Body Surfing (2007) by Anita Shreve

Author:Anita Shreve [Shreve, Anita]
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2010-12-19T00:41:46.781000+00:00

2005

Floods of biblical proportion have destroyed a southern city. Gas prices are soaring. Sydney notes that the Hampton tolls now have E-ZPass. In high season, the wait was sometimes a half hour, occasionally an hour. Now there are no lines, as if the north has been evacuated.

So much change. London bombed. Iraq shelled daily. It is an act of will, she sometimes thinks, simply to turn on CNN each evening and take in the day's news--hardly believable, all too believable.

Sydney enters the public parking lot, her car rolling over the loose gravel. There is a bathhouse, a badly weathered fence, a boardwalk. She lets her window down and inhales the air. It smells of dark sand and fish, signaling a low tide. The breeze is warm on her arm, poised on the sill. Warmer still will be the water, as it often is in September. Sydney knows that there will be few people on the beach.

The family never stays after Labor Day. Never.

She removes her shoes and rolls the cuffs of her black dress pants. She locks her car and slips the key into her pocket. The boardwalk is covered with thin drifts of sand. A last gasp of beach roses, most already turned to hips, crowd the wooden planks. She will cross the boardwalk, take in the beach, and then walk to the house. When she has accomplished this small but necessary task, she will return to her car and continue her drive north to Durham.

But when she reaches the beach, the view cuts unexpectedly to the quick, her body armor shoddy and out-of-date. She stands with her hand to her chest, as if that gesture might protect her. It is not only that she had lost the memory of what this particular beach looked like. It is, too, that she had forgotten that this air is the same that was once alive with sounds and smells and words. Sydney is suddenly fearful of those aural and tactile sensations.

The view, though. The view. It is undeniably exhilarating.

Sydney sits where she has planted herself. She closes her eyes against the naked sun and listens to the waves. She can detect their height just by listening--can tell the large smashers from the slow rollers. Has there recently been a storm? In the city, she is sometimes unaware of the weather altogether, or only mildly reminded of it as she walks from apartment to office and back again. Most of her days are spent in the psychology building, in a room with no windows. Sometimes, emerging in the early evening, Sydney is surprised to discover a heavy downpour, or its opposite, an evening so beautiful she can hardly believe she almost missed it.

Sydney has not been north of Boston since the day she said good-bye to Mr. Edwards at his doorstep. She could not pretend, though, that when she and her colleagues received the invitation to the conference at the University of New Hampshire, she didn't begin to be obsessed with thoughts of driving to the house and looking at it.

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