The beach, Pexels-pixabay
At the sports shop, looking through the racks of bathing suits I overheard Jane whispering to Mary, “I think Roland is rich so pick out whatever you want. He can afford it.” We all found what we liked and dressed there, bathing suits under our clothes. I bought two small, fold up beach chairs, two parasols and four large beach towels, a cooler for lunch and drinks, sunglasses, sunscreen, everything that can make a day in the sand more comfortable. As we came out, there was a small shop next door that advertised antiques and knick-knacks and toys. Scout was staring at a pale Japanese doll in the window. So in we went, Scout and I, Jane standing by the door with all our gear while Mary left for the car. I approached an old lady at the counter and told her exactly our situation. We were headed on a two-hour drive to the beach and needed some distraction, some amusement, for this ten-year-old girl if there was anything she might have. In an English accent she said she had some old puzzles. The first was a cardboard backed sheet with a dozen metal pieces, tiny triangles and rings and squares, conjoined in pairs, which you had to twist apart in just the right motions to separate. The second was a circle of string in a similar cardboard and plastic casing. It was called ‘cat’s cradle.’ It looked like something from the World War Two era. I bought them both for a trifle. I love the relics of bygone eras. They’re so simple, so pure, so human.
The car that Mary owned was not a comfortable one. It was an old Volkswagen. We loaded up the trunk to capacity, and I insisted that I should sit in the narrow back seat with Scout. We set off for S.F. with a screech, probably a sign of defective brakes. I broke open the metal puzzles, gave Scout one to solve and myself another. I was surprised at how swiftly she twisted the two pieces around and got them apart, more quickly than I could mine.
I handed out two more sets. Mary was driving and kept glancing back at us. Jane was in the passenger seat and turned around, her chin on her clenched fist on the top of the seat just staring at us with a bemused look.
“Your daughter’s smart.” I said to Mary. She burst into a spontaneous, prideful smile. Jane clasped her arm.
“You two are just like two peas in a pod in that back seat,” Jane said. “I’ve never seen Scout this happy, so expressive.” Scout was distinctly smiling at me with her oval face, her brown eyes peeping just below her pretty black bangs.
“Well I hope we can become friends. I don’t have that many.”
Soon we were at the deli I’d mentioned. We ordered sandwiches and Italian sodas, packed them in ice in our cooler and picked up a few fashion magazines at a newsstand outside.
Across the bridge and into the hills, while the women were admiring the redwood trees, I took out the cat’s cradle game and began reading the instructions, winding the string through my fingers. As I held it out for Scout, she seemed to understand implicitly and even seemed to be looking at the instructions on my lap, as I was, and we bent our fingers together and wove it around passing it back and forth in different patterns to her great delight.
All the time I was thinking, “how can a child this clever be unable to speak. There must be some kind of blockage in her head, some cerebral logjam, which, if it were cleared out, she’d be quite normal and chatter away like any little girl and live a full life.” I could see intelligence in her watery eyes, and it struck a deep chord of pity in me that it was so cruelly hampered.
We arrived at the seaside fully supplied, arms loaded, to an almost empty beach on a perfect day. We picked the best spot near the rock cliff where a small creek cut its path through the sand into the sea. Here we stopped, Jane and Mary setting up their parasols and towels and beach chairs, the cooler between them, full of food and drink, looking glamorous in their new sunglasses and wide-brimmed straw hats, their striped bikinis, sunscreen lovingly rubbed in and fashion magazines to read.
Scout and I had a different agenda, and that was to play. We threw down our towels, next to mother’s and we’re off to the surf for swimming and splashing in the waves. I’d left my wallet in my jeans under the seat of the Volkswagen, with all its precious cargo. But before I tucked it in, I already had another plan in mind. I took out one of the wafers, closed it between two fingers, and as Scout was visibly thirsty from the ride, as we stood unpacking beside the car, I opened her a bottle of soda and slipped the wafer into it. She swallowed it while both Jane and Mary were gazing at the sea.
I’d bought a few beach toys for the trip, a Frisbee and sand castle tools, so after a brief sojourn in the frigid waves off we went, like wild children to the creek beside us where the much warmer water snaked into the ocean. Between swimming and running and jumping and digging in the sand and speechless laughter, we tired each other out by early afternoon. When we ran back to Mary and Jane a slight dilemma arose, there were only two beach umbrellas but four of us. I laid down on my towel, face down and claimed I didn’t need one. Jane started rubbing some sunscreen on my back but just as she began Scout jumped on my back, pulling her towel over her whole body and head signifying she would be my sunblock and my savior.
And so it was. I fell asleep and so did Scout, right on my back, within minutes. Mary and Jane tittered at the sight and left us alone. They were holding hands and completely content for the first time in a long time, basking in their love, warm as the sunshine.
A curious thing happened during that sleep on the beach. I had a dream, but it was Scout’s dream. We were in a forest together, in a dark and scary one, a labyrinth, with beasts howling in the night. We were walking down a path hand in hand, but small animals kept creeping out from the brush and nipping at her legs and arms, wounding her, while what seemed like bats flew about her head, distracting her from the attacks below. She was terrified in this situation, not knowing what to do. She screamed and clung to my arm in desperation, but I didn’t know how to help her. I picked up a stick from this imaginary place and handed it to her and told her to hit them as they appeared, helping her a few times until she got the knack to beat them off. She still couldn’t speak, but her eyes were tearful and expressive of thanks. I told her that if we continued walking further, we would be out of this forest forever and into grassy fields of light. Just as we reached them and just before we were roused from this dream, I heard her say, in the faintest voice, ‘thank you.’
“It’s time to go you two. You’ve been asleep for almost three hours” Mary said as she gently shook my shoulder. “We’ve had our lunch a while ago so you must be famished. But the breeze is picking up and it’s getting chilly, so you can eat in the car as we drive home.”
Indeed the beach, which had been full of sunbathers at noon, was now emptying fast. A trail of people walked up the steep path to the parking lot carrying their loads of gear. We followed suit. Scout was so sleepy still that I carried her, yawning and rubbing her eyes as I set her in the back seat of the car. The trip home was full of praises and thanks directed at me, which I had to tone down by saying I’d had as much fun as anyone. Mary said this was one of the best days Scout had ever had. She went on to reveal, as she drove, that Scout could hardly go a few hours on average without a fit of crying or hysteric screaming or a tantrum rage, which only hugging and rocking and caressing by Mary or Jane or her teacher at the school could quell. If left alone the fit would continue for hours. The doctors had prescribed powerful sedatives but both Mary and Jane, reading up on these drugs, saw that they were addictive and lifelong crutches with debilitating side effects if not outright trauma to the brain.
“We’re still in the dark ages in these matters,” Jane added in, “so we’ve gone the homeopathic way. Certain teas seem to settle her down, and we control her diet very carefully, except this morning of course, but you saw how little she ate, just a few bites.”
I was surprised at how they could talk so frankly about Scout’s condition right in front of her. But I suppose they did this habitually, and Scout didn’t seem to mind. She was sitting quite content and as if occupying herself with some secret game, making little mumbling noises with her lips blowing out faint sounds, some half musical. At odd intervals she would even take a word that one of us had just said and morph it, doubling or tripling the syllables and switching the consonants around, almost like pig Latin. When Jane said ‘morning,’ she blurted out ‘norminginging.’ So she wasn’t the mute child I at first imagined her to be. I knew now that she could hear perfectly, just some glitch in her mind had long been wrenching things around, and her fits were probably a sign of her utter frustration with this glitch.
I was now directing Mary through the winding streets of north Berkeley to my house. As we pulled up to my front gate and Mary saw the handsome mansion behind it she blurted out ‘mercy me.’ Scout was looking down and playing with her fingers as I was pressing the fob to open the gate when all of a sudden she responded: ‘irckmircy.’
For some odd reason this bothered me. So I said to Scout in a calm but serious tone, looking directly in her eyes: “no Scout, you must never mangle that word. It’s one of the most beautiful words in the English language. “Repeat after me, ‘mercy.”
I said it loud and slow.
There was an uncomfortable pause at that moment, everyone in the car in complete silence facing Scout. She then looked up at me with watery eyes, as if I were angry with her and she didn’t know why. But then she composed herself and spoke in a distinct, soft, child’s voice, ‘mercy.’
The expression on Mary’s face could only be described as ‘shock.’ Jane nudged her three times to pull the car into the open gate, which she finally did, having a hard time tearing her amazed look away from Scout.
But before we got out of the car, I tried another experiment.
I said to Scout, in a much kinder tone, ‘now repeat after me, “the quality of mercy is not strained. It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven.”
She began in a halting and tremulous voice: “The quality of mercy is not strained. It drop ...”. Then we heard a thud.
Mary fainted. Her head knocked hard on the steering wheel, and her body slumped down against the door. Jane jumped quickly out of the car and had to reach in to pull me through her door, right over Scout. We both rushed to Mary’s side, opened the door and dragged her with her arms over our shoulders through the backdoor into my kitchen.
We flopped her down on a chair, Jane holding her on it. Scout was now standing beside us, all curiosity. Jane asked if I had anything to revive her, a drink perhaps. I grabbed one of the bottles of red wine from the counter and a tall glass. As I was filling it, Jane abruptly said, ‘me too, I need a drink.’ So I found another glass for her to fill, tilted Mary’s head back and began slowly pouring a sip into her mouth. This had the desired effect. By the third sip, she jerked forward, spit a little out on my shirt, gurgling and waking up.
As she came to and saw Scout standing there, she stretched out both arms towards her and gave her a tight hug, pulling her right up to the chair into her lap. Then she started crying profusely. As both Jane and I were looking down at this scene quizzically, Jane turned to me, grabbed my shoulder and said: “Roland, this is the best goddamn wine I’ve ever tasted in my entire life.”
