An Enlarged Heart (14 page)

Going In

T
he beach we go to is the most beautiful beach in the world. This may sound like overstatement, but it is a statement of fact. It lies almost at the end of Cape Cod, where the hand of the Cape's flexed arm, extended into the Atlantic, turns and cups the bay. The bay is formed by the inner curve of that arm. In the summer, the house where we have stayed for many years—and where we may or may not remain, a niggling question that has just recently introduced itself, like the buzzing of a fly or the new, pernicious wasp that found its way to the beach this summer, a helicopter from an invading country, emboldened by a lack of predators; that house, with its splintery pine walls and its Joseph Cornell boxes of shells, is on that inner curve. It sits on a high promontory above the bay like a lookout station. From the small gray porch you can see all the way to Plymouth. It was on this hill that the Pilgrims first received corn from the Payomet people who lived here; there is a marker, a few miles away at High Head, where they discovered and drank from a spring. A friend to whom I recently recounted this history said, you must say: they
stole
the corn.

The beach we go to is on the ocean side, two miles away. When I went to the beach in June this year I was startled at how long the sun lasted over the dune; in August the sun slides out of sight by late afternoon. The light lasts longer by the water. In August in the afternoon, we move our towels closer and closer to the shore until we are almost in, but it is too cold to go in. It is almost always too cold to go in. It is bracing, the shock of the cold on the skin, but we persist: as if going in were an act of penance, an expiation, a test of character to appease the Puritans, their eyes watching us from the lost trees. When I was a girl I stayed in for hours, my lips turning blue, in my red serge bathing suit. Now my children wear wetsuits and swoop like herons on their surfboards, landing on shore only to turn their backs and go out again.

It is a mystery to me why I cannot think of this particular piece of geometry—the bay, the backshore, the straight line from Corn Hill to Plymouth, the High Head spring—without thinking of the Pilgrims. But there they are, in their funny hats and dark clothes, fierce, monkeylike, behind the scrubby trees. One day early in the morning I drove my husband down the last knuckle of the Cape to the airport at Provincetown—he had an appointment in New York. That half an hour after I left I would turn around, because he had forgotten not only his wallet but his keys, was indicative of the disorder we were entering then, that even now illegible year, though I did not at the time realize it, nor would I for many months afterward; these were warnings that even the firkins in the pines could have told me about.

After Truro, the second-growth forest of locusts and elms thins out. A millennia ago the glacier from the frozen sea, carrying rocks and earth, stopped just here, at High Head. The bluff it left rises one hundred feet, and at the bottom is the kidney shape of Pilgrim Lake, the glacier's afterthought. In good weather the lake reflects the sky. Beyond the lake, on the left, begin the string of Monopoly house cottages that front Provincetown Harbor. To me these had always looked cheerful. The houses I have known on the Cape are more elaborate: bigger, more entrenched in the dream of summer passed down from aunts and cousins, vested in the idea of permanence and perfection: the hurricane lamp, the curtain with its hokey pattern of seashells. They have room under their eaves for quarrels and reliquaries; even the less lived-in have hidden away matchboxes where mice have died and shrines made of small stones for buried butterflies. They are houses that have secrets and spit them out by accident. A friend of mine called the other day and told me that when he closed up his house this summer he opened a drawer and found a cache of writing paper from the magazine where his stepfather had worked for fifty years, imprinted with the magazine's first address, an undistinguished office building whose lobby held a shoe shine stand and a barber shop, where he knew his stepfather had been happy. On a closet shelf in my mother's house on the Cape—a house with six bedrooms and a cellar that smells of damp, to which I am allergic—there is an old gray tennis ball. The day a few summers ago that the International Astronomical Union decided that Pluto was not, after all, a planet, the children found it at the foot of the dune. It had been washed up by the high tide. It looked like a fossil fallen from the sky. “It's Pluto!” someone said. I have been unable to admit that I am saving it, but whenever I return to that house I check a little anxiously to make sure that Karen, the zealous cleaning woman whom my mother employs, and who leaves notes like “Monday: dusted under the sink!,” hasn't thrown it away.

So to me, the houses along Route Six, white as Chiclets, rented—I always imagined—by the week by people, hoping for sand and surf, for the charcoal barbecue, to “get away,” seemed enviable, coming as I do from a tribe that when it arrives on the Cape isn't getting away, but
getting to,
arriving at a place with its own intricate maze of switchbacks, where the person you were the summer before, in the same old shirt, and the one before that, examines your soul for new stains. One August, though, because some people we knew, on a whim—because with one thing and another it had been an expensive year, or maybe because the house they usually took in the woods had been sold, or taken back by the owners for the month because their niece was getting married at the Red Inn, the usual course of why a house falls away, like a snail shell—decided to rent one of those houses. They were lithe, loose-limbed people. He was a musician, and she, to her chagrin, I think, the daughter of a senator, who taught in a Montessori school. In the looping, elliptical world of the Cape, they were not really our friends, but friends of friends, who had met them years ago when their children played Frisbee together on the beach. Then, I want to say, as it turned out—but of course it did not turn out at all, or if it did, for a while it turned out badly—there was a connection between us. This woman's half sister was the sister-in-law of my first husband's cousin. Or something like that. This couple, though, were still not our friends. They were the friends of friends … but there was a link. Later, I would learn that there was bad blood between the sister-in-law and the cousin, but that's another story, told to me in the dusty Palm Court of the Plaza by a woman twice my age, who knew them both, the week before the hotel was closed. When I told my husband about these connections, at first, and then when I learned more, his interest did not match mine. He is one of ten children while I am one of three—chess pieces in an end game, sensitive to nuance, poised for conflict. To these kind of intimate coincidences he admits only a nodding acquaintance: better, to him, to be less known.

“Come by and see us!” they said, as we packed up one afternoon to leave the beach. Usually when we are in our house on Corn Hill we go nowhere, but I told my husband as we walked up to the car that I wanted to go; I had never been inside one of those houses. I had in my mind a vision of a simple bright room, a protohouse, with a table and three chairs, a tidy kitchen, two or three beds. A house unlike ours, with grit in the corners of the stairs and wet laundry on the railings. Like most visions this turned out to be only partially accurate. We went after dinner. It was midsummer so the sun was still bright in the early evening. They gave us directions. Off the shore road before the Mobil station we turned left toward the water. It was the third identical house on the right after the sandy parking lot, and the front of the house, with a door and two windows, faced the bay. It opened directly onto a small deck, about six feet wide. The deck was like the deck of a ship. At the end of it was the water.

The house was grotesque. There was nothing wrong with it except it was lit up like a light box and our faces and even the tanned faces of the children took on the waxen look of the dead. The sun in the room was so strong our bones shone through our skin. There were no curtains on the windows. Why aren't there curtains? I remember thinking, and their small heaps of belongings, things that although I didn't know them well I would have been able to identify as belonging to them (a watch, some necklaces, a beach towel) looked like leavings.

We stayed for a while on the deck with our drinks. The sun set over the harbor. When I went in to use the bathroom the front room was blood red. The children were disappointed that their children weren't there. They had gone, by themselves on the bus, to spend the day in Provincetown and weren't back yet, and their covert glances at each other—communicating that there was no circumstance in which they would have been allowed to do this—summed up all the ways in which we, as parents,were below regard. Then we left and returned to our musty house on the hill, with its damp bathing suits and bowls left in the sink, its sunset.

So the morning when I drove my husband to the Provincetown airport we passed those houses, white as bleached fish vertebrae on the east side of the highway. On the right was the lake, flat as a drawing of a lake, and when the water ended were the Province Lands dunes. I dislike those dunes and, as always, as we passed, I doled out for myself, from an infinite store, a little dollop of horror. Years ago I had a friend who had a fascination with the dunes, and now and again he would convince me to walk out into them, to cross the two-mile expanse of sand as a prelude to a day on the beach. No matter how fine the day began, before we had walked more than a quarter of an hour the wind would come up, first in a series of slaps, and then insistently, hurling sand without ceasing into our faces. We always came equipped with handkerchiefs to put over our mouths, so that conversation, too, ceased, which in any case had consisted only of my friend's exclamations of pleasure over the scenic, barren beauty of the dunes: It looked like Africa, he would cry, did it not? Now and again he would take a bottle of water from his knapsack and hand it to me, and I would rip the bandanna from my face and gulp furiously.

Here and there on the undulating hills of sand were what looked like gnarled old roots, but were, instead, the top branches of scrub pine trees that had been covered over by the sand. My friend thought this was poetic. Imagine, he often said, the fossil of the tree, but to me this idea only deepened my distrust of the dunes and my feeling, quite apart from my annoyance at the wind, the pinpricks of sand, the grit, that in only a moment we too—or at least I, for I was certain my friend was too perspicacious for any calamity to befall him—would either be buried under the sand too, or lose my way.

Most people who walk in the dunes take a compass. I have never found it possible to read a compass; it skitters in my hands, a hot star, a Ouija board planchette. In the Province Lands, the dunes rise up and down twelve or thirteen feet, with declivities between them: the horizon is as elusive as a dream. I do not have a compass. If I ever had a compass, I am sure it was a Cracker Jack affair, a plastic prize from a children's birthday party, easily and inevitably lost. My friend—of course—had no need of a compass. Set down anywhere on earth, he knew, like a bird or an animal, exactly where he was, and navigated faultlessly, finding, in a city he had been to exactly once, a decade ago, at night, the bar where his uncle, now dead, had bought him a beer. I, on the other hand, can be lost even in my own city, the city in which I was born and where, now, I live only three blocks from where I lived as a child. Coming up out of the subway I try to hold in my mind the direction in which I was traveling when I left the train car and every so often I have to ask a passerby to point me in the direction I should be going. I find this vaguely humiliating, and reproach myself with visions of intrepid Victorian travelers, leaving Portsmouth with only a satchel, on their way to serve as governesses to the children of the Raj.

My friend had a compass nonetheless. It was a handsome one in a leather pouch which, when we were walking in the dunes, he sometimes consulted sagely. In the dunes, time, like the horizon, had little meaning. A few minutes can and does seem an hour. Even if we walked steadily in a straight line to the back shore, even if the wind—as it rarely was—was still, it seemed to me an age as long as the time since the Payomet walked with their arrows and chalk, before the water (which one moment ago was nowhere to be found) loomed like a cloud bank in the east, we unpacked our towels and sandwiches, and, still swathed in my gritty clothes, I began the endless debate about whether or not I would strip down to my bathing suit and go in.

The morning I drove to the airport I had not walked in the dunes for almost twenty years. The last time it was winter. It was New Year's Day. My friend, who by then was my first husband, had invited another couple to spend the weekend with us. It had snowed the night before, and the locusts and pine trees that line the back roads were covered with frost. The trees on the Cape are small trees, because the high winds keep them from growing very tall, and the woods have the dollhouse proportions of a children's story. After lunch we drove to the shoulder of the highway near Pilgrim Lake, and began to walk to the sea. As usual, I had little interest in going. It was cold, for one thing. But our guests had been cajoled by the idea of this outdoor adventure: it was a wonderful way, everyone agreed, to begin the year. It was an arctic landscape. The sand, usually a very pale biscuit brown, was white. We were wearing warm hats and gloves and heavy shoes that sank into the snow, which wasn't very deep, an inch or two, and the lugs of the soles made marks on the snow. When we lifted up our feet we could see the cold sand. The tops of the strangled trees were black against the white, the limbs like ink drawings. As we walked, one of our friends, a Chinese historian, told us about a buried city in China: a sandstorm had crept over the city at night, and the only people who survived were the servants of the grandest houses, who slept under the eaves. Overnight, the city became a graveyard. The servants opened the painted shutters of the attics, climbed out, and walked over the buried houses and the hidden bodies of the dead. As we traipsed through the cold I imagined the light steps of the servants edging over the sand. It was springtime—I thought—in the Chinese city, and the people on the crest of the terrible wave of sand stood in their kimonos and silk sandals. It was a holiday. In the far distance from the top of the sand hill they could see another village, one not covered in sand, and they began to walk toward it, taking with them small things they could carry: vases and bundles of clothes. I think that later, when I chose a lining for a jacket printed with images of Chinese peasants, I had that story in mind.