Ocean State

The Offering

136 The Offering Don and Terry Adams leapt out of bed every morning, glad to be alive. They had clothes that fitted them, beautifully behaved children, and a four-bedroom house with twenty-four windows. Only the back wall was faceless, the part that fed into the garage and onto the concrete pad that Don called the patio and Terry the terrace. Daughter June called it the skating rink, and son Matt said it was far too small to deserve a name. It was plain white, and in the summer Terry dressed it up with cottoncovered beach chairs and a striped umbrella, although the space got but one hour of direct sunlight. Wine could be served after supper, and if you threw your head back, there above was the moonlit sky dripping with stars, a square of wondrous elevation. The family loved how it fed and focused their dreams, whether the pad from which they launched were patio, terrace, or rink. There was one servant named Ellen, who came by day to vacuum the rugs and water the plants. The Adamses preferred to clean their own bathrooms and change their own sheets and, when it came to that, to launder their sheets in their own machines down in the basement where the dead plants were stored in their dusty pots. Terry was one who could not dispose 137 The Offering of anything that had enjoyed a moment of life. Don was tidy, so these dead greens—now brown, beige, black, or henna-red— were stacked on flimsy, aluminum shelves, sometimes three in a stack. It was a graveyard, a waste of space, but Terry didn’t see it that way, and neither did Ellen, who had killed some of these plants early on, before she understood the ways of the family. The rows of vegetal decay and hibernation were, by turns, an eyesore, a graveyard, part of the doll theater, and cellar crud. Ellen came on Wednesdays and Fridays when Terry was in the beauty shop, doing her specialty: tinting heads of gray and white with threads of lapis, silver, verdigris, and powder pink. Out of a rusty or tarnished or faded cap of curls (or straight pins), Terry’s genius could make a star, moon, or seashell. Women were scheduled up to next Christmas for a varnish, which is what Terry called the process of stripping, coloring, washing, rinsing, and shellacking. Most of the profits of the small shop, Queen’s Corner, went into Terry’s pay envelope, which she gladly reinvested in leather chairs, antique mirrors, and a few decent rugs for the shop. In the bank’s eyes, Terry Adams “owned” Q.C., but Ann Marie Sant still managed the business and her name was on the license. Terry’s hands never smelled of anything but bleaches and paints, ammonia and hair oil. Everyone knew when “mother” was home. “You must learn,” she said, when she was still rearing the twins, “not to use your nose when it’s not wanted.” This was how “Mother,” as Matt called her, with the quotation marks hanging in the air, tried to dictate the terms of their life at 17 Greygull, for, of course, beyond the house and the flat concrete square was the sea. Don loved to bathe in it. His son, Matt, detested how his father lolled and floated in the opaque, marble-top ocean. He 138 the wedding gowns skimmed the waves and lay his lard-colored body atop the shivering sea skin to roast in the sun. Sometimes he folded his arms under his head as if he were hanging in a hammock. Matt Adams watched from the bedroom window over the roof of the garage. His father took a midday “dip” and wouldn’t it be nice, thought the son, if he just floated away to England, or even to those skimpy islands off the foot of England and its white cliffs. Matt knew his geography the way anybody would who lives at land’s end of a large continent full of a mishmash of people and climates and terrains and man-mades. Matt was disgusted by what lay to the other side of the garage: his house and everything else that wasn’t the sea. Only twice a day, at noon and at dusk, did Dad mar the pure flats of the dark Atlantic with his relaxing body. June, the twin, felt...