“I wouldn’t have thought we’d have to worry about you,” Martha says unhappily.
When I returned from Martha’s house the first time, I passed a farmer traveling on the beach road in his rusty car. Strapped to the roof of the car was a sandhill crane, one wing raised, pumped full of air and sailing in the moonlight. They kill these birds for their meat. The meat, they say, tastes just like chicken. I have found that almost everything tastes like chicken.
There is a garage not far from town where Jace used to buy gas. I stopped there once. There was a large wire meshed cage outside, by the pumps. A sign on it said BABY FLORIDA RATTLERS. Inside were dozens of blue and pink baby rattles on a dirt floor. It gave me a headache. It was such a large cage.
At night I take the child and walk over the beach to the water’s edge where it is cool. The child is at peace here, beside the water, and it is here, most likely, where Jace will find us when he comes back. When Jace comes back it will be at night. He always comes in on the heat, at night.
“Darling,” I can hear him say, “even as a little boy, I was all there ever was for you.”
I can see it quite clearly. I will be on the shoreline, nursing, and Jace will come back on the heat, all careless and easy and “Darling,” he’ll shout into the wind, into the white roil of water behind us. “Darling, darling,” Jace will shout, “where you been, little girl?”
Building
REMODELING their house is Peter’s idea, Katherine likes it the way it is. It is an old sprawling wooden house with small dark rooms. The plantings around it are old too, obvious from their type as well as their size. There are huge travelers’-trees, which aren’t popular any more, lining the driveway. This is on a key on the west coast of Florida, a key upon which the population has quadrupled in the last four years. Katherine has lived on the key for eight years and is forever finding herself telling new acquaintances how much everything has changed. These people all live in condos on the beach and are unapologetic, articulate and drink in moderation. Katherine hasn’t made a friend out of a new acquaintance in a long time.
Katherine first saw their house, and Peter, with her friend Annie, who was house-hunting. Peter is in real estate. He’s very successful now and has his own business, but then he was just getting started, working for someone else, and he was showing this house for sale on a Sunday afternoon. Peter grinned at Katherine as though he had met her before, which he had not. Annie thought the house was too dark, which it was, but Katherine liked it, although she was not in the position to buy anything. The house was a relic of the recent past in a neighborhood that had grown up around it. Peter told Katherine that he was thinking of buying it himself, it was such a good investment. Then he asked her to dinner and three months after that, they got married.
It is Katherine who has prevented Peter from improving their house before this. But the house had dry rot, it needed a new roof, new wiring. Really, remodeling was inevitable. Actually, little of the old house will remain. Now that Peter has convinced Katherine of the need to remodel, he encourages her to debate the decisions he makes.
“I want to lose an argument with you every so often,” he says, “that way the house will be more the way we both want it.”
But Katherine doesn’t have arguments with Peter, Peter never argues with anyone. All their friends are amazed, for example, at how well he gets along with the workmen involved in the remodeling. It’s unusual, their friends say, not to get upset with some, if not most, of these people in the long run, but Peter gets along with them all, the carpenter, the electrician, the plumber, the dry-wall and insulation man, the mason, the back-hoe operator, the roofer, whereas Katherine finds it difficult to converse with any of these people. Her jaws ache from projecting the illusion of concern. There is a basic misunderstanding between Katherine and all of them. They think she is interested in what is going to happen and she’s not.
“This is a house that will tell your story the way you want your story told,” the architect says.
“Heart-side up, heart-side out. Always,” the carpenter says. He is referring to boards.
The plumber says, “This is a beautiful tub. You should take good care of this tub.”
The dry-wall man says, “You were smart not to make square rooms. A square room is an acoustical prison.”
The electrician, a tall gaunt boy, says nothing. He looks like someone Katherine knew once, but she doesn’t think she’s actually met him before. Once all the young men she knew looked like him.
Peter and Katherine’s friends have told them that they “complement” one another by which they mean that Katherine is dark and rather glum and retiring and Peter is pale and energetic and gregarious. They’ve been married for five years. Katherine has heard that this is a dangerous time, statistically speaking, however she was married to her first husband for only ten months so she feels she has done her part to make statistics meaningless. Katherine’s first husband’s name was Peter also, although everyone called him by his middle name which was Travis. Even so, Katherine finds that she doesn’t call Peter by his name very often. She sometimes calls him “babe” as in “Here’s looking at you, babe,” when the first drink of the evening is about to be drunk. She isn’t aware that Peter uses her name very often either. Katherine suspects that, more or less, this is the way married people are with one another.
Peter and Katherine have rented a house to live in while the remodeling is going on. Katherine has arranged for this — it is the same beach house on the southernmost end of the key where she lived before she met Peter, after her divorce from Travis. She was thrilled when she learned from the elderly owner of the property, Dewey Dobbs, that the house was still cheap and available. Over the years, Dewey has driven a succession of developers half mad with lust and exasperation by refusing to sell his large unkempt holdings on the Gulf of Mexico. There are condominiums to both the south and east of him, pressed against his boundaries, towering high above the tall pine trees that shade his lowly buildings — the house that Peter and Katherine have rented, Dewey’s own, and a converted boat shed that Dewey rents to two surfers.
Katherine is happy about living in the beach house. It is little more than a shack really, small, hot, and gummy with salt spray. On the living room wall is a twenty-pound snook that Dewey’s son caught in 1947. There are straw mats on the floor and mildew on the ceiling. The water has a highly sulfurous odor and there is a leak beneath the sink which drains into a 7-Eleven Elvis Presley cup. The plastic cup describes the childhood of The King and must be emptied daily. Katherine takes a few clothes, a few books, a tube of zinc oxide, and moves in.
Peter doesn’t share Katherine’s enthusiasm for the shack. Actually, he hates it, but it doesn’t matter, he’s seldom there. He works very hard, and he comes home late. When he has any spare time, he spends it at their “real” house as he refers to it, watching the construction. He and Katherine are being exceptionally nice with one another. It is a difficult time, their friends say — the disruptions, the decisions — but everything, thanks to Peter, moves along smoothly. Katherine is not hurt that he has involved them in something that doesn’t engage her, and Peter is not offended by her non-involvement. Katherine feels that she must have learned something about marriage from being married before that is now working to her benefit. However, she doesn’t know quite what it is, or how, actually, it works.