I turned too quickly. Caught my balance on a tree, belched once, and giggled. Who knew fizzy booze packed such a punch? I held on to the tree and waited for the world to settle. Saw a face I recognized watching me from the path. A strawberry blonde so short she bordered on circus freak, which was probably why she was also hard-nosed and a little twisted and didn’t take shit from anyone. I could tell by the way her brow unfurrowed and her shoulders relaxed that Brenda the Bartender recognized me too.
I smiled and waved. “Hey, Brenda. What brings you here?”
“My kids.” She came toward me through the trees. “They said there’s a witch in here drinking beer.” She smiled at my forehead. “I’ve never seen the mark of the devil before, but it explains a lot.” She took a quick look around. “What are you doing in here anyway?”
I pointed over my shoulder. “Watching the show.”
“You’re spying on the protest? You really need to get cable.”
“I’m not spying, I’m observing.” I parted the branches for her. “See the sweaty redhead ranting at a taxi driver? That’s my dear old mom.”
She leaned closer. “Doesn’t look like she’s ranting. Looks more like she knows the taxi driver. Maybe they’re even flirting.” She glanced up at me. “Your mom’s got a great smile.”
“But she bites.” Most of the protesters were back on the line, wiping their brows and fanning their faces while they marched. But a few were setting up a canopy and a circle of chairs on the grass. Mark had brought the gift of shade. How clever.
“Anybody else think it’s break time?” he called, dragging a cooler out of the back of the SUV and waving the driver away. More protesters broke ranks and went to join him in the shade of the canopy. But Ruby kept banging that drum and poor Mary Anne and Benny kept slogging along behind her. “Save. The. Birds.” Drumbeat.
“Self-righteous bitch,” I yelled. “The world will be better off without you.”
“Liz,” Brenda said softly. “What’s really going on here?”
“My mother has Alzheimer’s,” I said, and instantly regretted it, wishing I’d kept my big mouth shut. As my great-grandma used to say, You don’t owe a thing to a bugger, including bartenders, bar buddies, and best friends—not that I had any of those these days. They’d all screwed off after I refused to sit through their ridiculous intervention. As though it was my fault I’d walked into our regular Friday night get-together, expecting dinner and drinks with the girls, only to get hand wringing and coffee instead. We love you, Liz. We want to help you, Liz. Who the hell did they think they were anyway?
I told them all to fuck off and leave me alone, and they had, for over a year now. Not so much as a phone call from any of them. And who cared? As Great-Grandma Lucy used to say, I dinna need you or yer shite. No wonder people were afraid of the old bat.
“I don’t know why I told you that.” I pulled out the fifth cooler and waved Brenda away. “Don’t you have kids to watch or something?”
“Two wonderful boys.” She parted the branches again. “But your mother looks too young for Alzheimer’s.”
I ignored her. Focused on my fizzy booze instead. Downed half the bottle and belched loudly. If only the stuff wasn’t so gassy.
“Can’t be more than fifty, fifty-one—”
“She’s fifty-five. And yes, that sounds too young.” I belched again and checked on the Diehards. Mark’s group was drinking bottled water under the canopy while Mary Anne and Benny stood watching them from the curb, and Ruby kept on drumming.
“Are you sure that’s what she has?” Brenda asked.
“Positive.” I swirled what was left in the bottle, watching it go round and round. “It’s called early onset because it usually hits people in their fifties, but it can happen younger. And the good news is that it’s often genetic, which means that shit may be happening in my own brain as we speak.”
“You seem to know a lot about it.”
“In the last few days, I have become a fucking encyclopedia on all things Alzheimer’s. Causes, signs, treatments, you name it, I know it.”
Brenda eyed my bottle. I offered her some, but she shook her head. Who could read people these days?
“But why are you spying on her? Why not just go over and talk to her?”
“Because we don’t speak, which has been working well for both of us. Except now she’s changed her mind. Decided we should talk after all.”
“Understandable.”
“You might think so, but you’d be wrong because I don’t care what happens to that woman. Grace, yes. Ruby, never.” The end of my nose began to burn. “Enough of this crap. I have better things to do.”
I took another pull on the bottle, hoping to swallow that stupid ache. But Brenda laid a hand on my arm before I could go for another, her touch as soft, as compelling as her voice when she asked, “Who’s Grace?” and that ache kept right on building.
“My sister,” I said, my voice sounding strangled and weak, leaving me pissed off with Brenda, with Ruby, but mostly with myself for making happy hour too small. Honestly, six coolers? What the hell was I thinking?
“Is your sister protesting too?” Brenda asked.
“Of course not. She’s at home on the Island. Terrified to leave the goddamn place anymore, which suited my mother just fine until the Alzheimer’s thing happened. Now she expects me to come home and be Ruby the Second, devoted to all things Island, including that fucking protest.” I pointed my bottle at the airport. “Well you know what, Brenda? I love those planes. If I had the money, I’d fly in one every day and I’d have the pilot pull a sign behind it that says ‘Up your ass, bitch. We are here to stay.’”I took another pull on the bottle. “I don’t know why I’m telling you all this. It’s not as if you care.”
“You’re right, I don’t care,” she said, which I appreciated. Then she blew it by adding, “But I will take that bottle.” She held out a hand when I hesitated. “Now.”
I shrugged and handed it to her. The stuff had no taste anymore anyway, so why not move on? Think about what I’d like next instead. Real vodka, Car Bombs, the choices were vast, but the destination always the same. “You working at the Duck tonight?”
“It’s Friday isn’t it?” She poured out the last of my fizzy booze. “Have you eaten dinner?”
Dinner? I wasn’t even sure I’d had lunch. Fact is, I rarely think about food these days. I figure it’s nature’s way of helping a drinker keep her girlish figure.
“I’m going to assume the answer is no.” Brenda bent to pick up my backpack. “Come on. I have sandwiches and cold drinks. Not the kind you like, but you’re welcome to one.”
I shouldn’t have been surprised. Brenda was the kind of person who spoke her mind and never judged anyone. Not even me on the many occasions when I’d passed out, facedown, on one of the Duck’s tables. She didn’t dump me on the sidewalk or slap me into consciousness or even call the police as a more prudent bartender might have. Just poured me into a taxi, paid the driver to make sure I got through my front door safely, and put it on my tab.
“What else was I supposed to do?” she’d asked when I finally had the nerve to go back after the first time. “Let one of those jerks take you home? It’s your business if you walk out with them under your own steam but not when you’re out cold. Not on my watch.”
Like I said, I shouldn’t have been surprised that she wanted to take care of me here too, and yet I was. Surprised and pleased and more than a little sick. I held my stomach and belched again. “Goddamn fizzy drinks.”
Brenda took hold of my arm. “You need to eat. And the boys will be wondering what’s happened to me.”
“I don’t know,” I said, but her fingers were strong, her hold firm. “Maybe for a moment then,” I said, and tried not to stumble on my way out of the trees.
GRACE
Everyone always thinks that people on the Island are friends with everyone else, but it’s not true. We’re just like people anywhere—we recognize the
faces we see every day. The ones on our street or on the ferry or at the Bridge Boutique, but there are seven hundred of us here, for goodness’ sake—as many as you’d find in a small town or a condominium building—and no one expects all those people to be friends.
But the thing about Islanders is that while we don’t necessarily know all the people, we definitely know all their houses because each one is different. We’ll say things like, “You know the house with the pink and purple door,” and everyone will nod and say they do. And then we’ll talk about the renovation or the paint job or the landscaping or whatever’s going on for hours. But that doesn’t mean we’ve ever been past the front door because we might not be friends—which is why I had no idea that the house Mark was renting was so nice or so big inside.
The houses on Ward’s were all built on the old camping sites, so there’s not enough room to add anything to the sides or the back. But Mark’s house was on Algonquin and those lots were bigger, so his house had a room out the back plus two extra storys! It looked like one of those beach houses in a magazine, with white walls and red tile floors and the kind of furniture my mom said was supposed to look antique but wasn’t really. I didn’t care what it was supposed to be. I liked it.
And lucky Jocelyn got the third floor all to herself with her own bathroom and a bedroom that didn’t double as anything else, and there were windows on both ends of the hall and a ceiling fan that kept everything cool.
The red tiles looked nice up here too, but after a while they got really hard on the butt. I knew because I’d been sitting on the floor outside that girl’s room for almost an hour, trying to get her to open the stupid door.
When I first came up the stairs, I wasn’t even sure she was still in there. I thought she probably climbed out the window and made a run for the ferry the moment Mark and my mom left for the protest. It’s what Liz would have done when she was twelve, and if I had it to do over again, I would have climbed out right behind her. But after a few minutes of knocking on her door and calling, “Jocelyn? Are you in there?” I heard a low thump, thump, thump, like she was banging her head against the wall, and I knew she hadn’t gone anywhere. It was the third floor after all. That probably made a difference.
Still, it was Friday night and for the first time since they made me come back to the Island, I had somewhere to go and something to do. But Mark had asked me to keep an eye on Jocelyn while he was gone, so I couldn’t very well leave the house without her, and since she wouldn’t come out no matter how nice I asked, I finally sat down and said, “Okay then, I’ll keep you company right here.”
Until this morning, I hadn’t seen Jocelyn since she was six years old. Her mom never wanted her daughter to know about us or about Mark’s life on the Island, so we used to meet him every week for lunch and we’d talk on the phone whenever my mom wasn’t around. It wasn’t like we were little kids who were hurt by this arrangement. I was eighteen when Jocelyn was born, and Liz was twenty-three, so we really didn’t care one way or the other.
After her mother died, Mark finally brought Jocelyn to Fran’s to meet us. He didn’t explain who we were in advance, just said he had a surprise for her. But I guess she was still missing her mom, and seeing two women give her dad a hug was too much. She had a really big voice for a little girl and made sure everyone knew she was not sharing her dad with anyone. Mark took her right back home and said it would be best if we kept things as they were until she was older. But I’m pretty sure he must have been thinking much older when he said that, because being twelve hadn’t made her any friendlier than she’d been at six.
And since the sound of my voice seemed to bug her as much as being stuck in the hall bugged me, I started talking. And I was going to keep right on talking until she finally came out screaming, “No more! No more!” Then I’d work on getting her to hop on a bike and come with me to the lighthouse because that was where I had to be.
I started by telling her all about the scalp massage I gave Mrs. Jackson this morning, going over it step by step, describing the bumps on her head and the horrible tarry smell of the shampoo she always brought with her. Then I moved on to Sandra Morris’s color job, giving her the formula that I mixed and carefully explaining how one part opened the hair shaft and the other part added the color.
When I’d exhausted all my clients, I started listing the birds I’d seen that morning, saying the names nice and slow in case Jocelyn wanted to take notes. I didn’t really see all that many and I was afraid that when I ran out of birds, I’d have to start talking about my dreams or something. But just before I reached the end of the list, I heard that same low thump, thump, thump, and I smiled, knowing it wouldn’t be long now.
“Did I tell you I pished in the woods this morning?” I said.
I love that word, pish. People always think it means something rude, but it doesn’t. It’s a perfectly nice word used by birders all over the world for an almost-acceptable way of getting a bird’s attention. But I didn’t think Jocelyn would know that so I leaned closer to the door, hoping this would do the trick.
“I’ve never pished in the woods,” I continued, “because it’s not really a good thing to do. But even the best people say that sometimes when you’re out there, and you’ve been waiting forever and you really have to go, but you still haven’t seen the bird you’re looking for, that’s when they say it’s okay to pish. And I really did want to see that bird.”
I waited and listened. Still the low thump, thump, thump but nothing more. Not even a shut up or an f you. So I kept right on going.
“I admit I was a little nervous. But I kept hearing this bird singing and singing, and it was really strange because sometimes he didn’t even sound like a bird. Sometimes he sounded like a cat or a dog, and once he sounded like a truck backing up, so of course I wanted to find it.”
All of a sudden I heard her shuffling around in there. Moving things, probably wishing she’d taken her iPod and cell phone in with her, or at least a pair of earplugs. But all of her stuff was sitting on the counter in the kitchen, and I wasn’t about to go down there and get any of it for her. Not when she was being so rude.
When my mom left for the protest earlier, I came over to see Mark’s new house, and he was giving me a tour when Jocelyn came inside, asking if she could go into the city to see her friends.
“You want to take the ferry alone?” he asked. And she said, “Well, duh,” and he said, “No, I’m sorry,” and she said, “You’re holding me against my will?” and he said, “Don’t be silly,” and that’s when she started talking about the Charter of Rights and something about liberties.
Mark held up his hands and said, “Jocelyn, don’t try to out-lawyer me. You’re twelve. You don’t know the Island or the ferry docks, and I don’t want you going over alone yet. Why don’t you come with me to the protest? It’ll give you a chance to get used to the ferry as well as an understanding of what we’re up against with that airport.”
Instead of saying okay, she shoved her fists into her hips so her arms looked like wings and said, “You want me to join your stupid protest? Are you kidding? I love that airport. If I could, I’d get on one of those planes and get the hell off this Island right now!” Then she ran upstairs and locked the door, leaving all of her stuff behind.
I’d watched her go, still not believing she felt the same way I did about something, and I was still thinking about that when Mark asked if I’d mind keeping an eye on her while he was at the protest. “You can use my laptop while you’re here if you like.” He held out the phone. “Mary Anne has a cell phone. You can call and ask to talk to your mom. See what she thinks.”
I knew she wouldn’t care, but what could I say to Mark? I can’t stay here because I have plans? If I told him that, then he wouldn’t go to the protest. And if he said anything to my mom after, she’d want to know where I went and with who and for how long, and I knew better than to start a Charter of Rights fight with my mother.
So I said sure, I’
d stay with Jocelyn. And Mark wasn’t gone two minutes when her phone started buzzing and vibrating itself all over the counter. I called up the stairs, “Jocelyn, your phone’s buzzing,” but she didn’t come down so I ignored it too. Sat on the sofa with Mark’s laptop and checked my e-mail, hoping for something more from Liz.
She’d sent me a dirty cartoon that morning, just like she did every day, so I figured she wasn’t mad about the whole iced-tea-in-the-head thing yesterday. I’d have liked a real e-mail too, just to be sure, but my mailbox was empty. So I’d gone upstairs and parked myself outside Jocelyn’s door, purposely leaving her phone behind. If she wanted it, she could go and get it.
“I’d been looking for that bird for an hour,” I continued. “And it was getting later and later, and my first customer was coming at nine and I was almost ready to give up when Benny came over to see what I was doing. You don’t know Benny, but he’s lived on the Island forever I think, and he’s told me stories about my Great-Grandma Lucy that even my mom doesn’t know. Like how she wasn’t afraid to go swimming in the ponds at Hanlan’s Point even during the polio scare. And how the two of them used to have a special spot where they’d sit and watch the fireworks every summer when the exhibition was on. I think he really liked my great-grandma, and when I told him I was looking for a bird I’d never heard before, he listened for a minute and you’ll never guess what he told me.”
“That the sound of your voice made him want to kill himself?” Jocelyn hollered.
“No, silly. He said it was a mockingbird.”
“Who gives a shit?”
“He said he could tell by the strange sounds it made and the way it kept singing and singing.”
“It was probably telling you to fuck off, just like I am!”
“I don’t think that was it at all. Benny said that a male mockingbird looking for a mate will sing night and day like that until a lady mockingbird answers back. They’re the only birds who never shut up.”
“Kind of like you?”
Island Girl Page 8