Miracle Beach (20 page)

Now Magda lay prone on the living room couch. Early-morning light filtered in and the grandfather clock ticked rhythmically, muted by the distance between the foyer where the clock stood and the living room. Magda thought what it must feel like to be surrounded by snow, to be buried alive in it—to be laid out flat, the snow molded to each curve of her body, embracing her legs, her bottom, her back, her neck. To have only her own heartbeat and breathing to break the silence, and nothing else. To be enshrined in pure, unadulterated quiet.

From her imaginary snow cave on the living room couch, Magda let her eyes wander around the room and into the formal dining room and beyond it, to the kitchen. Everything was right where she had left it. Everything was still spick-and-span more than a week after she’d cleaned. Not a single crumb out of place. Oh, to remember the days she had wished for exactly that! The days she hadn’t wanted to be a wife, mother, cook, maid, chauffeur, family strategist, and event planner. The days when she wanted nothing more than to go back, way back, before Jack or Nash, to a time when the only person she was obligated to was herself. To a time when she didn’t feel used up, wasted—when her future was bursting with possibility. Way back when she felt whole.

She had gotten it all—all that she had ever wanted: a marriage to a handsome man who made sure she never had to work. A beautiful child—a son to boot. A modestly elegant home in a town that was neither too big nor too small.

And look where all that had left her: by herself, with a twinge of a hangover from boxed white zin, and not a thing that she was required to do or a place that she had to be. She could go shopping for a new outfit for next month’s golf outing. She could read a book. She could go to the grocery store and whip herself up a nice meal. She could call Jack. She could watch the sun continue to come up through the frosty patio door. Or she could just lie right there on the couch and scream her pretty little head off.

When she was younger all she wanted was to be married. Once she was married, she wanted kids. When her house was full of kids and bills and toys and laundry, she longed for her single days, or to be transported to a desert island. To be completely alone, quiet.

And now she had that very thing. But the weight of nostalgia for those days—when she had to get up before dawn to make Nash’s and Jack’s lunch and start laundry, when she had to rush through picking up the house and errands and appointments to make it to Nash’s school by three-thirty to drive him to hockey or baseball practice, and then some nights to piano lessons, and after that picking up or making dinner, and then staying up late into the night to get ready to do it all again the next morning—the sheer weight of wanting it all back had pinned her flat on her back.

Magda looked at her milky-smooth hands, examined each knuckle and the myriad minuscule grooves and wrinkles that spidered over each one. She took exquisite care of her skin. Lately, though, she could see her age creeping onto it. The skin of her hands seemed to be growing thinner by the day. Instead of a soft, luxurious satin stretched over the bones, it looked more like delicate chiffon. Soon it would be transparent. Soon she’d have the hands of an old, old woman, with soft blue highways of veins running just beneath the papery surface.

She ran those hands over her toes, over each ankle, and up her calves, which were badly in need of a shave and littered with puffy varicose veins. Her calves were fleshy, Rubenesque. Her fingers explored, for the first time ever, how exposed the backs of her knees felt in comparison to the fronts, like the underside of a turtle.

She let her hands run up to her thighs and linger in the hot flesh between her legs before continuing over the dimply mound that, after a C-section and a lifetime aversion to exercise, now formed her stomach and stretched from hip to hip just below her belly button. Those same fingers and hands dug deep into the thickness of her torso, pressing hard to find each rib and working their way up as if on the rungs of a ladder, and toward the top, pushing aside her breasts, which naturally slung themselves toward her armpits these days. She took each breast in her hands, for the first time ever taking note of their consistency, despite years of urging by her lady doctor to do just that. She drew her palm across her clavicle and ran her thumbs up her neck, feeling what seemed like a cluster of wires and tubes sitting underneath the skin. She felt her chin, her jaw, her cheeks, her ears, the orbs of her eyes, and finally her scalp, as a blind person would.

Magda didn’t recognize any of it. Her hands were a stranger’s. She felt almost violated by their touch.

They had always been at odds, she and her body. She had treated it with a kind indifference; her flesh and bones were responsible for getting her to and fro, and for that she was grateful. But she hadn’t ever felt at home in them. For her, being in her body was akin to living in a hotel room her whole life. She knew far less about her body—its contours, how it felt under the skin—than Jack did. And even he hadn’t paid it much attention in a while. It had been many months since she and Jack had been intimate, and he hadn’t ever given her that—well—that
feeling
that was supposed to overwhelm you during one of those encounters. She had tried talking to him about it once, long ago. But Magda quickly found that it was a conversation with no winning sides. When they were intimate, she made sure he enjoyed himself, and she made sure to enjoy being close to him, the feel of his skin against hers. Afterward, she told herself that this was just life, and there was a lot more to it than s-e-x.
Look at your life
, she would say.
Just look around at how lucky you are. Don’t dwell on silly things you can’t control
.

And for so long, she had. Magda had been down the road of real, devouring love once before, which had dead-ended in a big, painful, fiery crash on Valentine’s Day in 1959, when she found her fiancé, Jimmy Wallis, snuggled in a booth at the back of Kroll’s restaurant with a girl who was not her, while he was supposed to be held up at school in Michigan. Then Magda found Jack. She found that he loved her in that dependable, solid way he had. And she found that she loved him, too, only not in the obsessive, jittery, unhealthy way she had Jimmy. With Jack, Magda felt as though she had been wrapped in an old quilt and set by a fire on a cold winter’s night. She felt safe and valued and, in the truest sense of the word, like Jack’s partner. Like they were forging their lives together, shoulder-to-shoulder.

Back then, she couldn’t help but believe that having chemistry with someone was a minor nonfactor in happiness. One had to be practical in matters of the heart, after all. One had to have priorities. One had to think about self-preservation.

But that had been long ago. Magda had self-preserved her way right into boredom and monotony. She wanted to miss Jack when he was gone. She wanted to want to call him each night before she went to bed and look forward to hearing his voice. She wanted to be more reliant on him, on what they had together. She wanted her body to be overwhelmed right along with his in those intimate moments. She wanted to be admitted to that secret club she had been denied from entering, despite trying like h-e–double hockey sticks her whole married life to get in.

She didn’t need to feel all of that, even; she’d settle for just a bit. She’d settle for feeling any one of those things just once in a while. Just one time.

But her life was almost three-quarters over. And there was a very real possibility that she’d never felt as utterly sad as she did at that moment, lying on that couch with a dead son and a husband gone in more ways than one. She wasn’t Nash’s mom any longer. Now she was just Jack’s wife. And what was that, really?

It was, Magda decided, the only thing holding her here. To this place. To this version of herself.

The fingers of her right hand found their way into the still-steaming mug of lemon water. She mindlessly let them drop back down between her thighs. The skin down there revolted against the water, or perhaps against her own hand. But she held it fast, the standoff ending when her lower half brushed slowly up against her touch, hesitantly at first, then again. And again. Each time with increasing assertiveness. Until, finally, she felt herself come into her own skin. Until she felt herself come home to her body. At long last.

 

Magda had chosen the Wisconsin Union hotel for two distinct reasons: its classic charm and the fact that no one really went there anymore. There was always a scattering of patrons, usually in their seventies or eighties, who had been regulars during the hotel’s heyday, when it was the hallmark of Green Bay high society. She sat down at the bar and ordered a gin gimlet, three olives, because she liked olives and because it was the kind of place where one should drink gimlets.

The bar and most of the restaurant were both deserted, just as she had hoped for at eight o’clock on a Wednesday night. The Union’s big rush was around five o’clock or so, given the average age of its clientele. Most of them were home in bed by this time.

“Thought I’d be closing early tonight,” the bartender said, setting Magda’s drink in front of her. He looked older than God, and moved so slowly and painfully that Magda felt awful about him waiting on her.

“Oh,” said Magda. “Sorry. Do you usually close early?” She sipped her gimlet. It had been decades and decades—the last time she had been in the Union, actually—since she’d had one. The tang of it made her pucker.

“Usually,” he said, wiping the bar down with a perfectly folded, perfectly white rag. “We’re just not that busy anymore. Not like the old days.” He frowned and shook his head. “But I have some office work to do tonight, so you, young lady”—he smiled at Magda and patted her hand—“you just relax and stay as long as you’d like.”

“Thank you,” Magda said, more pleased at being called a “young lady” than anything. The mood of the place, the gimlet, his age, almost made her add a
sir
at the end. Instead, she waved him off. “Don’t mind me. You go ahead and do what you need to do—this drink will last me a while. I’m just going to go relax over there.” She pointed to a cluster of chairs and cocktail tables behind her as she shimmied off her stool.

She settled herself at a table by the window. The old days. The bartender was right—this place really had been something back then. She looked around, remembering how it had looked the last time she’d been here. New Year’s Eve, 1958. The night that Jimmy Wallis had proposed to her.

They were on Christmas break from college and hadn’t seen each other since September. There were wall-to-wall people, and the place smelled of Scotch and Estée Lauder’s Youth Dew. Magda and Jimmy were having after-dinner drinks in exactly the same area in which Magda was now sitting. Jimmy had asked her if he made her happy. But it was so loud that she couldn’t hear him over the band and the boisterousness of the crowd. He had to repeat the question, yelling into her ear: “
Do I make you happy?
”

Magda told him that of course he made her happy and what kind of question was that? He had leaned into her ear again, then, and said, “I think I can make you happier.”

“Oh, Jimmy,” she had said, brushing him off. The band announced they were taking a brief break and would resume in 1959, and Jimmy abruptly excused himself to use the restroom. Magda remembered looking at the clock, annoyed. It was eleven fifty-five. Couldn’t he wait just five more minutes? If he didn’t come back in time, she’d be the only person in the entire room left without someone to kiss at midnight.

It was then that she had heard Jimmy’s voice on the microphone. He introduced himself and introduced Magda. He said that he and Magda had been having a little disagreement, and he wanted to settle things once and for all. He told the crowd how he thought he could make Magda happier, but that she didn’t think so. Magda’s breath had started coming in short bursts, her heart fluttering like a wild bird within her chest. Oh, if this was what she thought it was! Jimmy pulled a box out of his jacket pocket and said, “Magda, I
can
make you happier. Instead of being the best boyfriend possible to you, I want to be the best
husband
possible. Will you do me the honor of marrying me?”

Little more than a month later, after she had already found her dress and booked the church, she had found Jimmy in Kroll’s.

She couldn’t bear to drive by the Wisconsin Union hotel after that. She’d go miles and miles out of her way just to avoid the sight of it, even after she married Jack. But when she and Jack bought a house just down from the Union, Jack called Magda on her tendency to go the wrong way out of the driveway to keep from driving by it. Embarrassed, she relented as far as driving routes were concerned, but Magda vowed she would never step foot in the Wisconsin Union again.

Yet here she was. Only a few decades, give or take some years, later. And it was okay. She was okay—mostly. Magda felt a stirring of something sad and wistful down inside of her. She peered into her gimlet, studying the liquid, weakly tinted green, as if she might divine the answer there. Jimmy Wallis, New Year’s Eve, a chip of diamond shimmering up at her in the soft light, a head fuzzy with bubbly and a whole life to be lived, stretched out as far as Magda could see. The memories were the same, but with a different sting. It was, Magda realized, because she couldn’t remember feeling as happy as she had that night. Even the birth of her only child—fueled more by relief and apprehension and then afterward by an intensely pure emotion grounded in fierce devotion and protection—didn’t quite qualify. What she was after, what Magda was trying to remember feeling ever since Jimmy, was that sheer giddiness that made a person want to skip and sing her way down the street.

“Well, well, well. Magda Allen. It sure has been some time.”

She had expected Peter King’s voice to sound different, changed with age. But Magda knew its low, gravely timbre before she ever raised her eyes. They had been classmates from kindergarten all the way through high school, and there was never a time, in all those thirteen years, that Magda couldn’t remember him sounding just that way. When all the other boys’ voices were cracking and squeaking toward adulthood, Peter’s resonated with the deep and steady lilts of a Wisconsin farm boy. Even the kindergarten version of Peter, in her mind, had the mature voice of the almost sixty-year-old man standing in front of her. That his voice hadn’t aged with the rest of him—peppery black hair and an obvious paunch—immediately brought Magda back to the days when she knew Peter King oh so well.