by Elaine Ford
Laurie feels she should defend Helen, who is only sticking up for her own rights, after all, but she can’t deny the plaintive shrillness in the child’s voice. Anyway, the conversation between Nicola and Steve has moved on to an anecdote about an eccentric novelist and a fistfight on a flight to Paris. Somewhere inside the cottage, Nicola’s phone begins to sound its quasi-musical trill. Possibly it’s her poet. As it rings Laurie pictures the old man in extremis, on the verge of strangulation, turning purple down in the East Village. Nicola ignores the phone. After a few more rings it stops.
Steve and Nicola have organized a plan to drive up the coast to an art museum this afternoon. Unthinkable to bring Cameron on such an expedition: he doesn’t travel well and is a menace to any institution. “You go,” Laurie says.
The woman in the painting wears a white wimple, linen. Underneath it, her head is shaved. Her face is smooth as an egg and her eyes are empty ovals.
Nicola and Steve are standing side by side, not touching. At the far end of the gallery, a guard looks at them with mild curiosity, perhaps making a guess as to their relationship. You’d have to play games like that in order to endure the tedium of the job, Nicola supposes. The guard glances at his watch. Must be about twenty minutes until closing. Other than the guard, she and Steve are alone in the room.
“I need to have time with you,” Steve says in a low, urgent voice.
She says nothing.
When they left the cottage he assumed their destination was a motel in a nearby town. Swiftly she let him know he could forget that idea. They would visit the museum, just as they’d told his wife: Nicola has no intention of handing her body over to him in some tacky motel room. Under the jack pines she set the hook. Make him wait now.
“Come up to Boston,” he says. “Get a writer-in-residence gig somewhere.”
She pauses, as if contemplating the idea for the first time. “What about Pertek?” she asks, moving on to the next painting.
“Screw Pertek,” he replies, loud enough for the guard to hear.
Inwardly she smiles.
In the kitchen, Laurie opens the last bottle of Muscadet, which she has chilled in the freezer compartment of the refrigerator. A dragon palace, she thinks, would be so deep under the sea that it’s immeasurably cold. A cold beyond pain, beyond any feeling at all.
She hears a car on the dirt road, but it drives on past.
Dragons are kindly, and welcome your presence in their domain. Their palace is so beautiful you have no wish ever to leave it.
During the night Cameron came down with an earache, and Nicola got very little sleep. Skipping the chaotic family breakfast—Cameron squalling, toast mashed into the kitchen floor, Laurie in bathrobed disarray—Nicola goes for a swim.
As she performs her calm, competent breaststroke, she thinks about the conversation in the museum. She’s not yet certain what she wants to do, but is enjoying the various possibilities in the situation. In a way, this thing with Steve is unfinished business: going backward before she can go forward, as she told Pertek. She was always attracted to Steve, sexually as well as intellectually. In the Quadrat days, however, she couldn’t let herself be drawn into entanglements, with Steve or any other neophyte, that would lead nowhere and only drag her down. Now her reputation is firmly established; her ability to earn a comfortable living is not in doubt. She’s free to do as she pleases. The conventional wisdom is that the older you become, the narrower your choices. Nicola will not allow herself to be bound by that rule.
She rides the breakers to shore, dries herself with the bath towel she left on the sand, and walks up to the cottage. She has no interest in destroying Steve’s marriage, not for her own benefit. However, if she happened to rescue him from his dim and frantic wife, she might be doing him a favor.
While Nicola’s been gone, Laurie has managed to locate a doctor willing to see Cameron in his office this morning, although it’s a Saturday. Steve’s insisting on going along. He takes his parental role seriously, and Nicola finds his decisiveness appealing, in contrast to Pertek’s fumbling frailties.
“Will you keep an eye on Helen?” Steve asks Nicola.
“I guess so. Sure.”
“I want to go,” Helen complains.
Laurie begins to waver and then says, “No, you stay here with Nicola. We won’t be long.”
“But I want—”
“I don’t care what you want.”
Helen is astonished into silence; the brat clearly is used to having her whims indulged.
“Pay attention to what Nicola tells you,” Laurie says. “And stay far away from the water.”
They leave by the screen door to the deck, Steve carrying Cameron wrapped in a blanket taken from one of the beds. Nicola sees that Helen has been playing with a set of Princess Di paper dolls: spread out over the porch floorboards are clumsily cutout ball gowns and riding clothes and dresses to wear while pecking the cheeks of AIDS victims and disaster survivors. They smell musty and are curling with damp; a kid from some previous summer must have left the set behind. Helen stares rabbit-like at Nicola, her eyes not quite in focus. For some reason the timid, snot-nosed stupidity in Helen’s expression makes Nicola say, “I suppose you know she’s dead. Killed in a car crash, a long time ago. The princess didn’t live happily ever after.”
In her bedroom Nicola strips out of her suit, then goes to the bathroom to shower. When she returns, Helen is no longer on the porch, and the paper outfits are fluttering about in the breeze. Nicola glances through the screen and sees the child wandering aimlessly in the sand, licking a bright red Popsicle. Must have helped herself from the freezer, the sly little creep. Nicola flips up the cover of her laptop and opens the file that contains her new long poem, begun here a week ago.
Images begin to leap into her mind with almost alarming ease and rapidity: strange and illuminating juxtapositions. It’s sexual excitement that’s punching her into gear, in spite of the lost sleep. She’ll show the work to Steve this afternoon, Nicola decides, even in this early, very rough draft. It will be like their time together at Quadrat, when they examined each other’s writing word by word, provoking, goading, exulting in hard-earned, shared epiphanies.
Suddenly she hears screams.
Obeying her mother, Helen walked not toward the water but in the direction of the low grassy dunes behind the cottage. Yellow jackets lit on her mouth and chin and hands, sticky with cherry-red juice. She began to run and stumbled in the coarse grass. Dozens of yellow jackets rose out of their nest to sting her.
The emergency crew that Nicola summoned restarted the child’s heart, shot her full of epinephrine, cut a hole in her throat, spirited her away to a hospital.
“I’m sorry,” Nicola said to Laurie and Steve when they returned with Cameron. “I really am. But it wasn’t my fault. Surely you can see that it wasn’t my fault.”
This morning Steve arranged for a taxi to collect Nicola and take her to the airport in Portland. It’s the last they’ll see of her, Laurie is certain, but that will make no difference in their lives, one way or the other.
Helen lies on a hospital bed, her body grotesquely mottled and swollen. The child’s ribs are taped; an IV runs into her armpit. Her thin hair looks dark against the sheet. Its strands feel stiff to Laurie’s fingers, and smell of salt and beach decay. Doctors have stitched together the wound in her throat and hidden it beneath white gauze. Laurie can tell by the blankness in her daughter’s eyes that she has gone somewhere far away, to a place so remote that scary things can’t find her ever again. Laurie hopes she is frolicking with dragons, in their palace under the sea.
WHY MEN LOVE TO
CUT THINGS DOWN
Nancy comes out to the deck with a colander and a mixing bowl full of pea pods. She stands for a moment, watching her husband and son-in-law attack the new growth that has burgeoned in the past year. Don is felling bran
ches with a lopper, Brock yanking up spruce and fir seedlings with work-gloved hands. “Why is it that men love to cut things down?” Nancy asks.
Her daughter lifts her eyes from her book, a mildewed novel she checked out of the little town library earlier in the week. “If they didn’t thin out the woods every now and then, soon you’d hardly be able to see the water.”
“That’s not why they do it, though. Look at the joy they take in the work. Whack! Whack! Whack!”
Gina smiles. “I have to admit, neither one of them spends much time in soulful contemplation of the view.”
Nancy pulls a molded plastic lawn chair into the sun and sits, the colander in her lap. With her thumbnail she slits a pod and scoops the tender peas into the colander. The empty pods drop onto the deck planks, next to the bowl. “You’re worried about something, aren’t you?” she asks.
“What makes you think that?”
“You seem distracted. A little edgy.”
Gina crosses and re-crosses her long denim-clad legs before answering. “Shit, Mom. I’ve never been able to hide things from you.”
“You don’t have to tell me, if you’d rather not.”
Shelled peas ping steadily into the colander.
“No, it’s not that. I just don’t know how to say it.”
Out on the bay, a sailboat bounces along on choppy water. Somewhere in the distance a chainsaw whines. The smell of crushed needles and wounded bark reaches them, carried on the breeze.
“All right,” Gina says, “here’s the story. I want to have a baby.”
Well, good. But . . . ? Nancy imagines opposition on Brock’s part. Or some dysfunction like a disastrously low sperm count. Frustrating trips to specialists. “I’ve wondered if you and Brock were thinking about a family. I didn’t like to ask.”
“The thing is, I’m not sure I want to have a baby with Brock.”
Nancy looks at her daughter. Leaner now that she’s into her thirties, brown hair longer, almost stringy on her shoulders. In the sunlight gleam a few gray hairs you’d never notice otherwise. Shallow breasts, bra-less, under a faded T-shirt. Good bones, a facial structure inherited from a Lithuanian great-grandmother on Nancy’s side. Gina also inherited Don’s long legs and something of his shyness. “I don’t understand,” Nancy says.
Gina closes the library book and sets it on the bench beside her chair. “It’s not that our marriage is so awful. After eight years you get used to things the way they are, you find ways to accommodate.”
Nancy bends forward for a handful of peas and notices that her thumbnail is now green. Her own marriage evolved that way, too: accommodation, resignation. She’s long since made her peace with Don’s reluctance to take risks, his penny-pinching, his maddening aphorisms. Measure three times, cut once.
“But,” Gina continues, “for a long time I’ve thought that someday I might want to move on. Brock and I are so different, in so many ways.”
Moving on. Divorce. The word is tawdry, has a dismal air of defeat. Used goods. And yet Nancy isn’t nearly as taken aback as Gina must expect her to be, or as shocked. Yes, Gina and Brock are different from one another. He’s a lot older, for one thing, an established partner in a Wall Street law firm even before he met her daughter and married her. Gina wouldn’t need to keep her job as a designer for a small publishing house if she didn’t want to; in fact, Brock claims half-jokingly that tax-wise, Gina’s job costs him a bundle. A show-off, too, is her son-in-law, constantly dropping into the conversation references to Latin-American novelists or particle physics or medieval theological disputes. The first day or so of the annual visit to Maine Brock demonstrates elaborate interest in Nancy’s garden and Don’s latest workshop project. Then patronizing his in-laws becomes a bore, and he turns his energies elsewhere: running timed miles up and down their dirt road while complaining about the dust and potholes, fighting with the ancient Evinrude so he can take the leaky old skiff onto the water only to get stuck at low tide fifty yards out and have to wade home in muck up to his ankles.
“A baby connects you in ways that aren’t easily undone,” Gina says. “With a baby there’s not the same possibility of moving on.”
The men are now dragging felled vegetation into preliminary piles, from which stick out slender trunks with fist-sized clumps of roots on their ends.
“How does Brock feel about a child?” Nancy asks.
“He’s all for it. Has been right from the beginning. I’m the one who’s been procrastinating.” Gina turns toward her mother. “He’d probably be a very good father. He’d insist on religious training—Episcopal, of course—music lessons, the best schools. I can just hear him bragging about little Tristan’s prize in violin, little Isolde’s prowess in the swimming pool.”
“Tristan? Isolde?”
Gina laughs. “No common ordinary names for him.”
“No, I suppose not.” Nancy gets up from her chair, leaving the colander on the seat. She stoops to gather empty pea pods into the bowl.
“So what do you think I should do, Mom?”
What Nancy wants to say is: Dump the arrogant creep! Find somebody gentle and unpretentious, like yourself, while there’s still time. Age thirty-five becomes fifty in the blink of an eye. But of course she can’t say that. What mother advises her daughter to break up a comfortable marriage, to leave a good provider? To venture into the unknown for no demonstrably good reason? “Oh, dear,” she says. “I’m afraid I can’t help you on this one.” She carries the bowl down the deck steps and dumps the pods into the compost bin.
They parked in Don’s falling-apart old Catalina behind a factory that made spark plugs. On the radio was a Petula Clark song she’d heard a million times. Downtown . . . Don let his arm drop from the back of the seat and rest on her shoulder. Then he pulled her close and kissed her, his mouth tasting of onions and catsup from their meal at McDonald’s. He groped inside her coat to unbutton her blouse, and she asked him not to.
“Why not, what’s the matter?”
“I’d just rather not tonight.”
“All right,” he said, letting go of her.
Nancy knew he wouldn’t force himself on her. He wasn’t that kind of person.
The disk jockey, reading the AP news, announced that Malcolm X had been shot dead in Harlem. “Wasn’t he the guy who said Kennedy’s assassination was chickens coming home to roost?” Don asked.
Nancy was eighteen years old, taking courses for an A.A. at the community college, working part time in a gift shop, living with her parents. She had barely heard of Malcolm X.
“I think more chickens just flew home,” Don said.
She’d met Don at the college on her first day, in the line in the cafeteria. He carried her tray for her, sat with her while she ate her American chop suey. She found out he was soon to graduate with a degree in business, and that he was quite a bit older than she was. Right out of high school he’d gone to work in his dad’s company, a modest operation that manufactured plastic placemats with scenes like the Grand Canyon and Old Faithful printed on them. After six years his father died of a heart attack, and Don decided to sell the faltering business and go to school. The sale had brought just enough money to allow his mother to stay in the family bungalow in Bergenfield. Don didn’t want to make placemats his whole life, he’d confessed to Nancy that first day in the cafeteria.
“Ranger 8 ended its life last night in the Sea of Tranquility,” she heard the disk jockey say. “Before crashing, the spaceship sent back to earth seven thousand pictures of the moon. And now the weather. A cold front will move in overnight, temperatures falling to around the freezing mark, sleet or freezing rain before dawn. Take care, all you commuters out there.” The music resumed, a new Beatles tune. I don’t want to. Spoil the pa-ar-ty.
“I have something to tell you,” Nancy said. “I’m pregnant.”
At first he didn’t
seem to have heard over the noise of the radio, and she reached to turn the knob. “Don, I said—”
“You can’t be.”
“I saw a doctor. Friday they called to give me the results of the urine test.”
He stared straight ahead and she knew that he was thinking about the unreasonableness of it. Just the one time, and he never even managed to get all the way inside her before he came, and then all weepy she’d made him take her home.
Their breaths had fogged the windows. The factory’s security lights were fuzzy blurs. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll figure out something.”
Don shut the door of the Catalina, leaving his pregnant wife inside. Crammed into the backseat were practically all their possessions. A floor lamp that Nancy’s mother had pressed on her at the last minute poked crazily out of a mess of supermarket bags full of secondhand house furnishings, wedding presents still in their boxes, clothes on hangers. Through the passenger window Nancy gave him an encouraging wave.
The sign attached to brick at 33A Main Street said “Ellsworth Business & Tax Services. Second floor.” It featured the outline of a hand with a finger pointing upward.
They’d picked Maine because he’d heard somewhere that it was a cheap place to live, a bargain. Nancy liked the idea of living near the ocean, away from congestion and traffic and, Don suspected, from people who would know or guess why they had to get married. Ellsworth was the town from which he’d received the one reply to the dozens of letters of inquiry he’d sent out.
Don climbed the dark, narrow steps, which smelled of rubber from the treads, dust, and something vaguely ether-like. The stairs reminded him of those leading to the doctor’s office in Bergenfield where his mother used to take him as a child. What he felt in the depths of his stomach now was the same as knowing he’d have to undress with his mother watching and be prodded by the doctor in places he didn’t want to be prodded and then get a shot.