A Piece of the World

  After some time, I hear the familiar clacking of the old Ford engine up near the house. The motor cuts off. I twist around to see Al climb out, go around to the other side, open the passenger door. Out steps a slim smiling woman with light brown pin curls.

  Estelle—it must be. My stomach lurches. He did not mention a word to me about bringing her here.

  “Well, look at that,” John says. “Al’s got a girl.”

  Here they come, now, down the path, Al in front, grinning shyly, wearing a crisp white shirt I’ve never seen before, the woman behind in a blue dress, sure-footed, laughing, dimple-cheeked, swinging a basket in one hand and a straw bonnet in the other. I want to run away, but I can’t. I am caught like a fox in a trap, squirming, panicked, stuck.

  “Beautiful day, isn’t it?” Al says. As if we were acquaintances running into each other at the hardware store.

  “Sure is,” John says.

  I gaze at Al steadily, saying nothing.

  Color creeps up his neck. He clears his throat. “Christina, this is Estelle. I think I told you I’ve been doing some work for her father.”

  “There’s work that needs to be done at our house,” I say.

  Estelle’s smile fades.

  “How about we head down and see the others?” Al says to her.

  She looks at him, then inclines her head toward me and John. “Nice to meet you,” she says in a tiny voice.

  “Likewise,” John says.

  They turn and pick their way down to the rocks.

  John cracks his knuckles. “Well, guess I’ll grab another slice of rhubarb pie.”

  I nod.

  “You okay, Aunt Christina?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Can I bring you anything?”

  “No, thank you.”

  When John goes back to the clambake, I watch Al and Estelle, smiling and chatting and pointing at a sailboat, accepting plates of food. I sit glowering above them like a hot coal.

  Lora clambers up to sit beside me, then my brother Fred, bearing offerings from below: an ear of corn, still warm in its charred green husk, a bowl of clams, a slice of blueberry cake. I shake my head. No. I will not eat. Their voices falsely cheerful, they exclaim over the blue sky, the glassy water, those delicious drop biscuits, what a lovely dress.

  It was on this very bank that I sat with Walton—how many years ago? I know what everyone is thinking. Poor Christina. Always left behind.

  I feel myself battening down, fortressing.

  Sam climbs up and sits on the grass beside my chair. “What’s going on?” he asks, patting my knee.

  I look down at his hand on my knee and then at him. He removes his hand.

  “Nothing’s going on,” I say.

  He sighs. “This is no good, Christina.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You are ruining this picnic.”

  “I’m doing no such thing.”

  “You are, and you know you are. And you’re making Al very unhappy.”

  “If he’s going to bring that—that gold digger—” I blurt.

  Sam puts his hand over mine. “Stop. Before you say something you’ll regret.”

  “He’s the one who’s going to regret—”

  “Come on,” he says sharply. “Don’t you think Al deserves to be happy?”

  “I thought Al was happy.”

  He sits back on his heels. “Look, Christina, you know that Al has always been here for you. And he always will be. To begrudge him this—this relationship feels a little . . . well . . . mean-spirited.”

  “I’m not begrudging him anything. I’m just questioning his judgment.”

  Sam sits with me a minute longer, and I know he wants to say more. The words are sitting on his tongue. I can guess what they are. But he seems to think better of it. He pats my knee again and stands up, goes back to the others.

  A few minutes later Al and Estelle climb the bank and up to the Ford, looking away when they pass me. Even the children seem wary, giving me a wide berth as they play their games in the grass. Within the hour Lora and Mary are packing up blankets and putting food into hampers. When they pick me up and help me into the car, they don’t say much, but their faces are grim.

  Mary and Lora settle me into my chair in the kitchen and go back to the car for some foil-covered leftovers—“to tide you over for a few days,” Mary says. After carefully placing the dishes in the icebox under the floorboards, she gives me a small strained smile. “You’re all set?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Well. Happy Fourth.”

  “Happy Fourth,” Lora echoes.

  I nod. None of us seem very happy.

  After they leave, I scoop Lolly into my lap. I notice that the geraniums have wilted in their blue pot with the crack running up the side. The fire in the range has died out. The air is damp, rain is on the way. And all at once I have the peculiar sensation of watching myself from above, in the same spot where I have sat nearly every day for the past three decades. The geranium, the cracked pot, the cat in my lap, the fire that must be fed, rain on the horizon, the road to town in one direction and the St. George River in the other, stretching all the way to the sea.

  I don’t know how much time has passed when I hear Al’s car crackling up the drive. The door creaking open, slamming shut. Footsteps to the kitchen stoop, the squeak of the screen door.

  He flinches when he sees me. “Didn’t know you were in here.”

  “Yep.”

  “It’s dark.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “Want me to light the lamp?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  He sighs. “Well, okay, then. Guess I’ll turn in.” He hangs his cap on the hook beside the door and turns to leave.

  “She’s been married three times,” I say. My heart is thumping in my chest.

  “What?”

  “Did you know that?”

  He inhales sharply. “I don’t think—”

  “Did you know that, Al?”

  “Yes, of course I know that.”

  “And I hear she’s . . . ambitious.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Her motivations are questionable. I’m told.”

  He winces. “Who told you that?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say.” I know I’m hurting him, but I don’t care. I like the sharpness of the words. Each one of them a dagger. I want to wound him for wounding me.

  “What ‘motivations’ could Estelle possibly have?” he says quietly, hands on his hips. “I have nothing to offer. Except myself.”

  “She probably wants this house.”

  “She doesn’t want this house!” he spits. “Nobody wants this house. I sure don’t.”

  I feel like I’ve been slapped. “You can’t mean that. We have a responsibility. Our family . . . the Hathorns. Mother—”

  “Mother is dead. To hell with the Hathorns. And damn it, we should’ve sold this house when we had the chance. It’s become a prison, can’t you see that? We’re inmates. Or maybe you’re the inmate and I’m the warden. I can’t do this anymore, Christie. I want a life. A life.” He slaps himself on the chest, a dull thwack. “Out there in the world.” He sweeps his arm toward the window.

  I don’t think I’ve ever heard him string so many words together at a time. I hold my breath. Then I say, “I never knew you felt that way.”

  “I didn’t used to. But now I see . . . I see that maybe things could be different for me. You know what that feels like, don’t you?”

  Al has never spoken to me so directly. I think I’ve assumed he didn’t feel things as deeply as I do—but obviously I was wrong. “That was a long time ago. This is different.”

  “Why? Because it’s not about you?”

  I flinch. “No,” I snap. “Because we’re older. And this is where we belong.”

  “No, it isn’t. It’s just where we ended up.”

  His voice sounds choke
d. I think he might be crying. I’m crying too. “So what about me? I’ve spent my whole life cooking and washing and cleaning for this family. And now you’d just—throw me out with the trash?”

  “Come on,” he says. “Of course not. You’d be welcome with me wherever I go, you know that.”

  “I’m not a charity case.”

  “I never said that.”

  “This is my home, Alvaro. And yours.”

  “Christina . . .” His voice is weary, leaden. By the time I realize he isn’t going to say anything further, he has already left the room.

  IN THE MORNING I wake to silence. My first thought is: Al is gone. But when I look out the window, I see the Ford in the same place where he parked it last night. I go about my morning routine as usual, and as usual Al comes in from the barn for the noonday meal. He doesn’t say a word until he clears his plate, and then he says thank you and heads back outside. As I’m setting newly churned butter in its earthenware pot in the shed, my eye is drawn to the dory, high in the rafters.

  We should’ve sold this house when we had the chance. You’re the inmate and I’m the warden. The words hang in the air between us. But as long as neither of us mentions them, we can pretend they were never said.

  For the next few months, each morning when I wake up, I think he’ll be gone.

  Al doesn’t bring Estelle to the house again. He doesn’t speak her name. One day Sadie casually mentions that she heard Estelle met a man with two kids and moved to Rockland.

  Over time, Al and I settle back into our old ways. But he is changed. A bird flies into a windowpane on the second floor, breaking the glass, and instead of fixing it he stuffs a rag in the hole. He leaves the old Model T to rot behind the shed. He rarely cleans out the woodstoves anymore, just shoves the ashes back to make room for new logs. Long winters strip the white from the house, exposing gray boards underneath, and he doesn’t bother to paint. One after another the fields go fallow, farm equipment abandoned to rust. Within a couple of years, Al is farming only one small patch.

  It’s as if he has chosen to punish the house and land for needing him. Or maybe he’s punishing me.

  CHRISTINA’S WORLD

  1948

  In the middle of the field the earth smells like sourdough. Each sharp blade of grass is separate and distinct. Dainty yellow cowslips hang on their stems like tiny wilting bouquets; a yellow-and-black tiger swallowtail butterfly hovers overhead. It’s a mild May afternoon, and I’m on my way to visit Sadie in her cottage around the bend. She offered to come and get me in her car, but I prefer to make my own way. It takes about an hour to get there, pulling myself along on my elbows, hitching my body forward. My cotton knee pads are frayed and grass stained. This close to the ground, the only sound is my own rough panting and the chirp of crickets. Blackflies circle, nipping my ears. The air tastes of salt and lavender and dirt.

  I can’t walk at all anymore. My chair has worn a deep groove into the kitchen floor between the table and the Glenwood range. I will not use a wheelchair. So I have a choice: I can stay inside, in the security of the kitchen and my pallet on the dining room floor, or I can get where I need to go as best I can. That’s what I do. Once a week or so I visit Mother and Papa, crawling through the yellow expanse of grass to the family graveyard where they are buried, overlooking the sound and the sea. On mild afternoons I take a small pail with me and pick blueberries. I like to rest in the grass and watch the fishing vessels as they pull away from Port Clyde, out past Monhegan Island and into the open ocean.

  When I arrive at Sadie’s, she’s on the front porch waiting for me. “Mercy,” she says with a wide smile. “Look at you. I’ll bet you could use a glass of iced tea.”

  “That’d be nice.”

  Sadie disappears inside the cottage while I drag myself up the steps and lean against the wooden railing, breathless from the effort. She comes back out with a bowl of berries, a pitcher of iced tea with mint, two glasses, and a wet washcloth on a large tray.

  “Here you go, my dear.” She hands me the cool cloth. “So glad you came for a visit, Christina.”

  “It’s a lovely day, isn’t it?” I say, wiping my face and neck.

  “It surely is. I hope we have a temperate summer like last year, not like the one two years ago. Remember that? Even nighttime was miserable.”

  “It was,” I agree.

  Sadie and I don’t talk about much. A lot of our time is spent in companionable silence. Today the water in the cove shimmers like broken glass in the late-afternoon sun. The lilacs beside the porch smell like vanilla. We eat the raspberries and blackberries that she plucked earlier in the day, and drink the iced tea, the cool tingle of mint leaves slipping into our mouths like wafers.

  The older I get, the more I believe that the greatest kindness is acceptance.

  ANDY HASN’T ASKED me to pose since I complained about the portrait in the doorway. But one mild afternoon in early July, out of nowhere, he comes into the kitchen and says, “Will you sit for me in the grass? Just for twenty minutes. Half an hour at most.”

  “What for?”

  “I have an idea in my head, but I can’t envision it.”

  “Why not?”

  “I can’t get the damned angle right.”

  He knows I don’t want to. I feel shy, self-conscious. “Ask Al.”

  He shakes his head. “Al’s done posing, you know that.”

  “Maybe I am too.”

  “You’re always posing, Christina. It’s not as hard for you.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Al is restless. You know how to be still.”

  Patting the arms of my chair, I say, “Let’s face it, Andy, I don’t have much choice.”

  “That’s true, I suppose. But it’s more than that.” He strokes his chin, thinking. “You know how to be . . . looked at.”

  I laugh a little. “What an odd thing to say.”

  “Sorry, that does sound odd. What I mean is I think you’re used to being observed but not really . . . seen. People are always concerned about you, worried about you, watching to see how you’re getting on. Well-meaning, of course, but—intrusive. And I think you’ve figured out how to deflect their concern, or pity, or whatever it is, by carrying yourself in this”—he raises his arm as if holding an orb—“dignified, aloof way.”

  I don’t know how to respond. No one has ever spoken to me like this, telling me something about myself that I didn’t know but understand instantly to be true.

  “Right?” he says.

  I don’t want to give in too soon. “Maybe.”

  “Like the queen of Sweden,” he says.

  “Come on.”

  He smiles. “Ruling over all of Cushing from your chair in the kitchen.”

  “You’re just teasing me now.”

  “I swear I’m not.” He reaches out his hand. “Pose for me, Christina.”

  “Are you going to make me look like death warmed over?”

  He laughs. “Not this time. I promise.”

  AFTER ANDY LEAVES the kitchen to get his painting supplies, I slide off my chair, pull myself along the floor to the open door, and winch down the steps to a shaded spot in the grass. It feels cool and springy under my fingers. I rest there, waiting, propping myself on my arms. When Andy comes to the doorway and sees me, he squints. Walks down the steps and circles me slowly, cocking his head. Directs me: “Like this. Tucked under. Leg back.” I feel like a heifer at the livestock fair. He has a pencil in one hand and the sketch pad in the other. Then he opens the pad, settles with a grunt on the stoop ten feet away, and starts to draw.

  After a while, my back starts to feel sore. I say, “It must’ve been at least an hour already.”

  “It’s not so bad, is it? Out here in the sunshine?” Andy looks at me and back at the pad, sketching.

  “You said twenty minutes.”

  Holding the piece of charcoal aloft, he gives me a big smile. “Come on, Christina. You know a boy will say anythin
g when he’s trying to seduce you.”

  “That’s for sure.”

  He raises his eyebrows.

  I don’t say anything more.

  A few minutes later he says, “Hey, where is that pink dress? The one you wore to John’s wedding?”

  “In the hall closet.”

  “Would you put it on?”

  “Right now?”

  “Why not?”

  I’m tired. My legs are throbbing. “We’ve already been out here longer than you promised. This is enough for today.”

  “Tomorrow then.”

  Though I roll my eyes, we both know I’ll agree.

  Early the next morning, I ask Al to get the pink cotton dress from the closet. He lays it on the dining room table and I shoo him out of the room before wriggling into it and pulling it down over my hips, then call him back in to fasten the buttons. When he’s done he says, “I always did like that color.”

  Al’s not one for compliments. This is as good as it gets. I give him a smile.

  When Andy appears in the distance an hour later, I watch from the kitchen window. He makes his way up the hill with his tackle box, hitching one leg forward, pivoting slightly, grunting with the effort, and I find myself oddly moved by his sweet mix of bravado and vulnerability.

  Strangely, my hands are clammy. Like a girl waiting for her date.

  “Oh, Christina!” He gives a low whistle when he comes through the door. “You are—marvelous.”

  Despite myself, I blush.

  “It’s a nice day to be outside. Let’s get something for you to sit on so you’ll be more comfortable.” He sets his tackle box on a chair. “I saw a pile of quilts in one of the front bedrooms.” He disappears upstairs, emerging a few minutes later with an old double wedding-ring I made over one arm and his rickety easel and sketch pad under the other. “I’m taking these outside. Shall I come back and get you?”

  “Well . . .” Ordinarily I would say no. But dragging myself down the steps and across the grass in this dress might ruin it. “I suppose.”