Sea Glass_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [65]
Walking to the store would be easier on the sandy pavement of the road, she knows, but because of the contours of the landscape, the journey is only half as long on the beach. The soles of her feet (tender after the long winter) hurt on the sand and shells, and so she moves along the shoreline, letting the waves lap over her toes. After a time, Honora sees a familiar shape and glisten, washed up by a wave from the incoming tide. But when she runs and reaches for the piece of sea glass, another wave snatches it away.
She has never lost her love of sea glass, nor the excitement of the hunt, despite that terrible moment on Christmas Eve when the kitchen rained glass. She waits for the roll of water to subside. Where the sea glass was, there is nothing now — only a smooth surface of wet sand awaiting yet another deposit, yet another erasure. The beach is made and remade this way hundreds of times a day, its entire geography instantly effaced, redrawn. Sometimes when she looks out the window of her bedroom, there are hills and gullies that weren’t there just the day before. Occasionally the sand is covered by rocks — thick fists of gray and brown and black. At other times, the beach is so filthy with seaweed that she can hardly see the sand. The surreptitious people from the empty cottages scurry onto the beach and collect the seaweed, as if it were a treasure. She imagines that they cook and eat it.
And once in a while, especially during the winter, Honora will look out the window of her bedroom and the sand will be gone. Against the seawall, the beach will be five or six feet below the previous day’s level. It is as though the sand has simply been scooped away from the beach, the residue neatly smoothed, like icing. No sign of cataclysm, no melee, a sight defined only by absence. In the spring, the sand will mysteriously return. Overnight. As if it had been borrowed.
She picks up a pottery shard with rounded edges and a red-and-brown flower painted on the glaze. She puts her shoes on behind the abandoned Highland Hotel — bankrupt now, scheduled for demolition in the fall.
One day a man has a job, and life is full of possibilities. The next day the job and the car are gone, and the man cannot look his wife in the eye. There is no paycheck, no way to earn money for food and clothing. Life is taken up with trying to survive.
It takes all the time there is, this trying to survive.
There have been days when all they have had to eat is cornmeal: cornmeal porridge for breakfast and then fried up for lunch, and then because there simply isn’t anything else to eat, and no money left from the pay packet, Honora will warm up those fritters for supper. Once, after they had already sold the radio and the clock and the Multi-Vider pen (never used), and there wasn’t anything else in the house to sell, they had only dried berries and peanut butter sandwiches to eat for days. Today, when she goes to buy the lobster bodies, the fish house will stink and Honora will have to tie her kerchief around her nose. There will be no tails or claws to speak of — those will all have been shipped to Boston. When she gets home, she will painstakingly remove the meat with a pick, and then she will make her stew. Night after night, sometimes that’s all there is to eat: lobster bodies.
Once, when Sexton was away, she put bread in water and tried to make a kind of porridge. The next day, she walked to Jack Hess’s store, and that was the first time she ever asked for credit. That Friday, when Sexton brought home his pay packet (the four silver dollars — cartwheels, the workers call them — and the ten paper dollars), Honora walked to Hess’s store and paid the man back. House or no house, she said to Sexton, they would not owe money to Jack Hess.
Poverty, her mother has written, makes you clever, and Honora knows that this is true. If you don’t have ingenuity, you don’t eat, and so you have to be smart. You take the lace collar and cuffs off a dress to make it appear as if you had a new