She did these things.
When she cut the engine at the edge of the slope leading down to the beach, loose sheets of paper were blowing around in the sand. At first she thought the children were out playing with them, chasing them along the edge of the water. But no one was out there. Only the loose sheets of paper fluttering and rising and racing about like gulls drunk to madness. And there, on the shadowed side of the building, the door where the older gentleman had called to the children, the door from which Eileen sailed toward her that first day she visited, hung open in the breeze, keeping offbeat time for the dance of all that paper.
Her feet fell ahead of her down the slope. The bright morning light made everything unbearable, unreal. She shielded her eyes with a hand, but it helped little, and though the sound of cars on Ocean Avenue and the surf splashing filled her ears, it still felt like silence. At the door she gripped its handle and peered inside. She’d never seen inside, and now it only looked like darkness. Nobody home. She stepped up into the old warehouse, her heels clicking against the slick concrete floor.
“Hello?” she said, and nothing answered.
After a moment, objects took shape. The windows up above dropped light onto a pile of cots seemingly thrown together in the far corner, and opposite this hunkered a wide desk. Nearer by, a single long table and a modern kitchenette stood like unmatched members of a misplaced apartment, neither part of the original place. Aside from this was only the high ceiling, the vast emptiness of stale air between. Altogether the space reminded her of a gymnasium, with the same old human energy left behind with the lights out, the same faint scent of bodies recently at work. A vague memory of girlhood, of sneakers and gym shorts and Sister Edith blowing her whistle. Of Philippa turning her wide eyes on her.
They were gone, clearly, all of them. Eileen had left without another word, like a customer out the door when her back was turned. Claudette had been cool to that Vision talk and that coolness had been enough to put all this nothing in here. Or no. It had been Phil, shouldering and harrumphing in the shadows of the kitchen last night as she stood outside in terror, reaching up for the phone, holding it to the dark shape of his head, finally calling the police, a man determined to crush something in the world, and so he did.
Her stomach turned with the certainty of it, the clear image of his shadowed bulk, just as clear as the CLOSED sign on the door of the Roadside Café uphill, and the dark quiet here, where Claudette strolled through the place, looking over everything, telling herself that she would want to remember what was left, that later on it might be important to know what parts of Eileen’s church survived. It was surprisingly close to nothing. Under one of the cots she found a single jack and the stub of a cigarette. In the wide parts-factory bathroom where they had hung a sheet to divide boys from girls, she found a finely sharpened pencil. On the seat of a chair she found a dried maple leaf, perhaps come here from far away, an immigrant in this sandy climate.
In the bottom drawer of a desk she found the only thing with human markings, the only thing with even a note of personal quality, a rolled blueprint held together by a thick skin-toned rubber band. She took this to the open door and unrolled its drawing to the bright day. Here was a small town of ideal little houses, a grid of streets, a perfect neighborhood of matched squares fronted by circles, each labeled with the word tree. At the top left corner in a rectangle not part of the plan were the words Eden Gardens. And beneath this, the phrase A Revealed Vision of the Message, Del Mar, CA, 1952.
And even below this, in smaller lettering, Eileen Cuttredge (Danville).
A place as dull as anywhere, from what she could tell, but with a name you could search for all your life. She didn’t know what it was supposed to mean or why it remained, but still she rolled it tight and bound it with the rubber band, seeing it as her only memento of Eileen, the only thing she’d left behind, maybe a way to find her. After another pass along the sheet-metal walls, she stepped out into the sand and bright morning. The hushing comb of the foam-lipped water muttered its endless message. She was at the edge of the world here, as they all were, but she wouldn’t stay. She stood for a time letting the water soak her shoes, thinking of where Eden Gardens would be and how far, and then left.
On Ice
Marlene Ranagan—1957
He was definitely balding, all right. That forehead of his, inching back, practically sounding a retreat from the battlefield of his wrinkled—
Such a stupid metaphor.
—his wrinkled, freckle-splotched brow. And those eyes of his, looking more and more like her father’s, pinched at the edges and always bloodshot, like any minute he could burst into tears. To look at him now, shakily sipping at a whiskey and orange juice—
Who in god’s name drinks such a thing?
—at 2:17 on a Saturday afternoon, gazing at the television screen like this old cowboy-and-Indian movie held the secret to his existence. Or like a squirrel, the way a squirrel stares into the middle distance, certain something is coming for him now, no, now, no, now. Out the window behind him the white carpet of snow and more snow coming down, all of Long Island a gusting arctic nightmare. He’d been up early at the Halfords’ trying to sell a shelter in this weather, everyone involved hungover from last night’s party at the Sumners’. Another tonight with most of the same faces at Ira’s and for god’s sake she wasn’t looking forward to it and was he talking? Right now? Was he actually saying something to her? Was she expected to understand his mumblings over the terrible racket of all those rifles and hooves and war whoops?
“—then I’ll just take a little nap, you know, to straighten out my head before—”
Yes, that definitely was worth listening to. Absolutely necessary. Couldn’t conceive of finishing this potato salad without first hearing Charlie’s plans for wasting all of Saturday afternoon stoned drunk or asleep, so that when they both appeared at her brother’s doorstep that evening she would be the one to have to carry all the conversation, though what she really wanted to do, all she wanted to do, was sit in a warm bath listening to that record Jeff Linwood bought her of the Brandenburg Concertos, and then to maybe eat a slice of pie—yes, pie, warm berry pie.
She’d have to send this lunkhead back out to the store if she were going to make it, the pie, yes, and finally a little television, something silly and rather stupid, in her robe and pajamas, her legs folded onto the couch, the furnace purring away downstairs like an escaped leopard. But no, she couldn’t send him out, not after all his hard work and on a Saturday, no less. No, the afternoon was for booze and cowboys and sleeping it off, certainly not running out to the grocery in the snow, and even more certainly not fixing that damned leak under the bathroom faucet.
They’d been happy once, some time ago. Charlie a charming goof, full of big ideas he’d regale her with into the night, she enamored with him. He had listened to her then, too, wanted to know what she’d done this day or that, where she wanted life to take them. But his last big idea had been this house, this town, and in the years since its realization she had faded for him into the wallpaper, his eyes squinting at her like a stranger’s when he came in the door.
“Could you turn that down?” she said, without realizing the words had started to leave her mouth.