Sea Glass_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [35]
In the afternoons and early evenings when the tide has drawn off, Honora looks for sea glass. She finds a slim sliver of amethyst and a jewel-like bit of cobalt. She picks up a thick chunk that looks like dirty ice after a long winter, ice that has been skated on and has gone cloudy with use. She fingers a piece the color of young dandelions and finds shards that look like flower petals: hyacinth and wisteria and lilac. She puts the pieces in her pocket and takes them home and lays them on a windowsill.
She finds a piece that once was a bottle neck. She picks up a delicate shell-like shape with scalloped edges. She touches a shard the color of mint sauce, another that is ice blue and reminds her of a waterfall frozen in winter. She finds an olive-green that resembles the state of New York, another shard that seems to be made of the salt film that once coated the windows of the house. She discovers whites that are not white at all, but rather blond and eggshell and ivory and pearl. One day she almost misses a piece because it so closely resembles sand. When she picks it up and holds it to the light, she sees that it is a translucent golden color, seemingly ancient.
She finds scraps of celadon and cucumber and jade, specks of pea and powder and aquamarine. Once she comes upon a chunk that reminds her of dishwater in a sink. She doesn’t like the browns, but occasionally she collects a topaz or a tea. Sometimes all there is is brown, and she goes home slightly depressed. She never keeps a piece of sea glass if it hasn’t gone cloudy or if it still retains its sharp edges. Those she buries deep in the sand.
The sea glass ranges in size from that of a broken cookie to slivered bits no bigger than a clipping from a fingernail. Sometimes there is writing. One says “OCHRANE,” another says “eder.” Another, simply, “to be.” One piece says “DOLPH,” as though part of a name. And is the 12-14 beneath it a date? Occasionally, the writing gives clues as to the origin of the shard of glass. The “WINE” is self-evident, the “LA” less so. But one day, when she takes down a jar of stewed tomatoes her mother gave her, she recognizes the letters L and A on the glass jar. She lays the piece of sea glass over the “ATLAS” of the jar and feels she’s solved a mystery.
If she looks closely at the glass, she can sometimes see the infinitesimal nicks, the imprints of the sand and rocks that have buffeted it. There’s a lump with bubbles in it; another piece, blue violet, in the shape of a bird in flight.
She prizes the oddities — a nugget of crystal threaded with rusted metal; a pale aqua rectangle the exact size and shape of a microscope slide; a shard that looks like ancient Roman glass, a lovely mottled green and gold. She finds a translucent ochre chip imprinted with a W, another bit that bears a thicket of white crosshatching, the paint still more or less intact. She finds larger pieces that are flat and guesses that they might once have been parts of windows, and that makes her think of shipwrecks. Once she finds a deformed bit of bottle, and that makes her think of Halifax. Is it too fanciful to imagine that a bottle melted in the aftermath of the explosion and then was swept out to sea on the tidal wave that followed? Was a whole city of shards made smooth by time and sand?
Eventually, Honora collects so much sea glass that she has to put it in a bowl. But in the bowl, the colors jumble together and take on the hues of the bits below and, on the whole, don’t amount to much. She experiments by putting the shards on the bedsheet, spread apart, and discovers that their true colors emerge on a clean white background.
In her housedress, she walks to Jack Hess’s store. When she arrives, she tells him she wants a white dish, good sized.