Strange Fits of Passion by Anita Shreve

Author:Anita Shreve [Shreve, Anita]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

There was a rhythm to my days. It established itself before I had even become aware of it, an insistent pattern pushing at the edge of my consciousness.

Each day I woke with the low rumbling of a motor on the lane. There would be just a hint of gray beyond the window, the first sign of daybreak. I would listen as one or several trucks made their way down the sand, and after a time I began to be able to recognize the sounds of routine: a truck door shutting, the dragging of an object along a truck's metal bed, the small splash as a dinghy was put into the water, the creak of wood under a man's weight, the slap of a wake against a larger boat. And then the other motor would start up, grumble a bit as if it wanted to quit, and there would be the quiet whine out to silence as a boat moved away from the mooring.

Each day I made the high double bed. I smoothed the sheet, drew up the quilt. There was about these gestures a monastic purity, a return to the single self. If the baby was not awake yet, I would go down to the kitchen and make myself a cup of coffee and sit in my nightgown and sweater at the table and watch the water change its colors as the day began.

At first I was unable even to read. I had the books, but for days they lay unopened on the table. I wanted just to look.

It was winter, the dead of winter, when everything was dormant, and yet I was continually surprised by the constant mutability of the landscape. Sometimes the tide would go out so far that what sea was left was only puddles. At other times, when the tide was high, the spit in front of me would seem to have shrunk to a spindle.

I knew so little. For the first few days, I couldn't predict the tides at all; they were a constant surprise. I somehow always had it wrong. I could spot the gulls, but there were other birds I had never seen before. Sometimes I thought I saw seals, I was sure of this, and yet when I'd look again, the dark hump I'd thought was a seal was only a rock with the water lapping against it.

I had my chores, of course. I took to washing the clothes by hand, boiling the diapers and putting the wash out on a line behind the house. I liked the way our wash looked—the tiny undershirts and my jeans whipping in the breeze.

There was industry all around me, and perhaps I took my cue from that. How could I be idle when every morning men came to the point to mend their broken pots and traps or go out onto the water? First there would be the trucks, then the sound of a boat's engine or a curl of smoke from the fish house. There might be three trucks on the point, or four.

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