Its test was the choice of enjoying it.
Her first effort at the beach was a typical double hit; a mix-up of sunburn and southerly. She’d never seen so many people move so fast, or be swept with so much sand. On the bright side, it could have been worse; at first, when she saw the bluebottles floating serenely in the water, they looked so pure and otherworldly. Only when children came running up the beach, in varied states of distress, did she realize they’d all been stung. Biedne dzieci, she thought, poor children, as they sprinted toward their parents. While most of them shivered under the showers, and cried and sobbed unedited, one mother, especially, kept her daughter from rubbing sand in. She’d reached down for panicked handfuls of it and raked it over her skin.
Penelope watched helplessly on.
The mother took care of everything.
She calmed her and kept her close, and when she had her and knew she had her, she looked up, at the immigrant close at hand. No more talk, just a crouch, and stroking the girl’s tangled hair. She saw Penelope and nodded, and carried the child away. It would be years before Penelope learned that bad bluebottle days were rare.
The other fact that amazed her was that most of the children went back in the water, but this time not for long, on account of the howling wind; it came up seemingly from nowhere, carrying darkening lumps of sky.
To top it all off, she lay awake that night, throbbing hotly amongst her sunburn, and the pitter-patter of insect feet.
But things were looking up.
* * *
—
The first momentous event was that she found herself a job.
She became a certified unskilled laborer.
The camp was linked to what was then known as the CES—the government-run job center—and when she visited their office, she was fortunate. Or at least, fortunate in her usual way. After a long interview and a sea of governmental forms, she was granted permission for the uglywork.
In short, it was public amenities.
You know the ones.
How could so many men piss with such inaccuracy? Why did people paint and smear and decide to shit anywhere but in the toilet? Were these the spoils of freedom?
In the stalls, she read the graffiti.
Mop in hand, she’d recall a recent English class, and chant it into the floor. It was a great way to pay her respects to this new place—to get amongst its heat, to scrub and clean its filthy bits. Also, there was a personal pride in knowing that she was willing. Where once she’d sat in a frozen, frugal storeroom, sharpening up the pencils, now she lived on hands and knees; she breathed the breeze of bleach.
* * *
—
After six months, she could almost touch it.
Her plan was coming together.
Sure, the tears still welled up each night, and sometimes during the day, but she was definitely making progress. Out of sheer necessity, her English was forming nicely, although it was often that calamitous, jumbled-up syntax of false starts and broken endings.
Decades later, even when she was teaching English at a high school across the city, she sometimes summoned a stronger accent at home, and always we couldn’t help ourselves, we loved it, and cheered, then called for it. She never did manage to teach us her original language—it was hard enough practicing piano—but we loved that ambulance could be umboolunce, and that she told us to shurrup rather than shut up. And juice was often chooce. Or “Quiet! I can’t even hear myself fink!” Somewhere in the top five, also, was unfortunately. We liked it better as unforchantly.
* * *
—
Yes, in the early days, it all came down to those two religious things: The words, the work.
She wrote letters to Waldek now, and called him when she could afford it, realizing, at last, he was safe. He confessed all he’d done to get her out, and how standing on the platform that morning was the highlight of his life, no matter what it cost him. Once, she even read to him, from Homer, in broken English, and was certain she felt him crack; he smiled.
What she couldn’t know was that the years would pass by, almost too quickly, in that way. She would scrub a few thousand toilets, and clean chipped tiling by the acre. She’d withstand those bathrooms’ felonies, and work newer jobs as well, cleaning handfuls of houses and apartments.
But then—what she also couldn’t know: That her future would soon be determined, by three connected things.
One was a hard-of-hearing music salesman.
Then a trio of useless piano men.
But first, it was a death.
The death of the statue of Stalin.
He’d never forget the day he first saw her on Archer Street, or actually, the day she’d looked up, and seen him.
It was early December.
She’d driven seven hours from the country with her mum and dad, and they arrived late afternoon. A removalist truck was behind them, and soon they carted boxes, furniture, and appliances, to the porch and into the house. There were saddles there, too, a few bridles and stirrups; the horse-works important to her father. He’d been a jockey once as well, in a family of jockeys, and her older brothers, too; they rode in towns with awkward names.
It must have been a good fifteen minutes after they got there when the girl stopped and stood, midlawn. Under one arm she held a box, under the other, the toaster, which had somehow come loose on the trip. The cord hung down to her shoes.
“Look,” she’d said, and she’d pointed—casually across the road. “There’s a boy up there on that roof.”
* * *
—
Now, a year and a few months later, on Saturday night, she came to The Surrounds with a rustle of feet.
“Hey, Clay.”
He felt her mouth and blood and heat and heart. All in a single breath.
“Hi, Carey.”
It was nine-thirty or so, and he’d waited on the mattress.
Moths were there, too. A moon.
Clay lay on his back.
The girl paused a moment at the edge, she put something down, on the ground, then lay on her side, with a leg strapped loosely over him. There was the auburn itch of hair on his skin, and just like always he liked it. He could sense she’d noticed the graze on his cheek, but knew too much to ask, or to look for further injuries.
But still, she had to do it.
“You boys,” she said, and touched the wound. Then waited for Clay to speak.
“Are you enjoying the book?” The question felt vaguely heavy at first, as if somehow pulleyed up. “Still good the third time round?”
“Even better—Rory didn’t tell you?”
He tried to remember if Rory had said something along those lines.
“I saw him on the street,” she said, “a few days ago. I think it was just before—”
Clay almost sat up, but quelled it. “Before—what?”
She knew.
She knew he’d come home.
Clay, for now, ignored it, preferring to think about The Quarryman, and its faded old bookmark betting stub, of Matador in the fifth. “Where are you up to, anyway? Has he gone to work in Rome yet?”
“Bologna, too.”
“That’s fast. You still in love with his broken nose?”
“Oh yeah, you know I can’t help it.”
He gave her a short, broad grin. “Me too.”
Carey liked the fact that Michelangelo had had his nose broken as a teenager, for being too much of a smart mouth; a reminder that he was human. A badge of imperfection.
For Clay, it was slightly more personal.
He knew of another broken nose, too.
* * *
—
Back then—way back then, a few days after she moved in—Clay was out front on the porch, eating toast, a dinner plate up on the rail. It was just as he finished when Carey crossed Archer Street, in a flannelette shirt and well-worn jeans; the shirt rolled up at the elbows. The last piece of sun beside her: The glow of her forearms.
The angle of her face.
Even her teeth, they weren’t quite white, they weren’t quite straight, but they had something nonetheless, a quality; like sea glass, eroded smooth, from grinding them in her sleep.