Beach Strip Read online

I believed Gabe would forgive me, and I had almost looked forward to the anger, the tears, the shouts, and the cleansing of confession.

  But what if, I wondered, and this was why I needed to spend hours alone in the darkness of the house we shared: What if Gabe’s anger knew no bounds? What if his suspicion and rage were stronger than I knew? What if he had taken his gun with him to the blanket, not to kill himself but to kill me? And why did Walter Freeman ask if Gabe had given me any expensive gifts lately? Because he had, of course. And if anyone but Walter had asked, I might have admitted it.

  I thought of all these things and more as the steam above the mills dissipated in the evening air, the glow of the slag vanishing with it, leaving the beach strip in its familiar darkness.

  A HUNDRED YEARS AGO, when immigrants were arriving from Italy and Croatia and Ireland and Poland to work in the steel plants and the factories along the bay, the wealthy families who owned the mills and the factories built summer residences on the beach strip. The strand was clean and uncluttered, the bay and the lake were teeming with fish, and air conditioning was an impossible dream. The August breezes that swept off the water and into the windowed towers of the cottages, each several times larger than the crowded homes of the immigrant factory workers who lived in the city, provided natural cooling, and this was where the wealthy families spent each summer. The rich factory owners sailed dinghies on the lake, their privileged children flew kites on the strand, and their pampered wives gossiped beneath parasols in their gardens. Irishwomen cleaned the rooms and laundered the linen, Scotswomen made the cucumber sandwiches and sliced the ham, and Welshmen tended the gardens. God bless the Empire.

  They moved to the beach strip, these rich families, every June with their children and servants and steamer trunks, and remained until September. The husbands were here only on weekends. As I grew older and learned about the beach strip and about men, I wondered if the absence of the husbands from their families during the week permitted them to spend time with their mistresses back in the city, or spend money on the girls who worked the side streets near the factories. I suspected the men would tolerate the city air, heavy with smoke and heat and humidity, in return for the freedom to entertain young girls alone in their mansions.

  About a dozen of the original Victorian cottages remain on the beach. These gingerbread-trimmed fire traps, restored and winterized, sit crowded between houses like the one Gabe and I purchased, a frame bungalow with a lawn in front and a garden in back. Our house shares nothing with the summer mansions of the Victorians except location. It is dull in design, square in shape, predictable in layout. “Amorphous,” Mother called it when she first saw it, back when she could speak. Mother’s vocabulary was always elaborate and surprising, and the nature of the hell she finds herself in now can be defined by that fact. She used that term herself when she wrote, on the small blackboard, I live in an unspeakable hell!!! When she handed it to me, she smiled at the pun.

  Air conditioning changed the beach strip, and perhaps the morals of the wealthy men who deposited their families here for the summer, but that’s a doubtful notion. As the factories grew larger and dirtier, their smoke and dust were carried on the west wind down the shore of the bay to the strip of sand separating it from the lake. In time, the soot and smells became unbearable for wealthy families with cottages on the strip. Luckily for them, air conditioning arrived just as the soot began turning the strip as black as the rest of the city. With air conditioning installed in their mansions, located upwind from the factories and mills, no one needed twenty-four-room Victorian cottages on the beach strip and the cooling breezes from the lake to get a good night’s sleep in summer. Many of the massive summer homes were first converted to rooming houses, then demolished and replaced by spindly three-room frame cottages with screened porches, and these became the belated palaces of factory workers who rented them for a week or two each summer in the years after the wealthy families abandoned the beach strip. The men would sit on their porch and listen to insects buzz against the screens while their children played in the sand and their wives prepared summer salads and lemonade in the kitchen. The men sat like that, their backs to the factories, for two weeks each year, living fourteen days each summer in the manner they wished to live every day of their lives.

  I huddled in the living-room chair thinking of the wealthy families who once lived here on the most desirable side of the strip, facing the lake. I was thinking of the wives, and what they thought of their husbands back in the city. I decided they thought very little of them, intent as they were on operating a household free of the interference of men.

  I have never been free of the interference of men, and I would not be for some time.

  That is what I thought after the red glow in the sky faded and I heard police officers speaking in low voices outside my window, talking about what had occurred that evening among the shrubs, about the naked cop who had shot himself on a blanket beneath the moon.

  5.

  I slept in the living-room chair and awoke remembering. remembered hearing the sound of the transport trucks on the high bridges behind me as I was falling asleep. I remembered thinking of the men who drove them, and how strange it must be to be constantly moving, without a choice of destination. I remembered what woke me up.

  It was our telephone in the kitchen, where telephones belong. Not in cars or purses or pockets or attached to your ear like jewellery. Telephones should be in the kitchen, where lives are lived, and I followed its sound. I had refused to get a cell phone, but I gave in to Gabe’s idea of getting a cordless phone that we could use in the garden, if we chose, although why anybody would want to use a telephone in the garden was beyond me. I called people in the kitchen, and I answered the phone there. Am I stubborn? Do I cling to old ways? Does a shark have teeth?

  The kitchen was bright with light from the sun, already high above the lake and shining through the windows facing the water.

  It was Mel calling, as I knew it would be. “Did you sleep at all?”

  “Yes. In a chair in the living room.”

  “I’m going back downtown. I was there until past two.”

  I said nothing. I didn’t care where or how long or with whom he had slept.

  “There’ll be an inquest. It’s all over the news. People from the newspapers, the TV stations, will want to talk to you.”

  I heard voices on the boardwalk along the beach. When I pushed the curtain aside, I saw two television trucks in the lane next to our house, and a woman pointing a microphone like a weapon. I closed the curtain. “They’re here,” I said.

  “You don’t have to talk to them.”

  “I know.” Someone had seen me and was ringing the doorbell. “I won’t.” Now there was rapping at the back door. I squinted at the clock. Twenty minutes to eight in the morning. How did the woman with the microphone get her hair and her makeup so perfect this early in the day? It was obscene. She didn’t even need it—she was maybe twenty-five years old. Women like me, we need … I began to cry.

  “Josie?”

  “I’m here.” I thought I would never eat again, and that I would never cease crying.

  “Refer them to Reg Gilmour. He handles media downtown. That’s all you have to tell them. They can talk to him at … you got a pen there?”

  I opened the kitchen drawer, the one next to the drawer where Gabe kept the ammunition for his gun when he was home, pulled out a pencil, and looked for the notebook we always kept on the counter, the wire-bound book he had torn a page from and written I’m in the bushes. Get naked! It wasn’t there. Gabe and I wrote shopping lists and telephone numbers and messages to each other in the notebook. I had bought it at a drugstore. We could have used one of the police-issue pads, like others did, Gabe bringing home a couple at a time, but Gabe said no, that’s not what they were for. Using them for our personal use would be theft. So we paid two bucks for the same damn pad from a drugstore. That’s how honest Gabe was. That’s what my husband was like.
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br />   When I couldn’t find the pad on the counter, all the anger, guilt, and frustration from the evening before welled up in me again. I opened all the drawers, then turned to look on the kitchen table and in the cupboards where the dishes were kept, all the places I knew the pad would never be. I began shaking with rage and anxiety and something else. “I can’t find it,” I said to Mel. “I can’t find it, it’s not here.”

  Mel asked what I was talking about, but I couldn’t say. I just hung up the telephone, walked to the rear door, and screamed, “Go to hell!” at everyone—the television reporter with the perfect hair and makeup, two guys with TV cameras, a photographer who took my picture over and over. Hans and Trudy, the German couple down the beach who were still building their oversized house to resemble a castle, complete with parapets, were walking their dog, and both they and the schnauzer stopped to look. They all saw the grieving widow at her worst.

  I returned to the chair in the living room, where I curled into a ball and thought about Gabe, and how he wouldn’t even steal a two-dollar wire-bound pad from the police department, and fell asleep there.

  I DID NOT DREAM FOR THE NEXT TWO HOURS. I woke to the ringing telephone, to people knocking on my door, to the sound of cars arriving and leaving in the lane next to the house. Each time the noise ceased, I slept again. No dreams. No organizing of thoughts. No dealing with facts I did not understand, like why my husband would carry a gun with him to a blanket in the bushes and wait for me there and, when I did not arrive, why he would shoot himself in the head.

  Around ten, I walked to the bathroom and showered and combed my hair and put on some lipstick and cried a little more. I dressed, made coffee, and listened to my telephone messages. Two were from Mel. He was concerned, he was sorry, and he honestly wanted to do whatever he could for me. I believed him. In everything we had done, as wrong as it might have been, Mel had been gentle with me, and concerned about Gabe. Men can do that—sleep with another man’s wife and worry about the couple’s marriage. Mel had worried about Gabe. Had Mel been married, I would not have given a damn about his wife. Why should I? That’s a man’s job.

  Three neighbours and an old friend, Dewey Maas, had called to say they had heard the news about Gabe and to express their sadness. Helen Detwiler from the retirement home passed along her condolences and told me not to worry about work because they would make other arrangements for as long as it took me to get over my loss, and that I might consider calling Mother as soon as I was able. Two radio stations and a local newspaper reporter wanted to talk to me.

  I phoned Helen, was told she was in a staff meeting, and asked that she assure Mother that I was all right and I would visit her later in the day. Then I drank three cups of coffee and considered drinking a glass of whisky, just to gather nerve to call my sister, Tina.

  NEITHER MY SISTER NOR I HAVE CHILDREN. Some people see this as a tragedy. I see it as evidence of genetic selection.

  I was unable to have children, although I was informed that my problem, if that’s what you wish to call it, could be cured with a combination of drugs, surgery and petri dishes. When my first husband and I learned we could not be parents, everyone we knew suggested adoption. I replied that adopting a child was like buying a used car through the mail. The truth is, we weren’t devastated by the news, although my first husband, in one of our last fights before our divorce, accused me of lying about being unhappy that I could not bear his child. By that time he was at least half correct.

  Tina, on the other hand, is almost abnormally fecund, which is a word that looks and sounds uglier than it should. The way Tina explained it, she could get knocked up by folding a man’s underwear. Tina got pregnant twice, with two consecutive boyfriends, before she was eighteen. She claimed she’d had sex with each of them only once. She aborted both, and the second time was so painful she decided never to go through childbirth. And she didn’t.

  I sat with my hand on the telephone, knowing it was early in British Columbia and thinking perhaps I should wait until she was fully awake before calling her. As if she would hesitate to call me, I realized, and dialed her number.

  She was awake, probably having made eggs Benedict for the neighbourhood after leading them in an hour of yoga. Tina lives in Kitsilano, a part of Vancouver that tries to pretend it’s Beverly Hills, just as Vancouver wishes it were Los Angeles. She lives there with her husband, a surgeon who inherited a reasonably sizable fortune from his father’s lumber investments. Andrew, Tina’s husband, had enough cash on hand to buy the southern half of Vancouver Island and dine on pheasant every day without lifting a finger, if he chose to. Instead, he married Tina, purchased a small mansion in Kitsilano, and spends his days cutting people open and examining their innards, and I have no idea why.

  When I visited Tina and Andrew before marrying Gabe, Tina introduced me to her country club friends. They were so gracious and warm that by the third day I feared I would throw up on the next woman who gave me an air kiss before handing me a glass of Chardonnay. On the fourth day, I flagged a cab near the university and had the driver take me to East Hastings Street, the skid row of Vancouver. I sat in the cab, parked at the curb, for twenty minutes while I watched hookers stumble into alleyways to give twenty-dollar quickies, and guys with vomit on their sweatshirts wash windshields at stoplights, and druggies pick up their fixes, and people in tourist buses stare open-mouthed at the carnival freak show. Then I had the driver take me back to Kitsilano for canapés and pretension. The few minutes on the other side of town set me up for the rest of the week. Everything, my father used to say, needs to be rebalanced from time to time. My father was rarely wrong about anything.

  Now, at the sound of my sister’s voice on the telephone, something terrible happened to me: I became my mother, unable to speak.

  She said “Hello?” three or four times, growing angrier with each delivery, until I finally got the words past the lump in my throat. “It’s me,” I said.

  “Who’s me?” Tina said. Then: “Josephine Olivia? Josephine?”

  Some people hate their names. I don’t hate mine. I just think Josephine Olivia is perfect for somebody else. Anybody else. By the time I reached puberty, I insisted that everyone call me Josie. Not Josephine. Not ever. Tina would tease me about it, calling me Josephine and then saying “Oops!” as though she’d forgotten how much I disliked it. She said “Oops!” so often she began calling me Josephine Oops until I poured a can of turpentine in her underwear drawer and told her why. Her full name, by the way, is Christina Abigail. The second time I called her Abigail, she hit me on the head with a book.

  “Gabe’s dead,” I managed to get out.

  “Oh my god. How? At work?”

  “Outside our house. On the beach last night. They say …” I swallowed the lump. “They say he shot himself.”

  “Oh my god.” Tina is not much on originality about anything, including her expressions of surprise. “Are you okay?”

  “Well …” I didn’t have an answer for that.

  “Oh my god. I’m coming down.”

  “That’s not necessary, Tina—”

  “I’m catching a plane this morning. I’ll call you from the airport. Oh my god. What are the funeral arrangements?”

  “The what?”

  She was losing her patience. I was supposed to be the cooperative victim, I guess. “The arrangements. Who’s taking care of them? When’ll he be buried?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “That’s what I figured. I’ll be there tonight. Don’t bother coming to the airport to pick me up.” The thought had never entered my mind. “I’ll take a limo. We’ll stay up and talk all night if we have to. Gabe’s killed himself. Oh my god. Love you.”

  “Me too,” I said. And she was gone.

  I slumped back in the chair. My husband was shot to death practically in our own backyard, and my sister was coming to stay with me, maybe for a week. How much punishment could one woman take?

  6.

  One of my
neighbours has a helicopter on his front porch. It has sat there for more than a year. Not the whole helicopter, just the part you ride in that looks like a large white plastic egg on skis. The rest of it, the blades that spin on top and the long tail with the small propeller on the back, are missing, but Gabe assured me it’s a real helicopter. We would pass the house with the helicopter on the porch during our walks along Beach Boulevard on summer nights, when we wanted to avoid the boardwalk crowded with skaters and skateboarders and bicyclists and joggers and retired people and vagrant hoodlums. We would stroll past the few remaining Victorian-era cottages and the tar-paper shacks and the new prefab homes with goldfish ponds in the front yard and hot tubs in the back, and we would be happy doing it.

  The neighbour with the helicopter on his porch also keeps a Florida swamp buggy in the lane next to the house, in front of an army machine that Gabe said looks like an APC, which he translated as Armoured Personnel Carrier. I don’t know what the man who keeps this stuff looks like, because I have never seen him.

  The beach strip is peppered with misfits and eccentrics living among young professionals winding themselves up and retired people winding their lives down. They start out in Porsches and end up in golf carts.

  If misfits and nonconformists can be catalogued, I do not know any faction that is not represented among our neighbours.

  Hans and Trudy, the German couple down the beach with the schnauzer, have been building their stone castle since Gabe and I moved here. Along with the rooftop parapets, it includes narrow windows set deeply into the walls—the better for archers to aim their arrows, I guess—and a heavy oak door studded with rivets. I expected to see gnomes in lederhosen at work on a moat someday. Most of the neighbours think it’s quaint. Nobody considers it out of place.

  A motorcycle club converted a cottage at the south end of the beach, the scuzzy end, into a clubhouse, adding steel bars to the windows and drawing weekly visits from the police. Near them, over the dusty upholstery shop, lives a woman who for the past month had been stalking the boardwalk and glaring into our garden, her mouth moving without any words emerging.