Archive

There was nothing too bothersome about the compact, mint-colored beach cottage when the woman first moved in except the landlord, an older man who brought his college-aged grandson with him every Thursday or Friday to mow and weed the yard.

At first, she found it almost comforting. Seeing two mildly familiar faces out the window once in a while helped her feel more settled, less alone. She’d felt alone since the minute she arrived in this neighborhood tucked on the shore of Narragansett Bay, right where the ocean contracted down into a river. She had squinted once at a map of the bay and thought the upper part where she lived looked vaguely like a pelvic bone.

Now, three months into her lease, summer pulsated with long, humid days and relentless weeds that grew back in a blink. She took the kayak out every morning at sunrise and paddled up to the cove, near the sacrum of the bay, and then down to the state park and back home again, about an hour or two depending on the current, usually to find the two men in the yard at week’s end. They would wave at her while she dragged the kayak up onto the lawn.

“Great morning for a paddle,” the landlord would say from under a Red Sox cap. Sweaty, she’d release her grip on the boat and wave or nod or say something generic about the water or the weather (“Choppy out there today” or “Another warm one,” although they were actually having some of the hottest days on record that year, the heat so intense some days that there were warnings on the news for people to stay indoors until sundown). She’d then disappear into the house to shower all the salt off her skin. But she could usually hear them just outside the window, discussing mundane things like the dead pine tree that needed to be cut down or the British literature classes the grandson would take in the fall, and she would worry her leathered skin would be visible to them through the slats in the window blind, that they’d catch a glimpse of her naked 52-year- old body and recoil. Once, she’d been lean and taut and bronzed. Now, she just was what she was.

Not that she wanted the alternative, either—for them to see her and not recoil. She didn’t want to be seen at all, but rather to be the one watching from inside, observing that they were somewhere near, but also not near. In the beginning, their presence in the yard had been fine. A solace on some of her darker days, even. Now, though, their willingness to return consistently and tend the yard’s overgrowth began to annoy her. Seeing their silhouettes through the wavering, wheat-like barrier of beach grass between her yard and the beach now made her almost want to go straight back into the water for another hour or two, even though her sunblock had long since worn off and her eyes stung from all the salt in them. She always took a moment of pause as she watched them work, considering how much more sun exposure she could bear if it meant not having to make herself known. Instead, she pulled the kayak into the yard, made routine pleasantries, and hastily ducked inside the cottage like always.

***

There was an old top-loader washing machine in the basement that leaked half of the time, and a dryer that blew hot air but never seemed to fully dry anything, so she preferred to take her clothes to the laundromat down the road. Everything that came out of her laundry at home was damp and smelled like soil.

There was a liquor store next door to the laundromat, and while her clothes tumbled around in water she hoped wasn’t tinged with bits of waste from other peoples’ bodies, she took to wandering the wine aisle. She read the labels and chose her bottle based on where the grapes had been grown, or how well the description of flavor had been written. She wanted to be reminded of something fond when she drank wine, whether a place she had visited in her old life or the way a good sentence warmed her like a hug. She saw the irony, though, because she usually drank to make forgetting easier.

It was a muggy, overcast Wednesday that week when she put the laundry basket into her car and drove it down to do the wash. She started the cycle and left, even though the attendant girl glared at her through frizzy brown bangs as she walked out the door.

She went down two storefronts, past the cheap haircut place, and into the liquor store. It was just before lunchtime on a workday.

“Hey,” the cashier said. He was young, twenties probably, skinny and pockmarked in his pink cheeks in a way that made him look even younger, his face downturned as his thumb flicked the screen of his cell phone. She kept walking.

The wines were categorized by region and country. Today she went to Bordeaux and picked up, read, put back many bottles until she found a Cabernet Franc that looked right. The blue-black liquid was meant to have notes of vanilla, raspberries, and smoke. She thought for a long moment about those flavors, warm and sweet but also peppery, how they would feel in her mouth, and decided this was her pick for the day. She tucked two bottles under her arm and went to the register to pay.

“Need any scratch tickets or mini bottles?” the kid at the register asked her as he put the wine into a paper bag. He slid a thin rectangle of cardboard between their glass bodies to keep them from shattering.

“Sure, why not? Two of those five dollar scratch tickets would be good.”

He tore them off, slipped them in the bag, and read her the total. She paid by credit card, as she did for everything now. Every purchase was a conscious practice in not panicking. She tried to do the yoga breathing she’d learned in all those classes she used to take, but even flushing her system with oxygen didn’t stop her from thinking of the day she’d hit her credit limit and have to call her ex-husband for more money. You’re out again? he would ask, usually with a disappointed sigh. Where’s the money I just wired you? Technically, legally, he didn’t have to send her a dime. But he did because, as their mutual friend had tipsily told the woman once, he harbored deep guilt about how he’d derailed her life all those years ago. He’ll probably send you money until he dies simply out of atonement or some bullshit like that. But the woman hadn’t felt comforted hearing that. Instead, it made her teeth itch. It was like overhearing the neighbors having sex, and then smiling at them as if it had never happened. She couldn’t un-know that he felt guilty. He had never once told her how he felt, but he seemed fine telling their friends.

The woman stopped at her car to drop off the wine before going back in to check on her laundry. The washing machine was still tumbling her clothes and towels, but it looked like it might be almost finished. The attendant with the bangs came over a moment after the woman sat on a white plastic chair to stare at the muted television and wait it out.

“Ma’am,” the girl said firmly. “You can’t leave when you’re doing a cycle.”

“Oh, sorry. I didn’t realize,” the woman lied.

“It’s on the signs,” the girl said, pointing to various posters which all declared: YOU MUST REMAIN WITH YOUR ITEMS.

“I must have missed those. Sorry. My eyes aren’t that great anymore.”

“I’ve seen you here before, ok?” the girl said. “I know you leave every time you put your wash in. No more. I have to put my foot down, ok? We have these policies for you and your stuff’s safety.”

The woman wanted to laugh but didn’t because she wasn’t in the business of being rude and undermining another woman who was just doing her job. It was silly, though, to think that her clothing needed to be kept safe. From what? Thievery? If someone wanted her small collection of worn cotton t-shirts and shorts, her decades-old towels with frayed edges, the tattered fabric of her former life, they could have it all.

“Sorry,” the woman said again. “You’re right. I’ll stick around next time. Thanks for letting me know.”

The girl seemed satisfied and went back to her post. When the wash cycle ended a short while later, the woman dropped her soaking laundry into the basket and took it all home to dry out on the clothesline instead.

***

Thunder crept in that night, just after dark. She opened the bottle of wine and poured it into a small glass. There were no wine glasses here, but then again, she wasn’t fancy anymore.

She went to the three-season room at the front of the house to watch the storm over the water and scratch her lottery tickets. Lightning flashed in the distance across the bay where the houses were much larger, palatial even. Once, she’d lived in a house like that—a McMansion, her sister from Maine had half-joked in what appeared, at the time, to be envy. You two need five thousand freaking square feet of living space? Really? You need to build a McMansion? For what?

But the woman only needed what she had now. It was enough. She’d put a desk and chair in one of the small rooms, her full-sized bed in the other. A confined bathroom between the rooms, rust on the heat vent and orange-pink mold on the floor of the shower stall that required scrubbing every few days. She could stretch her arms and touch the interior wall of the shower and the mirror at the same time.

The front of the house was an open space meant for a couch, which she still hadn’t bought, and opposite that was the kitchen: a stovetop with no oven, a mini refrigerator, no dishwasher. Then, running the length of the front of the cottage was the three-season room where she ate her meals on a scratched wooden table she’d found at a yard sale, and read and slept on a padded glider the landlord had left for her.

Thunder vibrated the walls. She scratched with a penny at the first ticket, brushing away the silvery particles as they accumulated into little hills. The card was a bust. No winnings. She held up the second one, contemplated it, then put it down. Had a sip of wine. Contemplated again. She’d save this one like she’d save the second bottle to give herself something to do in a day or two.

The downpour started a few minutes later between a swift, quivering flash of lightning and another clap of thunder. Rain spattered the roof as the wine softened her joints and her thoughts, nicely loosening up everything that was usually pulled so tight. Once, in her past life, her husband had almost been struck by lightning while on the golf course. Instead, the bolt chose a fat willow tree only fifty or so feet away, cracking it with blinding, surprising ease. I felt the shock in the air, he told her that night as he buttoned his pajama shirt. I almost died today.

Sometimes she imagined he had died out on the eighth hole, burned up from inside, crisp at all his soft edges like grilled bread. The windfall from his electrocution would’ve changed her life. The life insurance money, selling the house, losing him in a way that let her grieve instead of resent. Maybe she would’ve met someone else before her urge to be alone consumed her as it had. A nice divorcée or widower, someone who cooked for a change. Instead, he’d lived, she thought to herself as she poured the remainder of the wine into her glass and leaned back in the glider.

The rain curtained her view of the bay. Despite the hiss of the wind and the beating rain and intermittent thunder, she heard a distinct sloshing. She went to the door and opened it, briefly pushed by a gust. She squinted into her front yard, a short stretch of grass that gave way to beach grass and rocks and then dropped a couple of feet onto the sand. But where the rocks should’ve been, she saw the ocean splashing. It’s because of high tide and the weather and the moon probably, too, she told herself as she shut the door, hoping the water would stay out there.

The woman went back to the glider and her wine. The splashing outside continued, the sound of the bay intruding on her lawn. The landlord had told her that when he purchased the house, he had two options: tear the cottage down and build a new structure farther back on the property or leave the existing one where it had always stood. There was no option of rebuilding in the same spot, just feet from the shoreline because the ocean levels had risen and crept closer to the property since the house had been built nearly seven decades earlier. It was no longer safe to be that close to the edge of the bay.

The woman felt full of nervous energy and finally pulled on her rain boots and went outside to investigate. She trudged across the yard and stopped when her feet were submerged, much closer to the house than she expected.

“Ah. Shit,” she said as rain pelted her arms, legs, and face. The ground was spongy and sucked at the soles of her boots as she pulled away and backed toward the door. She pulled the bulkhead open and peered down into the dark cellar. Lightning gave her a split second to see the water pooling along the basement floor. “Shit,” she said again.

Back inside, she toweled off while she called the landlord on her cell. It rang and rang and then his voicemail picked up. She left a brief message. “Hi. Sorry to bother you. Call me when you get this, please. I don’t think the sump pump is working.”

She went back to her wine and noticed a coal of anger burning in her chest. It was irresponsible of the landlord to not double check the pump before a storm, yet he could tend the lawn every week? He could cut back the innocuous weeds and grass, yet let the house fill with water from the bottom up? She’d float away, but at least the lawn would look nice.

She hadn’t worried about floods at the McMansion. There, they were nestled in a development between two small mountains. Sometimes trees fell outside the development when the wind gusted above thirty miles per hour, blocking roads and tearing power lines from their sockets, but there was no risk of the ocean devouring the houses. And, inside the development, there were hardly any trees to worry about. Plus, their power lines had all been buried underground. There was nothing exposed that could be wrenched out or destroyed by a falling limb, and hardly any limbs that could fall in the first place.

It’s great, her husband had said when they first went to see their lot. They were both forty-six and had decided to build. They had the money and were bored. Their divorce was still a few years away and the idea of separating didn’t yet feel urgent. So much sky. Nothing blocking the view, he’d said as he swept his arm out in front of him as if clearing away an invisible mess of vines and branches.
The view? she’d asked. Of…the sky?

You know. The trees. They get in the way sometimes. He’d said it so flippantly, with a swift wave of his hand, as if she were a fool for not understanding how problematic trees could be. Now all she could think was how relieved she was that they’d never been able to have children after they tried for years. Relief that she hadn’t brought children onto a dying planet and given them a father who found trees inconvenient. She’d felt stupid when he’d said this, his words a direct reflection of what she’d been willing to live with for so long. She couldn’t fault herself too much now, though. She knew there was an almost infinite amount of ignorance a person could overlook in the name of love, in the hope of simply having their dreams fulfilled.

Her cell phone rang inside on the kitchen counter.

“How’s the weather in your neck of the woods?” the landlord asked, an apparent joke since he lived only a few minutes away.

“Stormy. There’s water in the cellar. And the front yard is pretty flooded.”

The landlord said hmmm and then, “Well, the pump should take care of the basement at least.”

“It’s not running,” the woman said. “I don’t hear it, anyway. Have you checked it recently?”

“Not running? Is your power out?”

She’d been sitting in the dark since the storm started and only realized as he asked this and she reached over to flick on the lamp that yes, her power had gone out at some point and she hadn’t even noticed.

“How long ago did you lose it?” he asked.

“I have no idea. I think the last time I turned anything on was a few hours ago when I warmed up some food.”

“Are you ok there by yourself?”

She paused. It hadn’t occurred to her that she might not be ok.

“If not, you can always stay with us for the night,” he said so plainly that the woman thought he must’ve forgotten who he was speaking with, confusing her for a sister or niece or granddaughter. He was seventy-six, and while still very active, clearly his mind was fading.

When she didn’t say anything, he asked, “Did we get disconnected?”

“No, I’m here. I couldn’t impose on you like that. It’s kind of you to offer, though. I’m sure I’ll be fine here by myself.”

“Oh, it’s nothing. We have a guest room, anyhow. Lorna and Tyler would love your company.”

Lorna, the wife she’d never met but heard about in passing. Tyler, the grandson who waved from the yard, his navy blue university hat pulled low as he helped his grandfather. Their quaint little family. The woman had imagined a family of her own once, many years earlier when she still had a viable womb and a partner. They’d both imagined it, she and her husband, but he had been the driving force behind trying to make it real.

We’re getting older and our time is running out, he said when they both neared forty. Their birthdays were a month apart. If we’re doing this, we need to make a real attempt at it now or we’ll always wonder. She didn’t disagree. In fact, at the time, his desire for a baby had felt romantic. So, she’d quit her job in publishing to reduce stress, a tactic their doctor said would make the in-vitro more likely to work. The woman stopped waking to an alarm clock, instead letting her body rest as much as it needed and find its natural circadian rhythms. She went to yoga and drank grassy green juice every morning and turmeric tea every evening. Her acupuncturist gave her bitter Chinese herbs to drink, which she had to swallow while pinching her nose. She took her basal body temperature every morning upon waking before getting out of bed and marked it in a little notebook. She tracked her cycle with the precision of a scientist tracking an incoming asteroid. She scheduled weekly massages, cut gluten and dairy and refined sugar from her diet, went to reiki appointments to clear her chakras.

In the end, her effort failed. The ultrasounds always showed static where a heartbeat should’ve been, a vacant cavern inside her abdomen.

“I’ll be fine here,” she said again into the phone, realizing with a smack of grief that she didn’t want to be around a family tonight if for no other reason than she felt too fragile from the wine, too aware of her mortality all of a sudden. “I’ll call you if things get worse.”

“Suit yourself. I’ll call up the electric company, though. Is there a tree down? Do the neighbors have power?”

The woman peered out the window.

“The whole street is dark. Have you ever seen the tide come up into the yard before? It’s splashing near the lounge chair right now.”

“Really? That’s odd. And to think some people say climate change isn’t real.”

The water rose in baby waves, tiny ocean efforts, and splashed the grass.

“So, is that a no?” she asked.

“I’ve never seen it higher than the rocks myself. That house has seen bigger hurricanes than this little storm, though. Listen, I’ll come by first thing tomorrow morning, but you call me back if it gets worse over there.”

She thanked him and hung up. She could handle some weather and the bay trouncing her front yard, the groundwater filling up her rental from below. No problem. She’d faced worse.

The woman opened the second bottle of wine because the rain had intensified and now that she realized she couldn’t turn on the lights if she wanted to, she had to somehow soften the urge to light the whole place up. The second bottle tasted better than the first, sweeter and more like raspberry and mesquite, a dry warmth washing against the soft insides of her cheeks. With the flashlight built into her cellphone, she illuminated the second lottery ticket and scratched it clean to reveal it was a $5 winner.

“Ha,” she said as she held it up and scanned it again. There was at least some luck to be had tonight.

She saw the battery on her phone was low, only twelve percent charged, and turned it off to preserve what would likely be only one phone call’s worth of juice. If she needed to be rescued, she wanted to at least be able to ask for help. She set the phone down and wandered through the house for a while, rearranging her desk and straightening the hand towel in the bathroom. She was bored of her own company, tipsy, annoyed, restless.

Before, when she hadn’t stopped working yet, she almost never felt boredom. Her mind ran like a wind turbine, whirring constantly, always generating. And even after she left her job to try for the baby, she kept so busy with relaxation that she never had a spare second to feel so blank. She should be writing now that she had all the free time the world could offer, maybe finish her last book and try to get it published through one of her old work connections, but instead she floated in the kayak and rocked in the glider and let perfectly good days slip away, drops from a leaky faucet, gone gone gone.

She knew she was being wasteful, yet a friend, an old colleague, had strongly suggested the woman have grace with herself while she got back on her feet. Cut yourself some slack. You don’t have to figure it all out right away, the old friend had said. But, oddly enough, the friend hadn’t called the woman back in months. As with all the others, the woman assumed that the friend had grown tired of her gloom. She suspected this because another friend, a perpetually upbeat woman from Zumba, had practically told her so. Don’t let your circumstances define you, was what she said in the locker room as they toweled their damp skin and pulled their day clothes back on. You’re going to meet a great man and find a super job and everything will be good again before you know it. Try not to be so down about it all so much. It’s a little… depressing to be around. No offense.

The woman rocked in the glider and kept her eyes on the front lawn. The tide was predictable enough, but she wondered what she’d do if it decided not to recede this time. Climb onto the roof or up into the nearby trees? Sometimes local libraries opened as shelters during power outages. “Warming” and “cooling” centers, they called it, depending on the season. People huddled in Fiction or Reference while they waited for the conveniences of modern life to be restored to their homes. Would they call it a “drying” station if the whole neighborhood went under water, as the horseshoe crabs and slick green clumps of seaweed floated past mailboxes and garbage bins? Could the woman even get to the library if her car was waterlogged and she was perched up in the treetops like some featherless, prehistoric creature?

Whenever anxiety and what-ifs started to make it difficult to breathe, she would tell herself this was all a learning experience. Eventually, her old friends would find themselves downtrodden and lost, too. Maybe they’d recall their old friend, the one whose divorce ground her down to almost nothing, and they’d call with an apology for their absence and a plea for help. The woman sometimes practiced what she’d say. Have you tried manifesting a better life? Maybe you should try yoga or meditation. Tell the universe what you want. Honestly, it’s all about your mindset. Have grace. You’re allowed to cry. But not too much, just in case it confuses or upsets the people around you.

No, she’d never say that. She would use her ex-husband’s guilt money to fly to the friend, bringing tea and comfort foods like soft cheese and dark chocolate bars and her hard-earned experience. She would position herself across the sofa from the friend, fix a peaceful look on her face and say what none of the other women around would be brave enough to say, even though they had to know it to be true.

Sometimes, honey, if you’re down for the count, all you can do is stare up at the stars and reckon with them for a while until your legs work and you can stand again.

***

The woman opened her eyes to the landlord’s face, broad and smiling, his finger tapping the window. Her mouth was dry and sour, her eyes crusty.

“It’s soupy out here,” he said as he gestured over his shoulder. “But the tide went out. Are you all right? You look a little pasty.”

“I’m fine. Excuse me,” she said, hurrying into the house and closing herself in the bathroom. She rubbed cold water on her face and over her hair to smooth the frizz around her forehead and temples. She brushed her teeth twice, the acrid taste in her mouth lingering under the mint. The hangover was worse than she expected. She felt carved out of wood.

“Did you sleep in that awful chair?” the landlord asked as she joined him outside by the bulkhead. He was looking down into the wet basement where the sump pump was now running.

“I did. Power’s back on,” she said. “I didn’t know when it went out and I didn’t realize it came back on. How funny.”

He gave her a pitying kind of expression that told her she needed a life.

“Funny,” he said. “A tree around the corner took down a wire, but they were working on it this morning. This should be dried out by later on. I’ll come back and check on it to make sure.”

“I can keep an eye on it,” she said. “I’ll let you know if it’s not dry by tonight.”

He shrugged. “Speaking of, you should come by and have some pot roast with us. Lorna’d love to cook you a meal. She likes to do that for our tenants.”

“Oh, tonight?” she asked, taken by surprise. “I’m not sure I can make it tonight. I have plans.”

“Maybe next week, then.”

“I’ll have to take a look at my schedule,” she said. Her empty, empty schedule.

“That’s ok. It’s not for everyone.”

“What, your wife’s pot roast?”

He laughed. “No. Dinner with acquaintances. Socializing. That sort of thing. Your choice, but the offer stands. Let me know how the basement’s looking, though.”

After he left, she walked around the outside of the house to check the drainpipes for clogs and to feel with the toes of her boots where the ground was the most saturated. Water had pooled at the house’s corners, softening and muddying the lawn. She went down the bulkhead stairs into the basement and watched the pump chug and suck the water out of the room. The fieldstone walls were damp, the air humid. Maybe, one day, the cottage would be overtaken by the rising ocean or swallowed by an enormous hurricane, but for now, it was just a little wet.

Back in the yard, she tipped her kayak to empty the standing water from inside the hull. It pooled around her rain boots. Then she dragged the boat down onto the beach where she launched it into low tide and walked it out until water lapped around her thighs. She climbed in and righted herself before it tipped, and then started to paddle out into the gentle waves.