The Outer Cape

by Patrick Dacey

  “Good seats. We’ll probably need earplugs, though,” Robert says.

  “Earplugs,” Nathan says. “Don’t be a homo, Dad.”

  Andrew starts to giggle, then looks at his father and quiets instantly.

  “What was that?” Robert says, and then, in an effort to make up the ground he has lost, he drops this little number on his son:

  “You know, Nathan, you could stand to use that machine a few hours a day, too. You’re quite the fatso.”

  The word feels so antiquated, so old and histrionic, Andrew is now giggling uncontrollably. Tears form in Nathan’s eyes, his head bowed, shoulders slumped. Irene throws up her hands.

  “I’m done with this Christmas,” she says, and for the next few minutes, all three of them stay still as she hurriedly collects the wrapping paper into a black trash bag, finally carrying the bag into the kitchen and climbing the stairs to the master bedroom.

  Those wild movements have scared them into the present, as though whatever had just been said was already a memory waiting to be dredged up years later.

  Robert lights another cigarette and sips his coffee. Luckily the boys have other toys to entertain them: plastic monkeys with curled arms they can connect and let swing from a plastic ladder, a tape recorder to use when they perform their mock radio show Nate and Andy’s Fart Time Fun Hour, a remote-controlled car (the third Robert has bought this year, which he knows will be broken by the next day and is the reason he has kept the receipt).

  “Go on,” Robert says, “play.”

  The boys are content; it doesn’t take much. Maybe he was the same when he was a boy, Robert thinks, hiding these acts of violence away and with great focus and determination redirecting his attention to the pleasures in front of him.

  There are two presents left under the tree, both for him. One is from the boys, a small box hastily wrapped in newspaper comics. Inside the box is a money clip with his initials engraved on the back. Elegant, useful, and inexpensive. The other is from Irene, and by the size and shape of the box, he knows it can only be one thing: the snakeskin boots he had seen in a shop window in Manhattan years ago. Irene had walked ahead of him but came back to where he was standing, and he said how he had wanted to be a cowboy when he was a kid, and she had said, “Who says you still can’t?” When he daydreamed he often did so thinking of big sky country, cattle trains, sleek brown horses, saloons and spittoons, silver-plated pistols, and fires whining in the cool, desert twilight. The previous spring, he had looked into taking a trip to a cattle range, where they let you play the part of a cowboy for two weeks, but it seemed superficial and overpriced; if he was to be a cowboy then he’d have to be one for life and that was not the life he was given. He’d need a horse, and the boots, and money, too. There was danger. He did not have to wrangle over prices with big-powered Texans. He took the money and the guns and the women.

  The snakeskin boots are a start; they make the outlaw dream real, the scales freshly polished and with two loops on the ends to pull them up his calf. Maybe Irene has an inclination that he will run. Maybe she wants him to after all.

  He sits on the couch and pulls on the boots, then stands and begins to walk. He nearly falls over and has to grab hold of the tree, shaking loose a flurry of pine needles. His heels clack on the hardwood floor as he walks to the full-size mirror in the bathroom, where Robert is overcome with how ridiculous it all looks: his leg up on the sink in his New England home, the snow outside, the snakeskin boots he can’t even walk in. He sits on top of the toilet seat and pulls off the boots, smells the leathery insides. A brief sting of joy hits his throat. Then guilt. Then confusion.

  He’s no outlaw. He’s no family man.

  He doesn’t know who he is.

  FOURTEEN

  In an effort to save money, Irene decides not to have the oil drum filled and so, at night, has the boys in sweaters, under heavy comforters. They sleep longer than usual in that warmth. So long, that on the first day back from winter break, they miss the bus and Irene has to drop them off. Robert has been out of the house for three weeks now—Christmas was the last straw—and has only called once to tell the boys he loves them and to tell Irene he’s sorry. She refused to accept his apology and hung up the phone, her hand trembling. As she drives back toward the house, she thinks, fuck it, and gets on the highway toward Boston. She still has Robert’s credit cards, and whether or not he can pay them off anymore is of no concern to her.

  She parks in a lot near Newbury Street and, in her cheap wool coat, walks the crowded sidewalks full of vibrant, healthy-looking people. She has been on the Cape all through winter and so hasn’t been around more than a dozen people at one time. Even the children who run to catch up to their parents, or sit impatiently on the benches while their mothers gather together their shopping bags, appear to have sweet, harmless faces and neatly combed hair.

  Yes, she has put on weight. The purging has had the opposite effect than she had hoped. And she’s been smoking more than usual, and in the unnatural light of the designer boutiques, she notices creases in the skin around her eyes and mouth. At Serenella, she tries on a number of cardigan sweaters, moving up in size, so that they hang down over her hips. Buy big, she thinks, because when you lose the weight, it will be that much more noticeable.

  At the cash register, the Amex is declined, and the MasterCard and the Cape Bank check card.

  “Seems your man has some explaining to do,” the sleekly dressed, long-armed woman at the register says. The tips of her turquoise colored fingernails on her right hand hold the cards as though in a bird’s claw.

  Irene smiles, embarrassed.

  The other women in line look at her as though she’s an abandoned puppy, their greatest fear to be left wanting.

  What does one do without money?

  Irene feels like a fraud. Shopping is a habit, a way to fight boredom or gruesome thoughts of what if. This isn’t me, she tells herself. She has been coasting through the days. But she believes it’s important to struggle, that in never being challenged she had become soulless.

  “I’ll put these back,” the saleswoman says and refolds the items on the counter. “But I need to cut up the cards.”

  The long winter shows in the blackened, crusted snow pushed to the curbs and corners along the street.

  Irene drops her wallet in her purse and walks out of the store not too quickly. Outside she tips over her purse and pours out the contents on ground. She takes her wallet and picks up the change—pennies and nickels and dimes—and her lipstick and car keys, then kicks the purse into the parking lot. She walks to the pharmacy and buys a candy bar and sits on a bench in the park nearby where the boys used to play when they had first moved to town. She tears off the wrapper and bites into the hunk of chocolate, exhaling like someone who has just come up from being underwater too long.

  Past the swing set, monkey bars, and spring horses, there are trails leading into the woods. She decides on the one with the fewest footprints—though there are doe prints, or are they the paw prints of a lost dog?—and walks, looking up at the trees, wondering, what am I supposed to think of these trees? What are their names? Why can’t I remember something so simple, and vital? Still looking up, she misses a large root bulging up through the dirt, across the path, trips forward, and hits her head on the ground. A pratfall, it feels like. She laughs, outside herself, and brought back to the recent past, watching herself fall, flail, like a child without the experience to know yet how to break a fall (with your elbows, dummy, not your noggin). She comes to, rolls over. The tree branches are a blur, swollen, crooked arms made of the wood of the trees she cannot name. She closes her eyes, squeezes them; soft, hot tears bead at the corners. Then a voice, voices.

  “Are you okay?” a man asks. “Is she okay?” talking to someone else.

  “Don’t touch her,” a woman hollers. “We need to call someone.”

  “Oh, sure, let me just shout into this can on a string.”

  “Sarcasm, Alan.
Remember your homework from the therapist? Work on controlling your sarcasm?”

  “Sure. And you work on controlling trying to control everything.”

  “This is not a good example of that.”

  Irene realizes now that they must be husband and wife.

  “Miss?” the man says. “Can you hear me? Miss?”

  Irene opens her eyes. No trees. Just two, homely faces, pale, red-cheeked, necks covered with matching red and green plaid scarves.

  “I tripped,” she says, her voice shallow at first, then coming back to her, “then I thought I’d lie here for a while.”

  “It’s pretty darn cold out.”

  “So help her up, Alan,” the wife says.

  “I’m going to, Rose, Jesus. I’m just trying to get some information first.”

  “Sorry, Doctor. I didn’t know we were in the ER. I must’ve mistaken you for George Clooney.”

  “And I’m the one who’s accused of being sarcastic?”

  As they continue to bicker, Irene gets up and brushes the snow off her pants and jacket.

  “Really, I’m okay,” she says.

  “See,” Alan says.

  “We can help you back to your car,” Rose says. “I think we just go out this way, right, Alan?”

  Alan looks unsure.

  “We came in from that side,” he says, pointing behind him, “didn’t we?”

  “Magellan over here,” Rose says.

  “Again with the sarcasm.”

  “Okay, well, why don’t you start taking control then? Yes, you control and I’ll be sarcastic. A role reversal, a game. This should be fun, actually. Tell us, chief, this way or that way?”

  Alan rubs his eyebrows, raising up uncut hairs, then shuts his eyes and begins to tap his forehead with his index and middle fingers as though playing the first two keys on a piano. He opens his eyes and looks at Irene, then at his wife.

  “Perhaps this woman has the right idea,” he says, and sinks down, bracing himself on one arm, until he has lowered his body to the ground, where he spreads out like a mass.

  Rose looks at Irene as if to say, Can you believe him? or, Can you believe all men?

  “Oh, for crying out loud, Alan,” she says. Then, she says, “Why the hell not?” and kneels on the ground and unfurls at his side.

  At least they’re trying, Irene thinks, Rose and Alan. Maybe that’s all a marriage really is, trying, failing, trying again, until one or the other gives up.

  Irene walks the path back to the park. Still feeling a bit dizzy, she sits down on the bench again, until her eyes are able to focus. Dirty and wet and left behind or forgotten or blown away to here, against the leg of the bench, is a faded pink baseball cap with a print of an orange-yellow sun, and the directive, the call, in purple letters: VISIT PLUM ISLAND, MA.

  “Why the hell not?” Irene says aloud.

  * * *

  Irene goes back to the house and, in her bedroom, shuffles through her underwear drawer. When they had money, Robert used to give her cash at the start of the week, a kind of allowance. She spent it on things—accent furniture, dinnerware, stereo equipment—to fill the house, things they didn’t really need, but looked needed, looked like they belonged once they were set in the empty spaces she found for them. Whatever money was left, she hid in her underwear drawer, as though subconsciously expecting she might need it at some point. She has eighty dollars left, and the first twenty is spent filling up the gas tank.

  She takes Route 1 to Scotland Road, listening to a tape of Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, singing the words she knows beneath his voice, smoking and flicking the ash from her cigarette out the window. She’s much younger like this, and she doesn’t look at her face in the rearview mirror.

  Few shops are open along the main road on the island. She passes shanty homes and mansions and a small harbor, parks in the lot across from the beach. The wind blows her back a bit as she takes the wooden walkway to the beach and sits on the steps and stares out at the sea. The chill in the wind pushes tears from her eyes, and she turns her head to see a kaleidoscope image of clouds and sun and sea grass along the dunes.

  Late in the afternoon, she asks to use the phone at the only inn on the island and calls her neighbor, Francine, a widow in her midsixties who has taken pity on Irene since Robert left, declaring that whenever Irene needs some grown-up time, she’ll be happy to watch the boys for her. But Irene has been reluctant to let anyone near the boys, unsure if they’d lash out in her absence, if some secret violence waits in them, ready to be used on an unsuspecting subject.

  “I’d be delighted to help,” Francine says, in a way that sounds condescending, as though Irene is interrupting something important, something that will require her to do a favor for Francine in the imminent future.

  Irene waits for Francine to jot down the number of the inn, then gives instructions as to what the boys can and can’t eat, and then Francine says, “Don’t worry, go enjoy yourself.”

  But how can she enjoy herself? Who is she without her boys? Panic sets in. She shouldn’t be here. There are no such things as signs. The hat was just a hat. Plum Island is just a place. You are just a mother, and not a very good one, leaving your boys with this woman you barely even know. You’re a bad neighbor, too.

  She’s on her way to her car when, in the sinking orange light, a hand clamps down on her fatty triceps and pulls her back from a large pothole just off the curb. The woman is dressed as a gypsy, cartoonish, with a red scarf wrapped around her head and long peacock-like earrings, and a red sash across a knee-high black dress. But she has radical leather boots, double knotted hair, and a hard, tanned face. Irene thinks this makes her look trustworthy. A face like hers means she has seen certain things and has suffered, and is unafraid of sacrifice.

  “I saved your life,” she says in a deep, Eastern European accent, which sounds very near to the cartoon vampire her children used to watch on television every Saturday morning.

  “Well,” Irene starts, then looks back at the pothole, then to the woman, amused by her dress and brazenness. “I wouldn’t go that far.”

  “You could have tripped, fallen awkwardly, and broken your neck. Maybe you fall and hit your head and suffer bleeding in your brain. Or maybe you twist your ankle and tomorrow, or the next day, you try to get down the stairs and fall again, break your neck or hit your head, and suffer bleeding in your brain. Are these not possibilities?”

  Irene nods, says, “Thank you,” and steps over the pothole. But as she’s about to cross the street, the woman calls to her in a different voice, an accent familiar to Irene, hypernasal, using the aw sound for a when she says, “Please, dear, come talk with me awhile.”

  Her name is Sybil, and she’s originally from Long Island. She used to live on the Lower East Side during her twenties, then in San Diego, Seattle, and Chicago, before marrying a man who owned a boat and had it docked in Plum Island.

  “He’s long dead now. He had lots of money, you see.”

  She tells Irene how she got into the business of reading people’s futures. She felt the gift when she was young, when she had predicted her mother’s suicide.

  “In a flash, I saw her body lying in our claw-footed tub, half-filled with a deep red. I remember running into her bedroom and waking her up from one of her naps. She smiled at me. I thought, ignorantly, she must be happy. Then, three weeks later…”

  “How horrible,” Irene says. She thinks maybe Sybil knows something she will never know, or maybe she’s just a macabre person, filled with the sinister stuff of life. She walks with Sybil down the sidewalk as if they are old friends, until finally they reach the front door to what Irene assumes must be her place of business, a basic storefront window with curtains closed and letters in red displaying her name in an arc: SYBIL. Below the letters a pair of hands seem to appear from behind a cloak and surround the prosaic crystal ball.

  “Trust me, I understand your reservations. You seem like an intelligent woman. But people play into this
shit, you see. If it means someone’s more likely to pay to hear their future, why the heck not?”

  “Looks like a scam to me.”

  “That’s the attraction, though, get it? Most people think it’s a scam, so I play it up and they come in and want to expose me as a fraud. Those are the easiest people to read. Most of the time I have them in tears in minutes.”

  “I’ve cried all I care to in the last three months.”

  “Yet, here you are.”

  Sybil unlocks the door to her shop and turns on a light standing on a small table in the center of what serves as her waiting room, with four chairs along the wall and a red cloth pinned to the side of the door, which leads to the larger room where she performs.

  Irene follows Sybil into the room and waits while Sybil turns on a low light, then another.

  “Would you like some water or tea?”

  “No, thank you. I don’t think I’m in the mood for something like this. My kids are waiting for me back home.”

  “I imagine you called a sitter,” Sybil says.

  “How would you know … oh, the man at the inn. I see. I understand now.”

  “What do you see? Don’t give me that much credit, darling. Sure, most of this is a disguise, but not the cards, and not the third thing that hangs in the air between us and the world. You don’t really believe I can read futures, do you? My mother didn’t die in a tub. But I had that image. Instead she died slowly, day by day, in a boring, lifeless marriage to my deadbeat father. Now she lives in a trailer in Hollywood, Florida. You said you had kids, it’s late, you don’t strike me as someone who would leave them unattended. Pretty easy guess. But, that’s not what I do with the bright ones. What I do with the bright ones is slow everything inside us and outside us down just enough to let in the power of a spirit guide. The guide can instruct us about the purpose of our lives. Please, sit.”

  Irene sits. The chair is soft and comforting, like a warm bath.