Excerpt from Sea Glass by Anita Shreve, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"It's a way to save," he told Honora, "for a house of our own." When they announced their engagement, no one was surprised, least of all her mother. She'd seen it in him from the very beginning. In fact, she'd said so early on to Harold--wasn't that so, Harold?--that this was a man who would get his appointment.


Honora reaches down to touch the fabric in the carton. Faded chintz, curtains after all. And something else. A framed photograph tucked into the side of the box, as if snatched from a dresser at the last minute. A photograph of a woman and a boy. Years ago, Honora thinks, studying the dress that falls nearly to the ankle.

The stairs creak some under her weight, which even with the bedding isn't much. The sound embarrasses her, as if announcing her intentions. A crystal chandelier hangs rigidly over the landing, and she sees that the ceiling of the second floor has been papered like the walls. At the top of the stairs, a sense of emptiness overwhelms her, and for the first time she feels the enormity of the tasks that lie ahead of her. Making a house liveable, she thinks. Making a marriage.

It's just the empty rooms, she tells herself. The second floor is a warren of tiny chambers, a surprise after the spaciousness of the floor below. Some of the rooms are painted pale blue; others are prettier, with printed paper on the walls. Heavy curtain rods sit naked over the windows. On the window seats are cushions--frayed and misshapen from overuse.

At the end of the hallway, she finds a suite of three rooms with a series of dormers facing the sea. In the bathroom there is a sink and a bathtub. In the bedroom she thumps a mattress with her fist, making a small cloud of dust in the salt-filtered light of the window. Why did they take the bed but not the mattress? She tucks in the sheets, crouching at the corners, and listens for sounds of Sexton below, her heart beating so erratically that she has to put a hand to her chest. She unbuttons the yellow suit jacket, only then realizing that there aren't any hangers in the shallow closet by the door. She folds the jacket inside out and lays it on the floor next to her shoes. She slips off her skirt, turning that inside out as well. She sits on the edge of the mattress in her blouse and slip, and unrolls her stockings.


The kitchen was unseasonably hot and close for late June, steam rising from the iron and making droplets on her mother's nose and brow. Her mother wore her purple cotton dress with the petunias, her low-slung weight seemingly held up only by her pinafore as she lifted the iron and set it down again on the tea cloth over the butter yellow suit. Honora sat on a chair at the kitchen table, writing labels for the canning, both of them silent, aware of change. Her mother's hair was done up in a bun with combs and hairpins, and the stems of her glasses dug into the sides of her head. On the stove, there was the white enameled pot, the funnels and the jars, waiting to be filled with spring onions and asparagus and rhubarb jam. Even at the beginning of summer, the kitchen was always awash in jars, the canning going on late into the night, as they tried to keep one step ahead of the harvest from the kitchen garden her mother kept. Honora, who hated the peeling and the preparations she was expected to do after she got home from the bank, nevertheless admired the jars with the carefully inscribed labels on the front--Beet Horseradish Relish, Asa's Onion Pickles, Wild Strawberry Jam--and the way that, later, they'd be lined up in the root cellar, labels facing out, carrots to the north, wax beans to the south, the jars of strawberry preserves going first from the shelves. But this year her mother had cut the garden back, as if she'd known that her daughter would be leaving home.


Her uncle Harold, blind and papery, couldn't walk the length of the aisle of the Methodist church and so he stood by the front pew with his niece for half a minute so as to give her away properly. She was the last child to leave the house, the boys gone to Arkansas and Syracuse and San Francisco. Her mother sat in her navy polka-dot silk with the lace collar, her comfortable weight caught primly within the dress's folds. She wore real silk stockings for the occasion, Honora noticed, and not the tan stockings from Touraine's. Her mother's black shoes, serviceable rather than pretty, were the ones Harold always referred to as her Sunday-go-to-meeting shoes. Her mother wore a navy cloche, the silver roll of her hair caught beneath it with mother-of-pearl combs.

Copyright © 2002 by Anita Shreve