Sea Glass (17 page)

  Honora

Honora drives through the marshes, shaking her head. She can’t imagine why she told that man that she wanted a baby, nor why she touched his hand. It’s because of Christmas, she decides; it makes you do impulsive things — like telling Vivian she’d drive her to the airport. She’s glad she did; it was good to get out of the house. She thinks about the boy, his possessiveness, his pride. The rapt expression on his face at the airport. His grin when the man gave him the present. The way the man had to look at her, to watch her speak her words.

She hopes now that Sexton isn’t too upset that she wasn’t there to greet him. She will explain, and she is certain that he will understand. She steers the beach wagon around a corner, waiting for the sight of the house and the Buick parked out front, but when she completes the turn, she is so startled by what she sees — or, rather, by what she doesn’t see — that she inadvertently takes her foot off the clutch and stalls the automobile.

There are no lights on in the house, and the Buick isn’t there.

She tells herself that Sexton has gone out to the store to buy coffee. That he has run out of gas and has had to walk to a filling station. That there were too many cars on Route 1, and he had no way to get in touch with her. That he left her present on a counter in a department store and had to go back to find it.

She doesn’t believe a word of it.

She puts the car in gear and completes the turn. She parks in front of the house, where normally the Buick would be. She steps up onto the granite slab. The door is shiny in the moonlight. She moves into the hallway and thinks of the first time she and Sexton ever entered this house. The hallway is brighter now, the peeling wallpaper with the liveried servants gone, replaced by lemon paint. The electric sconces on the wall now work with the flick of a switch. The house no longer smells of mildew, and she doesn’t think as often about the other people who lived here before her. She puts her coat over a hook and enters the kitchen. The windows are clean, the indoor shutters painted, the grime of years long removed. The oven door opens without the screech and bang now, and the water flows smoothly from the tap.

The sound of surf inside her head makes it hard to think. She sits at the table and runs her hands over the embroidered linen. The tea things are still in the sink; nothing has been touched. Sexton did not come home and then go out again for a pint of milk. He did not come home at all.

She glances up at the cuckoo clock on the wall. Ten past six. She runs the water and begins to rinse out the cups. She has planned a Christmas Eve dinner of roast goose with raisin stuffing, scalloped potatoes, brussels sprouts, and a dish called Spanish Onion Supreme. She has the pies for dessert. Neither she nor Sexton is particularly religious, so they will not be going out again to midnight services — nor even, she thinks, to church in the morning. No, tomorrow they will sleep late, and then they will get up and have their coffee and wander into the front room to admire the tree.

He has had an accident, she thinks now. The Buick is disabled and is lying in a ditch at the side of the road. Sexton is hurt, writhing on a stretcher.

She puts her wet hands to her face. No, no, she won’t think like that.

Turning, she sees that Vivian has left behind a neatly folded newspaper on a chair. Her new friend must have had it in her hand or under her arm when she knocked on the door. Perhaps she was planning to read it in the waiting room at the airfield. Honora dries her hands, picks the paper up and unfolds it.
New England Business Outlook Good,
she reads on the front page, but then her eye travels to another headline on the same page:
Fifteen Banks Fail to Open for Business.
Honora sits down and turns the pages of the newspaper, looking at the advertisements to take her mind off the thought of the Buick lying in a ditch.
Cudahy’s lunch tongue, 21 cents,
she reads. Sardines are 13 cents. Silk dresses are $4.89. There are ads for waxed rolls, chiffon hose, and picoted underwear. For Camay and Ivory soap. Rayon bloomers are 49 cents.
Legal Ruling Guards Purse of Husband,
she reads.
Head of House Made Immune for Purchase of Fur Coat.
Again she glances up at the clock, which is moving at an agonizingly slow speed. She studies the want ads.
Woman who can cook. Middle-aged woman wanted. Young girl. Girl for office work. Waitress. Salesgirl. Housekeeper.

She puts the newspaper aside and reaches for the packet of sea glass Vivian gave her. She picks up each shard and inspects it. The electric light changes the colors — makes the lavender pink and puts a sheen on the watery blue. She stands and walks into the front room to fetch her platter of sea glass. Under the tree are several wrapped gifts, presents from the large box that her mother sent, as well as the pen she told Vivian about and a vest that she knit for Sexton. She lifts the platter, carries it into the kitchen, and sets it on the table. She sifts through the pieces, several layers thick now on the china, and lets them fall through her fingers like water. She empties Vivian’s collection of sea glass onto the dish. The pieces jumble together, so that Honora can no longer tell whose are whose.

She hears the sound of a car on gravel, something between a purr and a rumble — a sound she would know anywhere. She runs into the hallway and opens the door and calls her husband’s name.

Sexton emerges unsteadily from the Buick. He turns and puts a hand on the top of the car, as if for balance, and for a moment he seems not to know that she is there. She calls to him again and, hearing his name this time, he straightens.

She takes a step forward, but he holds up a hand to stop her.

“Sexton, what’s wrong?” she asks.

“I’m fine,” he says.

He makes his way around the Buick. He has his suitcase in one hand. When he reaches her, he puts his free arm around his wife, pulling her to him in a halfhearted embrace. The smell of him is foul, that of an unwashed body, of stale liquor on the breath.

Perhaps she recoils. He lets his arm drop from her shoulder. He walks toward the house, and it is as though he has already forgotten she is there. His posture is different — a slight hunch, the shoulders more rounded than she has remembered. He stumbles on a flagstone. He hesitates a moment on the doorstep, as if taken aback by the wreath.

Honora follows Sexton into the house. In the brighter light of the kitchen, she can see the uneven stubble on his chin, the deep bluish circles under his eyes, which are red rimmed.

He’s been crying,
she thinks.

“I was worried when you didn’t come,” she says.

“I’m sorry for that.”

“What happened to you?”

“What happened to me?”

She waits for his answer, but he seems unable, or unwilling, to fill the silence. After a time, she puts the kettle under the tap. But then she has to put the kettle down because her hands are shaking so badly.

“I’ve lost my job,” he says.

She presses her fingers hard against the lip of the sink.

“I’m going to lose the car,” he says. “The bank is calling in the loan.”

“Why?” she asks, turning.

He sits abruptly in the chair, as if his legs have simply given out. He rests his elbows on his knees and puts his head in his hands. “Banks are calling in loans all over the place,” he says. “It’s the same everywhere.”

“They can’t do that,” Honora says. “I don’t understand. They made that loan in good faith.”

“They can do anything they want.”

Honora wishes her husband would look at her. She can see only the top of his hat. There’s a smear of something like slush on the crown, as if he’d dropped it. “Have we lost the house?” she asks.

“Not yet.”

“What happened?” she asks. “You got a letter?”

“I got a letter. I went to the bank this morning.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

Still he won’t look at her. Even when he glances up in her direction, his eyes slide sideways off her face.

“And that was it?” she asks. She can hear the rising note of panic in her own voice. “They just said, ‘Well, we made this loan and now we’re taking it back’?”

“Something like that.”

She moves to the icebox and removes the tray beneath the ice. It’s full of water and sloshes as she draws it out. Carrying it carefully, she walks with it to the back door, opens the door, and tosses the water out. She puts the tray back in the icebox.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m emptying the ice tray.”

“For God’s sakes, Honora.”

“I’ll heat up something for dinner. There’s no time to cook the goose now.”

“I’m not hungry.”

She moves slowly to the kitchen table and sits in the only other chair. He turns and puts his arm on the linen cloth, but he doesn’t reach far enough to touch her. He still hasn’t taken off his coat, and she can smell his whiskey breath across the table.

“I took a gamble,” he says. “I did something that wasn’t exactly wrong but wasn’t exactly by the book either. Wasn’t strictly on the up-and-up.”

“What was it?”

“You don’t need to know.”

“I don’t need to know?”

“For crying out loud, Honora.”

She draws the platter of sea glass toward her. She thinks of her Christmas Eve dinner — the goose, the onions, the brussels sprouts, the pies. She fingers a piece of milk glass and holds it up to the light. How dare he take this tone with her? Isn’t it her car, her house, her life too? She lifts a shard of bubbled glass from the platter and examines the edges. She thinks of the presents in the front room: the Multi-Vider pen that she paid for by scrimping from the household money, the argyle vest she spent hours knitting. She sifts the sea glass through her fingers. She minds most of all that he has taken from her the pristine jewel of what might have been.

I’ve married a man who isn’t entirely honest,
she thinks.

“You and your goddamned sea glass,” Sexton mutters.

She wants her husband to leave the room. To go upstairs and have a bath and go to bed and not speak one more word to her tonight.

“Go upstairs and have a bath,” she says. “I’ll heat up some dinner.”

She pushes her chair back. Sexton stands, leans across the tablecloth, and takes hold of the platter of sea glass. He flips the pieces of glass hard into the air, the way one might toss a person in a taut blanket, or a flapjack in a pan. The glass flies up and hits the ceiling and the windows and the walls and the cuckoo clock and the stove and the icebox and the shelves, and for a moment it seems that all the world is raining bits of color. Honora raises her arms over her head to shield herself.

Sexton drops the platter onto the table. He spins around, his coattails snapping behind him. She hears the front door shut, the engine of the Buick start up.

Honora brings her arms away from her head.

The silence in the kitchen is worse than the shards of glass falling from the sky.

A piece of sea glass slips from her lap onto the floor with a tiny ping. She bends to pick it up. It is the jewel-like bit of cobalt. Turning, she sees that there is sea glass everywhere.

She stands and collects the glass from the windowsills and from the top of the stove. From the shelves and from beneath the icebox. From the chair that her husband has so recently sat upon and from the waxed paper she has put over the mince pies. She collects all the bits that she can find and puts them back on the white platter.

She sits again at the table and studies the shards of glass.

It’s a miracle,
she thinks. Sea glass doesn’t break.

  Honora

It is always more than she has imagined it to be, even after the three hundred–odd days that she has lived in this house and walked out the porch door and looked at the wet beach. The tide is dead low — so low it seems as if it will never make its way up the long shallow grade, glistening until the last fifteen feet, when it hits the drop-off.

The year is 1930. A June day. Not quite an ordinary day.

The cottages are mostly still empty, though some, seemingly boarded up, are surreptitiously inhabited by drifters, men and women without a place to live. She sees them when she walks the beach — a face in a window, a figure quickly rounding a corner, smoke from a house that appears to be abandoned — and occasionally these same people come to her back door looking for food. Even if Honora has next to nothing, it is understood that she will not turn them away. In Taft, her mother keeps soup simmering and bakes an extra loaf of bread each morning. Honora does the same, though she will have to give bread, and cheese when she can get it, as an alternative to hot soup through the summer.

Her feet sink slightly into a patch of soft, wet sand. When she reaches the road, she will brush them off and put on her shoes and walk the short distance down to the store. It will be a faster walk home because she won’t want to linger. With the lobster bodies, eight cents a pound this week at the fish shack, she will make a stew. Not enough money this week for meat.

Sexton did not reappear until Christmas night, by which time the marriage Honora and he had enjoyed for six months — that ordinary and innocent universe of checked oilcloth and women’s magazines, of erotic baths and gumdrop packets, of trust and hope and modest dreams — was gone. What replaced it was still a marriage, she thinks now, as a play will still be called a play, though the characters and the dialogue and even the tone of the drama may be so radically altered as to be almost unrecognizable. Theatergoers would be alarmed, unnerved, by such a change.

That night, Sexton was hungry and demoralized and dirty and wept like a nearly grown child — with harsh gestures and hiccupping sounds that frightened her — and sometimes she thinks she agreed to forgive him for the dishonesty and the Christmas debacle and the hideous incident with the sea glass simply to get him to stop. Three days later, when the auctioneer came for the Buick (her husband having refused to drive it to the address he had been given), Sexton waited on the porch, facing the sea, so that he would not have to witness the ordeal. It was Honora who stood at the end of the front walk and who watched the auctioneer’s assistant stall the unfamiliar automobile as he drove it from its parking place.

For weeks afterward, Sexton and Honora scarcely spoke, he lost in a kind of stunned reverie, as if he could not believe in his own disaster, Honora so frayed and raw that she could not bear to be touched, nor could she summon the wherewithal to converse, even about the mundane. Each day Sexton left the house in search of work — first seeking a job in sales, and then, when it became apparent no one was hiring, a position in one of the offices of the eleven mills in the city. Finally, desperately, he took a job as a ring spinner in the Ely Falls Mill. Every day he sees to it that two strands of slightly twisted roving are transformed into one strand of tightly spun yarn that is wound onto a bobbin. Honora doesn’t know much more than this because Sexton never talks about his job. He works from 6:30 in the morning until noon, and then from 12:30 until 5:15. For this work, he is paid twenty-two dollars a week, eight of which go for room and meals at a boardinghouse entirely inhabited by other men who work in the mills as well.

After Sexton lost the one job and finally found another (far lesser) one, Honora tried to tell her husband to let the house go. It drained them of every extra cent, she said. There was precious little left over for food — often nothing at all for clothes. She could move into Ely Falls and share an apartment with him. It wouldn’t be so bad, she said (though privately she knew that she would hate that outcome), but Sexton wouldn’t hear of giving up the house. He worked, he said, so that they could have a proper place to live, far from the filth of the city. He worked, he said, to hold on to the one thing that hadn’t yet been taken from him. And Honora understood finally, in a way she had not at first, that Sexton’s manhood was more wedded to the house than it was to her. That something inside him would be irretrievably lost if he failed to keep the house that he had ruined himself to buy.

When Honora meets Sexton’s trolley on Friday evenings, he kisses her as he alights. He is the last passenger at the last stop, and for a time, Honora imagines that his descending the steps and kissing his wife will erase the past or make it inconsequential, so that whatever happens
from that moment on
will be the true marriage, will be the thing they were meant to have. Husband and wife will walk home, and though Sexton is covered with bits of lint — in his hair and on his neck and even in his nostrils — so that she cannot entirely forget where he has come from, and though they are so guarded in their conversation as to be almost mute, she keeps alive the notion of a fresh start. When they arrive home, Sexton bathes in the tub, and sometimes Honora is just shocked at the filth that is left behind. She scrubs the grime from his neck and his face and his hair and his ears, and he enters a kind of trance as she does this. In the early weeks, when he first went into the mill, he could not raise his right arm to wash himself. He couldn’t reach his back or lift his hand to hold a pitcher of water.

But at some point between the bath and the meal, perhaps even during the meal itself, Honora will catch the first evasive glance on her husband’s face, the first glimpse of the set jaw. Resentment will begin to well up inside of her so that when she washes the dishes, her nerves will already have begun to sound a taut note just below the silence. And then she and Sexton will meet in the bedroom, her husband undressed and waiting for her between the sheets (ironed just that day, because two days in the sea air puts the wrinkles back in), and the notion of a fresh start will have vanished like a song. Honora’s limbs will be stiff as she undresses, her own sliding into the sheets more hurried than she has intended. And though her husband will appear to come alive, she knows that it is lust — too quickly ignited and too quickly extinguished — that animates him.

Walking to the store would be easier on the sandy pavement of the road, she knows, but because of the contours of the landscape, the journey is only half as long on the beach. The soles of her feet (tender after the long winter) hurt on the sand and shells, and so she moves along the shoreline, letting the waves lap over her toes. After a time, Honora sees a familiar shape and glisten, washed up by a wave from the incoming tide. But when she runs and reaches for the piece of sea glass, another wave snatches it away.

She has never lost her love of sea glass, nor the excitement of the hunt, despite that terrible moment on Christmas Eve when the kitchen rained glass. She waits for the roll of water to subside. Where the sea glass was, there is nothing now — only a smooth surface of wet sand awaiting yet another deposit, yet another erasure. The beach is made and remade this way hundreds of times a day, its entire geography instantly effaced, redrawn. Sometimes when she looks out the window of her bedroom, there are hills and gullies that weren’t there just the day before. Occasionally the sand is covered by rocks — thick fists of gray and brown and black. At other times, the beach is so filthy with seaweed that she can hardly see the sand. The surreptitious people from the empty cottages scurry onto the beach and collect the seaweed, as if it were a treasure. She imagines that they cook and eat it.

And once in a while, especially during the winter, Honora will look out the window of her bedroom and the sand will be
gone.
Against the seawall, the beach will be five or six feet below the previous day’s level. It is as though the sand has simply been scooped away from the beach, the residue neatly smoothed, like icing. No sign of cataclysm, no melee, a sight defined only by absence. In the spring, the sand will mysteriously return. Overnight. As if it had been borrowed.

She picks up a pottery shard with rounded edges and a red-and-brown flower painted on the glaze. She puts her shoes on behind the abandoned Highland Hotel — bankrupt now, scheduled for demolition in the fall.

One day a man has a job, and life is full of possibilities. The next day the job and the car are gone, and the man cannot look his wife in the eye. There is no paycheck, no way to earn money for food and clothing. Life is taken up with trying to survive.

It takes all the time there is, this trying to survive.

There have been days when all they have had to eat is cornmeal: cornmeal porridge for breakfast and then fried up for lunch, and then because there simply isn’t anything else to eat, and no money left from the pay packet, Honora will warm up those fritters for supper. Once, after they had already sold the radio and the clock and the Multi-Vider pen (never used), and there wasn’t anything else in the house to sell, they had only dried berries and peanut butter sandwiches to eat for days. Today, when she goes to buy the lobster bodies, the fish house will stink and Honora will have to tie her kerchief around her nose. There will be no tails or claws to speak of — those will all have been shipped to Boston. When she gets home, she will painstakingly remove the meat with a pick, and then she will make her stew. Night after night, sometimes that’s all there is to eat: lobster bodies.

Once, when Sexton was away, she put bread in water and tried to make a kind of porridge. The next day, she walked to Jack Hess’s store, and that was the first time she ever asked for credit. That Friday, when Sexton brought home his pay packet (the four silver dollars —
cartwheels,
the workers call them — and the ten paper dollars), Honora walked to Hess’s store and paid the man back. House or no house, she said to Sexton, they would not owe money to Jack Hess.

Poverty, her mother has written, makes you clever, and Honora knows that this is true. If you don’t have ingenuity, you don’t eat, and so you have to be smart. You take the lace collar and cuffs off a dress to make it appear as if you had a new dress. You get old coats at the church and carefully rip out all the seams and turn the material inside out and make new coats and jackets. You find old sweaters with holes in them and unravel the wool and wash it and reknit the yarn into new sweaters. You put fresh cardboard into your husband’s shoes every Sunday to keep the soles from wearing out. You turn his shirt collars, and you make your own laundry soap out of grease and lye and borax and ammonia. Such economies are embarrassing to Honora. She never speaks of them to anyone. She hides this effort in the way she hides the douche powder and the rubber hose and bag. High on a shelf so no one will ever see them.

And yet. And yet. If asked — if pressed — Honora would have to say she is strangely content. It’s an odd feeling that she cannot describe to anyone — not to her mother and certainly not to Sexton, whose unhappiness seems to have no bounds, whose unhappiness is defined now by what he does not have, which is almost everything. He will always, in his mind, be the salesman who no longer has anything to sell. A man who longs for the open road but who cannot ever take it.

Whereas Honora, oddly, now has more purpose than she ever did before. She is a dutiful wife who tends to her husband in spite of his weaknesses. She is a woman with ingenuity. She is a woman without illusions. She is a woman who, above all, is too busy trying to make a go of it to fret about her marriage.

Honora has hired herself out as a caretaker to five of the cottages on the beach, one job leading to the other, the first the result of a recommendation from Jack Hess. Most of the time, Honora’s duties consist of making sure there are no burst pipes in the basement or animals in the cupboards or glass panes cracked in a storm. On good days, she opens all the windows to dry out a house, to rid the place of the smell of mildew. In the best of the five cottages, she will take the sheets off the furniture if she knows that the owners are arriving for a visit. When there is an emergency (bats in a bedroom, a shutter blown off in the wind), Sexton comes with her on the weekends and helps to make the repairs. For this work, Honora makes fifteen dollars a month, all of which goes to meet the mortgage payment.

Every time Honora visits Jack Hess’s store she is struck by how much barer the shelves are now than they used to be, and she wonders how it is that Jack feeds as many people as he does when he appears to have less and less to offer. It is a conjurer’s trick, and Honora has sometimes imagined a kind of alchemy in the back room, a modern-day reworking of the loaves and fishes. Today she would dearly love two pats of butter, but she won’t be able to get them home in the heat. She hasn’t ridden in an automobile since she drove Vivian’s beach wagon to her house on Christmas Day and then walked back to her own empty house. Honora needs rice and beans and flour and greens of some sort, though a quick perusal of the store tells her Mr. Hess has little in that line. And today she will splurge on strawberries and sugar. She wants to make a strawberry-rhubarb pie with the rhubarb that grows wild near the street. Today is her wedding anniversary.