He could see, could understand, that these two meant to follow him, to leave the two young men, their sons, behind. To what? For what? The buzzing sound intensified and they were rocking on a sea of golden bees shimmering in the light like coins and he knew something with certainty that he couldn’t put into words and as he looked around he knew as well that these weren’t bees but something else, something more timeless than the world, and it seemed to Oliver that the truck accelerated into the gilded pulse, launching into the frontier like his wildly beating heart. “Let me tell you,” he was saying. “We’re only here to make a better place—”
The Beach Convert
Claudette Donen—1952
She met Eileen first out of all of them, so she called it Eileen’s church. Plus, everyone from the place deferred to Eileen when they came to the restaurant, and Eileen was the first to talk to Claudette, to borrow nothing but a canister of salt, which she promised to pay back tomorrow, though Phil in the kitchen under his framed photograph of General Eisenhower said to her, to Claudette, that they weren’t in the loan business, and Claudette said it was nothing, that she’d pay for it if the woman didn’t come back, and the woman—because she wasn’t yet Eileen to her—smiled so prettily that Claudette would have given her anything.
On the second day, when Eileen returned with a store-bought canister of salt, she said that her very own brother was a kind of preacher, and later that night after her shift, Claudette had stood in the gravel parking lot with the ocean lapping quietly at the beach and the moon glowing on the waves and watched the old warehouse, empty only a few short months ago, listening to the sounds of a cheery song raised up by fifty or more voices. Eileen’s church, then: a warehouse halfway downhill to the beach from Phil’s Roadside Café, itself an anyplace sort of place with wide glass windows and hash browns and a parking lot big enough for a government office.
On the third day, when all Eileen did was come in and drink coffee with an older couple, Phil stood there with his ham-pink face and his hairy arms crossed and his chest besmirched with every food a person could eat, and he announced after Eileen left that the woman wasn’t a member of any church at all and whatever they were doing in that old warehouse was likely illegal, and anyway, he was certain they didn’t have the permission of its owner. But on her day off, Claudette walked to the restaurant anyway and then walked around the rusted square building there on the slope between the train tracks and the beach and found a group of children playing in the sand all dressed in the same clothing, the youngest wearing things no more complicated than bags, the school-age kids in shirts and short pants, all that pale glue color of cotton nobody had bothered dyeing. Among them stood a single older gentleman in a robe like a biblical shepherd, his white hair jutting up out of his head from the breeze like a gale-swept John the Baptist, the very man she’d seen the day before drinking coffee with Eileen, the man she called Saul. Claudette had heard the woman’s name by then, too, she’d heard the name Eileen, though she hadn’t screwed up the courage to talk to her about anything other than the menu and whether she wanted more coffee, and so when the older gentleman turned to her and the wind caught his shock of gray hair and put it in a different shape, she said, “Is Eileen here?”
“You’re from the restaurant,” he said, and made his thin lips into something like a smile. “You can call me Saul.”
“I’m Claudette,” she said, and then, gesturing at the children, “Beautiful kids.”
“They’re all the mothers’,” he said. He turned toward them with pride. “Every single one a miracle. All of them born since the holy vision.”
His words struck her as something like a traveling preacher’s, and she knew then she would tell Phil that yes, it was a church, and he could forget calling the police on their singing. For now she asked again if Eileen was there, and when he turned back to her with that same half-smile, she said, “It’s nothing. I was just around and thought I’d say—”
“If you can keep an eye on the children,” he said, and then he said nothing more, but turned in his flowing robe with his wind-caught hair and walked barefoot to the warehouse door and went inside, leaving her in the grass-clumped sand looking frantically over the children, worried already that one of them may have wandered off. But they were nearly immobile, the younger ones sitting splay-legged, digging little holes with their fists, the older ones shaping piles or vague castles with careful hands in groups of two or three. Quiet children, apparently, and entirely disinterested in her presence. To tell the truth, they sort of gave her the creeps. One of them in particular, a little blond with the same abruptly scissored haircut as the rest, stared at her as he dug a hole near her feet.
Claudette had never really thought about having a child. Still, like anyone, she tickled a baby’s chin when she saw one, talked in all grins to those old enough to sit in their own chair at the restaurant. She’d never found them disturbing or unnatural in any way, and yet here she was, taking a cautious step back and then another, feeling an awkward danger in their presence, when all of a sudden came the old man’s voice from the door: “Come in, children. It’s time for your reading.” And, waving to her as the children dutifully started toward him, “She’ll be right out, ma’am.”
It was funny. Not until they narrowed into a line on their way up toward the warehouse did she note they weren’t all white children, not at all, but a mix from every race, in their innocence and matched clothes and the bright afternoon sun somehow tricking the eye, or making that difference unimportant. Something like a scatter of salt and pepper on a diner table, the grains identical unless you went looking. But in all honesty, not the sort of thing she was used to seeing, not even in the movies. With the children disappeared inside, she was still thinking on this subject when out came Eileen, looking slim and jaunty and dressed like Bette Davis in a gray pantsuit with wide white collars and a big white sun hat and dark glasses. The sight of her holding down her hat in the breeze and waving made Claudette’s chest leap, the way she imagined it would had Bette Davis herself appeared here on the Del Mar beach and waved at her like she knew her, and Claudette did everything short of running away to control herself. And then before they walked the beach for the first time, chatting about small and forgettable things, Eileen said the words Claudette would always think of when she imagined her later. She said, “It’s so wonderful of you to come visit me.”
As if she’d been hoping Claudette would drop in all her life.
After that, they walked together on Claudette’s days off, and otherwise Eileen came to the restaurant for coffee or a little something to eat during the late-afternoon lull in her shifts. They made fast friends, and when, sometime in those first weeks of their friendship, Eileen said that she’d left her husband to come to California with her brother, Oliver, and their friends, Claudette couldn’t help but ask, “Did you remarry?”
Eileen laughed, seated alone in the tiny booth at the window, the afternoon sun slatted in on her like a comb of light, and said, “I’ll never remarry. Oh, no! Once living with a man that way was enough.”