Chapter Twelve
Twelve
Evelyn
May 1955
I select my swing dress with the checkered skirt, and run my hands over my blouses as if browsing a department store, as if it matters, as if this is the decision that will change things. My suitcase open at my feet, I drop the dress, the fabric spilling over the side, as though it merely slipped from my grasp. I nudge the luggage deeper inside the threshold with my toe, hiding it from view. Then I shed two shirts from their hangers with urgency, barely registering as I toss in cardigans, capri pants, a thin black belt, the stockings with a run in the ankle from chasing Jane through a bramble bush, kitten heels with the worn soles.
A rustle in the hallway. I freeze. A beat passes in silence. I glance in the mirror, the empty hallway projected behind me. The woman staring back through the glass holds my gaze like an accusation. Flyaways wrestled into a low ponytail, wrinkles etched into her forehead, face angular and expressionless, eyes gray and lined with exhaustion, in a plaid housedress hiding widened hips that will soon be covered with an apron. I feel sorry for her; I don’t know her.
Downstairs, there is a crash followed by the sound of something shattering. Loud voices, muffled but angry. I flip the lid shut and squat to buckle the clasps, shove it to the back of the closet, hidden behind a pair of heavy winter boots I’ve yet to tuck away now that spring has arrived. I sprint into Jane’s and Thomas’s rooms, where I had left them playing with a set of Lincoln Logs and a promise to be right back, and find both empty. Shit. I careen down the narrow back stairway into the kitchen, also empty. Shit, shit, shit. Push through the swinging door into the dining room to find Joseph with his back to me, seizing Jane by the wrist, Thomas clutched in his other arm, frantically apologizing to a guest. When I get closer, I see it’s Mr. and Mrs. Whitaker, first-time visitors, and their table is covered in spilled orange juice and the smatterings of eggs. Jane’s hair hangs in wet streaks and her clothes are soaked, a red splotch of strawberry jam on her chin. Joseph hears me enter and whirls around in a mix of anger and relief.
“Take. Them.” He fumes, presses a sticky Thomas into my arms, and releases Jane with a push toward me. I scoop her wriggling body, nearly too big at four to be carried, with one arm, and Thomas with the other, desperate to get them out of sight. The full dining room is silent, my face burns with embarrassment. “So sorry, everyone...” Joseph stammers an apology as we exit.
Inside the kitchen, out of view, Jane stares at her bare feet, twists her toes into the grout of the tile, a chunk of egg falling onto her cheek. I reach for the wooden spoon to spank her and grab her by the wrist, but Thomas’s face crinkles, and he begins to wail. My eyes dart toward the door, the guests on the other side trying to enjoy what’s left of their breakfast.
“Upstairs, now,” I growl, throwing the spoon onto the counter. Jane races ahead and Thomas follows, whimpering when he reaches the stairs even though at two years old, he can manage them. I snatch him to my chest, my dress already moist from where I carried him, my neck streaked with jam from his cheeks. Upstairs Jane has stripped off all her clothes and left them in a heap on the carpet.
“Jane. In the bath, now !” I kneel and undress Thomas, overtaken with the stench of fresh poop, his cloth diaper heavy and leaking onto his legs. Jane sucks on a jam-covered strand of her hair. My eyes fill with tears.
I test the bathwater with my wrist and clean up Thomas as it fills. I scrub them and rub shampoo in their hair, work my fingers through the snarls and sticky jam, as they yelp and contort away from me. My knees ache on the tile floor. It could be any morning, it could be any night. The water rises higher now, high enough, and I reach to turn it off. I place my fingers under the faucet and hesitate, feel the rush over my skin, close my eyes, imagine it rise higher and higher, filling the room, flooding the entire house until we are all suspended in its muted embrace, in sweet silence.
The bathroom door jerks open, and I’m jolted by the appearance of my mother. I am faintly aware the bathroom reeks of orange juice and human waste, the stained clothes and full diaper beside me. The water is still running in the tub, Jane and Thomas splash each other, soaking the floor around the rim.
“What in the...” My mother’s mouth is parted in disbelief. Her hair is tied back neat as always, lips painted, her skirt pressed and shoes polished.
I register my appearance in her eyes, my unwashed hair, wrinkled dress spotted with food, naked lips and pale cheeks. I shut off the tap. “Hey, enough—stop splashing.”
She shakes her head. “I have no words, Evelyn. You ask me to take the children so you can go to your appointment and this is what I walk into? Joseph’s downstairs sweeping up a mess of broken china, and look at you. What did you do? Or better yet—” she points a thin finger at Jane “—what did this little hellion do?”
I shrug, too exhausted to protest or explain. Jane ducks her head underwater, and Thomas giggles.
“Unbelievable,” she scoffs. “You’re lucky you have me. I didn’t have any help when you were young. You two, out of the tub now, come on.” She clucks her tongue and delivers their folded towels with the tips of her fingers, as though they too are filthy, and follows the kids, dripping, out the door. She sticks her head back in to add, “This is why you can’t give children too much freedom. It makes them wild. I made that mistake and look at you—” she pauses “—you’ve never been happy with what you have.”
I swallow hard. “I’m going to take a bath.”
“Well, I hope so,” she snarls, and closes the door behind her.
I flip the hot water tap back on, filling the tub until it scalds. Run the taps, plug the tub, drain the tub. Wash the clothes, hang to dry, iron, fold. Cook, serve, clear, clean. Make the beds, strip the beds. Scrub the tubs, wipe the sinks. Run the taps, plug the tub, drain the tub.
Into eternity.
The Oyster Shell Inn felt more like mine when I lived next door. Now that I sleep in the master bedroom and make biscuits for guests and fold the sheets with crisp corners, this place doesn’t belong to me anymore. Sometimes I catch a familiar whiff, blackberries or a musty towel, and am transported, but those echoes are fleeting. Still, Joseph needs the security of a worn-in house, banisters smoothed by our own hands, by his parents and grandparents. To sit at the same table each morning to drink his coffee. I don’t think he has ever wondered about the music the Pacific Ocean would make, and if he had, he would favor a more familiar song.
I peel off my stained dress. Sink into the tub, let the water run. Minutes pass. The distinct creak of the stairway, my mother leaving with the kids. Water rises to my chin, and I plunge lower so my mouth is submerged, play with the water flowing between my toes. Finally alone at last, I yearn to be even more alone, alone from myself, from everyone and everything pushing in on me, closing in.
The faucet runs cold now. I hold my breath, my eyes just above the surface. Count to ten, watch the water flirt with the rim. I lean forward to switch it off, but hesitate, staring at the place where the rushing water interrupts the calm surface. I listen and hear nothing in the hallway. My heart pounds as the water climbs, now barely contained by the porcelain. Crane my neck toward the door. Silence. I stand, rivulets drip down my skin, watch the waterline recede to fill the space where my body had been. I wrap a towel around me, stiff from drying on the line.
Run the taps, plug the tub, drain the— What if I don’t?
I hear cascading water slosh onto the tile floor, the perfect distraction, as I close the bathroom door tight behind me.
In my bedroom, I slip into the navy shirtwaist dress. I paint my lips a deep red and towel-dry my hair. The empty-eyed girl stares back at me again. There is the faint whoosh in the background, and I wonder if, when it comes, if it will be enough to drown in, or if it will spill out in the streets, bursting through the windows like the hurricane surge, carrying me to the sea.
The door swings open, and Joseph enters. “What happened out there?” he asks, furious. “I thought you had the kids?”
I watch him through the mirror, his voice sounds so far away. “My mother has them now. I have a doctor’s appointment, remember?” I press my pinkie to my lips, erasing a smeared edge.
“What appointment?” Joseph stops himself, cocks his head toward the door. “Is the water running in there?”
I ignore the question and grab my purse. “I’m already late. I’ll be back later.”
He tugs my elbow. “You really got to be on them—”
I don’t meet his eyes. “You know... I hear it now too.”
“What?” He turns his head back and in the quiet we both hear the distinct sound of rushing water. “Oh no.”
He runs toward the bathroom as it seeps from under the door, spilling out into the plush hallway carpet.
“I have to go!” I call out, but Joseph is already behind the door.
“Can you grab towels?” he yells, and I pretend not to hear.
I steal the suitcase from its hiding spot and race down the back stairwell, each step betraying me with a creak. The keys hang on a rack by the door, so I snatch them with shaking hands and walk with forced calm to the car, nodding as I pass a family on the way to the beach, hoping to conceal my luggage behind my full skirt. Don’t want to invite questions, conversation, reasons to stall, to turn back, not now, when I am so close.
Then a phantom voice, my mother’s—the one I have tried to keep out, that I have tried to bury deep inside, pushes back— I made that mistake with you, and look at you...you’ve never been happy with what you have —floods my mind as I yank open the station wagon door, toss my suitcase in and wedge myself inside.
Then there is Joseph. His words fill me, too, as they swirl with my mother’s, pull me beneath the waves, the sound muted and pressure pounding in my ears. I want a baby. I want to go home. I think it will make you happy, make us both happy.
And suddenly I am almost thirty years old with two children, and a husband, and a mother that lives next door, and my life is nothing like I dreamed it would be, nothing like I wanted. I imagine myself, sixteen, before children and marriage and war. Sixteen, when my hair hung loose and wet against my back after a swim, when my skin felt tight from hours in the sun, when I ran through the field and jumped off the dock and splashed in the waves, when I recorded all of my wildest desires with certainty I’d see them through. That Evelyn would have taken one look at this life and swam to the end of the ocean, never turning back.
I jam the key into the ignition and my hands tremble. I grip the wheel to steady myself before backing down the driveway, a jarring acceleration that knocks the suitcase from the back seat to the floor, tires crunching as I approach Sandstone Lane and the new sign that reads The Oyster Shell Inn, to replace the one yanked from its chain by the hurricane so many years ago, the hurricane that lingers now that we are back in this life. This inn stands and yet Joseph is stolen from me, swept away in the shadows of the storm, because I don’t see my husband anymore. He wakes before the sun to restore echoes of damage, the roof shingles that split and leak or the shed lined with mold, and tends to guests, driven by guilt that his parents never saw the inn reopen. He stays up late balancing the books long after the kids have gone to sleep and I have crawled into bed, my bones aching from a day’s labor.
He is not the Joseph who taught me to skip rocks or who twisted his finger in my curls as we lay on the dock, imagining figures in the clouds. He is a shadow that creaks through the house and the jingle of keys and the fragments of clothes I glimpse as he slips in and out of doors, and I am the one holding the children and vacuuming the carpets and folding the linens and making sandwiches. I am the one who has her dress tugged, and her hair yanked, and gets spit-up on her blouse. I am the one who lives in a house that doesn’t feel like mine, trapped in this town that I desperately wanted to escape.
Swim to the end of the ocean, never turn back.
I navigate without thinking and find the highway, drive to put space between me and my conscience, trailing me and gaining speed. In my pocket the letter from the BSO, Dear Mrs. Myers, Thank you for your interest in the Boston Symphony Orchestra. We are in immediate need of a traveling concert pianist and are holding auditions on May 10... The morning ticks away along the lines of the road, grass and trees for miles, other cars whip around me, smears of color as they pass.
I flick on the radio to drown out the silence. Nat King Cole croons at the piano, and I shut it off. Joseph bought me a piano after Jane was born. He said he knew what would make me happy. A house, a piano, children. When she was small, I played with Jane in my lap, nestled against one arm, Bach and Mozart and Chopin, music that made me feel part of a world I had left behind. But then I was pregnant again, and my back ached and my ankles swelled and I couldn’t perch close enough to the keys to comfortably play, and Jane wouldn’t sit still and the house was full of clatter and conversation, a racket that was sound but not music, that pounded between my ears so loud I had to open the windows to let it out.
When Jane and Thomas discovered the piano on their own, it added to the noise, slapping of palms against the ivory, the cacophony of all the wrong notes. The pounding gave me headaches and disturbed the guests so I covered the keys, kept them covered so the children would forget that beneath the piano’s wooden door there was a stampede they could create with every smash of their little hands. I kept it covered so long I forgot there was music, soothing, and beautiful music I could create with mine.
I drive past signs I barely read, merges I never register, all the way to Boston, to the symphony, to a life I lived before, a life I almost started on my own.
I amble by the Boston Conservatory and feel that pleasure-tug in my gut, the thrill of the memory of my first private lessons. A building I would know intimately if only I had applied, gotten accepted, stayed. The people I would have met, the futures that would have diverged from walking through those doors. The second chance, now, of a whole new start, a renaissance of possibility at my feet. I pass the Berklee College of Music, students lugging instruments in cases, Boston apparently brimming with musicians, my desires admirable, commonplace even, here. My body implausibly light and unencumbered, no one grabbing at me, reaching for me, needing me, my limbs swinging free in the warm May sun. Sheltered by brownstones on both sides, strangers stride past without a glance, my suitcase tucked in my trunk, the implication of it parked on a side street in Back Bay.
Where to begin? Hours before the audition, and only a short walk to Symphony Hall, the morning open before me like an outstretched hand, eons I am unaccounted for, responsible for no one, walking in whatever direction I choose. Tea, sitting and drinking tea, at a café, alone—the urge strikes me and makes me giddy, how time could be spent this way, so frivolously. I order a tea latte, a luxury I’ve never had, the order so elegant, European, and waste away the morning on a cobblestone patio. Grateful for the warm mug nestled in my hands as the breeze picks up, the fluffy steamed milk hiding the scalding liquid beneath, burning my tongue. I study the women my age, and younger, and older, alone, and pushing strollers, and in groups of other women, and their arms linked with men, as they brush past or navigate passing cars to cross the street, and consider who they may be, where they may be going. Delighted to be mistaken for someone who lives here, sipping my usual order in my usual café, on my way to somewhere too.
How long ago it was I first arrived. Fifteen years. Maelynn picked me up from South Station, her navy trousers buttoned high above the waist, standing out in the horde of ladies in floral dresses. Her painted fuchsia lips, the tortoiseshell sunglasses she lifted onto her head when she saw me. Well, what do you know. You’re an easy one to pick from a crowd.
I wore denim shortalls my mother hated. Maelynn looked me once over, put her arm through mine, and said, I think we’ll get along just fine .
If only I could go to her now, find refuge once more in her second bedroom that she used as a writing space, the room that became mine, bathed in daylight and filled with books and exotic plants, spidery limbs hanging over their clay pots, a twin bed against the window that she bought just for me. To be that fifteen-year-old girl, none of her choices made for her yet, a girl who lost afternoons lazing on that Turkish rug, talking with Maelynn and toying with the feathery tassels and following the paths of red threads until the design became muddled, the way a word repeated too many times no longer sounds like anything at all.
Maelynn would be upset if she knew I was so close, and not calling. But I don’t have anything to tell her, nothing I can explain. The suitcase, locked in my car. Preparing for not just today, but for the possibility of days that bleed into weeks and months, mornings spent like this after nights performing with the BSO, strolling and sipping and people watching, until my conscience muddles in the same way. Questions I haven’t asked myself, answers I don’t explore, traced and repeated until they too mean nothing, hurt no one.
I grow cool in the shade of a striped awning, a French name, Patisserie Lola, scrawled across the front, my tea drained except for the bitter dregs, my adrenaline waning, my urge to drive now displaced by my need to walk until my legs burn, to see how far I can get on my own two feet. I pay my tab and loop around Newbury Street, up and down side streets, explore Boylston until I reach Copley Square. The memories of meeting Joseph here for lunch, sharing sandwiches, rises unbidden. That first time he waited for me, his own suitcase in hand. Now even Boston is no longer mine, it is a hideaway we share. I push past, desperate for a place in this city that still belongs to me. Pass the Arlington Church, where we said our vows. Promises that trail me as I turn my shoulder against the cutting breeze, blocking my view.
I reach the Public Garden, circle the pond, geese drifting lazily on its surface, surrounded by beds of tulips. Across the footbridge, clogged with lovers and tourists, I follow the green grass of the Boston Common down to Charles Street. One of my favorite spots, tucked in Beacon Hill, the brick sidewalk lined with shops and restaurants that weaves its way to the Charles River, sailboats drifting in the wind, the nearest thing I could come to the sea. Maelynn took me here that first Christmas, when I was so homesick for what was familiar. For my mother’s gingerbread puffs, for snowball fights with Tommy and Joseph on the way to school, for the cigar smoke swirling around my father after dinner. Maelynn noticed me sulking, so we took the trolley to Park Street and sipped on syrupy cocoa, strolled by storefronts lit with twinkling lights and lampposts wrapped in garlands. She bought me a copy of Jane Eyre in a bookstore filled with dusty fringed lamps and oversize armchairs and we walked, kicking little chunks of ice and peering at window displays until our toes went numb and I stopped missing home.
That store is gone now, replaced by a clothing boutique. The street is quiet, most people working on a weekday, and I take my time, admiring mannequins and contemplating menus until I reach the Charles. I can see the boathouse, and the amphitheater across the water, a stage for free concerts in the summer. An experience I missed, returning to Stonybrook at the end of each school year, that Joseph and I never took advantage of for reasons I can’t fathom now, can’t recall how we spent our time, the recollections gauzy with grief. Our entire time here is a sliver of what it should have been, embedded in me now as another loss. Joseph, physically here with me, but wedded to the inn, his destiny like a getaway car idling outside our window.
I, too, felt the neglected house calling me back, even as I clung to the lie of leaving it all behind. Standing on the docks now, I am transported to the Oyster Shell Inn of my memory. The kitchen was clanging pans and the scent of yeast and flour that followed us through the swinging wooden door as we darted by, stealing a fingertip of fresh jam or a wedge of cheese. Mrs. Myers’s laugh was honeyed, switching our behinds with a twisted towel to chase us away, she was a welcomed hug in her doughy arms. Mr. Myers was the jingle of keys on his belt as he repaired leaky sinks and swept the floors, he was foil-covered chocolates slipped into my palm when no one was looking. My parents’ home was marble sculptures and mahogany furniture, cold to the touch; the Oyster Shell was the warmth thrown from a crackling fire. There were guests in summer dresses who laughed and drank tea on the front porch, and there was a hum to it all, a brightness and belonging I have chased ever since.
Thoughts of Joseph creep in, and I imagine him putting the children to bed tonight. Waiting. Worrying. The panic that would take over. The pain once he found out the truth. Shame burns through my skin. The suitcase I packed, an escape hatch to a life I agreed to. I hear Thomas whimper, see his crinkled face illuminated in the hallway light. I see Jane walk out of her room, her shirt inside out, saddle shoes untied, spinning to show me how she got dressed on her own. I feel Joseph’s lips on my shoulders, his knees pressed behind mine as we lay like spoons. My head feels dizzy, disjointed, floating above me. Thomas reaching for me, Jane smiling, dancing in the morning light. Joseph’s body pressing into mine. The sails in the distance blur, and it is only then I realize I’m crying. A nearby church bell strikes five times.
The audition. My heart quickens, a steel drum.
My tears fall faster, my vision swims, I am a fool, letting the day slip away from me. Protecting my one chance the way a mother sends a baby in a basket downstream, a hope set adrift without a real plan, with little chance of a future. My time slot passed with the strike of the clock, the audition that would tell me if I had what it takes, if I was good enough. The audition I’m not sure I ever intended to see through. It was never them I wanted to leave. It was Joseph’s dream displacing mine, an anchor he inherited in birth. But without him, without our children, even the most captivating music is meaningless. Boston is an empty song.
I need to go, to get away from the river, the imposter sea, the elusive fantasy of some alternate life. The sun is blinding as it sinks, and I stagger down the path to the grass, and lean against a towering oak, close my eyes against rough bark to catch my breath.
Then I see them. I see them all and my knees buckle until I am in them, violets stretched along the riverbank, an endless purple pillow I melt into. I am crying harder now, flowers in full bloom by my ears and tickling the undersides of my arms. Crying for my father, for Tommy, for Joseph’s parents and for Joseph, who loves a girl we have both lost.
The drive back to Stonybrook is a blur of exit signs and headlights as the day fades into night, my chest tight with the guilt of leaving him, leaving them all behind, and knowing it could never be taken back. Before I reach Sandstone Lane I stop, hide the suitcase in the trunk, rake my fingers through my hair and lick my pinky to rub away the dregs of smudged mascara.
The tires crunch on the driveway, announcing my arrival. The bedroom windows are lit behind drawn blinds; the guests must have retreated for the night. Joseph appears at the front door, a silhouette in the yellow glow of the porch lights. I walk with what I hope appears to be a casual gait, but when I reach the steps I can’t help but throw my arms around him.
I whisper in his ear, “I’m sorry.” My eyes well up and I am thankful they are buried in his shoulder.
“Where have you been?” His voice simmering in anger. “I thought something happened to you.” A question I will have to deflect, its answer would beg more questions, would eat away at him because he would never understand a mother’s urge to flee.
“I needed...I needed a day.”
“Christ, Evelyn. You needed a day?” He pulls back from my grip, his face cool, distant, shut off to me.
“I’m sorry.” I tug his sleeve, but he won’t meet my gaze.
“Where did you go?” he repeats.
“I needed to drive, to get some space, is all. I should’ve told you.”
“It’s dark.”
“You never feel that way?”
“Of course I do!” he shouts. “But I don’t act on it! Because you can’t just leave when things get hard. We’re not eighteen anymore.”
A silhouette of a couple on the driveway approaches the porch, passing through from a moonlit walk. He leads me out of earshot, inside, into the kitchen, his hand pressing the small of my back, the only thing propelling me, keeping me steady, and something releases in me, something I had been holding on to for all this time. The lengths our love has gone, the depth of my need for him, surges within me like a life lived once before, like the sudden dinging into place of a forgotten memory, like the inexplicable feeling of having been exactly here, in this moment, like tracing footprints swept away by the sea. Once hidden behind the swinging door I clutch on to him with yearning, a language we had lost. My mouth falls open, press my tongue against his, caught by surprise but meeting me there, in this natural, primal place we once retreated inside a lifetime ago and made our own.
He slides his hands down my lower back and over my thighs, lifts me as I wind my legs around him, my lips on his neck as he carries me upstairs to our bed. He unties my dress and slips it from my shoulders. I unbutton his shirt and pants and he covers my bare stomach in hungered kisses. I trace my fingers across his shoulder blades, and his weight is my anchor. He moans and I press against him until I am falling into our movement, falling so far into him nothing else exists. I call his name and I am free, swimming to the end of the ocean with him beside me, our bodies rock in the waves, come to rest on the shore. I wrap my arms around him as our breath and heartbeats slow. He nuzzles his face into my neck, and I know he is thinking, like I am, of the girl we both thought we had lost, the girl that came rushing back with the cool air blowing through the open window. Joseph, you have found her again. I am home.