Sea Glass_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [63]
“Go upstairs and have a bath,” she says. “I’ll heat up some dinner.”
She pushes her chair back. Sexton stands, leans across the tablecloth, and takes hold of the platter of sea glass. He flips the pieces of glass hard into the air, the way one might toss a person in a taut blanket, or a flapjack in a pan. The glass flies up and hits the ceiling and the windows and the walls and the cuckoo clock and the stove and the icebox and the shelves, and for a moment it seems that all the world is raining bits of color. Honora raises her arms over her head to shield herself.
Sexton drops the platter onto the table. He spins around, his coattails snapping behind him. She hears the front door shut, the engine of the Buick start up.
Honora brings her arms away from her head.
The silence in the kitchen is worse than the shards of glass falling from the sky.
A piece of sea glass slips from her lap onto the floor with a tiny ping. She bends to pick it up. It is the jewel-like bit of cobalt. Turning, she sees that there is sea glass everywhere.
She stands and collects the glass from the windowsills and from the top of the stove. From the shelves and from beneath the icebox. From the chair that her husband has so recently sat upon and from the waxed paper she has put over the mince pies. She collects all the bits that she can find and puts them back on the white platter.
She sits again at the table and studies the shards of glass.
It’s a miracle, she thinks. Sea glass doesn’t break.
Honora
It is always more than she has imagined it to be, even after the three hundred–odd days that she has lived in this house and walked out the porch door and looked at the wet beach. The tide is dead low — so low it seems as if it will never make its way up the long shallow grade, glistening until the last fifteen feet, when it hits the drop-off.
The year is 1930. A June day. Not quite an ordinary day.
The cottages are mostly still empty, though some, seemingly boarded up, are surreptitiously inhabited by drifters, men and women without a place to live. She sees them when she walks the beach — a face in a window, a figure quickly rounding a corner, smoke from a house that appears to be abandoned — and occasionally these same people come to her back door looking for food. Even if Honora has next to nothing, it is understood that she will not turn them away. In Taft, her mother keeps soup simmering and bakes an extra loaf of bread each morning. Honora does the same, though she will have to give bread, and cheese when she can get it, as an alternative to hot soup through the summer.
Her feet sink slightly into a patch of soft, wet sand. When she reaches the road, she will brush them off and put on her shoes and walk the short distance down to the store. It will be a faster walk home because she won’t want to linger. With the lobster bodies, eight cents a pound this week at the fish shack, she will make a stew. Not enough money this week for meat.
Sexton did not reappear until Christmas night, by which time the marriage Honora and he had enjoyed for six months — that ordinary and innocent universe of checked oilcloth and women’s magazines, of erotic baths and gumdrop packets, of trust and hope and modest dreams — was gone. What replaced it was still a marriage, she thinks now, as a play will still be called a play, though the characters and the dialogue and even the tone of the drama may be so radically altered as to be almost unrecognizable. Theatergoers would be alarmed, unnerved, by such a change.
That night, Sexton was hungry and demoralized and dirty and wept like a nearly grown child — with harsh gestures and hiccupping sounds that frightened her — and sometimes she thinks she agreed to forgive him for the dishonesty and the Christmas debacle and the hideous incident with the sea glass simply to get him to stop. Three days later, when the auctioneer came for the Buick (her husband having refused to drive it to the address he had been given), Sexton waited on the