by Elaine Ford
Behind the glass door there wasn’t a secretary, just a balding fellow in a none-too-clean shirt seated at a big old oak desk. The room reeked of cigar smoke. On the desk and stacked on top of file cabinets and on the floor were ledgers, thick wads of paper in manila folders, mottled black and white cardboard boxes. The man—Al Pitkin—offered Don a plump hand. “Sit,” he ordered. Gingerly Don moved a pile of papers from his chair to the corner of the desk and obeyed.
Without preamble, Al Pitkin launched into his speech. “Like I said in my letter, I’m looking to ease off a tad. Want to do some fishing, play with my grandkids. Could use somebody to lighten the load. Think you can handle it?”
Don gazed at the chaos surrounding him and assured Al Pitkin that he’d be on top of the job in no time.
“I’ll be honest with you. Won’t be able to pay you a whole lot, seeing as you haven’t much experience, just out of school and all. One-thirty-five a week’s the best I can do.”
Don reminded him that he’d helped his father run a business, knew firsthand something about how books were kept.
“Fine, that’s fine,” Al Pitkin said enthusiastically, plucking a cigar stub out of an ashtray half-buried on the desk. “Give you a good leg up. Of course, certain things they do different down in Jersey than we do here in Maine. Take you a while to learn the ropes. How-some-ever, if things work out, we’ll talk about giving you a little raise, maybe in a year or two.”
Don thought about the baby in Nancy’s belly, how he’d have to find a place for them to live and pay for it, plus the doctor and hospital, plus the myriad other expenses of maintaining a family, not to mention the payments on his student loans and helping his mother out from time to time. He felt responsibilities cropping up around him like enormous weeds. Would it be possible to manage everything on a hundred thirty-five dollars a week? He doubted it, even if Maine actually was the bargain it was cracked up to be. Still, he couldn’t go back downstairs to Nancy and tell her he wasn’t going to take the job, after all. Gypsy-like, they’d have to roam the state or maybe all up and down the Eastern seaboard in the Catalina packed to the gunnels until he found something else. The car, ten years old and beginning to signal transmission problems, might not even make it to the next town. Well, he could always begin here and be looking for a better opportunity at the same time. “Sounds good to me,” he told Al Pitkin.
The men stow lopper, sickle, saw, and work gloves in the shed and start back to the house. Over by the gravel parking area is a mound of foliage the size of a minor hill, which will be burned come fall. The smell of sap is strong in the air, an aroma that has delighted Don ever since they moved to Maine all those years ago. It pleases him to see the results of a day’s work all in a palpable mass like that. So many efforts that a person makes can’t be quantified so readily or even observed at all. Don’s also pleased that there’s one thing—a tradition now—that he and his son-in-law can do together in a companionable way. You have to hand it to Brock, he’s a hard worker once he sets his mind on a task. All that energy.
“Wonder what Nancy’s cooking for supper,” Don says, to make conversation, though he knows Nancy was planning on lobsters—a treat for Gina and Brock’s last night in Maine.
Brock doesn’t bother to answer, just runs up the steps and into the house.
Don sits on the top porch step to take off his work boots and then stays there awhile, the boots beside him. He’ll let Brock shower and the water heat up again before he goes inside.
His daughter opens the screen door and pokes her head out. “Mosquitoes acting up yet?” she asks.
“Not yet.”
“Want a beer?”
“Sure.”
Gina reappears with two cold Heinekens—Brock imported them from New York, on the theory, apparently, that Maine is devoid of all forms of civilization—moves the boots to one side, and sits next to him. “Impressive,” she says, gesturing with her bottle toward the mountainous heap by the parking area. She takes a sip and then says, “Mom says men love to whack things down.”
“Hm.” Don mulls this over. It kind of surprises him that Nancy would say such a thing, or even think it. Why doesn’t she understand how fast things get out of hand if you aren’t paying attention? For reasons he can’t specify, what she’s said makes him feel bad. But then, Nancy has often surprised and wounded him without intending to. Women are confusing, even Gina, whom he loves dearly. Sometimes Don wishes he’d had a son, but after Gina’s miraculous conception in the backseat of the old Catalina they’d never been able to start another baby, almost as if God was punishing them for their sin. Well no, not God. Don’s not much of a believer. The fates, then.
Gina tells him a little about the book she’ll be working on starting Monday—a collection of travel essays by a man whose name means nothing to Don—but soon the mosquitoes do start to bite, and they go inside. When Don comes down from his shower the lobsters are already on the table, pound and a halfers, hard-shells. There’s Nancy’s special potato salad with hardboiled eggs, too, and peas right out of the garden, and melted butter in little cups, and homemade bread, and the bottle of white wine he splurged on at the Shop ’n Save. No meal could give Don more pleasure than this one.
“Come eat,” Nancy says, and everybody takes their places, Gina to Don’s left because she’s a lefty, her husband across from her, and Nancy across from Don. Nancy’s gray hair, worn short now, is curling around her face, which is flushed from the heat of the boiling lobster water. She has never in her life looked better to him. Happy in his role as head of the family, Don uncorks the wine and fills their glasses.
“Ah,” Brock exclaims grandly, rubbing his hands, “how splendid. Giant red bugs.”
There’s a brief silence. Then Gina says, her voice so soft that Don can barely make out the words, “Is it really necessary to be so obnoxious?”
Brock smiles. He has a ruddy Anglo-Saxon complexion, thinning blow-dried hair, large white orthodontically straight teeth, and a nose that’s sort of squashed at the tip. Not especially good-looking. When Gina first brought him to Maine, before they were married, Don wondered what she saw in him. Now, however, Don understands the steadiness underneath the bluster and appreciates it. “I’m sorry if I offended anyone,” Brock says, “but in point of fact that’s what a lobster is. An arthropod. Nothing more than an oversized wood louse.”
“Have some peas, Gina,” Nancy says, trying to pass her the bowl catty-corner above the food.
Gina ignores her mother. “And what you are,” Gina says, smiling sweetly at her husband, “is an asshole.”
Brock again shows his white teeth. “Perhaps, my dear, you’ve had too much to drink.”
“Or perhaps, my dear, you haven’t had enough.” Gina lifts her glass, rises from her chair, and upends the glass over her husband’s head. As they watch, wine drenches him and his clean lime-colored Lacoste shirt, pours into the lap of his L. L. Bean khakis. He doesn’t move. Liquid drips from his chin and from the squashed tip of his nose onto the carapace of his lobster.
Nobody says a word. Don reaches across the table to hand him his own napkin, and Brock mops his head, ineffectually pats his shirt front and trousers. Then he leaves the table, walks across the room, opens the screen door leading to the deck and lets it fall shut behind him. Not with a bang. More of a wheeze.
Don looks down at his cooling lobster. He has lost his appetite entirely. The two women dig in, however, wrenching claws off bodies and cracking them open. Beside him, Gina dips a chunk of meat into melted butter and pops it into her mouth. “Yum,” she says. “Giant red wood louse. Me eat giant wed rood louse.” She and Nancy begin to laugh. The two of them laugh until tears run down their faces.
Well, Don thinks. His son-in-law might from time to time display certain asshole tendencies, but he didn’t deserve to be humiliated that way. He was only trying to be entertaining.
Ou
tside, Don finds Brock sitting hunched on the edge of the deck, dangling his legs over the side, gazing out at the water. His formerly blow-dried hair, swabbed with Don’s napkin, is mussed all to hell and the poor guy looks generally bedraggled. Don sits beside him.
After a while Brock asks, “Do you think she’s still angry?”
Don contemplates the scene of hilarity from which he has recently departed. “Hard to tell.” That’s the truth. He hasn’t a clue.
“It was meant to be a joke. A lame one, I guess.” After another long pause Brock says, “We accomplished a lot today.”
“Yes. We did.”
“Now you have a pretty good view.”
Tide’s up. Soon the moon will rise and between the trees they will see it reflected on the glimmering bay. Two moons for the price of one, definitely a bargain.
“ . . . until next year, anyway,” Brock adds. “Downright scary the way the weeds grow back.”
“Sure is,” Don says. “Downright scary.”
JUNK
Today is garbage day. Lyle slips out of bed without waking Frances and is out on the street by five a.m. You have to get to the cans before the truck rolls by, and as the days lengthen that seems to be earlier and earlier.
The trouble with this town is that everybody’s either a pack rat or a pinchpenny, or both. Nobody ever throws anything away that they might possibly be able to sell or barter or that could, by some wild stretch of the imagination, come in handy some day. The summer people are different, of course, but they don’t start flitting back into town until after mud season.
Still, you never know, and all Lyle has to lose is a couple hours sleep. It’s true he might be spotted digging into a garbage can and held up to ridicule by some, but it’s not his fault Mildred Flowers decided she had to live in Florida. It's not his fault she made Billy shut down Flowers Insurance so now Lyle’s about to be out on his ear. Let people blame Mid if they want to blame someone. He’s only doing what he has to.
Nothing so all-fired freakish about this idea anyhow, or even original; half the people on Main Street empty out their attics onto their lawns every Memorial Day and don’t pack the junk up again until the leaves drop. Only thing is, Frances isn’t going to be happy about tourists trampling her dahlias and asking to use the bathroom. She’s a moody person, Frances. Wiser not to let her in on the yard sale plan until absolutely necessary.
In the Caprice he cruises slowly down Cottage Street, keeping his eyes peeled for any clue that might announce a treasure. An unusually large heap of trash probably means somebody’s either moving or else swamping out their attic or their cellar. What you can hope for is that the size of the job at some point overwhelms them, especially when they’re old and there’s no relations close by, and that they’ll lose heart and give the whole lot the heave. Last Tuesday after Milford Potter went to the nursing home, Lyle found a carton of ancient kitchenware—egg beater, soap cage, masher, flatiron—just sitting there in the gutter, waiting for Lyle to pick up and haul away. It’s hard to believe, but people pay money for those things.
The shed’s getting kind of full, in fact. And worse, Frances is suspicious. She wanted to know why the padlock is kept clamped shut now, instead of just hanging from the hasp to keep the door from sagging open.
“I heard in the office kids have been vandalizing outbuildings,” he told her. “Dumping out cans of paint. Smashing Mason jars. Setting little fires.”
“What kids?”
“I don’t know. Just kids.”
“I haven’t heard anything like that.”
“Maybe if you got out more, you’d hear things.”
“I get out all I care to, thank you.”
“All right, all right.”
“And I need my potting soil from the shed.”
He carried the plastic sack of soil inside for her and left it by the kitchen door, and he’s noticed it hasn’t been touched since. Also, she wanted to know where he went at the crack of dawn last Tuesday morning. He said he’d had a sudden craving for eggs and home fries at the Brass Lantern.
“I’ve never in my life known you to do such a thing.”
“You haven’t known me all your life.”
“I have, too. I remember when you were a little twerp in the fourth grade and you cried because a big boy took your milk money.”
He remembers her from those days, too. Eighth-grade Milk Monitor, fat and bossy, with a heart like a lump of coal. But he only said, with dignity, “You haven’t known how I felt about home fries.”
That made her even more suspicious, unfortunately. He could see right into her head: Frances was sure that Marilla, his first wife, used to cook home fries for him every day of the week. Queer the way she resents Marilla; if Marilla hadn’t left him, Frances wouldn’t even be here. Anyway, breakfast is the meal Marilla never fixes for anyone but herself. He doubts that’s changed, even if she is living with that shiftless worm digger over on Monkey Bay Road, and supporting him too. Serves her right.
On Flat Bay Road Lyle finds an amber glass whiskey bottle lying in a scrap of leftover snow. The bottle might look old, he thinks, if he soaked the label off and incinerated it for a while. A little farther on he spots a three-legged kitchen chair on top of a heap of trash by the drainage ditch. Under those chipped layers of paint the chair’s solid maple, he guesses. He hunts around in the frozen dried weeds near the trash pile, but can’t find the fourth leg. How did it come to be detached and lost? he wonders. In a domestic dispute, maybe. Or under a very fat person. Without warning she crashed to the floor, and in the ensuing confusion the leg rolled under the stove or behind the refrigerator.
He looks up the slope at the house whose occupants have put out this pile of debris. It’s a rackety farmhouse, half covered in tarpaper. The rest is unpainted board, weathered to a splintery gray. No TV antenna, which definitely means no refrigerator, either. He gives up any hope of recovering the leg and leaves the chair in the ditch. Tourists may be crazy, but probably not crazy enough to buy a three-legged chair, even if it is solid maple.
He doesn’t stop at the heap in front of the trailer around the next curve, although something’s sticking out of one of the cans, an old floor lamp minus the glass shade. Outside chance it’s brass. Even if it’s only iron, you could spray it with gold paint. But the trash pile is near enough to the trailer that whoever inhabits the place might hear him rattling around in the can, and besides, it’s getting late. He wants to hit the Dumpsters at the boat launch down the road before turning back.
The Dumpsters turn out to be a disappointment, though. The only thing worth mentioning is a doll without a wig. Its eyes flicker open as he lifts it out. His daughter Hannah had a doll something like this once, he recalls. The grayish cloth body smells musty, and the rubber fingers of one hand are gone, chewed off it looks like. By a dog, maybe. Probably cost more to fix up than he could ever sell it for.
But he hates to have come this far with so little to show for it, so he lays the doll on the backseat of the Caprice and heads for home.
“I hate to break this to you, Frances, but I think there’s something wrong with Lyle.” Frances’s girlfriend Bev shakes the crumbs from her fingers into the sandwich wrapper and taps her own skull. “Upstairs.”
The vinyl pad sticks to her bottom as Frances shifts uneasily on the bench in the breakfast nook. She’s afraid to hear what’s coming next, but she wants to give Bev the impression she’s one step ahead of her. “A man’s bound to be upset when he’s going to lose his job,” she says. “The truth is, he’s been better lately. More cheerful.”
Bev’s mouth had been open to bite into her cream cheese and sardine sandwich, but instead she puts the sandwich down. “You know what they say about a depressed person who suddenly becomes cheerful, don’t you?”
“Of course I do.”
Bev’s long experience as a teacher m
akes her alert to equivocation. Without pausing for breath she pounces. “All right, what do they say?”
“Why, that the person is coming out of the depression.”
“No, dear. He’s cheerful because he’s made a decision to escape his misery and he’s figured out how to do it.”
“Lyle?”
“Well, you can’t entirely rule it out, I suppose.”
“Oh, my lord. That’s what the suitcase must be for.”
“Suitcase?” Bev asks with her mouth half full. “What suitcase is that?”
“The other day I was dusting the blinds in the front room, and I glanced out the window and saw Lyle coming down the street with a suitcase in his hand. Around the corner of the house he went, and I ran out to the kitchen, and out this very window I saw him hiding the suitcase in the shed. It was plaid, the cheap cloth kind that zips instead of buckles. I wouldn’t put any clothes of mine in it, but men don’t care about such things.”
Bev looks confused. “What’s a suitcase got to do with anything?”
“What you said about deciding to escape, of course. He must be planning to escape with the suitcase.”
“I’m afraid that wasn’t the kind of escape I had in mind, Frances.”
“Why are you being so mysterious, Bev? Are you deliberately trying to provoke me?”
“Calm down, Frances. How are you going to help Lyle if you work yourself into a worse state than he’s in?”
Frances slams her coffee cup onto the saucer, and a chip flies off the saucer rim. “Now see what you made me do.”
“You’re talking exactly like a second grader.”
Frances squeezes out from between the bench and the table and moves heavily to the window. Across an expanse of fresh snow, she can see the shed, with the closed padlock dangling from the hasp. “What kind of escape, then?” she hears herself ask in a weak, high-pitched voice.