Sabina scowled at the horizon. There
a silhouette walked, whether with a limp or a swagger she couldn’t decide. At the
current rate of travel, the silhouette, which she assumed to be human and most
likely male, would reach the intersection of Tarmac Drive and the highway at
precisely the same moment as she, according to her calculations. The last thing
she wanted was to talk to anybody. She preferred the flora and the fauna, the
ocean and the sky; that which was and let her be. She dropped her gaze and watched the gravel
and hard dirt pass beneath her feet. The wind billowed her skirt in front of
her and long dark hair slapped against her cheeks, temples, and into her eyes. She
turned her back to the walking figure and a particularly frigid pacific gust
blasted her in the face. She walked backwards slowly, pulling her thick red sweater
around her shoulders and over her head, and feeling the way with her feet.
At
the other end of Tarmac Drive the lopsided old Victorian perched precariously,
about 20 yards from the edge of a cliff that dropped down straight to the beach.
It shrunk slightly with each step. Now she scowled at the backdrop of clouds
and fog that darkened the sea even as sun shone on her back. On most days in November the fog hung off the
coastline until evening, when it came to tuck the shoreline in for the night
with thick blanket of fog. But, this morning, dense clouds drove the fog bank to
shore, reminding her that the winter’s first major storm was due.
Not today, please, spare our house, her ritual prayer
escaped soundlessly past her lips and took flight towards some nebulous god
that Sabina had a little hope existed. There used to
be a good 50 yards between the house and the cliff, but at the beginning of the
rains just a few years ago the cliff had collapsed, taking a piece of her tiny
neighborhood with it. Since that day, on
any day that the sky brooded, Sabina silently prayed the same small prayer.
Sabina’s
skirt clung with wind to the rhythmic rotation of left and right leg. It’s hem,
damp with salty dew-soaked dirt from the road, rubbed against the backs or her
legs and bare ankles. She shook it free but it only took moments to resume its
previous position and subtle torture.
She turned back around, pulled up her skirt, and shook it again with
minimal success. She wished she had worn her boots.
She looked up and
sighed. She was still on track to meet with the silhouette at the intersection,
even after the backward-walking time delay. Now she could see that the
silhouette was a man and seemed to be limping (or swaggering?) at an unnaturally
slow pace. She stopped and watched him
reach the crossroad. He stopped, turned, and looked at her. She thought of
turning around and going home, but rebuked herself for almost getting nervous
like a silly little girl. She took a deep breath and began walking slowly again,
returning her eyes to her feet, disappearing and reappearing in turn. She hadn’t
looked up when the man’s voice broke the silence.
“Good afternoon, miss.”
He waited in vain for her response. “Sorry
to bother you. I’m not from here.” Sabina let her gaze rise, from his black
leather shoes, up the seams of his gray wool suit, to his the scruffy hair on
his face that resembled a beard and his mouth, which smiled as if he were
letting her in on a joke. “I am looking for somewhere to buy some hydrogen
peroxide.”
Though she thought
it an odd first thing to say to a person, Sabina responded politely, “I would
go to Cole’s Pharmacy if I were looking for some hydrogen peroxide.”
“Cole’s. That
would be in town somewhere?”
“Yes.”
“Well, if you’re
headed that way, I hope you wouldn’t mind if I join you? I’m good at
conversation.”
Sabina lifted her
gaze to his, which met hers and bore too deep.
They were friendly eyes, soft and brown, but there was something in them
she didn’t trust; the way he looked right into her, invading her space, as if
her were looking for something. And she didn’t like the smug look on his face,
either.
Town was to the
left; to the right was nothing for 10s of miles. “My walk ends here,” she said,
“I’m just checking the mail.” She opened the empty mailbox and looked inside.
“No mail on
Sunday,” the man said, still standing there with no indication that he planned
to leave anytime soon.
“I haven’t checked
it in a few days.” Sabina said, though she had checked it the day before.
“I’m sorry, it’s
none of my business,” he said, without a hint of smugness. “I’ll just be on my
way.” He bowed his head and touched the top of his hat.
Sabina
was suddenly ashamed at her lack of manners and quick judgement. “No disrespect
taken. I hope you find what your…hydrogen peroxide, Mr…um…?” The man stood quietly looking at her, leaving
the inquiry hanging between them, as he seemed to contemplate. He looked young to Sabina, though he could not
have been much younger than her at 27. “Robin,” he said, finally.
“Good to meet you,
Robin.”
“..and you are?”
“Sarah,” She lied.
“It’s a pleasure,
Sarah.” He smiled again, sincerely, not
smugly, and Sabina thought he might be rather handsome behind his scruffy facial
hair. “Thank you, ma’am, for your help,”
he said and walked away without looking back.
A man like that is up to no good, she thought, as she
looked away. She turned her back to where they had met and began the brisk
quarter-mile walk home willing herself not to look back.
A cacophony of
honking erupted overheard and Sabina let her mind wander to the sky where two
large Vs of Canada Geese flew. Several of the geese relinquished their pilot positions
and glided to the back, some because they were very tired and some because they
wanted to stay close to those they loved that were tired.
Then Sabina’s mind
began to wander its own corridors. The wind blew harder than ever and though
she held tight to her sweater, it flapped madly around her so much that had a
bull been in the field he might have charged her a matador. Sabina paid no
mind, but stared blankly at the pebbles that passed beneath her gaze as
unnoticed as the perpetual prickle of restlessness that afflicted her body and
mind.
The ocean’s roar
eternal knew how to lull her. Life at the edge of the world touched that timeless
cycle of eternity. She wanted to let herself be absorbed into it. One day, she
dreamed, she would push off the edge; to sail the ocean, or, as she often
thought more likely, to drown in it.
She was surprised
to find herself already at the foot of the five long, worn steps of her
grandmother’s house, home. She took in the familiar scene; delicately carved
angels peering from above the entranceway, the peeling paint, moss and lichen
that gave the house its marbled feel. Her grandmother appeared in the doorway
and frowned down at her.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Why are you back,
already? And without the liquor?”
“I’m sorry,
Maryann,” replied Sabina, respecting Maryann’s distaste for the word “grandma.”
Maryann thought Grandma and ugly word that means you are old. Sabina thought Maryann was
old. Maryann also hated the word mother because that word means you are a
slave.
“I can get some
tomorrow.” Sabina said looking at the
woman standing above her, arms crossed, not sure if it was safe to go inside or
if Maryann had more to say to her.
“I saw you talking
to that transient.” She eyed Sabina suspiciously, “What were you talking
about.”
“He asked directions. That’s why I came back. I didn’t want to walk
with him.“
“Smart girl,
Sabina. That man is no good.” Maryann paused, studying Sabina. “Why don’t you
wear that sun hat I gave you? Don’t you care about your skin? If you get any
darker, people are gonna to think you escaped from the reservation.” Sabina
pulled a leaf from the Lupine that grew next to the porch and, in the silence
that ensured, systematically tore it to shreds, letting the pieces fall onto
the ground. “You need to get the liquor,
Sabina. I’m tired of drinking all this tea. Something’s been trying to get me.
I don’t want to get pneumonia, again.
Jesus, I was so sick last summer, I can’t belie-”
Sabina
sprinted up the steps. “Sorry, Maryann,” she interrupted cheerily as she rushed
past her and into the house. “I’ll go into town in a little bit, after lunch. I
promise.” She closed the door behind her, thwarting what she knew would be
another excruciatingly detailed conversation about Maryann’s health history. She
could put up with most any of Maryann’s ramblings, but not that.
She crossed the
neatly organized, yet dusty and extraordinarily cluttered living room and
creaked up the stairs toward her bedroom, past old family photos bordering
large paintings: the melancholy impressionist and surrealism by her grandmother,
and the soft classic nudes by her grandfather.
Sabina was always
sure to avoid looking at the painting that hung directly at the top of the stairs,
the one of her grandmother, large and naked in a forest. Her father had hated
the painting, but Maryann refused to take it down. It was her testament of love
from her late husband, the last thing he had painted. So it stayed there at the
top of the stairs, as if it were their destination.
Sabina entered her
messy, yet sparsely furnished room. Magazines, books, letters and photos sat in
piles on the desk and the floor. She pulled off her skirt and threw it at the
dresser, drawers are various stages of closure. It landed partly in the top
drawer and cascaded over the drawer beneath, leaving the grimy hem of her skirt
toeing the misshapen pile of bedclothes in the wide-open third drawer. She
remembered how delighted she had been when her father had come home with the
beautiful sky blue dresser. Now it looked as tired and worn as she felt.
Besides her dresser,
desk and bed, the rest of her things lived in piles and stacks, in no
particular place. She had not yet learned
that the more things she acquired, the more places she would need to keep them.
The floor was big. The floor was easy.
She walked across it and let herself fall onto
her bed and stared at the cracks in the ceiling. She liked to imagine images in the cracks. Every
few years she would transform the images into a new story by turning the bed
like a dial.
Her body lay in
its restlessness, her morning journey circumvented. As she considered how she
ought to spend the rest of the morning, her hand slid casually across her
stomach and beneath her waistband where it lay for a moment before probing the
soft flesh around her clitoris. She thought of Henry Fonda for a moment, but worried
of the immorality of having dirty thoughts about people without their
permission, as if it were a violation on some spiritual plane. She searched
more, a string of faces and bodies moved across her mind’s eye like a
filmstrip. Robin’s face appeared,
startling her, freezing the rhythm of her hand. She frowned, and shoved him
from her mind, as one might shove someone out their bedroom door. She hastily created
a lover from scratch, some big, masculine type.
Sometimes she was herself trapped beneath his weight, and sometimes she
imagined she was him. When she finished,
she took a nap.
