Home by Another Way (16 page)

Eight

A
ll marriages have ritual sentences, I think. Ours certainly does. They are the sentences that are somewhere between private jokes and gestures of affection.

On the mornings I have to leave home to go on the road to be with a group for a spiritual retreat or a writers’ workshop or some such thing—something I love to do, though I wish all those groups would choose to meet somewhere close enough for me to be able to sleep in my own bed each night—I will say to Sara, “Did they call yet?”

“Not yet,” she will say, “but they will.”

“Oh, good, then I won’t have to go.”

In a minute while I am packing my suitcase, I will say, “Will you listen for the telephone while I am in the shower?”

“Oh, yes,” she will say. “They will call soon.”

We are both pretending we are expecting the
telephone call that says the retreat has been canceled for one reason or another. My experience is that Episcopalians will cancel a retreat on short notice if it turns out they cannot get separate rooms from each other and Methodists will call it off if they cannot get coffee before the dining room is open in the morning. I expect some evangelical group to call some morning and say they do not need the retreat after all because the Rapture has come and they are all going on to glory without the rest of us. I do hope they call before I get to the airport. I do not know what happens here after the Rapture, but I am certain I want to be in line next to Sara rather than standing alone in the line at security.

One of the other ritual conversations we now have goes like this: “We have to leave St. Cecilia on Saturday,” Sara will say.

She is only allowed to say this sentence during the last week we are there. Before that, we both have to pretend we will be able to stay forever.

“No, no, no,” I will say. “I called Margaret, and she said no one else is booked into Seastone until at least
2010, and that is a tentative booking, and we can stay as long as we like.”

“Oh good,” she will say as she turns back to her book. “Thanks, honey.”

“You are welcome.”

Such ritual sentences and conversations can slip by you if you are not paying attention. You can have one and not even know it.

Some of them are signals and signs. Some of them are reminders of moments when you discovered that something about your life together had changed or was about to.

I have long believed the way you get places in your life is that you keep moving in a certain direction over a long period of time, and then one day you look up, and you have crossed the line into some new place. You had no idea you were anywhere close to the line in the first place.

That is how Sara and I decided to get married.

We had been together for a while, a good long while, long enough for me to have put in a couple of thousand hours working on the gardens in her backyard. One afternoon we were sitting in the sunshine, watching the goldfinches we had tricked into the yard with the proper feeder and waiting to see the sun drop down below the hills across the way.

“What are you thinking about?” I asked.

Then I added, “Don’t edit.” It was a premarital ritual sentence that meant I really do want to know what you are thinking although it could turn out I would rather not have known. She was quiet for a few moments.

“I am thinking about getting married,” she said.

“So am I,” I said. And then we both went back to watching the sun set and the goldfinches feed and said no more about it.

The next evening we were in the car headed to a restaurant for dinner. I stopped at the light at the big intersection of Old Hickory Boulevard and Lebanon Road. We were not talking much about anything, partly
because at least one of us was still thinking about getting married. It was sixteen minutes after six for those of you keeping score at home.

Sara reached over and turned down the radio.

“To you,” she said.

“Oh, good,” I replied. “This is going to work out great.” We turned the radio back up.

Neither of us actually knows who proposed to whom, but we both take credit for it. Which is fine. There has been enough joy in it to go around.

“So how did you get here from London?” we asked David one evening when we were sitting at the Galley Door. It was apparent to us—British accent and slightly-wind-and-sun-smoothed tan notwithstanding—that David has not always lived on St. Cecilia. For some reason we had a sense David was a transplant, an expatriate from England. I was interested in how he stumbled over the line and onto St. Cecilia.

There are clues in words. Sometimes you catch them; sometimes you do not. We are word people, Sara and I, people of the sentence, if you will. And whatever the clues were, we had picked up on them and guessed correctly.

As I was asking the question, I was watching his granddaughter play in the sand by the beach. Earlier his grandson had warned me I should roll up my windows because rain was coming. When I questioned his forecast, he pointed to the notch between the big mountain and the second ridge to the north. “If there are clouds in that notch, then it will rain,” he said. He was right; it did rain. I found myself wishing I had raised my children here, where the sun shines and the water is warm and the world looks as though you are standing on the edge of it.

I was watching his daughter-in-law welcome people to the tables, and I could see his wife and his son through the windows of the kitchen.

“We came out for Christmas one year,” he said. “We just sort of never went back.”

“Never?”

“Well, we had to go back to put the house up for sale, but that was the only time.”

“How long ago was it?” we asked.

“Sixteen years.”

One of the people we have come to know is a man named Tim. The first time we met Tim, he waited on our table at the hotel restaurant at Bluewater Beach. He was formal and attentive, and I remember thinking this was too small a job for the person Tim seemed to be.

The next time we were there, we discovered Tim was the maître d’. And the next time he had changed from a white jacket to a suit, and as he chatted us up while we waited for dinner, he told us he was also the restaurant manager.

On the way home to the States, I was looking at some of the magazines I had picked up in St. Cecilia.
There was a feature story on Tim. He is the postman in St. Peter’s Parish, and he hitchhikes into town each morning to pick up the mail, and then he hitches back to deliver the mail before he goes to Bluewater Beach to be a waiter or a host or whatever else is on tap for the evening.

Most everyone we have met on St. Cecilia cobbles together a living. We know this because we have heard it over supper somewhere.

David works at the Galley Door four days a week, and he and his wife also have a gift shop downtown. Randy cooks at Domingo’s, and he cooks at Three Palms too, and he has a house where he does private dinner parties every month or so.

The guy who owns the art gallery is also a painter. He is also an illustrator, which is how he makes a living. He spends a fair portion of the year in the States, hustling illustration business so he can hang on to his studio and his gallery. The woman who watches the gallery for him while he is gone is a housewife whose
husband teaches at the medical school. They also housesit for people.

Tim is a postman and a waiter and a maître d’ and a restaurant manager. Andrew has a restaurant and a water-sports business and a catering service and runs the biggest annual fishing tournament on the island.

I met a man at the Heptagon one day who handed me a card that said, “Taxi, tours, real-estate sales, property management, auto rental, and personal services.”

I heard a story about a house painter who was considering branching out into neurosurgery. It was not a bad strategy, I suppose, there not being a neurosurgeon on the island. When it was explained to him how much training and cost was involved, he thoughtfully considered his position for a moment. “I think I will need a manual,” he said.

It is an island of generalists. A crowd of folks with whom I—writer, housekeeper, teacher, retreat leader, and general all-round yardman—feel very comfortable. It is a crowd of people with whom I am very comfortable
breaking bread. It is a crowd of people who keeps stumbling over lines into new places.

It may well be a crowd with whom I could be comfortable making a life.

Stumbling over the line is how I became a writer too.

I was raised in a family of publishers and writers and poets and artists of all sorts. The people I knew when I was growing up, the grownups I mean, were my father’s publishing and artistic friends. They would stay at our house, and we would go on vacations together, and I was forever being hauled off to some concert or conference or something and listening to people read their words or sing their songs.

It turned out I had a gift for turning phrases and for the random rearrangement of alphabetical characters that would bring a smile to the faces of strangers from time to time. I knew it when I was thirteen. I
spent many years in publishing and then in advertising and then in editing, trying to learn how to be a writer.