Strange Fits of Passion

  "He's passed on," she said, turning to me. Unlike most large women, she stood up straight and was graceful.

  She explained: "It was a squall, and he caught his foot in a coil of pot warp when he was throwing his pots over, and he went in too. It was Veterans Day. The water was so cold he had a heart attack before he drowned. Usually they go from the cold before they go from drowning," she said plainly.

  I said that I was sorry.

  "It was years ago," she said with a movement of her hand. She paused.

  I thought that she would go on, but she moved toward the counter and looked for a light bulb in a drawer instead.

  I turned back to my view. The gulls, several of them now, swooped high into the air with their booty, like feathers in an updraft. In the silence of the kitchen I could hear what I'd been too detracted to hear earlier—the business of the day outside the cottage: the gulls cawing and calling; the swell of the waves over the pebbles, the settling of these stones in the ebb; the drone of a motor on the water; the rattling of a windowpane from a gust. The cadence in those natural sounds brought on a sudden sleepiness.

  Julia Strout finished her inspection of the cottage and came over to the table where I was sitting. She had her hands in the pockets of her parka.

  I was still wearing my scarf and sunglasses. By tacit agreement, I had not removed them, nor had she referred to them. But the scarf and glasses were cumbersome, unnecessary now. With my free hand, I unwound the scarf, removed the glasses.

  "I was in a car accident," I said.

  "I can see that," she said. "It must have been a bad one."

  "It was."

  "Shouldn't that lip be bandaged? Or have stitches?"

  "No," I said. "The doctor says it will be fine." The lie came easily, but I found I could not look at her when I said it.

  She sat in the chair opposite. She seemed to be studying me, making, I thought, a judgment of some kind.

  "Where are you from?" she asked.

  "Syracuse," I said.

  "I used to be at school with a girl from Syracuse," she said slowly. "I don't suppose you would know the family."

  "Probably not," I said, avoiding her glance.

  "You've come a long distance."

  "Yes. It feels like it."

  "There's a clinic in Machias—" she said.

  I looked up sharply at her.

  "For the baby," she added quickly. "And of course yourself, if you should need it. It's a good idea to know where to go in case of emergency."

  "Thank you," I said. I reached for my pocketbook on the table. "I'd like to pay you now. What is the rent?"

  She hesitated, as if thinking to herself, then said, "Seventy-five dollars a month."

  I thought: Even in St. Hilaire in the winter, she could get twice that. I had three hundred dollars in cash in my wallet. I calculated that if I was very careful I might be able to last at least two months before I had to find a job or figure out how to get into my bank account without anyone discovering where I was.

  Julia accepted the money, folded it into the pocket of her parka. "You don't have a phone here," she said. "I don't like to think of you here alone with the baby without a telephone. You have a problem, you'd better go up to the LeBlanc place—that's the blue Cape just before we turned in. I'm pretty sure they're on the phone. For other calls, you can come use my phone, but I'm afraid we don't have a public phone in St. Hilaire. You have to go to the A&P in Machias. There's one inside the door."

  She shifted her body in the chair and looked at Caro line. "I think you'll find St. Hilaire a very quiet place," she said.

  I nodded.

  "You'll need a crib," she said.

  "I have the basket."

  She studied the baby again. She was thinking. "I'll get you a crib," she said.

  I noticed that her glance tended to slide off my face and rest on my baby's instead.

  She stood up. "I'll be on my way, then," she said. "That is, if you don't mind running me back to town."

  "No, that's fine," I said, gathering up the baby and my keys.

  "It feels warmer in here, don't you think?"

  I did think it was warmer and said so.

  Julia moved toward the door. She looked out at the ocean. I was behind her with the baby.

  A sharp gust rapped at the glass. I glanced beyond Julia to the seascape outside. I saw the snow-covered grass, the gray-black rocks, the deep navy of the frigid gulf. The sun glinted painfully off the water now. I thought the view was brilliant in its way, but inhospitable.

  I had the impression that she was thinking about the ocean or the view, perhaps thinking of her husband, who had been lost in the gulf, for she stood at the door longer than was natural.

  I was about to speak, to ask her if she had forgotten something, when the tall woman turned, looked down at my face, then at the baby.

  "This may be none of my business," she said, and I felt my heart begin to lurch. "But whoever did this to you, I hope he's in jail."

  ***

  I am tired. It is late, but you would never know. The lights are on in the corridors, and it is noisy here, very noisy.

  I will write tomorrow and the next day, and then I will send this off to you. You will be surprised.

  I have traveled so far—farther than you will ever know. Sometimes I remember my life as it was just a year ago, and I think to myself: That can't have been me.

  We drove to town in silence, the droning of the motor or the vibrations of the car causing Caroline to drift off to sleep just seconds after we had emerged from the lane onto the coast road. When we reached the village of St. Hilaire, Julia told me to park in front of the store. She would watch the baby in the car, she said, so that I would not have to wake Caroline in order to buy supplies. It was a sensible solution to a logistical dilemma, and I accepted it as that. I put the car in neutral, left the motor running and the heater on.

  I shopped quickly, perfunctorily, trying to think of staples, composing lists in my mind as I wheeled the small shopping cart up and down the aisles. The grocer was there behind the counter, making notations in a ledger. He nodded, squinted at me with his good eye, asked if I had liked the Gateway. I told him it had been fine, that Julia Strout was renting me a cottage.

  "The cottage," he said. "The one over to Flat Point Bar?"

  "I think so," I said. "It's north of town on a small peninsula."

  "Yup," he said, satisfied. "That's the one. Tight little place. You'll be all right there. Well, well. Good for Julia."

  The groceries cost me twenty dollars. I felt my own motor revving with the car and wanted to leave the store. But the grocer seemed reluctant to let me go, as if he had questions he wanted to ask, but had to make small talk before he could reasonably get to them. I didn't want him to get to the questions, and was impatient as he slowly put the groceries into the paper bags. I suspected that he functioned as a central source of information, and that he would be expected to report on the new woman who had come to town, the new woman who wore large dark glasses at night and covered her face with her scarf. Or possibly he already knew some of the answers to the questions. Would Muriel have called Julia, and Julia, in turn, have called Everett Shedd? I thought not. I didn't know why, but I trusted Julia Strout, could not imagine her as a gossip or as a woman who would give away much of anything very easily.

  The grocer appeared not to like the arrangement of the groceries in the bags; he began to take some of the items out and then to replace them. I inhaled two long breaths to keep myself from sighing out loud. He counted my change with elaborate care. I thought of Julia with Caroline in the car. I did not want to be indebted to anyone. Before the grocer had finished with his repacking job, I whisked one of the bags off the counter and said quickly, "I'll start taking these out to the car."

  I put the groceries into the trunk, drove around to the other side of the common, and let Julia off in front of her house. There were people about now—a group of school-age children throwing sno
wballs near a war memorial, us ing the large stone monument as a fort; an elderly woman shoveling snow in the driveway of the house next to Julia's. The old woman, lost amid the woolen layers of her clothing, was bent nearly double over the shovel, her progress snail-like across her driveway. Down by the co-op on the wharf, there were capped pickup trucks in soiled rusty colors.

  Julia stepped out of the car without ceremony and repeated that someone would be by to plow the lane. I didn't like to think about how Julia had seen my face and had not believed my lie, and so spun off from the curb perhaps a little faster than was necessary. It was only near the end of the drive back to the cottage, alone in the car with Caroline, still sleeping in the back seat, that I could begin to release the crabbed muscles in my back.

  At the cottage, I lifted Caroline, basket and all, into my arms and walked with this bundle into the house. Gently, so as not to wake her, I placed the basket on the rug in the living room. As long as the baby stayed asleep, I would have time to bring in the groceries and put them away.

  This task pleased me, made sense to me in the same way that caring for Caroline often did. I placed the perishables in the refrigerator, the packages and cans in the cupboards. I looked at the dishes and the silverware. The dishes were white plastic with blue cornflowers, the kind supermarkets offer as promotions. In a cupboard under the counter, I found a cache of pots and pans and serving bowls.

  When I had finished with the groceries, I turned to examine the interior of the cottage, as if for the first time. I was thinking that it was mine now, mine and Caroline's, and that no one could tell me how to live here, could tell me what to do. I walked around the corner into the living room. The furniture was spare, even homely: a lumpy sofa covered in a frayed and faded chintz; a wooden rocker with its caned seat coming loose; a maple end table I associated with my mother's house; a braided rug, worn smooth over the years. The walls were plain, painted several times, the last coat a pale blue, but the windows were appealing—large multipaned windows with white gauze curtains at the sides. There were pictures on the walls, trivial paintings of mountain scenes, painted by amateurs for tourists, I suspected. I began to take them down, to stack them behind the sofa. I found a hammer in a kitchen drawer to remove the nails. The walls should be bare, I thought; nothing could compete with that view.

  I opened a door and walked into the downstairs bedroom. There was a single bed with a cream chenille coverlet, a tall maple dresser in the corner. The crib might fit in there, I thought, but I wondered if I shouldn't have the baby with me, in the upstairs bedroom.

  I climbed the stairs to see if there was space for the crib there. In the center of the room was a large double bed with a carved mahogany headboard. The bed was exceptionally high—I could almost sit on it from a standing position without bending my knees—and on it was a heavy white quilt, intricately pieced together with hundreds of patches in rose and green. I ran my hand over the cloth, admiring the stitches with my fingers. I tried to imagine who it was who had made this quilt and when: Julia as a younger woman, Julia's mother? The widow who had gone back to Boston? To the right of the headboard was a bedside table with a lamp. And to the left was the view—a view farther out to sea than could be seen from the lawn. I sat on the bed and gazed at the seascape through the bank of multipaned windows. In summer the gauze curtains would billow out over the bed.

  I could see the boats moored in the channel from a different perspective here—the painted floorboards, the traps stowed in the stern, the yellow slickers hanging just inside the wheelhouses. I could also see the tip of the point, with the gravel beach and the sand beach meeting at a place where the slope cut sharply into the water. To my right, south along the coast, I could make out the map of the shoreline, with a large rock jutting up through the surface of the ocean. Far out to sea, there seemed to be a momentary pinprick of light, a lighthouse, though I thought it might have been a hallucination.

  I relaxed my gaze on the horizon and let my eyes drift from the area where I had seen the light, to allow the signal, if it was really there, to come into my vision. It was then that I heard it: it was a small sound, an intrusion. I clutched the fabric of the bedspread, stopped breathing altogether so that I might hear more keenly. It was the click of a key in the lock, the sharp tread of footsteps in the hallway. He was home sooner than I had thought he would be, I was thinking. I must pretend to be asleep. I must turn out the light.

  But it was not the sound of a man in a hallway. It was merely a car, an engine straining, in the lane. I released the fabric and looked at my hands.

  I listened to the car in the lane, heard it backing up, then the sound of something hard scraping gravel or ice. It must be the man with the plow, I realized. I stood up to peer out the window, but I could not see him from there.

  In the living room, Caroline was stirring. I was distracted and busy then—changing the baby, feeding her, putting clothes in drawers. In the background was the whomp and scraping of the plow.

  I heard the truck pull into the gravel driveway. I walked with the baby to the living room window, glanced down. The truck was a rusty red pickup with a cap, much like the ones I had seen that morning at the co-op. Below the driver's-side window there was a pattern of scrollwork in flaked gold. The driver alighted from the cab. He was wearing a Red Sox baseball cap and a denim jacket that was too tight across the waist.

  He rapped at the glass. I walked with the baby to the door and opened it. He stood on the steps with a crib, staring at me, seemingly unable to move.

  Then I remembered.

  "I had a car accident," I said.

  "Wow. You all right? Where did it happen?"

  "New York," I said. "Come in. I don't want the baby to catch cold."

  He maneuvered the crib through the door. He asked me where I wanted it. I said I'd like it upstairs, in the bedroom, if he could manage it.

  "No problem," he said.

  I laid the baby in the basket and meant to help him with the crib, but he was halfway up the stairs by the time I turned the corner. I could hear the crib being opened, the sound of the casters as he shifted it into position. Then he was back on the stairs, pulling a pack of Marlboros from his jacket pocket. He was short and stocky, but he seemed strong. He made his way down the steps as though moving to an inner jittery beat.

  "Mind?" he asked as he reached the bottom step.

  I shook my head. I walked into the living room. He followed me.

  "My name is Willis, by the way," he said. "Willis Beale. I saw you in the store yesterday."

  I nodded, but we did not shake hands. "I'm Mary," I said. "Mary Amesbury."

  "When did it happen?"

  I looked at him. Instinctively, my hand rose to my face, but I lowered it.

  "A couple of days ago," I said, picking up the baby.

  "Oh," he said. "I thought it mighta been on account of the storm."

  His hands were rough, the fingernails cracked and broken. I could see, too, that his jeans were worn, frayed, with grease marks, like finger paint, along his right thigh. He walked to the large window overlooking the point and studied the view. He had a day's growth of beard and used his cupped hand for an ashtray. Despite the sense that he was in constant motion, he seemed in no hurry to leave.

  "That's my boat out there," he said. "The red one."

  I looked at the boat he was pointing to. I could see the name Jeannine on the stern.

  "Me and a couple of other guys, we use the point. The channel's deep, and that island there gives good shelter. It's faster out to the grounds from here. You can get yourself a good head start. My father, he used to keep his boat here too. So when it came my turn, I started comin' here."

  "Thank you for plowing the lane," I said, "and for bringing the crib."

  "No problem," he said, turning, looking almost startled as he again saw my face. He shivered slightly. "Cold out there," he said.

  "You should have a warmer jacket."

  "I got one; I should wear it.
But I dunno, I always wear this jacket. It's a habit. My wife, Jeannine, she's always naggin' at me, Tut on your parka.' I know, I should. She says I'll get pneumonia."

  "You might."

  "How old is the baby?" he asked.

  "Six months."

  "Cute."

  "Thank you."

  "I got two kids, four and two. Boys. My wife, Jean nine, she'd die for a girl. But we're on hold now. For a while, anyway. They dropped the price of lobster on us last summer; times is tight. You alone here or what? Your old man comin'?"

  "No," I said. "I'm on my own now."

  The now had slipped out without my wanting it to. He heard it, caught it.

  "So you left him or what?"

  "Something like that."

  "Jesus. Winter, too. You goin' to be alone through the winter?"

  "Oh, I don't know," I said vaguely.

  He reached over and tickled Caroline under her chin. He looked for a place to stub out his cigarette, could find nothing, walked over to the sink, turned on the water. He opened the cupboard under the sink and threw the butt into the trash basket. He leaned against the counter, his arms crossed over his chest. I thought he must be expecting a cup of coffee, as payment for plowing the lane. Perhaps it was the custom here.

  "Can I get you a cup of coffee?" I asked.

  "Oh, no, thanks, but I'll take something stronger you got it."

  I remembered that he had seen me buy the six-pack at the store.

  "I do," I said. "I've got some beer. In the fridge there. Help yourself."

  He opened the fridge, took out a can of beer, and looked at the label. He popped open the top, swallowed long and hard. Then he leaned against the counter again, holding the can with one hand, the other in the pocket of his jeans. He seemed somewhat more relaxed, physically calmer.

  "So are you from New York City or what?"