The Last Beach Bungalow (9 page)

S
ATURDAY

On Saturday, there were cars lined up all along Pepper Tree Lane—huge cars, taking up a lot of space. They were all silver, white and black, like beasts lined up for slaughter. I parked two blocks away and walked back to the open house, thinking the entire way about love at first sight—love of boys, of bras, of houses.

It makes perfect sense that you could know in an instant that something, or someone, was just right for you. Why not? It’s not a skill you have to acquire so much as it is an attribute you possess without effort, like taste. You know in an instant when the tomato you are eating is a perfect example of summer perfection or when a scoop of vanilla ice cream has achieved a divine alchemy. The same is true of love. You look, you see, you experience, and you know. The moment I saw Peg Torrey’s beach bungalow, I knew that it had been made for me; setting foot inside was merely confirmation.

The first thing that struck me, when I walked through the extra wide front door, was the perfect proportions of the doorways and hallways, ceilings and walls. They seemed to be designed on a scale for which my own body was the model. They seemed to be calling out for me to come on in, sit down, stay awhile in a place that fits. I stood just inside the door, looking down the main hallway toward the bright bedrooms and the leafy backyard, looking to the left toward the massive pine dining room table and the golden kitchen, and looking to the right into the living room with its barn red walls, and I had the sense that I could have just stood there forever, taking it all in.

By the door, there was a basket of blue protective shoe coverings. I must have looked at them with confusion or disgust, because a kind woman dressed all in black materialized out of nowhere and suggested that if I didn’t want to use the booties, I could simply take my shoes off. I nodded. I slipped off my flats and let my feet touch the old cherry hardwood. We’d put bamboo in the house on Vista del Mar—a whitewashed wood, durable, with a modern flair. I hadn’t yet walked on it barefoot, but I imagined it was going to be cool. This wood was warm. It felt like the sun-warmed earth. It was red and rich, and it anchored the house to the ground.

“I bet they’ve used a lot of Murphy’s Oil Soap,” someone said behind me. I turned to see a stylish woman slipping blue plastic over her sporty Mary Janes.

Besides the floor, there was wood everywhere. The mantel was made of cherry, as were the built-in book-cases on either side of it. There was a window seat capped with a thick cushion covered in a gorgeous blue block print with red piping the color of the walls. A pillow of the same fabric was tossed against the worn leather couch. On the ground in front of the fireplace, there was a black and white cowhide. I stared at that cowhide for the longest time. Who would ever think that such a thing would work? Who would ever make the choice to paint their walls red and throw a cowhide rug on the floor? It was preposterous. It was fabulous.

The pine table in the dining room to the left was huge. Twelve sage green chairs gathered around it with room to spare. The table filled that room. It was easy to imagine kids doing homework on those planks, women sewing Halloween costumes, turkeys being carved, candles being burned, birthday cakes being sliced and served. There was another window seat in the dining room— the mate of the one in the living room on the other side of the door—and two narrow bookshelves had been fitted on either side of it. If you sat on the seat, you would be able to see the ocean out the window—a sliver of water down at the end of the street. Turn the other way, and you’d be gazing at a quilt that hung on the wall, a quilt that clearly told a story. It was a fractured image of a fish. A trout, maybe, with rainbow colors on its belly. At least eight shades of blue fabric formed the stream in which it swam: silks and calicos, batiks and abstracts.

It was so loud and boisterous in the kitchen it sounded like there was a party in full swing. I stepped down the hallway instead. The walls of the hall were lined with board games that had been frozen in time, framed and hung on the wall. There was a Monopoly game in which someone had hotels on Marvin Gardens and Boardwalk, and someone was clean out of money. There was a Candyland game with a piece suspended forever in the Molasses Swamp. I stopped in front of Clue—Colonel Mustard in the Conservatory with a Lead Pipe had done it—and marveled that someone had thought to preserve their family’s joy in this way. I wished it had been me.

The hallway led to the back garden, which was framed by a trellis painted purple and punctuated by a faded yellow market umbrella. A fire pit was surrounded by wrought iron chairs with faded cushions made of a striped fabric that had probably once been really bright. Flagstone steps wound through the grass, back toward a built-in barbecue, and eucalyptus trees marched in stately procession along the back fence, their trunks silvery and ghostlike even in the bright light of day. They reached straight and clean to the sky, throwing off their sharp scent, standing guard. Along the side fence were fruit trees: lemon, lime and avocado. Fruit littered the ground, brown and rotting. I watched as one man yanked a lime off the tree absentmindedly. He was talking to two women. They were standing near the back fence looking toward the house as if it were a kingdom they were about to conquer.

“Mrs. Torrey designed the trellis herself,” someone said. I turned to see the woman in the black suit. She had been watching me staring into space. “She and her husband lived here for forty-nine years. They were only the second owners.”

“Was she an architect?” I asked.

“No, just a resourceful housewife,” the woman said, “which is something of a tradition for the house. The original owner was a librarian. She came out here from the Midwest as a single woman in 1928.”

“You must be the seller’s agent,” I said.

She held out her hand. “Lane McNamara,” she said. “Beach Cities Realty.”

There were a dozen questions I wanted to ask, but I kept thinking of the woman on the street with the poodles. “Is the owner crazy?” I asked.

Lane laughed, and another woman—much smaller, wearing jeans and expensive European clogs—appeared next to her. It was this woman who answered me.

“My dad’s been dead, what? Has it been a whole month?” the clog lady said. “And in that month, my mom has tried to walk into the ocean like Virginia Woolf, she’s collected enough sleeping pills from Dad’s old colleagues to kill a team of horses, and she’s rejected six full-price offers on her house in favor of a contest that’s brought a parade of peepers, desperate home buyers, history buffs and newspaper reporters to her front door. What part isn’t crazy?”

“She must have really loved him,” I said.

“You have no idea,” the daughter said, and in the moment she said this, the look on her face instantly changed from combative to angelic. It was as if there was no way she could deny the power of her parents’ love.

I turned away.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” I mumbled. A real reporter would have kept digging—cornered the daughter for insight on what it was like to grow up in that house, pressed the real estate agent for clues as to what Mrs. Torrey was looking for. Even a halfway decent reporter would have dropped the names of the publications she’d worked for to whet the appetite of her prey. But I wasn’t a real reporter; I was a women’s magazine writer. I didn’t have it in me to intrude upon these people’s lives. I only had it in me to skirt along the surface of a story like a water bug. Standing there by that purple trellis, I knew that any magazine for which I would write about the last beach bungalow would reduce it to its basest elements: five healthy steps to take in the first weeks after losing a spouse; six novel ways to increase traffic at an open house; three unusual ways to sell a house. I suddenly didn’t want to have any part of it.

I froze up in the same way I had when
Glamour
magazine sent me to interview Melissa Gilbert at her home in the Hollywood Hills. I was supposed to grill her about what went on behind the scenes when she beat out Victoria Principal to be president of the Screen Actors Guild. But Melissa Gilbert had been Laura Ingalls, with the braids, the freckles, the charming crooked teeth. She had been the girl who wandered off on a rocky ridge and met God, and who dipped Nellie Olson’s braids in ink right in plain sight of the teacher. I couldn’t grill her. Even though she was an adult sitting in front of me expecting to be grilled, I couldn’t do it. I limped through a few sad questions about the vote, then pretty much sat there and gawked at the green eyes and red hair.

The same thing happened in the beach bungalow. I had my chance, but I took a step backward and walked away.

As I made my way back to the front of the house, I heard a woman say to her husband, “He
died
in that room, Bruce. I asked the Realtor point-blank and he
died
there. Cancer. She said it was his
choice
—to die in bed at home. I, for one, am not living in a house with that kind of legacy.”

A house with that kind of legacy was exactly what I longed for—a house whose walls had stories to tell. I’d never been able to pinpoint it in all the endless discussions Rick and I had while we were building our house on the hill. We kept talking about the configuration of the kitchen cabinets and how the traffic would flow around the furniture and where we would put the piano and what kind of shower door was easiest to clean, but we had no language to talk about legacy. There is no legacy when everything is brand-new, and there’s no legacy when you move from place to place the way I had for my entire childhood. I wanted walls that talked. I’d only known them once, in the house my grandmother had built on the shores of Squam Lake in New Hampshire.

It was a cottage, really, but it was the place where I’d learned to swim on a plastic foam dolphin, and the place where I’d sat and shelled peas on the porch. My grandfather taught me to play cards on a table he’d set up in the living room and my grandmother taught me to play the piano on an instrument that was so out of place in that cottage as to be laughable. The centerpiece of the whole house was the fireplace. It was made of stone that local men had hauled up from the mouth of the river— smooth river rock in shades of brown and gray. My grandfather died suddenly of a stroke back at the big house in Philadelphia and never even got to say good-bye, but my grandma knew she was dying, and she orchestrated the whole thing. She asked to be brought to the cottage so she could die in front of the fireplace, where it was always warm and there was always something to see out the window. They shoved the piano aside and set up a hospital bed, and waited for the cancer to march through her body.

It had started in her breast, migrated to her lungs and her liver and found a beachhead in her brain. I was only eleven and I had only known storybook deaths up until that time—deaths that happened either off-stage or in peaceful silence. Gram’s death was nothing like those. She was old, for one thing—eighty-seven. One by one, over the last several years, she’d had to stop doing the things she used to be able to do. At first it was pleasures, like walks in the woods, and then it was complexities, like paying bills. As the cancer consumed her, it came down to the necessities of daily life. She lost the ability to put together a meal, to drive her old blue Cadillac. It took her so long to button her sweater that she could no longer make it to church on Sunday mornings. The only thing she was able to do, in the end, was to die where she wanted to die. Toward the very end, her breathing became ragged and slow, and the pain she felt was so awful it made everyone else in the room hurt, too. My mom didn’t have much choice but to let me be part of it. It was summer and the cottage was small. We sat with Gram, rubbing Vaseline on her lips, holding her hand. We didn’t want her to be alone when she drew her last breath, but she had other ideas. She died in the middle of the night, when the fire was out, and no one was sitting beside her.

When I got home from the open house, Jackie came at me the moment I walked in the door.

“Can I go to church with Max tomorrow?” she asked.

“Church?” I repeated, lamely.

“He goes to the Unitarian Universalist church up on Montemalaga.”

Tomorrow was the children’s Christmas pageant. There would be a donkey. Someone would speak the lines,
Do not be afraid, I bring you tidings of great joy,
and we would sing "O Little Town of Bethlehem.” I looked at Rick, who was sitting on the couch folding laundry and watching a football game. “Did you ask Daddy?” I asked.

“He said to ask you,” Jackie said. “Max says they read from the Bible, the Koran and the Torah, and a few Sundays ago, the sermon was based on a John Irving novel. Don’t you love that?”

I wondered if the novel had been
A Prayer for Owen Meany
or
The Cider House Rules.
I could imagine sermons on both books that would be quite powerful— something about the nature of accident, something about the rule of the law versus the spirit of it. “Is Max your boyfriend, then?” I asked, as casually as I was able.

Jackie smiled. “It was official on December fourth,” she said.

When she was in fourth grade, a boy she liked gave her a pink plastic heart necklace on Valentine’s Day. She was mortified at his audacity and vowed never to speak to him again. It was important that everyone know this. She sealed the necklace in an envelope and had her best friend, Karen, ceremoniously hand it to him in the middle of the playground. He apparently took the envelope and flipped it into the trash can on his way to play basketball, no longer an official boyfriend. But what, in the lexicon of high school, did “official” mean? Had the boy with the blond hair given her a token of his affection that she deigned, this time, to keep? Was it merely a mutual acknowledgment that they liked each other? Or was it just that they decided to hang out together, eat lunch together, go to each other’s sporting events?

“Oh,” I said, feeling like an idiot. “Official. That’s great.” She had asked for something of me and had given me something in return. The chance to go to church with the boy she liked for inside information about the boy. It seemed like a fair deal. “I don’t see any reason why you can’t go to church with him,” I said.