Coming and Going

Blessed shall you be coming in and going out....Deut. 28:6

"London isn't what it used to be."

"Oh my word, no. People are afraid of each other," said the husband, his monstrous camera hanging from his neck. "It's wonderful here in America. Nancy and I love Cape Cod, don't we duck? I even got a good shot of a great white shark. Just the dorsal fin, of course."

Marjorie recalled that the sign had said the waters off Herring Cove were shark infested. The sharks preyed on the seals. She and Peter had seen the seals swimming parallel to the shore, very close in. They must be skittish, she thought. Like English people riding the tube late at night hemmed in by the residue of empire. She remembered how they had walked in the great city, near Piccadilly, trying to identify the languages spoken by women in saris, turbaned men talking into their phones. Urdu, Bengali, their alphabets decorative, each letter its own universe. London was like an animated atlas, the original sound cloud.

Here, at the beach, all they heard were gulls overhead, the slapping of the surf. It was such an immense space. Not a space really, more like an expanse. Behind them, the scrub and rose hips. Under, to each side and in front of them, the sand dotted with shells, salmon-colored, pale green, mother-of-pearl. Facing them, the sea, stretching to the horizon, beyond which people in pubs, black, brown and white, were drinking their pints. The sky above was the color of cornflowers, the October sun resilient and proud of itself.

Marjorie thought of the offhand remark of the English woman, casually dropping snarky social commentary into the otherwise perfect afternoon, like a pebble disturbing the glassy surface of a lake. Fear. Fear will do that. She remembered an earlier trip to Europe, before she had even met Peter. She had only just arrived from New York, her city-girl instinct for self-preservation still fine-tuned. It was early December. Traveling alone on the train from Stockholm to Uppsala, she picked up a magazine and a container of coffee and settled down in an unoccupied compartment. Doing the continental, sitting behind the closed door of a railway compartment watching the flat Swedish scenery out of the smudged window. Marjorie leaned back into a vintage movie fantasy, something Cary Grant-ish. Then the door opened and a man entered the little room. He wore a dull brown wool jacket. He was gray, not his hair which was straw-colored, but his actual lined and pocked skin. Two watery blue eyes made fleeting contact with hers. The man was carrying a brown paper bag, maybe a bottle of aquavit. Marjorie buried her head in her magazine and took a sip of coffee. After a few minutes, she felt his hand grazing her knee. The unexpected touch rampaged through her like an electric shock. She jumped to her feet, and spilled the scalding coffee all over her skirt.

"Pepparkakor?," he asked, taking his hand out of the bag and offering her a ginger snap, traditionally served during the Christmas season in Sweden.

"I hate fucking tourists," Peter said, brushing the crumbs out of his beard from the sweet potato trutas they had picked up at the Portuguese Bakery. "They're the real sharks. The real invasive species."

"Look," Marjorie pointed. "There's another seal." She wondered if they would flipper up onto the beach if she and Peter weren't there, sprawled on the sand with their Kindles and their water bottles. Someone is always moving in on someone else's turf, re-defining the rules of the road.

Marjorie thought if you took the long view, all of human history, not to mention the sorry saga of our activity in nature, could be boiled down to people pushing ahead on line, elbowing each other out of the way. It was either people from somewhere else with less money moving into the neighborhood, looking dangerously different and depressing real estate values, or, alternatively, people with more money, waltzing up the produce aisle in country-weekend designer clothes, making an ordinary head of lettuce a major investment. It was either pesticides going after bees and butterflies or deer showing up in suburban supermarket parking lots.

"We're all just passing through. We're all migrants," Marjorie offered in her standard fortune cookie style. This was the wide angle lens she tended to use when considering the larger questions.

"Not me," Peter said, lying back on the towel they had lifted years ago from a hotel in the Caribbean and zooming in on the moment. "I've got my ass on the beach and my face in the sun and I'm not going anywhere."

......This story was originally read at the open mic, IWOW, in the fall of 2015. I was developing another piece on the archetype of arrivals and departures when I consulted my files and noticed that I already had a piece entitled Coming and Going. This must mean something.

......For more on migrations of individuals, species and peoples I strongly recommend Mohsin Hamid's brilliant new novel, Exit West. mohsinhamid.com

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