“Nice spot Suzanne’s getting here,” says one of the deep voices outside the window. Heard very clearly; they must have shifted their feet around now, facing the house.
“Great spot,” says the other voice. “We came up here when I was a kid and stayed at Speckled Egg Harbor, I think. Something like that.”
Polite men having their cigarettes. Just keep your feet off the glads, Olive thinks, and don’t burn down that fence. She is sleepy, and the feeling is not unpleasant. She could take a nap right here if they’d give her twenty minutes, then go make her rounds and say goodbye, clear-headed and calm from a little sleep. She will take Janice Bernstein’s hand and hold it a moment; she will be a gracious gray-haired, pleasantly large woman in her soft, red-flowered dress.
A screen door slams. “The emphysema brigade,” comes Suzanne’s bright voice, and the clapping of her hands.
Olive’s eyes flip open. She feels a jolt of panic, as if she herself has just been caught smoking in the woods.
“Do you know those things will kill you?”
“Oh, I’ve never heard that,” the man says jovially. “Suzanne, I don’t think I’ve ever heard that before.”
The screen door opens and closes again; someone has gone in. Olive sits up, her nap spoiled.
Now a softer voice comes through the window. That skinny little friend of Suzanne’s, Olive thinks, whose dress looks like a piece of wrapped seaweed. “You holding up okay?”
“Yeah.” Suzanne draws the word out, somehow—enjoying the attention, Olive thinks.
“So, Suzie, how do you like your new in-laws?”
Olive’s heart goes beat-beat as she sits on the edge of the bed.
“It’s interesting,” Suzanne says, her voice lowered and serious: Dr. Sue, the professional, about to give a paper on intestinal parasites. Her voice drops and Olive can’t hear.
“I can see that.” Murmur, murmur. “The father—”
“Oh, Henry’s a doll.”
Olive stands up and very slowly moves along the wall closer to the open window. A shaft of the late-afternoon sun falls over the side of her face as she strains her head forward to make out words in the sounds of the women’s murmuring.
“Oh, God, yes,” says Suzanne, her quiet words suddenly distinct. “I couldn’t believe it. I mean that she would really wear it.”
The dress, Olive thinks. She pulls herself back against the wall.
“Well, people dress differently up here.”
By God, we do, Olive thinks. But she is stunned in her underwater way.
Seaweed Friend murmurs again. Her voice is difficult to make out, but Olive hears her say, “Chris.”
“Very special,” Suzanne answers seriously, and for Olive it is as if these women are sitting in a rowboat above her while she sinks into the murky water. “He’s had a hard time, you know. And being an only child—that really sucked for him.”
Seaweed murmurs, and Suzanne’s oar slices through the water again. “The expectations, you know.”
Olive turns and gazes slowly around the room. Her son’s bedroom. She built it, and there are familiar things in here, too, like the bureau, and the rug she braided a long time ago. But something stunned and fat and black moves through her.
He’s had a hard time, you know.
Almost crouching, Olive creeps slowly back to the bed, where she sits down cautiously. What did he tell Suzanne? A hard time. Underneath her tongue, back up by her molars, Olive’s mouth begins to secrete. She pictures fleetingly, again, how Suzanne’s hand so easily, gently cupped that little girl’s head. What had Christopher said? What had he remembered? A person can only move forward, she thinks. A person should only move forward.
And there is the sting of deep embarrassment, because she loves this dress. Her heart really opened when she came across the gauzy muslin in So-Fro’s; sunlight let into the anxious gloom of the upcoming wedding; those flowers skimming over the table in her sewing room. Becoming this dress that she took comfort in all day.
She hears Suzanne say something about her guests, and then the screen door slams and it is quiet in the garden. Olive touches her open palm to her cheeks, her mouth. She is going to have to go back into the living room before somebody finds her in here. She will have to bend down and kiss the cheek of that bride, who will be smiling and looking around, with her know-it-all face.
Oh, it hurts—actually makes Olive groan as she sits on the bed. What does Suzanne know about a heart that aches so badly at times that a few months ago it almost gave out, gave up altogether? It is true she doesn’t exercise, her cholesterol is sky-high. But all that is only a good excuse, hiding how it’s her soul, really, that is wearing out.
Her son came to her last Christmastime, before any Dr. Sue was on the scene, and told her what he sometimes thought about. Sometimes I think about just ending it all—
An uncanny echo of Olive’s father, thirty-nine years before. Only, that time, newly married (with disappointments of her own, and pregnant, too, but she hadn’t known that part then), she said lightly, “Oh, Father, we all have times when we feel blue.” The wrong response, as it turned out.
Olive, on the edge of the bed, leans her face into her hands. She can almost not remember the first decade of Christopher’s life, although some things she does remember and doesn’t want to. She tried teaching him to play the piano and he wouldn’t play the notes right. It was how scared he was of her that made her go all wacky. But she loved him! She would like to say this to Suzanne. She would like to say, Listen, Dr. Sue, deep down there is a thing inside me, and sometimes it swells up like the head of a squid and shoots blackness through me. I haven’t wanted to be this way, but so help me, I have loved my son.
It is true. She has. That is why she took him to the doctor this past Christmas, leaving Henry at home, and sat in the waiting room while her heart pumped, until he emerged—this grown man, her son—with a lightened countenance and a prescription for pills. All the way home he talked to her about serotonin levels and genetic tendencies; it might have been the most she had ever heard him say at one time. Like her father, he is not given to talk.
Down the hall now comes the sudden sound of clinking crystal. “A toast to Fidelity Select,” a man’s voice calls out.
Olive straightens up and runs her hand across the sun-warmed bureau top. It is the bureau that Christopher grew up with, and that stain from a jar of Vicks VapoRub is still there. Next to it now is a stack of folders with Dr. Sue’s handwriting on them, and three black Magic Markers, too. Slowly, Olive slides open the top drawer of the bureau. Once a place for a boy’s socks and T-shirts, the drawer is now filled with her daughter-in-law’s underwear—tumbled together, slippery, lacy, colorful things. Olive tugs on a strap and out comes a shiny pale blue bra, small-cupped and delicate. She turns it slowly in her thick hand, then balls it up and pokes it down into her roomy handbag. Her legs feel swollen, not good.
She looks at the Magic Markers lying on the bureau, next to Suzanne’s folders. Miss Smarty, Olive thinks, reaching for a marker and uncapping it, smelling the schoolroom smell of it. Olive wants to smear the marker across the pale bedspread that this bride has brought with her. Looking around the invaded bedroom, she wants to mark every item brought in here over the last month.
Olive walks to the closet, pulls open the door. The dresses there do make her feel violent, though. She wants to snatch them down, twist the expensive dark fabric of these small dresses hanging pompously on wooden hangers. And there are sweaters, different shades of brown and green, folded neatly on a plastic quilted hanging shelf. One of them near the bottom is actually beige. For God’s sake, what’s wrong with a little color? Olive’s fingers shake because she is angry, and because anyone of course could walk down the hall right now and stick his head through the open door.
The beige sweater is thick, and this is good, because it means the girl won’t wear it until fall. Olive unfolds it quickly and smears a black line of Magic Marker down one arm.
Then she holds the marker in her mouth and refolds the sweater hurriedly, folding it again, and even again, to get it as neat as it was at first. But she manages. You would never, opening this closet door, know that someone had pawed through it, everything so neat.
Except for the shoes. All over the floor of the closet shoes are tossed and scattered. Olive chooses a dark, scuffed loafer that looks as though it is worn frequently; in fact, Olive has often seen Suzanne wearing these loafers—having bagged a husband, Olive supposes, she can now flop around in beaten-up shoes. Bending over, scared for a moment that she won’t get up, Olive pushes the loafer down inside her handbag, and then, hoisting herself, she does get up, panting slightly, and arranges the tinfoil-wrapped package of blueberry cake so that it covers the shoe.
“You all set?”
Henry is standing in the doorway, his face shiny and happy now that he’s made the rounds, now that he’s been the sort of man who is well liked, a doll. Much as she wants to tell him what she has just heard, much as she wants relief from the solitary burden of what she’s done, she will not tell.
“You want to stop at Dunkin’ Donuts on the way?” Henry asks, his big ocean-colored eyes looking at her. He is an innocent. It’s how he has learned to get through life.
“Oh,” says Olive, “I don’t know if I need a doughnut, Henry.”
“That’s all right. I just thought you said—”
“Okay. Sure, let’s stop.”
Olive tucks her handbag under her large arm, pressing it to her as she walks toward the door. It does not help much, but it does help some, to know that at least there will be moments now when Suzanne will doubt herself. Calling out, “Christopher, are you sure you haven’t seen my shoe?” Looking through the laundry, her underwear drawer, some anxiety will flutter through her. “I must be losing my mind, I can’t keep track of anything…. And, my God, what happened to my sweater?” And she would never know, would she? Because who would mark a sweater, steal a bra, take one shoe?
The sweater will be ruined, and the shoe will be gone, along with the bra, covered by used Kleenex and old sanitary napkins in the bathroom trash of Dunkin’ Donuts, and then squashed into a dumpster the next day. As a matter of fact, there is no reason, if Dr. Sue is going to live near Olive, that Olive can’t occasionally take a little of this, a little of that—just to keep the self-doubt alive. Give herself a little burst. Because Christopher doesn’t need to be living with a woman who thinks she knows everything. Nobody knows everything—they shouldn’t think they do.
“Let’s go,” Olive says finally, and she clutches her bag beneath her arm, preparing for a journey through the living room. Picturing her heart, a big red muscle, banging away beneath her flowered dress.
Starving
At the marina on Sunday morning, Harmon had to work not to stare at the young couple. He had seen them before in town, walking along Main Street; the girl’s thin hand—cuffed at the wrist by fake fur on the end of her denim jacket sleeve—had been holding the boy’s hand loosely as the two had looked in store windows with the same laconic, unqualified comfortableness they had now leaning against the railing by the stairs. The boy was said to be a cousin of Kathleen Burnham and was up from New Hampshire, working at the sawmill, though he was no bigger, and looked no older, than an adolescent sugar maple. But his eyes behind the black-framed glasses were easy, his body was easy. They wore no wedding bands, Harmon noticed, and he turned his gaze out to the bay, which was sparkling in the morning sunlight and was as flat as a coin on the windless day.
“I’m mad at Victoria,” Harmon heard the girl say. Her voice was high, and in that way sounded too loud. She seemed not to care that everyone could hear, though there were just a few of them—Harmon, two fishermen—waiting to get inside. Recently the marina had become a popular breakfast spot on Sunday mornings; a wait for a table was not unusual. Harmon’s wife, Bonnie, wouldn’t do it. “People waiting gets me anxious,” she said.
“Why?” the boy asked. His voice was softer, but Harmon, not far away, could hear it. He turned, gave them a long glance through his squinted eyes.
“Well.” The girl seemed to consider this, her mouth moving back and forth. Her skin was flawless, and had the faintest blush of cinnamon color. Her hair had been dyed to match this coloring—or so Harmon thought. Girls did brilliant things with their hair these days. His niece worked in a salon in Portland and had told Bonnie hair coloring had been a whole different ball game for years. You could make it any number of colors, and it was good for your hair. Bonnie said she didn’t care, she’d take the hair God gave her. Harmon had been sorry.
“She’s been kind of a bitch lately,” the girl said. Her voice was energetic, but ruminative. The boy nodded.
The marina door opened, two fishermen came out, the two waiting went in. The boy took a seat on the wooden bench and the girl, instead of sitting next to him, sat on his lap as though he were a chair. “Here,” she said to Harmon, nodding to the space left.
He started to raise a hand to indicate no, that was all right, but she looked at him with such open-faced matter-of-factness that he sat down next to them.
“Stop smelling me,” the girl said. She was gazing out at the water; her denim jacket with its fake fur lining in the hood caused her head to be thrust forward. “You’re smelling me, I know you are.” She made a small motion, perhaps to hit the boy lightly. Harmon, who had been looking from the corner of his eye, now stared straight ahead. In just those few moments a breeze seemed to have picked up—the bay was one long ripple. He heard the sound of an oar being tossed into a dinghy and watched as the young Coombs boy slipped the rope off the post on the wharf. He’d heard it said the kid didn’t want to take over his father’s store, that he wanted to go into the coast guard instead.
A car driving into the parking lot allowed Harmon to turn his head, and he saw the girl was sniffing herself, the shoulder of her denim jacket. “I know,” she said. “I smell like pot.”
“Potheads,” Bonnie would say, and dismiss them. Also the way the girl was sitting on the boy’s lap, she wouldn’t like that. But Harmon had the impression that everyone young smoked pot these days, as much as they had in the sixties. His own sons probably had, and maybe Kevin still did, but not when his wife was around. Kevin’s wife drank soy milk, made up baggies of granola, talked about her yoga class—Harmon and Bonnie would roll their eyes. Still, Harmon admired the vigor behind it, just as he admired the couple next to him. The world was their oyster. It was in their easiness, in the clarity of the girl’s skin, her high and strong voice. Harmon felt the way he had as a child when he’d been walking along a dirt road after a rainstorm and had found a quarter in a puddle. The coin had seemed huge and magical. This couple had the same pull on his excitement—such abundance sitting next to him.
“We could take a nap,” the girl was saying. “This afternoon. Then we’ll be able to stay up. We’ll want to, everyone’s going to be there.”
“We can do that,” the boy answered.
At the counter there was no room to read the paper, and Harmon ate his eggs and corn muffin watching the young couple, seated at a table by the window. The girl was thinner than he’d have thought; her torso—even with its little denim jacket—was no bigger than a wash-board as she leaned forward over the table. At one point, she folded her arms and put her head down. The boy spoke, his relaxed face never changing. When she sat up, he touched her hair, rubbing the ends between his fingers.
Harmon got two doughnuts in two separate bags, and left. It was early September and the maples were red at their tops; a few bright red leaves had fallen onto the dirt road, perfect things, star-shaped. Years earlier when his sons were small, Harmon might have pointed to them, and they’d have picked them up with eagerness—Derrick, especially, had loved leaves, and twigs, and acorns. Bonnie would find half the woods under his bed. “You’ll get a squirrel living in here,” she’d say, directing him to clean it out, while the boy cried. Derrick had been a pack
rat with a sentimental streak. Harmon walked along, leaving his car at the marina, the air like a cold washcloth on his face. Each of his sons had been his favorite child.
Daisy Foster lived in a small winterized cottage at the very top of the dirt road that wound its way down past the marina to the water. From her little living room you could see a small strip of the water far out. From her dining room you could see the dirt road just a few feet away, although in the summer there were the brambly bridal wreaths that flowered up against her window. Today the shrubs were twiggy and bare, and it was cold; she had started a fire in the stove in the kitchen. Earlier, she had changed out of her church clothes, putting on a pale blue sweater that matched her eyes, and now she sat smoking a cigarette at the dining room table, watching the tips of the branches of the Norwegian pine across the road move up and down just slightly.
Daisy’s husband, old enough to be her father, had died three years ago. Her lips moved, thinking of him coming to her last night in that dream, if you wanted to call it a dream. She tapped her cigarette ash into the big glass ashtray. A natural lover, he’d always said. Through the window she saw the young couple drive by—Kathleen Burnham’s cousin and his girlfriend. They drove a dented Volvo with bumper stickers all over it, reminding Daisy of the way old suitcases used to look, covered with stamped visas, back in the day. She saw the girl was talking, while the boy, driving, nodded. Peering through the twiggy bridal wreath that touched the window, Daisy thought she saw a bumper sticker that said VISUALIZE SWIRLED PEAS, over a picture of the earth.
She squashed her cigarette in the big glass ashtray just as Harmon came into sight. Harmon’s slow walk, his slumped shoulders, made him look older than he was, and just in this quick glimpse she could see how he carried within him a sadness. But his eyes, when she opened the door, looked at her with that flash of liveliness and innocence. “Thank you, Harmon,” she said, when he handed her the bag containing the doughnut he always brought. She left it on the kitchen table’s red-checked cloth, next to the other one Harmon put there. She would eat the doughnut later, with a glass of red wine.