Blessed Are the Cheesemakers

by Sarah-Kate Lynch

  The pity—or was it disgust—was plain on Ed’s face.

  “I had one martini at the Grill and advised you to do the same,” Ed said, “then I went home. I don’t even know those guys you were with, Kit, did you? They were assholes. Hey, we all feel bad about Jacey and the baby, buddy. But when it comes down to it she’s gone. You’re still here, and you’re fucking things up, man, just like she did.”

  The brick wall Kit had built in his mind to block out the pain of what happened to Jacey started to crumble. The baby. He couldn’t bear it. With all his might, he put the bricks back in place. Then, sitting in Ed’s office, looking out across the buildings and cranes to the glimpses of green from Central Park beyond, he suddenly caught flashes of Ed and Mary and George and Julia searching his apartment. For what? Something round and silver flashed in his memory. Something jammed in the S-bend of the basin in his bathroom. The top of a bottle? Jesus.

  “We all wanted to help you, Kit, but nothing we do seems to make any difference. You can’t expect the company to pay the price for the fallout from Jacey.”

  Kit shut his eyes. Flashes of Jacey lying on the floor invaded his thoughts. Jacey, her face pale and blank, their unborn baby already dead inside her. His heart started beating its terrified tattoo. Jacey was gone. Jacey was gone. Jacey was gone.

  “I just need more time, Ed,” he beseeched. “More time. That’s all.”

  “Kit,” said Ed. “It has been almost three months. You’ve had all the time we can afford to give you. Anybody else would’ve been out weeks ago. It’s only because George thought so much of you that he hasn’t done it already. I tried to tell him a month ago that we should—” Ed checked himself. “I’m sorry, man, but that’s the way it is. Now, I’m calling Niamh to take you home. Go on vacation. For chrissakes, get your shit together.”

  He picked up the phone, and as he punched in the numbers, a dangerous crack formed in Kit’s wall of resolve. As he sat in his best friend’s office, the bricks came down, slowly at first, then in a great gushing, thundering heap, and for the second time that day, he wept.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “Of course the grass is only part of it. Without the sun, the rain, a slightly salty sea breeze and whatever you’re having yourself, your milk will taste like shite and so will your cheese.”

  Joseph Feehan, from The Cheese Diaries, RTE Radio Archives

  Another Princess Grace was alive and well, as it happened, and living on the other side of the world in the remote Sulivan Islands. This Princess was occupying the imagination of Abbey Corrigan, who was mud-bathing on the squishy banks of the Ate’ate Stream.

  Actually, Abbey thought she was imagining Gorgonzola but the Princess didn’t mind. She was more miffed at having to share Abbey’s daydream with an automatic washing machine.

  Lying on her back in the warm mud, eyes closed, Abbey’s smile soaked up the sun. In her head she did loads of clothes with one press of a button while creamy wedges latticed with bluish-green stripes floated in the air around her.

  The mud always reminded her of cheese, it was just one of those things. It didn’t make sense but then neither did anything else so she didn’t worry about it. As for washing machines, she thought about those because she spent hour after infernal hour on the banks of the Ate’ate Stream, soaping and dipping and rubbing and rinsing and wringing out her and Martin’s dirty laundry by hand. That didn’t make much sense either, she thought idly as she lay in the mud, as they had a perfectly adequate supply of running water in their hut. But Martin wouldn’t hear of using this water for washing their clothes—it was a precious resource not to be wasted, he was always telling her, and while this was not, in fact, the case, she knew he didn’t like to be reminded of that. All in all it seemed easier to do the laundry the hard way.

  She opened one eye and squinted up at the stunning blue sky above her: not so much as a whisper of tattletale cloud left behind after the morning’s rain. Abbey flattened her palms against the soft ground and squelched the silky mud between her fingers, imagining it was the innards of a thousand overripened Camemberts and wondering if the push-up bra really pushed up. She thought about bras a lot these days too—underwear generally but bras in particular. They were the only thing that really made her wish she could jump in a cab and whip up to Harvey Nichols with her mother; in fact, apart from that, she didn’t miss Harvey Nicks or her mother at all.

  “Is it normal,” she asked the sky, “to lie in the mud and think about bosoms?” She barely recognized her own voice these days with its funny English base, Irish inflection and hint of Sulivanese pidgin. It sounded like it belonged to someone else.

  “Well,” she spoke aloud again. “Is it?”

  The sky didn’t answer her but Abbey thought she knew the answer anyway and it was no. It was not normal to lie in the mud and think about bosoms. It was not normal to lie in the mud, period. But it seemed that the longer she lived in the islands, the less normal she became; and the less normal she became, the less she knew what normal was anyway. She wondered if that evened things out a bit, somehow, and decided that it probably didn’t, but she couldn’t be sure. She couldn’t be sure about anything these days. It drove Martin to distraction but then so did everything, everything to do with her anyway.

  She’d arrived in the Sulivan Islands eleven years ago with two pristine white B-cup bras; perfect for the rosebud breasts she had at the time. Within a year, however, she’d been bursting out all over. Her mother had always told her that she would blossom “overnight” but then her mother had also told her that Santa Claus was a child molester and that it was good luck to have nobody remember your birthday, so she hadn’t been holding her breath. Typical that just when she had least access to department stores, her boobs decided to show up. She didn’t think she’d grown any taller than the five feet five she had been when she arrived. Her hair was still reddish brown, her eyes hazel, her waist small and her thighs firm. Okay, so she probably had a few more freckles (after all, she was an Irishwoman in the sun) but otherwise the package was pretty similar—apart from her bosoms. They’d grown big for someone her size but were perfectly round and quite pert, and after her initial shock at their tardy appearance she had become quite attached to them.

  Abbey turned her head to one side, not so far that she would get mud in her ear, but far enough to see the overflowing basket of laundry plopped next to her on the bank. She sighed and awarded herself a few more minutes’ daydreaming. Really, what was the hurry? Closing her eyes again she indulged herself in one of her favorite lingerie fantasies. In real life she’d been making do with the same three Elle Macpherson sports bras for the past six years, but in her dreams her corsetry was far saucier. This morning she was imagining a full, milky-white breast bursting out of a scarlet Yves St. Laurent cup, maybe just a hint of nipple threatening to expose itself at any minute. Eyes scrunched closed to keep out the daylight, she followed an imaginary finger, a man’s finger, smooth and pale and strong, as it traced its way across one rising bosom, down into the sacred valley of the cleavage, then up the sloping hillside of the second breast before tenderly coming to a stop, then tracing its way, unbearably slowly, toward—

  “Abbey!” Martin’s voice at such close quarters jerked her out of her daydream with a gasp. “What on earth do you think you’re doing?”

  She sat bolt upright, her body making a large “ploop” as it rose out of the mud, and turned around, into the sun, to see the dark form of Martin surrounded by golden rays, wearing his uniform of Akubra hat, open-neck shirt, bandanna, khaki shorts and sandals. He looked like a summer version of the Marlboro Man, even in silhouette.

  “You’re covered in mud,” Martin said, his posh English accent surprising her as it often did. “What happened? Did you fall over? Are you all right?” He picked his way down the bank, frowning and staring pointedly at the basket of laundry, and stopped at Abbey’s feet, taking off his hat and wiping the sweat on his forehead with his arm.

  Abbey rubbe
d the back of her head, gooey with riverbank, and tried not to act as stupid as she felt. “I had a bit of a headache,” she lied, fairly feebly, “so I just lay down for a bit. I’m fine, really.”

  She looked up at her husband and smiled, thinking for the millionth time how handsome he was. His hair got blonder with every year, and she loved it long and roughly cut. Eleven years in the sun had weathered his skin but that just made his eyes look bluer, his teeth whiter, his smile all the more radiant when he chose to shine it on her. Is it any wonder, she thought, that she had followed this gorgeous man to the ends of the earth as a dreamy teenager?

  “You look completely mad,” said Martin. “What on earth is the matter with you? Get up.” He held out his hand and pulled her abruptly to her feet. They stood there, achingly close to each other for just a heartbeat, and Abbey felt, in that moment, a glimmer of hope. Dashed, of course, almost immediately.

  “You’d better get on with the washing,” Martin said, putting his hat back on and turning away from her, making his way along the bank toward Irrigation Central, the “project” with which he had become more and more obsessed over the past decade.

  Abbey watched him go, then waded into the water to thigh level. She crouched, facing downstream, so that the water flowed around her shoulders and neck. The noise of it rushing by with such determination made her feel excited, like she was going somewhere or something was about to happen, something that nobody could stop.

  Drying out later on the river stones as she knelt and got on with the laundry, Abbey picked up a pair of murky gray Y-fronts and held them up in front of her. Had she known as a wide-eyed teenage bride that hand-rinsing her husband’s briefs in an island river would be the highlight of her day, would she have been quite so quick to run to the end of the world with him? Abbey shook her head as if to rid it of dangerous thoughts and scrubbed at the Y-fronts a second time. She loved him, he was all she had, and that was what counted.

  “Abbey! Abbey!” She was distracted from her thoughts by the urgent calling of her friend Pepa, standing at the top of the riverbank waving at her. “Jeez, Abbey,” Pepa called with much dramatic wringing of her hands. “Plenty hoo-ha! Please! Come quick. Hurry!”

  Abbey threw the washing in the basket and scrambled up the stone path, running after Pepa, who was scurrying toward the meetinghouse-cum-schoolhouse-cum-church that formed the central nucleus of the village.

  From the stand of coconut palms to the left of the meetinghouse, Abbey could hear a great ruckus going on and it was toward the ruckus that Pepa was heading. As she got closer she saw that Oba, another friend of Pepa’s, was kneeling by a tree, wringing her hands, obviously distressed, comforting her sister Nan, from whence the ruckus was erupting.

  Abbey realized with astonishment that the noise was actually that of Nan crying—astonishing because the Sulivanese never cried. Not even when a limb was accidentally amputated, a labor spine-splittingly long and hard or a loved one snatched forever by an unforgiving sea. They mourned and felt grief, deeply and loudly, but tears they did not understand.

  Today, though, huddled outside the meetinghouse, clutching her knees and burying her face in her skirt, there was no doubt that Nan was crying real tears, lots of them.

  “What’s the matter, Nan?” Abbey asked as she knelt down next to her, but Nan turned her face and waved Abbey off.

  “What’s the matter with her, Oba?” Abbey asked her sister.

  Oba shook her head dramatically. “Ah-ah. Ah-ah, Abbey,” she said, shooting Nan a warning look that only made the distraught woman wail even louder as she rocked backward and forward against the tree trunk.

  “What’s the matter with her, Oba?” Abbey asked again, perplexed. “I don’t understand.”

  Oba leaned over and whispered sharply into her sister’s ear. All Abbey could pick up was “Fafi,” the name of Nan’s eldest daughter, a well-developed seventeen-year-old who had eschewed further schooling on the main islands in favor of staying to help her mother with her four younger brothers and sisters.

  “Is something wrong with Fafi? Is she all right?” Abbey asked. “Oba, you have to tell me what is going on or I can’t help.”

  “Abbey no much help mos’ likely anyway, hey,” Oba said, studiously avoiding her gaze and turning her attention to Pepa, who stood behind Abbey nervously biting her fingernails.

  “What is it, Nan?” Abbey asked again, ignoring the others and rubbing Nan’s back with one hand. “You’re frightening me. What is it?”

  The woman’s sobbing slowed to a hiccup, and Nan lifted her head and looked Abbey in the eyes.

  “Abbey take Waraman away, hey?” she asked hesitantly, sniffing miserably in between each word.

  Waraman, or Water Man, was what the islanders had rather facetiously christened Martin when his obsession with irrigation first became apparent. God in Heaven, thought Abbey, what was going on here? She laughed, in what she hoped was a reassuring way, and gave her a hug.

  “Don’t be mad,” she said. “I will never make Water Man go away. Never! Sshhh, there’s nothing to worry about.”

  But Nan had started sobbing again and nothing Abbey could say would stop her. Oba just sat by looking unhelpful, while Pepa fidgeted and tried not to meet Abbey’s eye. Eventually, confused and feeling useless, she gave up trying to console Nan or get any sense out of Pepa and Oba and headed home. But the woman’s tears unnerved her—why would anybody think she would take Martin away? Why would anybody think she would make Martin do anything? Could make Martin do anything?

  After hanging up the washing on the clothesline behind the house, Abbey sat in the shade on the porch with the latest Australian Women’s Weekly and tried to interest herself in an unknown TV star’s table settings. Through the shrubs she could hear the sound of her next-door neighbor Imi having loud and athletic sex. Imi’s husband, Nunu, had been away for more than a week on a buying trip and the strain of going without had obviously been more than she could stand. Nunu wasn’t back yet but there was no mistaking Imi’s cries of ecstasy.

  The Sulivanese were a highly sexed crowd who enjoyed nothing more than a good seeing-to, as long as nobody involved was related. They specialized in a complicated arrangement of sleeping with each other’s husbands, and wives, depending on which island their ancestors came from, and were great believers in the more the merrier. More than once Abbey and Martin had been invited to join in. Martin, of course, was quite opposed. Not that Abbey fancied the idea much herself, but sex of some description would be nice. She closed her eyes again and leaned back against the outside wall of her home, attempting to conjure up the little lacy bra and strong, pale finger that had captivated her during her morning mud wallow.

  This time, the finger was tracing one of the delicate blue veins in the by now rapidly rising and falling milky-white breast. Down the finger slid, down, down, down, until it slipped ever so gently inside the cup of the bra and sought out the almost bursting nipple, feeling it harden and—

  “Jesus Christ, Abbey, what are you doing now?” The sound of Martin’s voice jolted Abbey out of her dreams for the second time that day, this time causing her to bang her head against the doorjamb.

  Martin was standing over her, looking dirty and sweaty and more than a little grumpy.

  “Haven’t you got anything better to do than daydream?” As he threw his hat on the rickety bench next to the door, for the first time in a while Abbey noticed his hands. The nails, half-bitten and chewed, were black and brown and torn in places, the fingers thick with calluses and scar tissue, the result of his endless toiling in the “project” behind the village. They were the fingers of a hard-working outdoorsman. They were not, thought Abbey, the fingers that had been trespassing on the bosom of her dreams, a bosom she had imagined to be her own. So whose fingers had those been? she wondered, with a nasty thrill that left her with guilty goose bumps.

  “You haven’t forgotten that the Fullers are flying in today, have you?” Martin’s voice was reminding her
from inside the house. Abbey opened her mouth in silent horror and rolled her eyes heavenward. How could she have forgotten? Jim Fuller, who flew his Hercules in once a month with provisions from Queensland in Australia, had told them last month that he would bring Shirley, his wife, with him next visit. Abbey had stayed with Jim and Shirl six years before on an emergency trip to Brisbane and counted Shirl as just about her closest friend on the planet. How could it have slipped her mind?

  Of course, I’ve got better things to do than daydream, she thought, scrambling to her feet. Jim and Shirl were going to stay on the island overnight, and she was going to cook a meal, God help them, and she and Shirl were going to stay up all night just talking and talking and talking. She’d been looking forward to it for a month. How could she have forgotten?

  She raced into the kitchen, cheeks flushed, to find Martin gazing around with a sour look on his face at the sad lack of preparation. Their breakfast dishes were stacked higgledy-piggledy in the battered old stainless-steel sink and the wooden floor hadn’t seen the business end of a broom all week.

  “Abbey, are you all right?” Martin said, looking at her, his grumpiness replaced by something else. “Is everything okay?” As she searched her mind for something sensible to say, he put his hardworking outdoorsman’s hand on her back and steered her toward the kitchen table, then pushed her down into a chair.

  “I am really terribly worried about you,” he said, leaning toward her and looking into her face. “You’re not yourself.”

  Abbey had to agree. She wasn’t herself. She was someone quite like herself, but a bit madder. She couldn’t explain it really. Well, not to Martin anyway, but she gave it a try.

  “Do you ever feel like you’re not attached to your life?” she asked her husband. “Like you’re floating along beside it or on top of it and it’s just getting on with things without ever really involving you? Like you could even drop off to sleep for a couple of years or go to Mars or something and when you came back your life might not have even noticed you were gone?”