Cape House
debut fiction by Sarah Nourie
Out on the coast, the wind is cutting and cruel, and I like it that way. I like the way it sweeps her hair diagonally across her face and the way she screeches at a particularly overpowering gust. She hunches her shoulders and stomps her feet and hides her hands under my sweater which she has taken as her own. It’s the thick wool one I got studying in Dublin, the one that itches like wire weeds against your ankles, the one built for weather such as this. It is not that I am unencumbered by the wind, but
more so that she makes much more a show of it than me, and enjoys it. It’s as if she’s saying: I see the way you churn the earth, the way you sweep the long shore grasses, the way you push the waves, the waves!—as powerful as they are—to your will. I see it, and I protest! This is the thing I love most about her.
We are not summer beach-goers. There is nothing appealing to me about horseflies the size of quarters making a meal out of me. There is nothing appealing to me about the crunch of sand in my sandwich, despite the name (God, who names these things?). There is certainly nothing appealing to me about the cooking of flesh in beach chairs, screaming babies, and seagulls fighting over greasy French fry bags.
No, we come out here when the crowds have packed their overstuffed cars and driven back west, their hot skin textured by the salt and sand rubbing angrily against leather seats. I see them return to our neighborhood in flocks, piling their luggage on front stoops, snapping at tired children whining and hungry from the drive. This is when I turn to her and say, “Isn’t vacation supposed to be restorative?”
And she looks up from her novel (she is always reading, my girl) and says, “hush.” She keeps me grounded like this.
Arriving home, we kick the cold sand off our boots and leave them on the welcome mat and she says,“whew!” and gives her body a shake. Then she says, “where the fuck are my slippers?” as if someone has hidden them. I find them kicked under the couch, and call her “dear.” She puts the kettle on the stove and rubs her hands above it, still wiggling her small body. We shed our outer layers, which hold the wind in their fibers as a cool reminder, and don blankets over our shoulders like children on Christmas
morning. I sit at my desk and she brings me a cup. It is warm and bitter and I hold it in both my hands and drink too soon. The wind rattles the old shutters of our little shack and she shouts, “Go away! There’s no one home!” and curls up on the couch with her novel and we stay silent like this for hours, our muscles heavy full of October sand.
It is raining when I return in May to paint the shutters and fix the rain gutters, which have fallen victim to winter yet again. Over the course of the winter months, I find myself picturing them overborne with snow and sagging and feel great cruelty at my abandonment. On the drive, I crank the classical station above the tinny pangs of rain upon the roof of the car. Out the window, I can see the length of the ocean stretching out beyond covert inlets. The wipers hit madly on the windshield.
The house is still and dark and has a coldness that seems stale. I put my overnight bag on the edge of the bed, on the blue knit blanket, and the frame wheezes and breathes out light dust which stalls in the air. There is an empty mug on the desk which resists when I attempt to tidy, leaving a sticky, dark ring. I lick my thumb and rub, leaving a darker smudge, which fades soon after, but leaves the ring still in its wake. It is then that I decide to write to you. I begin with “Dear” and click my delete key four times
before staring at the blank screen and thusly close my laptop and sigh. In the bathroom, I study the creases in my sorry face. I comb my mustache with my tiny mustache comb and try to smile, but I frighten myself and resume my ordinary stare, which seems to me now unbearably empty. I start again.
Dear D — How are you? I’m not sure how to start a letter such as this one. It is, as I’m sure you can imagine, my first time writing. Right now, there is a nagging at my throat. Do you know what I mean by that? I imagine that means there is something I need to say, but to be honest, I’m not sure what it is. I will say I’m a big fan of your work. I’m sure you get that a lot. I’m not as sorry as I seem, or perhaps as desperate as your other correspondents. I loved your column where you responded to the man whose wife died and left a journal. If you recall, the sister wouldn’t let the man read the journal. I loved what you said about the things that we say when we’re angry that may be hurtful. I feel my predicament is not far off.
The rain slows. The drops make more distinguishable, singular sounds and then they stop altogether. Out on the beach, the rain has left little craters in the sand. A handful of terns move together down the shoreline. Against the gray sky, only their little black hoods, and three small lines of bright orange (two legs, one beak) can really be seen. Their quick steps prove an efficiency to which I cannot relate, in my slow, clumsy tread. It takes a while to get used to the way sand moves under one’s feet again. Today, it feels both familiar and entirely foreign. My duck boots feel heavy. There are two small children who run towards me, their own shoes in hand, little blue jeans rolled at the ankles. They let the still icy (even icier than it is in the summertime) waves catch their toes and scream, running back. They have that sea hair, swept and curling. The new spring wind is still biting. As I gain on them, one turns and smiles and the other pays no attention at all, knees pushing into the sand as she digs with small hands. I find this pairing endearing and it fills me with a grounding that holds both anonymity and presence. A gull screeches.
At our little town store, Gerry tells me I’m early this year. He is standing behind the deli counter, wearing a flannel under his apron. I fill a paper cup with the dark roast and put a paper on the table, and a pack of sausages. “Honey do’s,” I say, and this is half true. There is a teenager at the register, her hair tied in two braids over her sweatshirt. She is condent and bored.
Before I go on, I feel I must know more about you, for you will soon know much more about me. With that in mind, I feel compelled to ask your age, marital status, and perhaps what you eat for breakfast on a daily basis. While this could shatter the illusion of who you are in my mind (old professor type, doting spouse or widower who has somehow made peace with the devastating hole in your life because you were so blessed to have every day before it, two eggs on toast, side of sausages, or fruit when you wish to shed those winter pounds) I believe I am owed something of a CV to really be sure you are qualified to answer my questions. If you, somehow, live in your mother’s basement and chide her for folding your laundry the
wrong way, I may search elsewhere.
Before I leave our home place, she runs her fingers over the creases where her brow furrows and says she’s getting old. I say I can’t wait to be old and lean to kiss her there and she turns. Standing above the folded laundry on our home bed she says, “You’ll want this,” and hands me my sweater, the one I got while studying in Dublin. The one that is rough like my father’s beard against my cheek as he kisses me goodnight when I am a child. And then she is in the yard, clearing out dead earth from around our
flower beds when I say goodbye. Sometimes, I think I can feel what she does, and then I know that she much prefers the cold earth under her fingers than she would the rough warmth of my palm. She does not look up.
Out on the beach, the two children are poking at a seal carcass that has washed in with the tide. Decapitated by the blades of a motor boat, no doubt. She is limp against the sand, what warm blood had surely gushed from the openings of her injury has been let and she now exists only as cold flesh. I hold my few groceries in my arms and the sausages fall into the sand and as I bend to pick them up, I can’t help but remark upon the resemblance they bear to our dead friend on the shore, which makes
me laugh, to my own disappointment.
The sun (relentless, dependable) pushes through the thick cloud cover and I can see it light up the cotton ridges above me. Out on the water, the sunlight outlines the ripples in the tide. Looking back towards town, I can see the shop girl leaving. She pulls up the hood of her sweatshirt and tucks her jeans into her socks to stop the wind from encroaching. Soon, a girl with dark curly hair runs up behind her, in that dancing way you do in sand, and pulls her into her arms, and she turns to her and they hold each other there.
I heave the ladder from the basement and wear the clothes that she loves most (my dad’s old denim, long-sleeve T with the stripes) and let the paint (Water’s Edge, how fitting) spray back upon me. I crank the boom box we have never gotten around to throwing away and swig the warm brown liquor we stash in the little cabinet above the refrigerator. There are gulls above me and in a stroke of cheesy and entirely human recognition, I tell myself, I’m free! and one time say it aloud. When I say it, my
voice is sharp and I lose myself on the “ee” sound and look around with a downward stare.
While I’m here, though,
Up on the ladder, I have a seabird glance of the two girls lying down in the sand. The children have since been collected by their parents. The shop girl has a finger curled around the other’s hair and they face each other and then, together, look up towards the gulls, creating a little triangle with their prone bodies, heads together, feet apart. I lose my footing.
I might as well just,
In December, there are dishes in the sink. I am in the doorway calling her name.
There is nothing wrong, there is nothing wrong, there is nothing wrong, I tell myself, but the repetition starts to wane in a cautionary way. I could be overthinking this.
As I was saying,
Everything is fine.
She is in the tub with that long look. She is in bed under the mess of her hair. She is in the car with the lights on out front, too long.
But she is laughing, too, in March she is laughing and
I misstep and fall into the hydrangeas. Next to me, on the sidewalk, and in the leaves around me, too, the paint has pooled and spread like blood spatter. I pull myself and fall back and am laughing, too, and she is laughing in my mind, in the library, too loud, lifting a naughty book to make my cheeks burn. Laughing, too, in the market at an impossibly small carrot. I roll from the bushes and simply cannot stop myself. I am bursting at the seams and drinking more now and there is that funny gull on the
ladder above me and this is too much, too much!
In April, she is in another Sad Spell and I can feel it in my bones. There is rain and cold and a surprise slushy snow this month. She does not want to do anything and so will I just stop asking? I scrub dried cereal from a bowl in the sink and hum Beethoven’s ninth and I can feel her growing strained and prickly in the room behind me and know when she stands that she will tell me she’s going for a walk.
And then, I watch something break in the space between us when I say something horrible that I don’t remember ( I do remember, I just don’t want to), because I just can’t take it anymore! It’s too much, it’s too much, and I didn’t sign up for this (this is what I signed up for entirely, exactly) and she is standing there, but I watch something fall hard behind her eyes and she —
And then she is a stranger, but I know her too and do you ever see your own self fade from the eyes of another? And you wonder, in your selfishness and incompetence if you even love this person you no longer know?
Of course I do, of course I do, and I am burning the sausages and singing to the radio because I need to just let GO for ONCE!
Back in October, she is singing as she clears the table and she is the warmth that fills our little shack. She stands in the doorway to our sweet room, (pink with the bedside lights reecting against the curtains) and laughs upon seeing me one blink from dozing. Climbing into bed, she curls herself into me and I breathe my soft belly into the small of her back, slowing as we fall asleep, and holding something sacred between our warm bodies, even warmer as the night goes on. I rest my arm in the
hollow above her hip and pull her close.
The sun is setting now and the room fades with it. A hand towel catches on the stove and I hold the cigarette in my mouth (did I mention I have been smoking?) and say, fuck, fuck, fuck with closed lips and bathe it in the sink. Soon, it will be dark and I will pass out on the couch with her little slippers tucked underneath.
In the thick of it, in the end of it, she is maddening and cold and stubborn, and I am stunted and too wordy and in the way. Do you ever have nights where you reach for something out in the darkness, thinking you are close, only to have your eyes adjust and tell your stupid instincts how far you really are? Do you ever take hold of yourself, in your own mess and loneliness, and wish you had been kinder to your mother when she was alive? That you had been born someone with a warmer heart and certainty and direction in this life? I am not a pitiful man, I am not asking for it either, pity, nor am I without blame to share. (In fact, if I could split the blame and hand her half, she could rip it once more and hand it back). But do you ever? Are you ever? What would you do?
Sarah Nourie is a writer, visual artist, Middle School English teacher, and student at Harvard Extension School, working towards an ALM degree in Creative Writing and Literature. She lives in Somerville, MA with her husband. This is her first published short story.
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