Anything but Still Lives: The Worlds of Edward Hopper

by Anne Gambling

fly

  Birds fly over the rainbow

  Why then, oh why can’t I …

  ‘I want to go home,’ she said suddenly over dinner that night.

  Harvey emerged from behind a wall of newspaper, took the pipe out of his mouth. ‘What?’ His eyes were ten times bigger behind those reading glasses.

  ‘I want to go over onto the Cape and visit Conor. See how he’s getting on,’ she regrouped.

  ‘Hmmph,’ he lifted the paper again. ‘You talk regular enough on the phone.’

  ‘Yes, but when was the last time I was down there?’

  ‘Well, don’t be gone too long then.’

  She took the car and drove slow. Hadn’t called ahead. Down the interstate from Boston, she went – Route 3 they called it. Over the Sagamore Bridge, onto the Cape. It’d only been open a few years. She remembered with fondness the old drawbridge it replaced, before they widened the canal. A memory. Baggage, nought more.

  She drove on and into Sandwich, stopped in town and bought a cake and the makings of a nice dinner, settled the provisions in the trunk of the Ford Fodor beside her bags. You’d have thought she was staying a month by the look of those bags. More baggage, she grimaced.

  On and out to East Sandwich, down some lanes, the turn into the drive. The drive with its avenue of maples, already hinting at a fire-red fall. The white gatepost. The letterbox daubed with C. O’Grady. Redwing.

  She pulled up there awhile. Tried to slow her breathing. I want to go home, she’d said to Harvey. And now here she was. Damn those tears.

  She motored slowly up the drive, round the back of the house, and parked in the shed beside the Brush Breaker. Each spring fires raged through the State Forest. Only last year Conor had lost three buddies. He was committed to his work in the volunteer brigade.

  No sign of the pick-up, though, and the house stood silent. Curtains drawn, yet windows open. Joe hadn’t come to greet her either. She walked over to the screen door.

  ‘Conor? she called. ‘Conor, you home?’

  She bricked open the screen door and went back to retrieve the things from the trunk. Then into the kitchen with it all. Neat, clean, everything in its place. She always marvelled how Conor could keep such a good house without any woman’s help. He was completely self-sufficient. Something she wished she’d better learnt growing up. There on the Cape. Where you could be more self-sufficient, where you had to be more resilient. More resilient than living in the city. Living in and with the city. What had she taught her children? Nothing. A big fat zero. They’d never be able to come back. Too soft now. Soft city kids. She’d done that to them. She and her baggage.

  Jennifer stood still, listened to the silence. Listened till she heard beyond the silence, re-learning the sounds of nature. Took down the Cafeolette – she needed a cup of coffee after that drive. And a piece of the cake she’d brought. She hummed. Sang. Whistled while she worked. The tune an oldie of Irving Berlin’s. Depression-era. Lifting her up and out from her own baggage-filled pit:

  Just around the corner

  There’s a rainbow in the sky

  So let’s have another cup o’ coffee

  And let’s have another piece o’ pie!

  The truck backfired its way into the yard while she sat, sipped and sang. She heard Joe barking with delight. That slobbering fool had probably launched himself off the tray-back before it’d even ground to a halt in the lean-to. Here he was, at the screen already, now, pawing and whining to be let in.

  ‘Joe. Joe!’ She gave him a good wrestle. Oh. He was big and warm and smelled of hay, his coat shining and sleek.

  Conor’s eyes smiled. ‘Now this is a turn-up for the books,’ he said and hugged her. Nice. Long and nice.

  Another cup o’ coffee, another piece o’ pie. He reached over the table for the cake knife and she saw puckered flesh, hairless skin.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Hmm?’ looking up to meet her eyes, looking down to where she stared at his arm. ‘Oh,’ shrugging. ‘From the big Bourne fire last year.’

  ‘You were injured too? Why didn’t you tell?’ Cake crumbs stuck to her lip.

  ‘Leave be, Jenny,’ he sighed. ‘It wasn’t exactly the first thing on my mind.’

  Memories, baggage. They were all capable of carrying the burden. Not sharing the load. Why couldn’t she learn from his example? Why did she have to be so wistful? Regretful? Restless?

  ‘Oh God, Conor, I’ve missed being here.’ There it was, out now. ‘I just want to be away from it all. The city, the newspaper headlines, the movies living lives that I never had, that I’ll never have. What am I gonna do, Conor? What am I gonna do? I just can’t think straight anymore.’

  Tears fell. Joe scrounged cake from his master’s hand. Dog slobber filled the void. How poetic, she thought. How goddamned poetic in the face of all my goddamned self-pity. She slumped and stared at the cake stand.

  ‘Well, Jen. I guess it’s that change of life got you all tied up in knots,’ he said and pulled a wad of baccie out of his pouch. ‘You’d be ripe for it, I guess.’

  Her sigh was noncommittal. How to describe her hot flashes, or missing the kids away at college, or not wanting to talk to Harvey now she had no choice. Don’t even get her started on the girth of fat she despised that had seemingly appeared overnight. How to describe wanting to upchuck all the debris of the past, regurgitate it from a drain blocked by circumstance and compromise, let it bubble up and out, frothed scum at its surface.

  ‘Sometimes it’s like there’s a pressure cooker in my head. Slow boiling my brain to mush. I just don’t know where the vent is, where the off-switch is.’ She took a deep breath, decided, ‘I’ll only stay a coupla days. Clear my head, you know?’

  He nodded. ‘As long as you want. As long as you can put up with me. Post tot naufragia portus.

  ‘After so many shipwrecks, a haven,’ she agreed. Redwing. Home. The tears welled. Where did they all come from, damn it? ‘Thanks,’ she managed.

  Coffee drained. Hanky put away. ‘I think I’ll go out for a walk,’ she said. ‘Get some fresh air.’

  He stood and stretched. ‘I got some paperwork to do.’

  Out the front door she went, a front door that leapt straight into the meadow. It was yellowing off nicely now, this meadow she’d run and tumbled through as a child. This meadow which held the promise of discovery, of all manner of beetles and bugs, rabbit holes and ground bird nests. Joe dived past her, into a sea of grass and waving seed-heads, with the closest thing to a whoop she’d ever heard from a dog. And she did the same, laughing. They were two crazy hounds, that’s for sure.

  She loved this time of year, the season’s shift from late summer to early fall, trees starting to turn, mists beginning to rise. The meadow shifting its mood likewise; no longer tinged with the bright brilliance of high summer green, the high grasses had begun to subtly morph into a flaxen-wheat glow, slow dancing with twilight, hugging it close, lingering longer, even as an equinox sun sunk toward the horizon.

  ‘No frosts yet?’ she called back to the house, into the front room where he sat at a desk writing cheques.

  ‘No. None expected for another month or so, I’d say.’

  ‘But you still got the party line going?’ she confirmed, the warning system where each rang through to the next on the list if a cold night was predicted.

  ‘As long as I’m a registered grower.’

  She walked on, crossed the meadow. State Forest clung to its eastern side, scrub oaks and pitch pines all a-jumble, moody and reflective, shadows deepening and chill rising as the sun slipped away. Went to stand at the wetland’s edge. The family cranberry bog, where a sea of shiny red bubbles greeted her, waxy fruits ripening nicely. She picked a couple and nibbled slowly, letting their tart flavour burst in her mouth.

  To think all this went back to Indians and Pilgrims and a sea captain quietly watching these shrubs grow wild. Seeing how much better they fruited once the wind coated them in sand. This their
home, a place of sand. So simple, to be fertilized by nature’s hand. Here, at home.

  Home, she thought, home. Some of the vines were older than her. Planted by her father, more than fifty years back. Home. She thought. Home. Maybe she’d stay on a bit longer. Help Conor get the crop in.

  It wasn’t a large venture. But enough for his simple life. Lucky Conor. Lucky, lucky Conor. Dry-harvesting by hand with a wooden rocker scoop, maple teeth combing the fruits from their ground-hugging vines. Loading up the boxes and down to the co-op where they bounced about on a Bailey Separator.

  She could almost see the bright red sticky-stained hands of her youth. Each fall the same, each fall the harvest, each fall laughter and camaraderie, all hands on a sandy deck. Maybe she’d even make a couple of pots of sauce to take back to Harvey. Home-made from home. Her gift of thanks to a Thanksgiving table.

  She plucked a few more berries and kept walking. Startled a redwing up out of the bulrushes. Did she have a nest there? With a new speckled egg like Old Mother West Wind told? No, too late in the season.

  Over past the salt marsh, across the dunes, down to the beach. Oh. That air. That first full blast of sea breeze. That king hit of salt and damp. Filling her face, her hair. Up and out it went, over and past. Off with the shoes to sand-sink her toes. In and down, deep. Down she sat, straight down where she was. I won’t move till the tide shifts me, she decided. Let the tide shift me and shunt off all that baggage.

  Could it shift her into