Sea Glass (6 page)

  Honora

After their swim, Sexton washes the salt from the first-floor windows while Honora scrubs the kitchen cupboards. She gives him a broom with a cloth tied over it, and he sweeps the cobwebs away. As she bleaches the mildew from the walls, he uses a chisel to open the swollen windows. She rinses the grit from the radiators, and he rakes up coal that has fallen onto the cellar floor. She lays the tablecloth her mother made for her over an assembly of wooden crates and puts the mismatched plates and flatware Sexton bought at the local store on its surface. She arranges beach roses in a glass, and she and Sexton share the one remaining glass for drinking. For supper, they have tinned pork-and-beans and brown bread and Indian pudding.

In the days that follow, Sexton constructs a platform bed on which they lay the mattress. They use wooden crates for bedside tables, and Honora makes curtains from the fabric she found in the carton at the foot of the stairs. Sexton removes peeling strips of wallpaper, and Honora polishes an abandoned set of andirons.

Each evening, after they have done their chores, Sexton and Honora take their baths. Honora likes to bathe alone, but Sexton says he prefers company. He bends slightly forward, and Honora soaps his neck and shoulders and spine. As she washes him, she thinks about how fate contrived to have Sexton Beecher open a map and select a route and drive to Taft, New Hampshire, and walk into a bank and find Honora Willard on the other side of the grille. What if it had been her lunch break? she wonders. What if he’d seen the sign for Webster and taken it instead? What if he’d gotten waylaid in Manchester? What if his tire had gone flat?

One evening, after Sexton and Honora have bathed and eaten, they go for a walk along the beach. The sun, just about to set, lights up the cottages and the water with a rosy hue. The surf at the waterline is pink. Honora stops and bends to pick up a piece of pale blue glass. She rubs her fingers along the edges, which are smooth. The glass is cloudy, as though a fog were trapped within the weathered shard.

“What’s that?” Sexton asks.

“It’s glass,” she says. “But not sharp. Here. Feel it.”

Despite his bath, Sexton’s fingers still have white paint in the creases. He holds it up to the light. “It’s being in the ocean gives it that effect,” he says. He hands the shard back to her. “The color’s nice,” he says.

“Where do you suppose it came from?”

“It’s trash,” he says. “It’s garbage. Other people’s garbage.”

“Really?” she says. “I think it’s kind of beautiful.”

* * *

“I have to go back to work,” Sexton says early in July.

Honora has known all along that this will happen, but still, the announcement takes her by surprise. “So soon?” she asks.

“Someone’s got to make a living.”

This is said genially, without arrogance or irritation. Honora has worked, at the courthouse and then the bank, since she was fifteen, but there has been no talk of her taking a job. It is assumed by both of them that she will stay behind and make a home. There is enough work to occupy any woman for months.

“I could go with you,” Honora says.

“It’s against company policy,” Sexton says. “They would fire me.”

They are sitting at the kitchen table, having just eaten a turkey loaf and an onion pie. For practical reasons, she has replaced the embroidered tablecloth with a rectangle of blue-checked oilcloth bought at Jack Hess’s store.

“How will this work?” she asks.

“I’ll give you money,” he says.

She glances at the headlines of the newspaper beside his plate.
CELEBRATION OF FOURTH COSTS 148 LIVES.
She turns the newspaper around so that she can read the article. There is a grid next to the report. Seven people died from fireworks, seventy-one in automobile accidents, and seventy drowned.

“How much do we have?” she asks.

He looks up and thinks a minute. “Eighty dollars,” he says.

She reaches across the makeshift table and puts a hand on his forearm. “Just thinking about having you gone, I need to touch you,” she says, surprising both of them.

His skin is warm through his shirt. Already, she has washed and ironed the shirt several times. By her count, he has six dress shirts, two work shirts, two suits, one pair of work pants (stained now with paint), and a navy sweater that has pilled.

The touch seems to move him. “I could take you with me,” he says. She watches him ponder the idea as if it were his, as if he had just thought it up. “You could be my assistant. You know how to type, don’t you?”

“I had to learn for my job at the courthouse.”

“You could sit down at the machine and demonstrate,” he says, musing. “No one could resist those hands.” He thinks a minute. “I certainly didn’t,” he says.

“You didn’t?”

“The day I met you. When I walked into the bank. It was your hands I noticed first. Under the grille.”

As if to prove the truth of this assertion, he takes her hand and holds it above his empty plate. Her skin is only slightly roughened from the laundry soap. “You could use some Jergens,” he says.

Sexton likes to say he covers the three P’s — Portland, Portsmouth, and Providence — and everything in between. He shows her on the map exactly where they will go, and she traces the route with her finger. From Ely, they will drive to Portsmouth, then travel out Route 4 to Dover and to South Berwick and to Sanford. From there, they will take the 111 to Saco and then stay on Route 1 all the way to Portland. On the return south, they will head west by way of Hollis Center and Shapleigh and swing by Nashua and Lowell and Worcester. They’ll go to Boston and to Woonsocket and to Pawtucket and finally to Providence. After that, they’ll see.

“You can keep me in clean shirts,” he says.

“Where will we stay?”

“Cabins.”

Honora knows all about cabins. The one-room buildings with counters for kitchens and communal bathrooms out back are popular destinations with tourists visiting the lakes near Taft.

Still, though, it’s an adventure.

Sexton passes her off as Miss Willard, his assistant. She wears her butter yellow wedding suit and removes her ring. In a routine that takes shape as the days unfold, she shakes the client’s hand and very slowly draws off her gloves, finger by finger. She sits in front of the typewriter and feels the tiny ovals with their silver rings. She can type nearly as fast as Sexton can speak, and her hands are a blur over the keys. Her husband keeps up a running sales pitch with the customer, and when he is done, Honora offers up the beautifully typed page like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat. She will have typed a verbatim transcript of the conversation that has just taken place.

A thing worth having is worth having now,
she will have typed.

The sooner you get it, the sooner it will start earning you money,
Sexton will have said.

Honora watches the customer’s face begin to work its way toward a purchase. No client fails to be impressed by the transcript.

“Which carriage would you prefer?” Sexton asks. “The wide or the narrow? Which stand do you think would be best — the high or the low?”

The customer chews the inside of his cheek, all the while watching Honora’s flying hands.

“Would you prefer to take a discount?” Sexton asks. “Or divide the amount into four monthly installments?”

Perhaps thinking about the uses of dictation for himself, or a pretty assistant of his own, the client is silent for a moment.

“This is a description of what you want,” Sexton says, moving in for the kill. “May I take your order now?”

Sometimes, however, a customer is recalcitrant. “Yes, but . . . ,” the customer says.

“That’s the very reason why . . . ,” Sexton counters.

“I’m not sure about . . . ,” the client adds, waffling.

“I’m coming to that,” Sexton says. And then, with precisely calibrated insistence, Sexton asks, “What’s the real reason for hesitating?”

As soon as the client puts pen to paper, Honora rises and slips her gloves back on. The most important part of a sale, Sexton has impressed upon her, is to get out of the room once the deal has been made. Nothing is to be gained by lingering. The customer might change his mind.

Occasionally, Honora worries about Sexton’s sales pitch. Is it true, for example, that a thing worth having is worth having now? That the sooner one buys a typewriter, the sooner it will start earning money? It seems to her that there might be a flaw in this logic, that it might not be absolutely accurate that putting a purchase off is like paying more for it.

She worries too about the slow drawing off of the gloves and the absence of her wedding ring. When she and Sexton thought up the routine, it was fun and frivolous, a lark that made them laugh. But by the third or fourth time they perform it, the gestures seem to have grown more serious, and Honora feels uneasy. There is the undeniable implication that Miss Willard — or the
idea
of Miss Willard — might go with the typewriter.

On their first road trip, Sexton sells twenty-three machines for a total sales commission of more than $135. It seems to both of them a fortune. In the cabins, in the afternoons, with the smell of mildew in the blankets, Sexton and Honora make love to the sound of the occasional car passing by on Route 4 or 111. The beds sag in the middle, the pillows are as thin as quilts, and when they are finished, they have to sleep squashed against each other because the beds are so narrow.

“You’re very long,” Sexton says to her one afternoon.

Honora feels his breath at the tip of her ear. Her nightgown is rucked up and down so that it seems that only a flimsy bit of cloth covers her stomach. When she shifts position even a little, fluid spills from her body and onto the sheets. She is awed by the intimacy, something her mother, even if she had wanted to, could not have told her about.

  Sexton

“They say that Bill Stultz was drunk when his plane crashed,” Rowley says. “You ever been up, Mr. Beecher?”

Sexton catches a whiff of whiskey breath across the bank president’s desk. It isn’t even eleven in the morning. Kenneth Rowley is youngish for a bank president — thirty-eight, maybe forty. He must have inherited a job he didn’t want, Sexton decides, letting his eyes slide around the room: mahogany-paneled walls, windowsills so high he could rest his chin on them, an oddly immaculate desk.

“No, I haven’t,” Sexton says. “But I certainly would like to.”

Actually, Sexton isn’t sure if this is true. He likes adventure well enough, and the open road more than most, but what exactly keeps the plane aloft? he has always wanted to know.

A secretary of indeterminate age enters the room carrying two tall glasses of iced coffee on a silver tray. She sets the tray down, smooths the skirt of her summer-weight tweed suit, and eyes Sexton. Miss Alexander, her name is, if memory serves. Sexton winks at her as she leaves.

“Cream?” Rowley asks Sexton.

“Yes, please.”

“Bizarre the way they’re all going for a record of some sort,” Rowley says. “Portsmouth to Rome, I hear now.”

Sexton watches the ivory liquid swirl through the coffee and wonders when he should begin his pitch.

“What are you driving?” Rowley asks, stirring the cream. He slides a glass on a coaster across the desk toward Sexton.

“A Buick,” Sexton says. “A twenty-six.”

“Like it?”

“Love it,” Sexton says.

“Have you seen the new Essex?”

“Not up close.”

“Bought one for my wife last week,” Rowley says, leaning back in his chair. “Hydraulic shock absorbers. Four-wheel brakes. Radiator shelters. Air cleaner. Paid six hundred ninety-five.”

“How’s it drive?”

“Smooth as a fucked mink. You married, Mr. Beecher?”

“A month tomorrow.”

“Congratulations.”

Sexton takes a sip of coffee and thinks of Honora back at the cabin. He likes to imagine her still in her nightgown, the one with the loose straps that slide over her shoulders. When they woke earlier in the morning, the sheets and the pillows were damp.

Rowley sets his coffee glass down. “So what have you got to show me, Mr. Beecher?” he asks.

“Well,” Sexton begins, divesting himself of his glass of iced coffee and sitting slightly forward. “We’re awfully excited about our nineteen thirty line. Of course, we still carry the Number

Six and the Number Seven, and we have another model I’d like to tell you about — I’ll get to that in a minute — and also a terrific new tool called a Copiograph machine that will just knock your socks off, but the machine I think you’ll be the most interested in is our new flat-surface accounting-writing machine.” Sexton pauses for emphasis. “It’s a machine that will allow you to keep in touch with every transaction from every department without adding an extra man to the payroll,” he says. “It consolidates accounting methods into a simple, unified plan. I’ve got a picture of it right here.” Sexton reaches into his leather case and pulls out a catalog. He finds the page and hands it across the desk.

“What do you think about those Athletics?” Rowley asks as he looks at the brochure.

“I think they can go all the way,” Sexton says. If Rowley reads the description of the accounting-writing machine all the way to the end, Sexton knows he’ll have his sale.

“Boston’s pitiful,” Rowley says. He puts the catalog, description unread, down on the desk. “What’s this thing going to cost me?”

“I’ve got one in the car,” Sexton says, evading the money question. “Why don’t you let me bring it in and demonstrate it for you?”

Rowley is silent, as if he’s just remembered an important appointment.

“A thing worth having is worth having now,” Sexton says.

Rowley pushes himself away from his desk on his roll-away chair. The chair seems to travel pretty far, putting some distance between him and Sexton.

“Putting it off is like paying more for it,” Sexton says, trying to relax his shoulders. “I’ve got that new Copiograph machine I was telling you about in my car too. Which would you prefer I bring in? Should I bring in both?”

Sexton makes as if to rise from the chair.

The bank president wheels himself back to the desk. He studies Sexton for a moment. From a drawer, he takes out two shot glasses and a bottle. “What do you say we chase that coffee?” Rowley says.