American Music - Jane Mendelsohn [74]
When the days grew longer she would walk along the beach after dinner. She scanned the shore as if she were expecting a bottle to wash up, addressed to her. She still wrote to Honor, on holidays and her birthday. She mailed the letters to whatever address she had. Occasionally her daughter sent a postcard, but she had not received one in a long time.
The sky was white and the sea was almost black. Hundreds of triangles of light floated on the surface of the water, silver and shifting, making the ocean look as if it had been sketched in pencil. A boat or two sailed away. Anna looked around and wondered how she had ended up here. She had been raised in privilege, attended an elite high school, been derailed by a teenage pregnancy, but still, out here in what felt like nowhere, how did that happen? She felt the nowhereness of her place on the planet and smiled. She asked herself why she hadn’t asked herself the more important questions: How was it that she had ended up here and could still feel so happy? How was it that the light on the water could soften the piercing sense that her life had sailed away? Was this a gift she possessed, this ability to inhabit the present so completely and contentedly, or was it a curse? The tendency that had turned at various times in her life to distractedness or impulsiveness or, to put it mildly, low frustration tolerance and poor planning. Who knew? She had always felt as though she was waiting for something and she had cultivated a kind of perverse patience, a patience that rarely seemed like wisdom but which—from a great, great distance, the kind she had now, here, looking at the vast expanse of liquid spilling off the side of the earth—now seemed to her the essence of her being. She had had the patience to have her daughter young and wait for her own youth to happen later. She had had the patience to let her daughter go and know that time would bring what it would bring. Maybe these were rationalizations. It didn’t matter. This is the way things looked to her now.
The sky was still white. The sea was still black. The other wanderers on the beach were still wandering. A figure came walking toward her across the sand. It was a man. He was slightly younger than Anna, weathered for his age, sandy-haired. He was barefoot. He knew her. He smiled when he approached and he wrapped his arms around her. Perhaps he was why she felt happy now.
They walked together along the water. They talked of their short-term plans: dinner, a boat ride this weekend, maybe they would get a dog. Then they fell silent and continued to walk. Anna thought about the loneliness she felt in spite of her contentment, a loneliness that echoed through the generations, and how it was so much a part of her by this age that she didn’t notice it sometimes. So maybe she should have called it a contentment in spite of her loneliness. But what was the initial sound that was still echoing? Where did this come from? She would never know, but she hoped that someday perhaps her daughter would. Her daughter. She kept coming up today, or maybe it was every day and Anna was only just noticing it. The light had shifted and the water was shimmering dully like an enormous stretch of tinfoil, and the sky had gone from white to the kind of pale blue that emerges just before sunset begins, a last gasp