The Bay House

During one of our yearly pilgrimages to visit my grandfather in Maryland, my mother pulled me outside for a talk. I went willing, suspecting that this talk had something to do with the woman whose house we were going to for dinner. My grandfather was a quiet, introverted man, and I’d never even seen him talk to his neighbors. I didn’t even know that my grandfather knew any women, so I was dying to know what was going on.

It was July, and the Maryland sun was scalding. I had been too stubborn to put on shoes, so I had to run across the pavement to keep the bottoms of my feet from being burned. I waited on the far side for my mother, who had taken the time to slip on her L.L.Bean sandals before leaving the house.

We walked two lots toward the end of the cul-de-sac before my mother came to a stop. I stood in the grass next to the sidewalk, shielding my eyes with my hand and trying to be patient.

“Your grandfather is getting married,” my mother finally told me. It had never occurred to me that old people got married too. “This is where they are going to live. They are both going to sell their houses and move into a new one together.”

I squinted through the bright sun, shifting from one foot to another, regretting my decision to forego shoes. The empty lot was blanketed with dandelions, which seemed to glow gold in the bright sun.

At the wedding, my grandfather’s wife did not wear white. I was eight, and I came to understand that I understood very little.

* * *

A full year went by before I returned to Maryland. In my absence, a house had sprung up. I had not seen any of the construction, just that it had not been there, and then it was: a magical appearance. It was the largest house I had ever seen, stained a deep mahogany and built into the side of a hill. The front yard, where the dandelions had been the year before, was level, but in the back it sloped down at a sixty-degree angle to the banks of the Chesapeake Bay.

There was a rope between two trees at chest height that ran the length of the hill. To get to the water, we had to belay down a steep dirt path. It was best to go second, and allow my brother to walk face first through the numerous spider webs that appeared across the path overnight.

My new grandmother owned a section of beach. It was no more than seventy feet of reed-covered sand at a narrowing of the bay called Kinnaird’s Point. The bottom of the bay had been carved out to allow large boats to pass through. The water was neck-deep four steps in from the edge.

We loved that beach. I think we would have loved it even if it had been strewn with rocks and the water never got deeper than our bellybuttons. The words private beach spelled us into love before we had even seen the place.

* * *

The house was the first thing to magically appear in Maryland, but it certainly wasn’t the last. My memories of those summers all mix together, and I can no longer say for certain in what order things appeared, or how old I was when each happened.

Some things appeared permanently. A dock appeared, allowing us to cast our lines out into the channel when we fished and to perform sloppy cannonballs into the deep water. A set of stairs replaced our belaying rope, to my parent’s relief and my secret disappointment. The stairs had five flights and a bench halfway down. The bench had been intended to give people a place to rest, but was more frequently used to wait for slow adults. Baby cousins, who grew far too quickly and whose names I could never keep straight, were also added to the mix, along with some dogs to bark excitedly whenever we caught a fish.

Some things only appeared for a single summer. During a particularly bad drought, the usually brackish water became salt water. With the shift of the salt-water line came new salt-water creatures. For the first time, we were able to catch crabs off the end of the dock by tying raw chicken to the end of long pieces of tine and lowering them to the bay floor. After an hour, the chicken was slowly brought to the surface and scooped up with a net when it was six inches from the surface. The crabs would skitter sideways around the dock with their claws above their heads, before running off the side and plunging back into the water. Jellyfish were also a novelty, but only for the first day. Most were only the size of a quarter, and pulsed along with the current. I thought they were adorable, until one stung me. I spent the rest of the trip hauling them out of the water with a net to die a slow and painful death on the sand.

During the same summer as the drought, my father took it upon himself to try to clear some of the reeds, and ended up with a terrible case of poison ivy for his troubles. I glimpsed my father sitting in the bathroom in his underwear, his skin raw from itching. It made the jellyfish-shaped welt on my leg feel insignificant by comparison.

There were also people who appeared for a single summer. There was a pair of Irish soccer players, whose accents were so thick that I could not understand them, but they sounded pretty. An exchange student also visited us from Germany. She was fascinated by the one-legged heron that stood on the other side of the bay every morning.

* * *

I never saw Maryland in a state of transition; things appeared and disappeared between summers, but I never saw them changing. Somehow, not seeing things change allowed me to delude myself into believing that things weren’t changing, that I wasn’t changing. Maryland seemed to be beyond time, a paradise that was not subject to the laws of the real world.

Except it wasn’t.

I was seventeen, and I was walking beside my grandfather up the five flights of stairs to the house. He was going painfully slow, and I felt awkward beside him, waiting for him to take each step. His breathing was harsh and heavy, and each step was more faltering than the last. We were two thirds of the way up when his balance suddenly shifted backward, not a lot, but enough. In slow motion, I saw him begin to topple, and before my mind had even caught up with what was happening my hand was on his arm, steadying him.

He looked at me, and his face was red with exertion. Perhaps it was a trick of the light, or an illusion created by his red face, or even my imagination, but in that moment my grandfather’s eyes looked like a child’s: bluer than any contact and surprised by his own helplessness. I was struck by a flash of vertigo, of a half memory of a time when I was the one going slowly up the stairs and he was the one reaching out to steady me. His arm trembled under my hand, and I was no longer sure who was steadying who.

* * *

I didn’t tell my mother or my grandmother about the almost-fall right away, though I probably should have. The encounter had scared me, and I needed time to taste the words before I said them.

That night, my grandmother showed me a stash of treasures I had hidden in a drawer the first time I visited the Bay House. They were silly, childish treasures that I could barely remember owning: a glittery lip gloss on a red lanyard, hooker-red lipstick and some chunky bracelets. I had left them there nine years earlier, when I had been someone else, an eight-year-old who now felt as foreign to me as the treasures in the drawer.

Time had dehydrated the lip gloss, reducing it to some powdery glitter at the bottom of the tube. I was struck with the childish notion that I could add water to the lip gloss, and make it like it used to be. I got as far as the bathroom door before realizing it was silly and stopping.

With the lanyard clutched between my fingers, I finally found the courage to tell my mother about the almost-fall. I whispered it like a secret, but she already knew. I realized that she had always known. Maryland had never been free of time. That had been an illusion of my creation.