The House on Oyster Creek

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  “I saw Henry the other night,” Darryl said. “At the Mermaid . . . Does he . . . does he like it there?”

  “He loves it there. He says he’s been waiting all his life for a bar named the Mermaid. There was a Mermaid in London that was supposed to be Shakespeare’s favorite. Were you there too?”

  “No, oh, no! AA meets in the Masonic lodge, across the street. No, I’ve had my fill of the Mermaid.”

  “Henry loves a good bar,” she said, seeing that Darryl was trying to understand what could be wrong between the two of them. Everything Charlotte did, the way she laughed with Darryl, the way she listened to him, showed there must be something amiss.

  “It’s not that . . .” Charlotte started to explain. “It’s . . .” Henry didn’t hit her; he had no other women; he wasn’t, as Darryl hoped, a drunk. He took out the garbage; he swept the kitchen floor. All he had done was keep his distance from her, hold her in quiet disdain. Her throat closed—the story felt shameful; she couldn’t let Darryl see.

  “I didn’t mean . . . I . . .”

  “No, no, I know . . . it’s just . . .” She took a deep breath, looking out over the grants. The water sloshed against the canoe now, and they piled on the last few bags, full of little ones, the size of quarters.

  “How long do they have to grow before you sell them?” There, a safe subject.

  “Three years, more or less. These’ll be ready in two. It’s like money in the bank. I mean, given decent weather conditions, and freedom from disease.”

  “And from lawsuits.”

  He smiled. “But assuming the best, these oysters will be the down payment on a house in a few more years.”

  “Who do you sell them to?”

  “Aquaculture Central, down in Yarmouth. I mean, in the summer the Wharf Grill buys most of ’em, but winter, nothing’s open; they truck ’em over the bridge to Boston.”

  “So . . . that’s wholesale.”

  “Yah . . .”

  “Could you sell them in Boston yourself?”

  “Nah, you’d need a refrigerated truck for that.”

  “But if you had one, you could do better . . . maybe a lot better.”

  “I suppose. . . .”

  “I wonder what I could do for work around here,” Charlotte said, thinking aloud.

  “You’re a mom!”

  “But if—you know, if I had to make money. I always wanted to be a reporter—to poke around and get to see all kinds of stuff, find out how everything works. I don’t know how it turned into journalism—so serious and important. In fact, Henry seems to think that if something’s interesting that means it isn’t serious enough to bother with.” It had been such fun to make real money at Celeb! At least at first—then somehow it would be a handbag she had to rave about to sweeten relations with an advertiser. Then a famous comedian’s wife took up fashion design and Charlotte was required to gush in person and on paper. . . . Finally she could not find one thing to be proud of, and the money began to seem like ill-gotten gain.

  “I wonder if I could get work at the Oracle.”

  “That’d cover your morning coffee,” he said, laughing. Then, with a glance into her face to check for danger: “It doesn’t look like there’ll be any end of construction jobs, though. I’m getting my independent contractor’s license. I’ll be working for myself.”

  It was the future all laid out, stepping-stones to a dream—it seemed as if they’d been building a bridge to each other all these weeks, each working from his own side until here they were, face-to-face. . . .

  “So we could buy out the Narville property,” she said, “and raze that house!”

  He looked up suddenly, as if she’d read his mind, then away. “We’d have to work a long time before we could do that.” He jerked the last rack up out of the mud and laid it on top of the canoe.

  “I think that’s it. Except for that piece of net over there.”

  She looked where he was pointing and realized the fog had closed around them, so thick that even the far end of the canoe looked blurry.

  “You could get lost out here,” she said. She could see only the dim outline of the houses, hers dwarfed by the Narvilles’, and the dark line of trees behind.

  “Bud did, once,” Darryl said. “I suppose he’d been drinking. But it comes in fast sometimes, and if the tide’s real low every direction looks the same.”

  “It’s eerie. It feels like we’re alone . . . in . . .”

  It was the word alone. . . . Some inflection crept into it so he knew everything; she saw it dawn in his eyes, and reached out by instinct, and her hand seemed to go through an invisible barrier. There he was, the real man; she was touching his cheek, and he turned his head to kiss her fingers, a half kiss, his arms at his sides, his eyes half-closed as if he were praying. Then he pulled her in tight, his hand pressing down her spine as if to seal them together so nothing could ever separate them, and she kissed his collarbone, his neck, his mouth.

  They broke apart, flew back together, Charlotte pressing her face into his sweatshirt, breathing in the smell of woodsmoke. She’d been on an endless journey; now she was home.

  “Darryl,” she said, rapt.

  “Henry . . .” he replied. “What about Henry?”

  Bliss to consciousness: sixty seconds flat.

  “It’s . . . it’s . . .” she said. “It’s nothing.” It was bad enough to kiss him—to let him see her in this state of hope and uncertainty, as Henry never had. She could not criticize Henry too.

  “It’s funny,” he said. “I’d been thinking that someday I might be lucky enough to have a marriage like yours.” He laughed bitterly.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Eh, you can never really see inside a marriage.”

  This was enough; Charlotte was crying. She had not cried . . . well, her mother’s funeral was one of the many places she hadn’t cried. Everyone had expected it; they’d watched her, afraid she’d come apart and they’d have nothing to offer. She spared them. Or spared herself. She couldn’t have cried that day if you had run her through with a sword. Now she couldn’t stop. A life’s worth of sorrow came loose in her, sorrow so common it was usually hidden in plain sight; no one would notice it any more than they noticed the salt and pepper shakers on a kitchen table—everyone had some of their own.

  “You must think I’m a terrible person.”

  “No, no . . . the opposite . . .” he insisted, but he was holding her loosely, uncertain now. Desire—he had thought of it as a synonym for lust.

  “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” she said, her forehead against him, the rubbery smell of his waders breathing up at her. Where was she?

  “It’s okay, it’s okay,” he was saying, openhearted. But it wasn’t true. He was barely able to keep his own balance; her poise was the first thing he’d noticed about her, and now, the second he touched her, it dissolved. He was late getting the oysters in; he couldn’t lose this tide. But they’d started building a little life together, like children playing, and . . .

  “It’s okay,” he said, truly now. The tears were honest, as few things are. “When I was in detox,” he said, “in the very beginning when it was . . . just . . . hell . . . I’d hear my roommate on the other side of the curtain repeating something over and over. At first I thought he was praying. I started to listen, try to figure it out. He’d say ‘chicken,’ ‘almonds,’ ‘saffron,’ and then ‘sauté the onions in butter’ . . . it was like a story I was listening to, and I couldn’t give up because I had to know how it turned out.”

  “How did it turn out?” She’d stopped crying; she was just listening.

  “It turned out to be a biryani, a chicken biryani. His mom came from India; that was her special dish. He always said that’s how he made it through, remembering the recipe step by step. It was how I made it through too, at least that first part.”

  He was speaking into her hair so she could feel his voice as much as hear it.

  “Someday let’s make one,”
she said, and felt his shoulders drop. “You can call him up and get the exact recipe.”

  Darryl shook his head. “He relapsed.”

  Charlotte missed the point.

  “He’s dead. Three years clean; then his wife left and he went back to using. . . . Fell off a highway overpass, Christmas day. Or jumped, they couldn’t tell. There’s two of us left standing from that group that came in together.”

  As he said this he leaned into her so completely she nearly lost her balance—it was as if he thought she could bear his whole weight. Of course, he was desperate—who isn’t? And she was looking to him for rescue. She stepped back, away. The tide was streaming in around their boot soles; God knew how long they’d been out here.

  He went back to work, giving her one end of a length of rope he’d had attached to his belt, so they could tie it to the ends of the canoe. The work steadied them, and with the canoe between them they could begin to talk again.

  “Do you remember when Fiona yelled at us for not getting married?” she asked him.

  “How would I forget that?”

  “We’ve been thinking about all the same stuff!” she said.

  “I guess so. I thought . . . maybe . . . but then I thought I must be crazy. . . .”

  “Maybe we could do something with Fiona sometime. She has this image of herself about riding on some man’s shoulders. . . .”

  “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea. . . .”

  The tide was lapping over their feet and he started toward shore, floating the canoe behind him. Charlotte’s boot had leaked full of water and she could barely keep up.

  “Shit, we left that net,” he said when they got back to the truck, and she turned to get it, but the water was already too high.

  “Go on,” Darryl said harshly. “Go home, get dry, this is a bad idea, forget it.”

  She stood stupidly for a minute, wounded, confused, then started up the beach away from him, head bowed.

  “Charlotte!”

  She was maybe ten paces away from him, far enough so he felt her loss. She turned and saw him there with one arm outstretched, his face radiant and guileless, as if his whole heart, his whole being were open to her.

  “I do!” he said. “I do want to be with you . . . more than anything. . . .”

  Now the bolt of fear struck her. “We can’t! We can’t,” she said, running away toward the shadow in the fog that marked her home, trembling like a murderess, and weeping, and thrilled.

  “ ’Lo!” Henry called up from downstairs.

  The same life was sitting here waiting for her, just where she’d left it. Fiona’s socks were still on the clothesline, sopping now, though they’d only been damp when Charlotte hung them out.

  “Hi!” she called down to Henry. So her voice still worked; it didn’t come out as a moan or caw or scream. “I’m going to pick Fiona up.”

  “Okay. We need milk. . . .”

  “Okay.” Milk. Socks. Charlotte moved electrified through the world of milk and socks, the roly-poly beetles in the stair corners, laundry on the bathroom floor. She seemed to be hovering over herself, watching as she changed into dry clothes. The bed was pulled apart, the sheet on her side and the quilt on Henry’s, as if they’d spent all night in a tug-of-war. She made it up. She would have to call Mulligan Appliance and see if they could fix the dryer. Hearing Darryl’s truck come up the beach, she stepped away from the window.

  At Mrs. Carroll’s door, Fiona jumped into her arms. “We’re having a recital,” she said. “We’re singing ‘Jingle Bells’ and ‘Piggy-Wig’ and you can bring cupcakes.”

  “I don’t think I know ‘Piggy-Wig,’ ” Charlotte said, buckling her into the car seat.

  “It’s a great song,” Fiona said, in a Henry-esque tone that suggested Charlotte must be a philistine if she didn’t know “Piggy-Wig.” Then she broke into heartfelt, tune-free song. Mrs. Carroll waved good-bye. No one noticed that Charlotte happened to be in flames. She got milk and a box of animal crackers from the SixMart, waited at the bridge while Bud Rivette crossed from the other side, took Fiona home and gave her the snack at the kitchen table, went out to get the socks off the line, laid them out on the radiator, where they gave off a wet, comfortable smell. Was this her life? Yes, yes, she could hardly believe her good luck!

  Henry came up at five o’clock with a wooden ruler in his hand—the old-fashioned kind with a metal edge.

  “Here’s something for you,” he said to Fiona, who was so unused to being spoken to by him that she didn’t look up from her coloring book.

  “Fiona, look,” Charlotte said. “Daddy has something to show you.”

  “It’s a ruler,” Fiona said politely, going back to her work as Henry would have if she’d interrupted him. She had a ruler already, pink Lucite with dogwood blossoms, that Natalie had sent from Fayetteville when she was tracking down Bernie Kerik’s secret first wife. This one was not nearly as cool.

  Henry’s shoulders sagged and he glanced over to see whether Charlotte had taken note: He was trying; it was Fiona who was at fault.

  “Let me see,” Charlotte said. “What did you find?”

  It was printed with block letters advertising his father’s business. HENRY F. TRADESCOME, INSURANCE. ACCIDENT AND INDEMNITY. TRUSTWORTHY, HARDWORKING, RELIABLE. 797 BEACON STREET, BOSTON, MA. MULBERRY-4-5202.

  “My desk drawer got stuck, so I had to pull it all the way out and I found this caught in the back. ‘Trustworthy, hardworking, reliable’ . . . Can you imagine?”

  “Now it would be ‘hip, sexy . . .’ ”

  “Edgy, that’s the one I like,” Henry said. “Apartment for rent—edgy.”

  “What’s edgier than accident and indemnity insurance?” Charlotte asked with a laugh. The conversation skated along as always, over the cauldron of her feeling.

  “It describes my father to a T,” Henry said, smacking the ruler against his palm as if to test it. “A straight, straight arrow. Oh, what a disappointment I was to him!” He laughed as if this were a happy memory. “He liked everything done one certain way. Period. What was I to do?”

  “Let’s see, I suppose you could have moved to New York to start a newspaper that championed the opposite of every single thing he believed in?”

  “Most amusing,” he allowed. “I found this too.” It was a Christmas card with a picture of Richard and Pat Nixon, a special thank-you to campaign contributors.

  “Oh, my God . . . 1972. The year my mother got sick.”

  “When I told my father I’d never get married, he cried,” Henry said, laughing again, a laugh crossed with a groan, as if he were talking about something he’d read, not lived. He kept things at arm’s length, while Charlotte swallowed it all down.

  “Look, this was your grandfather’s ruler,” she told Fiona. “Can you imagine, when Daddy was your age he would be coloring at this same table, just like you are now?”

  “Did you like coloring, Daddy?” Fiona asked, but it was as if Henry’s ear couldn’t pick up the frequency of her voice.

  “Henry, Fiona’s asking you if you liked to color. . . .”

  “I don’t remember a thing, not a thing,” he said.

  The fog had gathered so thickly they could hear big drops dripping from the eaves. Charlotte was shot through with every kind of thought—she would get Fiona a better father, a man who could see her, hear her. Or, she would find the thread to connect Henry to Fiona. She would forget this day ever happened. Except . . . it had been the best day of her life.

  “How was the oystering?” Henry asked.

  “It’s brutal work,” she said, “but there’s something about being out there, having to reckon with the wind and the mud and the tide . . . it feels good—real.” This was so easy. She had protected herself from Henry, letting him see less and less about her, talking to him cordially, intelligently, without saying a thing that mattered, as if she were sitting beside him on a bus.

  “We lost a lot when we gave up the agrarian society,�
�� he said.

  By the time she tucked Fiona into bed, the fog had blotted out the lights on Try Point, even the green buoy lantern that marked the channel. For all you could see they might have been floating alone through space. She opened the window an inch and sharp, wet air poured in—she felt it as fully as when she was sixteen and every sensation was new. She’d imagined then that love would overtake people two by two, like a storm they were caught in together. Silly girl. Or—silly woman, who had let that girl fade away. The front door closed quietly; Henry’s quick step went up the driveway. She pulled the cover up and listened, listened—she had never been more awake. The tide was coming in, waves rushing together at the end of the point, flooding up the bay.

  17

  PERFECT CLARITY

  The wind came up sometime after midnight, battering at the house, waking Charlotte, who had drifted off in spite of herself. The fog had blown away and sharp-edged clouds were racing across the moon. Henry was tight asleep, curled at the far side of the bed, with the sheet clutched in his hands as if it were the only shred of comfort in his life. Leaning over to close the window, Charlotte heard Fiona’s feet hit the floor, then her definite little steps bounding down the hall. She vaulted over Charlotte to get cozy between her parents, kissing Charlotte’s shoulder, then Henry’s. His bony hand reached around back to pat her, reminding Charlotte of a hermit crab’s claw.

  “Mama, Daddy, me,” Fiona said, with a tidy satisfaction: Her life was settled and cozy; everyone was in place. She kissed her bear on the top of his head and fell back asleep.

  By morning the window was frosted in wild baroque plumes. The furnace could not keep up; Charlotte wore two pairs of socks and still felt the cold through the floor. She held a hot washcloth to the kitchen window so Fiona could see out—the bay had been thickened by the cold, the waves lifting and cresting in slow motion like oil, a sheen of ice forming instantly in the lee. A clump of black ducks bobbed together in a huddle, heads tucked down, into the wind. Looking southwest you could see all the way across to Plymouth, maybe forty miles.