Portion of the Sea Read online

  “Interesting,” I said. “But I’ve got to go.” I started to walk.

  “It was nice meeting you, Lydia,” she called after me. “But don’t forget how much you love writing. I do think you could be a writer one day, perhaps a famous one.”

  I stopped and turned my head. “How do you know?”

  “I don’t for sure. I said ‘perhaps.’ You were the one who said you loved to write more than anything in the world.”

  “Yeah, but only in my diary.”

  “Well, we all start somewhere. You just remember that, darling. If a successful writer is what you see for yourself, then by all means, you’ll become it. I believe in you.”

  I turned fully around and walked a few steps back toward her. “You do?”

  “Yes. It was a pleasure talking with you.” She blew me a kiss in a movie star sort of way, and then turned as if, this time, she was the one ready to leave.

  “Wait,” I said. “I’ll let you read a little of my journal, if you like. You can tell me if it’s good or not.”

  She laughed. “I’m honored. Let’s go sit down.” She walked over to an enormous piece of driftwood shaped like a bench and sat down as if to perch. I followed and pulled my journal out from my bag and handed it toher, hoping I wasn’t handing my mind over to the claws of some bird of prey. But I never thought of my writing as being good or bad. I only thought of it as something I loved to do, so maybe I could use some objective feedback. I watched as she flipped randomly to the front of the book and her eyes began to skim.

  “An ever-serving, obedient and domestic wife,” she read aloud. “Thrilled and thankful for being born a woman, destined to become a wife and mother,” she continued. “A woman envied by all her neighbors for having the most meticulous kitchen floor and dinner on the table by five o’clock nearly 365 days a year.” She stopped and looked up at me. “Mature words coming from a girl your age.”

  “They’re my father’s words, not mine.”

  “Yes, I assumed that much.” She rolled her eyes.

  “They’re things he has told me about my mother. I can’t write creatively. I can only write about things that have happened or things people have said. I’m not at all good at making stuff up.”

  “Then you’re a nonfiction writer,” she said. “That’s what most journal writing is. That’s fine. Maybe you’re in the making to become a journalist.”

  “Of course not,” I said. “I’m just a girl.”

  “Yeah and Sanibel was just a sandbar once. Look at it now!” She glanced from east to west. “And Thomas Edison was just a boy. Did you know his mother schooled him at home because he drove his teacher nuts with so many questions in the classroom?”

  “No.” I laughed.

  “It’s true. What would this modern fifties world be like had he never gone on to become more than just a boy? What if he didn’t pursue his interests?

  We’d be living in a rather dark place, I think.” I thought about it a moment. “But what would Edison have done had his own mother not been there for him? His mother deserves credit,” I said. “She had a very important job. Every mother does.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I suppose you’re right.”

  “If you ask me, anyone with a mother is fortunate.”

  She handed back my diary. “True, dear, but we need to look at what we do have and not what we don’t have. You, for instance, have a desire to write. I do believe you will be a successful journalist one day, famous maybe. If that’s what you want to be.”

  She read a little more, this time to herself and I thought about whether I should bolt from this stranger, the strangest stranger I had ever encountered and that was pretty strange. Living in Chicago gave me daily opportunities to pass by, say hello, exchange eye contact with, or walk right by strangers, and sometimes they’d mumble something my way, and once it was about the end of the world coming, but none of them ever told me anything like this. Not even anyone I knew ever told me I could be and do anything that I wanted, and I wondered whether or not I should believe her. Believing her would bring options and possibilities to my life that I never knew I had, but then again, she was only a stranger, and it would be stupid of me to listen to what some stranger had to say.

  “I don’t believe what you’re telling me,” I said, standing up from the driftwood. “I don’t believe anything you’ve said.” I walked a few steps away, knowing I should keep going, that my father would go ape if I didn’t return soon.

  “Then what do you believe?” she asked.

  I shrugged my shoulders. I believed one day I would get married and have babies and those were my only options. I never believed anything other than that. I never gave it any thought.

  “Do you believe you can build a snowman here on the beach?”

  I turned and laughed. “You’re crazy,” I said.

  “Oh, no. I’m not. I’ve been called many things—dramatic, eccentric, fun, but crazy I am certainly not.”

  “How can anyone build a snowman here on a beach in Florida? It’s impossible. There’s no snow.”

  “If you believe, you can achieve,” she said, jumping up from the driftwood. “Now get down and help me build a snowman.” She dropped to her knees and started digging in the sand. A moment later she looked up and said, “C’mon, join me, and I’ll show you.”

  I didn’t want to get my new pink sailor dress dirty, but there was somethinginside me that wanted to believe; so, I joined her on my knees and started scraping my hands through the shell-fragmented sand, and she started humming. We were close enough to the shore that the sand was damp, and it packed nicely into a mound. I noticed her fingernails, long and beautiful, painted in mauve, and I felt the pressure of sand building behind my own nails, short in comparison. Her humming grew louder, and I dug harder until broken miniature shell pieces pricked the tips of my fingers. I no longer needed my sunglasses, so I took them off and tossed them aside.

  “What are you humming?” I asked.

  “A lullaby my mama used to hum.”

  “Oh.” We dug and packed some more, and when I looked at her, I noticed the scarf around her face loosening and falling to the ground. There were white bandage-like wraps covering her nose, and she caught me staring.

  “I was born with the long, curved beak of a White Ibis and wanted the nose of a woman,” she said, stopping to retie it. “I always imagined how beautiful I might look with a more womanly nose; so, I just recently got a nose job.”

  “Oh.”

  “I blame it all on my great, great grandmother. I got my nose from her.”

  I smiled, wondering whom I got my nose from and also what a nose job was. I hadn’t ever heard of that kind of a job before and assumed it meant she got paid to smell stuff like food or cologne. Or maybe a nose job meant she worked as a nose model. Hers was perfect enough. And maybe it’s why she wrapped that scarf and gauze around it, to protect it from the sun and air and from catching a cold and becoming red and runny, I thought as I dug in the sand until my stomach growled, reminding me it was almost dinner time and my father would be upset if I wasn’t there.

  “Why don’t you start making the middle ball now?” she said standing up, leaving me to dig alone.

  I scooped two handfuls of sand and smacked them atop the first ball, but it all crumbled down the side. I hoped the erosion might remind her we’re on a beach with sand, not snow.

  “Oh, come on! You can do it,” she said.

  I raised my eyebrows at her. “I don’t think so.”

  “You still don’t get it. You still don’t believe that anything is possible, do you?”

  “Realistic things are possible,” I said. “But one can’t build a snowman in the sand.”

  “You can do it,” she reassured, then stooped over and helped me pack sand atop the first ball. Once more, it all slipped down. “This is why we must be flexible,” she said, scratching her long dark hair with her sandy hands. “You’ve got to change your mindset. Make him lying down. Who say
s snowmen have to stand up? Keep going,” she said. “I’m sick and tired of the world teaching a girl she ‘can’t’ do this, she ‘must’ do that. She should do this and she shouldn’t do that. Can’t, must, should, shouldn’t! What is it that you want in life, Lydia?”

  I couldn’t think of anything. My father got me everything I ever wanted, which is like eating before getting hungry and never knowing what a hunger pain feels like. We owned three sixteen-inch black-and-white televisions. I had been the first of all my friends to get a Hula Hoop and Silly Putty. When the bridal dolly had come out, my father went to every store in Chicago until he found one for me.

  My father, Lloyd Isleworth, was gone most of the time, but I was never alone. He employed an entire staff of females to handle our housework, shop, prepare our meals, tutor me in reading, writing and arithmetic, teach me piano, and so on. And when they all went home to their own families, the television went on, and it kept me good company.

  Lloyd had told me this would be our first no-work-allowed vacation, but then he bumped into that man. The man was a developer and had all kinds of things he wanted to develop, and my father, a banker, had all kinds of money he wanted to lend. He gave me a new dress, and I felt better.

  “A new pink dress—that’s what I want,” I finally said. “This one was new, but look at it now.”

  “Dig, dig deeper!” she chanted. “Think hard about all that you want from your life. You’ve got to dig to find the real answers, to discover whatyou want. It’s easy to live on the surface, so dig! Dig harder! What else might you want?”

  Curves. I wanted curves, but they were something my father couldn’t buy me. As I felt the sand working its way deep into my girdle, itching me horribly, I knew how ridiculous it was to wear a hot, uncomfortable item in Florida. Still, a girl never knows when she might bump into the man of her dreams, and curves are essential to getting the all-important husband and insuring one’s economic future. Money, thanks to Daddy, I would never lack, but alluring curves, I had no idea why they weren’t yet showing up on me. I wanted them badly. I wanted to look as curvaceous as Marlena. Her hips were wide and the same size as her bust, and her waist was tiny like the necks of the birds trekking along the shore.

  “Why are you grinning?” she asked.

  “I think trying to build a snowman in the sand is funny,” I said, using my arm to rub sand out of my eyes.

  “My dear. Then stop thinking and keep moving. There are times when thinking hinders us from achieving the impossible,” she said as she stood with her arms stretched overhead. She began swaying as we do in art class when our teacher tells us to act like trees, feel like trees, then paint those trees. “You are in the spring of your life, child, when possibilities are blooming as profusely as Florida’s wildflowers.” She leaned to the left, then to the right again. “It’s looking so much like a snowman,” I heard her say. “You’re about there. Now let me rephrase my question to you. What is it that you dream of for your life, Lydia?”

  Her words suddenly reached me as if she were a fairy godmother and was tapping me on the shoulder with her magic wand and the world was growing pinker by the moment, probably from the setting sun. And then I spotted a group of motionless bright pink birds, more beautiful than any bird I could ever imagine. I knew of flamingoes, but these weren’t flamingoes! It was sometime after I saw these birds that the white silken sand of Sanibel transformed itself into glistening snow within my own hands and I knew then that anything was indeed possible. I knew then that I would one day become a wife, a mother, and, if I wanted, a journalist!

  “I’ve done it,” I announced, jumping up from the sand with my arms in the air. “I’ve built a snowman …”

  “Snowwoman!” she corrected. “Let’s call it a snowwoman. Who says snowmen must be men?”

  I laughed. “Then I’ve built a snowwoman on Sanibel.”

  “You have, Lydia. Do you believe now that you can do anything?”

  “Yes!” I shouted. “I do.” I gazed over to see if those pink birds were still around, and just as I spotted them, one of them raised and lowered its beak, and the flock took off. The pink was gone.

  “Your snowwoman needs facial features. Go and gather up seashells,” Marlena said.

  I rushed to the water and stooped over in search of eyes, a nose, and a mouth in the clear water below.

  “Be kind,” Marlena called out to me as she tied her chiffon scarf around the snowwoman’s neck. “Be especially kind in choosing a nose.”

  I returned moments later with my hands filled with shells.

  “That broken whelk will be the nose,” she said, taking from my hands a shell bearing zigzag-like streaks. “And how about those two sharks for eyes?”

  We pushed them into our snowwoman and stepped back a foot. “Looks great, but I better get going before my father hires a search team,” I said, noticing the sky getting darker. I walked over and picked up my straw bag.

  “It wasn’t my intention to get you in trouble,” she said. “I do apologize.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “It was nice meeting you.”

  “You, too. How long are you here for?”

  “Six more days but I don’t ever want to leave.”

  “Enjoy.”

  “I will.”

  “Goodbye, dear.”

  I waved and started meandering down the beach. A few seconds later, I heard her calling out to me.

  “Oh, Lydia! Lydia! Wait, please!”

  “Yes?” I stopped and turned.

  “I do think we met for a reason,” she said, hurrying up to me. “I don’t believe it was a coincidence. I hope I’m not wrong.”

  “Wrong about what?”

  She took a deep breath. “Today was the first time in a long time that I poured myself a cup of coffee and went out to my lanai to sit and read. And then, I spotted you on the beach. At first I thought you were just reading, but then I noticed you writing in what looked like a journal.” She reached into her bag and pulled out a very old-looking book. “Here,” she said, handing me the book, but still clutching it herself. “This is what I went out to my porch to read today, but I’ve already read it so many times. It’s a journal, and it’s very old.”

  “You’re giving it to me?”

  “Heavens, no!” she said, nearly pulling it back. “I’m only lending it to you. The girl who wrote in it died long ago, but you reading it would be like giving flight to her words. I do believe you and she have some things in common. She loved Sanibel and, like you, didn’t want to leave.”

  “Thank you,” I said, the two of us still jointly holding onto it.

  “There’s one thing I ask of you,” she continued.

  “Sure, what?”

  “That you not tell a soul about this. I don’t think this girl wanted anyone and everyone rummaging through her priceless treasures, especially any man; so, please don’t tell your father. I’m sure you wouldn’t want your father reading your journal now, would you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then, you understand. I think it’s important that only the right kind of person read this. It’s the kind of book that should be read by invite only. You’re the first person I’ve chosen to share it with. Who knows? Maybe when you’re done, we might pass it on to another. But in the meantime, can you promise to keep it a secret?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Good. And remember, I do want it back. What you walk away with after reading it is yours forever, but the book itself belongs to me.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  She looked nervous. “Are you good at returning things? Give me an example of something you’ve borrowed, then returned properly.”

  “Library books,” I declared. “Only one late fee in all my life, and I check out about fifty books a year.”

  “I thought you looked like an earthbound individual. Still, I need you to swear on your mama’s grave you won’t tell a soul and that you will return it to me before leaving the island.”
<
br />   “I swear.”

  “On what?”

  “On my mother’s grave.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “When one returns a library book late, there is a fine to pay. Do you know what will happen if you don’t keep our promise?”

  “What?”

  She thought a moment. “You will be cursed. Your ability and desire to write will erode and you will find yourself stranded forever in a place where ideas and creativity lie stagnant. Some people refer to that place as ‘writer’s block.’ If you tell, you will wreck your destiny as a journalist. And I know you want to become someone important, famous maybe. What girl doesn’t want the entire world listening to all the important things she has to say?”

  “What if my father asks me what I’m reading? What should I say?”

  “You’re sharp.” She reached into her bucket and pulled out another book.

  “Here, take this. Its dimensions are a bit larger, so you can hide the journal inside it.”

  “Catcher in the Rye?” I asked, taking the book.

  “Yes, and author J.D. Salinger autographed it for me personally. It’s about a boy and nothing I’m too interested in reading. Are you familiar with it?”

  “No.”

  “Figures,” she said. “If anyone asks what it’s about, tell them a generation of adolescents, overwhelmed with anxiety and frustration.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I will.”

  She sighed. “I think that’s it. Oh,” she covered her mouth with her hand. “I almost forgot the most important thing. I live straight through that thin line of Australian pines.” She turned and pointed. “See that yellow place with the green-shingle roof and shutters? The one on stilts?”

  I nodded.

  “There’s a sign out front that reads, ‘Bougainvillea.’ If you don’t see me on the beach, then please drop it by my mailbox before you leave the island. Now you better get back. It’s getting dark. And keep that journal a secret!”