloria, and he only looks baffled again, or I am getting a feeling of bafflement from him; I don’t actually see his face.
“We see you in Jack’s all the time. We’ve never met,” I say, holding out a hand to shake, but he’s moving back. He’s stumbling back and is gone into the crowd, just like that.
“Shy,” says Gloria. “It’s cute. You should follow him.”
“You should,” I say, but I get a little chill. His reaction, like he’d seen a ghost.
We don’t follow him. We get matching Fair Isle sweaters for Char and for Gloria’s daughter, who will be flying home in a matter of days. I imagine bright-eyed Mira clutching hers to her chest, saying, It’s perfect, I love it, I love you, Mom.
Char, I know, will just throw hers in the closet and never take it out. She wears black, always, and this sweater is all marled in teal, cherry, and lemony-green like the lights they’re taking down all over Moss Park.
And the white lights are going up, whiter than white, dazzling like sparklers in summer.
Gloria and I are headed toward the center of the park when she stops. “I’ll catch up,” she says, and when she does catch up to where I’m watching men change out the lights on the gazebo, she has two tall cups. Coffee, I think, but it’s not. It’s a strange syrup. I cock an eyebrow.
“Cinnamon cocoa,” she says, and we sip while we watch more of the lights come down.
“Out with the old,” she says.
Far past the gazebo, out near a treed end of the park, I see an old man and a woman arguing, gesturing wildly. Is he beating his chest? Did she just slap him?
I am glad that Gloria doesn’t see.
* * *
“Skip work this afternoon,” Gloria says over breakfast. ...
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