The Maytrees

by Annie Dillard

  Beyond the damp swale they used a soft jeep track in sand that snakes crossed. They regained sight of the reeling sea where far waves broke in rows. Then, whoops, by her bare feet she saw a coiled pointy-headed snake, thick—a rattlesnake? Maytree dove for it. It escaped into poison ivy. It was a hognose snake, he said. Its first defense in life was to mimic a rattlesnake even where no rattlesnakes lived. He brushed his hands on his pants. —Pity…He watched the poison ivy as he spoke. You can do tricks with a hognose snake. In her mind she replied, as if bored, Oh can you.

  The foam rows lined up in the offing marked shoals—Peaked Hill Bars, graveyard of the Atlantic, people said here, as on other coasts. Lou heard Maytree pronounce four syllables, Peak–ed Hill Bars. That those green shoals wrecked boats and killed people everyone knew. They bewildered her. Each offshore surf line contained commotion but got nowhere, like someone’s reading the same line over and over. Sluggish waves rolled into wind. When they smashed, spin-drift blew back in clumps.

  On the foredune’s crest, she saw the ocean’s color change. Maytree’s legs parted grasses and turned inland. She saw his shack. It rose off-plumb from driftwood stump corners. Her friend Josephine said of a shack like Maytree’s that it looked like a big waiting bonfire. Maytree was telling her his father first built it while he was on lifesaving duty at Peaked Hill Bars station. Maytree said he had rebuilt the shack many times. Lou knew it would have an outhouse. But where.

  He made no move toward the shack. Its deck was pine planks with popped knots. Its one room was twelve feet by sixteen feet. Lou could use a seat, so it was she who left him to sit on the first shack step, elbows two steps up. The sun was out and every second the sky’s hues perished with no fuss. Behind him sand gave way to a band of dark sea and light sky.

  She saw him walk away. Thirty yards down a slope he primed a pitcher pump from a water bucket. He came back and sat at a proper distance on her same step. He refilled his canteen. He spent the war at a California desk and bought the canteen at Wall Drug. Wind blew his shirt. Now again he was teasing her about her many suitors, possibly because she had not reacted the first time. He was only a bit taller than she was. She watched blue shadows on his white shirt stretch and shrink as he moved. The shirt flattened on his shoulder and ribs and blinded her. She looked away. It must be an old shirt of his father’s. One of her arms felt one of his sleeves.

  Only then did it strike her in fear that she could love this kind stranger. He knew everything, including, and perhaps specializing in, love. After VJ Day he came back near home for college. He returned to the West to cowboy for a few years. Then he came home at thirty. She knew nothing at all. How could he mistake her for sophisticated?

  She opened her mouth to drink tinny water, but she did not open her mouth to correct his impression. What could she say? Nothing had been said between them. Their intimacy’s height so far was drinking from the same canteen.

  When Lou was a girl, her breasts grew both calamitously early and big. Boys came at her, shouting to one another. Alone or together, running, they competed to touch a breast, capture the flag. Had those boys put her off males forever? Throughout boarding school she thought all males younger than her teachers possessed neither fears nor noble hopes, let alone fine feelings—or even any inner lives at all. They were more like bumper cars than people.

  Boarding-school boys rarely sought her. Considering her looks, and what one called her Betty Grables, they figured her dance card was full for years to come. In college she fell for a reckless cellist, Primo Dial, who played in the orchestra standing up. Whenever his music specified six or eight bars of rests, he lifted his music stand and cello at once, kept his eyes on the music, and wandered to set his stand in another part of the room. A new conductor fresh from Europe kicked him out. He took up the violin, the concertina, and blues harmonica. She had never heard blues. He dashed through town and its outlying cornfields making music. Lou was almost six feet tall. She laughed, held Primo’s thin shoulder, and belted. It was a discovery of her reserve that she could sing if she belted, and never minded people about. Primo played “Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby,” “Blues in the Night,” “Heart of My Heart,” “I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate,” “Makin’ Whoopee!” “Alabamy Bound,” “Side by Side,” “Hey Daddy.” Sometimes instead of singing she percussed: play a rat, play a rat, play a rat-a-ma-que, or ligga digga digga digga boom, boom she-boom.

  She queried herself absorbedly in those ragged and trying years—for all their quick pleasures, the earnest years. Always she felt she was born to some heroism—but what? Only to abstractions, especially loyal love, and especially the specific love in the interest of which she and Primo Dial kept kissing each other. They kissed all over Ohio. Walking hand in hand or making music, she often discovered behind them a line of flushed girls like young quail barely keeping up.

  She asked herself: Would she rather have his love, or hers for him? Would she rather have Primo himself, guaranteed to love her and only her forever, or would she rather have her love for Primo Dial forever, intact and untainted come who may? Astounded, she realized she would choose her love over his. Was she so selfish? Of course, if she lost him, and she did, the love might well dim—an apostasy to think, but lots of lovers lose. She took the chance, as any lover does, witting or not.

  When Primo Dial and his concertina left her that May for winsome twins who played glockenspiels, she cried the whole of a Provincetown summer. She fed her love willfully on forcemeats and tidbits from their strolling player days and dancing nights she knew by heart. She wrung her love. If the twins ever interrupted her memory, she reminded herself she liked them both. She drew her mind back to Primo. She liked loving, renounced being loved, and only rarely thought of slitting his throat.

  Lou, singing to herself in the house on the beach, kept her misery and love alive in her single heart. Who but a passionate theoretician, of the sort those years produce, would burn down the house to finish cooking—just to see how it came out—a half-baked principle? It had been an appalling summer she cringed to recall, another failed go at interior life. Yet something about her hypothetical choice was right.

  In the shack’s outhouse Lou looked up now and saw a big blacksnake angled from the wall to float in the air over her head. Lou and Maytree started back. Every day she failed to tell him about herself and her solitude she led him further astray. She followed him up and down high dunes at the world’s ledge. She looked at his neck. What kept him from taking her hand? In this charged air any touch would probably arrest her heart and disarticulate her joints, and so forth, but he should act soon because it could only get worse.

  She was twenty-three. She could not imagine that a brave man could shrink from risking one woman’s refusal. She wanted only a lifelong look at his face and his long-legged, shambly self, broken by intervals of kissing. After a while she might even, between kisses, look into his eyes. No time soon.

  What could she do? She had gauged Maytree well: He never touched her. That is beauty’s one advantage, she always thought, and might be its downfall. In town he left her at her walkway and waved off breakfast. She had been liking the way his hips set loosely, his shoulders tightly, his long wide-smiling face, pale eyes back under thick brows, alert. She stood in danger outside her door. What was she afraid of? Of her heartbeat, of his over-real eyes, of her breathing, everything.

  Maytree had worked all year on a long poem, Wood End Light and Race Point. He worked mornings. Wood End Light and Race Point Light were Provincetown lighthouses. Race Point would embody sharp Aristotelean thought. Wood End would stand for Platonic thought. He rekindled his enthusiasm for the project every morning. He hauled lines of poetry like buried barbed wire with his bare hands.

  On a frigid June fifth, he raced to Cornelius’s dune shack to blurt his joyous scheme. While he was telling Cornelius that in his poem Race Point Light stood for Aristotelean thought and Wood End Light stood for Platonic thought—a distinction so obvious it scarcely
warranted mention—abruptly the opposite correlations struck him as even more obviously right. It all sounded inane.

  Still, he got back to it. In August, exhilarated, he loaned two sections to Lou Bigelow. He had by then kissed her, and she had kissed him back. Now he told her which lighthouse represented which thinker. She had a decent education and an ear—the woman he loved, beyond love as he knew or imagined it, in his hometown, had an ear! A week later he rummaged her spare comments. —Now all you have to do is reconcile them, she said. She smiled. What she said was sublimely true, and proved her stunning understanding, as if they were two halves of one brain. They were perched on the granite-block breakwater to Long Point, watching sunset in a spirit purely scientific.

  —Right you are. Her level eyes were on him. The red light on her young face skin and mouth. —All I have to do is propose a metaphysic to cap Western thought. That year, Maytree was ready.

  (After the book appeared, a poem in three parts, no one noticed its crucial—to him—structure. At thirty he feared being obvious, and any clarity, any saying what he meant, was ipso facto obvious. He never even mentioned the moieties Plato or Aristotle, let alone their reconciliation, lest he insult the reader, whom, in those days, one could posit. It was only his third book. Still, the poetry world and other Provincetown writers noticed the book, that there was one. Many storms. After that he told people he wrote about the sea, and steered talk ashore.)

  REEVADARE WEAVER THREW A crushing lawn party for the Maytrees’ engagement. Reevadare Weaver was a henna-haired old Provincetown woman, un peu superbe, who wore wax-fruit-elongated hats. As her party began she discovered that all her liquor was gone. Cornelius Blue wandered in from his dune shack. He had combed his walrus mustache and Walt Whitman beard. —Be a dear, Lou heard her tell him, and run get two bottles of everything. I’ll pay you back, you’re marvelous. Cornelius and all her guests, however, had long ago learned that to Reevadare’s lawn parties, as to Deary Hightoe’s beach picnics, they should bring everything but the place. Cornelius revealed a bottle of bourbon.

  Reevadare wore a long purple cloth, low at the neck, and amber drop earrings that suggested her ears were draining. Deary brought, like a bindle, an oyster sack of beach-plum brandy in jars. She handed out conical Dixie cups no one could set down. She passed among them, refilling. Affixed to Deary was six-year-old Marie Koday, fist like a clothespin on Deary’s skirts. Wild-eyed she followed on bare feet brown as buns. Everyone had bottles and bowls: linguica sausages, baked beans. Cairos toted out two hams, and Maytree brought smoked clams.

  Lou hoped to be near Maytree, and knew he shared her hope, but the party’s movements kept them apart. Reevadare hugged Lou around the waist. —Marriage is wonderful, she said. She should know. Lou had learned Reevadare’s past in bits. Reevadare had run through six husbands like a brochette. When she married Joe Jernigan, her first husband, family and friends gave her monogrammed towels and sheets. Subsequently when she married in succession the Messrs. Jarvis, Johnson, and James…

  —I never needed to change monograms! She laughed, long-toothed, delighted all these years later. One husband, Chee, was the handsome grandson of immigrants. At the time she told Lou, on her college break, that she was then a Reevadare Chee. Reevadare made Mr. Chee nervous. He moved back to Boston. By the time she married Five, Trudeau, she was poor. Her friends and family had wearied of buying her presents, and monograms were out of the question. A year later Trudeau, suppressing laughter, sailed as one-way crew on a schooner for Papeete, Tahiti, and Reevadare resumed her maiden name, Weaver.

  After a few hours the party moved to the Flagship restaurant. Reevadare had hired the place for the night and brought in a Boston band. The band played all night. Jane Cairo, a wild-haired schoolgirl, danced with most of the men and resumed reading. Lou was fond of brainy, tactless Jane Cairo. Her oval eyes were cynical. Deary sat in two sets on drums. When the band took breaks, Deary carried sleeping Marie Koday and kissed her hairy skull. Lou wished Maytree would dance. She knew the thick youth who was nodding at Deary and knife-knocking time on their table as Moses Lonn, a Long Island painter who lingered. Deary was a girl who could jitterbug, and so, Lou soon saw, could Moses Lonn; he flipped her like a baton. They returned breathless. He turned to Lou. —Anyone ever tell you you look like…Ingrid Bergman? Ever since the war, she thought. She smiled. To retaliate she whispered in his ear, Why do so many painters come to Provincetown? She wanted to see if his answer varied the usual, It’s the light.

  —It’s the light, he explained. What about the light? He could not say.

  During a band break, Cornelius proposed his usual toast from Santayana: “If pain could have saved us, we should long ago have been saved.” It cracked him up every time and he hit his knee. Cornelius had one eye deep-set and one swimming, low eye, like Blake. Lou thought Cornelius was a man of sorrow, only because his mustache made him look sad unless he was laughing. He laughed constantly in company, splitting mustache from beard unexpectedly, and flashing pale teeth. He looked around. —The downwardly mobile we have always with us, he said, and sat. Lou and Maytree sought each other’s eyes. They would talk later. When the band quit and the Flagship closed, half the revelers returned by the street to Reevadare’s. Lou heard Elaine Cairo say she was up to her eyeballs in highballs.

  Reevadare pulled Lou to a pinching metal bench. How constantly, Lou thought, old people claim to have been once young. It is as if they don’t believe it. That old people were old never jarred her, but it shook the daylights out of them. They could count. They did not feel old, they said. Lou wondered if they felt as estranged from themselves at her age as she felt estranged from herself at ten.

  Reevadare’s grandmother on Hilton Head inherited a rolled-steel fortune in Birmingham, Alabama. Reevadare’s mother was organizing peach pickers’ time in Georgia, and her father was seldom in. Leaving the South, Reevadare served as a WAVE in the war, then moved to Provincetown because she was too odd, as a red-diaper baby, for anyplace else. The summer Reevadare was fifteen, she was a striking beauty, she told Lou, but the Duke University senior she loved ignored her. She tried to drown herself off Hilton Head, but turned back because the water was black muck and sucked her into oyster shells that cut her so blood striped down her black legs. Here in Provincetown she bought a house and collected friends’ art. Of course she married people.

  There in her garden under a locust, Reevadare told Lou her favorite part of marriage. —It’s a marvelous way to get to know someone! Reevadare wore a Gibson girl pouf that perhaps also filled her glass-cherry-piled hat.

  Lou asked point-blank, Can love last? (Rural people get to philosophizing, and will say anything.)

  —Oh, darling! No, not that heart-thumping passion. Give that eighteen months. But it’s replaced by something even better.

  Lou waited.

  —Lovers!

  How they prized Reevadare, upright people did. She fought their battles for them like a mercenary. —Why do people fret about such a simply marvelous thing as love? After a bout with Reevadare, her friends’ gargoyle scruples dropped from their shoulders and did not climb back for hours. Maybe she would even go to hell for them! She was already a southerner, from Virginia or Oklahoma or Mississippi or one of those.

  That night on her pinching bench Reevadare offered Lou advice. With many killing rings she pressed Lou’s hand and said, Keep your women friends, darling. Men come and go.

  It was only lunatic here in part, Lou thought, looking around. Among their friends were people who wrote, people who painted, people who taught, people who carved or welded sculptures, and poets barefoot, lefty, and educated to a feather edge. They wore Greek fishermen’s caps, frayed shirts, and huaraches. J. Edgar Hoover warned Congress about their ilk in 1947, noting Communist plans “to infiltrate the so-called intellectual and creative fields.” They talked: Did the United States have a culture—apart from making money? Could a moving picture be a work of art? Among the older generation of their friend
s, almost no one remained a party member; Stalin’s purges purged them. Did existence precede essence? Did somebody say martini?

  Lou stayed late. South above town the Milky Way tangled Mars in its slack nets. Laughing, locust leaflets in her face, Deary related to Lou every least event from this very party they had not left. With Maytree and Cornelius, Lou emptied ashtrays and tossed Dixie cups. Reevadare, Sooner Roy, and Deary switched to whisky sours. Lou walked home by the water, at stars’ level. She held her shoes and avoided trash. In the open, starlight was plenty of light. Of course Reevadare’s exotic life led her to think men came and went. No one knew what she and Maytree knew.

  The following noon, walking Commercial Street as everyone did many times a day, Lou saw Deary posing for a painting class on the beach by MacMillan Pier. Maytree recently told her that old Cornelius said of Deary, quoting someone about a Hollywood star, that she had curves in places where other women didn’t even have places. Lou watched the painting students. Lou knew that vagabond Deary tended to marry painters, inter alia. Her marital history rivaled Reevadare’s. Deary was the marrying kind. Between marriages she had boyfriends.

  Lou and Maytree both liked a recent suitor of Deary’s. That was articulate Slow Sykes, who wore green shoes and held down third base. A serious painter in oils, he also read good books. He always showed up for sunset drinks on Maytrees’ beach, and acted out a new joke or two a day. Lou heard at once when, within two hours of Deary’s marrying him, the new groom motored from Fishermen’s Pier for their honeymoon cruise without her. Later Lou visited Deary’s cold-storage shed and saw by lamplight the letter this gentleman wrote Deary on linen bond. He apologized and sought divorce as kindly as possible. He noted in apparent misery that he had realized on the pier, for the second time on their one wedding day, how long it took a woman to change clothes. Deary found that sensible, and told the story on herself, laughing helplessly and anew each time. She was, Cornelius said, easily amused.