Strange Fits of Passion

  I walked for at least an hour, maybe two. Toward evening I remembered the baby sling, endured her wrath as I dressed her and myself for the cold, and struggled to get her into the new contraption. A change of scene might save my sanity, I thought, and the fresh air might let her drift off to sleep.

  The air stung: I shielded her face in my coat. The sling allowed her weight to rest on my hip rather than in my arms, and it was such a relief to be out of the cottage, I didn't mind the cold. The sharp air was bracing, but not as bitter as it had been the day before—or perhaps the damp by the sea had taken the edge off; I don't know. I walked down the slope to the pebbled side of the spit, made my way along its expanse. My boots, even with their modest leather heel, were inappropriate for the rough surface, and the walking was slow going. I thought immediately that I would have to be careful, that I could not afford to stumble or to twist an ankle. Apart from the damage to Caroline from a possible fall, there was the total isolation of the point. Would anyone hear my shouts if I was in trouble? I looked around and thought not. The nearest cottage, a blue Cape up on the main road, was too far away to call to: I would not be heard against the white noise of the surf and wind, particularly if all the windows and doors in that cottage were tightly shut, as they must be on a cold night.

  Dusk was gathering quickly, seeming to rise in a mist from the gray gulf itself. Already I could no longer make out the horizon—only the blip of the lighthouse at rhythmic intervals. There was seaweed on the stones, some old weathered boards—driftwood—empty crab shells, bits of blue-violet mussel shells. As I passed the fish house, I could smell the lingering scent of a dampened fire. I was intrigued by the fish house. I walked over to it and peered into the windows, but I could not see much in the gloaming: two or three aluminum-and-plastic lawn chairs; a stack of slatted traps in a corner; a low wooden bench along one wall; a small, untidy fireplace. I thought about the men who gathered there during the day, imagined their voices as they sat in the stuffy warmth, mending their gear. I wondered what they said to each other, what they chatted about.

  I crossed the ridge of grasses to the beach side of the spit, enjoying the comfort of the hard sand underfoot in place of the uneven stones. I thought briefly of the honeypots that Willis had warned against, but I wasn't sure I believed in them; anyway, I reasoned, if I kept close to the high-water mark, I wouldn't step in one.

  When I reached the point, the green-and-white lobster boat had lost its color. There was a faint outline of its shape, a sense of rocking from side to side. Only a set of yellow foul-weather gear, hanging on a hook by the pilothouse, caught what was left of the light. The gear looked like a man moving with the boat—so much so, in fact, that I felt as if someone were watching me.

  I was thinking about the man Willis had referred to as Jack, and about his wife, Rebecca, who had become melancholy, when I idly stuck my little finger into Caroline's mouth for her to suck on. I sometimes did this if I thought of it, because it seemed to soothe her, but when I put my finger in this time, she immediately bit down on it, and I felt the tiny sharp surprise. That was it, then, the source of her discomfort and irritation: My daughter had another tooth, one on top this time. I could feel only a sliver of a rippled ridge in her gum; I couldn't see the tooth in the darkness. She looked up at me and smiled. She seemed almost as relieved as I was that I had solved her mystery. I remembered then that I didn't have any baby aspirin with me. I wondered what the women of St. Hilaire used when their babies teethed—a sluice of brandy along the gums, a frozen crust of bread to gnaw on, or the prosaic baby aspirin I'd have used if only I had thought to buy it at the store?

  I heard a motor on the lane. I turned to look back in the direction from which I'd come, but darkness had fallen so swiftly I could no longer see the cottage, only a flicker of headlights as a vehicle bounced along the dirt road toward the beach. I thought it might be Willis, wanting company—perhaps thinking to try his luck again now that it was evening and I'd been softened by an entire day alone with the baby. But when I saw the headlights make their way steadily along the beach, I was inexplicably frightened, as though I were trespassing and would be caught or scolded. I was standing just south of the point; the truck was moving along the northern edge of the spit. I was sure the headlights would soon pick me out, but the truck stopped just short of where it would have found me. The driver left the headlights on and got out of the cab. He still had on his yellow slicker; you could see that right away. I stood motionless behind a small hillock of sand. I put my finger in Caroline's mouth to keep her from crying, but it wasn't necessary; she had finally fallen asleep.

  I watched as the man called Jack walked along the sand to his dinghy. He bent into the boat to retrieve a metal box, like a toolbox, but as he straightened up, he seemed to hesitate. He laid the box on the edge of the dinghy and bowed his head, as if thinking for a moment. He replaced the box in the boat, walked back to the truck, and turned off the headlights. I was puzzled. I could barely see him now—just a hint of a yellow slicker moving across the sand to the dinghy again. He got inside and sat down. He didn't move.

  I could have turned and walked back to the cottage along the gravel beach. He'd have heard me, but I'd have been walking away from him by then, and there'd have been no need to call out to me or to speak. I could have done that. But I didn't.

  I stood at the edge of the point, cradling the baby, my finger in her mouth. I was watching the man in the dinghy—only a suggestion of yellow against the black of the sand and the water. The natural light, what little remained, was playing tricks with my eyes. Already it was impossible to tell where the water met the shore, and I was no longer sure I knew where the truck was parked. The man lit a cigarette. I could see the sudden flare of the match, the red ember.

  I stood and he sat for perhaps five minutes. I don't know what I was thinking then; I was just watching, trying not to think. I did not consciously decide, yes, I will speak to him; I did not have a reason to speak to him beyond a vague curiosity or wonder about what his life was like, with his wife and his children and his boat. Possibly I felt that I wanted to dispel the image of trespassing, that I didn't like the image of myself sneaking away. I crossed over the hillock to the northern side of the point, walking toward him, saying as casually as I could—as if it were noontime, summer, and I were having a stroll on the beach with my daughter— hello, as I walked.

  I startled him, I could see that. He'd been far away, or he was surprised to see another human being. Probably, I thought, he was used to having the point to himself, had forgotten there was a car at the cottage.

  He stood up, stepped out of the dinghy, faced me. I said hello again, and I think he must have answered me or nodded.

  I walked close to him. Now that I had intruded upon him, I had to let him see me—though I must have appeared to him as only a gray shape in my coat and scarf.

  My first impression of him is distinct and clear. I am not overlaying this with later images, seen in the sunlight, or by firelight or at daybreak. His face was angular, and I was aware that he was taller than I'd thought. There were deep lines running from his nose to the bottom of his chin at either side of his mouth, but I didn't think these were from age, even though he looked as if he was in his forties. They were from weathering; his face was weathered. You could see this even in the darkness: the roughened skin, the wrinkling at the eyes. His hair was average length and curly. You could not see the true color in the darkness, but I knew already it was the shade of dry sand. He wore an off-white Irish knit sweater underneath his slicker; there was a hole unknitting itself where his collarbone would be. He threw his cigarette onto the sand.

  "You've got a baby there," he said. His voice was deep and slow, hesitant, but he didn't sound surprised. He had a bit of the Maine accent; it was in the lilt of the words and in his vowels. But he spoke more like Julia Strout, his cousin, than Willis Beak.

  I looked down at Caroline.

  "She was teething—I just discovered th
at—and I was trying to get her to stop crying, so I brought her out for a walk in the sling."

  "Looks like it worked," he said.

  "Yes," I said. I smiled. "I've taken the cottage there."

  That seemed to register. He looked in the direction of the cottage.

  "I heard someone was there, and I've seen your car."

  We didn't tell each other our names, and we didn't shake hands. Why? I thought at the time it was merely economical, as if we imagined we would not know each other long, or at all.

  "I've seen you," I said. "And your boat."

  "I bring it into town if we get some weather. Otherwise, I leave it till mid-January. We sometimes get a thaw in early January."

  "Oh."

  "Cold tonight, though."

  "But you went out today."

  "I did. Didn't get much for my trouble."

  "Willis Beale was delivering some fish when we saw you come in. He said he thought you were crazy to go out today."

  He made a sound, a sort of laugh. "Willis," he said, as if I shouldn't pay much attention to Willis. But I already knew that.

  He was glancing out to where he'd have seen his boat if there were any light left, and I was looking at the side of his face. Ravaged, I remember saying to myself, by the elements or by something else. What was it about the face? The eyes—they were old eyes, or were merely tired. Yet I was drawn to his face, its shape, the sense of calm around the mouth, or what I took to be calm in the dim light. His body was lean, but you felt its weight, as if it were anchored to the sand. Or its stillness. I had a feeling of stillness when I watched him, when he moved.

  A breeze came up, blew a strand of hair across his brow.

  "I have to put her to bed," I said, shielding Caroline's head with my arms.

  "Getting late," he said.

  He bent down to retrieve the toolbox from the dinghy. I walked away.

  We didn't say, "So long now," or, "Nice meeting you."

  I was halfway down the beach when I heard the motor of the truck start up. For a minute I was walking in its headlights, conscious of my back in the headlights, and then they were gone, veering up the lane. I stopped to watch the progress of the truck, the jostling of the light on the rough dirt, the left turn onto the coast road, the swath of light moving south toward town.

  There was a rhythm to my days. It established itself before I had even become aware of it, an insistent pattern pushing at the edge of my consciousness.

  Each day I woke with the low rumbling of a motor on the lane. There would be just a hint of gray beyond the window, the first sign of daybreak. I would listen as one or several trucks made their way down the sand, and after a time I began to be able to recognize the sounds of routine: a truck door shutting, the dragging of an object along a truck's metal bed, the small splash as a dinghy was put into the water, the creak of wood under a man's weight, the slap of a wake against a larger boat. And then the other motor would start up, grumble a bit as if it wanted to quit, and there would be the quiet whine out to silence as a boat moved away from the mooring.

  Each day I made the high double bed. I smoothed the sheet, drew up the quilt. There was about these gestures a monastic purity, a return to the single self. If the baby was not awake yet, I would go down to the kitchen and make myself a cup of coffee and sit in my nightgown and sweater at the table and watch the water change its colors as the day began.

  At first I was unable even to read. I had the books, but for days they lay unopened on the table. I wanted just to look.

  It was winter, the dead of winter, when everything was dormant, and yet I was continually surprised by the constant mutability of the landscape. Sometimes the tide would go out so far that what sea was left was only puddles. At other times, when the tide was high, the spit in front of me would seem to have shrunk to a spindle.

  I knew so little. For the first few days, I couldn't predict the tides at all; they were a constant surprise. I somehow always had it wrong. I could spot the gulls, but there were other birds I had never seen before. Sometimes I thought I saw seals, I was sure of this, and yet when I'd look again, the dark hump I'd thought was a seal was only a rock with the water lapping against it.

  I had my chores, of course. I took to washing the clothes by hand, boiling the diapers and putting the wash out on a line behind the house. I liked the way our wash looked—the tiny undershirts and my jeans whipping in the breeze.

  There was industry all around me, and perhaps I took my cue from that. How could I be idle when every morning men came to the point to mend their broken pots and traps or go out onto the water? First there would be the trucks, then the sound of a boat's engine or a curl of smoke from the fish house. There might be three trucks on the point, or four. From time to time, I'd hear a voice or a bit of music, sometimes a shout and then a laugh. And in the early afternoon, I'd see the green-and-white lobster boat come from behind a pine-darkened island. This would be a milestone in my day, a mark of punctuation, and I never failed to watch the man in the yellow slicker perform his returning ritual.

  But when the black truck had gone back up the lane, the day would seem to lose its momentum. The rhythms I had heard and understood and counted on disappeared, and those hours until darkness were somewhat harder for me to negotiate. I tried to fill them with a drive or a walk or a nap. But I understood that these were gestures of defiance, skirmishes against empty time.

  Eventually, in the second week, I established a routine that suited me, that didn't feel at odds with the world around me. I bought a few skeins of yarn and began to knit, a sweater for myself and one for Caroline. In the mornings, when the baby napped, I would knit. My mother had taught me how when I was a child, but I hadn't taken it up again since I had moved to New York. I felt it as a link to her, to something she had given me, translated now into something I could give my daughter. I liked also the sense of working with my hands—a kind of counterpoint to the men working around me.

  I called my mother once a week on Saturdays, from the A&P in Machias. It was a habit we'd established, and I knew she'd be alarmed if she didn't hear from me. I didn't tell her where I was or what had happened. I pretended everything was fine.

  Willis came by almost every day, on one pretext or another. He might have fish for me or want to warm up in the kitchen. Once he had whittled a small wooden figure for Caroline. Each day he took a seat at the kitchen table. He would look at my face. The bruises were healing, I knew, and didn't appear as raw as they had when I had first come to the cottage. But when he examined me, I would look away.

  I almost always let him in, from politeness if nothing else, and he seldom stayed long. I think he felt proprietary toward me. He never asked again if we could "fool around," as he had put it that day, but the question always seemed to be in the air: If he was persistent enough, would I not change my mind?

  You will perhaps wonder why I permitted these visits and I sometimes ask myself that too. I believe I didn' want to alienate Willis—or anyone else from the town, for that matter. Nor did I want to draw attention to myself any more than I had to. I think I hoped that Willis would grow tired of my lack of response and stop coming.

  After Willis had left, I would feed the baby and then make a lunch for myself. Usually I'd done my chores by noontime. Then I'd go out with the baby. If the day was reasonable, I'd put Caroline into the sling, and we would walk to the end of the point and back, or south along the rocks. I had bought for myself, on one of my forays into Machias, a pair of sneakers so that I could make my way better along the stones. Sometimes I'd look for things: smooth mauve pebbles one day, pure white shells the next. There were jars and cups of stones and shells collecting on the sills in the cottage.

  After a walk, I'd put Caroline into the car, and we would drive into St. Hilaire. I shopped every day at the store there, selecting in the early afternoon what I would have for supper. I learned to weather the baleful glass eye, the small talk, and the questions—even, after a time, to look forwa
rd to them, a tenuous thread of connection to the town.

  Two days a week, when it was open, I'd go to the library. I'd begun finally to read, and once I'd begun, I became hungry for more books. I read in the evenings and long into the nights, sometimes devouring a book a day. I hadn't ever had this kind of time, it seemed to me, and the books were a luxury I'd rediscovered.

  The library was a poor one, I suppose, as libraries go—there wasn't much new in it—but it had the classics, plenty to keep me occupied. I read Hardy, I remember, and Jack London, and Dickens and Virginia Woolf and Willa Cather.

  I looked forward to walking into that small stone building. There was a woman there, a Mrs. Jewett, who balked at first when I requested a library card, since I was only renting, but finally, after much wheedling from me, she gave in. An extraordinary reticence on her part, now that I think of it, since I was almost always the only visitor she had, and I know that she looked forward to these visits.

  Eventually I took to going around to Julia Strout's for a cup of tea. Yes, I was sometimes lonely—even if I savored my solitude: an odd paradox—and it was this loneliness, after a long spell of gray days in the second week, that prompted my first visit to the tall woman with the gapped teeth. I'd come out of Everett's store and seen Julia Strout's house across the common. I thought: I could just stop by on a pretext—the kitchen faucet leaked? I needed extra blankets?—but when I climbed her porch steps with the baby in my arms and knocked on her door, pretext left me, and I said, when she answered, her eyes momentarily startled but her face not giving away much of her surprise, that I'd just come by to say hello.