Gossip

  “You weren’t kidding,” she said. Carrying it made her walk with a hitch in her gait, but she wouldn’t give it back. “What’s in here?”

  “Books. Laptop. A bottle of champagne.”

  “Oh how nice! We’ll have more use for the champagne than the laptop, though.”

  Uh-oh. No Internet? I hadn’t thought of that.

  “We have dial-up. Sometimes. But don’t worry, if it’s important we can go over to the main and use the computers in the library.” No silent nightly exchange of the day’s news with Easthampton, then, no wishing one’s absent loved one peaceful sleep and sweet dreams.

  She was putting my bags into the trunk of a battered gray Karmann Ghia that had to be fifty years old.

  “Oh my goodness” is all I could think of to say when I saw the car.

  “This is Betty,” she said. “Belinda gave her to me when I turned eighteen. I can’t put her top up anymore, so we have to walk if it rains, but otherwise she’s doing well for an old bag.”

  Betty’s engine started with a gruff rumble that reminded me of something, a sound from when I was young, bringing a shock of pleasure.

  “I used to know someone who had one of these,” I said, remembering a shy blond young man who had courted me for about five minutes during my debutante summer. With the memory came the scent of honeysuckle in Canaan Woods and the warm green smell of June lawns. We turned onto the main road that ran along the ridge of the island.

  “She isn’t legal, of course,” Avis said. “None of the island cars are. There’s no one to inspect them, unless you take them to the main, and why would we do that?”

  “How do you keep them running?”

  “The man I was waiting with at the ferry does it somehow.”

  “Tom?”

  “Brian. He got that jumpsuit on eBay. He has a brother with an auto graveyard on the main, where he gets the parts.”

  We drove past a weedy pair of clay tennis courts, past the tiny library and the post office and down to Avis’s little house. My room, the guest room, was upstairs, papered with old-fashioned wallpaper, with pale blue ribbons twining against a white background. There were gauzy white voile curtains and a view out to open sea. I had my own widow’s walk, although Avis was the actual widow. Her bedroom was downstairs with a slightly more modern bathroom than mine, which had a claw-foot tub and no shower. There was plenty of hot water, though, and the towels and bed linens were fresh and new, and the mattress was excellent. I unpacked my clothes and books, sat for a moment appreciating the heart-stopping sweep of the meadow and the bay and the thoughtfulness of fresh sweet peas in a little vase on my bedside table. I wished Gil could see it. I wished I could see the room he was in at that moment. I hoped that Althea was hating the Hamptons and wished briefly that she would fall down a hole and break her neck.

  Then I went down to join Avis on the porch, where she was waiting with crab salad, a bowl of cherry tomatoes, and homemade lemonade.

  After lunch we walked down to the post office, a white clapboard two-room building with a small wall of ancient mailboxes in the entryway and a cheerful young woman in a flowered summer dress who got up from her chair behind the counter to greet us.

  “Good afternoon, Audrey.”

  “Afternoon, Avis. Is this your company? Up from the big city?”

  I introduced myself.

  “How long will you be staying?”

  “Two weeks. Her mail will come care of me,” said Avis.

  “I’ll pop ’em in your box then. You have a package, do you want it now?”

  “How big is it?”

  Audrey approximated with her hands.

  “We’ll come back for it with Betty. We’re taking our constitutional at the moment.”

  We walked out to the end of the island, stopping to chat with people we met, accepting an offer to tour an ambitious garden with a yellow climbing rose that interested me particularly. It belonged to a young couple from Philadelphia who were expecting a group from the Garden Club of America the next week. They were anxious that their clematis make a good show. The lady from Philadelphia was the only person on the island who didn’t call Avis by her first name.

  Out past the village, we picked warm blueberries and ate them in the sun. They had a lovely tartness and felt slightly grainy on the tongue. We made some plans for how to spend the time of my visit. I offered to cook dinner that evening or to take her out to eat, if there was anywhere to take her, but she said she was going to make her world-famous chicken burgers. I was allowed to shell the peas, which had come from the garden minutes before, and her neighbor Caroline had baked a raspberry pie.

  It wasn’t until we were seated over our supper, with candles and a bottle of rosé, that Avis mentioned Grace. In the evening light her strong narrow face looked surprisingly young. She reminded me of the girl I had first known at school, all legs and angular bones, with the regal bearing that sent a different message from the rather anxious expression in her eyes.

  “She’s decided to take a degree so she can teach. She got into Columbia,” Avis told me, doing her imitation of a mother with a normal bond with her daughter.

  I knew that already but didn’t say so.

  “Will she come up to visit while you’re here?”

  “Oh yes, she’s coming next week.”

  I was puzzled, since I myself was occupying the only guest room.

  “Not here,” said Avis. “She’ll go to visit Belinda in Dundee, on the main. I thought we’d get Brian to run us over for a day, if you’d like to.”

  “I’d love it. I haven’t been there in years.”

  “It’s absolutely charming. Belinda found a house there that suits her perfectly when Nantucket got too overrun for her.”

  I wondered, if it was so charming, why Avis was here instead of there, but didn’t ask. It was easy enough to see that this island life suited her.

  “Were you sorry about Nantucket?”

  “No, it was always too much of a scrum for me. I went because Grace loved it.”

  I thought of Gil, saying fondly that Avis was an odd duck. Nantucket was my idea of heaven. I wished I’d had a mother with a house there, instead of a mosquito-infested campsite in the Rangeley Lakes, which was our childhood summer vacation if we were lucky.

  “Grace is much more like Belinda than she is like me,” Avis said. “They both love hubbub.”

  “Is there hubbub in Dundee?”

  “Apparently. Have you seen much of her this spring?”

  “Belinda?”

  “Grace. I’m told she has a beau coming with her this visit.”

  I had a moment of feeling extremely cross with Grace. She was angry with Avis, I understood that, but that was not an excuse to be unkind. There were manners that should be observed, no matter what one was feeling.

  Then I remembered how little my own mother knew about my private life.

  “Have you met him?” Avis asked, carefully attending to getting peas onto her fork. She was hungry to know but surely understood that any answer would hurt her feelings. There was nothing to do but ignore the unkindness.

  “Wait till you hear—it’s my godson Nicky Wainwright. Dinah’s son!” I said, light and bright and feeling as if I had slapped her.

  There was not a moment’s hesitation in Avis’s response. A huge smile lit her face.

  “How absolutely wonderful!” she cried. “The younger one, the actor?”

  I wished Nick and Grace were there that minute so I could paddle them both. Avis had remembered all that I’d told her about Nicky because he was important to me. “Yes, Nicky, the actor-law student.”

  “Do you think they’re serious?” she asked, marveling.

  “I think they think they are . . .”

  “Isn’t this wonderful? Wouldn’t it be fun?”

  “It would be,” I said, with all the heart I could, knowing it was already fun for Dinah. We sat together in the darkening evening looking out at the fireflies in the meadow.
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  “Let’s have the champagne,” said Avis. That was a motion I could second.

  Our days passed easily and happily. Avis made it easy. One day we went over to the main to hike in Acadia and explore Mount Desert. We picked blueberries and made muffins, most of which Avis put into the freezer so I could take them with me when the visit was over. We spent long hours reading on the porch. We wrote letters. One evening when a thunderstorm knocked out our power, we played Russian Bank all evening by candlelight. At first, in the blackness that had fallen so suddenly, along with the eerie silence of no humming refrigerator, no cranky water pump in the cellar groaning on and off, no anything living in the house except us, we couldn’t find the candles in the kitchen, and the flashlight wasn’t on the hook inside the cellar door where it was supposed to be. We felt our way around in inky dark, the storm having blanked out the moon. Avis rummaged in the tool closet, hoping to find hurricane lamps and dropping things on her feet. I finally found my purse hung on a coat hook. Avis thought I was a genius to realize that the screen of my cell phone could be used as a flashlight.

  The next morning, with power restored, we woke to find all the living room lights on, and the kitchen faucet running. “Thank heaven,” said Avis. “I was afraid we’d have to make our tea with gin.” That afternoon we took Betty to the island grocery to stock up on batteries and lamp oil.

  We played some desultory tennis on the clay courts, which apparently belonged to everybody. Avis was surprisingly good, and yet I, who never practice, always seemed to beat her in the end. Over the course of the visit, I figured out that Avis doesn’t like to win. I don’t know if it frightens her or makes her sad to take something that someone else wants. It raised the question: what in this life did she want badly enough to try to take it from another person?

  The day of our visit to Dundee dawned hot and cloudless. Brian was taking us over in his extremely aromatic work boat, the Carol Ann. He had put his lobster pots out around dawn that morning, then come into the town wharf to pick us up. Once we were out on the bay it seemed this was a day the lord had made just to remind us that into every life come moments of perfection.

  We skimmed around the Bass Harbor light and up Great Spruce Bay, Carol Ann making a cheerful racket, and arrived at Belinda’s dock at about ten in the morning. One had a sense of being flooded through the eyes with the blue of sky and sea, the light, the sheer beauty of it. If it had been ink it would have spread through one’s soul, tinting everything with glory.

  Grace and Nicky, hand in hand, came down the lawn to meet us. Nicky held his big hand out to Avis, introducing himself, while Grace embraced me and kissed me. Then Avis and Grace kissed the air beside each other’s ears.

  “Sweetheart,” said Avis warmly.

  “Mother,” said Grace.

  We walked up to the sun porch where Belinda was waiting for us, her white hair perfectly coiffed, wearing a shirtwaist dress printed with nautical flags and a big necklace of white plastic beads.

  “You’re both just brown as berries,” she said to us. The children began to chatter about what we should do with ourselves until lunch. Tour the village? Climb Butter Hill? Go out in kayaks?

  “I’ve never been in a kayak,” said Avis.

  “It’s great,” said Nicky. “You skim along like a water bug. Even I can do it.”

  “Now don’t make poor Lovie go out and paddle around like a duck,” said Belinda. I had never been in a kayak myself and longed to try it, but of course I said, “That’s right. You go. I need a catch-up with my pal here.”

  So I watched from the porch as the other three went down toward the stone beach where four kayaks lay upside down on the grass above the tide line. They fitted themselves with life jackets and spray skirts. Avis looked a little like a water bug even before she entered the boat, with her long bare arms and legs punctuated by knobby joints, struggling to fold herself into the hollow kazoo shape of the boat. Nicky briskly tucked her spray skirt into place all around the cabin hole so that the boat seemed to replace her lower limbs. Grace gave the boat a shove from behind, and Avis glided off onto the water with a cry of surprise. A maid brought me a glass of sweet iced tea.

  Belinda, for all she was perfectly turned out, wasn’t feeling well. I told her all the news I could think of from New York, and even had the rare pleasure of being able to talk about Gil and Althea. Her interest and sympathy were balm to my soul.

  When the paddlers came back, Avis was glowing with pleasure. They had gone over to the yacht club moorings and peered at the visiting boats. Lunch was vintage grandmother food: clam chowder with oyster crackers, tomato sandwiches, and applesauce with ginger snaps for dessert, cooked and served by a chatty village woman named Ella. We ate at a glass table on the porch looking up the bay toward the Bass Harbor light.

  Avis noticed how little Belinda ate; I watched her eyes. When we had finished, Avis asked Grace if she would take us to visit an old friend from Miss Pratt’s who had a summer place nearby. I didn’t know the woman, as she had graduated before I’d arrived, so suggested a game of Honeymoon Bridge with Belinda. But Belinda wanted a rest. I went along to the house on the Salt Pond, where Avis and I sat in lawn chairs with our hostess, Eleanor Applegate, kibitzing and talking about old school friends while Grace and Nick played a jolly game of croquet with the children of the house.

  It meant the world to Avis to be with Grace and Nicky, watching them, laughing with them. But I knew that Dinah would have been out on the lawn with them, whacking away with her own croquet mallet, challenging the rules and playing to win. And when we were back at The Elms, saying our good-byes, with the Carol Ann waiting down at the dock, the formality between Grace and Avis was unchanged by any apparent warmth shared during the visit.

  Avis was made very happy by the day, though, and Brian had had a fine time as well, shooting the breeze at Olive’s Lunch, stocking up on fishing gear and automotive supplies. The bay had gone glassy and there was a tinge of pink on the water as the afternoon sun moved toward the wooded horizon. We waved to yachtsmen who waved back as they slipped silently along on the bay, sails almost limp, making for Dundee Harbor. When we rounded Bass Harbor Head into Brian’s home waters, we helped him pull his lobster pots. I took the helm and did whatever I was told while Avis and Brian, in heavy rubber gloves, pulled the traps up onto the stern. Brian extracted the lobsters, measured them, threw back the undersized and the roe-bearing females, and pegged the claws of the keepers. Avis meanwhile rebaited the traps and threw them back into the water, keeping the buoys and toggles well away from the propeller. By the time we got back to the village wharf, Avis smelled as fishy as Brian did. The icing on the cake was that when Brian put us down at the wharf before going out to his mooring, we found ourselves surrounded by the matrons of the Garden Club of America, all decked out in their summer finest, waiting to board the ferry. This Avis was a person Grace didn’t even know.

  After I left Avis, I stopped in Ellsworth to spend a night with my parents before catching my plane in Bangor. My father’s luck, which had never been great, had run out some time before, and after a year of increasingly erratic behavior he had been diagnosed with dementia the previous winter. I’d been in touch, of course, and though at a distance had made some arrangements that helped with his care, but it was my two youngest siblings who lived close to home and did all the heavy lifting, especially my sister April and my younger brother’s wife, June. (You can imagine for yourself the calendar jokes they get. They’re fond of each other and often together, so they’ve heard them all.) My brother Tim is a fisherman, and June is a hairdresser, absolutely salt of the earth and extremely bright, but that didn’t stop my mother making fun of her Down East accent.

  Getting my father to stop driving had been the hardest part. June had been with him one day when he’d tried to turn off the ignition with the radio knob, yet the great State of Maine had allowed him to renew his driver’s license. For a week, first my sister Sally from Portland, then Tim, then Jun
e, had wrested his keys from him, explaining to him that he had Alzheimer’s disease, and that if he continued to drive with a diagnosis like that and he hurt someone, he could be sued for everything he had, right down to his underpants. The light of understanding would dawn, he’d begin to weep, then shocked and exhausted he’d have a nap, and when he woke up remember no word of the conversation. It was shattering. They had to go on breaking his heart at least once a day, for weeks.

  I cooked supper for my parents and put the blueberry muffins into their freezer. They like to eat supper about 5:00 P.M., as most of their neighbors do. Dad went up to bed before it was dark, and Mother and I sat on the back porch in the twilight looking out over the unmown grass in the yard at the half-built catboat that had sat in a cradle there under a tarp since before I left for boarding school, waiting for my father to find time to finish it. The car was parked outside because the garage/shed was filled with a half-finished dollhouse, a bench strewn with tools for making picture frames he never got around to, a wooden canoe with a gash in it he’d bought but never mended, a riding mower with its engine in pieces, two no-longer-functional washing machines, and a lot of equipment for doing automotive bodywork, from a business he had half-finished starting.

  I tried to talk with my mother about her trying to take all the care of my father herself, making the house a jail for both of them, and she, annoyed, made condescending remarks about my bone-dry spinster existence and how little I understood of the things in life that really matter. I thanked her for her interest and went up to bed.

  Belinda invited Avis and me to a literary luncheon at the Town Club that September. Avis and I both belonged to the Colony Club and enjoyed a gentle feigned rivalry with our Town Club friends, including Belinda. As you can imagine, this sort of thing was no part of my upbringing in Ellsworth, though I understood the Grange and the Odd Fellows. When I was young, clubs seemed to me to belong to the world of English novels, but with time one gets used to many things one never expected to. A club is a great organizing principle, a place where you have at least one thing in common with everyone you meet. It’s a haven for those of us who sometimes have too much time on our hands, a party you don’t have to plan. Not a home, but still a place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.