Beach Strip
JOHN LAWRENCE REYNOLDS
To the memory of Wayne Ewing,
who understood the souls of the beach strip and of Lester Young,
and who celebrated both in his quiet and dignified style
It is not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the animal.
That is why superiority has been accorded in humanity not to the sex that brings forth life, but to the sex that kills.
—Simone de Beauvoir
Brevity is the soul of lingerie.
—Dorothy Parker
W
hen I climb the stone steps my husband built to reach the path that separates my house from the beach, I am on the shore of a Great Lake. If I look east, down the length of the lake, I imagine I can see all the way to the St. Lawrence River. If I turn to look behind me, beyond the high bridges and their incessant traffic, I see the things my mother called the devil’s appliances, meaning the steel mills and refineries that line the shore of the bay. And if I turn to look at the lake again, but closer now, at the grove of high caragana bushes on the beach in front of my house, just beyond the boardwalk, and if I visualize the open space within them, I see my husband lying on a blanket we brought from Mexico. He is naked. One arm rests across his chest and the other is flung out as though reaching for the gun just beyond his grasp, the one that fired a bullet into his brain.
MY HUSBAND WAS GABRIEL ENFIELD MARSHALL
, and he was a police detective. Gabe was impressive but not truly handsome. He was tall with a voice that carried a hint of abrasiveness, like talcum sand. He spoke to me in bed often, sometimes reading from a book or magazine, sometimes telling me tales of his childhood or his work, and he did it because he knew how much I loved hearing his voice while my head rested on his shoulder. Men never appreciate the value of words spoken to a woman in
bed. I loved it, and I loved him for doing it. Gabe could be reading the label on a bag of fertilizer. I wouldn’t care.
Gabe would read to me in bed, and I would say silly things to make him laugh. It was our version of give and take. I’ve used laughter all my life to deal with things I don’t like or can’t face. I couldn’t stop when I met Gabe. I couldn’t stop after Gabe died. I can’t stop now. I would rather laugh in bad taste than cry in good taste.
GABE AND I MARRIED FIVE YEARS AGO
, the second time for each of us. My first husband now lives in Alberta with his wife, who teaches aerobics. She is twelve years younger than him, has hair the colour of lemons, and he bought her breast implants for her birthday. Do you need to know more about her than that? I didn’t think so.
We left each other, my first husband and I, the way jockeys and horses part at the end of a race. The jockey mounts another horse and leaves the first horse facing a wall bathed in sweat and running the race over in her mind, trying to figure where she stumbled and why she lost. I spent a good deal of time staring at my stable wall. This is all I need to say about my first marriage.
Gabe’s wife left him for an advertising executive, taking their two children with her. Gabe discovered she had been cheating on him for almost a year. When he asked her to choose between him and the advertising man, she chose the advertising man because he was not a cop, because he had a large house in a ritzy neighbourhood, because he owned three cars and part of the advertising agency, and maybe because she loved him.
She and the children moved out between Christmas and New Year’s, leaving Gabe in an empty house in an empty Toronto suburb. Gabe’s son called his father on New Year’s Day, and Gabe told me they cried together as though both were eight years old, but only one was. Three weeks later, while the advertising man and
Gabe’s wife and the children were on their way to the Laurentians for a skiing holiday, the advertising man’s expensive SUV skidded around a turn and rolled down a stone embankment. No one survived.
Gabe spent a year getting over that. When he asked for his job back, he was advised to find other work. He didn’t know other work. So he moved here, where the city police department hired him to manage files and push papers around. When they were satisfied that Gabe was not likely to break into tears while directing traffic, they gave him first a duty officer badge and later a detective badge, which is when I met him. We were introduced by a girlfriend of mine who had dated him and thought he was boring. She suggested that he and I were meant for each other. Some friends are like that. I don’t miss her.
“Did you always want to be a cop?” I asked Gabe on our first date.
“No, I always wanted to be an entertainer,” he said. He looked at me, his head bent, his eyes raised. “I wanted to sing and dance. I wish I had tried it. Singing and dancing for a living.”
It was laughable, Gabe as a Vegas act, but I did not laugh. Instead, I said, “Do you know what I have always wanted to do? The one thing I have wanted to do more than any other?”
He shook his head.
“I have always wanted to live in a house on the strip of beach that separates the bay from the lake. I want a house facing east toward the lake, where I can watch the sun rise up out of water in the morning. That’s what I have always wanted to do. Watch the sun rise over water every day of my life. I don’t know if I have any other ambition. What do you think of that?”
“I think,” he said, “it sounds like a wonderful place to live.”
We married three months later, and moved into his apartment in the city, where we lived for almost a year until we found this house facing the lake on the beach strip. I had been single for
almost five years and had known several men. Gabe had been single for three years, and I knew of no women other than his wife from his past, nor did I ask.
ON THE NIGHT GABE DIED
, I had finished my bookkeeping at the retirement home where my mother lives, in a private room overlooking the lake. Two afternoons each week, Tuesday and Thursday, I did the books for Trafalgar Towers, which was owned by a corporation headquartered in Kansas. The company’s policy said if Trafalgar Towers delivered a fifteen percent annual return on their investment it would be satisfied. If profits dropped below ten percent, it would change management. And if the retirement home began to lose money, serious thought would be given to demolishing the building and erecting a wall of condominiums. This was a business philosophy Charles Darwin would endorse. Maybe more of life’s rules should be so simple. Probably not.
I don’t know how much the company in Kansas earned each year, because we never heard from Kansas except when Christmas cards filled with warm Midwest greetings arrived for each full-time staff member.
Keeping the books for an organization that housed fifty-seven residents and a dozen staff was easier than it may sound. Monthly fees for almost all of the residents were paid from private and government pension plans. My job was to confirm receipts, issue salary payments, and pay utilities and repairs. Everything was routine. Surprises were rare and small. I finished my work in five hours, from one to six, two days a week.
I took half my pay in cash. The other half I gave back to ensure that Mother would enjoy the privilege of her private room, something her pension income alone wouldn’t cover. When I arrived for work, she would be about to have lunch. When I left for home, she would have finished her dinner and said goodbye.
Trafalgar Towers is north of the canal, just beyond the marsh where herons stand in water and poke for fish. It is an easy walk to the retirement home from our house. I can make it there in less than half an hour. When the weather is pleasant, I follow the path to the canal, cross the lift bridge over the canal, skirt the marshland, and there I am. I did this on the day Gabe died.
In summer, the lift bridge rises every half-hour, permitting sailboats to leave the bay and enter the deeper, cleaner, more dangerous waters of the lake, or return to the bay and sail past the steel mills on their way to the yacht clubs and marinas west of the factories. The bridge also rises for cargo ships, which signal their approach from either direction with a blast of their horns, but there are few cargo ships now.
In summers when I was a teenager, and if my boyfriend had a car, I would ask him to drive me to the canal that cuts through the beach strip, joining the Great Lake to the bay. We would watch ships enter and leave the bay, floating past like moving mountains of steel, travelling to and from places that would always be names on a map to me, places I would never visit. Bremerhaven. Le Havre. Cadiz. Ships that sailed across the Atlantic, up the St. Lawrence River, and a thousand miles inland.
Hard-looking men stood at the railings of the ocean freighters, cigarettes hanging at an angle from their mouths. When the ships drew close, I would step out of the car to wave at the men. I would be wearing tight white shorts and a T-shirt, and they would smile and wave back, and sometimes grab their crotches or mutter something that would make other men standing near them laugh. As the ships passed, I would look at the sterns of the vessels to read their home ports, cities in Sweden or Yugoslavia or Greece or Taiwan or Panama, rusting hulks on morose journeys. I wondered if the men would picture me while lying in their beds that night, if they would remember the girl in the tight sweater, with long hair and good legs. I liked to think they
would. The men looked dangerous, and I was near enough for them to absorb all they needed to absorb and too far away to reach it.
When it grew dark on the beach strip, boys wanted to do what boys always want to do with girls in cars at night. Sometimes it was a thrill and sometimes it wasn’t. But it was always exciting to watch the ships pass, and see the lonely men at the rail staring at me, a girl they would know only in their fantasies.
The lift bridge carries beach strip traffic across the canal, people in cars and people on bicycles and couples who walk along the beach for exercise. Twice every hour, an air horn blasts a warning before the bridge rises, and a man behind a high smoky glass window in a building next to the bridge changes the traffic lights from green to red, and pushes a switch to lower wooden arms over the road and walkway to hold back cars and people. When all is clear, the bridge begins to rise. If only pleasure boats are waiting to go through the canal, the bridge stops a few feet in the air and the boats pass beneath it quickly, the people in the boats waving at those strolling along the edge of the canal. If a freighter is passing through, the span rises to its full height, groaning like an old man lifting weights, all the way to the top and staying there, sometimes for a half-hour or more, until the ship passes through the canal.
You can walk along the canal beneath the lift bridge and stand there as the span first rises above you, then settles back down again. Boys used to leave pennies on the flat surface of the footings when the bridge was up. They would return after the bridge rose again half an hour later and retrieve the coins, pressed to paper-thin blotches of copper, until a fence was installed to keep them away, although the boys would climb or even tear down the wire fence to get to the footings. That’s what they’re called, the concrete pads that the bridge settles on. Footings. Gabe told me that. Gabe told me many things, and he avoided others.
High above the canal on the bay side, twin steel bridges carry traffic along the freeway. The highway bridges begin their rise a mile back on either side of the canal, and are more than two hundred feet above it at their peak. The traffic they carry is distant and uninteresting, which is how I suspect the people in those cars view us who live below them on the beach strip. The high bridges are on the beach strip, but they are not of it. I ignore them, like everyone else who lives on the strip. We develop blind eyes and selective ears. We ignore the high bridges and pretend not to hear the noise of the traffic they carry. We turn our backs on them, and on the oil-slicked bay and the steel mills with their slag and steam and smoke, and we look east across the lake extending to the Thousand Islands, lovely green and granite jewels that, in the pictures I have seen, look like pieces of paradise.
On the beach strip, we live between a distant heaven and a smoky hell.
MOTHER SUFFERED A STROKE TWO YEARS AGO
, a knife-edge rupture, the doctors called it. The stroke left her mind intact but destroyed her ability to speak, and weakened her sense of balance so badly that she can’t walk safely. That’s when I found her a room at Trafalgar Towers and worked out an arrangement to do their books in return for her private room and some cash for me. This took an hour of negotiation with Helen Detwiler, who manages Trafalgar Towers. Helen has hair like steel wool, wears print dresses and drives a Buick. I could learn more about her, I suppose, but I have never had the inclination.
Mother sits and moves in a wheelchair, and needs special medication to hold the next stroke—the doctors talk about it the way people in California talk about the next earthquake—at bay. Otherwise, Mother is aware and alert, perpetually silent, sometimes angry, and always happy to see me. She appreciates what I have done for her.
Her room with a view of the lake is akin, I am told, to having a hotel room in Paris with a view of both the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame Cathedral, on a smaller scale. Mother takes pride in that. I have called her a View Snob, and she agrees. This is why she refused all of my invitations, half-hearted as they may have been, to come live with Gabe and me.
My visits with Mother at the end of each working day were usually brief. Perhaps once a month, or when Gabe would not be home in time, Mother and I would have dinner together. I would describe my day and talk about friends and relatives. My sister, Tina, and her husband in British Columbia. A cousin in New York. An aunt in Toronto. If Mother had a comment to make, she would write it on a small blackboard I bought her, tracing her comments with chalk in the lovely cursive handwriting that had won her awards in public school. She would write,
Your hair is very nice today, but you should get a manicure.
Or,
You put too much salt on your potatoes.
Mother will always be a mother.
She has her sense of humour as well. She described a staff member who kept butting into other peoples’ lives by writing,
She’s so nosy, she’d peek over a glass wall.
The night Gabe died, Mother made no humorous comments because she knew I was troubled. She did not know why I was troubled. But she realized later, as did I, that had I not been so troubled by what I needed to do that evening, Gabe would still be alive.