Seventeen Against the Dealer

  Working, she knew what she was going to do. On Sunday night she wrote to Claude, telling him that she was giving up the shop, assuring him that the work she’d contracted to do for him would be finished by the end of the month, apologizing for such short notice. She didn’t offer Claude any option to charge her March’s rent. If she offered, he’d take it, and Dicey had better use for the money she’d earned. Things came up, like illness or tennis camp; she needed to save up her money against the things that might come up.

  The dinghies she was storing she would move into the barn at home. The larch she’d try to sell—maybe put an ad in the paper. She had about enough money to pay for an ad. Until she sold it, she’d store that, too, in the barn.

  Once she’d finished this job for Claude, she’d go looking for work for herself. She had a lot to learn. Maybe she’d just spend her whole life learning from the mistakes she’d keep on making. Maybe there wasn’t anything you could do about that, except to make sure you learned.

  By Tuesday evening she’d finished the last coat on the last of that batch of boats. She rode home feeling pretty good: That made twenty-four done, with only six to go. The only question was, should she do the final six in the same grouping of four, leaving just two at the end, or should she split them three and three, making two smaller jobs? She thought about that, pushing the pedals of the bike around and around, watching her own breath blow white out of her mouth. She could feel her pulse, the steady beat of her blood. She felt, riding her bike along the quiet road between the hibernating fields, how her inner time fit into the flow of the day around her, outer time, how her lifetime fit into geologic time, how time washed all around her, as complex as a symphony, all the different instruments time played on, all fitting together. Harmony, that was the word.

  As soon as she thought that, Dicey felt the differences of her knees jerking up to push down, her feet pushing back and forth on the pedals, her shoulders forcing her hands to force the handlebars steady . . . She felt out of sync.

  She was out of sync. Probably everybody felt out of sync, if they started to think about it. That feeling might even be part of the harmony. Dicey rode along, pedaling, pedaled along, riding—and she discovered that she had decided not to sell the larch. Not even for money, not even for cash money being held out to her. Because she was going to build her boat, build it for herself. She turned into their rutted driveway, slowing down, gripping the handlebars firmly and rising off the seat to keep better balance as she bounced toward home. There was every likelihood that the boat she built would sink, or list uncontrollably, even if she got it far enough along to put it into the water.

  Never selling a boat, that wouldn’t be bad. But never building one, that would be the real failure.

  “I got a seventy-one and a quarter,” Maybeth greeted her, turning around from the pot of soup she was stirring. “I’m making minestrone for supper.”

  For a minute, Dicey didn’t understand. Then, “You can pass history,” she said. “Because we can keep on studying, and it works. But where did the quarter point come from?”

  “I didn’t look, I just kept looking at the grade on the top of the paper,” Maybeth admitted. “I didn’t know I could get seventy-one and a quarter percent of everything right.”

  Dicey went into Gram’s room, but Gram wasn’t there. She went out to the living room and saw her grandmother enthroned on the sofa in front of the fire. Gram had a blanket spread over her and a book on her lap. Sammy sat at the desk behind her, doing some schoolwork. “You heard Maybeth’s news,” Gram asked at the exact same time that Dicey asked, “Did you hear Maybeth’s news?”

  CHAPTER 24

  Dicey decided to split the last six boats four-two, getting the worst over first. She spent a day exchanging the finished rowboats for four unfinished ones and restocking her paint supply from Claude’s storerooms. Then she spent a day sanding. Getting the work done. Sammy had agreed to help her get her own things out of the shop on Saturday—the three dinghies, the lumber, the tools. They would move them to the barn. She would be able to work in the barn. Everything was going to be taken care of. Once everything was taken care of, she’d build her boat.

  She walked into the kitchen out of the lingering twilight of Friday evening, to the smell of spaghetti sauce and the sound of singing coming down the hall from the living room. Listening to Maybeth and Sammy sing, the same way that Gram—she knew—sat listening on the sofa, Dicey felt a sadness rising up in her. Their two voices carried the same melodic line, Sammy’s rich, woody bass below Maybeth’s golden soprano. It was about the loneliest song Dicey had ever heard. “Who will sing for me?”—the song kept asking that question, and never gave any answer.

  She took a deep breath and hung up her jacket. The table was set, but there was a bowl of flowers in the middle of it. She recognized the bowl. It was a white china one Gram used for fancy dinners, on Thanksgiving and Christmas, for the days on which first Dicey, then James and Maybeth turned sixteen, and the day Dicey turned twenty-one. She didn’t recognize the flowers.

  Yellow tulips with red streaks, tiny white irises, shining daffodils—the flowers looked like a handful of spring, set out in the middle of the table. Dicey went down to the living room.

  They were just as she’d imagined, Maybeth and Sammy side by side on the piano bench facing Gram, who lay along the sofa. The fire burned warm. Dicey sat down on the sofa arm by Gram’s feet, not wanting to interrupt. When they moved on to a new song she joined in. In this song, the rhythm was almost ragtime. “‘Oh, Lord, you know I have no friend like you.’” You could hear in the singing the way banjo and tambourine would sound, jollying the music along. “‘This world is not my home, I’m only passing through,’” Dicey sang, watching the miniature mountain range Gram’s toes made under the plaid blanket twitch in time to the music. “‘I can’t feel at home in this world anymore.’”

  True enough, Dicey thought, hearing almost how the guitar would sound behind the music, sounding like a combination of banjo and tambourine. She didn’t feel at home, even though this home of hers—people and place—felt entirely comfortable and good. She knew who was missing, and she couldn’t do anything about it. “‘Oh, Lord, you know I have no friend like you,’” they sang, starting the song again because it sounded so good.

  Grief, Dicey had learned, faded. There were things you couldn’t do anything about, except outwait the worst of their grief. She looked around the room, wondering what was different—because something was different. Flowers, more flowers, that was what was different. A huge armload of flowers, the kind of armload a giant might gather, of puffy white flowers, were in the big red milk pitcher on the desk. Tall, proud, white roses, with leafy ferns, stood on the table by Gram’s shoulder, in a gold-rimmed glass vase.

  “What’s with all these flowers?” Dicey demanded.

  For a minute, nobody said anything. Then Sammy decided he could tell her. “It’s Valentine’s Day. From Jeff. He said mine were the closest he could get to tennis balls. They’re pretty hairy for tennis balls.”

  “Did you see the bouquet in the kitchen?” Maybeth asked.

  “Yes, I did.” Dicey wondered if there was a fourth gift of flowers, somewhere.

  “House looks like a funeral home,” Gram commented. “I know, I’m an ungrateful old bat.”

  “You’re not old,” Sammy told her.

  Dicey understood, watching Gram and Maybeth and Sammy watch her, that there wasn’t any fourth gift of flowers. Whatever they might think of it, it seemed to her that that was fair enough. It wasn’t as if she’d sent anyone a card. She didn’t think much of Valentine’s Day and she’d always said so—Valentine’s Day was just somebody’s way of making money. “Why don’t we ever grow flowers?” she asked, to change the subject and tell her family it didn’t bother her.

  “They aren’t any too useful,” Gram pointed out.

  “How much does that matter?” Dicey wondered. “How about daffodils? They’re bulbs and all you
have to do with them is plant them. That’s right, isn’t it? You don’t have to take care of them. Couldn’t we plant some daffodil bulbs around the yard?”

  “You have to do that in the fall,” Maybeth said. “It’s too late now.”

  Dicey guessed the message from Jeff was pretty clear.

  “But we could next fall,” Maybeth said. “I’d like to. Could we, Gram?”

  “I don’t see why not,” Gram said.

  Sammy got up from the piano and took one of the flowers out of the pitcher. He tossed it up from his left hand and swung at it with the palm of his right hand. The flower shot across the room like a comet, dribbling skinny white petals. “It makes a rotten tennis ball,” he said. “If Maybeth gets to have flowers, I should be able to have chickens. Can I have chickens, Gram?”

  Gram didn’t even turn her head. She just ignored Sammy.

  “You’re ignoring me,” he pointed out, picking up the disintegrating flower and batting it over the back of the sofa to land in front of the fire.

  “That’s right,” Gram agreed.

  After they’d had supper and cleaned the kitchen, after Gram and Sammy had settled down to a checkers tournament while Maybeth played the piano behind them, Dicey went into the dining room and took out the sheets of paper and the pile of books. If she was going to build a boat without really knowing what she was doing, she’d better know as much as she could. She’d gotten out of the habit of concentration, she discovered that. Even though there were no flowers in this room, she couldn’t seem to sit easy with the idea of them.

  She tried to get herself angry, because if you thought about it, it wasn’t an awfully nice thing to do. He didn’t have to send flowers at all. If he was going to send flowers, but not to her, he should know how she’d feel. Or at least he’d know how her family would feel about how she’d feel.

  Dicey tried, but she couldn’t get angry, because she didn’t figure she’d been any too nice to Jeff. She tried, but she couldn’t concentrate on the lines before her—not the lines she’d drawn on paper, nor the lines of words in the book. She felt uncomfortable, uneasy with herself. It wasn’t like her to feel that way about herself.

  Yeah, and it wasn’t like Jeff to be unkind. So people didn’t always act like themselves.

  Dicey gave up trying to work and looked at the flat black windows instead.

  People did act like themselves, that was what felt wrong.

  Dicey got up. She went to the living room door. She told her grandmother that she was going to take the truck for a while, if that was all right. That was all right. Dicey had decided: She could gamble on what she knew was true of Jeff, what she had learned he was like, or she could gamble on what she was afraid of.

  Driving along the dark road, Dicey realized that she might have things all wrong, but she thought there was a good chance that Jeff was home this weekend. He wouldn’t call or write to let her know; that wasn’t his way. But he would figure out a way of letting her know, if she wanted to figure it out, that he was home. From his point of view, it would all depend on whether she wanted to figure it out.

  The long driveway up to Jeff’s house ran beside the creek, along a low bluff. The oyster shells that covered the driveway glowed a dim white. Dicey drove slowly, partly for the well-being of the truck, partly because she wanted so much to be right that she put off arriving, in case she might find out she was wrong.

  The little house was dark. It sat in its own shadow. On the other side of the low, slanted roof a full moon rode up into the sky. Jeff’s station wagon was parked by the door.

  Dicey knocked, and opened the door before he could answer. She really only wanted to apologize to him—in general—and let him know how things had been going, and find out how things were going with him. As she drove over, she had been thinking that maybe you had to work as hard at people as at anything else, and she owed Jeff an apology.

  He sat at the table, looking out the window to where the moonlight fell over the barren landscape, dreaming so deep about something that he hadn’t even heard her come in. When he heard her, he turned his head, his face like a mask in the shadows. He waited for her to say something.

  Dicey didn’t have anything to say. She had thought she did, but she didn’t. She didn’t know this face, and maybe she didn’t even know Jeff. Jeff’s eyes were gray, sometimes cloudy gray and sometimes clear, but never these dark, shadowed, unreadable places. She didn’t know what she could say to him.

  “Dicey?” he asked.

  She heard it in his voice—and she already knew it, anyway. It wasn’t that Jeff no longer loved her—but she was such a chicken, she hadn’t even dared to know that. Maybe it was hearing it, knowing it. Or maybe it was the moon, hanging sad-faced up there in the dark sky. “I’ll give it up,” she heard herself say. “I promise, I will. I don’t have to be a boatbuilder.”

  Jeff didn’t stand up. He didn’t say anything. He turned his back to her and looked out the window.

  The creek wound like a silver ribbon through moon-frosted marshes. Dicey walked around and sat back against the edge of the table, trying to see Jeff’s face. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “You have no right to promise me things I never ask for,” Jeff said. He didn’t even look at her.

  He was angry, and at her. She wasn’t about to quarrel with him, not about whether he could be angry at her. “I don’t understand,” she told him. “Look. Jeff.” He didn’t move his head. “I want to marry you. That’s what I want. What about you?” She was keeping it as simple and clear as she could.

  “There’s no need for you to have to choose, Dicey,” he said, his voice as cold as moonlight.

  Dicey didn’t understand. “What do you mean?”

  “Just what I said.”

  “But you haven’t said anything, Jeff.”

  Then he did look at her. “You know, there are courses, there are some schools that teach courses. Or apprentice programs, lots of them. You never even thought about that, did you?”

  “Are you angry at me for dropping out of school?”

  “No. I’m angry at you because you never even thought about any other way. And then you come out here and tell me you’ll give the whole thing up. As if that was even what I wanted.”

  He was right. Dicey didn’t want him to be right, but he was. It was her turn now to look out the window, because she hadn’t even tried to think about it, she had just gone ahead doing it her own way. It wouldn’t do any good to apologize. He probably already knew that she regretted what she’d done—and he didn’t even know half the reasons she had to be sorry. “I lost that contract, for the boat,” she told him. “I’m losing the shop at the end of the month.”

  “I thought there was something like that,” Jeff said, his voice cold and unsympathetic. That was all right with her; it wasn’t sympathy she was looking for.

  Dicey stood beside Jeff, looking at the twisting vines of the undergrowth and the looped creek, and at the stretching marsh, with the moon moving across the sky, as if the whole thing was a movie. Like the whole thing was a black-and-white movie, the moon moving out there among the stars, a movie someone was showing—

  “Can you rent video cameras?” she asked Jeff.

  She could feel his surprise. When he had reached out a hand to turn on the light and look at her face, she could see it, surprise and confusion.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “it’s just that—Can you rent them?” If you could, there were indoor courts up in Salisbury. If she rented a video camera, and they rented an hour with the pro, he could play with Sammy and she could tape it. Then Sammy could send the tape to the camp.

  “Sure,” Jeff said, cautious.

  “Because of Sammy’s tennis camp scholarship, the one he can’t get—”

  At the look on Jeff’s face, as if his features were falling apart, she stopped herself. “I didn’t mean,” she said. “I just thought of it and—I thought it was hopeless and I just now thought of this and—” Jeff’s face
collapsed into laughter.

  Dicey didn’t know what was so funny. He was laughing, but he looked tired. She didn’t like to see him looking so tired. She wondered how his interviews had gone and what he’d be doing next year, where he’d be living. She wondered if she was going to get to talk with him about how badly she’d done with the business, and hear his advice.

  “I don’t mind,” Jeff said. “It’s just like you. Sometimes, you’ve got a mind like a jumping bean. I didn’t get you any flowers,” he told her.

  “I didn’t expect any.”

  “I wanted to get you a tree, if I was going to get you anything, but—do you know how much trees cost, Dicey?”

  Dicey shook her head. She tucked that tree away to think about.

  “Why do you want to get married?” he asked her. “Now, all of a sudden.” His gray eyes studied her face.

  She couldn’t explain. She couldn’t even begin to explain. There were too many reasons, all too woven tight together into a cloth that was too . . . beautiful, or thick, or right, or complicated, she didn’t know what—she knew only what its value was. She couldn’t even begin to put words to it. And then Dicey knew, from looking into Jeff’s eyes, that not being able to explain was the right answer.

  “I didn’t get you a tree, either,” he said. “I got you a book.”

  A book? Dicey tried not to, but her face gave her away.

  “Poetry,” Jeff added. “You’re not going to like it.” He didn’t seem to mind that. “Or maybe you will.”

  “Then why did you get it?” Dicey demanded.

  “Because it’s what I wanted to give you. Whether you want it or not. If you came over, I wanted to give you something I wanted to give you, not just what you want me to give you.”

  “What does that mean, Jeff?” Dicey asked him. She was going to try to understand, and if she really tried she bet maybe she could. “What do you mean by that?”