A yoga class floated out in the glassy bay on paddleboards in downward-facing dog. The deck of a restaurant two doors down was swarmed by seagulls, pinned to updrafts, shrieking and squawking and landing on the rail, waddling and pecking and pooping on the planks. The bay was tea-colored, and beyond the jetty the white sea foam stood out crisply. I took off everything and swam. Still air, so quiet, birds, high soft clouds, a bright hard sun, cold, clear bay water. I floated over a hard sandy bottom in what felt as buoyant as Jell-O with glowing green blobs of algae that moved softly against my hand. I made my way by breaststroke down the curved harbor, past morning kayakers, rowboaters, anchored sailboats and sculls.
Walking through town in the clear morning light, wet and partly clothed, I saw a woman wearing a dog in a backpack. A shirtless boy set down his boom box, unfolded his sheet of cardboard, and danced. People threw money at his feet. A French-speaking family stopped to eye some kitchen gadgets in a storefront window. A huge, brownish, immature eagle with patchy white flecks perched on a telephone pole on the bay side above a wine store, scaring seagulls. I sat and had coffee and some toast. We were twenty miles out in the ocean, on a skinny piece of sand, bathed in light. Along the upper stories of a brightly painted bed-and-breakfast, blossoming vines mounted columns, spilling off the roof deck, drinking in the light.
We came for the light, the nearness to nature, the solitude, the convergence of elements. It hummed. It grabbed you and pulled you in every direction. It drove you back to something in your memory, made you want to try to repeat it. It made you crazy. It gave you hope or sex or courage. I passed the Crabby Sailor and two barefoot boys with sand on their calves. In front of the hardware store, a woman removed a long chain that wove through gas grills, patio furniture, and surfboards. There was a farmers’ market on the town green, with bright white stalls. A sign advertised a spaghetti dinner at the firehouse. A brand-new coffee shop had opened, with tables shaded by umbrellas out front. Every summer new places tried where old ones had failed, and the traffic got worse and drunks got arrested, and swimmers drowned on the rough side of the point. Broadway stars and summer rep took over the old theater until the end of August. A drag queen named Tasty Burlington sold out her two-week run. Then came Carnival, then Bear Week, then Labor Day, and then it was over.
There’s no such thing as a reliable narrator. There’s more reliable and less reliable, but any light that passes through that lens is shaped, bent, divided. You willingly create distortions and those distortions are misleading, designed to stir up, revise, reverse, undo, shift, shape, sing. A story is an interrogation, an act of aggression, a flirtation. It’s slippery, squirrelly, and rascally. The conference had helped me return to meaningful work, but I’d lost faith that the project would gird me. Instead, a darker feeling filled me with longing. I imagined myself years into the future, and felt the inevitable letdown of having produced anything at all, of putting myself into it and giving it away.
People lined up to get on the ferry, dressed for someplace else. Men, women, and children shuffled off the boat, carrying luggage, blinded by the sun. I walked home with my shirt in a ball. I still had an hour before class. The siren blared across the bay. In the Barn I stood under hot water in the shower stall, then fell onto the soft, worn flowered bedspread with its rusty stains, all clean, wrapped myself in it, and slept.