She removed her wet jacket. It was warm in the kitchen and something sweet was baking in the oven. When no one answered she pushed through another, brighter blue door in the wall opposite and found herself in the hotel dining room. The room was spacious with four tall windows providing a view of the sea; sitting at one of the window tables was a young girl dressed like the schoolgirls Marjorie had seen outside just before falling asleep. The girl sat slouched over the table, her head propped in one hand, looking toward the water.
“Hello,” Marjorie said again, this time managing to make herself heard.
The girl turned to face her. She had a very round face and an abundance of dark hair like uncarded wool. “Care to join us?” she asked, indicating a chair adjacent to her own. Despite her use of first person plural and the fact that the table seemed to have been set for three, with knives and forks and spoons and flowered dessert plates, there was no one else in sight. “If you want anything to eat in this place you have to get it yourself.” The girl pointed in the direction of the bright blue door, behind which the kettle suddenly stopped whistling.
Marjorie hesitated. During the night she seemed to have turned to a block of ice and the dining room was even warmer than the kitchen. In her condition, the heat might prove dangerous.
The girl studied her face, moving her eyes across different parts of it like someone scanning a landscape. “Everybody has to eat,” she said.
It was ten o’clock in the morning — Marjorie had slept late. The tide had reached its lowest ebb a half hour earlier, laying the beach bare. She could see a brown shoe and a carburetor and a great many piles of seashells and seaweed and dead sea creatures. At some point she realized her teeth were chattering but she couldn’t tell if it was because she was chilled to the bone or because something about her table companion was making her nervous. “Maybe just a cup of tea,” she said, and the next thing she knew the girl had leapt up and disappeared into the kitchen.
She returned carrying two large white take-out cups with lids. “The hotel management is using teabags now,” she warned. She introduced herself as Penny. When she first came here, Penny said, there had been fresh flowers at every table and an attentive wait staff. Now the flowers were plastic and the management used paper placemats instead of lace tablecloths. The hummingbird feeders were still there, attached to the windows with suction cups, but the hummingbirds had been replaced by large moths that arrived at dusk.
How did I get here? Marjorie wondered. It had been a night in summer. There had been a horse and a ferryboat. Later there was a wall and later still there was an animal that might have been a dog. A big dog though, nothing like her own little pet. She could hear the sound the dog’s nails made as it ran along beside her on the other side of the wall. She could hear the rattling of its collar.
“What about those ‘special services’ I saw advertised?” she asked, suddenly remembering the white sheet hanging from the limb of a large tree. “Is the hotel management still making them available?” The tea was lukewarm and had a lot of milk and sugar in it. Even so, it tasted delicious.
“That depends.” Penny leaned back in her chair, lifting her thicket of hair in one clump and positioning it firmly behind her. “Some people find them desirable, others not so much. Are you planning to stay the night? You should, you know,” she said. “The rooms are delightful, especially the corner suites with balconies.”
“I’m afraid I can’t,” Marjorie replied.
“A lot of parents stay over,” Penny said. “Those with girls at the school, that is.” She took a sip from her cup and made a face. “It’s amazing how fast tea loses heat in these cups.”
People used to say that being a teacher was like being the mother of thousands but Marjorie knew that wasn’t true. Even the students she’d felt a special attachment to had left her classroom without a single backward glance. They were differently composed, elusive as minnows. “I’m not a parent,” she admitted shyly, finishing her tea and returning the cup to the table. But what exactly am I then? she wondered.
Time was making a ticking sound as it passed though there didn’t seem to be a clock anywhere in sight. A vision came to Marjorie of her dog trotting around inside the house, looking for something to eat. Every so often she would forget to fill his water bowl and, small as he was, he would end up drinking from the toilet. She saw him lying on the floor beside the refrigerator with his tongue hanging out like a piece of lunch meat. I’m a dog owner, she thought, that’s what I am. The thing about a vision was it didn’t let you zoom in to see whether your dog had stopped breathing. The ticking was coming from an oven timer, but Marjorie couldn’t tell if it was in the hotel kitchen or part of the vision. Seconds were always passing this way, thimbleful by thimbleful, as were the lives of living beings. This was why you kept getting smaller as you got older; it had nothing to do with bone loss.
Above their heads the vacuum cleaner suddenly stopped; a door banged shut.
Penny looked up at the ceiling. “It sounds like you’re in luck,” she said. “If you change your mind and decide you want a room, that is.”
Marjorie was surprised at how relieved she felt to see Penny tilt her neck. It was ridiculous, she thought, how the old superstitions refused to die. The Horsewomen! Girls of a certain age still managed to have this effect, just as there were still women who claimed to be descended from them — chiefly nurses, a few actresses. In most cases it wasn’t clear if the girls making these claims were looking for praise or pity, like the ones who insisted they cast no shadow. Many families had a photograph of a shadowless female relative tucked away in a drawer somewhere.
“I only dropped in,” Marjorie explained. “I wasn’t planning to stay. I didn’t even bring my purse.”
“That’s what they all say,” Penny said, letting out a sigh.
Just then the tide began to come in. It came pouring onto the beach all at once, filled with fish and who knew what else. If there was a name for this phenomenon Marjorie had forgotten it. A gull sailed past the window and landed atop the carburetor just before the carburetor disappeared under the water and the gull took off. Why did gulls always show themselves in profile, she wondered, never head-on?
Meanwhile Penny began fidgeting with her hair, scooping it up and lowering it, the expression on her face difficult to read. Suddenly she smiled. “Well, look who’s finally decided to join us,” she said, pointing in the direction of the window.
Marjorie turned in her seat but all she could see was the water advancing toward them. The waves had a wild, disorganized appearance, black and green-black with yellow-white fangs and claws. They were very large and they were approaching the hotel at an alarming speed. She rubbed her eyes. If there was someone out there in the water she certainly couldn’t see them. It was hard to believe a person could survive in waves that size. Maybe something really is wrong with me, she thought; maybe I really am being borne away bit by bit. Maybe I’m going to get so small I’m going to have to live inside a drum like a fairy.
Penny directed her gaze across Marjorie’s shoulder. “What on earth took you so long?” she asked. “Didn’t you hear the timer go off?” She rose from her chair and began to walk swiftly toward the blue door on the far side of the room that led to the lobby. She was very light on her feet, Marjorie realized, much more graceful in motion than she’d looked sitting down. “Where were you?” Penny said to a girl who was just entering the dining room. “It was my job to watch her, ” she said, pointing at Marjorie. “It was your job to watch the pie.”
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