The Ocean House

by Mary-Beth Hughes

  The buildings were squat, beige, ugly, industrial looking. As if to offset the blight, tiny red squirrels danced in the orange treetops and of course the finches, gold and purple, dipped to test the seeds in student-made feeders.

  Faith sighed. Cece had made better-looking bird feeders in nursery school. Because the college was expanding faster than it could build, Cece had been placed in a “holding” dorm. It was hard not to feel this assignment as a diminishment. A preemptive dismissal—and Cece had only been a student a few weeks! God knows they were paying the tuition rate of highest privilege.

  Faith idled. Waiting with the other parents to be directed to a designated parking lot. Irene pulled the passenger visor down, slid open the mirror, and carefully applied a lipstick. Where does she get them? thought Faith. A dense lightless carmine smear first on her long slender mouth and then out beyond the lips to her cheeks on both sides, slowly, purposefully. Mom! said Faith. What— But now an undergrad in a neon apron was leaning down to talk to her. Faith lowered the window and smiled. But he looked right past her to Irene and her triumphant lipstick and the boy hooted. A mean laugh. Faith shut her window on his grinning face and followed the car moving away in front of her. Whatever their instruction was, she would take it, too.

  Soon, they were entering a cleared pasture half-filled with other parked cars. Beyond the grass, newly mowed for this parking, there was longer waving grass carved with walking paths. Then in the not-too-far distance, the mountains, and on this day they were actually purple, capped by clotted cream–colored clouds, the sky along the peaks a deep periwinkle blue. The familiar scent of the freshly cut grass. As if a choice had been made to soothe the nervous parents. Somewhere, cows lowed. Birds looped in and out of the long grass in wide arcs. Faith had to concede: the place was a knockout.

  Mom, said Faith. Let me look at you.

  Ça va? said her mother.

  Ça va, said Faith, wetting a tissue with spit, holding her mother’s face gently, and dabbing at the stains now deepening at the corners of her mother’s mouth. Belle, she said to her mother when she was done. Très, très belle. Faith nodded, smiled, eager for this one day to keep the peace.

  Recently her mother had told her an ugly story she disbelieved but couldn’t quite forget. Long ago, in the first days of their marriage, Faith’s father had decided to rename her mother. This was just one of many tall tales. At Easter, Irene had sat shrunken down over her lamb dinner like a castaway finding food for the first time in weeks. Cece smiled into her lap at her grandmother’s appetite. But her odious high school friend Bobbi, a senior crush Cece couldn’t outgrow fast enough for Faith, this tinsel-thin girl snickered when Irene took up a whole handful of potato casserole and pushed it into her mouth, half of it landing on the table in a splat on the white damask. Mom, said Faith, rising, but not leaping. This wasn’t the first time. Mom, she said, coming over, stroking Irene’s shoulder. Hungry?

  If it were all one thing, I’d know what to do, she told her brother, Eddie, on the phone the next day. He’d entered a Buddhist monastery in Nova Scotia two years before. Two years and counting she’d said to her old friend Courtney Ruddy. Nothing lasted long for her brother.

  How’s the drinking? he’d asked.

  Really, she said. You could think that thought from here.

  What does she want? asked Eddie. What is she saying herself?

  Oh, you know. The usual. One day, she’d like to see her mother. Where am I hiding her mother? Why am I hiding her mother? The next day the bridge club is assembling in her living room and she’s mixing a decent daiquiri. It’s strange.

  Sounds like— he began.

  Sounds like the dinner gong is ringing in Canada, said Faith. She hung up the phone. He’d call back again soon enough. Or she would.

  But then right away she wished she’d told him the whole Easter story. How she’d walked their mother away from the table into the ground-floor guest room where Irene would spend the night. There was a quilted bedspread with lavender-colored blossoms, make-believe flowers with hideous yellow centers. Faith amazed herself by allowing it through the door, but she thought it might comfort her mother to see it. It had been on Faith’s childhood bed and she’d held on to it all these years, had it repaired even. Professionally restuffed. Her mother sat down on the very edge of the bed and tidied the skirt of her dress. She straightened her pearls at the base of her throat. She patted the poof of now-sparse, air-spun hair by her right ear. And a whiff of ancient, dusty Chanel No. 19 rose in the faintest tendril. This exact choreography: skirt, throat, hair, scent—repeated her entire life—made Faith’s mouth water, but for what?

  Mom, what can I get you?

  Maybe a brandy? It seemed the daiquiri expert was back.

  Faith was only gone a moment, but when she returned her mother was lying flat on the bed and watching the ceiling, unblinking, like a frightened soldier trapped in a lavender field.

  What—

  He gave me a new name, said her mother. And Faith noticed Irene’s knees were trembling very slightly. She put the brandy down and reached a hand to cup the knee closest. Outside the door, far away in the dining room, a burst of laughter. Faith stroked the stockinged calf down to the ankle, calming, calming. You’re okay, she said.

  He said I had an ugly, common name and he’d give me a new one. Why not? he said. Who could object? I was his problem now. I need. I need. Irene. He could be very unkind.

  Who? said Faith.

  Her mother gave her a look, then blinked back at the ceiling. I need, she whispered.

  That’s where your name came from? Faith held her breath then. Oh, come on. She willed a smile. Her mother liked to play little games, lead her down the garden path until she was panting with indignation or grief or confusion. It was a strange trick that fooled her nearly every time. Finally, she’d told Courtney Ruddy just the other day, I’m on to her.

  Your father said everyone waves a little flag, flashes a little light. It was how he did his business. Read the flag. Seize the advantage. Remember?

  No, I don’t, Mom, she said.

  It’s true.

  Okay, what’s my flag? said Faith. She was careful to show by tone and expression that this was a test.

  Her mother looked at her in a way that told Faith that at least the test would not be one of memory. Irene remembered. But then she seemed to switch gears. She watched Faith’s face now as if waiting for a revelation. Cherished, Irene whispered at last and blinked her eyes faster. Then she was frowning up at the ceiling, nearly growling under her breath. I won’t have it any other way!

  Oh, for godsakes, said Faith. You’re making all this up. Come on. Let’s get you out of— But her mother had fallen fast asleep. Just like that. Faith pulled up the quilt to cover the now too-slim legs. As she closed the door and wandered toward the laughter, she thought, I need. I need. No. He couldn’t have.

  All along the walking path from the parking meadow to Cece’s temporary dorm there were hand-painted signs, identifying the new indigenous plantings and the historically accurate wildflowers that were now in last bloom. Purple brushes tipped in the breeze over golden grass, other things too. And Faith would have stopped to look if it hadn’t been for the state-issued posters, much bigger and uglier, identifying the ticks and poisonous spiders all around them. She hurried Irene along, as fast as her mother’s patent leather pumps could carry her.

  Finally they were in the clearing. She took hold of her mother’s hand. All around the “dorms” it was busy like a bus terminal, and she didn’t want Irene drifting off. Sweet reunions everywhere. As if these kids hadn’t seen their parents in decades. Very sweet and all at once she was eager, too, like a joy she could feel rushing down her body, heart to toes. She held tight to Irene and scanned over the heads of the hugging families for her own beautiful child. Because that was the great surprise. At the very last possible moment—or so
it seemed to Faith—her daughter had become a beauty. So different from Faith but still quite something. And it felt as if it had happened—she could almost name the day—at the beginning of August. One morning Faith looked up from her checkbook and caught sight of Cece’s chestnut hair waving down to the tips of her shoulder blades. She wore a T-shirt—something filthy of course—and a pair of boxer shorts, provenance unknown. And her legs for this one moment did that fawn thing of knocking in toward one another. Her skin, even in the green light of the refrigerator, was achingly pretty, and when she turned to yawn at Faith, her sleep-puffed mouth was like a peony. Clear strong expensive teeth, dark suspicious eyes—her father’s—and Faith understood all at once that her daughter was a beauty. Nothing like her, of course—which had been lamented since the day Cece was born—but surprise, something else, and it did surprise her. Her own tenderness about this surprised her. How marvelous, she thought but didn’t say, as if this new thing were so fragile and dreamlike it might vanish if she paid attention. She looked back down at her bills and away from her daughter’s scanning eyes. Scanning for a fight, but she wouldn’t give her one. (Faith had a beauty on her hands. At last.)

  But where was Cece now? Surely her particular temp dorm had already disgorged its freshmen? Mom, are you okay? she asked. But Irene was busy sniffing the air. Those cows need more water, she said. And Faith smiled. I’m sure you’re right. The cow smell was much stronger here by the temp dorms, or at least Faith ardently hoped that’s what they were smelling.

  When she and Cece were looking at colleges, Faith had one thought: Smith. Cece could finish the degree she’d missed out on. So how had they ended up here? By accident. They’d driven past the entrance after Cece’s sullen dismissal of Faith’s only choice and out of curiosity and despair taken a look. Like a shipwrecked voyager finding land at last, Cece brightened, lowered the car window, stuck her head out, and breathed in, gulping. Oh god, oh god, she’d said. So here they were.

  And Irene, too, seemed to find the air compelling. She’d closed her eyes now and was taking audible damp-sounding sniffs or sniffles, some combination. Mom, Faith whispered then. Can you help me find Cece? Oh wait! Oh no. There she was.

  The freshman fifteen had already settled in around the belly. And hips and face and then some and, and my god, my god, she’d shaved off her beautiful hair. Don’t react, Faith counseled herself. But beyond that, she had no more advice.

  Cece made her way through the crowd, which parted for her. She was a big girl with a shaved head, and she wore something like a brown clay fist at the base of her throat attached by a leather thong. Other than that, a black T-shirt with obligatory torn sleeves, a pair of man’s ocher shorts. These shorts exaggerated her sprawl-legged walk. A disconcerting gait now on a young woman but nothing new. She’d walked that way—like Popeye! unlamented Hadley had often said—since she could stand.

  An enormous smile broke across Cece’s face when she spotted them. Mommy! Meemaw! And she raised her free arm to wave. Held by the other hand, Faith could now see a boy trailing behind her, a fragile-looking boy. It was a pantomime that made Faith suddenly and deeply angry. How dare she, thought Faith. Then she told herself, again: Don’t react. A reedy boy. And maybe it was slightly possible Connor would have grown to look this way. But Faith always imagined someone stronger, which was funny, since he’d been tiny his whole life, so delicate. Faith stared. Then Cece let go of her cruel prop long enough to hug her wobbly grandmother—carefully—and for Faith something quick and brusque. But by now that was more than okay with Faith.

  Sebastian? said Cece in a whining tone entirely new to Faith. She wouldn’t have allowed it. Sebastian? Hello?

  This Sebastian stepped forward and offered Faith his fingertips. Briefly, like a cat testing a string, then he wriggled the same hand toward Irene, who blinked up at the boy, openly dismayed. Check, and double-check, Captain, he said to Cece, saluting. Then as if further compelled, he turned back to Faith. An immense smile washed over his face as if he suddenly recognized her for who she really was, and she found herself disarmed, repulsed, both. Then he was running away. Slipping through the crowd to find his own family. Hiding, he’d said. He has his own family, said Faith, nodding, as if confirming for everyone a key fact. Actually, said Cece, I’m not sure he does. He’s kind of a fantasist.

  Faith tried to find him again, to spot his reunion.

  So, actually, Cece said in the new whine. I’m supposed to drag you two to the chapel. We’re already late!

  And whose fault was that Faith didn’t say. But now Irene beside her was looking intrigued and wide awake. And Faith smiled in spite of herself. Okay. All right, she said. Lead the way.

  The chapel was the odd duck of the mostly modernist architecture on this campus, something left behind by the Puritans. It was made entirely of stone, and inside the hush felt, at least for today, tuned to the celestial. Light rushed down through wavy glass like a direct message. Even Faith could feel the uplift, and she was immune, she liked to say. Behind the pulpit, which was really a music stand, stood a large man with a small head and a tonsure haircut. He waited with obvious impatience, directing the freshmen families to one side of a wide center aisle or the other. Arbitrarily it seemed to Faith. As in a Quaker meetinghouse, the two sides faced one another. Light touched down on the heads of families across the way, and in the very back row Faith finally spotted Sebastian. In the same pew, a young woman with a nearly identical face—a sister, obviously—in a blue leather halter dress. And between the two siblings, a mother gazing up at the rafters. Faith looked up, too. A complicated crisscross. Sure. She looked back down. The mother was wearing an obvious wig with deep bronze curls. A very good wig, Faith could see even at a distance, but jokey, too. Sebastian and his sister cozied in toward the mother and they, too, began studying the ceiling. In contrast, Cece seemed to be physically disowning Faith. Her back turned away now so Faith could fully view the unimaginative snake tattoo crawling in blurry green ink up her neck into the bristles of new growth on her shaved scalp and then vanishing. Irene had dozed off. At last the man with the tonsure cleared his throat and spoke: Congratulate yourselves. You have arrived. He had the layered lush resonant voice of an opera singer.

  To Faith’s surprise, he was replaced immediately by the provost. A woman in steep heels made her way up toward the altar. She wore a white stretchy sheath dress and black hair fell to her shoulders. She gripped both sides of the music stand and looked out at them all with the expression of someone eager to sort out the bad fruit. Her legs were planted firm, no disarming hip-leaning poses here. Muscular legs, quite brown. She looked fed and sunned and sexed and satisfied. And Faith couldn’t help but think of Courtney Ruddy. And worse, in this context, Courtney Ruddy’s early and perennial assessment of Cece. It was true that Cece had struggled a bit in middle school. Especially after Owen lost his way home for good. But there had been solutions and Faith had found them. What was hideous and what she remembered now, watching the provost smile with whitened teeth, was the summer Cece had to do intensive remedial work on her reading skills. A sad summer of forced classics for them both. Too much Thomas Hardy. And Courtney Ruddy had let it be known at the Beach Club—because Faith was home reading, reading—that Faith had lost her husband, her brighter child, and was now left alone with the dimwit. A bit of fetid gossip that had of course come back to her. An idea that circled to her even now and still brought tears of fury, of shame. Courtney Ruddy could be a vicious woman, certainly, and Faith knew better than to confide in her. But she had. And occasionally­—­god help her—she still did.

  The provost in the white sheath dress boomed out her expectations for the future. Not only the future of the assembled freshmen (and their financial co-conspirators), but for the world. Now. This very moment. Being prepared for greatness in these new waves of historic change. Tempered. Fortified. Brilliance. Faith looked toward Cece and her cartoon snake. Cece looked back, eyes sleepy.
Then she settled low in the pew and played with her fingers like a little girl. And Irene snored quietly. Faith could kill Courtney Ruddy. The provost’s voice grew louder and pointed. It was fiercely aimed, but Faith now imagined she could deflect the poison dart, let it veer away from her and all the other trapped parents, up the stone walls, through the rafters, and out the wavy glass windows. Or better, whip around and stab her in her white stretch sheathed heart. But the provost, instead of keeling over dead, was winding up with a smile. As a closing flourish, she flipped her long black hair aside, an intimate sensual gesture very much like someone beckoning for love. Oh! Much too late, thought Faith. Does she have any idea? But after the aggressive bombast, the delight now moving through the woman’s fingers of something wonderful and saving coming to her as reward—as her due—touched Faith in spite of herself. This was the lever Courtney Ruddy tapped over and over again: Love me. It’s essential. Love me or else. And Faith understood right then that Courtney Ruddy was afraid. Afraid in a way that Faith could never be because she didn’t have that lever, that hope of possibility anymore. It had been burned right out of her.

  For a place famous for its free-flowing approach to the surfacing of hidden genius—it embarrassed Faith to think Cece signed up for this but here they were—for these free spirits it was a highly structured day: lectures, tours, musical interludes, a swatch of modern dance, above all a demonstration of the integration of desirable real-world skills into the ephemeral on all levels of the college and so on. Lots of artful food, fanciful in form, industrial in flavor. By late afternoon, the sun was casting a magenta glow into the clouds over the violet mountain peaks, and they were all starving. Cece said she knew a local café.