The Village by the Sea

by Paula Fox

  She sat down for a moment in one of the chairs, imagining all six of them filled with identical Aunt Beas, rocking away the long day, cackling about the horribleness of everybody in the world except themselves and that painter, Monet, until they tipped their chairs right off the edge of the porch.

  She jumped up and ran down the steps. There wasn’t a book in the world that would interest her this morning.

  Her father would be sleeping now—the false sleep of hospital operating rooms which she remembered from the time her tonsils were taken out. It had been like sinking into something soft and furry and thick and damp.

  White clouds tumbled across the blue dome of the sky as though the wind were a great broom sweeping them all west forever. The water of the bay curled, broke into whitecaps. The islands were so distinct, Emma could see a line of yellow beach around each one of them. Down the rickety stairs was another beach, shadowed by the cliff at this hour of the morning. She leaned outward, holding to the stair post which was warm and splintery in her hand. She couldn’t see a living thing below, not even a shorebird scissoring along the water’s edge.

  Yesterday morning her father had given her a small paperback guide to seashore life, and she had looked through it while she was waiting for Uncle Crispin to pick her up. She knew the beach was not empty, that it was teeming with tiny living creatures, some as soft as custard, others hard as stone, hidden in shells and sand and seaweed.

  Yesterday morning! It seemed a week ago.

  How lonely it looked down there! She imagined herself standing motionless on the sand, alone. She imagined a ring of stones around her feet, and each stone an hour that had to be spent before she walked through her own front door. “Oh!” she cried out softly, and turned back to the house.

  She could hear voices from the television set. The roses on the trellis seemed to flow in the wind as though they rode a calm tide. Beneath the overhang of the porch, a small rabbit stood, its nose twitching, its paws held up. She felt terribly sleepy as if it were past midnight—a midnight, with a brilliant sun burning in the dark. She sat on the grass, then lay down, and sleep broke over her like a wave.

  “Emma, Emma. Wake up. Your mother is on the phone.” It was Uncle Crispin, shaking her shoulder, calling her name.

  She rose and took the steps two at a time. As she raced to the phone, she saw Aunt Bea, leaning forward, smiling, toward the television set. She heard Uncle Crispin say, “Turn it off, Bea!”

  Emma pressed the receiver against her cheek.

  “Emma, dear. Daddy is in the recovery room. He’s still pretty knocked out. I can talk only a minute—I want to be there when he comes out of the anesthesia. The operation went well. All the news is good.”

  “When will he wake up?” Emma asked.

  “Oh—very soon. Then he goes to a special place called Intensive Care. And if everything goes right, he can come home in a week.”

  “Oh, Mom …” Emma said.

  “I know, Em. I know how you feel,” her mother said. “But I must go. I’ll call tonight.” Then she was gone. Emma put the phone down and turned. Her uncle and aunt were staring at her.

  “He’s all right,” she said. Her heart was thumping loudly the way it did when she was frightened. Aunt Bea leaned forward and turned up the volume on the television.

  “It’s the best news in the world,” Uncle Crispin said.

  Aunt Bea looked back at Emma. “He’ll like staying in bed for a while,” she said. “My brother is very lazy.”

  “Oh, Bea …” muttered Uncle Crispin.

  “He isn’t,” cried Emma.

  Aunt Bea began to work on her fingers, grinning to herself. “Oh yes he is!” she said. “I know him better than you do.”

  An announcer’s voice sounded very loud in the living room as he said, “We will now return to the hearings.”

  Aunt Bea stopped scratching her fingers. Her grin had broadened. She was staring at the set as though it were a delicious meal set before her. She looked up at Emma briefly. “Well, it’s a good thing the doctors did something right for a change.”

  That was the most she was going to say, Emma felt sure. Uncle Crispin was speaking to her in a low voice, though he needn’t have bothered, for Aunt Bea’s rapt attention was bent on a man in a soldier’s uniform whose face filled the screen. “She does care about your father,” he was saying. “But you know that people express their feelings in different ways.”

  She could have told me she was glad, Emma thought to herself. Maybe she wasn’t glad. Maybe she didn’t know how to be glad for another person’s good fortune or sad for their troubles.

  “I think I’ll take a walk,” Emma said.

  “Good!” said Uncle Crispin. “I’ll make lunch and call you when it’s ready.”

  “I’m trying to listen to these important hearings,” Aunt Bea said irritably. “Give me a break!”

  “Where do you get those awful expressions, Bea?” Uncle Crispin snapped.

  Emma went out to the porch. The day was hers now. She walked into a small pine grove where the scent of resin pricked her nostrils. She leaned against a tree trunk, its scratchy bark against her forehead. Suddenly, to her surprise, she felt tears on her cheeks. She cried a few minutes, her arms around the tree as though it were a beloved person, thinking how odd it was that all those tears had been there inside of her, stored up like rain in a barrel.

  6

  Bertie

  After lunch, Uncle Crispin suggested they celebrate the happy outcome of the operation with a trip to Montauk.

  “You’d like that, Emma, wouldn’t you?” he asked her.

  What would happen if the three of them were cooped up in a car together? wondered Emma. It was hard enough in this big house.

  “How far is it?” asked Aunt Bea without enthusiasm. She was sitting at the dining room table, which was strewn with sheets of cream-colored writing paper, envelopes of various sizes, the silver pen and, of course, the teapot and a cup and saucer.

  “You know how far it is, Bea,” he said patiently. “We’ve made that drive often enough.”

  “I have letters to write today,” Aunt Bea declared.

  “You could write them when we return,” replied Uncle Crispin.

  “Oh, yes!” cried Aunt Bea indignantly. “After you get lost, and after we spend hours in traffic jams because of all the greedy summer people who come out here in herds only to shop in those new stores that have ruined our villages. And besides, I’ll miss the afternoon hearings.”

  “I thought you’d like to get out of the house for a bit,” Uncle Crispin said. “You haven’t been anywhere for days and days.”

  There wasn’t any patience in his voice now.

  “I have friends who are dying to hear from me,” Aunt Bea said sulkily.

  “I’m sure they can wait a few more hours,” he said.

  Aunt Bea looked at him suspiciously. “I hope you’re not being sarcastic, Crispin,” she said.

  It was so hard for Emma to write letters. I did this—I did that. But Aunt Bea didn’t do anything. She could write: I had eighty cups of tea today. A dreadful young person has come to stay with us, and Crispin must cook and slave for her. What kind of friends would she have? Would she write them at the same time she was watching television?

  “Bea—do make an effort! I’m sure Emma would like a little distraction after what she’s been through waiting to hear about Philip.”

  “She hasn’t been through anything—yet,” Aunt Bea said ominously.

  They weren’t looking at Emma. She knew they weren’t thinking about her either. Whatever it was that was going on was between them.

  Aunt Bea sighed hugely and heaved herself out of the chair. It seemed to take a long time before she was on her feet.

  “For heaven’s sakes!” she exclaimed. “Let’s go then! I don’t want to stand here forever!”

  In the car, Emma stared at Uncle Crispin’s white hair. He was inclined forward, and, she could see in the rearview m
irror, he was squinting against the sunlight. His face was strained; he looked as though the drive they were to take was a difficult chore. Emma would have been just as glad not to have come. She had hoped the trip to Montauk would help her not think about her father. But she seemed to be thinking about him more every minute.

  Hospital corridors were silent. Emma remembered that, and the hard narrow bed she had lain upon, holding her mother’s hand, as the bed moved along on rubber wheels pushed by an attendant she couldn’t see. Nurses had passed them carrying paper cups of medicine or little trays with something worse, a needle for one of the patients behind the half-open doors.

  Her father moved so lightly on his feet. He would be lying still now in a bed with iron bars around it, a grown-up’s crib.

  “Look at that,” Aunt Bea said from the front seat. “Isn’t that new, Crispin? The trailer camp? Why do people want to live in such hideous things? I suppose a trailer has its convenience. You turn off the ignition and you’re home. And look at that fat tub in a guard’s uniform at the gate!” She laughed loudly. “Don’t tell me they’re afraid of a crime wave in there! What do they have that’s worth stealing?”

  “Trailers don’t cost as much as houses,” said Uncle Crispin. “A lot of people can’t afford the kind of homes you’d approve of, Bea.”

  “Boo-hoo …” said Aunt Bea.

  She was wearing a large pink straw hat that hid her hair. Now and then she touched the brim of it with her fingers. Red and scored with scratching, her hands looked as though she’d plunged them into a thorny thicket. Emma tried not to look at them. Yet the upward movement of her aunt’s arm, her wounded fingers slipping across the rosy pink straw, stirred a reluctant pity in her.

  In these last months, her mother, too, had begun to do something strange to herself. Often, when she was reading a book or cooking a meal, Emma had seen her suddenly grip her arms and press them fiercely across her chest as though the apartment air had grown bitterly cold. She had known her mother’s thought at those moments had been about her father’s sickness.

  What was Aunt Bea’s thought when she tore at the flesh of her fingers?

  Emma stared out the car window. She didn’t want to think her mother and her aunt were alike in any way. She didn’t want to feel sorry for Aunt Bea at all.

  The road they were following cut through immense furrowed fields. “Potato farms,” Uncle Crispin said, glancing back at Emma. At the edge of the fields, as though dropped in clumps from the sky, stood empty-looking new houses with large, shadeless windows. There was a pearly glow at the horizon as though the sea sent its own light up into the sky. Every few miles, ramps led off the road to shopping malls filled with cars.

  “Stop!” Aunt Bea shrieked. “I want to go in there!”

  There, Emma saw, was a tumbled-down little farmhouse at the edge of a graveled apron with a sign over the door that read: Nice Things.

  “You won’t be long, will you?” asked Uncle Crispin as he parked.

  “One minute,” Aunt Bea said. “Perhaps two.” She scrambled out of the car, and picking up her long black cotton skirt, ran to the door and disappeared inside. It was the first time Emma had seen her move fast.

  “It’s the kind of thrift shop she likes,” Uncle Crispin explained. “She doesn’t get out of the house often. But I’ll fetch her in a few moments.” He sounded apologetic.

  Emma sank back in the seat. It was so hot in the back of the car; she felt sleepy and jumpy at the same time. Since the phone call from her mother, her worry about her father had lessened. But she had to think about the time ahead until she could go home. She longed to be by herself.

  “She has lucky hands,” Uncle Crispin was saying. “She always manages to find lovely things in piles of absolute junk.”

  How could Uncle Crispin think Aunt Bea’s hands were lucky? Emma made no comment. They sat for what seemed an hour without speaking. Another car drove onto the gravel. An elderly woman got out of it and walked to the thrift shop. The younger woman in the car held a laughing baby, lifting it up so its round head nearly touched the car roof, and then bringing it back to her lap. Aunt Bea appeared at last carrying two stuffed pillowcases, her expression triumphant. She opened the back door. “Move over,” she ordered Emma roughly as she heaved the cases onto the back seat.

  “You found some nice things in Nice Things?” asked Uncle Crispin.

  “Tons!” she said. “Three perfectly good cotton bathrobes and real cotton sheets for a dollar each. Just tons! Look!” She pulled out a sheet on which Emma saw a pale gray smudge as though the person who had once used it had left a part of his shadow behind. “Just wonderful!” Aunt Bea congratulated herself.

  The baby let out a shriek of laughter.

  Aunt Bea was settling herself into her seat. She glanced over at the other car. She started to giggle. “Look at that baby! Did you ever see anything so wizened? It looks a hundred years old!”

  “It’s a perfectly nice baby,” Uncle Crispin said. “Really, Bea. How can you make fun—”

  “Oh, Crispin, never mind! I have to go home. I’ve got a pain in my side. I shouldn’t have carried that load of stuff. You might have helped me!”

  “Bea, don’t do this,” he said.

  “I’m not doing anything! I really don’t feel well. I’ll tell you what I will do though. We’ll stop at the market—I’ll pick up some food and I’ll make us a divine little supper.”

  Uncle Crispin gripped the steering wheel as though he were drowning and it was a life saver.

  “Please, Crispin,” Aunt Bea said. “You know how I hate long drives. You knew that all along. You shouldn’t have insisted that I come. Am I right?”

  Uncle Crispin sighed. Aunt Bea turned around in her seat to gaze at the pillowcases. She smiled vaguely. Without removing her gaze from her purchases, she said, “Emma, you and Crispin simply must go to Montauk some other time. You’ll love the old lighthouse.”

  It occurred to Emma at that moment that half the time, Aunt Bea didn’t know what she was saying.

  “You are the limit,” Uncle Crispin said. But he turned the car around and they headed back the way they had come. Emma wasn’t sorry.

  Inside the joy she had felt at the news that her father had come through the operation was a sorrowful awareness that he might not have.

  It was almost funny that Uncle Crispin’s celebration had ended up with her crowded into a corner of the back seat next to the bulging pillowcases. Aunt Bea was humming loudly, tunelessly. Her shopping must have made her happy.

  Just before Uncle Crispin drew up in front of a supermarket, Aunt Bea startled Emma by turning to her and saying, “I expect you’re feeling let down. Oh, I don’t mean this silly drive—though I must say, it turned out nicely for me—I mean, knowing the operation is over … the waiting …”

  Her voice wasn’t especially friendly. But she smiled and said, “You’ll get over that, too. Everything passes.…” And clutching her great pink hat, she got out of the car and went into the store.

  It had been a very good supper. Even though Aunt Bea—who had somehow gotten bits of parsley in her hair—giggled and boasted as she explained how she had cooked the meal, Emma liked all of it. Her aunt wanted praise for everything, she had thought, for her cooking, her cream-colored stationery, her silver pen, especially her Monet poster. Praise, praise, until stuffed with it, she toppled over into sleep, or into the sofa in front of the television set.

  Now, finally, Emma was alone at the top of the cliff stairway, the guide to seashore life in her hand. There might be another hour of light, though the bay was already streaked with a reddish glow from the westering sun. A delicate breeze lifted her hair from her neck. She went slowly down, stopping to touch the blades of tall, bright green grass that grew through the cracks of the weathered steps.

  At the foot of the steps, a long curling strand of black seaweed lay upon the sand like a thick snake. Along the edge of the water, its head cocked as though it listened to the sof
t shifting of pebbles moved back and forth by the tide, a shorebird ran on thin legs. Emma sank to her knees and leaned toward it. At once, it lifted into the air and circled out over the bay. Where light did not touch it, the water was the color of dark metal.

  Tonight she would cross off another day on the calendar she had drawn. Twelve days left. It didn’t sound nearly as bad as two weeks. She got up shivering a little—she could feel the night gathering itself around her, flowing from the dark green pines above, the darkening water, the sooty eastern sky—and wandered down the beach, picking up shells and small stones. When she had all she could carry, she sat down and opened the book. From the pile of shells, she chose one that resembled a tiny ram’s horn, and found an illustration of it at once. It was a limacina.

  It pleased her to find a name and a drawing of something she had picked up without thought. Did everything in the world have a name? Or were there things that were still secrets, waiting to be revealed by words?

  Also in the pile were an angel’s wing, a razor clam, a pale yellow lamp shell, nearly transparent, and a large winkle that for some reason reminded her of Aunt Bea’s pink straw hat.

  “Hey!” said a voice nearby.

  She looked up. A tall, slender girl, a year or so older than she was, she guessed, stood in front of her. She was wearing tan shorts and a blue sweatshirt. Her braided hair was the color of butter. She was smiling broadly. A ray from the setting sun touched her left ear. It was like a little flame at the side of her head.

  “Hello,” Emma said, getting to her feet.

  “You here for the summer?” asked the girl.

  “For twelve more days exactly,” Emma answered. “Up there.” She gestured toward the stairs that led to the log house.

  “Oh-ho!” the girl exclaimed. “So you’re staying with Lady Bonkers.”

  “She’s my aunt,” Emma said a little stiffly.

  “Sorry about that. It’s what my granny calls her. She’s known her a long time. The whole family … the first wife who died, and the second wife. Granny says that one was pretty nice.”