The Atlantic Hotel
By
Sarah Harley
Her heart was made of liquid sunsets.
— Virginia Woolf
There’s a hotel room in my mind. White walls and narrow windows with rippling glass, tall enough to walk through like a door. I watch the light as it travels through the room, from the sea just across the street. At dusk, the sea air blows in; by nightfall, a rustle of the wind. The swinging harbor lights cast shadows across the ceiling. Eventually the room grows dark and silent. Night passes slowly through it.
On a table, there are bottles of mineral water in green glass bottles. The light goes through them, dancing before forming a mottled pool on the wall.
There are other green bottles, empty now, from the red wine that turns my mother’s lips dark and stains her teeth. I want my mother to have a pink mouth but that is not to be.
In another room, there’s a large white bed, made up with stiff white sheets and blankets. At the head of the bed, there’s a thick bolster pillow. As soon as we reach the room, my mother drags the pillow from the bed as if it’s a body she has to move. Normally, she is the one we are moving, when we find her lying on the floor, my sister holding her arms and me the feet.
She has brought her pillow from home to avoid sharing one with my father. For the time being, they continue to sleep on opposite sides of the same bed.
In the room with the large bed, there’s another window covered with white wood shutters. The early light passes through them, forming slants of parallel lines that almost touch the floor.
There’s a dressing table with a large, round tarnished mirror. There are more bottles, all light turquoise in different sizes. I can see my mother’s perfume, cobalt blue glass and metal. On the scratched wooden surface of the dressing table, there’s an old transistor radio, so my father can stay in contact with the outside world. Next to the radio is a Kodak camera. My father is the one who puts it there, inside its brown leather case. The camera contains the photographs he takes of the holiday as it is unfolding. He takes one of himself along with my sister, sitting in front of the mirror. She is wearing a red long-sleeved shirt with the buttons all done up. My father’s face is partly obscured by the camera. In the mirror, my sister is looking blankly into her own reflection, her small chin resting on my father’s shoulder. A bright flash distorts the image.
The dressing-table mirror in the hotel is one of the places where my childhood disappears.
* * *
We go to the hotel each summer, making the journey in the old broken-down navy blue Austin Maxi. When there were six of us, we all packed inside. I’m the smallest so I am always squished on someone’s lap, my mother’s or my oldest sister’s. My mother complains we are like sardines.
Our belongings are crammed inside two old suitcases.
My mother stares vacantly out of the window, wishing for it all to be over.
We take the night ferry, the roughest crossing, eight or ten hours depending on the swell of the waves. We hang our arms over the white railings, watching the land grow distant and eventually disappear. My father announces we are at sea when there is no land in sight.
We reach the ferry port in darkness. Dark shapes of cliffs are faintly visible. The waves lap against the sides of the ship. My father drives for hours and hours. Through the window, enchanted forests, Gothic cathedrals, medieval churches surrounded by stone walls. We pass through towns with names I still remember: Châteaulin, Morlaix, Quimper.
Finally, we arrive at the hotel by the sea.
The hotel faces the Atlantic, deep blue, stretching out of view. In the early morning, my sister and I tiptoe out of the hotel, running along the expanse of white sand, edged with beach grass. The mist is still rising over the sea. I watch the first light dancing across the surface of the water, catching the white crest of a wave before being dragged under.
We walk along the water’s edge, gathering shells and pebbles, and things washed up with the waves. My sister picks up pieces of beach glass, worn down from their time in the sea. The glass has lost its transparency along with its sharpness. My sister runs an edge across the fleshy part of her finger. I wait for the crimson rush of blood.
“It won’t cut you,” she says, feeling her own confidence.
I am six and she is nine.
I don’t want to return to the endless nights inside the hotel. I want to live on the beach with my sister.
“We have to go back,” she says quietly. The older she becomes, the more she adopts my mother’s resignation and remoteness, the awareness that life will never be fully lived on her terms.
My sister is like a place I am trying to find.
* * *
Back at the hotel, my parents are no longer speaking to each other. It’s yet to be determined how long this period of silence will last. My mother is taking out her feelings on the sheets and blankets, shaking the life out of them into the still air of the hotel room. Last night was not a good night. My mother swings a pale lavender checkered scarf over her hair, tying it in a small knot in the nape of her neck. She puts on the oversized sunglasses. She’s wearing a white sleeveless top and a navy blue skirt. Small feet go into smaller shoes, white sandals with a wedge heel. Then off she goes, slamming the door for good measure.
We find her later on the beach, lying on a towel, staring into the sky.
“I’m leaving your father,” she says, matter-of-factly. My sister and I nestle around her, trying to draw out the love that’s no longer going to our father. We do our best to comfort her.
“I want to be alone.”
My sister takes my hand and we walk toward the shoreline, following the line of sunshine until we reach the rocks. I think the rocks must contain their own light because they sparkle in the sunlight. We clamber over them, slick with salt spray, trying to reach the highest point. Along the way, there are rock pools, magical and fairy-like. I imagine myself as a tiny figure, standing at the edge of the rock-pool, now scaled up to be a beautiful large quarry lake. I want to live in a miniature world.
When we reach a high flat rock, shiny and green like a marble table, we crouch down to sit, crunching our knees into our chests.
From this vantage point, our mother looks like a small doll, lying motionless on her beach towel.
We watch her quietly, waiting for her to stir. Finally, she gets up, shaking the towel in the wind in the same manner she shakes the sheets and blankets. She gathers the towel, folding it against herself as she walks away, growing smaller before finally disappearing.
* * *
My mother has just learned about the affair. It’s not the first time, but she takes the news as if it was. She knows that feelings have a vanishing point, diminishing with time. My father turned out to not be a man of his words, afflicted with a longing for something always just out of reach.
I am a child so I don’t understand the pain and betrayal my mother is experiencing. That comes years later, when I see that my mother’s pain is a preface to my own.
The evenings have different ways to go, different ways to unfold.
When my father manages to placate my mother about his transgressions, we go out for the evening. We walk from the hotel to a medieval walled city, on a small island in the center of a harbor. The city is surrounded by granite walls, built to protect against invasion.
Inside the walls, we wander through stone cobbled streets, past cafes and shops filled with shiny things. Lighthouses, model wooden boats, small painted ships with tiny white sails inside bottles, closed tight with a cork. I’m allowed to buy a small, brown leather purse, with a string for wearing around my neck. I slip it over my head the moment it belongs to me. The moment comes with a feeling of being important. I’m allowed to stand by the harbor by myself, looking down into the black inky water, sunlight scattered across its surface. I am wearing the pouch around my neck. I don’t have anything to put inside it so my sister gives me a small white shell to keep. I am convinced I am wearing a protective amulet against the evening turning bad.
Later, we walk along the ramparts of the city with a view of the open blue sea, as if inside a glass domed paperweight, white particles drifting around us. Fishing boats, blue and white with rounded hulls, move through the choppy water. The sky grows dark. The fishermen cast their nets into the night. Seagulls swoop and dive around the boats, their calls echoing across the water. A single mast with a sail rises above the deck. The boats move with the waves. In the air is the smell of salt and fish.
Inside me there’s a fear deep down, a feeling without a name.
* * *
We go to a place called The Fisherman’s café. The inside is etched in my mind like a room in a doll house: small tables covered in red and white checkered tablecloths; toward the back, it grows darker, a secluded bar where the old men sit, speaking to each other in French.
Like my mother, I’m drawn to the darkness. It’s a tendency that goes through time, trying to decipher things in the darkness that should have been determined in the daylight. Letters shimmer and sway. Pernod. Chambord. Absinthe. Dark bottles in different shapes. Oval, round, tall and yellow.
My mother grips and twists my wrist hard under the table, to pull me away from staring. She glares at me in the mean way. The waiter comes to fill her wine. She drinks it down quickly. He leaves another bottle on the table.
My mother forbids me from following the path she sees me trying to take. Without knowing it, I am trying to hypnotize myself. I am attempting to flee from the night that is developing.
Small imperceptible signs indicate a coming scene.
My mother is refusing to eat, continuing the hunger strike about my father and a woman he has been carrying on with. Her eyes turn glassy. She smokes one cigarette after another, leaving it burning in the white ashtray. Smoking is one of her secret weapons against my father, known to make him upset. My father bangs both his hands on the table, making everything rattle and the glass salt shaker fall over. My mother crosses her ankles under the table, pleased with how her plan is going. She kicks off her shoes so she can walk through the streets in bare feet later.
We go back to the hotel, running after my mother who is carrying her shoes in one hand, holding a cigarette in the other. In the hotel room, the night is dark and silent. My mother goes off to a bar downstairs. My father follows. There’s a peaceful lulling sound of the sea until they come back. A door slams. Then another.
My parents fight all night in the other room, in a rising and falling cadence, off-pitch and frightening. I go faraway deep inside myself. I keep waking up with a start, kicking my legs in a bad dream. My sister is in bed next to me. She tucks a sheet around me, stroking my damp hair from my face and saying shush.
* * *
For a few years, my mother keeps a secret, a hardening in her breast. It is small at first then grows to the size of a marble. She nurtures the lump because she can use this against my father and his ways. It grows larger with the passing weeks.
Finally, she goes to the doctor who gives her the bad news in a small room. A pale glow on an x-ray screen; a shadow, stark against the lighter background. The mass is irregular and dense, absorbing all light.
There won’t be much time.
After my mother’s diagnosis, we only went back to the hotel one more time. I am twelve, my sister is fifteen. My mother has gone through chemotherapy and radiation, and a full mastectomy of the breast that contained the cancer. She is no longer herself. Her depression is so deep she no longer wants to live. By the following summer, she is gone.
During the last stay at the hotel, they argue late into the night. My sister and I have grown jaded, falling into deep sleeps. We no longer care. We are adept at tuning out the sound of their voices and the objects being thrown, glass shattering. We are shutting down. But still I wake with a start. I lie in bed, sea air coming through the room, my feet pointed towards the end, staring up at the ceiling.
Although we never went back to the hotel, I return to the room in my mind, year after year.
* * *
There’s a moment I try to relive. I am walking into the hotel by the sea. Wide steps of sparkling green granite, each one curved at the edge, leading to a shiny black front door. I open it with my left hand, using my small body to push it ajar. Through the door, there’s a black and white tile floor. Under my bare feet, the tiles are cold. The steps lead through to a shadowy hallway and a staircase.
Inside the room, everything is white. Bed sheets, walls, shutters. It’s the hotel room in my mind. I throw open the shutters, turn the sheets down, drag the bolster pillow from the bed. I pace through the room with a lightness that was missing as a child. It’s supposed to be the other way round but strangely, I feel more like a child than I did when I was young. For a moment, I stand in front of the round, tarnished mirror. Inside, it’s my mother’s face, not my own, looking back at me. I blink and the reflection turns shimmery, as in a dream. I walk backwards toward the large white bed, then fall onto it without a sound. I stare at the ceiling and think about my mother, wishing I could time travel to rescue her from the unhappiness she was living through. I realize she’s been left in the hotel room since she died when I was thirteen. A part of me, who used to have a mother, is there too. We are exiles.
I decide to check us out of the hotel.
I pack her small suitcase carefully. Sun cream, perfume, a lipstick in a gold case. I fold two dresses hanging over a chair and a black wool sweater. White sandals. A beach towel.
Together, we walk out of the double doors, painted black, across the tiled floor, down the granite steps, curved at the edge.
“Where would you like to go today?” I ask my mother. She smiles as she puts on her oversized sunglasses.
Sunlight dances across the surface of the sea, catching the white crest of a wave before being dragged under.
She takes my arm. We walk into the first light of the day.
