Subtraction

by Mary Robison

  “When?” Dottie said. “Earlier in the week?”

  “We are very, very high, Mother. If this is what life is like for Raf, I have new admiration for him.”

  “I know,” Dottie said. “I think about that.”

  I said, “I can hardly make a sentence.”

  “This decade. Or you mean me?” she asked.

  “We need food,” I said.

  We raided the kitchen, in this case a storehouse, with drum cans of vegetables, soups, cooking stuffs posing on utility shelves, hundreds of wine bottles in rows in wire cages, a meat locker, two freezers, Dottie’s personal refrigerator.

  We loaded china plates with food: cheese, fruit, two tins of smoked oysters, a knitted rope of French bread, chocolate bars. We had coffee in a burnished silver pot. We layered everything onto a room-service cart and trundled it all back to the sitting room.

  “You know, we shouldn’t eat this with the brandy on top of your Colombian because we’ll get fat at our age.”

  “Our age?” Dottie said. “Our age together is one hundred and two.”

  I said, “Then who cares?”

  “Well, I don’t. But what about?” she asked.

  “Being a fat one-hundred-and-two-year-old.”

  “I know,” said my mother. “Especially at your age and really fat because of all the reefer you smoke and drink brandy and then you eat.”

  Fredo, the freckled dog, sat in earnest patience, politely begging. I fed him an oyster. “Poor old dog,” I said.

  “You know he isn’t?” my mom said. “That’s son of Fredo; Fredo Two.”

  “Can’t be. Same dog,” I said. “I wrote a poem on enantiotropy.”

  “It hurts me to laugh,” said Dottie.

  “I wrote in a chorus of parents who were children, anti- fathers and anti-mothers. They admitted, yes, they had been parents, but no, it didn’t count.”

  “The Fredo you remember was really old and a beach- ball, a tubbo,” Dottie said.

  I rolled down my pants’ cuffs and positioned my feet back in my shoes. “If we get snowed in here, I just pray Raf can make it.”

  The fireplace log burned through and slumped suddenly, thumped, releasing a swarming spiral of red sparks.

  “My heart!” Dottie said.

  “Eat a pear,” I said.

  I told her the little port city in Cameroon where Mario and I had stayed couldn’t be found on maps, that the only way in was to ferry down from Calabar. I said that the Mermoz, one of our hotels, had a beer machine, and that each night the guests would get drunk and sing, “I go backwards ever; forwards, never.”

  “So what?” Dottie said. She had cleared a space on a writing table with her forearm and dropped her head. An afghan made a drape tent over her.

  The telephone out at the registry desk jangled.

  “Who am I?” I said to the caller. “Who are you?”

  I yelled to my mom, “Someone named Paul?”

  “Say hi and sorry but I’m too tired to talk right now,” she said.

  “Dottie’s wasted,” I told him.

  Down in Wasnascawa, there was still light but it was burning out fast by four that afternoon. Blizzard-driven, the surf came against the sea wall with crashes that spattered down into a smaller noise, like applause for home runs at some distant stadium.

  Ice had shellacked the boardwalk under me, so for traction I made each step a stomp. There was a paste-white fog. The wind beat my hair forward, gave me blinders on both sides.

  I shoved into a year-round bar called the Ocarina.

  The best booths were in back. My favorite had a team photograph of the Cape Head Women’s Softball Club, 1986 South Shore Park League Champions. Third one in, on a bench, sunburned and smiling, was Dottie.

  The customers today were three Coast Guard wives, a town selectman, and the lobstermen regulars.

  I sat under a fight poster for Marvelous Marvin Hagler who used to train out around the beach.

  “Hey, Paige,” the waitress said. “Where’s Raf?” Her name was Connie Del Verona. She had a waist-length red hair braid and black-lacquered nails.

  “He’s around. Espresso,” I said.

  One of the all-day drinkers sauntered over. Dick was his name. Looking very disheartened, he scooted beside me in the booth.

  “Hey, Paige. Where’s Raf?” he said.

  I remembered Dick ran a day trawler out of Kitahassett for a living.

  “How’s the fishing?”

  “Another week of this storm shit and I go under. So is Raf in town? I love that sucker.”

  “Hiding out, you know?”

  Dick liked hearing that. He grinned.

  “I love that sucker,” he said again. He wore yellow rubber overalls and a matching parka that reeked of the sea and booze. His streaming beard and hair seemed to pull his eyes and mouth down as if he were melting in his misfortune. He was a nightmare version of Raf.

  “We tried goin’ out yesterday, to the shelf, believe it or not. You want some of this?” Dick said, offering me his brimming doubles glass. In his raw-knuckled grip the glass shook.

  “I came here to get straight,” I said.

  “You came to a bar to get sober?”

  That was true. I came for the cold air, the walk, to escape the temptations of the inn; came because Raf and I had had some jolly times in these booths.

  Dick guzzled his red whiskey and shivered.

  He rasped at me, “You do writing, don’t you?”

  “No, just poetry,” I said.

  “Right, well, here’s a poem you can write. This’s what God told me last time we were chatting,” Dick said. Hunching closer and taking my wrist in his hand, he said, “Fornicate and be fruitful.” He unrolled his long tongue and panted at me.

  I said, “Oh, Charlie?”

  Nervous Charlie owned the place. He ran the Ocarina’s grills and tended bar. He was bouncer too, and with his darting maroon eyes, missed nothing. He never went far from the cash register, where his baseball bat was stashed.

  “Charlie’s getting the Louisville Slugger,” I said to Dick.

  “Raf’s wife, and she throws this kinda crap at me. Gets Charlie angry. Raf’s a close buddy of mine.”

  “Then let go of my wrist, Dick, and keep your tongue in your mouth.”

  Charlie had moved our way and he carried the tape- handled bat. “You two all right? Where’s your husband, Paige?” he asked me.

  “Running for governor,” I said.

  “All that’s happened was I got a little lippy, Charles,” Dick said. He looked bad.

  “You gonna be sick now, Dick?” Charlie asked.

  “How would I know?” Dick said. “Funny kind of day I’m having with everything shitting on me.” He got up and hobbled away.

  Charlie took his ball bat and tucked it under his arm. He leaned against the wall across from me and gave me his sternest look.

  The wind pressed hard now on the Ocarina’s wet front window. The window had patches of frost.

  Charlie’s cheek quivered and he said, “In case you haven’t heard, things are going awfully rough for the watermen these days. There’s an injustice to tell about, you and your mother want to write something.”

  “I’ll do it, Charlie. I’ll write a septet or a villanelle about fishermen injustice.”

  “See it when I believe it,” Charlie said.

  The Snow

  I DREAMT THAT RAF lay in the next room, gasping and laughing. His laugh was wheezy but agreeable, and sometimes it degenerated into a shallow cough.

  That was true to life, that cough.

  Dottie kept the inn’s private dining room heated and that’s where she found me this morning. She sat across the table, seeming dazed in the light from the new snow.

  “You look familiar,” she said to me.

  I sighed, flicked my computer screen clean. I had been typing shakily, working some lines and words around toward a n
once-rhyme poem.

  The freckled dog Fredo loped into the room, yawning as he came.

  My mom made a loose fist and dangled her hand in front of the dog’s face. “This is the froggy that will hypnotize you,” she chanted. She put her nose to the dog’s nose, stared into its dogface. Fredo’s facial markings gave him an expression of crazed good cheer, as if he found Dottie hilarious, her every action a howl.

  I said, “You slept fifteen hours and, having arisen, you smoked dope. Haven’t you heard of the war on drugs?”

  “This is the normal me,” she said. “You just need coffee. I’ll make us some, you play with Fredo.”

  “Mom, I’m writing and he noses me.”

  To Fredo, she said, “Do you hear this? Go nose her. What a bitch!”

  Not a gull, but some shifting thing in flight slashed past the window. I watched it kite over the south annex and the layers of outside terraces. The flying thing was a black sheet—a rain poncho, maybe. The wind forced most of it under the house soffit.

  I typed some bird names I had memorized because the black shape gave me a chill. “Hooded Merganser. Fulvous Whistling Duck.”

  Gradually the sheet whirled itself loose. It went witchlike, spinning in a crosscurrent, up, and wrapped itself around the weathercock on the Dutch barn. It stuck there, speared by the pointing metal of the vane.

  I gave up on writing for the day, Saturday, and hiked off my hangover, going to the village and back.

  Dottie enlisted my help with some upkeep chores. We waxed the nice wooden floors, broomed and dusted the rooms that were still heated and in use. But even by nine that night neither of us could face food. I volunteered to walk Fredo.

  “Wear layers,” Dottie said.

  Behind the inn were white-timber terraces, where the summer guests would drink and dine. From the terraces, a path with a pipe handrail curled down the bluffs to the beach.

  Fredo lunged ahead down the path so that, clenching his leash in my fist, I descended in a barely controlled scuttling fall. In my free mitten was an eight-volt box flashlight.

  There was moonlight but scraps of snow clouds were dark, shadowing the beach. The dog paused at an old ice patch to squirt lines of urine. The light at the end of the jetty and the St. Michael’s Island light had come on. They twitched like faltering stars.

  Fredo hobbyhorsed through a dense clutch of grass, spiky with ice, at the foot of the palisades. Down here the Atlantic winds had scraped away the snow piles, and the beach itself made a kind of flat avenue.

  There was an access lane that curved off the Point Road and swerved down a quarter mile to dead end on the beach. Parked at the dead end was an old school bus, I could see. The bus was painted matte black. Beside it were the flames of a campfire.

  I headed that way.

  “That’s deceased,” I told Fredo, who was sniffing and whimpering over the big shell of a horseshoe crab.

  We walked on, in the direction of the bus. Eerie things lay all along here. I saw a broken eyeless eel, phosphorescent with frost; a rope-soled shoe pointing inland; a dead gull whose white body made a W-shape on the sand.

  I got within shouting range of the bus. There were three or four figures idling around the campfire. In its light, they were genderless, mammoth-sized and strange.

  Fredo loped ahead; a ridge of fur pricked up along his spine.

  The figures had turned to watch.

  I waved, tugged on Fredo’s leash. He walked low, gargling threats, half dragging me.

  A girl broke from the group and headed for me. I could make out her shape and the angles of her face. She carried a stick she pointed. Its strip of shadow pointed too.

  “What’s going on?” I asked her.

  “I dunno—nothing,” the girl said.

  As we spoke our words vaporized in the warm currents of our breath, froze and blew off.

  The girl was scaled larger than I but was only eighteen or twenty, I guessed. “I see you’re walking that little dog,” she said.

  She wore pieces of military garb. The clothes had been bleached and dye-soaked, and in the flashbeam I could see the colors were uneven, streaked and blotched with whites and grays.

  She drew scribbles with her branch stick in the damp sand.

  I said, “Why are you here? Are you having a party or something?”

  Both of us looked around at the bus. There was light inside, and behind green window curtains, plenty of movement.

  “He’s a cute dog,” the girl said. “What’s he laughing at?”

  “I wondered about your bus, though,” I said. “Because this is a private beach, the property where you’re parked, see.”

  She lifted her eyebrows at me, gave a shrug. “It wasn’t my idea. We parked on the street earlier but they said we were in the way because of snowplows needing to get through,” the girl said.

  “Yeah, but when the tide comes in soon, this’ll all be underwater.”

  “That’d be weird,” she said.

  I aimed my flashlight at the ground. In the beam that came up, the girl’s face floated white and serene.

  “It’s fine with me if you hang around, but the cops could grab you. The Cape Head cops or the MDC cruise past all the time.”

  “You should tell these fish that wash up, ‘Don’t rot on the beach because it’s private.’ ”

  I said, “I’m trying to help you. We’re due for another foot of snow.”

  The other two from the campfire, boys who were teenagers or not much older, came over. They wore the same military-surplus clothing.

  The taller of the two had on a beret. “Good to see you. Didn’t we already speak with you?” he said. He asked his mate, “Didn’t we already speak with this person? Dozens and dozens of times?”

  “She isn’t mad at us. She just says because the beach is private,” the girl said.

  “Aha,” said the second young man.

  “She told me the tide’s gonna cover up the bus,” the girl said.

  The whole beach lunged. I felt as though I’d stepped onto an ice floe. I moved backward for balance. The snow clouds had cleared away from the full moon for a second and the clouds’ shadows streamed around us.

  The girl whipped her stick left and right in the sand.

  The beret kid’s eyes sparked.

  “You should get to high ground,” I said.

  In the moon’s blaze, I felt weightless.

  I had to push my way back through a charged and prickling wind. My eyes stung, and there was ticking all around. When I shot the flashlight’s beam I saw a heavy snowfall unfurling in the light cone.

  Dottie stood with the door of her big refrigerator spread. She jolted a little when she looked up at me.

  I was covered with ice and crystalline snow. I still grasped the flashlight, was still winded from the stair climb.

  “Are you O.K.?” Dottie asked.

  “No. Crisped. Frightened.”

  “I’m scared of Alzheimer’s,” Dottie said. “I’m afraid it’s encroaching. I’m pretty certain it is. I read the symptoms and I’ve got them.”

  “Oh, fish sticks. What you’ve had is too much Colombian,” I said.

  “One detail it took me a long minute to remember one night, and I tell you it had me in chills, was my bank’s name, the name.’ ”

  I told my mother, “There are kids on the beach. Well, older than kids—a guerrilla army.”

  “More power to ’em,” Dottie said. She bit the dainty wing of a Cornish hen. “Wherever land ends, you get people, Paige. They’ll come. It’s saline sympathy.”

  “This bunch came in a black bus and has sort of uniforms. Any sort of uniform, I get nervous,” I said.

  Dottie twisted a tiny drumstick from the hen. “I raised you well,” she said.

  I slept for short intervals, and the all-night classical station interrupted Verdi’s Requiem on the quarter hour to report that snow was building, roads would be impassable, most
churches were canceling tomorrow’s services; all should prepare for power outages; the New York Thruway and New Jersey Turnpike were sealed, the state of Maine had closed; snow would continue falling.

  The chance of seeing Raf got further from me with each report.

  The bus people invaded one dream that had just started to form. They were chasing Fredo and calling his name. I woke up to the bells from Our Lady of the Angels and an air-raid siren and the groan of the Misery Island foghorn.

  At my window I saw a remade and padded world. Hip- high snow beds winked like sugar through the fog. The Point Road made a barely visible indentation.

  Dottie hummed as she coasted around in her suite, the Commodore, straightening and tucking.

  “Ready for another day? This one could be serious,” she told me.

  “That’s all I’ve been hearing,” I said.

  “The Patriots have the Jets at home. Could mean the play-offs,” she said.

  “You mean football? Mom, we’ll be lucky if we keep the power on. And meanwhile, trespassers are freezing to death on the property.”

  “Look,” Dottie said, nodding at the portable TV on the tabletop. A Ninja movie glowed on the teeny screen.

  “Kwii-chee-boo-die!” she said and kicked at her reading chair’s ottoman. She backhanded a brush from her vanity table; sent it flying a good ten feet.

  “Not that the beach is anyone’s defined property . . .” I began.

  “I’ll define the property with my kwoo-chung-chee-boo,” Dottie said. She stuck out a thin arm with her fist clenched.

  I went hiking on the only flat land, the beach, followed it almost to the fork to Hampham. I saw a lot of damage. The boat shack above the Coast Guard station had blown down. The Boston ferry boat had crashed away a huge part of Nathan’s Pier.

  Far out, the sea was dark, but jade closer in, in the icy shallows. Waves were frozen, as in some monumental sculpture: scalloped white glazed lace.

  There were no people, no black bus, only birds picking around the remains of the campsite. And more snow sifting down.

  When I was near to the inn, I saw a man in a thin jacket balanced up on a dune. He was shouting at me with his bare hands propped around his mouth for projection.