by Amy Hoffman
She opened the door a crack, with the chain across it. I didn’t know our door even had a chain—wasn’t that one of the reasons we had moved from Brooklyn, to do away with locks and chains? “Betrayer! Figure it out yourself for once,” she yelled. “You are disgusting. And this is not your home anymore. You violated it.” From behind the door, she pushed out my down jacket, my wallet, and a plastic grocery sack. “I mean it, Nora, I never want to see you again. You made your choice.” She closed the door, and I heard the lock turn. I put on my jacket, stuck the wallet in my pocket, and looked in the sack. Asparagus.
The Universe Comes to a Halt but Quickly Starts Up Again
I had no idea what to do, where to go, whom to call. Baby was out of the question—going to her would confirm every bad thing Janelle suspected me of, and anyway, the thought of Baby made me feel, just at that moment, bruised. Roger had already made clear his opinion of my escapade. In a state of shock, I wandered in circles in front of my former home. I thought Janelle might see my distress, but when I looked up at the windows, the curtains were closed. She would never relent. I didn’t even think she should relent. I was scum. Vile scum.
I wandered off, destination-less, making an anxious mental list of the people I had met so far in Provincetown: The Jamaican cashiers in the Stop & Shop. The librarian—she had checked out books for me several times, and I had seen her once in the post office, but she was always silent, as befits a librarian, and since we had never exchanged a word, maybe she didn’t count. I had had an interesting conversation with the Unitarian minister when I had signed up for the craft fair—she volunteered on a team that rescued stranded dolphins in the spring and feral cats in the fall—and I had felt an instant bond with the woman who had cut my hair, who was also a newcomer to town, although she had come all the way from Moldova, while I had only traveled up the Northeast Corridor. But I realized I hadn’t learned anyone’s address, so I couldn’t suddenly turn up to crash on her couch, even if I had had the nerve to.
I opened the bag and tried a stalk of asparagus—not great. Janelle had been less of a head-turning success than usual. But tears welled up in my eyes at the thought of her trying so hard because of my supposed whim, hunting through the vegetable counters in every understocked corner store between Provincetown and Wellfleet as Baby and I frolicked. How could I have done such a thing? When I came to a trash barrel, I crumpled up the bag and threw it in. I found a tissue at the bottom of my jacket pocket, blew my nose, and threw the tissue in too. Then I just stood there, next to the trash barrel. I couldn’t think of a reason to move. My life force, or whatever it is that keeps us humans running around all day, had evaporated.
Miss Ruby
Hey, girlie!” A large woman on one of those riding scooters they advertise on cable TV had come to a stop, too, in the middle of the street. I stared at her. Maybe it was happening to everyone. Dressed in gray sweats, with gray hair decimated by alopecia, the woman was remarkably shapeless and colorless. Her scooter, though, was candy-apple red, and she had decorated the basket in the front with plastic roses. “Give us a push? I think the motor’s busted.”
Dutifully, I went over and pushed her to a curb cut and up onto the sidewalk. It was surprisingly difficult to get the contraption moving without its motor.
“Thanks.” She held out her hand. “Miss Ruby.”
I shook her hand. “Nora Griffin,” I said. “What are you going to do? Is there some kind of Triple A for these things?”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “I’ve never had a problem with it before.”
“I left without my phone,” I said. “Or I could call someone for you.”
“I don’t have one either,” she said. “Don’t trust ’em.” She reached into the basket and pulled out a large, trapezoidal purse, the kind that closes with two gold beads and is full of used tissues, and arranged the handles over her shoulder. “My place is up the street. I think we can make it.”
She slid off the seat, grabbed my arm, and clung to me like the Old Man of the Sea. Steering me around the corner, she said to herself, “Shouldn’t have worn house slippers.”
“Don’t try to talk,” I said. We had progressed only about half a block, but she was breathing heavily.
“Stop a minute,” she panted. “Coming to the hard part.”
Provincetown is built on dunes; everything slopes up from Commercial Street and the harbor. As we rested, a small white pickup pulled up to us, honking. “Scooter break down again, Rube?” the driver called out the window.
“Ignore her,” said Miss Ruby. She pulled on my sleeve, and we began stumbling up the street again. “My place,” she wheezed. “Over there.”
She took a hand off my shoulder to wave in the direction of a little cottage. Many of the larger houses had one or two of these built in the yard, to cram a few summer visitors into during the season. This one had quaint weathered shingles, like a lot of P-town structures, but looking closer, you could see that many were missing, and the trim had not been painted in so long that like the shingles it was gray, with a few cracked ribbons of white still clinging to the wood. A patch of lawn held a No Vacancy sign. At the door, Miss Ruby scrabbled around in her purse for her key but came up empty-handed.
“Pants pocket?” I suggested.
Too winded to talk, she held up her index finger, felt around her waistband, and produced a key. The door opened into a living room. We had barely gotten ourselves inside when what seemed like a million cats surrounded us and began rubbing our legs. Miss Ruby reached down to pet a few and made kissy faces at the rest as she tottered over to an enormous recliner that was the room’s centerpiece and fell into it, trying to catch her breath. Noticing that I was still standing in the doorway, surrounded and trying not to step on any tails, she shouted hoarsely at me, “For goddess’s sake, girl! Don’t let ’em out!” Two or three startled cats streaked away before I could slam the door, but Miss Ruby didn’t seem to notice. “Water,” she panted, pointing to the kitchen.
I went in, found a glass, and without thinking turned on the faucet.
“Are you trying to kill me?” Miss Ruby called. “Get it from the refrigerator!”
“Sorry.” I did as she demanded, and back in the living room, I handed her the glass.
On a side table next to her chair was an array of pill bottles, jars, and inhalers of various colors and shapes, a box of tissues, a phone, the television clicker, a stack of crossword puzzle books, and a pile of dirty dishes. She popped a couple of pills, puffed on one of the inhalers, and produced a pack of Marlboros from her purse. Lighting up, she blew a couple of smoke rings in my direction. “Take a load off,” she offered, gesturing at an armchair next to hers. “What a day!”
I couldn’t stop myself. “That can’t be good for you,” I said, sitting down.
“You believe every damn thing they stick on the side of a package?” She pointed the clicker at the television and turned to a channel that was showing what looked like a video of the craft fair. The camera panned the hall, then zoomed dizzily in and out to show quick close-ups of the tables. I could see the mistake I had made putting out the books next to my quite nice jewelry; they lowered the tone of the whole setup. Settling in with a whining Siamese in her lap, Miss Ruby looked at me expectantly. “So, Nora Griffin. What’s your story?”
“It’s hard to say.” I couldn’t seem to grasp how I had ended up choking on cat hair and cigarette smoke in Miss Ruby’s living room, and when I tried to organize my thoughts about the past couple of weeks, all I saw was a blur. A few colors stood out: A gift of amber beach glass. A pink towel. “There was Baby and, you know—”
“Ha! Ha!” coughed Miss Ruby. “Good old Baby!”
“—Janelle kicked me out. But maybe she didn’t mean permanently. She’s the kind of person who gets mad, but then it blows over.” Actually, Janelle had never exhibited this sort of behavior, and neither had anyone else I had ever known, but I had heard of it. Lesbians, in my experience, were
more likely to stew over things for years, then let it all out in a big awful scene from which there was no return. “Maybe I should try going back.”
Miss Ruby stubbed out her cigarette. “You can’t go home again,” she said, nodding at her wisdom. “It’s a good thing I picked you up; you seem like you could use a helping hand. Take the spare room. The No Vacancy sign is just for strangers. Sheets and towels are in the bureau. You’ll have to make the bed yourself; I can’t do all that bending anymore.” A ten-year-old in a crooked tutu twirled across the TV screen, catching her attention. “Hey, that’s little Danny Pereira! Looking good, don’t you think? Graceful.”
Miss Ruby spent her nights—and most days, now that her scooter was in the shop—in her chair, smoking, napping, and hacking up her lungs, the TV constantly muttering in the background. Sometimes she muttered back. “Cheers me up,” she said. “Hope it doesn’t bother you.”
Maybe that first night at Miss Ruby’s wasn’t the worst of my life, but I can’t think of another. Every time I started to doze off, the TV or Miss Ruby’s coughing seemed to reach a crescendo, or I had a sneezing fit or an unscratchable itch in the middle of my back. My attempts to realistically assess my situation degenerated into insomniac raving. Words stuck in my head, the way songs sometimes did: Asparagus, for hours. Beach glass. Toward morning, boobs—a word I don’t even like. Janelle’s breasts—well, that was one story. And Baby’s were exemplars of their kind, big and soft and beautiful. If only I hadn’t been sweeping. If only I had been working, Janelle might not have noticed. But no, I had to sweep. Sweep, sweep, sweep.
I felt grateful to Miss Ruby for taking me in off the street, literally, and I felt sorry for her for being so sick and weak, but when the sky outside began to brighten, and the mourning doves started up with their endless chanting—in exactly the rhythm of the death march—and the TV was still yammering, and I still hadn’t fallen asleep, I realized her environment was simply intolerable. And yet I didn’t see a way out. There probably was one, and if, I berated myself, instead of lying on Miss Ruby’s lumpy cot, I would just stand up, and let the night’s thoughts sift out of my head and float meaninglessly to the floor with the rest of the dust, I could probably find it. I rolled over and buried my head in the pillow. Then I couldn’t breathe.
Bitches
I bought a package of underpants, some socks, and a toothbrush at the hardware store, which carried a surprising assortment of daily necessities, but I knew that was only a temporary solution. It took me a week to work up the courage to call Janelle, and she reluctantly agreed to allow me into the house. Once. She didn’t ask where I was staying, or anything else. “And don’t bring that bitch around here,” she said.
“Actually, if you must know, I haven’t seen her since—”
“Please don’t tell me about your relationship problems.”
I had been avoiding Baby, although not because I didn’t want to see her. I longed to, but I was confused. My head was constantly stuffed and my nose running, and my eyes were so swollen I couldn’t see straight—or maybe I was starting to hallucinate from lack of sleep. Miss Ruby kept me remarkably busy, picking up her prescriptions, running all over town to find bargains on cigarettes and over to the shopping plaza when she had a yen for a beer or a pint of Häagen-Dazs. She didn’t seem to eat much real food, and I had started to get out of the habit myself. She hadn’t found anyone to fix her scooter, so she really was stuck, and I felt obliged to help her, since she didn’t seem to have anyone else to do it. Also, she hadn’t asked me to pay for the room.
“I won’t be around, so I’m trusting you on this,” said Janelle. “Although I don’t know why. Roger says I was naïve all along.”
“Then he’s a bitch too,” I said. “That is totally untrue.”
“But how can I believe you?” asked Janelle.
For a moment she sounded less angry than sad, and I felt awash in guilt—almost literally, as though she had dumped a bucket of freezing liquid guilt over my head.
On moving day, the Unitarian minister helped me pack and carry boxes out to her van. She had offered to store my stuff in the church. “It’s against the rules, but should we be bound by irrational regulations?” she mused. “An interesting moral question.”
Sorting through my art supplies, I realized that Janelle had repossessed all the beach glass she had found for me. “Shit!” I burst out. “What next? That was going to be my livelihood! Fuck!” I remembered the minister. “Sorry, Reverend Patsy.”
“No problem,” she said, staring at me intently, which I thought was odd until I realized she was trying to convey sympathy. She had a gray, do-it-yourself, bowl haircut, aviator glasses that were so out of style I kept wondering where she had found them, and an oversized nose. Something about her, although I couldn’t figure out exactly what, screamed religious—nun, pastor. She could even have been a rabbi, except for the collar, which she seemed to enjoy wearing in all circumstances—like now, hauling boxes back and forth. I could just see her dressed for dolphin rescue, in a baggy tank suit and the collar. “I’m sorry you’re experiencing this difficult time,” she said.
“Miss Ruby says you can’t go home again,” I said.
She nodded and stared at me some more.
“Of course, Janelle says that too,” I added.
I didn’t have that much stuff, relatively, but I think it was more than Reverend Patsy had anticipated. We arranged the boxes around her office to create a path to her desk, and I promised her I would move them out really soon, although I felt unhappy about that, since I had no foreseeable way to actually come through. “No problem,” she repeated, but less forcefully. “If anyone wants pastoral counseling they’ll have their choice of places to sit.” She was being so nice to me, and I didn’t even belong to her church—I decided to go to a Sunday service sometime, although I had never had any particular religious preference. It would be a new experience. Then I remembered I had had enough of new experiences.
Removing the last of my things from what I guess had been Janelle’s house all along made me feel unmoored and weightless, if not totally hysterical. “Can I use your phone?” I asked Reverend Patsy.
Baby picked up right away. “Nora, sweetie!” she cried out. “I’ve been so worried! There’s something wrong with your phone. Every time I try to call you, it seems like it answers, but then there’s just a click. I didn’t know what happened to you! I thought maybe you had gone back to Brooklyn.”
“Just to Miss Ruby’s,” I said. “She found me on the street after Janelle threw me out.”
“Threw you out!” said Baby. “Get over here right now and tell me what happened.”
“I’m a wreck,” I said.
“Well, of course,” said Baby. “Who wouldn’t be, after all that, and Miss Ruby.”
“She keeps the TV on all the time!” I said. “She has a thousand cats!”
When I arrived, Baby turned the sign on her shop door from “open” to “closed.” She lived in a studio in the back, which sounds modest, but it was literally on the beach, with a grand window onto the harbor.
“It’s amazing during a storm,” she said. “With the birds blowing around and the waves crashing over the deck, you would think you’re on the Titanic.”
“I have to tell you something,” I said. “It’s going to be a while before I can manufacture those earrings for your store. Janelle took back all my beach glass. The stuff’s hard to find; she was really good at it.”
“We’ll figure that out later,” said Baby, taking me into her arms.
“All I’ve done is think of you,” I sighed.
“But not really,” she murmured, kissing a particularly lovely spot on my neck and causing an electric current to zing through me and out my toes. “When there’s so much else going on.”
“Oh, yes,” I said. “Yes.” I may have sounded a little Molly Bloomish right then, but what I had told her was true. She had hovered over all of it—losing Janelle, getting found by
Miss Ruby, her cats, my boxes. And you might think that in such a crisis—set off, after all, when Baby had tak-tok-tak-tok-ed into my life—I would have been distracted and anxious, even regretful, and unresponsive to her touch. But that’s not how it was. Instead, I snapped to attention, completely and utterly and helplessly present to Baby.
The Green Teddy
After we showered and dressed, Baby turned the shop sign from “closed” back to “open,” and we sat behind the counter together and talked about what to do. It felt oddly peaceful and even intimate, in the off-season lull. In the bleak depths of December, most of the traffic on Commercial Street was made up of trucks full of construction materials, and bursts from jack hammers and chainsaws periodically drowned out the melancholy hooting of the pigeons and the foghorns.
The guys in their big muddy boots and fluorescent vests mostly weren’t interested in jewelry and crafts, so Baby and I, like the other shopkeepers, weren’t often interrupted by customers. In fact, one had started to use the slow afternoons for phone sessions with her psychoanalyst, until she realized that word had gotten around, and everyone in town was trying to interpret her dreams. Others took advantage of the time to slap additions onto their houses, which the Board of Selectmen would then demand they remove, saying they ruined the historical character of the town. The owners would refuse, and everyone would have a good time writing letters to the local paper and filing lawsuits, until the additions had been up so long they could be grandfathered in.
The selectmen were perpetually, hopelessly, campaigning against P-town’s tackiness; one summer, knowing they would never make any headway against drag queens like Cher, standing elegantly on her electric skateboard and blowing kisses to the summer crowds, they had instead banned the Lobster Man, a loudmouth in a red plush suit who had handed out flyers for a local restaurant. He had been genuinely annoying, so there wasn’t much of a fuss—but then they banned the kid who sold pink-frosted cupcakes from a card table on a corner after the bars let out. They claimed that he should have applied for a catering license. The drag queens, who loved the cupcakes, came to his defense and took up a collection, which was so successful he was able to open a bakery.