Persons Outside Windows
by Jon Conley
Of Persons outside Windows,
The Entering takes away.
- Emily Dickinson
Thirty-three stairs wound up the side of the wooden shake beach house. To access the stairs from their parking space, the Williamses, with a week’s worth of luggage, needed to navigate a narrow corridor between a screened-in porch and a thick row of sweetshrub. The porch belonged to the guests of the first floor, at that time two young couples who fell silent with a nod while the Williamses passed. After that, a shared, outdoor shower space. One stall on the wall.
The stairs themselves were wooden and once white, painted at the start of the season but well-worn by walking and salt that late in the summer. The Williamses ascended. They wrapped around the backside of the house and rose at a sharp angle before coming to a halt on the landing. There was the door, weather-battered and wide open.
*
As the Williamses crossed the coastal highway and came into town proper, they had passed sites which seemed familiar to each of them, though neither Freida nor her father, Mister, had ever been there. Only Freida’s mother, Beth Anthony, had been to B_________ and not since she was a child. They passed the totem pole placed in the median of the main street. Its long, bearded face at the base and stretched eagle’s neck at the crown greeted everyone as they drove into town. On the right was the five-and-dime, painted yellow, frozen in time, cheap chairs and floats and cages of crabs crowding the sidewalk. Then the long-standing pizza shop where customers wore neither shoes nor shirts. On the left, the surf shop, the custard stand, the bookshop, the other custard stand.
A man walked through the heat at high noon wearing a green flannel shirt tucked into tight, dark jeans. His legs were long and straight, and his pot belly drooped over his belt buckle. He ate, with his right hand, from a small bag of chips in his left. He wore glasses and a large, gray mustache. He caught all of their eyes.
“Why would he wear that?” Beth Anthony said.
“You said some of the locals were weirdos.”
“Sure. Some.”
“Like Dean,” Mister said.
“Sure. Like Dean.”
“Who’s Dean?” said Freida.
“I didn’t know you were listening back there,” Mister said. “Banthony, tell her about Mr. Dean. You tell her everything else.”
“Not everything but okay,” Beth Anthony said. She swiveled the rearview mirror so her eyes met with Freida’s. “Mr. Dean was a guy who lived in town, year-round, in one of the units of the building where we used to stay when I was a kid. He’s probably still there.”
“Okay, but,” Freida said, “what about him? Why is he a weirdo?”
If Beth Anthony’s brief hesitance left any static in the air, it did not shock Freida. “He was just strange.”
“How.”
“Well he lived alone in a small, dirty apartment, and he always had this family come stay with him for the summer. They had four boys who all slept in one room. All those extra people.”
“Not weird,” Frieda said.
“And I think he was in love with the wife.”
“Not weird.”
“He had terrible teeth and no job, talked a lot and seemed smart.”
“Not weird, not weird.”
“He hated the ocean and the water and warm summers.”
“Huh,” Freida said. “And he chose to live here.”
“Also,” Beth Anthony said. “He would go in the ocean with his shoes on.”
“Is that weird?”
“Maybe not. But he would make a big show of it. Saying how he never went in the ocean, and then every summer he would let the kids force him. We would whine and pull on his hairy arms. He had the darkest hair on his arms, forests of it. His legs, too, in these too-short terry cloth shorts. We would beg until he’d agree. He would stand up with the kids hanging from his arms like leaves on a tree and walk into the ocean, shoes and all.”
“Did he swim?”
“No. He just stood there.”
“Anything else?” Freida said.
“They were velcro.”
But Freida had already fitted her headphones back into her ears. Mister laughed.
“Also, he was a chronic masturbator. Arrested multiple times. Public indecency. Indecent exposure. Lewd and lascivious behavior.” Beth Anthony turned in her seat. “Attempted solicitation of a minor.”
Freida removed one headphone. “What?”
“Nothing. I said if you want to try and find him, he used to hang out by the boardwalk in the very early morning, every morning, talking to the beach patrol.”
Freida returned to herself.
“That wasn’t funny,” Mister said.
“Slow down,” said Beth Anthony. “Look at all of these people.”
*
On the other side of the open door was a sweating man.
“Air conditioning,” he said. He pointed over his shoulder. “All new units. Crowley should have told you. You look surprised.”
“No, sorry,” said Beth Anthony.
“Just in time anyway. Hotter than hell,” he said. “I’ll get out of your way.”
He did. The Williamses were left standing on the little landing, looking into the open loft.
“Hot,” Mister said.
Inside, the loft was half-finished. “The bottom half,” Mister joked, but it was true. The ceiling was exposed to the teeth. The drywall came up from the floor and stopped at the pitch of the rafters. The joists rose from the darkness behind the drywall, adjoining at the peak above. Mister thought to write that down. There were two bedrooms, painted blue, with three beds between them. The bedrooms were adjoined by a Jack-and-Jill bathroom. The bathroom, painted white, had a bathtub but no shower. There was a water closet which often had large bugs in it—grasshoppers and beetles brave enough to make the climb. On the western wall of the main living space was the breaker. Beth Anthony, a realtor, was horrified to see only 50 amps.
“With the stove and refrigerator,” she said.
Mister and Beth Anthony began arranging luggage in their bedroom and did not hear the knock on the door.
Freida’s head appeared in their doorway. “Do you remember that man we saw?”
“What man?” Beth Anthony said.
“When we got here.”
“The installer.”
“No. When we got to town. That flannel guy.” Freida drifted across the hall and into her own room. She fell into bed. “He’s at the door. I’m not answering it.”
The sun was so bright that, when Mister opened the door, the man was just a shadow, and the only thing Mister could make out was a glint on a sweating forehead. It could have been a droplet or a growth glistening. Mister smelled something like vodka and garbage.
“Williams?” the man said. His voice was deep and slow and would have been sharper if it weren’t softened by the drape of his gray mustache.
“Yeah,” Mister said. “Can I help you?
“Crowley,” he said. The man pointed to his shirt where the word Crowley was printed above the pocket on the left breast. Crowley was the local real estate company that handled most of the privately-owned vacation rentals in town. They had a reputation for friendliness and efficiency. Beth Anthony had been dealing with them. The man smiled beneath his mustache. “I’m just checking that the new AC units were installed and the place was cooling down.”
“Yeah they’re installed. The guy left right when we got here,” Mister stopped to let the sound of the machines intrude. “Everything’s running.”
“I’m glad,” the man said. He then pushed his pinky into his mouth, tugging back at the corner of his lip. With a long nail, he dug at something in his molars. Mister tried to see his teeth, but the man’s mouth was a spill of ink with an oyster in the middle. He pulled his wet finger out and wiped it on his jeans. “It’s supposed to be a real hot one. Not just today but all week, so I recommend running that AC as much as you can or want. This unit gets real hot in the morning with the sun coming in from the porch side over there.” The man put both hands on the doorframe and leaned through the threshold. He nodded toward a metal door with a half window. In addition to providing an ocean view, the door opened onto a small deck. “I would close the blinds on that door, too.”
“And lose the view?”
The man shifted his lean toward Mister.
“Sun’s hot.”
Mister moved, hoping to block the man from something, but he wasn’t sure what.
“Between you and me,” the man said and lowered his voice, “there’ve been reports of a peeping tom around here, sneaking onto balconies and shit.” Here the man might have winked. “Gotta keep you and yours safe, right?”
Mister thought he smelled something on the point of turning. He thought of the oyster trapped behind the man’s lips, the oyster rubbing its ribbed edges along the insides of the man’s mouth. Before Mister could shake the image, the man slapped the doorframe.
“I’m sorry if the installer disturbed you or your family. Bad timing. But, again, glad it’s done,” the man said. He stood up straight for what seemed like the first time. He was a full head taller than Mister. “The wife and daughter settling in well?”
“Uh yeah,” Mister said. “We’re fine.”
The man then turned, trundling down the thirty-three steps.
*
The Williamses finished settling in and decided to go for a late lunch. Their rental was five blocks north of the center of town. To get there, they could walk the beach, the boardwalk, or the street. They chose the beach, which, during the day, was covered in a canopy of umbrellas.
It was densely packed, but not as packed as R________ or M________. Those beaches, a half hour drive to the north and south, respectively, were major tourist traps. It was this lucky positioning that kept B_________ so relatively sleepy.
The Williamses stuck to the shoreline while they walked. They took their shoes off and did not talk. They listened to the trills of the people and the gulls, listened to the swells of the water.
“Hey,” Freida said and pointed. “Look.”
Out at sea, a yellow float was drifting away. A young girl was attempting to follow it until the sea lapped quite literally over her head. The lifeguards scrambled from their towers and retrieved her with ease. As the spectacle of human rescue began to die down, the gathering beachgoers turned their eyes toward the float, a giraffe from the five-and-dime, on a lonesome safari. The guards, who daily swam enormous stretches, decided to take up the hunt. They swam one hundred yards but found themselves short. As they slowed, the distance continued to grow, and they were forced to turn back. They arrived on shore to the conciliatory claps of the thinning crowd.
*
The Williamses walked off the beach and into the warm lull of town.
“Let’s take the trolley,” Beth Anthony said. “For the whole loop. We can board it right there.”
At the stop were two middle-aged couples, a group of elderly women, and a few young families with small children who, at this point in the afternoon, were baked and worn. The ones who were awake looked tortured, needed everything already, had sticky skin and sticky voices. The others were finished, beet red in their strollers or over their parents’ shoulders.
The trolley itself was open on all sides and decorated with black, wrought-iron ornament, a sky-blue body, and yellow lettering. The cost was 25¢ per person, quarters only. Beth Anthony and Freida sat next to each other, Freida taking the window. Mister sat behind them, his knees pressed into the hard plastic back of the orange bucket seats.
“Town,” said Mister.
“What’s that?” Beth Anthony said.
“Nothing. Just thinking,” Mister said. He slouched into his bench, spreading his legs wide and rolling his head back.
Though the town had not changed much, Beth Anthony felt the passing of time like a gut punch. Between the ages of four and fourteen, every summer, she spent three weeks here with her mother, father, and brother. They stayed in the penthouse of a seaside rental that she had pointed out to Mister and Freida on their walk. The first three floors were divided into four units each, two with balconies facing the sea, two with balconies facing the western parking lot (one of which, on the second floor, was Dean’s). The top floor was the penthouse on the seaside and a small unit on the lot side where the owner of the penthouse lived during the summer. The owner was an old Greek named George who over the past few years, Beth Anthony heard, had been picked up multiple times by the Washington DC police, wandering around the area where he grew up with no clue as to what he had been doing there, unsure of even his name. Just this spring he died of heart failure, his chambers stretched too thin to pump.
*
The Williamses arrived back where they had begun. They took their shoes off and ate pizza before walking the boardwalk back towards their rental. It was not quite supper time, but they all agreed that they were not hungry enough for another meal today.
“I’m going up to lay down,” said Mister. “Maybe get some writing done.”
“Oh,” Beth Anthony said. “I want to stay near the water. It’s been too long. Freida, do you want to go back down to the water with me?”
“Actually,” Freida said, “can I go back?”
“Home?” Mister said.
“No. To town.”
“Sure,” Bath Anthony said. “But keep your phone on. Check in. Be back before dark.”
“Banthony,” Mister said. “That’s like four or five hours.”
“So?” Beth Anthony said. Mister turned to Freida, but she was fifty feet gone already, striding the boardwalk. “She’ll be fine.”
Beth Anthony walked toward the water while Mister went towards the rental. As he passed the first-floor patio, he could hear a man talking loudly on a speakerphone, discussing hunting rifles. Exiting the porch on the backside was a woman with a bath towel wrapped around her torso, cinched at the top by her left hand. She and Mister were right next to each other before one could see the other. Mister looked at her bare feet and ankles before looking at her face. She blanched and smiled.
“I won’t be long, if you were needing to shower.”
“No, that’s okay,” Mister said. “Have a nice day.”
“You too.”
She stepped into the stall and turned on the water. Mister started on the stairs, turned the corner, then waited a minute. There was no doubt she had removed her towel by then. He listened to the water streaming from the rough metal shower head. As soon as he could smell shampoo, he started up again. The loft was cold when he entered.
*
Beth Anthony lay in the bathtub, eyes closed, as the sun set and a storm arrived. The bathroom door opened just enough for a line of light to break over Beth Anthony’s body.
“Banthony,” Mister said. “Lightning.”
Beth Anthony agreed with a noise.
“Have you heard from Freida?”
“I’m sure she’s fine.”
Mister closed the door. In another twenty minutes Beth Anthony would emerge, wrapped in a single towel, hair wet and hanging, having taken her chances.
