by Dawn Tripp
“That’ll be forty-three cents,” he said. She didn’t answer, didn’t reach for the money, didn’t seem even to hear him. Her face was turned away, slightly toward the window, she seemed to be studying an imprint of dried salt collected along the edge where the glass fit to the wood, and the sun coming through struck the bridge of her nose, lit the plane of her cheek, and she was so there, so beautiful and solid and present, that he was suddenly thrown by the sense that although she was standing right there across the counter from him, at the same time, she was somewhere else entirely, and the body of the girl he could see was more shadow-like, more unreal and insubstantial than the other part of her that was removed. He cleared his throat, maybe too loud, because she glanced at him, a startled expression in her eyes, her beautiful eyes, her face very still, like she had accidentally left the door of it ajar, and he was falling into her through that open door.
“So, uh, is there—?” he muttered.
“What?”
“Anything else you need?”
She just looked at him. “No.”
“Alright then. You bet.”
“How much did you say it was?” she asked. “Did you say?”
He went to answer, cracked his mouth, and some queer stale noise whizzed out, and her face was closed again, and she was just a girl standing on the other side of the counter. She glanced at the numbers on the register window, counted out the money, took her things, and walked out into the blaze of the overturned world.
He stared at the door just where it was, soft and shut against the jamb behind her, and knew it then. He loved her. Like he’d never loved another living thing, like no one ever could. He knew it. Like he knew daylight.
He felt stupid. Ashamed. Young. So impossible, loving her. Such ugly and stupid impossible shame. He glanced down, so frosting stupid it was, then his eye caught the book on the counter—the plastic-covered library book—hers—she always had it with her, that book, and now she had left it behind. He didn’t think a minute, snapped it up, jumped the counter, and ran. He shot through the door, caught sight of her ash hair, gave a shout, and she turned, startled, as his toe caught the edge of the door, and he tripped, flying forward, he staggered, caught his balance nearly, then lost it again, and fell, his hands scraping hard over bleached shell and the book sailing out of his grasp, landing splayed open on the ground. She walked back quickly, picked it up, and looked at him a moment.
“Not your day,” she said, a little smile that made him just crazy, made him go right to pieces. “Are you alright?” she asked.
“Earthbound fine,” he said. He couldn’t look at her. He picked himself up and slunk back into the store. His toe was a mess, the nail dangling, he ripped it right off, there was a nasty cut on his hand from some dumb piece of shell. He picked the grit out. But it hurt like the devil that cut, so deep and bad, the hurt, like the devil, the devil, the goddamn fucking devil.
Two weeks later, a heat wave struck, a set of real scorchers, day after day topping ninety, the air so humid you could skin it with a knife. By nine on Saturday morning, the traffic was already backed up Main Road as far as the gas pumps at Aiken’s corner, car after car stuffed full of beach chairs, towels, sand toys, kids, everybody loaded up with coolers full of lunch and cold drinks, bulging and pushing to get out of the city and down to the breeze off the ocean. They got nowhere fast, just stuck on that winding country road, bumper-to-bumper, cars snaking past as fast as molasses, and the four of them—Huck, Pard, Robbie Taylor, and Eejit—were lying belly-down on the roof of the Point Market, lying on the shady side, peering over the peak, down the pitch into the line of cars in a slow creep down Main Road. Wheels turning once, brake, stop. Somebody leaned on a horn. The four boys had their pea-shooters out, their pockets stuffed full of hard peas and good chewed-up bits of paper wadded into tiny balls. They loaded them into the shooters, blasted them down into the open car windows and the folded-back tops of convertibles.
“What the heck is old Vernon thinking trying to get somewhere now?” Pard said, giving Huck a poke, nodding down to where Vernon Soule was backing his green tub of a DeSoto out his driveway into the traffic. He waited patiently until some courteous driver waved him in, and then Vernon backed out slow, backed out his driveway and into the street until he was crosswise in it. Then he put his car in park, got out, and ambled around to the front of it, popped the hood, and started tinkering with something underneath it. The boys just stared. Everyone just kind of stared. Then Pard started to laugh, he started laughing so hard, he was rolling on the roof. And when the DeSoto didn’t budge, horns started to blare, somebody shouting, and old Vernon straightening up from under the hood, dug a finger into his ear like he couldn’t quite hear, then leaned down again over the engine. Pard was still laughing, he and Eejit laughing. Huck loaded his shooter, pegged a guy in a red convertible T-bird, nailed him good right behind the ear. And as he was loading in another bit of chewed-up paper, he suddenly noticed Jane Weld across the street, standing on the sidewalk, out front of Mary Johnson’s folding table of lemonade and zucchini bread for sale. Jane was just standing there, one of those rotten summer kids she looked after, the little boy, he had her by the hand and was pulling at her to come on, but she wasn’t moving, she was just standing still there, looking across the street at something, not old Vernon’s DeSoto, but something on the porch of the store. What the heck was it? Huck couldn’t see, it was down below the overhang pitch of the roof where he was lying, something though had caught her eye fast.
Pard jabbed an elbow into Huck’s ribs. “Give me some of them peas, I got a good shot, and I’m out.” Huck dug into his pocket, drew out a handful, still not taking his eyes off Jane standing there, still staring at whatever it was.
“That Mustang there,” Pard was saying, “knucklehead in the Yankees hat, he is all mine.”
What the heck was she was staring at?
Farther down the street, the same side of the street where she was, Huck spied the tall engineer, all dandied up, white shirtsleeves and tailored trousers, slick-shine shoes and those blue-tinted rims, that sucker Clerk of Works, that adman hack, that ghost. He was walking toward Jane Weld, he was, had his eye on her, motherfucking no-business nutter, he did.
Huck spit the balled-up wad of paper from his shooter and dug into his pocket for a stone. The stones you took your time with. You picked them with care. They had to be the perfect shape, perfect size. You wouldn’t often find a deserving use for them, but you’d keep a few on hand just in case.
The ghost was ten yards from Jane Weld now, his ballpoint pen a dark jab sticking out of his shirt pocket, that Leica swinging on its black ribbon from his neck, walking toward her, his eyes on her, like what the hell right did he have?
Huck loaded the stone into his shooter, aimed it, fired, fuck it, missed.
GLANCE
JANE, SEVENTEEN
Summer 1962
She was starving that night, at supper, filled her plate with three slices of cold ham, potato salad, corn, diced tomatoes, ate that up, then filled her plate again, her mother, Emily, looking across the table with some surprise as she kept on eating, squirreling that food away. It was unlike her. She knew it herself, but could feel only hunger—a sudden wild hunger.
She broke a heel of bread off the loaf.
“Are you alright?” her mother asked.
“Yes fine.”
Emily looked at her doubtfully.
Jane nodded at the butter. “Pass me that please.” Her mother did. “Why wouldn’t I be fine?”
Carleton Dyer. She thinks his name again. Why think it? Just for how he’d looked at her across that morning street and the way that look poured through her. No good reason. He was sitting on the front steps of the Point Market when he caught sight of her, on the sidewalk across the road, his eyes fell on her face, stayed there, and time ended.
Carleton Dyer. She remembers now, growing up, she’d see him down at the wharf, or on his way there, he had a kind face, even young, skin used
to weather, he always smiled when he saw her. His father was a fisherman—one of the few her grandfather Gid thought well of—as good with an iron on a swordfish as the Norwegians working out of the Vineyard. He kept pots as well, set seine for herring up at the little sandy place, fall-fished for tautog. And Carl was his only son, always on the water like his father, just had it in him as some did. She remembers this now, remembers, too, how she’d see Carl early mornings helping his father load up the boat when she’d run down to the wharf to bring Gid his dinnerpail, which he always managed to forget though her grandmother left it right with his boots at the door.
She never thought much about seeing him there. He was anyone else. Wasn’t that true? At school he sat with Zeke Cash and Danny Wilkes, near the woodstove in winter, potatoes they’d brought for their lunch baking on that heat while they learned off their long division and, at recess, as she and Sue Thomas skipped rope, Carl and the other boys would play mumblety-peg with a pocketknife, and once when Carl threw, Danny Wilkes tried to grab the knife midair and the blade slashed his hand. She remembers how the blood ran, fat and glistening into the dry dirt, all the boys laughing, even Danny, all but Carl, who tore a piece off his flannel shirt for Danny to wrap his hand in. There was that other time, too, when they were a little older, five of them messing around one night, they broke into the old Cory store that had been shut down, no one knew exactly why, boarded up for forty years. They found their way through a window into the basement and went all through the place, the sail loft on the top floor, sails laid out, half finished; the main room downstairs that had been a post office and a tavern, drinking glasses still on the bar, a table set, like someone had just stepped out, and locked the door behind them, never intending to be gone all that time. Along one wall were the pale slashes of letters in the post boxes furred with dust. That night the five of them agreed each would take one thing: Sue Thomas took a sugar devil, Danny Wilkes, a whalebone-handled corkscrew. It was one of those letters that Jane wanted, addressed but never opened, that no one had come to collect, and Carl, being tall, reached across the counter to draw one out for her—
All of this, somehow, she had forgotten. Details burned away into the colorless time of her father’s disappearing, the long flat plain of Afterward that gradually effaced every other before. Had she read that letter?—that scrawl with no recipient? She must have once. What had it amounted to? Just another instance of putting her hand through cloud.
She mulls this over now, sitting at the dinner table with her mother. How he’d looked at her this morning—Carleton Dyer—that quick sudden light she saw break across his face when he looked up and took her in. Her fork scrapes the plate, an awful noise over the skid of food still left. She gets up, clears the table, and fills the dishpan. How he had looked at her, staring through the blue flow of the moving street, looked at her and did not stop, and now these buried things about him rushing out of corners she didn’t even know she’d tucked them down into. Her hands feel through the soapy water for the cutlery, a brown scud of grease rims the dishpan’s edge, and she thinks about how it’s like a rock you walk by for years and never notice, never wonder what might be hidden underneath, what strange free life, if you were to kick it over. Wings sudden in your chest, alive in a way it never struck you to be. Just standing on that hot baked morning sidewalk, and the traffic tied up, that DeSoto blocking them all up both ways, the old man in his red suspenders fiddling around with nothing under the hood, and you are hearing nothing, seeing nothing, only Carleton Dyer looking at you like you were all that was in the world.
She pricks her finger on a knife tip. Swears.
——
When the dishes are done and dried and put away, she and her mother come to read in the front room, as always, her mother vanishing into some novel, and Jane with a book of poetry she’d picked off the shelf, the consistent rhythm of verse, meter, some refuge, order, to tame the unquiet.
Round her trailed wrist fresh water weaves,
With moving fish and rounded stones.
She glances up at her mother sitting there, in the green upholstered chair, its stuffing gone alump—the fair beauty of her once, now careworn and alone. Same old story: Nice girl. Loved a bad man. Married him. The end.
Isn’t that how it breaks down? Just a pair of old shoes matched together in a closet. After the bruised, irresistible sweetness of the early time, what will you be left with then? There was a doom to it.
It never struck her before it could be any different.
She does not seek him out. Not the next day or the day after, not, at least, in any intentional way, but seems to see him everywhere, like her eye is just drawn. And it is Wednesday, the following week, when she walks out of her house to go down to the widow’s for chores, and Carleton Dyer is sitting on the cemetery wall with one of his friends, having a smoke, and for a moment she feels like she would just as soon leave her bones in a pile on the sidewalk than walk by him but, at the same time, wanting only that. As she passes, Carl glances up.
“Hello, Jane.”
“Hello,” she says and keeps walking, past them on the wall, like she has told herself she would. Carl jumps off and falls into step beside her.
“You on your way down to the wharf?” he asks.
She nods.
“Mind if I walk with you?”
“Don’t mind,” she says.
“Why do you do that?”
“What?”
“Walk by me so fast.”
“I don’t.”
“You do,” he says, smiling, “you always walk by me fast like that, say nothing.”
“I said hello.”
“That’s it.”
“Not much else to say really.” But now she has started to smile herself, to laugh a little even, like she doesn’t want to but, at the same time, does, a fluttery kind of lightness like a bubble in her chest nudging up. She keeps her eyes on the sidewalk, the cracks split through the concrete, a fallen branch in front of him, he steps around it, his shoulder brushes hers, and instinctively she moves away. He stops then, catching her by the arm, swift, and without thinking she looks up and he is looking down, and her eyes are under his, that light in them, his eyes, that raw clean light that gives everything away. The sky has gone small and the street is quiet, all the sound drained out, and he is close to her, his hand on her sleeve, close, and she feels something blown open inside her, then fear, a wave of it, and he must see it cross her face, that fear, because his hand drops from her arm and they just keep walking, not looking at each other now. Some summer kids ride by on their bikes, shouting to one another, laughing, so free, every carelessness about them, and for a moment she envies them, that they can have that.
They pass the Point Market. Joan Slane’s cat darts across the road, pauses on the opposite curb, its tiger-striped head swiveling to watch a car go by, then it sprints back across the street again.
“That cat’ll be dead by the end of next week,” Carl says.
Jane shakes her head. “That cat’s been slipping fate for ten years.”
“Bet?”
“What?”
“I’ll make you a bet,” Carl says, “that cat’s dead by the end of next week.”
Jane starts to smile again, she can’t help it really, the smile. “Alright,” she replies.
It is an ordinary day. A drift of haze still clings. The lawns, trimmed, have begun to give up some of their green—it’s been so dry—clouds promising rain, no promise kept. Just an ordinary day, but the light cuts through, there on the stone wall, and on the newly painted whiteness of that gate.
They reach the widow’s house. Jane pauses a moment before she turns onto the walk.
“See you around then,” he says.
“Sure. See you around.”
That was all. Only that. He walked away. And she went and did the chores, then to work, and at the end of the day, when she came home, she found a note from her mother saying she’d gone into New Bedford, shopping with
Mary Ellen Reeves, they would be back late, and not to wait supper.
Outside, the wash is still on the line, the sheets, a summer dress, nightclothes, pillowslips; across the river, the sun dropping now behind the scrawl of hills on the opposite shore, the water holding every failed and fallen color of the sky, and it occurs to her that the river has never looked so beautiful, and she is alone with her shadow turning its own lovely way on the ground, in the soft air cooling now. She begins to take down the sheets. As she unsnaps a clothespin from one corner, the end gets loose, the sheet blows in against her body, and for a moment, it all feels clear.
Impossibly simple and clear.
MEMORY OF WATER
JANE
July 23, 2004
A shadow moves. Ada’s hand. She picks a speck of something off one of her nails, then moves a tile in her rack. “Looks like I’ve spent through my luck,” she mutters.
I’ve taken my turn. I glance at my watch. Past two o’clock. From the swamp woods back there behind us, a bird calls. Weep call. A jay. Is it? Wait. No. The call again, shorter, more grating. Mockingbird.
“Clear up to my ears in vowels,” Ada says, still looking down at the seven in her rack.
I lift the pen. The curve of the script, a doodle I’ve made there, at the border of the page, like a vine, that doodled script, no word or thought exactly straight or held to its own closed and self-contained shape anymore.
Ada leans forward, without looking up. She shifts her elbows onto the table, rests her chin in her hand. I glance away, waiting still for her to take her turn. On the other side of the cemetery wall, the soft emptiness of the deep summer grass growing fast, faster now than they can keep it cut, and the sun still high in its place above our heads, soaking down through that summer green like the light is growing up from the ground.
“It’s your go, Ada,” I say.
“I know that,” she murmurs. “I know.”
Yesterday: After Ray left, Marne was restless. She flung herself around the house awhile, then went down with Carl to the garden, and I got to the wash, dragged it up from downcellar, and brought it outside to hang on the line.