Sara Majka - Cities I've Never Lived In - Stories

There was a window over the door, and another near the bed, covered with a gauze fabric that brought to mind cheese-cloth. I smoked with my feet under me and watched out the window. Maybe it is cheesecloth, I said. He lay with his head down and eyes closed. What else do you see? he said. I told him about the seagulls, the clouds, the different shades of gray that made up the landscape there.

We went to the Old Colony the night they closed for the season. They turned off their fridges and put beer on the counter and you could buy anything for two dollars. They also turned their heat off, but space heaters blew air into the dark room. It was as if they had already closed, then opened to make fifty more dollars. He had loved that, sitting on a chair against the wall in his wool coat. That night he told me — we were sitting at the bar and he was holding a drink and he moved the bottle away from his mouth to say it — I’m going to take the bus out in the morning. Okay, I said. He got us both a shot of whiskey. Of Evan Williams. They didn’t have beer and shot specials in Provincetown like they did in New York; we had to buy everything separately.

The P & B bus for Boston left at six thirty in the morning, in the dark, from the harbor. He stayed up all night, working in the living room, while I slept for a few hours. I got up at six and went to the kitchen to make coffee. You don’t need to be up now, he said. It’s fine, I said, walking past him. We walked to the harbor holding coffee in travel mugs, and he had his bag over one shoulder. I wore a long coat over my pajamas. The bus was already there, idling. We drank coffee standing near the door of the bus. The harbor like that, in the dark, felt like a wild animal. You heard it and felt it — the dark abyss of it. Sometimes it felt like the wildest place on earth. He lurched onto the bus in the way he had of moving, as if breaking something that was attaching him to where he was.

My mother and I talked on the phone several times a week. Sometimes we’d start in midconversation. There’s not much furniture in here, my mother said when I answered the phone one day, not long after she had visited. I’m sitting on the kitchen floor, she said.

She was, it turned out, housesitting a cottage on a lake for the winter. She knew the owner from Puritans, the store where she worked. Ever since those years of living on the ocean, she had wanted to see water when she woke up. Ocean property had grown so expensive. Even a lake she couldn’t afford. You should come here for a time, she said. The previous tenants left boxes in the attic.

Going through other people’s stuff?

Part of the deal is that I clean the place out, she said. He said I could keep anything I wanted.

Is there anything good?

No, not really. But you should come. There might be something of the sort that you like. Or maybe she had said, Something up your alley.

When I arrived — a week or two later, the restaurant had shut down and I wasn’t working anymore — she was wearing surprisingly fashionable clothes though she wouldn’t have known it, only recognizing them as clothes from years ago. She had on high-waisted jeans and a T-shirt and her hair was held back by a scarf.

Those sorts of pants are in again, I said.

With who? she asked.

In the city, people have started to wear those.

Not skinny jeans anymore?

It’s transitioning.

There we go then, she said. I found them in the boxes. And I may have found a mystery for you, she said. Something you might like.

In the boxes?

Yes, something in the boxes.

She talked about the mystery after dinner. Her dinners were always tidy — baked chicken, salad in small bowls where most things, even the carrot shreds, came from bags and were slightly dried out, and then fluffy rolls, a bottle of ice-cold chardonnay that she had opened days ago. After we ate, she loaded the dishwasher, wiped and dried the table, then sat down. I asked if she minded if I taped her. You’re working again, then? she said.

I’m not sure. Maybe.

When I turned the recorder on, her voice became loud and dutiful. There are some people who are natural being recorded, but my mother wasn’t one of them. She said that she had found photographs of children standing in front of her house, sitting near the sliding door, standing before the lake. They were a boy and a girl — blond and happy. She thought they were childhood pictures of the teenagers next door. She had watched them before they left for the season. They were working at a camp and had its name on their hats and sweatshirts. The dad would grill, and then the children would leave for town in a jeep.

My mother said that she had waited for the family to leave for the season before swimming in the lake. Sometimes the father came on the weekend to do projects. She took the pictures to him. He — Ian — was in front of his house, putting in a new mailbox. She told him that she had found the photographs and wondered if they were his kids. He didn’t hold the photographs as his hands were dirty, so she held them. Then he went inside to wash his hands. When he came back, he asked if he could keep them and she said yes, that was why she had brought them over.

She got to know him as the fall went on. She would be out raking and he would be out raking. Or they would both get the mail. Those sorts of things. They would talk about the weather, or the town, or what getting older entailed. Once he said that if he had acted peculiar that day, when she had brought over the pictures, it was only because he wasn’t sure they were his kids. They looked like them, but not enough, for some reason, that he knew right away. He said, Isn’t that something you should know?

One day, when we came back from shopping in town, Ian was in his yard. He had just arrived for the weekend. I hadn’t met him yet. The three of us stood on the lawn; she introduced me, I shook his hand, then my mother and I went into the house, carrying groceries. I sat at the table while she made lunch. Afterward she wiped and dried the table, then laid out photographs, having kept several of them. I studied them, then asked what she supposed. I don’t know, my mother said. I thought you would like them.

I thought, She must be lonely. There was hardly any furniture and trees kept light out. It had the economy she wanted. She said to me at some point — maybe when she was hand-washing dishes because she only had two of everything and we had wanted to eat salad in bowls after eating soup — I’m sorry that I’m not something different. You think it wouldn’t pain me to keep four bowls.

Looking at the pictures on the table, I talked about my interest in doubling — that reality could have been altered slightly, leaving traces of another. For instance, his children, at the time those pictures were taken, could have been somewhere else, but that didn’t mean those weren’t also his children.

I thought about it later, on my mattress on the floor. I wasn’t trying to explain the pictures. I was trying to explain another world, one I had always wanted to find. One day, when we were in Provincetown, Richard and I had broken into a dune shack. I had stood inside, looking out the window at the ocean. I didn’t move, even as he tried to show me things he had found. He asked if I was okay. We lived in so many houses when I was a little girl, I said. What was I feeling? Desire, maybe. To want something that you couldn’t remember. It was a hard feeling to live with. After the divorce, I saw light everywhere. Some light — the light at the end of the day, the way it hit the pigeons that flew around the steeple, the way it hit the sides of buildings — that light felt like entrances to another world. Like the shack had felt when I was looking out the window. Sometimes it was better to be farther from this feeling. I felt it would split me if I let it.