by Amy Hoffman
Extending over it all is the net of human relationships. I’m no naturalist, no Henry David Thoreau tramping the length of the Cape. I’m from the city, and I’m interested in the people, and how the hand of the Cape gathers everyone and everything together in its palm.
At New York gay pride marches, I had heard the chant of the P-town contingent: “0-2-657 / Provincetown is just like heaven.” Medieval painters used gold leaf to represent heaven, so I started by dabbing flecks and stipples all over my paper, before I even laid down the boundaries of land and sea. The geography would be a wash of color over it: blue for the sea; green for the land, a topographical map. My portraits of people and animals would nestle among the textures.
I was pleased with my day’s work, even though I didn’t have a lot to show for it that would mean much to anyone else. But my vision was clearing; I was getting a sense of a way forward, the rhythm and the shape of the piece. I called Baby to tell her about my productive afternoon, but she didn’t answer, so I left a voice mail. I assumed that, as often, she was in her shop.
But she was not in her shop. She was swimming.
When she called back, she was full of admiration for my efforts. “You’re so diligent!” she said. “It always amazes me, how you people get things done. I’d never have the discipline—some new possibility would come up, and I’d go for that instead.”
She was right about herself. Baby wasn’t an artist; she was an appreciator: A sunset, the clear cold sea, a ripe mango on sale at the Stop & Shop. The pleasant click of her boot heels on the sidewalk. The view from her window. Me, in her bed.
Thus, her afternoon: taking advantage of the clear sky and the warm sun, she had driven out to Herring Cove. I could just see her, in her wet suit and red cowboy boots, with her pink towel and her yellow-daisy bathing cap. On such a nice day, she hadn’t been the only one on the beach, and as she ambled down to the water, Broony had appeared beside her. “Race you to the lifeguard stand,” Broony offered.
“I’m not into competition, Broony; you know that.”
“You are strong, Baby; you might beat me,” Broony tempted her. She dove, and Baby dove after her, stroking wildly. She lost, of course, since she had no interest in winning. But it was fun, and when they had had enough of racing, they hauled themselves out onto the sand, like the seals, panting and dripping. Broony congratulated herself by raising both arms in a V for Victory sign and turning around slowly for the admiration of all. Baby spread out her pink towel.
“You like to swim?” Broony asked her.
“Sure,” said Baby.
And Broony said, “Train with me. I want to swim at the beginning of the summer, in the Swim for Life. I want to win it!”
Baby laughed. “But Broony, the Swim for Life isn’t a race!”
It’s a fund-raiser, for AIDS care. The swimmers collect donations from their friends, and then they swim the mile or so from Long Point to the Boatslip beach. Lesbians in kayaks and rowboats accompany them and keep them on course, and drag queens dressed as cheerleaders and waving pompoms welcome them at the finish line. Since it takes place on the weekend before Memorial Day, it’s a time for the town to take a last look around, collect itself, and get ready for the long hours and frantic pace of the summer.
“For me it is,” said Broony. “Everything is so. They announce who is first to the finish, do they not? That person will be me.” She flexed a bicep, and accommodatingly, Baby gave it a squeeze. “Not just for the girls. For all the racers.”
“Swimmers,” Baby corrected her. “Tell you what: I’ll train with you, but just for the hell of it. I’ll swim the Swim; you can race it if you want.”
“Deal!” said Broony. “We will make a good pair.”
As Baby described her delightful, energizing swim with Broony and their training regimen, I became more and more appalled. “Baby, how could you do this to me? Broony is my enemy! She got me fired! And I thought the winter swimming was a special thing between us. Not something you’d do with anyone who just happens to show up.”
“You own the ocean?” said Baby, annoyed.
Suddenly, awfully, I found myself in the middle of our first fight. Baby not only didn’t have a jealous bone in her body; she didn’t seem to understand the concept. And she abhorred conflict. “This is silly,” she said. “Let’s talk tomorrow, when we’ve both forgotten all about this. I had a nice day, and I want to sit in my living room with a glass of wine and watch the tide go out.”
Sit in her living room with a glass of wine and watch the tide go out—so she could fill the vista before her with fantasies of Broony and her biceps! “Oh, Baby!” I cried, collapsing into my plastic chair. It turned over sideways and dumped me onto the cold, dirt floor. A cloud blew in and blocked the sun. “I won’t be able to forget about it!”
“Tomorrow, sweetness,” she said and hung up the phone.
I looked up at the painting I had done that day. What a mess.
Miss Ruby Sits
I decided to concentrate on the portraits. On an afternoon when Tony had taken Miss Ruby on a walk to the center of town and back that had left Miss Ruby too exhausted even to turn on the TV, I invited her to come up to the studio.
“More walking?” she said.
“Oh, come on, Miss Ruby,” I said. “It’s just across the yard. And once we get there, you can rest. I have a chair.”
Grumpily, she picked up a cat in one arm and put the other arm around my shoulders, and with her leaning on me the way she had when we first met, we stumbled up to the studio. I pulled out the chair for her. “It’s tippy,” she complained, trying to settle the squirming cat on her lap. She had grabbed the wrong animal, though—it wasn’t one of the huggy ones—and finally it gave a yowl, dug its claws into her thigh, and leaped off. It tried to slink out the door, a jerry-rigged thing made of two French windows that didn’t quite meet in the middle, but finding it couldn’t fit through, the cat curled up in front of the door in a sullen heap. “Ow,” said Miss Ruby, rubbing her leg. “Goddamn thing.”
“Just try to relax,” I said, pulling out my drawing pad and pencils.
“Now what?” said Miss Ruby.
“Now I’m going to draw you,” I coaxed her. “You promised you’d sit for me.”
“I thought you brought me here just for a look around,” Miss Ruby wheezed. “Use your imagination, can’t you?”
“Don’t be such a crank; it’s not the same.”
She pulled an inhaler out of her pocket and sucked on it a few times. “Guess not,” she agreed. “I swear, that Tony’s going to be the death of me. I was breathing better when I was on the cigs.”
“Oh, no, you don’t,” I said. “After all your effort, you don’t want to start that up again.”
She sighed. “They were a comfort, you know. Like little friends.”
“Well, now you have me and Tony.”
Miss Ruby rolled her eyes.
“Don’t you think it’s kind of insulting to compare us to Marlboros?”
“Little friends,” she repeated.
There’s an interesting thing that happens between artist and sitter, at least in my experience. While the artist concentrates on the drawing or painting, not saying much, the sitter loses awareness of the purpose of the encounter. Her mind wanders, and she begins to talk freely. “So, Miss Ruby,” I prompted her, to distract her from her cigarette jones, “what brought you to Provincetown?”
“What brought me? Nothing brought me, unless you mean my mother, carrying me for nine months! Girl, I’m Provincetown born and bred.”
“You’re kidding,” I said, looking at her through a squint, to get another perspective. “I didn’t know that.”
“Well, not many can say that, these days. We were what you might call traditional, my dad either out fishing or out carousing, my mom keeping house, cooking—she was the real support of the family. Nobody could make the caldo verde like her—for a while, she made a business of it, fixing giant pots of the stuff every
weekend and delivering it to restaurants. My dad and me, we never got tired of it.”
“What did you call it?”
“Kale soup!” said Miss Ruby. “You’ve lived here all these months and haven’t had it yet?”
“You’re Portuguese?”
“Well, sure,” said Miss Ruby. “Ruby Cabral. What else would I be?”
“But aren’t you, you know . . .” I stopped, realizing that I had assumed all this time that she was a lesbian, although one who was old and had had enough of the scene. But we had never actually had a conversation about it.
“Gay?” said Miss Ruby. “I would have thought that was obvious too.”
“Well, yeah,” I said. “I thought—”
“Nora,” said Miss Ruby. “I thought you were smarter than this. Is there some kind of law that says you can’t be both? My mom took in guests every summer—artists, gays, straights, whoever could pay the rent. Several years in a row, I remember, we had this couple, older ladies, as I thought then, although they were probably about the age I am now.
“They came every summer to paint, for a couple of weeks. I imagine they didn’t get but that much time off from their jobs. They’d be out there every day with their easels, around town or down by the pier. Then at night I’d hear them partying together.
“Partying, in that old house,” she mused. “The walls were like paper. You might think the little cottages around here are so pretty,” Miss Ruby said accusingly.
“But they are, aren’t they?” I said, wanting to defend myself, although I wasn’t sure from what.
“Sure, with their weathered shingles and flowers in the front yard—my mother would put me to work as soon as we had a thaw, weeding, watering. But they were drafty and cold in the winter, and up some rickety stairway that was more like a ladder, those stuffy bedrooms! It’s no wonder I’ve got the asthma now. Everybody on top of each other—parents, kids, borders. Some don’t like all the tearing down and putting up and gutting and rehabbing that goes on around here, but I’ll tell you something, I say, Go to it!
“The beds my mother put in for the guests, they were really more like cots. Thinking back, Nora, I truly don’t know how those old girls managed it. They were quite a substantial pair, you know?
“A real inspiration,” Miss Ruby concluded. “I think of them often now that I’m a little older and substantial myself.” She patted her belly proudly with both hands, and I made a fast sketch in a corner of the paper, to capture the gesture. “There were a lot of years when I had a helluva grand time.”
She stood and gathered the hissing cat into her arms. “And that’s enough for now, okay? I was hoping to get a nap in before supper.”
“How about kale soup?”
“It would be nice, wouldn’t it? I even have the secret family recipe. But not tonight, unless there’s such a thing as veggie linguica sausage. Which I doubt.”
“Tony’s coming?”
“Yeah. For vegan night.”
Dyke Drama
Sylvie at the post office handed my mail across the counter, grasped my hand, and asked, “How’s your friend? Ms. Janelle Elizabeth Burnside, Box 1057, I think it is? All those express packages from New York—she’s got one waiting for her right now. I bet she telecommutes; so many of them do now—”
“Good, I guess,” I said. “I haven’t really seen her—”
“Oh, my, I know what that’s like,” said Sylvie. “I see it all the time. People move here together and then a few months later—”
“She’s fine, Sylvie,” I interrupted. I knew Sylvie’s name only because it was embroidered on her uniform shirt, so I couldn’t figure out why we were having this conversation. “Nice weather we’re having.”
“You like these gray days? Well, she must miss you,” said Sylvie. “That’s probably it—some people get morbid. She was all on about the cancer. Cancer, cancer, cancer—she came in here asking about it and writing everything down. If anyone had heard of a cluster and who’s had it and what type. She said she was taking a survey. The other customers were a little disconcerted, to be honest. Some don’t like to talk about it, outside the family. I sure don’t. My mother, you know—”
“I’d like a book of stamps,” I said. “I’m sorry to hear about your mother.”
“Thank you, dear, it was a long time ago. But you know, you never get over a thing like that. I don’t go a day without thinking of her, not one. Maybe not even an hour.” She rummaged around in her drawer. “I have some of those pink ribbon stamps in here someplace. I hear your girlfriend was stage four by the time they caught it.”
“That’s nonsense, Sylvie,” I said, gathering up my junk mail and the packet of stamps. “Please don’t keep repeating this stuff. Janelle is a very private person.”
“Not my impression,” called Sylvie as I stalked off.
Maybe Sylvie was right, and Janelle wasn’t private at all. Maybe she had changed. Maybe I was the only person in town who didn’t know every detail of her existence. Later that week, during my next shift, she appeared at the deli counter and asked for a half pound of olive loaf, sliced thin. “Roger’s here again?” I asked.
“I told him it’s full of carcinogens, but he wants what he wants. And does everyone in this town have to know every little thing? What do you care about who’s staying at my house?” said Janelle.
“He’s my friend,” I pointed out.
“My friend, you mean. Like that awful woman in the post office, trying to weasel out why we’d moved here, and why I was so interested in cancer. I told her I have six months to live.” Then she added quickly, “Roger’s taking a semester’s leave from teaching and coming up here to help me with the environmental campaign—like a real friend. Unlike some people, who walked out on me.”
“Wait—what? I walked out on you?” I probably should have ignored her rewrite of our history, but I couldn’t let this go. “You physically pushed me out of the house and into the street!”
“Yes—because you cheated! You were getting it on—”
I tried to interrupt her. “Maybe, but—”
“You can’t deny that, Nora! And in our home!”
“I’m not denying it! I’m not denying anything! I fucked up bad, okay? But I never meant to hurt you.”
“Who cares what you meant!”
“I thought it would just be a momentary—I didn’t think you’d notice,” I admitted.
“You didn’t think I’d notice? So you were planning to lie, on top of cheating? Listen, I kicked you out, you walked out. Whatever. Whatever! It’s insignificant. You’re gone.”
“I’ll come—” I started, although I had no idea what I was about to offer to do.
“No, Nora! Fuck you! And your fat blonde friend!”
I stared at her in shock. A few people had lined up behind her while we were talking, but they had started to look uncomfortable and drift off. I guess it’s more satisfying to hear the dish on the latest dyke drama at the Stop & Shop secondhand than to get caught up in it when you’re just trying to get your errands done. Wrapping the olive loaf in white paper, I held it out to Janelle with, I thought, admirable professional courtesy. I used to take such comfort in her cheerful calmness and rationality. The walk she took every morning to sort things out in her head before she started her day. Her interest in and encouragement of everyone she met.
She snatched the package out of my hand. “Great. Thanks. Let Roger get cancer too!”
Jellyfish
A squib in the Provincetown Banner announced that because of the recent increase in outbreaks of scary mosquito-borne diseases like Eastern Equine Encephalitis and West Nile virus, the state Department of Public Health was recommending that southeastern Massachusetts and Cape Cod towns begin regular insecticide spraying as soon as the weather warmed up. Actually, I hadn’t noticed the announcement, but Broony had pointed it out to Baby during their weekly swim. Broony, that idiot, had been pleased about the spraying, because she didn’t want her training
program interrupted by illness.
“I hope she gets stung by a jellyfish,” I told Baby as she touched up her lipstick. We were in my shed. Since my session with Miss Ruby had gone so well, I had thought I would try Baby, too. Always game, she had agreed, although not without hesitation, to pose as a swimmer. “You could have picked a more attractive outfit,” she said. “More dignified. But follow your vision, my dear.” I had seated her in the plastic chair in her wet suit and red boots, pink towel across her shoulders, yellow-daisy bathing cap at the ready in her hand. She was able to sit quite still, yet naturally. Baby’s pink, red, and yellow, I decided, would appear nowhere else in the work.
“Oh, you,” said Baby. “The jellyfish here aren’t the poison kind. We just get the little white ones, and not until August.”
“The spraying is just the sort of thing Janelle was warning about. There has to be a better way to prevent horrible diseases than by drenching everything with carcinogens, where they leach into the water and cause yet other horrible diseases.”
“Absolutely!” said Baby, enthusiastically, without breaking her pose. “Posters, phase two! I’m up for it. We’ll stick to mailboxes and telephone poles this time.”
Federal and corporate property, I thought. “No, I’m thinking we start a petition,” I said. “To get it on the town meeting agenda.”
Baby sighed. And she wasn’t a big sigher.
I wondered if it had indeed been a mistake to put her in her swimming outfit. Perhaps it was reminding her at that very moment of her swimming companion, Broony. “What?” I asked.