by Elaine Ford
She sees on his ruddy, crosshatched face a look of—what? Sympathy? Admiration?
“I didn’t tell a single soul where I was going. I didn’t know myself. My first night on the road I called my daughters from the motel and said not to worry about me, I was fine.”
“I reckon you were, too.” He lifts the plastic bottle in a sort of salute.
“The girls had been calling the house for hours, getting Henry’s phantom voice on the answering machine . . . sorry, we can’t take your call right now . . . , and of course they were fit to be tied when they found out I hadn’t burned down the house, after all.”
“Machine wouldn’t have worked if you had.”
“No. And my limbs were all intact. I was taking a short vacation, I explained, and they’d hear from me when they heard from me.” She takes a deep breath. “Honestly, I felt a little guilty. But at least they weren’t going to file a missing person report and have the police on my tail.”
“Might’ve slowed you down some.”
“Indeed. So I kept driving north on Route 1, through New Hampshire, up the Maine coast. I’d stay overnight in towns along the way. Just passing through, as you said. And then, right in front of the sign welcoming me to town, I got the flat tire.”
“That’s where Stan the Fix-It Man came in.”
She smiles. “An angel in disguise. By the time you jacked the car up and put on the spare, it was past four in the afternoon. You promised you could have the tire repaired by morning, so I checked into the motel.”
Clara takes off her sunhat, lets the salty breeze ruffle her hair. Pixie cut, the young woman in the Clip ’n’ Curl called it.
“Well, Stan, I walked around town and felt at home, in the oddest way. Comfortable. The beautiful old Congregational Church could have been the one where I went to Sunday School as a child. I ate supper in the restaurant by the motel, a fried haddock sandwich. I never eat anything fried anymore, but I did it anyway, and it was absolutely delicious. I even ordered a glass of wine. When I was leaving I stopped to look at the table where they display all those tourist brochures. On the table was a stack of photocopied flyers advertising a little furnished house for rent. I’m not sure why—maybe it was the wine—but I took one and folded it and put it in my purse. The next day I called the number on the flyer, and went and saw the house, and fell in love with its quirky coziness and the view across the salt marsh to the bay, and . . . ”
“Here you are.”
“Here I am.”
They eat some chocolate chip cookies that she baked yesterday, letting the gulls do the talking for a while, sitting in easy companionship. Then they begin to pack what’s left of the lunch into the cooler. A sudden gust of wind carries off Clara’s hat, and as it sails by Stan catches it and claps it on his own head. She wishes she had a camera with her, not just to capture the silly sight, but to preserve this moment—the happiest, she realizes, since Henry fell ill.
They leave the cooler, with her floppy hat wedged under it, and set off down the escarpment. The tiers of pink granite are streaked with basalt. At their foot, where you’d expect to find a pebbly beach, is instead an expanse of smooth boulders the size of round loaves of bread. Boules. Clara and Stan begin to make their way across them, heading in a southerly direction. Broken urchin shells, some with their bristly spines still attached, lie among the piles of stones. Stan tells her that gulls dropped them from the sky to crack them open, so they could get the meat out. Too bad for the poor urchins, Clara thinks. After twenty yards or so she stumbles, and Stan takes her hand. He’s sure-footed for a man of his age. He seems to have no trouble moving from stone to stone, without having them slide under him, the way they do to her.
Of course, he was born here. It’s like a seaman’s familiarity with the roll of a boat.
The tide is low, and beyond the stones, at the base of the granite and basalt cliffs, a tidal pool lies exposed, scooped out of ledge. Gently Stan lets go of her hand. He takes off his shoes and socks, rolls up his pants cuffs, and crouches at the rim of the pool, the water lapping around his ankles. She sees how thin is the hair on the top of his head and hopes the sun won’t burn it.
He points out to Clara the creatures that are hiding here, taking refuge. Little whorled dog-whelks and periwinkles in a multitude of colors, some with stripes. Limpets sticking to rock like tiny cones. Blue mussels, with their tough weedy beards.
“Let’s see if we can find a hermit crab,” he says. “Hermits like to use empty moon snail shells for their houses.” He looks around and finally finds one. No snail or crab inside, so he gives it to Clara. The gray moon shell feels lovely in her palm, almost erotic. It gives her a shiver of pleasure. She shakes sand out of the shell’s interior and stows it in the pocket of her trousers. Meanwhile, he’s come upon a big crab with a rough reddish carapace. “What are you doing here, fella?” he asks.
“Where should he be?”
Stan explains that Jonah crabs are generally denizens of deeper water. He must have been washed here by mistake.
“Will he be all right?”
“He’ll leave with the tide, unless a gull finds him.”
“Are they named Jonah crabs because they’re swallowed by whales?”
“Likely not. A whale will swallow just about anything. What I know is, lobstermen hate the critters. They crowd up the traps so the lobsters can’t get in. A nuisance catch.”
“Unwelcome aboard then, like passengers who jinx ships. Aren’t they called Jonahs?”
He looks up at her and smiles, his hand shading his eyes from the sun. “You’re more of an old salt than I thought.”
“Hardly. I must have read it somewhere. Have you fished for lobsters yourself?”
“I’ve done most everything there is to do around here, one time or another. Look, Clara. See that spongy growth clinging to the wall of the tide pool? Crumb-of-bread, it’s called. Real old form of life, but a dead-end branch, when you’re talking about evolution. It refuses to change into something different or better. No matter how many millions of years go by, crumb-of-bread stays exactly the same.”
“Why, do you suppose?”
He thinks a moment. “It’s perfect the way it is, I reckon.”
Perfect? How disconcerting to think of such a strange creature as perfect. You can’t even tell if it’s a plant or an animal.
“These shells that look like little volcanoes,” he says, “they’re acorn barnacles. Kin to lobsters.”
“Surely not.”
“Looks can fool you.” With his thumbnail he pries one off the rock to show her. “See the valve on the top of the shell? He’s got it closed now, but at high tide he’ll open it up and whip out his arm and grab a bite of algae for his dinner. He may not look like a lobster, but a dog-whelk finds him right tasty.”
“How does the dog-whelk get him out of his shell?”
“No trouble at all. He just pries the valve open with his radula and goes chomp.”
“What’s a radula?”
“A tongue-like thing he has. Lots of teeth on it. Hand, mouth, fork, and weapon all in one. For Mr. Dog-whelk barnacles are easy pickings. Snacks. If he’s got a heartier meal in mind, he might fancy a mussel. Mussel’s got a lot more meat than a barnacle, but it’s a lot harder to get at, too. Now Mister Dog-whelk needs a more patient strategy. Crafty. He’ll drill a hole in the mussel’s shell with his radula—takes him a couple days—and slowly suck the critter out.”
“Good heavens.”
“When you come across an empty mussel shell with a neat hole in it, you’ll know how the owner met his fate.”
Clara is fascinated and horrified at the same time. “I never would have expected such . . . unpleasantness . . . in this pretty little sea garden.”
“If it makes you feel better, wrinkles are vegetarians.”
She thinks about Stan eating he
r sandwiches, all that meat and fish, maybe out of politeness. “You’re not a vegetarian, are you?”
“Course not.” One by one, he’s yanking his socks up over damp feet. “How-some-ever, I prefer my mussels cooked.”
“How did you learn so much about these creatures?”
“Science teacher I had in school, he brought us here on field trips, here and other places. Woods, swamps, blueberry barrens,” he says, lacing up his work boots. “I read books, too. Get ’em out of the library.” He’s on his feet now. “Tide’s turned. We’d better start back, or the stones’ll be slippery.”
It’s chilly, too. When Clara wasn’t paying attention the sun ducked behind clouds and the mist crept toward them.
The distance to the relative safety of ledge seems longer on the return trip, the puzzle of navigating from stone to stone without making a false step more complicated. Occupied with his own transit, Stan doesn’t take her hand. His bobbing motion reminds her of those drinking-bird toys that were a fad when she was a youngster.
The cooler and her sunhat are right where they left them. So the wind won’t seize it, she holds the hat tight against her blue linen blouse and pauses to take a long last look at the dramatically churning sea, the rocks, the gathering mist.
“Do you ever get used to this, Stan?”
“Can’t recall when I wasn’t used to it.”
“But it’s so special, so spectacular.”
“I reckon it’s different for you, being from away.” Stan lifts the red plastic cooler containing uneaten sandwiches, cookie crumbs, empty water bottles, and soggy half-full baggies of carrot and cucumber sticks. “Ready to go?”
On their way to the parking area Clara says, “You’ve told me all about sea creatures, but scarcely a word about yourself. Are you widowed, too?”
“Not me. I never got married.”
“You didn’t find the right person?”
“Well, Clara, I did, or thought I did, but she wound up marrying somebody else.”
“Oh. That must have been painful.”
“It happened a long time ago. Forty years or more. I got over it. Most things you get over, if you wait long enough.”
“I’m hoping that’s true.”
“Anyhow, living alone suits me fine.”
Earlier, she failed to notice that very near the truck are the charred remains of a driftwood fire. Teenaged partiers? Beer cans and soda-pop bottles are strewn about, a paper bag is caught in a bush, candy and fast food wrappers flutter listlessly, a child’s barrette is embedded in the dried mud. It would be a good deed to collect the junk and cart it to a trashcan in town, but Clara feels suddenly tired, much too tired to be picking up someone else’s litter. Whoever these careless people were, they weren’t tourists. Tourists would never have found the place. She swats at a blackfly that lands on her neck and lets Stan help her up into the cab. The cooler goes under the tarp.
Maybe she and Stan have overdone. He looks weary, too. Still, she learned a great many things today, and it felt good to talk about Henry’s death and what transpired afterward. Clara reaches into her pocket and feels the smooth surface of the moon shell Stan gave her. It will be something to remember this day by.
He starts the engine and heads for town.
THE ROCK AS BIG
AS THE QUEEN MARY
There hadn’t yet been a frost. Inside their wire cages the tomato plants had retracted, though, like little old ladies with bone shrinkage, and the fruit on the vines seemed more exposed. Meg wrested a pair of plum tomatoes from their stem and laid them in the basket that hung from her arm. Nearby, Peter walked through dew-soaked grass, following her. “We don’t get vine-ripened tomatoes at home,” he said. “We have to grow them under glass.”
“I know. It’s not even the same vegetable.”
She felt acutely the presence of the man behind her. His features had become so much more pronounced since she’d last seen him: the nose larger, the dark eyes more deeply set, the eyebrows untidy graying haymows. Wens had risen on his face and neck. His students must find him forbidding, this distinguished professor of medieval literature. And yet . . .
She turned. He was looking beyond the garden, at the retreating sea, which was leaving a mud flat in its wake. “When is it due back again?” he asked.
Meg began to explain about the tidal system, twice in, twice out, in a roughly twenty-five-hour span, but found herself floundering in the complexities of lunar pull. “Sorry, Peter. You’re the one who’s good at figuring out things like that, not me.” She laughed, shrugging. “It’s all a mystery.”
“Or a miracle?” He smiled with the same shy but intimate smile that had charmed her all those years ago—intimate not in a sexual sense, precisely, but in a way that said: You and I, Meg, know a joke no one else is privy to.
“That too,” she agreed, walking toward the herbs, which grew in a disorderly patch behind the tomato bed. The oregano had sprawled over the parsley and now bloomed with tiny purple flowers. Meg tore off a few branches and laid them across the tomatoes and the second-crop lettuce in the basket, and added a few sprigs of tarragon, whose stems had now become woody.
“Your garden is lovely, Meg.”
“Not so lovely at this time of year.” He stood so near her now that if she shifted only enough to transfer the basket to her other arm, her shoulder would touch the wool of his herringbone jacket. Fat bees hummed in the oregano. At the top of a spruce a crow cawed.
Slowly she moved away from the herb patch and said, “I don’t have enough space to grow everything I’d like to. It’s the trees. They don’t leave me much sun. I could squeeze in one more raised bed here, I guess.”
With the side of his shoe he nudged a flattish stone the size of a dessert plate. “This would be in the way.”
“Wherever you dig in Maine you find stones,” she said. “It’s the number one crop.” She started back to the house, conscious of his footsteps following hers across the hillocky lawn, which was really only self-sown weeds and wild grasses that she periodically cut to a stubble with a hand mower.
They entered the house through the kitchen door, and she set the basket on the counter. “Why don’t you sit,” she said, “and keep me company while I take care of some odds and ends.”
He offered to help, but she told him no, just sit. Obediently Peter pulled a chair away from the table and settled himself while Meg emptied the lettuce and herbs into an enamel pan. She ran water into the pan, then removed a package from the refrigerator. When she’d torn open the paper wrapping she brought it to the table for him to admire the contents, fillets so fresh and thin you could almost see through them. “Lemon sole. Off the boat this morning.”
“Splendid.”
At the counter she began to lay the fillets onto a square of paper towel. “I’ll just sauté them in a little butter, nothing fancy.”
He cleared his throat. “I wonder if you’d mind if I poached mine.”
Poached? She pictured the delicate flesh disintegrating in an instant, swirling away into boiling water.
“It’s my stomach. I can’t take butter anymore, anything fried.”
He looked embarrassed, and she said quickly, “Of course, Peter. But you don’t need to do it yourself, I’m happy to.”
Poached. She’d planned for the meal to be artlessly simple, but perfect. Now there’d be a soggy lump squatting gloomily on the white ironstone plate. Oh well, dress it up with a spray of tarragon and a lemon quarter.
Chilling was a bottle of sauterne, the best she’d been able to find in the local market. She took it out and handed it to Peter along with the corkscrew. “You still drink wine, I hope.”
“Oh, yes, I still drink wine.”
She thought about her twenty-second birthday dinner, the last time she’d seen him, and guessed he was thinking of that, too. Peter had brought two b
ottles of vintage Bordeaux as his contribution to the occasion. Claret, he called it. Peter not yet married, Meg’s firstborn asleep in his crib.
Late that evening, giving in to wine-induced impulse, Meg had brought her son to the table to nurse. She knew that Peter, in the chair next to hers, could not help gazing on the baby’s fuzzy head, on her own blue-veined breast swollen with milk. Her last opportunity to provoke a response in the gentle scholar to whom she’d become attached—he’d be on the plane back to Oxford the next day. No one else among the guests at the dinner table noticed a thing, least of all her husband.
The memory of her shamelessness caused Meg some chagrin, and she busied herself rinsing lettuce while he wound the corkscrew into the cork, eased it out, and poured the pale wine into glasses she’d set before him.
She wiped her hands on a dish towel. “Cheers, Peter,” she said, touching the rim of her glass to his.
“To absent friends.”
“Yes,” she replied, “to absent friends.” With her glass she returned to the counter.
Peter was Jim’s friend before he was hers, of course—Peter Finesilver, the young medievalist on a prestigious one-year grant in the same department where her husband slogged along as a graduate student. Impressed by Peter’s mind, Jim began to bring Peter back to the apartment for drinks after the Thursday afternoon seminar, and presently she’d invite him to stay for potluck. By chance she’d have cooked something a little special that day, seminar day. Or maybe not exactly by chance. With a modest smile Peter would produce a bottle of wine from his briefcase. Soon her whole week began and ended with Thursdays, even though she was pregnant with Jim’s child, and in the spring semester nursing Jim’s son.
After Peter returned to England the men’s interests took different turns, Jim’s lurching into Tudor drama, where he calculated the jobs were, and Peter’s wending into linguistics and theology. Meg was the one who assumed the task of keeping in touch. Except that it wasn’t a task. She wrote the offhand, chatty letters responding to Peter’s, only once in a while slipping in some small self-revelation, like a wrapped candy tucked as a surprise into a lunch bag. About as often she’d receive something like that from him, a minute confession woven as if by accident into his amusing observations on a concert he’d attended, or some international intrigue, or the commotion among his colleagues when a certain fourteenth-century leechbook inexplicably vanished from the Bodleian. Even after Peter wed, the occasional letters back and forth across the Atlantic continued. Twenty-seven years, and still her heart leapt a little whenever a blue air letter with his curious hooked handwriting on it arrived in the mail.