Inland Passage

by Jane Rule

  “I’d better put the cookies on a plate,” Nancy decided.

  “Doesn’t Jessica know?” Ann asked surprised.

  “Oh, that, sure, I told her years ago when we were still in college.”

  The tin was also, of course, an ‘in’ joke, which was why it had been given them:

  The child that is born

  on the Sabbath Day

  Is bonny, blythe, good

  and gay.

  It was Wednesday, not Sunday, from which Nancy wished she could protect Jessica.

  Coming toward Nancy through the clutter of people at the baggage claim area, Jessica didn’t look as if she needed protection. Though her hair was short and the flesh had begun to fall away from her jaw line, she looked very much like herself. Only when they embraced, a gesture that startled Nancy, could she feel Jessica’s thinness under her disguising clothes. Then Jessica was standing her off to look at her.

  “I’ve decided there are two categories of classmates: totally unrecognizable or made up to play the part of a forty-six-year-old woman. You’re in category two. That hair’s fantastic. Is it a wig?”

  “No, my very own.”

  “So’s mine,” Jessica said proudly, taking a handful to demonstrate. “But not as distinguished as yours. And mine’s a suspicious length. I look like a man recently out of the army or prison.”

  “You look elegant,” Nancy said and meant it.

  Jessica hadn’t rejected her mother’s advice. But the suit she wore, a combination of suede and cashmere, was expensively soft and becoming.

  “Do you like it?” Jessica asked, looking down at herself. “It’s even more important to divorce a rich man once you’ve married him. I bought it at Carmel last week.”

  Claiming her bag, walking to the car, driving home, they talked in their old casual easiness. There were, after all, all those people and those four years they had in common, a larger store than Nancy had imagined, not coming directly from a reunion.

  “Vera, do you remember Vera?” Jessica asked. “Sure you do. She was that little blonde who was funny and pretty. Well, she’s still the belle of the ball. She divorced her husband, got a huge settlement, the house, alimony, and now he’s moved back in and wants to marry her again. Nothing doing! She likes him better as a star boarder. She says it’s much more romantic and practical, because now she’s the only woman he can afford.”

  “Was Larsen there?” Nancy asked.

  “Oh, no. The really colorful ones, the really interesting ones, like Larsen, like you, don’t go to reunions.”

  “Like me?” Nancy asked surprised.

  “Being a lesbian by now, even in those conservative circles is, well, admirably scandalous. And then you have a career…”

  “I call it a job,” Nancy answered.

  “Well, we weren’t trained to have jobs, were we? Not like girls today. Even mine. The college is a different place, you know. No curfew, men in the rooms. Some of our classmates were shocked about that. But I said the only thing that shocked me was how stupid we were to put up with all those rules.”

  “Do you remember,” Nancy said, “when we got campused for a week-end for opening a side door after six o’clock?”

  “We’d probably be expelled now. There are locks everywhere, even on the rooms. If you want to go out, even to the library, after dark, you have to call the campus escort,” Jessica said.

  “What about Dr. Ryan?” Nancy asked.

  “She gave the dinner speech. She retires next year. She’s old, Nancy, dottery.”

  Once they arrived at the house and Nancy could look directly at Jessica, she saw the sudden death’s head strain in Jessica’s face.

  “Rest?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Jessica agreed simply.

  Jessica was still in the guest room when Ann got home from work.

  “How is she?”

  “Just the same…and dying,” Nancy answered. “I don’t know.”

  “How are you?”

  “Very glad she’s come,” Nancy said, “and frightened for her.”

  “Can she talk about it?”

  “She hasn’t.”

  They began to prepare dinner together without exchanging the ordinary bits of their separate days.

  By the time Jessica joined them she had refreshed herself. She embraced Ann as warmly as she had Nancy, as if to include her in that old friendship though they had met only once.

  “No drink, thanks. Do go ahead,” she encouraged. “And if you smoke, please smoke. I can’t stand the role of Hamlet’s ghost.”

  “‘Swear,’” Nancy intoned dramatically, remembering that they used to say that, not remembering why.

  “I also hate to waste time resting,” Jessica said. “They’ll have to put me in again and do something about me when I get home.”

  “It must be awful,” Nancy said.

  “It is,” Jessica answered. “Do you know what I hate most? All those articles about the ‘cancer personality,’ trying to make you feel guilty as well as sick.”

  “It’s the medical profession, passing the buck,” Ann said.

  “And the friends and relatives. My daughter thinks it’s God’s wrath for my wicked ways. I said to her, ‘Ducky, the only reason I have to die is that we all do. You find me a survivor, and I’ll repent.’”

  “Why is everyone so stuck on cause and effect, I wonder?” Ann asked.

  “A combination of Newtonian physics and Christianity,” Nancy suggested, “when we need Einstein and possibly Zen.”

  “Nobody said anything remotely like that at the reunion,” Jessica said, laughing. “Nancy, you don’t disappoint me.”

  Nancy remembered how little anyone at college had ever talked about what interested her, how Jessica had always covered for her accidents of seriousness and turned them into a joke.

  “Well, as one of our gallant classmates put it, if divorce makes you a high risk for cancer, at least it lowers the risk of being found chopped in pieces.”

  “What a ghoulish way of putting it,” Nancy said.

  “But Josie Enright (she was in one of the hill halls, do you remember?) had that distinction, haven’t you heard, and her ‘widower’ got off scot free,” Jessica said.

  “It’s not the sort of thing that gets into the class newsletter,” Nancy said.

  “She was in the obits. In the Quarterly, not with the gory details. ‘Suddenly,’ I think it said,” Jessica said.

  “Is the general consensus against marriage by now?” Ann asked.

  “Oh, I don’t suppose so: Sore heads tend to congregate. Ninety percent of us were really majoring in marriage after all. The awards go to those getting ready for their silver anniversaries with one pregnant child or child-in-law. On some, smugness is even becoming. Do you remember Judy Framton?”

  Nancy nodded as she got up to clear the table.

  “Well, she’s proto-grandmother of the first category, totally unrecognizable.”

  “I wouldn’t have the courage to go back,” Ann said.

  “It was fun,” Jessica said. “I haven’t laughed that much in a long time.”

  Nancy brought the plate of cookies to the table.

  “Home made?” Jessica asked.

  “It’s what lesbians do when they’re alone together,” Nancy said.

  “Now I wish I’d known that before the reunion,” Jessica said. “There are still sheltered lives among us. Gosh, I haven’t baked cookies in years. Do you remember the enormous chocolate chip cookies they used to make at college? They still do.”

  Nancy remembered the short-and-thicks, milkshakes you had to eat with a spoon, and fresh orange juice at the college shop.

  “I had to buy the whole pitcher of it once,” Jessica remembered, “because Donna (she was my roommate) was so hungover she couldn’t write her exam without it.”

  The remembering went on over coffee, which Jessica didn’t drink. She and Nancy apologized to Ann, who said she knew some of the stories as well as they did and co
uld even join in on a punch line or two. But Jessica was tiring.

  “You have a long trip tomorrow,” Nancy said.

  “Oh, I know,” Jessica said.

  Ann and Nancy went into the kitchen to finish loading the dishwasher.

  “What about Einstein and Zen?” Ann asked.

  “We have to accept the random. We know all the leaves are going to fall, but we have no way of knowing when any particular one…”

  They heard Jessica coming down the hall to the bathroom. She stopped at the kitchen door.

  “I forgot to say about the flowers in my room. They’re lovely. Goodnight.”

  For a few moments they moved around the kitchen without speaking.

  Then Nancy said, “Zen masters write death poems. Odd things like:

  Seventy-seven long years

  I’ve reviled the Scriptures,

  Zen itself. A failure through

  And through, I piss on Brahma.”

  Ann gave a startled laugh and then said, “Maybe you should have…”

  Nancy shook her head, “It’s just another slogan.”

  THE END OF SUMMER

  CANCHEK ARRIVED PROMPTLY AT eight in the morning in what looked like a new work shirt and trousers, boots that had been carefully cleaned. Even his beard looked freshly laundered. So well covered by hair and cloth, his age was readable only in his eyes, young enough still for consternation and hope.

  “Your holiday’s done you good,” Judith Thornburn said.

  “Got her pumped out?” he asked, ignoring her civility in a way she didn’t mind. He was a man who didn’t like wasting other people’s money.

  “Yes, they’ve just left. They couldn’t see any cracks in it. Neither could I.”

  “You looked in it yourself?” he asked, surprised.

  “I wanted to know,” she answered.

  Judith had been waiting for nearly a month to get this last of the summer problems solved before she closed the house for another year. There had been too many of them, a leaky skylight, a failed pump, and finally this seeping septic tank whose pungent odors had driven her guests off the new back terrace with its lovely view. One man had dug down to it.

  “It’s cracked,” he told her. “You’ll probably have to get it replaced.”

  When she called Canchek in urgent concern, he said, “I’m going sailing for three weeks. She probably just needs patching. I’ll do her when I get back.”

  There was only one other man who could be called about such things, Thompson, but, once you’d had one work for you, the other wouldn’t come back unless you made it clear that you were switching sides. Thompson was an older man, garrulous, who told the widows and grass widows he worked for, “Don’t go looking for trouble. Just don’t put no paper down her, and don’t clean your sinks with nothing to interfere with the natural process. These old places, they don’t like to be disturbed, any more than you do. Old plumbing is old plumbing.”

  “He’s a harmless old coot, and at least he’s friendly,” those who sided with Thompson would say, and they’d add, “And he’ll take a neighborly drink and he doesn’t still live with his mother.”

  Canchek wouldn’t, and Canchek did. Judith wasn’t old enough yet, in her mid-thirties as Canchek was, to appreciate Thompson’s vulgarity. And she was a person who liked to look for trouble, get to the bottom of it and solve it. Canchek was her man even if she had to wait.

  They walked around the house together, she carrying the trowel she had been using when he arrived.

  “I thought I might lift some of the plants if you show me where you have to dig.”

  “Don’t know yet,” he said, flashing a light into the tank.

  “It’s odd,” she said. “I even saw the cracks when we uncovered the outside, right about there, and I would have sworn they went right through. Fiberglass isn’t that thick.”

  Canchek blew out his breath harshly before he spoke. “Not cracked,” he said, and then he walked down the sodden earth below the tank, “but she’s been leaking all right, for quite a while.”

  “Is that why that plum tree looks so sick?”

  “Lost two of my own apples just to run off. Probably.” He put a sympathetic hand on the trunk as he looked up to the blackened rather than turning leaves. “They’re only drawn to so much water. Not like a man.”

  Even Canchek people said he was a dour, silent man, but good at what he did, hardworking and reliable. Perhaps that’s why she valued these small attempts at conversation. They made her know that Canchek liked her, or at least didn’t disapprove of her as she suspected he did a lot of people, even those who chose to be his particular customers. She didn’t know why he did. She drank and smoked, both of which would probably be against his beliefs. Nobody seemed quite sure what sect it was he and his mother were the lonely representatives of. He was willing to drive a truck; he even did emergency work on Sunday, but his beard looked more like a religious than a personal choice. Judith knew so little about religious choices, she wasn’t sure what anybody believed or was supposed to believe. She was not yet divorced, but the prospect seemed more and more likely. Surely Canchek wouldn’t approve of that. He could easily have heard the gossip, if he listened to such things, about the Thornburn woman, out here most of the summer by herself. Husband bought her the place to get her out of the way, as so many of them did. A fancy car, a boat, whatever else she wanted or he wanted for her to show that she was well provided for. He didn’t give her the one thing a man ought to give a woman: a child. Maybe, in a world increasingly both careless and frantic about money, Canchek liked her simply because the Thornburns were willing to pay the cost promptly of having things fixed.

  “You can save the daisies,” he said, pointing. “I’ll save only some of the bulbs.” Did he notice her regret when he added, “but bulbs just turn up, don’t they?”

  She wanted to save what flowers she could, but she also felt less guilty about asking him, or anyone, to do such an unpleasant job if she didn’t flinch from it herself, and worked along with him.

  “Funny thing,” Canchek said as he began to dig in the area she’d indicated. “Man’s the only animal that doesn’t like his own smell.”

  Judith heard the lines, “And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;/ And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell.” Certainly Hopkins didn’t like it.

  It was warm enough, now that the early morning fog was burning off, for another workman to take off his shirt. Canchek would not. Judith had to imagine his shoulders, the muscles of his back. She was not so much attracted to him as curious. The skin on her husband’s back already began to feel like the skin of a puppy which would grow into a large dog.

  Judith supposed he still made love to her the way he still paid the bills, as a responsibility. He hadn’t said anything about a divorce yet. When he first became involved with another woman and Judith confronted him, he said he expected her to be civilized about it. In front of him, she was. Alone her hysterical crying fits and destructive rages so humiliated her that he was the last person she’d subject to them. Judith hadn’t even spoken to her close friends because her grief and her shame were both so boring and so predictable, as was her fantasy of being his mistress instead of his wife, the one he ran away to. This last summer, in fact, he was occasionally running away from his mistress to Judith or the quiet life she provided at what they called “the cottage.” It was a good-sized house, set in some acres of woods, just across the road from the sea. His mistress was not being civilized, or she owned a vicious cat.

  “At this point, my dear,” said a friend Judith hadn’t confided in, “they go back to their wives.”

  Judith couldn’t see why. There were no children for whose sake things should be done. For herself, he didn’t any longer seem much of a prize for her good behavior: “Home is the sailor, home from the sea, and the hunter home from the hill.” She would never expel him from the world he had paid for, but she would not move out once he’d left either.
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  “Look,” Canchek said. “This must be the crack you saw.”

  She walked over and looked at the exposed curve of a badly damaged septic tank.

  “That’s it,” she agreed.

  “Well, she’s not yours. She’s another one.”

  “Really?”

  “They must of broken this one putting her in, just smashed her up a bit more and put in this other one.”

  “Why didn’t they take the broken one out?”

  “Couldn’t be bothered maybe. These guys with machines won’t get off them. Some of them don’t even own a shovel.”

  Canchek pulled great pieces of fiberglass out of the soil until he and she could have played at a giant jigsaw puzzle, but he was not interested in the wreckage. He wanted to find out what was leaking. As he dug, he occasionally grunted in discovery and disgust.

  “There’s no septic field here at all, nothing but some tile and mud. I’ll have to get pipe.”

  He had done enough work around the place for her to know he begrudged any purchase of new material if what was around could be used. Whether it belonged to the rich or the pensioned, money was money.

  “We’ll need some rocks,” he said, kicking about in the tall grass where cultivation ended.

  “There’s a pile over here,” she offered. “They came out of the garden.”

  He did not look up or acknowledge her offer, intent on his own search which seemed to her odd. Judith would not have looked for rocks like Easter eggs in the field grass.

  Canchek grunted and sank down on his haunches, like a hunter checking prints and droppings, only the crest of his dark hair visible among the tassle tops. Then he stood up, shaking his head.

  “You know, there’s as sure a wrong way to do it as there is a right way. Look at this.”

  Judith followed his path to where he stood, and there spreading out beside him was a sprawling pile of stones nearly uniform in size, hidden in the tall grass. She remembered having seen it in spring, matted over with last year’s rot before new grass began to grow again.

  “Why do they even dump it on the site if they don’t intend to use it?” he asked himself and then gave his answer. “They call in the inspector just before they’re going to lay the pipe. He sees the trenches. He sees the pile of rock, says, ‘Okay, boys, that’s good.’ And the minute he turns his back, they bulldoze the trenches and go home. What did I tell you? Not a shovel to their name!”