by Lynne Hugo
“This is wonderful,” I said. “It’s all that I need and more. I love it. Thank you so much for trusting me. I’ll be very careful, I promise.”
“Well, what’s in here is Mother’s. It’s all I could keep of her, you know?”
“I do know,” I said, thinking of the boxes of our heritage locked in the black airlessness of the trunk, and Mother’s ashes there, too, her letter folded and wedged into the base of the urn.
ALL I HAD TO CARRY IN was the one suitcase, plus a duffel bag with some extra things Evan had brought me from our apartment. It wasn’t even dark by the time I’d unpacked and driven up to the little market for a chicken sandwich to go from the meat and deli counter, and some coffee, cereal and milk for the next morning. When I’d unpacked those, I pulled on a sweatshirt of Mother’s that I’d saved from the Goodwill offerings, and walked down to the beach, where the sun was setting.
The Cape is like a long, bent arm that extends into the water and curls back westward, toward the mainland. On the bay side of the peninsula—if you’re above the elbow, near land’s end—you can face the water and look into spectacular sunsets over the Provincetown harbor. When I reached the beach, the sky was spread like watercolor in shades of red, magenta, melon, peach and gold melding upward into the gray-blue of evening. The low tidewater and sand took on a pink-gold tinge, so luminous and intense was the color. It seemed like a sign of sorts, and I walked toward it, alone and relieved to be so, until darkness had nearly taken over. Then I turned back, watching for the lights I’d left on to guide me. Locking the door behind me, but without eating the sandwich I’d bought, or so much as washing my face, I shed my clothes, turned the lamps off and dropped into an exhausted, blank sleep.
30
I WOKE EARLY, TO THE SOFT, rhythmic sound of the bay’s small waves, and with no memory of going to bed. After pulling on some clean clothes, I made coffee and took it out onto the little porch and drank it while I got my bearings. The tide was half out or half in—I didn’t yet have the internal tide clock I’d develop in time—and I watched the water a while, gray, still, in the edgeless light. I went in to eat some cereal, and made a production of washing, drying and replacing the three dishes, and another production of unpacking the suitcase and duffel into the bureau drawers and closet, and arranging toiletries in the bathroom medicine chest. After that, I was at loose ends again. All I didn’t want to think about—what to do about school, for example—began to push into my mind, and in an effort to keep moving and keep distracted, I went out onto the beach for a walk. Already the light had strengthened, scattering diamonds onto the surface of the bay, and it kept moving so the facets would glitter, just as I’d moved my hand to show off my engagement ring in another life.
She hadn’t been there when I was drinking coffee, or she’d blended with the sand and early light well enough that I simply hadn’t seen, but right at the end of my short path onto the beach lay a gull. She lay on her side, utterly still but alive. One of her wings quivered at my approach. Her feathers were variations of tan, brown and white, which was why I deemed her female. Did I remember Ben telling me the brown ones were? Perhaps I just saw something dying and assumed it was female, like Mother, like me.
I had no idea how to help her, but I couldn’t go by her, either. I squatted six feet away and spoke gently, hoping to soothe her enough that she would let me pick her up. Maybe I could take her to someone who would know what to do. I couldn’t hear footsteps, but a voice was approaching from behind me on the path. It was Bonnie talking to a dog, a golden retriever trotting ahead of her.
“Hi, Ruth. Did you sleep well?” she called when I turned. “Wow, your hair is something—it looks like…like…that burning bush story about who was it? Moses?”
I felt myself blush. My hair must look like a bush, I thought; I had only brushed it out and left it thickly loose, to hang below my shoulders. I gathered it into one hand. “I know, it’s a mess right now. The wind got it.”
“Hey, I meant it as a compliment!” She furrowed her brow. “I’m way too blunt. Susan tells me that all the time.”
“No, it’s okay, I mean, I’m sorry.” I was almost stammering. I rarely knew how to take what someone said to me. “But look, I’m worried about this gull. Do you think she’d let me pick her up? Is there someplace I could take her, a vet maybe, or is there some wildlife place?”
Bonnie put her hand on the dog’s collar. “Here, you hold the beast, and I’ll take a look. This is Nellie…Nellie, this is Ruth.” The dog—a lush-coated, eager beauty—nuzzled my free hand as I held her with the other, and I wished I had a scrap for her. Bonnie squeezed past me on the path lined with dune grass and bent directly over the gull. “No. Just leave her alone.”
“But she’s not…all right.”
Bonnie gave me a strange look. “Sometimes it’s just time for something to die,” she said. “It’s just time. It’s natural, you know. I don’t see any sign of injury, a fish hook or line, or anything like that. I’ve got to get on now.” She moved away from the gull and then beckoned to Nellie.
“You can let her go now. Get over here, girl.” Then, to me, “Nel needs her run and there’s lots of work waiting back at the ranch. See you later,” she said with a wave and strode on into the early sun, Nellie shining and prancing ahead. Bonnie’s legs were not thick, but sturdy and brown, and she had a solid look to her body. She had on khaki shorts and a blue, men’s long-sleeved shirt, sleeves rolled up for business, and walked like a woman who knew where she was going and why.
I stayed, sitting nearby in the sand, and talked to the gull. I cried a little and when I felt I couldn’t endure watching any longer I still wouldn’t let myself leave. The sun had risen a good deal more, and she was still alive, when I went back to the cottage and drove to town to escape, calling myself coward all the while. I couldn’t help someone live, and I couldn’t help her die, either.
IN PROVINCETOWN, the streets were empty of tourists. Locals and shopkeepers were the only people around, sweeping shop stoops, watering flower boxes and the like. Few places were open yet, even though it was past nine-thirty. I walked each side of the street, up and down Commercial Street, peering into shop windows, studying the hand-crafted jewelry, pottery, displayed paintings. The bakeries’ doors were open, aromas of fresh bread and pastry wafting onto the street. The Portuguese bakery had a tiny, fenced-in café area outside, and I thought to buy an elephant ear and coffee and read a newspaper there. As I went through the gate, I heard a man and woman inside, arguing violently.
“How much did you spend last night?” he shouted at the same time she was repeating, “Shut up, I told you, I’m not going to talk to you when you’re like this.” I sat down at one of the wooden café tables, embarrassed at what I was overhearing. A glass shattered near the door, and I jumped, afraid, and suddenly seeing how the sun glinted on the bay like broken glass. Everything comes down to this, I thought, the giving and receiving of pain, no matter what anyone says he or she intends.
It was quiet, then. A glass case slid open along its track, then shut, and some chairs were pushed into tables rather noisily, but there were no more words. I dreaded going in, what I’d see on their faces. I’d just leave, I decided, but when I stood and glanced in uncertainly, I saw them. The woman stood close to the man, breaking a doughnut. It was round and sugared, and she tore it into two parts like an invited sadness. Like two passions, the equal hope and hopelessness of love, she fed half to her own mouth and half to his. I saw him lick her fingers.
I had absolutely no idea of what to think or to do with myself then. After I read the New York Times and Provincetown Advocate over too many cups of coffee, I walked the streets, mapping them in my mind, for a long time before I gave up and just returned to the cottage beach. By then, it was after two. At first, I couldn’t tell if the gull was still alive, but then I saw a nearly imperceptible flutter on her chest, her heart beating on, however erratically. I’m sure it will sound strange, but I spread out a
towel from the cottage and just sat, waiting on the beach as though I were compelled. I was being with my mother.
By late afternoon, I had to go in to shower and get ready to go to dinner at Ben and Marilyn’s. Somehow, that felt all right to do, as if I’d given the full measure, and now there was someplace else I was supposed to be. When I came back, well after dark, stars glinted richly in the sky, and quivered on the moving water as though a portion of them had dislodged and fallen into the bay. The gull was there, though now I could not tell if she was dead yet. I sat by her a while, speaking only a soft few words, and then went in to a troubled sleep. In the morning, I carried a child’s plastic sand shovel I’d bought at Dutra’s to the beach where I dug a hole and buried her body.
“EVAN? HI, IT’S ME, RUTH,” I said loudly into the static of the pay phone. It was early evening, the same day I’d buried the gull. I’d bought a paperback novel and lay on the beach reading most of the day, trying to put something into the vacated shell of my mind. “I promised I’d call.”
“Are you all right? Where are you?”
“I’m on Cape Cod in a pay phone.”
“Where?”
“In a pay phone on Cape Cod.” I raised my voice, and turned my back to the traffic, wincing as I scraped my sunburned shoulder against the phone box. The booth was less than a mile from my cottage, outside a motel farther down the beach on 6A. Landings had phones in the cottages, and therefore no pay phone.
“No, I mean where on Cape Cod?”
I hesitated. What was I holding back?
“In the Provincetown area.”
“Where are you staying?”
“I’ve rented a little cottage on the beach.”
“Is there any way I can reach you?”
“No, I haven’t got a phone.” This was mainly true, except that Bonnie had given me the main number and said they’d run a message down if there was an emergency call. Bonnie had said I could pay to have the phone in my cottage—disconnected after her mother died—hooked back up, but I didn’t want it.
“Ruthie, Ruthie, talk to me, please. How are you? What’s going on?”
He wasn’t asking a single question he didn’t have every right to ask, I knew that. It was just that it sounded so…well, stupid, that I didn’t know the answers. “I’m just trying to get ahold of myself, Ev. I’m okay.”
“Do you need anything? Can I send you some more money? Or, just use the credit card for anything, you can do that, too.”
“I know. Don’t worry, I’m okay.”
“Ruthie, can we talk sometime? I mean really talk, about us? I love you. I’m…going a little nuts, here. I feel like I’m married to a phantom.”
I froze, unable to recall my old ability to say what someone needed or wanted to hear. “I’m sorry, Ev. I can’t right now. I know it’s not fair, and I’m sorry.”
He must have heard the change in my voice and forced some lightness into his. “Oy vey, it’s all right. Not to worry. But, please, call me. You’ve got to call me…wait! Is there somewhere I can write you?”
“I don’t even know the mailing address. There’s not a mailbox outside my cottage or anything. I’ll call you.”
“Well, remember I’m here, and your home is here waiting. I love you, Ruthie.”
“I appreciate that, Ev. I’ll talk to you soon.” The pain my last words caused vibrated back like a string in me plucked from a distance: still connected to him in spite of all my efforts. I hung up, crossed a parking lot to the beach and began walking along the shoreline. The tide was nearly high and the sand left exposed was dry; each foot sunk in with each step. Behind me, another vivid sunset was beginning. The sun hung just above the Provincetown harbor like an enormous red ball. As it lowered itself, reflected color began to spread across the sky and reflect a path onto the water. I wished I could walk over the low tide shoals, through the pools between sandbars and keep going to where I couldn’t ever hurt another human being.
DAYS PASSED, A SAMENESS TO them, a weight on and in me I couldn’t shake. I called the chair of the department at school and told her I needed a leave of absence. “I understand, Ruth. I completely understand. Whatever you do, though, be sure you do come back and finish. You’re too close, and too talented not to. Will you promise me that much? Next semester? You could finish by the end of next summer then.”
I did promise, mainly because I knew she was right about how close I was to my degree, not because I could feel any desire to go back. But I wasn’t really feeling anything. I had put myself in Neutral. At the end of the first week, when Bonnie and Susan had said I could stay as long as I liked, I took out a library card as a resident, though I’d paid the rent for only another week, and was without any real plan. I’d begun talking to them—briefly at first, then conversations of increasing length when I passed one or the other in their garden or on their porch as I went to my car. Nellie became my friend; I bought Milk-Bones so I could always have one in my jeans pocket. I could put my arms around her and feel her, alive and loving me back.
Susan was a small woman, plain until I got to know her and recognize the warmth of the particular deep brown of her eyes, matched by her brows and hair. Her heart-shaped face was fair complected, framed with a thick luxury of wavy hair, chin-length and often pulled back in a barrette, especially when she was at a canvas. Like Bonnie, she wore no makeup that I could discern, but she was naturally pretty enough, especially up close and when she smiled, that I didn’t notice the lack the way I did on Bonnie. Susan was the easier to talk to, but it was Bonnie who invited me to dinner first. “If you feel like some company,” she’d added. “It’s okay if you don’t.” But I did, maybe because Bonnie had alluded to difficulties with her dead mother. I went that night, a bottle of Mateus in hand, and felt fairly at ease within a half hour. Their house wasn’t elaborate, but the artful blend of blues, greens and browns in eclectic furniture and original artwork made it stunning. An expanse of windows, clearly added long after the original house was built, opened the airy living room to a panorama of dune grass and sea. Paintings by Susan, mainly seascapes and studies of the Provincetown harbor, were displayed, and pieces of hand-thrown pottery, glazed in earth and water tones, adorned the various tables. A hanging lamp lay a soft circle of amber light over the dining table, where dark blue-gray candles waited for a match.
“This is so beautiful,” I said, picking up a graceful cream pitcher, richly glazed in brown-edged blue that sat by a matching sugar bowl on the sideboard.
“Susan made those for me,” Bonnie commented.
“It started out as a vase, but just kept insisting on being a pitcher, so I finally gave up and let the clay be what it wanted. Like it has a soul…you know, and you have to feel what it really is meant to be. My teacher used to say that,” Susan said. She wore a nutmeg-colored top with a scoop neck, black pants and lipstick tonight. “Then, of course, I had to make its mate.” She smiled at Bonnie.
“I love clay,” I said, sitting on the couch and smoothing my dark skirt over my knees, glad I’d changed, though Bonnie was in her jeans and an Oxford shirt. “I learned a little when I was an occupational therapy intern in a hospital. Then, I worked last summer in a nursing home, and they let me buy a wheel for the patients. They liked it a lot, you know, even the ones in wheelchairs could do it. I got one with an adjustable height.”
“It does something for you,” Susan agreed. “There are classes, you know, right up at Castle Hill. You can sign up for a week at a time.” She pointed in what must have been the direction of the art studio, and her arm was graceful as a dancer’s.
I felt a rush of pleasure at the thought, then quickly shut it off. “What can I do to help with dinner?”
“In a few minutes you can pour the wine,” Bonnie answered. “Unless you want to do it now.” I did, and got up to busy myself, to keep the conversation from going to the subject of what I was going to do.
After a rich vegetable-garden stew and homemade bread, we sat in rockers
on their porch, drinking tea and watching the stars while crickets and frogs tuned legs and throats for their approaching fall symphony. Chill had seeped into the air and Susan brought out a woven, long-fringed shawl and wrapped it around my shoulders.
“How are you getting along?” Bonnie asked me, working her arms into a sweater. “I mean, alone and all. Sometimes we worry about you a little. I don’t know how I’d have survived after Mother died if I hadn’t had Susan.”
Susan laughed. “How on earth can you say that?” Then she turned to me in a mock-confidential aside. “She felt so guilty she’d barely speak to me for days at a time. I didn’t think she’d ever pull out of it.” She reached over and rubbed Bonnie’s shoulder. “But you finally did. Took you long enough, though, right?”
“There you go,” laughed Bonnie in response. “Something else to feel guilty about.”
It surprised me more than either of them when I said quietly, “I understand better than you’d think. I’m married.”
Neither of them spoke for a moment, but Bonnie touched my hand briefly. “Where’s your husband?” she asked softly.
I chose to take the question literally. “In New York.” Then, abruptly even to me, I changed the subject. The talk turned lighter then, to the attitude of permanent residents toward tourists, and not too long later I went on back to my cottage.
IT WAS THE BEGINNING of my third week. Mother’s ashes remained in the trunk of the car with Roger’s and my heritage while I read novels and took long walks. Mornings I walked in sneakers on the rocky bay side, in either direction from my cottage. Early afternoons, I read on the beach or went into Provincetown and picked up fresh fish and some fresh vegetables. By midafternoon, I’d driven to the ocean side to park at Ben and Marilyn’s where I hiked barefoot, dodging surf as it hammered the sand, paler, and tiny-grained over there, and let the wind blow thought out of my mind. Evenings, I’d take a mug of hot tea and rock on my own little porch and watch the sun flame. Sometimes old, solitary fishermen in rubber boots, with a tackle box and bucket next to them, flung long lines into the water, then set the rod in a sand-anchored holder and sat in a folding chair to wait patient as eternity while they stared across the bay’s small ripples.
