Learning to Surf

Grace had charcoal lips, desultory eyes, and hair like stormclouds. When she laughed she yelled, and stood fully erect. Charlie had loved her, when they lived in Pensacola, a place on the Florida Gulf Coast. Then, the town was nothing but virgin white beaches and shadows that sloped like sleeping archangels. They had learned to surf there, under the watchful eye of Mikhail, a man known first by his reputation as being a fantastic lay-about. When Mikhail would doze off, lolling in that nebulous breeze that sometimes drifted through, Charlie and Grace would kiss, the saltwater lapping at their ankles. After Mikhail had his stroke, Grace talked much more vaguely and laughed much more quietly, and eventually moved off to live with distant relations in a wooden town in Colorado.

It was a year or two later, after he had developed an Adam’s apple but not the force to use it, that he found her again. Christmastime, and lights were strung up from the gutters of the flat roofs. Grace had returned to see him again, but she never admitted it. She told him that her dog had died, and she wanted to see her mother again. (It would be years later that she would admit to anyone, including herself, that these were both lies, which she did in a confessional in Wichita). Her mother, Elmira, had never looked the same after Mikhail passed. She seemed to age for the first time in her life, and the process moved with a startling rapidity, making up for lost time. She was of indeterminate age, but her cheeks sagged like the shirts of old men seated in a row at a bus mall. The day after Christmas, she too died. Elmira’s last words were, “I could have used some new gloves, but I suppose a waffle iron is just as well.”

Grace lived in Colorado still, and Charlie and her brief exchanged letters for an even briefer interval, correspondences smelling of pipe tobacco and pine needles. Once, she promised to enclose some snow for him, for he had never seen it, but it just melted, and all he got was a soggy letter. In return, he sent her some grey sand. It seemed less colorful out of the sun’s warming spotlight. She never sent a return; he didn’t even know if she got the sand, but he figured she must be having fun out there. He imagined her whooping laugh like an Indian war-cry reverberating through the desolate Colorado pines.