The Off Season

by Amy Hoffman

  “I wish I could afford to hire you in the shop,” said Baby. “You need a job.”

  “A different place to live, too,” I said gloomily.

  “Can you pull espresso?” asked Baby.

  “Aren’t I a little old for that?” I said. “Baby, you might not realize it but back in Brooklyn I was teaching, I’d made a few sales, an agent was interested in me, and I was on my way to a solo show. I was developing an actual career.”

  “Okay, but I have a feeling we’re not in Brooklyn anymore, Toto, darling.”

  I remembered the scene in the movie where Dorothy and her friends go to that spa in Oz city. “You mean it’s all service jobs.”

  “Come with me,” said Baby, jumping up. She was not one to sit around when she might be taking action, and I rushed after her. When we arrived at a busy coffee shop in one of those tiny house-like structures that Provincetown seems to specialize in, she pointed triumphantly at a sign on the door. “Check it out. I thought I remembered it.”

  “‘Use other door’?” I read, to tease her. But I really wasn’t so happy about where this was going.

  “You are a nut,” she said, giving me a playful kiss. I returned it, and we scuffled enjoyably for a moment in the entryway. “The other sign!”

  “‘Experienced help wanted,’” I said. “But I don’t have experience.”

  “Jeez, Nora, how hard could it be?” she said.

  “Hey, lesbians—keep it clean over there!” someone boomed at us.

  “Hey, Bob!” Baby greeted him. Turning back to me, she explained, “He’s the one you have to talk to.” Bob had the height and build of a linebacker, and a shaved head—although unfortunately he wasn’t one of those people with a beautiful round skull to show off; his was lumpy, more like Nikita Khrushchev’s, ears and all. He was wearing a leather vest and big black boots, an outfit that I later discovered he wore year-round—with jeans and a T-shirt under the vest in the winter; running shorts and nothing under the vest but his hirsute chest and back in the summer. He would have terrified me if he hadn’t also sported, tucked into his vest pocket, a small, colorful stuffed bear—Green Teddy, GT for short, for whom the coffee shop was named. “His friends call him Babs,” said Baby. “Some night we’ll go catch his drag act at the Crown and Anchor.”

  “Baby!” he called again. “I love you! Get over here!” Bob/Babs was a true washashore. The story was that he had been a top executive—how high up depended on who was telling it—at a transnational corporation that hawked various climate-killing widgets, dressing every day in one from his wardrobe of suits custom made for his height and girth. At a certain point, it had all crashed. Some of those whispering on the Green Teddy patio claimed he had actually done time, but most disputed this. No one does time for corporate busts, they pointed out—it wasn’t like he had just kited a few checks—and anyway, Bob never seemed hardened or depressed. He did have a lot of tattoos, but they weren’t the jailhouse kind. In P-town he did yoga, he meditated, and he said he was practicing gratefulness. A perfectionist, he told me I would need months of training before I would develop the necessary skills to use his imported Italian espresso machine, but he hired me anyway, to sweep the patio and ring up the customers. We shook hands on the deal.

  “But why so formal?” he said. “We’re friends now!” He held out his arms. “Hugs, hugs!” he insisted, enfolding me.

  Baby turned away from a conversation she had been having with one of the baristas, a muscled Valkyrie with two long, blonde braids wrapped in a crown around her head and a Polynesian armband tattoo that would grow more elaborate every week. “See,” Baby told me. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

  “Who was that?” I asked.

  “Who was who?” said Baby. I pointed at the barista. “Brunhilde? I call her Broony. Come on, let’s go back to my place and make dinner.”

  So we did. We made dinner, we made love, and the next morning, I walked back to Miss Ruby’s, somewhat dazed from all our activity, somewhat ecstatic, somewhat depressed, somewhat employed. A frigid, salty fog was rolling around the streets, coalescing periodically into snow flurries, the season’s first, and I realized I had never before seen snow on a beach. Out on the bay, the moored boats disappeared into the mist.

  And I was adrift, I knew, like a dinghy in the fog.

  The White Pickup Truck

  When I got back to Miss Ruby’s, the white pickup truck was parked outside. In the living room, sitting in what I had begun to think of as my chair, was a short, wiry butch of about Miss Ruby’s age, wearing a camouflage-patterned T-shirt and khaki work pants. Her wavy gray hair was squashed down on top from a severe case of hat-head clearly caused by the trucker’s cap she held in her lap. The place seemed different, and I realized the shades were up. I hadn’t noticed before that the room had so many windows. The TV was off, and the cats were trying to hide in a pile in the corner. “What the hell’s been going on here?” she demanded.

  “Tony,” explained Miss Ruby, waving at her visitor. “Nora.”

  “She’s smoking like a chimney, she hasn’t gone out of the house in a week, the scooter’s chained to a parking meter down on Commercial, the freezer’s full of ice cream, and the whole damn place smells like beer and cat pee, Norma.” Tony sneered the name like it was a synonym for “cat pee.” It wasn’t one of my favorites either.

  “Nora,” I corrected her. “This is Miss Ruby’s home. I didn’t think it was my place to start telling her how to live.”

  “Yeah, well, I call that enabling,” said Tony.

  “She’s twelve step,” Miss Ruby whispered to me.

  “Twelve step nothing,” Tony said loudly. “I call it irresponsible.” She turned to me. “She’s done this before. She asks some sweet little Girl Scout to help her cross the street or something, and bam! Next thing you know, the rescue squad is all over the place and she ends up in that lousy Cape Cod Hospital on oxygen. Norma.”

  “But she’s helping me,” I said.

  “Well. That’s a new one,” said Tony. “Get this place in order. I’ll go down and fix the scooter.” She stomped out the door.

  Miss Ruby groaned. “She doesn’t know a damn thing about motors; she just likes having an excuse to wear her tool belt. The mechanic will charge me twice as much after she gets done with it.”

  “She’s right though,” I said.

  “Tony?” said Miss Ruby, pointing the clicker at the TV. “She’s always right.”

  Miss Ruby’s cottage was so small that dusting and vacuuming weren’t really much of a chore, and I wondered guiltily why I hadn’t cleaned as soon as I arrived. Exposed to light and cleared of hairballs, the place felt almost wholesome. If I took pills for the cat hair and got a supply of ear plugs for the TV, I realized, it would be close to livable.

  Miss Ruby beckoned to the cats, and several jumped into her lap. She lit a cigarette. “I suppose you want me to cut down on these things, too,” she said.

  “Quit, actually,” I said. “If I’m going to stay. You’ll feel a lot better when you can breathe, Miss Ruby.”

  “And we were having such fun,” she sighed.

  Pulling Espresso

  The Green Teddy gig was not an immediate success. On my first day, Bob had just introduced me to my coworkers and was teaching me how to work the cash register when Janelle and Roger walked in. Although she was an early riser, he wasn’t, at least not on weekends. He prided himself, though, on being a superpolite and self-effacing guest, so he must have been trying to accommodate her schedule. That would end, I suspected, after he had spent a late night or two of cooking elegant dinners, failing to persuade Janelle to go out dancing with him afterward, and then, when the bars closed, trying to scare up some off-season action at the Dick Dock.

  “School vacation?” I asked Roger. I hoped that if I could get him to talk to me, maybe Janelle would too.

  The two of them stared at me wordlessly, turned around, and stomped out. I felt slapped.

  “Int
ense,” said Bob. “Do you often have that effect on people?”

  “Just them.” I had never been cut so decisively before. A myriad of experiences in those weeks had confronted me with just how thoroughly I had fucked up—but it was only after that encounter with Janelle and Roger that I truly understood my life would never be the same.

  “Well, don’t scare away any more of my customers.” He laughed, oblivious or perhaps entertained by my problems. I hoped I had accumulated more acquaintances, who would take my side, than Janelle had. A drawback of small-town life was becoming clear to me: word got around.

  “Okay, guys, here goes!” said Bob, clapping his hands. I looked up to find that a long queue had materialized, winding around the little store, out the door to the patio, and down the front stoop. “This is our morning rush, Nora,” he explained. “José will be here in a second; he’s a regular. He’ll want to hang out and gossip for twenty minutes while you ring people up, so I hope you got the hang of the register. He takes an extra-large red-eye, but don’t charge him for the shot today. I like to comp him every once in a while.”

  “Got it, boss,” I said, feeling bewildered. Then I didn’t have time to feel anything. A shift at the Green Teddy was like stepping off the platform onto the playground slide: the morning rush zoomed past and into the afternoon rush, and at the end I landed with a bump onto the patio, a bit vertiginous, but on my feet.

  “That wasn’t too bad, was it?” said Baby. She had arrived just as promised to pick me up after my inaugural shift, a treat to get me through my first day.

  “It’ll cover the rent, I guess,” I said. “Miss Ruby says she’ll quit smoking if I pay her.” At Tony’s direction, we had worked out an agreement. Miss Ruby would do the shopping on her scooter, and I would cook and clean the litterboxes. Tony would make frequent, unannounced visits to make sure we weren’t slacking off. Although Miss Ruby grumbled, I could tell that underneath, she enjoyed having Tony’s attention, while Tony, for her part, seemed gleeful about having us to instruct and mold.

  “So you have an okay place to stay,” said Baby. She had been chatting with Broony, who had come out for a smoke. She was now my co-worker and thus, I guessed, my friend too, although I hadn’t had time for a conversation. Or, actually, hadn’t attempted one, except for a few squeaked behind you’s and sorry’s, and even those had probably been unnecessary, since Broony had been too preoccupied to respond. She was in charge of the imported espresso machine, which seemed to require a lot of tinkering and an occasional whack.

  “Hey,” I said, with a little wave. “Broony.”

  Staring at me, she dropped her cigarette to the ground and crushed it under her heel, in violation of all of Bob’s rules for employee behavior on the patio. “Brunhilde,” she said. “Bitte. If you please.” She kissed Baby affectionately on both cheeks and went back inside.

  Baby gave her a fluttery-finger wave. “Don’t mind her,” she said. “Her bark’s worse than her bite.” She linked her arm through mine. “The tide’s out. Let’s walk the jetty.”

  “Don’t the rocks make you nervous?” To me, the jetty, beloved promenade of both townies and tourists, looked like a long, rambling opportunity to turn my ankle, fall into the water, and drown.

  “I’m part goat,” said Baby. “Haven’t you noticed?”

  “You’re a randy thing,” I agreed.

  “You’re not so bad yourself,” she said and gave me a kiss on the lips, with a thrilling bit of tongue. “Come on, don’t be a wuss.” She began pulling me along the street, so I had no choice but to follow.

  We arrived at the end of Commercial Street, a rotary with a little memorial park in the middle. Janelle and I had made a ritual of walking through it to look for the name, carved on a paving stone, of Roger’s only steady boyfriend, a victim of the epidemic. Sometimes we could find it, sometimes not. I sighed, to think of Janelle and me, and Roger, and poor dead Paul Wong, whom we had never had the chance to know except in Roger’s stories of their true love.

  Baby, unaware of all that, kept to the sidewalk that ran alongside the Provincetown Inn, a sprawling, decrepit motel with some of the best bay views in town. I never figured out how it hadn’t been taken over by a developer—it was just the sort of place that was being razed and replaced by a couple of mansions everywhere else—but until that happened its pool was a favorite Gay Family Week hangout, a parent or two sneaking a drink at the motel bar while the babies splashed around in the warm water.

  An expanse of grassy wetlands, the moors, spread out before us, the palm of the Cape’s hand. The jetty snaked across them to the outer dunes and Wood End lighthouse. Baby stepped onto a boulder. “Come on!” she said. “I’ll hold your hand. You won’t fall.”

  The fact that she was wearing cowboy boots with heels didn’t increase my feeling of stability, but I took the hand she held out to me, and we began picking our way along the rocks and jumping over crevasses. The winter sun was low in the sky, and the clouds on the horizon glowed. A silhouetted couple paced slowly through the shallows, heads down, clamming or crabbing or some other such oceanic activity.

  They looked familiar. “Oh, not again,” I said. “That’s Janelle and Roger.”

  “Are you sure?” asked Baby. “Really, it’s hopeless trying to avoid anyone in this town.”

  “Of course I’m sure.” Janelle’s tufty hair haloed her head, and I would have recognized her walk anywhere.

  Baby pointed to a sign at the entrance to the jetty. “Well, they’re not supposed to be shell fishing here. The water’s not clean.” She waved her arms and called to them. “Hey! Hey!”

  Janelle looked up, and Baby cupped her hands around her mouth. “Pollution!” she yelled.

  Janelle and Roger turned and started walking toward us.

  “I don’t want them getting poisoned,” Baby explained.

  “Why not? Janelle would be happy if I was.”

  They scrambled up the rocks, pretending not to notice us. As it turned out, they weren’t carrying buckets of sea creatures, just a couple of jars of murky water.

  “Science project?” I asked.

  Janelle glanced up. “You could call it that,” she said, and I felt a brief sag of relief. The cone of silence had been breached.

  “Hi,” said Baby optimistically.

  Janelle looked at her like she was a slimy sea creature. Me, she didn’t look at, at all. After that first, automatic response to my question, she refused to acknowledge me. She and Roger continued off the jetty and onto the sidewalk.

  “What’s that all about, I wonder,” said Baby.

  “Come on,” I said, tugging her hand. “It’s getting too late for this walk.” I hadn’t wanted to do it in the first place, and encountering Janelle and Roger made the place feel toxic, and not only for shellfish. “Let’s go. I told Miss Ruby I’d cook. We’re having Iron Chef night—whatever’s in the pantry. Tomorrow’s shopping day.”

  “Okay, but some day you’re going to walk this whole jetty with me,” said Baby.

  I had promised Tony I would keep watch on Miss Ruby to make sure she stuck to her resolution—or rather, Tony’s—to develop better habits. Although our previous regimen had been wildly unhealthy, it had its satisfactions. It had buoyed Miss Ruby up from a depression. When I had found her—or she had found me—in the street she had been lonely and sick. Then she had begun to enjoy my company, and ordering me around, although I was sinking into a mire of confusion. Before Tony had appeared, Iron Chef night hadn’t been about preparing a meal; it had been about watching a reality cooking show and eating cereal for supper. Miss Ruby favored Lucky Charms.

  “What a day,” I said as we approached Baby’s storefront. Even though I had been going on about my evening commitment, I was kind of hoping she would invite me in. “I’m not used to getting up so early for work. And then all that walking on rocks, and running into Janelle and Roger. And Miss Ruby is cranky these days, with no cigs and real food.”

  But Baby didn’t
offer. She gave me a big hug, then tak-tok-ed down the walk to her door. I watched her go, and after she disappeared inside, I felt a horrible pang, as though we would be parted for months rather than hours. As though I could get myself into as much trouble by letting her go as I had by entangling myself with her.

  When I Paint My Masterpiece

  And then when I got back to the cottage, Miss Ruby wasn’t there. Surprised and, I realized, disappointed, since I had been feeling so virtuous about advancing our healthy lifestyle, I fed the cats and paced the kitchen, stopping every once in a while to stare into the refrigerator. I should have been figuring out my next steps in life, or at least what to fix for dinner, but my mind wasn’t on either. I kept berating myself for my lack of focus and then immediately slipping off into another daydream of Baby, or speculation about Janelle and her jars of marsh water and her few words to me.

  Finally there was a commotion at the door—Tony and Miss Ruby. “She made me walk all the way from the Stop & Shop,” said Miss Ruby, throwing herself into her recliner. Her face was flushed and sweaty, and she was audibly wheezing, but I could see that she was pleased with herself.

  “You need the exercise,” said Tony.

  “You just can’t figure out how to fix my scooter,” said Miss Ruby.

  “Anyhow, it wasn’t all the way.” Tony turned to me, a concession that surprised me—her feeling the need to explain that she hadn’t been torturing her friend. “She’s nowhere near ready for that, Nella. I just kicked her out of the truck to do the last couple blocks.”