T. Boyle - San Miguel

And then — she had no notion of how much time had passed — Will was there, nudging her awake. “Minnie,” he said, his voice soft and apologetic, “Minnie, wake up, we’re almost there.”

Through the fog of her sleep and the dullness of the thing inside her that was just starting to rise and yawn and unsheathe its claws, she had to take a moment to stare up at him, blinking, and ask him, “Where?”

“Where?” he echoed. “Santa Barbara. Don’t you want to come out on deck and see the shoreline?”

And now she was awake, fully awake, for the first time in months. “Yes,” she said, not coughing, not yet, and she lifted the cat from her lap and stood firmly, planting her feet against the motion of the ship. She touched her hands to her hat, smoothed down her dress — and then, spontaneously, as though she couldn’t help herself — she gave him a smile that was as pure and uncomplicated as the evening coming to life around her. “I’d like that,” she said, and she could already picture the view from the deck, the boats bobbing in the harbor, the carriages ashore, palm trees, streets and lanes and avenues, and in the houses that ran back from the sea in neat orderly rows, people already lighting lamps against the coming of the dark.

Though she slept through the entire voyage back, slept like an Egyptian mummy in the narrow berth that smelled of bilge and hair oil and the private sloughings and parings of the man whose bed it was — Curner, Mr. Curner, Captain Curner — she rose the moment her mother came to her and whispered, “We’re here.” After that, she couldn’t sleep at all, not for the next two nights running, for sheer excitement. It was as if she’d never in her life seen or heard or felt or tasted, as if she’d been color-blind, as if her ears had been stuffed with wax and her tongue coated in magnesia. She’d been deprived, that was what it was, locked away on an island like some fairy princess, everything drab and changeless and the only sound the keening of the wind and the weak disjointed cries of the sheep, the seals, the birds. The world had been stilled, and now — in a sudden explosion of color and noise, glorious noise — it had come careering back to life.

On the very morning after they’d returned to the rented house and pulled the covers from the furniture and dusted and swept and sat down to a meal that wasn’t mutton or turkey or fish coated in its own slime — steak, Ida made steak and French-fried potatoes with a fresh garden salad, the greens even better than the meat itself, lettuce a revelation, tomatoes sweet as candy and candy available round the corner and ice cream too — her mother made her go back to school, though she was months behind in her lessons and there were only three weeks remaining in the term. The teacher — Mrs. Sanders — looked different somehow, older, thicker, with a perpetual drop of moisture depending from the tip of her nose and hair thinner and grayer than she remembered. The room seemed smaller, the desks shrunken, the map of the United States that decorated the wall beside the chalkboard more worn and faded. She barely recognized her classmates. Still they were her classmates, young people, people her own age, and what they thought of her clothes or her attitudes or how they might have snubbed her or not didn’t really make a difference, not that first day — it was enough just to be looking at them, hearing them, sitting at a desk in school and listening to Mrs. Sanders drone on as if she were singing in the wrong key.

Though all the girls wanted to know where she’d been and what it had been like, she felt shy of them, overwhelmed by the wheeling gallery of their faces and the way they seemed to talk without pausing for breath, by their clothes and their boldness and the sheer press of them. One girl, Becky Thorpe, the one she remembered best from last December, asked if she wanted to walk home with her after school but Edith just shook her head, coloring, and murmured, “Maybe tomorrow.”

Still, she took her time making her way home, peering in the shop windows, lingering outside the drugstore just long enough to avoid attracting notice, going up and down the steps of the Arlington Hotel for the sheer novelty of it. The hotel was her special favorite, a towering glamorous three-story palace dedicated to the society people who came for the air and the sea and the sun, a place that had its own orchestra and, so she’d heard, the best dining room in town. She saw the women arrayed like jewels on the porches that ran the entire length and breadth of the ground floor, the grandes dames from San Francisco and Los Angeles and even farther, from the East Coast maybe, with their silks and furs and their little pug dogs, and she watched them too, studied them as if they were her true curriculum — and they were, or they would be, once school let out and her mother took her back to San Francisco. But she had to laugh at herself, even as a woman came up the steps in a blue velvet polonaise with a borzoi on a leash and the doormen practically fell over themselves to pull back the doors for her, because she’d just gone through her first day at school since before the Christmas holidays and here she was already looking ahead to the end of the term.

No matter. It wasn’t math or history or geography that interested her. It was the theater, the Burbank, the Tivoli, the Baldwin. Lillian Russell. Danseuses. Stage lights. The orchestra she could feel thrumming in her chest like the wash of her own blood when they were only just tuning up. That was life, not some provincial school, and when she was growing up in San Francisco, for as long back as she could remember, her mother had taken her to the theater and the concert hall, to variety shows and dramas alike. She never tired of the thrill of it, the anticipatory rustling of the audience as the houselights went down, the way the actors emerged from the wings in shirtsleeves and housedresses as if they were in their own parlors with the curtains drawn and no one to see or hear them, or the way the musical performers came right out at you like they were going to rise up and float off the stage.

For a long while she sat on a bench on the hotel grounds, feeling as if she were doing something illicit, and if anyone questioned her she was going to say she was a guest in the hotel, come down from San Francisco with her parents and staying in Room 200, a number she pulled out of the air. But were there that many rooms? She scanned the windows, doing a quick count, fourteen rooms per side, times three floors, and then multiply that by the four sides, which made a hundred sixty-eight. All right, fine. She was in Room 168, and maybe it was a suite, with a marble bath and gold faucets, and who to say different? She was almost disappointed when no one asked.

It was past five by the time she started for home — she had no idea it was that late till she glanced up at the clock outside the bank across the street — and she found herself hurrying, feeling guilty, afraid of what her parents would say. Her mother would start scolding in her rasping worn-out voice that was like the buzzing of insects, of hornets, angry hornets, then her stepfather would take over. Had she been wasting her time in nonsense? Had she been with boys, was that it?

She ran the length of the last block, breathing hard as she swung open the gate and started up the walk. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary — there was the porch swing, the varnished rail and the white palings, the windows glazed in sunlight and the curtains hanging motionless behind them — but she had the oddest feeling that someone was watching her. She had to turn round twice and look back out to the street before she realized with a start that her mother was there, sitting perfectly still in a chair set in the front corner of the yard. At first she thought her mother was waiting for her, ready to pounce, but then she saw that her eyes were closed and her head thrown back so that her face caught the full glare of the sun. Which was odd, not at all like her. Her mother would never sit out of doors and risk her complexion, not without her parasol, but her parasol was nowhere to be seen. And more, and worse: her arms hung limp at her sides, her fingers curled and wrists dangling as if they were barely attached to her.