Her courage left her then. The society of the bored and the disappointed, from which she had hoped to escape, seemed battlemented, implacable and splendid—a creation useful to concert halls, hospitals, bridges and courthouses, and one that she was not fit to enter. She had wanted to bring into her life the freshness of a journey and had achieved nothing but a galling sense of moral shabbiness. “You want me to get your boyfriend?” the cab driver asked.
“He’s not my boyfriend,” Melissa said. “He’s just come out to help me move some things.”
Emile saw her then, and crossed the street, and they started for Madamquid. She felt so desperate that she took his hand, not expecting him to support her, but he turned to her with wonderful largess, a smile so strong and tender that she felt the blood pour back into her heart. They were heading out to the point where there was nothing to see but the cream-colored dunes, with their scalp locks of knife grass, and the dark autumn ocean. He was perplexed by this. One of the several divisions in his world was that group of people who went away for the summer—who closed their houses in June and bought no more groceries until September—and never having enjoyed any such migratory privileges himself, he had imagined the places where they went as having golden sands and purple seas, the houses palatial and pink-walled, with patios and swimming pools, like the houses he saw in the movies. There was nothing like that here, and he couldn’t believe that even in the long, hot days of summer this place would look less of a wilderness. Were there fleets of sailboats, deck chairs and beach umbrellas? There was no trace of summery furniture now. She pointed out the house to him and he saw a big, shingled building on a bluff. He could see that it was big—it was big all right—but if you were going to build a summer house why not build something neat and compact, something that would be nice to look at? But maybe he was wrong, maybe there was something to be learned here; she seemed so pleased at the sight of the old place that he was willing to suspend judgment. She paid off the cab driver and tried to open the front door, but the lock had rusted in the salt air and he had to help. He finally got the door open, and she went in and he carried in the bags and then, of course, the groceries.
She knew well enough that the place was homely—it was meant to be—but the lemony smell of the matchboard walls seemed to her like the fragrance of the lives that had been spent there in the sunny months. Her sister’s old violin music, her brother’s German textbooks, the water color of a thistle her aunt had painted seemed like the essence of their lives. And while she had quarreled with her brother and her sister and they no longer communicated with each other, all her memories now were kind and gentle. “I’ve always been happy here,” she said. “I’ve always been terribly happy here. That’s why I wanted to come back. It’s cold now, of course, but we can light some fires.” She noticed then, on the wall at her left, the pencil markings where each Fourth of July her uncle had stood them up against the matchboard and recorded their growth. Afraid that he might see this incriminating evidence of her age, she said, “Let’s put the groceries in the icebox.”
“That’s a funny word, icebox,” he said. “I never heard it before. It’s a funny thing to call a frigidaire. But you speak differently, you know—people like you. You say lots of different things. Now, you say divine—you say lots of things are divine, but, you know, my mother, she wouldn’t ever use that word, excepting when she was speaking of God.”
Frightened by the chart in the hallway, she wondered if there was anything else incriminating in the house, and remembered the gallery of family photographs in the upstairs hall. Here were pictures of her in school uniforms, in catboats, and many pictures of her playing on the beach with her son. While he put the groceries away, she went upstairs and hid the pictures in a closet. Then they walked down the bluff to the beach.
