Random Talisman

A short story
by Catherine J.S. Lee

Later, you will ponder the wisdom of drifting, inaction as action. But right now, it is the ebbing tide that entrances you. The current. Right now, as you look at the place where the dull sheen of ocean meets the gilded mackerel sky, you are overtaken by a feeling so vertiginous that you curl your toes into the coarse sand. Maybe it’s a matter of perspective. Maybe it’s gravity.

This sand beach (so rare a thing on this Maine coast of cliff and shingle) is nearly deserted now. The young couple in matching windbreakers blend to one scarlet blot in the distance. A crisp, salty breeze tosses the hair you pay Louis-Michel a hundred dollars a month to keep shorn into a perfect bob. Geometry disheveled. You compare this coast to Wichita, the crowds, the slow air, the humid riverbanks, and wonder why nothing ever brought you this far east before.

Against the fire-bottomed clouds beyond your right shoulder, Mount Cadillac looms. Sea ducks banner the evening sky, and the air rustles as they wheel overhead to their offshore rookery. You scuff through sand cohesive and gritty as brown sugar to the seaweed-strung tide line, squelch through kelp to the water’s edge. The Atlantic washes against the shore with a hiss like silk, cream-edged licks stopping only inches from your bare toes. You surprise yourself by wanting to get your feet wet. By wanting to become one with this mysterious northern ocean, wanting to feel what you know will be a breathtaking rush of cold around your ankles. Cold like a wave of reality washing over a fabulous dream.

You go to meet the receding tide. The first chill caress tickles your toes. The second, as you stride deeper, whacks your insteps, contracts the high arches that allow your feet to look so elegant in punishing, high-heeled shoes. The third wave grips your ankles in immobilizing frigidity. You push on. By the time the water reaches your knees, your feet are passing from ache to numbness. In contrast, despite the sharp breeze, your face and shoulders feel almost warm.

Diminishing tidal wavelets curl slowly around your calves, then around your ankles, as you stand motionless. The stiff breeze peppers your wet legs with goose bumps, and the skin on your arms roughens in sympathy. As you rub absently at one forearm, you look down, and in the dying light you see a glint of metal in the sand.

It’s a man’s wristwatch. Rectangular, rose-gold case. Dial the color of old cork. Vintage 1930s—you know this because such details form your business, shape and line, volume and color.

This watch has probably lain here for sixty years or more, buried in the shifting sand until this evening, when the tide uncovered it just for you. You rub your fingers over the leather strap. Slick and slimy, it’s relatively intact, but when it dries, it’ll probably stiffen up and crumble in your hands. You wonder if watches were waterproof so long ago, decide they weren’t. Useless, then, though beautiful.

It seems preposterous, too coincidental, that you would end up standing here at this exact spot at this exact moment when the ocean scraped the sand to reveal a hidden treasure. You draw your expensively arched eyebrows together in a little frown. Is there meaning here, some sort of dharmic significance? You sweep your fingers over the gritty surfaces of burnished gold and curved crystal, brushing away the sand. Then you clutch the case tightly. It feels like a good weight against your palm.

You think about the relationship between randomness and design, how each antagonizes but also supports the other. For twenty years, your entire adolescence and adulthood, you’ve let life come to you. Friends, jobs, lovers, never actively pursued or chosen, only accepted. You always tell yourself it’s Zen, but in truth it’s more like laziness. Even this trip east was planned by someone else.

You think about this drifting, this lack of will. On your legs, the salt water dries and crusts, itchy like a woolen blanket. You stand as still as summer fog, reflecting on the serendipitous course that led to your work as a decorator. It wasn’t planned, it just happened, an art deco room for a friend, another room for a friend of the friend, an entire apartment for a friend of the friend of the friend. Dabbling turned avocation turned career.

Why, this evening, did you take this uncharacteristic step? Going after something at last, even though it was only the sensation of cold ocean against your warm, Midwestern skin.

Your fingers tighten. The watch case cuts into your palm.

Small steps. An endless highway. The journey its own reward. You turn from the water’s edge as a big red moon shatters the dusk and turns the sea to copper.