The Beach House

I NOTICED HER WHEN I was getting lunch, conspicuously sitting on the sand without a blanket or towel and wearing street clothes that were totally inappropriate. It rained hard overnight and though it laid off in the morning, it was drizzly and the air was a mixture of the saltiness of the Atlantic and the brightness of the Nor’easter.

She sat there. Just sat there with her knees up and her arms wrapped around her legs. She was in shorts and a windbreaker with some sort of baseball cap on her head and even from my house’s deck where I sat beneath the umbrella I could see she was troubled. I actually wondered if she were alive since she didn’t seem to move and I couldn’t imagine anyone alive allowing the damp sand to work its way to her skin.

As I say, I was making lunch. It was still too wet to sit on the deck so I chomped down on my tuna sandwich and gulped my iced tea on the kitchen’s big  island. When I was finished and my plates and glass were rinsed and in the dishwasher, I opened the screen that led to the deck and, sure enough, she was still there. I couldn’t let her just sit there and went down the stairs to the beach. The beach itself was otherwise abandoned except for a guy who ran every day at about this time from Amagansett and back, never in a shirt and always in baggy shorts. He was heading east, back whence he came and I wondered whether he’d even noticed her and wondered why she hadn’t moved between when he passed her on the way out and passed her on the way back.

No matter. I’d put on my own windbreaker and my cream-colored hat with a big brim. I took my flip-flops off when I reached the beach, and the damp sand felt soothing between my toes. But it was uneven, and I waddled to where this stranger sat.

“Excuse me,” I said quietly when I was a few feet behind her and slightly to her right, where I’d stopped.

She didn’t respond and I repeated it, only louder. She shuttered and shook her head and then turned it to look at who was interrupting whatever it was she was doing. Her gaze was brief and she returned to staring out over the ocean.

“May I join you?” I asked.

“It’s a public beach so I don’t think I’ve much of a choice.”

I had a towel under my arm and I spread it not far from her and plopped down.

“Are you hungry?” I asked.

“I’m fine.”

“You’ve been out here not moving for like an hour. In the rain. You’re not fine.”

“What’s it to you?”

She was perhaps the most unpleasant woman I’d ever met, and I’d met a lot of unpleasant woman. But I wasn’t going to just leave her sitting and getting damper and damper, at least when she was doing it where I could see her.

“Look. I don’t care if you drown in this mist. I’m just saying that if you want some tuna fish and something to drink, I’m right up the stairs that are behind you and I’ve got plenty.”

I got up and when I got to the stairs I peeked and saw that she still hadn’t moved. I put my flip-flops on and went up the stairs, having done my good deed for the day.

*     *    *

I WORK FROM THE HOUSE and decided I’d bring my laptop to the kitchen and set it up on the island. Very curious, I was.

With a fresh pot of coffee I could be there if she took me up on my offer, and about forty-five minutes after I extended it and with the sun beginning to break through the clouds to the west, I heard a light rapping on the door frame. She stood there, looking more homely and more beautiful than I could have imagined. She was a mess, but somehow being such a mess brought some truth about her out.

I went to the door and slid it open.

“This place is yours?” One did not have to enter to be impressed. It was one of the grand, older houses above the East Hampton beach.

“I wish. It’s my grandparents but I’m working here for the week.”

“It’s like Gatsby’s. Jesus.” She stopped her gazing. “About that tuna—”

She was drenched and dripping a bit.

“Come with me,” I said to this stranger who I’d just invited into my family’s house, and I led her to one of the bathrooms on the ground floor, the one with a shower.

“You’re about my size,” I said. I pointed to a stack of towels folded atop a small dresser. “Take a shower. You can dry off. We’ll get your clothes cleaned and dried, and we can talk.”

I put the tuna out for her. She came from the shower in the shorts and t-shirt I’d laid out for her with a towel wrapped around her hair.

“I left my stuff in the bathroom, if that’s okay,” and as I went to get it and throw it in the washing machine in the little room off the kitchen, I told her it was.

The kitchen was the one place in the house that was modern. My parents convinced my grandparents to open it up—in keeping with the house’s style—to the deck. The wall between it and the formal dining room was gone and the island appeared, with a more relaxed dining area. More than anything, the wall to the deck was altered so it was a bunch of floor to ceiling windows and a pair of French doors off to the side, and it was at the screen there that she appeared.

I don’t know that my grandparents appreciated the alteration facing the Atlantic, but it in a sense merged the house with the ocean and, as it happens, but for that I never would have seen her.

“Her”?

She said her name was Susan as she made her sandwich. It was nearing two, and I told her I had to get back to work. She asked if I had a spare computer she could borrow as she waited for her things to dry, and I found a laptop that was more or less for the general house’s use. She didn’t want to bother me, so I brought her to the living room. It didn’t have quite the view that the kitchen had, but it was comfortable, and I left her to it and put her things into the dryer.

I wrapped up my work at about four-thirty and not having heard anything from the living room, I went to find her. She was on the couch. The laptop had slipped, open, onto the floor and she was dead asleep on her side. She’d removed the towel and placed it on the arm of the couch and her wet hair lay on it. She looked very awkward, but there was something about the rhythm of her breathing and her angelic countenance that made her both strong and vulnerable.

I went upstairs to the linen closet in the hallway. I found a light blanket and brought it to the living room, where I gently placed it across her body. She didn’t notice, and I left her there.

I hadn’t intended to really cook. There was plenty in the fridge I could microwave. But somehow that didn’t seem appropriate. I’m not much of a cook, but friends say I make a more-than-passable marinara sauce. After a check of the fridge and the cupboards, I realized I had what I needed.

I laid out the ingredients on the counter. Bottle of EVOO and a stick of butter. Garlic glove, small onion, and three very ripe tomatoes (what remained of what we got at the Bridgehampton farmers’ market on Saturday). Salt and pepper, of course and a few other spices.

I set out to make my sauce. After my chopping and sauteing and stirring in a large skillet, I was ready to sit with a large glass of wine. The sun had dried the deck and it was beginning to get warm, though not hot, and the morning’s humidity was gone.

Before my parents left the day before, we’d put the cushions from the deck furniture into the large bin to beat the rain. With things dry and rain not in the forecast for the next few days, I restored the cushions to the wicker sofa and chairs that formed a little area around a low table with a glass top. I opened the umbrella on that side of the deck and spread myself across the sofa with my tablet and my wine and did some social mediaing.

“Smells good.”

I was awakened by the smell of marinara sauce on a large wooden spoon being held near my nose by Susan.

“You wanna try it?”

I shook to clear my head, nearly hitting the spoon, saved only by her quick thinking. I rolled my legs over the side, and she pushed the tip of the spoon towards my mouth. I opened it and she pushed it to me and I sucked in my sauce and said, “Doesn’t taste so bad either.”

Her face lit up, like she’d done the cooking, but I didn’t care. Seeing her face light up was worth it.

“The smell woke me up and I panicked for a second when I couldn’t find you and then there you were, out here looking like my sweet angel.”

She said it was nearly six and that she was starving and had filled the big pot with water for the pasta.

“Did you make it from scratch?” she asked, and I said I did as she cleaned what remained on the spoon with her lips.

She asked if I had fresh pasta—“Being as rich and classy as you are”—but I had to disappoint and said it’d be boxed linguine or nothing at all. I got up, and she followed me into the kitchen. The water was boiling so I threw in a fair chunk of salt soon followed by half a box of pasta.

“I wish I had some fresh bread to dunk,” I said, which is usually what happens when the family is crowded in the kitchen while pasta is made. But she said the smell alone was more than enough.

Susan and I finished off the wine opened yesterday, and I didn’t want to open something new, especially since it was my grandparents’, but she said water was just fine. There was lettuce enough for a salad—also from the farmers’ market—and she saw to that and by six-thirty we sat at the table on deck on its cushioned chairs and listened to the rhythm of the waves as we ate.

There were people on the beach now, and their sounds made it to us with surprising clarity. But it didn’t matter. The sound of the waves came through well enough. The sun was beginning to drop as well. As it did, I lit a couple of candles that were on a table to the side of the deck and put them on the table.

If she was pretty in the daylight, she was even prettier in the flowing light of a pair of candles. I think my stares made her a little self-conscious, but I couldn’t help myself. And with our plates empty and not wishing to break the mood by bringing them inside just yet, she told me her story.