The Last Beach Bungalow (11 page)

“Max swims butterfly,” Jackie said. “He’s going to nationals in the spring.”

“Good for you,” Rick said.

“Congratulations,” I added.

“We better go,” Max said, glancing at Jackie. He reached out his hand first to Rick, then to me. “It was nice to meet you.”

“Nice to meet you, too,” I said.

As they walked out the door, I saw Jackie take his hand.

I wanted to tell Rick that I was sorry I’d needled him at dinner last night, and I was sorry about what I felt about the bungalow, and sorry that I hadn’t said more than two words to the boy that Jackie brought home, but Rick went to brush his teeth, and then he stood by the door jingling his car keys, saying that it was time to go in a voice that was still brittle with anger.

We rode to church in total silence.

We belonged to an Episcopal church that was tucked into a grove of eucalyptus trees in a small canyon that I always imagined to be the exact spot where Redondo Beach, the surf town, gave way to Palos Verdes, the hilly home of doctors and Hollywood lawyers. All the towns in the South Bay were crammed together so that you were never really sure where one began and another ended, but the Redondo-Palos Verdes border felt like a line of demarcation. The curve of beach melted into crumbling cliffs, the hills rose up behind them, and the Palos Verdes Peninsula began its audacious jut out into the sea. The Beach Boys sang about Redondo Beach. It was one of the hot spots you’d hit on your endless summer surfing safari, a place of leisure and delight. But it was from the hills of Palos Verdes that you could view it all: the palm trees silhouetted against the sunset, the crescent of sand wrapping around the Santa Monica bay, the spread of lights across the L.A. basin.

Saint Francis Episcopal Church stood like a sentinel on the road leading up to those lofty views. Rick had been baptized in the original chapel and later served as an altar boy there. He’d kissed a girl named Patti Patter-son in the choir stalls of the new sanctuary building one Easter morning in eighth grade. I’d done all those same things, too—except the kissing—at a Methodist church in Houston, Texas. Far from feeling like a compromise, adopting Rick’s church and religion felt like a gift I was giving to our marriage. In the beginning I kept noting the differences between the two services: where people prayed or didn’t pray, how they kneeled or didn’t kneel. After a few years, I stopped paying attention.

On Sunday, I focused on the purple candles on the Advent wreath and tried to feel some connection to God as I sang the familiar hymns and listened to the familiar prayers, but nothing was familiar because Jackie wasn’t there and anger still hung in the air around us. During the opening prayers, I tried to focus on the words, but all I could think about was the way Jackie had grabbed Max’s hand. During Communion, I tried to pray for the soldiers who had just pulled Saddam Hussein from a hole in the ground and I tried to feel grateful for the simple fact of being able to sit in church on Sunday morning and not worry that I would be shot. My head, however, was filled with an image of the house on Pepper Tree Lane.

The gospel reading and sermon that day were taken over by the pageant. Mary, Joseph, the innkeeper and assorted shepherds and lambs assembled at the back of the church. You could hear them shuffling and whispering, jockeying for position. The real Mary was purported to be a shy young thing, obedient and respectful of the law, but it was a coup to be chosen to play Mary at Saint Francis Palos Verdes, so it was usually a rather pushy girl who got the part—someone with a loud voice and a mother who was capable of spinning light blue silk into a fetching robe. The lights dimmed and a young girl, about twelve, came out and sat down at a piano that had been rolled into the sanctuary for the occasion. She was wearing a black velvet dress with a wide red ribbon around her waist, and her black hair was slicked back in a bun. She smiled and struck the first chord of “Once in Royal David’s City.”

Mary came up the aisle, the angel Gabriel followed, Joseph came and gave his travel plans, the shepherds who watched their flock were amazed by the star in the sky, but I never took my eyes off the piano-playing girl. I played piano for eight years as a child and I used to love wearing a beautiful dress onstage. It was a thrill to play Chopin, to hit all the notes, to lose myself in the music in front of the audience of adoring parents, but it was all made even better by a great dress and patent leather shoes. It was the clothes that made all the students stand up straighter and walk with a lighter step. My teacher Mrs. K believed in renting an auditorium with a real stage and a grand piano for the recitals, and she insisted on the formal dress. “So you’ll know what it’s like to play Carnegie Hall,” she used to say.

I’d wait in the wings, craning my neck to see if I could see my mom, and if I was lucky that night, my dad. I wanted to memorize where they were sitting so that when I clip-clopped out onto the stage in my shiny shoes and sat on the black bench to play, I wouldn’t have to look to know exactly where they were sitting.

My parents never yelled “Brava!” the way some parents did, and they never had a red rose or a little bouquet of flowers for me. My mom would sit and clap until everyone else stopped clapping, and if my dad was there, he would clap three or four times, but that was enough. It was everything. It was all I needed to decide that being onstage was going to be my life. I switched to singing in junior high because the kids who were nice to me in the new school in our new town were in the choir. Whenever my dad wasn’t home, I went around the house rehearsing every song to obsessive perfection and became so confident in my voice that in my sophomore year in high school, I landed the role of Cinderella. Those Rogers and Hammerstein songs about love and loneliness and possibility helped me nurture illusions of a singing career until one day at the start of my senior year when my mother took me to hear Kathleen Battle sing.

Ms. Battle was giving a master class at the College Conservatory of Music, and the concert was part of her appearance. She sang from
Aida
,
Don Giovanni
and
The Marriage of Figaro.
From the moment she walked onstage, I was smitten. The unmistakable sweep and grandeur of celebrity clung to everything about her—her hair, her skin, her black top with the wide scoop neck— but it was her voice that devastated me. That magnificent voice. I watched her waltz onstage, saw her open her mouth and heard the sound that came out. I wept, it was so beautiful. And I wept because I knew that she belonged onstage in a way I never had and never would. She owned it. She came alive on it. She told amusing anecdotes between songs and offered to sign the students’ sheet music after she was finished. All the college students lined up to get her autograph, and as I watched them jostle for position, and heard them flatter her with their overenthusiastic praise, I felt utterly deflated. I was utterly destroyed by her talent, and I sometimes wonder if that wasn’t the thing my mother had in mind in bringing me there that night.

I signed up for stage crew for the spring musical and when the high school counselors asked me what I was thinking about studying in college, I did not say piano and I did not say singing. I said English. I said I wanted to teach English.

When a young mother from the church slipped baby Jesus into the arms of the waiting Mary, I wasn’t the only one in the congregation with tears streaming down my face, but I was probably one of the few who thought the piano player had stolen the show.

After church, Rick went on a run down to the beach. I paced around the apartment for a few minutes, picking up and setting down the paper, before I grabbed my purse and got in the car.

I drove first to the twenty-by-thirty foot storage garage where most of our belongings were stacked in boxes against the cinderblock walls. In a large pocket left near the front of the space was the grand piano that had dominated my grandmother’s living room. It was a Bösendorfer 170 in high polish ebony. She had left it to me in her will because she knew I loved it. I loved the way it looked like a giant black bird taking flight; I loved the way it sounded, with its magnificent range of tone; and I loved the hours we had sat together in front of it, when she had taught me to play.

My mother sold the house in New Hampshire after my grandmother died. We were living at that point in Houston, and it seemed too far to come to a cottage on a lake. She sold the house and the unwanted odd bits of china and wool coats with holes where the moths had gotten to them. She kept the silver and some paintings, and she had the piano shipped out to us. I’d already been taking lessons for two years by that point, practicing on a Baldwin spinet we’d bought from a neighbor whose kids had outgrown it. Switching to the Bösendorfer was like inheriting a whole country.

I couldn’t sleep for the first week we had it in our house. I’d awake in the middle of the night and sneak out just to make sure it was still there, massive and shining in the dark. I’d awake early in the morning, touching the keys without depressing them so as not to wake my parents.

It frightened me, in a way, having my dead grandmother’s piano in my house and knowing that it was mine. But I loved being frightened in that way. The piano stayed with my family while I went to college, while I worked as an elementary school teacher after graduation, and while Rick and I were living in our first tiny condo. As soon as we moved into a house big enough for a grand piano—the original ranch house at Vista del Mar—I had it shipped to me. It took up way too much space in our living room, I almost never had time to play and Jackie never showed any interest in doing anything other than banging on the keys, but I loved having it with me all the same.

When it came time to move our belongings out of Vista del Mar for the remodel, the movers unscrewed the legs on the piano, then wrapped all the pieces in bubble wrap. They stood the main box on its side with the keyboard running from floor to ceiling, silenced under all that plastic. I took my car key and carefully sliced away the tape that held the bubble wrap. Crouching down, leaning sideways, I played the opening phrase of Bach’s Two-Part Invention, the one in F minor, which I’d played at my first big recital. I wanted to hear the sadness out loud that I felt so silently in my bones.

I locked the piano behind the corrugated door, then drove up the hill to the mall. I walked past the beguiling smells of Williams-Sonoma’s food demonstrations and straight to Soothe Your Soul, where I walked the aisles and looked—at books, at Buddhas, at beads. I stuck my finger into the falling sheet of water that poured from a fountain at the front of the store because if Jackie had been with me, she would have done the same thing the moment she walked through the door. I finally stopped in front of the jewelry case and asked the cashier if I could look at something inside. She took out a necklace made of sterling silver. The chain was made of long links that looked like tiny twigs with hooks at each end. In the center of the chain hung a square charm, and on the charm perched a dove. I turned it over. Engraved on the back of the charm was one word:
peace.

“That’s from a series the artist calls his Soul series,” the cashier said. She was the same woman who’d sold me the Buddha. I could tell that she recognized me; something about the way she spoke included an acknowledgment of my having been in that store before, of her having helped me. I felt an odd affection for her.

“I always wonder if an artist who makes something like this is searching for peace or if she’s already found it and the art is her way of passing it along,” I said.

She shrugged. “I think it amounts to the same thing.”

“How so?” I asked.

“Just that everyone is searching for peace, or seeking to pass it along, sometimes both at the same time, or both on the same day. No one ever gets to stop and be done with it. We’re all in the mix, all the time. Artists have just figured out a way to make beauty out of the chaos.”

I nodded. “I’d like one,” I said.

“Would you like it gift-wrapped?”

“No, thanks,” I said. “It’s for me.” While the shopkeeper rang up my purchase, I felt the familiar, strange affliction of wanting to tell every stranger my news. It had first struck me right after I was diagnosed. I told my news to the librarian at Jackie’s school, an assistant editor at a new magazine in New York, and the pharmacist at Rite Aid. Anyone who asked how I was doing wasn’t going to hear that I was fine. I wasn’t fine. I had cancer. It was a relief, in a way, when my hair fell out because I could step outside and my head would be a neon sign. “I just celebrated my five-year cancer-free anniversary,” I said, “and this is what I think I’d like to mark the occasion.”

The shopkeeper smiled—a lovely, tolerant smile. “Congratulations,” she said. “I can’t think of a better gift you could give yourself.”

I put my wallet in my purse, took the chain from her hand. “Well, actually,” I said, “I was thinking about buying a new house.”

She laughed. “Why not?” she said, and lifted her hand in a formal flourish.

Why not? Because I could do it, and it could all be for nothing. I could get inside that red living room with the Catalina tile fireplace, inhabit that perfectly proportioned space, and it could make no difference whatsoever. I would still be mortal, I would still be me. Plus there would be leaks in the plumbing and walls in the wrong places and floors that needed to be refinished. It could, in the end, just be wallboard and wood.

“You know what?” I said, turning back to the cabinet with the necklaces, “I’ll take another one. And there’s no need for a box.”

After I paid, I went out to the car. I hooked one of the necklaces around my own neck, then wrote a note on a piece of paper from a plumbing supply store:

Mrs. Torrey,

I felt something in your house I hadn’t felt in a very long time, and the only word I can think to describe it is
peace
. I felt peace in your house. Feeling it in your house made me see that maybe peace is somewhere inside me, too. I wanted to thank you for that, and pray that you find it, too.