Rock Island Line by David Rhodes (most life changing books txt) 📗

“Here I am back again. I had to turn off the water in the sink.”

“Are you doing dishes?”

“Well, I was just getting ready to. Carol always complains I don’t do my share, and she’s gone for the weekend, so I guess I don’t have anybody to blame.”

“Do you want to do something tomorrow? Go somewhere or something?”

“Well, my parents are coming to visit tomorrow and will probably stay till after dinner. But later that night or Sunday. Where do you want to go?”

“I don’t care. We can go anywhere you like.”

“Good, then let’s go to the shore Sunday morning. I’ve been wanting to go ever since it started getting warmer.”

Pause.

“Where?”

“To Atlantic City.”

“OK. Sure.” Pause. “How would we get there? Take a bus?”

“We can take my car.”

“You have a car? You mean you’ve got a car of your own?”

“Yes. It’s a pretty old one, but it runs OK and I like it. It used to be my parents’ second car, but they never used it, so they gave it to me. Do you know how to drive?”

“ Yes.”

“Good, then you can drive. I’ll come over and pick you up. Where do you live?”

“No, I’ll come over there.”

“I can pick you up.”

“Well, OK. I live at 921 Sampson Street. Do you know where that is?”

“Pretty much. What time do you want to go?”

“Any time’s all right. I suppose we better go early, or not?”

Even though her car was really nothing to shout about, July once again felt trapped in a little drama that was somehow beyond him—participating in another tribe’s ritual. The two of them driving down for a day on the beach, in their own car (hers), a picnic basket behind them on the back seat, was almost surreal to him. He had never seen the ocean, but he didn’t let on so, and tried to pretend at each new stage of the day’s experience that he was completely relaxed and had done it a thousand times. He also began doing something only partially conscious. He began to invade her private world. Each time she would refer to some place she had been, or someone else, he would ask her, “Who? Where was that? When did you say that was, when you were in college at Penn? How long were you there?” And it pleased him that she so obviously enjoyed his attention. Just in the drive up she made several references to places and people he had learned about earlier, and her mystery seemed then to become partially revealed.

Walking down the Boardwalk, they talked lightly back and forth. They cleared the buildings and stepped onto the beach. Mal was talking about an experience she had had and walkedalong for quite a way before she realized that she was alone. Turning around, she saw July still back at the Boardwalk, dumb-struck, staring at the horizon and the waves along the shore as though in a hypnotic trance.

“July!” she called. “July!”

He turned toward her, and smiled, and they walked out across the sand together. But from that moment on for the rest of the afternoon the attention she had received in the car disappeared, and for the most part July just sat and looked out over the water, eating sandwiches and drinking pop and beer in silence, freeing Mal to herself.

The sensation of the clean, hot sun on Mal’s skin, and the relentless white sand, the marine horizon and the sea salvage washing in with the waves made her despair that she would ever be a great painter. She imagined she had only the emotional fury of the artist and none of the detachment or dedication. She stretched out on her blanket and put her hands down into the sand to the elbows, brought them up and let the tiny white particles fall through her fingers. She felt a kind of loneliness that was almost a pleasure, and small, insignificant memories of her past yawned open in front of her, inviting her back to when her mother covered her with warm sand, one foot after the other, and when Jimmy Morgan took his three trucks and sank them in the swimming pool behind their house and left them there until his father got mad, and the time she’d run away from home for an afternoon and sat in the tall weeds in back of Jacobsons’ garage and was covered with gnat bites. Then she remembered burying things.

“Here’s another present to go bury,” said her father, handing Mal a quickly wrapped trinket he’d picked up at the university stationery store. She ripped it open, discovering eight cat’s-eye marbles and a clear blue bowler. “Thank you,” she said, and ran off into her room, where she could look at them in private with the door locked. They were lovely, except for squeaking together horribly when she squeezed them in her hand. Immediately aftershe examined each individually she felt the desire to bury begin to take hold of her; but she put it off. And waited. The magic could be bad if carelessly prepared. Marbles, for instance, should never be asked to do the job of long, thin things, or be put near them. Long thin things were the most powerful of all, and once when Leslie O. had made her cry, she’d taken a splinter of glass six inches long and buried it beneath the very spot where she’d been standing when Leslie’d said what she did, pointing right at where she’d been, and in two months Leslie had the chicken pox. Then after they’d become friends again, she’d dug it up.

Mal waited for just the right day, and at the end of a slow, lonely evening she put the three yellow cat’s eyes in a little triangle pattern, each separated from its neighbors by the same tiny distance, in the very corner of the back yard next to the corner post, exactly four fingers deep. Those were for her grandmother. Three more went to a different