“You people need cold showers, not hot ones,” Albert told two shivering newlyweds who complained upon checking out. That was before he had broken down and added hot water. Had pampered the fussy guests who graced the doors of numbers 1, 2, 3, or 4.
But in fact Albert planned, if business would only pick up, to buy a plastic swimming pool from Sears, one of the big fancy jobs, twelve feet wide with a little diving board and with a most colorful design. He would plant it where Sarah Pinkham’s old flower garden had been and charge the bastards $1.00 to dip in it. For the local kids he would even go so far, being a philanthropist of sorts, to offer a $25.00 seasonal pass, a virtual giveaway at that price. Quite frankly, it wouldn’t be a great variation from the price he charged tourists. If his motel was in Florida, maybe, he’d have to charge $365.25 for a seasonal pass, so as not to lose money. But in northern Maine, with a summer that comes and goes on mosquito wings, Albert could make a killing on seasonal passes. Bruce agreed.
Amy Joy got out of her mother’s car and slammed the door.
“Goddamn McKinnons,” Albert thought. “Just because a door is there, they gotta slam it.” Bruce’s teeth scraped, top against bottom. His tail went slack. Albert calmed him with a quick stroke of the neck fur, right where Bruce loved stroking, and opened the door. Weddings meant honeymoons.
“Well, if it ain’t little Amy Joy,” Albert said pleasantly. “What’s this I hear about you getting married and breaking all them bachelor hearts? Good gravy, I remember when you was no higher than this,” said Albert, and held out a hand, knee high, to demonstrate the awful passage of time. He smiled, displaying his motelier smile, while Bruce, recognizing the salesmanship involved, rushed forward to insert a cold nose into Amy Joy’s hand.
CYCLES, RECYCLES, AND BICYCLES: VINAL AND PIKE AWAIT THE TIRE CONVENTION
“I’ll say one thing for the Giffords. If you’re in trouble, they’ll take the shirt right off your back.”
—James Henderson
Goldie Gifford saw Amy Joy’s engagement picture in the Watertown Weekly and showed it to Pike.
“What a shame we ain’t been saving our money for the past ten years,” Pike said. “We could buy her something real nice.” They laughed together, Goldie and Pike, and so did a portion of small Giffords who happened to be doing homework within hearing distance. But a somber thought crept into Pike’s mind as he lay on the sofa in front of yet another episode of The Edge of Night. A wedding like that was bound to be the social event for years to come. And the McKinnons had rich relatives from Portland. They had a bushel of friends and acquaintances from out of state. Ed Lawler himself was born down south somewhere, near Massachusetts. Only God would know who might be coming to that wedding. Massachusetts. It had a magical ring. Pike was smitten with out-of-state places the way the young girls in Mattagash were. Marriageable maidens, tired of the few old family names that never seemed to change, swooned over the strange names of men from the cities. They loved going off to marry, and then dragging back to Mattagash some Polish or German name so long you couldn’t fit it onto the back of a pulp truck. For Pike, however, this flirtation with other states was purely artistic. He imagined those were the places that first received all the latest hubcap designs straight from Paris, France, or wheresoever they designed them. And tires! Four to a car. Pike could almost sniff the whitewalls. He tried to imagine what an entire school yard full of fancy cars might smell like. There was no doubt in Pike’s mind that the high school gymnasium would be used for the reception. Everyone had their receptions there, no attention paid to the last name. And Missy had already come home from school in a tizzy to tell Goldie that the entire fifth-grade class spent their activity period making carnations out of pink Kleenex to decorate the Mattagash gym.
“For Amy Joy Lawler’s wedding reception,” Pike had heard her say, and warmth had spread throughout his groin at the thought. He stretched out longer on the couch, but inside he was curling up. In spirit, he was all bent over, rolling a tire quietly away into a soft April night.
***
Vera Gifford read of the wedding plans, too. She wondered how Sicily McKinnon Lawler was handling the affiliation with a Catholic, not to mention one that was French. Being a Catholic herself, Vera understood the religious persecution that went hand in hand with such a thing in Mattagash. But she was never really sure where Catholic began and Gifford left off. She knew one thing, though, having lived all her life on the outskirts of the social wake the McKinnons and Crafts had always caused in Mattagash. Sicily McKinnon Lawler would no more welcome a Frenchman into the fold than she would a Gifford. Look at all the fuss, years ago, when little boy-crazy Amy Joy got herself tangled up with Chester Gifford. Vera’s first cousin. You’d have thought someone was selling Amy Joy up the river to slavery to hear the backlash. Well, good enough for Sicily. Let her get what she deserved. You spit up into the air, and it’s bound to come back at you. At least Chester Gifford spoke English, even if it was mostly lies.
But the wedding wasn’t nearly as interesting to Vera as were her troublesome relatives at the top of the hill. Retribution over the assassinated canary had finally arrived, two days earlier, when Little Pee stole Little Vinal’s cumbersome bicycle. He had stripped away the paint, sawed off the bar that designated the sex of the bike, painted it a bright blue, and added a little horn. Then he presented it to his sister Priscilla, who had ridden the bike proudly up and down the road that ran between the two Gifford houses. Little Pee told Goldie that he and Priscilla had pooled their pop bottle money and bought the bike for five dollars from Old Sam, who owned the little junk shop at the St. Leonard–Mattagash town line.
“I can’t imagine him selling such a nice bike for so little,” Goldie had said to her son. She even left a huge pot of macaroni boiling on the stove to come outside and admire the glistening bicycle.
“His granddaughter who lives in Caribou left it,” Little Pee lied. “She’s too big for it now.”
“I didn’t know Old Sam had any kin in Caribou,” Goldie had said as she shook the outdoor rug, made of plastic Sunbeam bread wrappers. Then she had gone back inside to add some hamburg and two cans of stewed tomatoes to the macaroni.
At the bottom of the hill, Vera and her children had watched Priscilla riding up and down in front of their house for two days before they recognized the bicycle as Little Vinal’s.
“She looks like she’s selling apples,” said Vera, the first day she spotted Priscilla. “Look at her. Wearing out her legs to give her ass a ride.” But the bicycle did look spectacular. Little Pee was handy at welding, painting, and sanding. In fact, the only course he was passing at school was shop. And the skills he had picked up that aided in disguising the bicycle would someday be applied to automobiles that mysteriously disappeared outside the Watertown movie theater, and other establishments, to emerge again as mere ghosts of their former selves. No, it wasn’t that the quality of the job on the bicycle was shoddy that tipped off the bottom-of-the-hill Giffords. It was because the very bicycle that Little Vinal had bought a few autumns ago, with what he claimed was his potato-picking money, had mysteriously vanished. It was as if the old settler soil had opened up and swallowed it. And the new bicycle upon which Priscilla was traipsing the roads looked alarmingly like Little Vinal’s. If you looked closely. If you imagined it black, instead of a dazzling blue. If you stuck a bar back on and made the bicycle male. For a usually unmathematical family, Vera and her offspring had put two and two together to come up with the whereabouts of Little Vinal’s bike.
“Little Pee could make the Titanic look like a canoe if you left him alone with it for an hour,” Vera had said, and waited with her fists opening and closing like petals for Big Vinal to get home. She forgot about supper. She let her big washing machine sit with dirty loads of clothing all about it on the floor. Where the hell had Pike and Goldie gotten the money to pay for a new bike, that’s all Vera wanted to know. She even forgot
about the new mailbox that Vinal was thoughtful enough to get her. She had planned to touch it up with a quick paint job. Now the mailbox was leaning sadly on the back porch, its red flag lowered, the lettered announcement MR. & MRS. WALTER HEBERT, RR #2, WATERTOWN, MAINE 04774, awash in April sunlight.
The kids were eating sandwiches from sticky jars of already mixed peanut butter and jelly when Vinal Gifford finally strolled in and slammed the kitchen door.
“Is it too much work to mix your own?” he asked his wife. He was already tired from a day of imagining how the parking area of Amy Joy’s reception would fill up. He expected some peace, Vera could tell, so she put her rantings in limbo. Instead of starting with the bad news, she broke ice with the good.
“Look here at Amy Joy Lawler’s engagement picture,” Vera said, and thrust the newspaper into Vinal’s face. “Ain’t she the picture of old Marge McKinnon? Look how that little nose turns right up into the air.”
“Maybe we should wrap up a battery and give it to her,” Vinal joked. “Do you think she’d like a pair of hubcaps? Some booster cables?” That’s when Vera told him about the bicycle.
“I want it back,” she warned her husband.
“If you and Goldie would keep your traps shut,” Vinal complained, “them kids would play together like they should. God didn’t put us on the earth to fight. He put us here to relax.”
“He did?” Vera countered. “Well, if he’d known how much you and Pike was planning to relax, he’d have put you both on the moon, where it’s quieter.”
So Vinal was obliged to trudge up the hill for a short conference with his brother Pike. When he came back, he brought the blue bicycle down the hill, leading it like a tame deer, and gave it to Little Vinal.
“Don’t say a word,” Vinal told his son. “You know damn well he turned that old clunker into what looks like a brand-new bike. And he’s gonna weld the bar back on so you won’t look like a sissy. Take it and shut up. It didn’t cost you a penny.”
“She had her heart set on tramping the roads on that bike,” Vera said, as she lay in bed that night next to Vinal. “She’s as boy crazy as they come.”
Vinal reached over and clasped a limp breast in his hand. Vera tried to avoid the hand by rolling on her side, her back to Vinal, but he followed the sagging breast.
“I did five tubs of wash today,” Vera said, then she yawned. Vinal slipped off his long johns and rested a hairy leg on Vera’s thighs.
“This’ll keep her mind off fighting with Goldie,” Vinal thought, and smiled. “As long as she’s fighting someone, she’ll be okay.”
PEARL PACKS ESSENTIALS, THELMA PACKS PORTLAND, MARVIN PACKS OFF THE RESIDENT MISTRESS: RANDY THINKS THEY’RE A PACK OF FOOLS
“I already smoked Genesis, Exodus, and a good part of Leviticus.”
—Randy Ivy, on where to find the best substitute for reefer papers, April 1969
Pearl packed everything she might try to grab in case of a fire. Her concentration was no longer on dresses or purses or which pair of shoes. She wanted the important things now. The things you couldn’t replace if flames raged through your home. And there was a fire curling around the old memories in Pearl’s brain. Eating them up. Pearl put the little things in her suitcase, the kind of items that people look at once you’re dead and marvel at what you ever saw in them. She remembered how she and Sicily had jokingly belittled the contents of Marge’s moldy trunk, the leftovers of her life.
“Why would she keep these old clippings from World War One?” Pearl had laughed. “And look, here’s a tattered handkerchief from France. It says ‘Argonne Forest’ on it. Now who do you suppose ever sent her that?” Well, Pearl saw things differently now. Lives were like wars. You could only study them years after they were over.
“Margie was only fourteen when that war broke out,” Pearl thought, and packed the battered locket Marge had given her for her ninth birthday, January 25, 1918. The locket opened out into two very young faces of Pearl and Sicily. “The war was almost over when she gave me this,” said Pearl. “Who might she have known in that war that worried her? Where did she ever find the money to buy this little locket? Where did she buy it?” She wished she still had Marge’s old trunk so that she could look at the items anew, with a fresh interest. All they had saved from it were things that had been passed down from the Reverend and the papers of Grace McKinnon. The other things had seemed of no consequence. Personal letters from Marcus Doyle, the missionary Margie had loved so dearly, who had abandoned her for some reason or other. Pearl remembered seeing the two of them walking among fields of goldenrod, Margie’s brown hair blowing in the wind, her skirts picking up burrs and dead dandelion spores. She loved that missionary, and Sicily and Pearl had thrown away his letters. Had thrown away all the secrets of her life. Because there must have been important clues there, Pearl knew. If they had only known it at the time. Pearl had read how archaeologists could dig up cities thousands of years old and tell all sorts of things about the people just from what they ate, what they wore, how they set about housekeeping. And she and Sicily had opened their own sister’s trunk, only a few years old, and had seen nothing. Now here she was herself, on the threshold of being the owner of a trunk of items that held more interest to moths, and spiders, and the inching dampness of rot, than to her grandchildren.
Pearl packed the McKinnon family scrapbook, its back broken from bending, its pages loosening like wings. Family members, flown into death. She took Junior’s bronzed baby shoes. Maybe he hadn’t turned into the most perfect son. She would admit that. But why should she forfeit those early years of waking in the night, of standing over his bed, sometimes for hours, watching his tiny red upper lip blowing outward with the small pop of his sleeping breath. What a beautiful child he had been, and what a precious thing to own. How had the Reverend gone off and left three of these soft, darling things behind?
“He loves the flock,” Marge had said once of the Reverend after he was gone. “He loves the flock, but he has no need for the lamb.”
Pearl packed the engagement ring she had not worn in years. Her finger had grown too large for it. The wedding band was let out to accommodate the growth of her finger. A jeweler had enlarged it for her. But the engagement ring, like the virgin it truly represented, was left untouched. Its little stone sang out as Pearl held it up to the light so that the facets could catch fire.
“How tiny it is,” she thought. Had it shrunken with age? Had it shriveled up the way old people do? Or if she had stayed in Mattagash, where things were kept safe from their tininess, would the ring loom larger than ever? This was true of small towns. Things are big there. And you are sheltered from the oddities of foreign cities and phrases, from menus you can’t read, from wines you can’t pronounce. You’re protected from fancy tables where there are no paper napkins, but linen ones you’re reluctant to soil in case someone’s mother has to wash them. You’re saved from silverware around your plate, enough for a whole family, but it’s all for you, and you struggle with which fork to use first. Which wine with fish? How much tip? Oh, the questions involved in just trying to get something to eat when you leave a small town and move up in the world! When? Where? To what extent? How often? The horrible adverbs of the city. Yes, a small town is safe enough for some things, but if you make a mistake there, a mistake that might otherwise be lost in the casual rush hour of the city, it will follow you around a small town all your life, like an unrepentant dog.
Pearl packed the grandchildren’s most recent pictures. They might not be perfect either, these children, but they had not asked to be born. And for that, surely, they could be forgiven some things. She stared a minute at the wedding picture of her only son and his bride, Thelma Parsons. Pearl left it on her dresser where it had been since the day Thelma excitedly gave it to her. Pearl left the picture where it had stood all those years. She was still in the city, after all, and while in the city, she could put some unrepent
ant dogs to sleep. This was one mistake she didn’t want following her back to Mattagash, nipping at her heels.
She did pack clothing, but they weren’t special clothes. There were no “Look at me, I’ve gone off to the city” clothes. No silk blouses, no fancy dresses. No things that would tear easily if you were planting in the spring earth. She packed none of the impractical clothes that Mattagashers wouldn’t even wear on a Sunday. Mattagash saw those clothes differently. Mattagash saw them as “Look at her come home from the city and who the hell does she think she is?” clothes. Pearl had been a victim of that kind of dressing. Sometimes you can’t help wanting a pat on the back from your heritage, and when one doesn’t come, well then, some ex-Mattagashers dress themselves up a bit too fancy, and they vacation in Mattagash with accents they’ve borrowed from the city. Pearl knew. She’d done it herself. But after a while, you’re gone from the small town longer than you’ve ever lived there. Gone a lifetime. And then you realize one morning that there’s no more pretense. Your accent has changed. Your style of dressing has changed. Your taste in food has changed. You find out, quite suddenly, that you’re the genuine article. And there’s no backtracking. You’re gone for good. You’re caught between two worlds now because Mattagash will never accept you as the genuine article. They remember you from the day you were born. They remember you without silk clothing. They’ve seen you in the buff.
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