The Ocean House. Mary-Beth Hughes
toward Asbury Park, all the new slinky apartment towers lined up, with concrete balconies like gray tongues that stuck out on the ocean side only. Tucked in, here and there, were the few other survivors. A nunnery. Two oil tycoons in retirement. Syrian Jews. And next to them, the Lebanese Catholics. Houses like their own, shingled and sometimes sagging, behind iron gates and high hedges.
The Beach Club was eager to tear down their house and build its own tower. Sheep, said their mother. Sheep with demolition kits.
When the house first came up for sale—something quick and private to settle a complicated estate—the club lost the bid. And their father won because, their mother said, of his exceptionally good character. And also the windfall that came to their mother quite by surprise, a gift sent from overseas. Money that had once been her own mother’s now all these years later released to her. They paid cash, she told the girls, and Courtney liked to think of a wheelbarrow full of bills and coins.
The club president never gave up about the house. He’s a terrier! said their mother. A sheep, a terrier, a snake, the shape and sound of his threat changed day to day. Baa, woof, hiss.
At least he can’t sue, said their father. He can only send spiteful letters.
But he can, true? He may do much worse.
This over breakfast coffee in the human-scale kitchen, another rectangle, whitewashed beadboard to the chair rail, then blue plaster walls. And bluish morning light off the ocean through the windows to match. Mrs. Hoving scraping carrots into shreds at the sink. For later. Their father would welcome a lawsuit. That would settle things for good. Though of course there are no grounds, he said.
But there were. And this was something Courtney would look into much later, the shady deal that briefly gave them their beautiful house and then allowed them to lose it. And she would think about the wheelbarrow full of money.
Still, at the time, the girls understood a truce had been struck with the Beach Club about their mother’s essential swimming. She was allowed in the pool. Soon, she would bring them, too. When they were ready to learn to swim. The girls believed all of this was an extraordinary concession. For their mother, who deserved special treatment. But it turned out they’d had a membership all the years they lived next door. Something that evaporated when they left and moved inland away from the ocean. As if without their mother they were no longer welcome at the Beach Club. So the special-treatment theory held steady for a long time.
In those years, they’d never use the club’s front entrance. Like their mother, they’d learn to pick their way over the slick jetty, a shortcut. By their own front gate, a too-grand affair of iron curlicues, black-green cypress spires grew high enough to block out the sight of the summer traffic and to screen their mother’s chosen bedroom from any prying eyes.
She especially liked the room for its red marble mantle, which reminded her of London. In summertime, the windows would be thrown open and the hum of car engines on the avenue and the bang and hiss of the waves would rush in all together. The lion-skin carpet at the foot of her bed had a doggy smell.
The only pet you’ll ever have, my loves, said their mother, who was against keeping animals because of what had happened to her dog in the war.
As they grew older, their mother spoke more about her life in London. One morning in London, for instance, their grandmother Bess—whom they’d never meet, though Paige had her dark round eyes exactly—one morning their grandmother put their mother, seven years old, on a train to the country. With other girls just like you their mother told them. She had a fat ham sandwich and a clean blue dress folded in a paper sack. Ten weeks later she came home to a crater in the sidewalk. And all because their grandmother Bess refused to fold up her food tent just for the sound of yet another sputtering engine in the sky. Beneath a white fluttery tablecloth strung up on poles to keep out the sun overhead, Bess gave sandwiches to anyone in need. Her card table set at the end of the front walk. Samson the beagle lay at her feet, ready to ward off danger if it came along. From above, among gray stone houses and gray roads and rooftops the white tablecloth must have shone clear.
But when they were still tiny enough to keep to the playroom, the most frightening thing they believed their mother knew was the hungry boy who swung upside down over the deserted master bed. She was keeping clear of him.
Far below, their mother on the tips of her toes stepped off the seawall, her sundress fluttering away from her in the wind, her famous black swimsuit just visible when she straddled the Beach Club fence. Mrs. Hoving’s cool hands fell on their shoulders smelling of peaches. Come away from the window now, girls. Let your mother have a bit of peace.
Later their father moved them two miles inland. The new house in the neighborhood behind Our Lady Star of the Sea had a flat lawn, closets with louvered doors on metal tracks, and a screened-in porch where their new stepmother, Ruth, would set up shop, she said, until it was time to switch the thermostat up in the fall. Then her friends would visit in the den. If the girls needed permission for anything, they always knew where to find her. She had a voice that carried and wanted them to talk louder, too. And stop walking so much on their tiptoes. They were quiet girls, especially Paige. The elder, Courtney, ten turning eleven when they moved to Honeysuckle Lane, often spoke for them both now.
Once they were settled in, their father decided he’d keep the ocean house a while longer.
What for? asked Ruth, taken aback. You won’t see a better offer. This is it, the sky-high limit. Trust me.
Their father winked at the girls. Oh, I might hear something a little more persuasive. And they smiled. This was the old game they knew.
Okay, said Ruth. Not my beeswax.
From Honeysuckle Lane the girls could walk themselves to school. Ten minutes flat, back door to Star of the Sea parking lot. A new school for the girls, they were Catholics now, like Ruth. Their mother had been agnostic. Just in case, she’d said. Their mother let them wear shoes whenever they liked. Ruth handed out their school shoes only in the mudroom. She didn’t want them tracking in the muck of their shortcut through Mr. Kemp’s apple orchard. The whole house would stink of rot, like stale cider then.
Mr. Kemp’s shortcut was mostly avoided by the neighborhood kids. The old orchard was overgrown and dense with pricker bushes and poison sumac. Paige spotted three snakes and a water rat on a single afternoon. Once they saw a group of boys from the seventh and eighth grade smoking cigarettes and sitting on a fallen tree trunk by a half-collapsed wood structure, an old outhouse. A thorny holly sealed up the door. It was a windbreak, and the boys squeezed the still-lit butts though the cut sliver moon in the door, as if daring the place to catch fire. Courtney and Paige walked the farthest path then, heads down to avoid notice.
But one day Courtney had detention after school. While Sister Joseph was sorting the attendance book entries, a counting mistake she couldn’t make sense of, Courtney let out a fake sneeze that had words embedded inside: Aren’t you? Aren’t you fat?
Silence, Sister Joseph said. Heads up.
And Courtney whispered something about the knot in Sister’s forehead, a mysterious lump that popped out between her eyebrows.
Don’t move! shouted Sister. Freeze! Then, when she’d fully assessed the class: Courtney Ruddy? Right here, right now.
Sister pointed to a spot near the chalked detention list. Add your name and stay right there.
And Courtney felt her face go hot red with the effort to keep it still, not to laugh or cry. Made to stand against the blackboard until dismissal and not wriggle, then given the task of stacking the chairs in the corridor, all thirty of them.
On the way home, her boots unzipped, her coat unbuttoned, seeking penance, Courtney heard her sister Paige’s voice. A shiver of a laugh for the kind of ugly joke they might tell each other in the night, a supposition about Ruth and her wide fanny. Or the big bosom they liked to wrap their arms around, Paige in front, Courtney behind, then re-create the shape of, amazed. It was that same laugh, a bit of a hiss, but she couldn’t see Paige. The trees in October were already scratchy tangles against a gray sky, so there was no place to hide except the outhouse.