I look steadily at Ramona and she looks back, her eyes filling with tears. “I am so sorry,” she says.
“Everything is fine, Mother,” I call back.
“Who’s there?”
“Ramona Carle.”
My mother is silent.
“He didn’t deserve you,” Ramona whispers.
I shake my head.
“Yes, he’s smart, and he can be charming, but quite honestly he is a weak man. I see that now.”
“Stop,” I say. “Just stop.”
Leaning forward in the rocker, Ramona says, “Christina, listen to me. There will be other fish in the sea.”
“No, there won’t.”
“There will. We’ll find you a great catch.”
“I have hung up my rod,” I say.
This seems to break the tension. Ramona smiles. (It was hard for her to be this serious! She isn’t constitutionally cut out for it.) “For now. There’ll be more expeditions.”
“Not in this leaky boat.”
She laughs a little. “You are as stubborn as a Maine coon, Christina Olson.”
“Maybe so,” I tell her. “Maybe I am.”
WHEN I GO to bed, I never want to get up. There’s an ache deep in my bones that won’t go away; I jolt awake in the night sobbing in pain. Nothing will ever get better. It will only get worse. I pull the blue wool blanket Papa made tighter around me and finally drift to sleep. When I wake several hours later in the astringent light of morning, I bury my face in my pillow.
Al comes into my room. I can hear him, see him, though my eyes are shut and I pretend to be asleep. “Christina,” he says softly.
I don’t answer.
“I found some bread and jam for breakfast. Sam and Fred are in the barn. I’ll bring eggs to Mother and Papa when chores are finished.”
I sigh, tacit acknowledgment that I hear him.
Behind my eyelashes I see him look down, hands on hips. “Are you sick?”
“Yes.”
“Do you need a doctor?”
“No.” I open my eyes, but I can’t rouse myself to an expression. He looks back at me steadily. I don’t remember ever holding his gaze like this.
“I would like to kill him,” he says. “I really would.”
My bed feels like a shallow grave.
I TAKE THE stack of letters from Walton, tied with their pale pink ribbon, and place them in a box. Part of me wants to set them on fire and watch them burn. But I can’t bring myself to do it.
At the top of the first flight of stairs is a small closet door on the side wall. When no one is around, I slide the box into a dark corner of the closet. I don’t want to see his letters. I just want proof that they exist.
IN TOWN NOBODY says a word about it, at least not to me. But I see the pity in their eyes. I hear the whispers: She was abandoned, you know. Their sympathy fills me with a shame so deep that I can understand why someone might sail off to a distant land, never to return to where he’s from.
GETTING READY FOR a late afternoon sail with my brothers on a warm June day, I tuck the shell Walton gave me into my pocket. On the sloop I stroke it with my fingers, probing its rough crevices and silky exterior. It’s the perfect weight and shape to nestle in my palm. Toward the end of the trip, as the sun dips in the sky, I move to the back of the small sailboat and sit alone, peering down at the scalloped water. How easy it would be to slip over the side and sink to the bottom of the ocean. Blackness, only blackness, and merciful unconsciousness. I taste the tears running down my face, salty sweet in my mouth. Before long, no doubt, my brothers will marry, my parents will weaken and die, and I will be alone in the house on the hill, with nothing to look forward to but the slow change of seasons, my own aging and infirmity, the house turning to dust.
Walton and I sat together at the back of the boat just like this. I adore you, he whispered in my ear. How devoted he was; he couldn’t get enough of me, loved only me. Only me. His solid shoulder against mine, his long finger pointing toward the sky, the constellations, all the names I learned so eagerly: Orion the Hunter, Cassiopeia, Hercules, Pegasus. I look up now at the darkening sky, as solid as slate. The stars are washed away, present only in memory.
Closing my eyes, I lean over the side, the salt spray on my face mingling with tears. I weigh the shell in my palm—this cameo shell that has no place with the others. A store-bought trinket with no history, no story. I knew, deep down, when he gave it to me that he didn’t understand anything about me. Why didn’t I recognize it as a warning?
I feel a hand on my arm and open my eyes. “Nice night, isn’t it,” Al says mildly. “Careful back here. It’s slippery.”
“I’m all right.”
He tightens his grip on my arm. “Come sit with me.”
“In a minute.”
“Did anyone ever tell you you’re as stubborn as a mule?”
I laugh a little. “Once or twice.”
We gaze out into the dusk. On the shore, faint lights glow in the windows of a faraway house. Our house. “I’ll stay here with you, then,” he says.
“You don’t need to do that, Al.”
“Wouldn’t want anything to happen. Couldn’t forgive myself if it did.”
The weight of sorrow presses on my chest. I grip the shell, feeling its blunt knobs. Then I let it slip from my fingers. It makes a small splash.
“What was that?”
“Nothing important.”
The shell sinks quickly. I’ll never have to look at it again, or hold it in my hand.
WHAT PROMISES I MAKE
1946
Hel-loo? Chris-tina?” A woman’s artificially high voice comes through the screen.
“In here,” I say. “Who is it?”
The woman pulls open the door and steps into the kitchen like she’s stepping onto a sinking ship. She’s of indeterminate middle age, wearing a worsted wool suit and stockings and pumps and carrying a casserole. “I’m Violet Evans. From the Cushing Baptist Church? We have a hospitality club, and—well—we’ve put you on our list for a stop-in visit once a week.”
My back stiffens. “I don’t know about any list.”
She smiles with aggrieved patience. “Well, there is one.”
“What for?”
“Shut-ins, mostly.”
“I’m not a shut-in.”
“Umm-hmm,” she says, glancing around. She holds up the dish. “Well. I brought you chipped beef and noodles.” She squints into the gloom. It’s late afternoon, and I haven’t lit a lamp yet. Until she came inside, I hadn’t really noticed how dark it is in here. “Maybe we could switch on a light?”
“No electricity. I’ll find a lamp if you’ll wait a moment.”
“Oh—don’t go to any bother for me. I won’t stay long.” She steps gingerly across the floor and sets the casserole on top of the range. “I spilled a little on my skirt, I’m afraid. Can you point me toward your sink?”
Reluctantly I direct her to the pantry. I know what’s coming.
“Why, this is—a pump!” she says with a little surprised laugh, just as I knew she would. “My heavens, you don’t have indoor plumbing?”
Obviously we don’t. “We’ve always managed fine without it.”
“Well,” she says again. She stands in the middle of the floor like a deer poised to bolt. “I hope you and your brother like chipped beef.”
“I’m sure he’ll eat it.”
I know she expects me to act more appreciative. But I didn’t ask for this casserole, and I don’t particularly care for chipped beef. I don’t like her haughty manner, as if she’s afraid she’ll catch a disease by sitting in a chair. And something in my nature bridles at the expectation that I must be grateful for charity I didn’t ask for. Perhaps because it tends to be accompanied by a kind of condescending judgment, a sense that the giver believes I’ve brought my condition—a condition I’m not complaining about, mind you—on myself.
Even Betsy, who understands me, is always wanting to
improve my lot. She washes the dishes with her delicate hands and puts the crockery back in the wrong places. I find the broom behind the door and the dishrag drying on the back stoop. One day she showed up with a pile of blankets and sheets and plunked them on the table in the dining room. “Let me take those old rags you sleep on,” she said. “I think it’s time you had some fresh linens, don’t you?” (Everyone knows I’m proud. Betsy’s the only one I’ll tolerate speaking to me like this.) She gathered up my bedcovers—which, it’s true, had seen better days, especially the threadbare blue blanket Papa knitted—and hauled them outside, tossing them in the back of the station wagon to take to the dump.
“Don’t worry about the Pyrex,” the woman from the Baptist church assures me. “I’ll collect it next week.”
“You don’t need to keep doing this. Really. We get along just fine.”
She leans over and pats my hand. “We’re glad to help, Christina. It’s part of our mission.”
I know this woman from the Baptist church means well, and I also know she’ll sleep well tonight, believing she’s done her Christian duty. But eating her chipped beef and noodles will leave a bitter taste in my mouth.
MOST SUMMER DAYS, around midmorning, when heat thickens over the fields like a gelatin, Andy is at the door. There’s a new intensity to his demeanor; his son Nicky is almost three years old and Betsy is pregnant again, due in a month. Andy needs, he says, to produce some work that will support his growing family.
Sketch pad, paint-smeared fingers, eggs in his pocket. He kicks his boots off and roams around the house and fields in his bare feet. Makes his way to the second floor and moves from one bedroom to another, trudges up another flight to a long-closed room. I can hear him opening windows on the third floor that haven’t been cracked in years, grunting at the effort.
I think of his presence up there as a paperweight holding down this wispy old house, pinning it to the field so it doesn’t blow away.
Andy doesn’t usually bring anything, or offer to help. He doesn’t register alarm at the way we live. He doesn’t see us as a project that needs fixing. He doesn’t perch on a chair, or linger in a doorway, with the air of someone who wants to leave, who’s already halfway out the door. He just settles in and observes.
All the things that most people fret about, Andy likes. The scratches made by the dog on the blue shed door. The cracks in the white teapot. The frayed lace curtains and the cobwebbed glass in the windows. He understands why I’m content to spend my days sitting in the chair in the kitchen, feet up on the blue-painted stool, looking out at the sea, getting up to stir the soup now and then or water the plants, and letting this old house settle into the earth. There’s more grandeur in the bleached bones of a storm-rubbed house, he declares, than in drab tidiness.
Andy sketches Al doing his chores, picking vegetables and raking blueberries, tending the horse and cow, feeding the pig. Me sitting in the kitchen beside the red geraniums. Through his eyes I am newly aware of all the parts of this place, seen and unseen: late-afternoon shadows in the kitchen, fields returned to flower, the flat nails that secure the weathered clapboards, the drip of water from the rusty cistern, cold blue light through a cracked window.
The lace curtains Mamey crocheted, now torn and tattered, blow in an eternal wind. She is here, I’m sure of it, watching her life and stories transform, as stories will, into something else on Andy’s canvas.
ONE CLOUDY DAY Andy blows through the door with a grim expression and stomps up the stairs without stopping to chat as he usually does. I hear him banging around up there, slamming doors, swearing to himself.
After an hour or so of this, he plods back down to the kitchen and sinks into a chair. Mashing his palms over his eyes, he says, “Betsy is going to be the ruin of me.”
Andy can be dramatic, but I’ve never heard him complain about Betsy. I don’t know what to say.
“She’s decided she wants to restore an old cottage on Bradford Point for us to live in. Without even consulting me, I might add. Damn it all to hell.”
This doesn’t strike me as entirely unreasonable. Betsy told me they’re living in a horse barn on her parents’ property. “Do you like the cottage?”
“It’s all right.”
“Can you afford to fix it up?”
He shrugs. Yes.
“Does she want you to help?”
“Not really.”
“Then . . . .?”
He gives his shaggy head a violent shake. “I don’t want to be shackled to a house. The way we’re living is perfectly adequate.”
“You live in a barn, Andy. In two horse stalls, Betsy said.”
“They’re fixed up. It’s not like we’re sleeping on hay bales.”
“With one child and another on the way.”
“Nicky likes it!” he says.
“Hmm. Well . . . I think I can understand why Betsy might not want to live in a barn.”
Picking at a patch of dried paint on his arm, Andy mutters, “This is what happened to my father. Houses and boats and cars and a dock that needed constant repairs. . . . You get in too deep, start hemorrhaging money, and then you’re making decisions based on what will sell, what the market wants, and you’re ruined. Goddamn ruined. This is how it starts.”
“Fixing up a cottage isn’t quite the same as all that.”
Andy narrows his eyes and gives me a curious smile. Except for my unhappiness with his portrait, I’ve never really disagreed with him. I can tell it startles him.
“I’ve known Betsy since she was a girl,” I say. “She doesn’t care about material things.”
“Sure she does. Not as much as some women, maybe. But I would never have married those women. You bet she cares. She wants a nice house and a new car . . .” He sighs heavily.
“She’s not like that.”
“You don’t know, Christina.”
“I’ve known her a lot longer than you have.”
“Well, that’s true,” he concedes.
“Did she tell you how we met?”
“Sure, she was bored one summer and started coming to visit.”
“Not just to visit. She knocked on the door one day—she was only nine or ten—and came in, and looked around, and set to work washing dishes. Then she started showing up every day or so to help out around the house. She didn’t want anything for it. She was just being . . . herself. She used to braid my hair . . .” I think about Betsy pulling the clips from my long hair and working through it with a wide comb, patiently teasing out tangles. My eyes closed, head tilted back, the sky orange inside my lids. The strands of hair caught in her brush threaded with silver. Her small hands strong and firm as she separated my hair into three strands and wove them together.
Andy sighs. “Look, I’m not saying she isn’t a lovely person. Of course she is. But girls grow into women, and women want certain things. And I don’t want to think about any of that. I just want to paint.”
“You do paint,” I say with rising impatience. “All the time.”
“It’s the pressure I’m talking about. It’s hard not to be—influenced.”
“But you aren’t. You wouldn’t be. It’s all about the work, you always say that. She always says that.”
He sits there for a minute, drumming his fingers on his knee. I can tell there’s more he wants to say that he isn’t sure how to articulate. “My father loved all that stuff, you know. The trappings of fame. It just makes me angry.”
“What makes you angry? That he valued that stuff, you mean?”
“Yeah. No. I don’t know.” He stands abruptly and goes to the window. “I was almost hit by the same train that killed him, did you know that? At the same intersection, several years ago. I was driving along, thinking about something else, and I looked up and jammed the brakes at the last second and the train went firing past. So I know what it was like for him to see that train bearing down. The horror of it. The futility of realizing there’s nothing you can do.” He hesitates, then
adds, “And I’m filled with rage. At—at losing him. Losing him too soon.”
Ah, all right, I think.
“I’m angry at losing him, but I’m also angry at the waste,” he says. “The time wasted, the energy squandered on meaningless possessions, the compromises . . . I don’t want to make the same mistakes.”
I think of the mistakes my own father made toward the end of his life. I know how the death of a parent can be both a release and a reckoning.
“You won’t.”
“I’m about to.”
“Let me make you a cup of tea,” I say.
He shakes his head. “No. I’m going back up. Rage is good for the work. I’ll pour it in. And sorrow, and love, all mixed together.” Standing in the doorway, gripping the frame, he says, “Poor Betsy, it’s not her fault. She wanted a normal life and she got me instead.”
“I think she knew what she was in for.”
“Well, if she didn’t, she does now,” he says.
1917–1922
For the first time in years, the summer days hold more hours than I know what to do with. I order wallpaper from a catalog in the Fales store and enlist Mother’s help in transforming the rooms downstairs. (If this is to be my home, let it at least be papered with small pink flowers on a field of white.) Mother persuades me to join groups I’ve previously disdained—the Friendly Club, the Helpful Women’s Club, the South Cushing Baptist Church sewing circle, with their ice cream socials and apron sales and weekly meetings. I borrow books from the library that Walton didn’t recommend. (Ethan Frome in particular, with its bleak New England winters, its agonizing compromises and tragic mistakes, keeps me up at night.) I take sewing orders for dresses and nightgowns and slips from ladies in town. I even agree to go to the Grange Hall on a Friday night with Ramona and Eloise and my brothers, though when I hear the cheerful piano and fiddle music wafting through the trees as we get closer—“Tiger Rag” and “Lady of the Lake”—I want to vanish into the woods.
As soon as we arrive, everyone disperses. “You poor dear!” Gertrude Gibbons yelps from across the room when she spots me. She rushes over and grabs my hand. “We were all so sorry to hear.”