by Jack Hodgins
Marsten roars. “Oh the tee vee!”
Nobody in my family ever used the word “love” when I was a kid. Not the way those actors use it. It was the kind of word, like “God,” which would shrivel your tongue if you tried it, or make your neck burn and cringe if someone else did. You didn’t know where to look. Not that it stopped me from thinking for a while there that I had a lot of it to give, but I guess Stella finished all that.
“The end of every marriage—good or bad—is cataclysmic,” old Mrs. B. says. She likes words she can wrap her tongue around. “Either you die or you get yourself born again. Those are the only choices.”
This to me, who sometimes wonder if I’ve managed it even the first time. I’m always getting this picture of myself legless, thrown up out of the sea and shrivelling, drying up like kelp or a marooned starfish.
When Marsten and the old woman start arguing about religion I just have to get outside, just far enough for the sound of the waves to drown out their voices. In the new dark, it’s hard to tell where the land dies and ocean begins, except by sound. But where the eel grass saws at my ankles and rotting crabs stink in my nostrils, I spread my feet and pee into gravel.
That’s what it’s like around here, that’s what I’ve got to put up with. It’s a good thing I know more than I’ve ever told them, is all I can say. If I really was brooding as bad as they think, their stupid bickering would drive me up the wall. Sometimes I feel like telling them about Phemie Porter to see what would happen, the looks on their faces. Just to see how stupid they’d feel, after all their feeling sorry for me, and feeling superior, and telling me to snap out of it. Those two stopped looking at me, really looking, long ago.
It’s because Stella got the place, that’s what it is. They just can’t accept that. I let her keep the place, it only made sense to me, there was a good chance she’d be saddled with that imbecile mother of hers for ever, and she couldn’t very well kick Jon and Cora out before they finished high school. So I just let her have it. Why fight? I couldn’t pretend I’d ever made good use of the land, or needed all those car parts I had in the shed, or laid any plans for the resurrection of the old boarded-up gas station. I couldn’t think of a single reason for hanging on, it was almost a relief to take my pickup and camper and a few things and move down here to the beach.
Something happened when I was moving out that I can hardly believe. Stella kept out of the way all the time I was rummaging through the house, picking out what I wanted, which wasn’t much, but when I was all set to go she comes out onto the front step and said, “You forgot your own true love,” and I said What is that woman talking about? “You forgot your picture of the one dearest to your heart.” Then I knew what she meant, my big oil painting of Old Number One that I operated every day for twenty years until they sold her on me, so I went back in and hauled it out to the camper. It’s a wonder she didn’t just let me forget it and then do what she always wanted to do with it, put an axe right through the middle. Stella always said she could take a mistress easier than Old Number One, you could scratch a mistress’s eyes out, she said, but what do you do to a steam locomotive? How can you fight it? Something I didn’t forget was my little cassette tape of Old Number One huffing and chugging down the track and blowing her whistle, though I’d never played it again since the day she wrecked my recorder throwing it out onto that street in the village in Ireland. I kept the tape in my pocket, always. I knew I’d get a new recorder some day, I wanted to get one of them kind I could rig up into the cab of the pickup, so I’d have it wherever I went. I’ll never get over losing that loci. Spit and Old Number One, we were a team. Roy Rogers and Trigger. Who else in that mill got out of bed at four o’clock in the morning to fire up a head of steam for the day’s work? I’ll never get over the way they took her away from me, never.
Actually, there were two things that surprised me the day I moved out. The first was forgetting that painting I went to so much trouble and expense to get painted. The second was Jon and Cora. They went out for the day and didn’t even offer to help. Didn’t hang around watching. They just went out. Cora I think went over to a friend’s, where she’d sit stuffing chocolate cake into her face and watching the soap operas on television, and complaining about her tight brassiere straps. Jon rammed a book up under his armpit, sniffed at us all, and went mincing down the road to wherever. I don’t mind having a son that’s a brain, I told Stella, but if he don’t get that hump out of his shoulders and wipe that prissy look off his mouth I’ll be wishing he’d change his name. Well don’t worry about it, old Stella says, if I get married again some day, maybe my new husband’ll adopt them and then you won’t have to be ashamed. That was about the closest she ever came to being mean back then, last fall at the beginning, and I can’t blame her for that one, they’re her kids too. I guess I was just a bit put out by the way they didn’t think it was important to stay around home the day that I happened to be moving out. Didn’t lift a finger to help, or stand and watch, or wish me good luck or anything. I might as well have been one of them hitch-hikers in off the highway to use the toilet or get a drink of water.
All through the business of the separation Stella was as kind as you could expect, she was always considerate and never raised her voice to me once or did a mean thing or tried to get more than anyone would agree she had coming to her. You wouldn’t think there was a spiteful bone in her body, except for her one or two comments about Old Number One and the way I couldn’t get over her. What I don’t understand is what happened to her over the winter? While I was trying to get used to this whole new way of looking at myself and fighting the urge to just chuck it all and go off somewhere new, and dreaming the damnedest nightmares, what was happening to her? I don’t believe that if you chop all the arms and legs off a man and a woman and thrown them both into a brand-new country where they don’t know the language, I just don’t believe the woman would be any faster at adjusting than the man. It doesn’t make sense. I can’t believe that while he is lying around waiting for new legs to grow on and hoping to die, that she would decide legless was what she’d always wanted and a new language was as good as the old. It doesn’t make any sense to me. I would just like to know what was happening to Stella Delaney over those winter months, between the time I moved off the place, and the time I took her out for dinner in May of this year.
I should’ve just kept out of it. But you get used to remembering your wedding anniversary and doing something special on it, and it’s not something you can just ignore, even when it shouldn’t mean anything any more, so I phoned up Stella in the middle of May and told her let’s go out to supper somewhere to celebrate the first wedding anniversary we’ve ever spent as a Separated Couple. She told me it would probably be a big mistake, but if it was that important to me, she couldn’t see any reason why not. What I shouldn’t have done was let her pick the place. I’d forgotten already about that part of Stella, the part that never remembers to think how I’d feel in a place, and also the part that told her the way to prove she’s as good as the best of them is to spend as much money.
It rained all the day of our anniversary, and blew too, but when I drove up to get her, it started to clear. All those brown sag-bellied clouds split, to let sun in, and then peeled back like gobs of gauze, leaving streaks and fluffs behind to turn pink and brownish-red over towards where the sun would set. I remember because I was nervous as hell driving up to get her, and had a good look at the sky to get my mind off it. But I knew, oh I knew the minute I saw those flaming torches outside the restaurant and the sort of old-private-house look to the place that the whole thing was one big fat mistake. You just couldn’t imagine Spit Delaney going up those steps and inside and eating there, it wasn’t my kind of place. But it was Stella Delaney’s kind of place, she said, and went right on in so I had to follow her.
The sight of her hair all frizzed out like a pile of steel wool was a bit of a shock when I picked her up, but that was nothing compared to the way I felt w
hen she took off her coat and there she was in tight black pants and a black top all covered with Indian fancywork and four or five different kinds of necklaces flopping around on her chest. Stella was one of those women who still wore housedresses when we were married, around the house, even when every other woman we knew, no matter what age or size, was wearing pants like a man to go everywhere even in public. She wore flowered dresses to the day I left. I don’t know what happened after that. I’m scared to think. Forty years old and bony as an old nag and here she was in black pants, for crying out loud, and beads. I never said a thing, I couldn’t, my throat was all closed up already from wondering how I was going to get through eating a meal in a place like that, with waiters flapping around in black suits setting people’s supper on fire and pouring out wine for them to taste and nod over, and mixing the salads right out in plain view with hands that would look better tightening nuts. One consolation, if I spilled soup all over myself, or left the waiters too small a tip, there wouldn’t be anybody from work there to see me.
Old Stella acted as if she ate there every day. You’d think the place was built for her, you’d think the waiters had been flown in from somewhere just to serve her. She always did think she could’ve been a lady if she’d ever been given a chance. She knew which fork to use. But I could never see her acting like that without thinking Come on lady, this is Spit sitting here, I’m the one that’s seen you walking around naked in the bedroom and how lady are you then? How can you put on this act in front of someone who’s seen the stretch-marks on your belly? And of course this time all I had to do was think that and the next thing I was thinking was about being in bed together and what a wild woman she could be under the sheets if she felt like it, and wondering if before the night was out she might admit she was missing it, too. You can’t blame me for hoping. But old Stella didn’t suspect my thoughts, she was busy acting a lady. That was the thing she knew best how to do.
She also knew how to go for the throat. The first thing she says when we’re sitting down is “Have you been taking out many women to dinner?”
None, I told her. Not one. I wouldn’t know how to start.
“That’s stupid,” she says. “You never had any trouble asking me, in the old days.”
Well, that was because I knew who I was back in those days, or thought I did. I hadn’t been hit by all the big questions yet, or lost everything in the world that mattered, or had the chance to find out how some women think.
“It’s a shame that you don’t,” she said. “I’ve been inside some of the most interesting restaurants. From one end of the Island to the other. You shouldn’t cheat yourself out of these things.”
She ordered a gigantic vegetarian kind of thing for herself, of course—what else could I expect?—and I ordered scallops with some fancy foreign name. I like sea food. But I should’ve ordered roast beef and potatoes. This stuff came in a giant white shell, scallops and mushrooms buried in a white wine and cheese sauce. At least I could stir my fork around in it, and look busy, without anyone knowing how much I’d left uneaten. It smelled good, but my stomach was in no shape to receive. By the time I’d waded through soup and salad my insides were hollering Stop.
“Really, I don’t know how you can eat those things,” she said. She dabbed at her mouth with the big linen napkin.
“Why not?” I said.
“I mean because they were alive,” she said. “It almost makes you a murderer.”
I laughed. This was something else that was new. Stella in the old days would eat a horse while it was standing if she was hungry enough, and not bat an eye. “Don’t be ridiculous, woman,” I said. “These are only fish, and anyway what makes you think eating that plate of carrots is any different?”
Oh man, did she look holy. “A carrot was never conscious. You can’t say it’s been killed.”
Well, I had her there. “Don’t be so sure about that,” I said, and who cares if the other tables all looked up from their lobsters and bleeding steaks and bottles of wine? “Listen to this,” I said. “I read it in the papers.”
“Please, Spit, keep your voice down.” Old Stella can say something like that with a look on her face that would make others think she was just telling me how much she liked a present I bought her.
So I told her about these scientists I read about, experimenting with plants. They rig them up to electric machines of some kind, put a whole bunch of plants in a room and then pay this guy to go in and rip one of them all to pieces. Then they parade a whole lot of people, including this one guy, past the plants one by one, see, one by one, and they recognize him. When the fellow that ripped the one plant all to bits walked past, all the other plants went crazy.
“Ha!” said Stella, and popped in a whole carrot to show how impressed she was.
“Fear, Stella,” I said. “What about that? Fear for survival. What does that say about you and your carrots?”
“I don’t think everybody needs to hear you, Spit,” she says, and shoots me one of her looks. “I’m sure the cook in the kitchen finds it interesting, but this is hardly the time.”
It’s because carrots don’t have eyes, of course. If carrots had big sad eyes like a cow you wouldn’t catch her eating them either. I almost enjoyed fishing out scallops from the sauce after that, and chewing them down.
I thought I had her stopped, she was quiet for a while. But all she was doing was thinking of ways to get even. “I think you just cancelled out your own argument,” she said. “And since you’re so good at noticing weird things like that, you must’ve seen about the man in the car accident.”
I should’ve said “Sure” and changed the subject. But not me, I said, “What man?”
She had me. That look on her face. “This has happened before, but it happened again last month somewhere. I think it was in the States. I read it in a magazine. This was a perfectly healthy middle-aged man living a normal life and doing his job, and he got killed in a car accident. His skull was split open,”—she lowered her voice so the others wouldn’t be offended, or bring up their supper—“and when they examined him in the hospital they discovered that all he had left of his brain was a tiny knot of gristle.” I could tell by the way she held her fork just outside her lips that there was supposed to be some great big lesson in it for me. And here it was: she said of course it made you wonder if the brain is so all-fired important as it’s cracked up to be, if maybe our thinking don’t come from somewhere else altogether.
“You mean in the kneecaps?” I said. I had to.
No, she said, she meant outside. “And something else too. It means if a man with no brains at all can carry on living a normal life and do all the things that have to be done then what is the matter with you?” She put down her fork and her knife and sat back.
What’s that supposed to mean, I wanted to know. They tell me the lady spider eats her mate when he’s served his purpose; I guess I ought to consider myself lucky.
“It means don’t you think it’s time you stopped acting like a kid that’s been kicked out of his cradle and started building a new life for yourself? It means don’t you think I know you’ve been acting as if the world came to an end, and making everybody feel sorry for you, and going around with this martyr look on your face? It means why don’t you start trying to find your own life in yourself instead of behaving as if it all depended on everyone else, and you got cheated out of your share?”
By God, I could’ve told her a few things. What did she know? How would she know what it felt like to be me? She couldn’t even imagine what it’s like to be locked up inside me, locked inside this. The only thing I ever liked about my job gone, nearly twenty years of marriage and family down the drain, everything I thought was real just turned into nothing. And not able to tell anybody about it, just locked up inside and acting out this play for other people, and not knowing what lines to say next. By God, I could tell her a few things.
What I should’ve done right then was tell her about the dream
I kept having. That’d let her know a few things. I should’ve told her about the dream and how it started on Christmas night, when I came back to the Touch-and-Go after that horrible family supper with her and the kids and her old lady. Christmas night old Kanikiluk walks right into the cabin and changes me zap, just like that, into a fish, a dolphin I think or one of that type of thing, and off I go cutting arcs through the Pacific, leaping and diving and curving this way and that, all the way out past pleasure boats and seiners and even the big foreign trawlers, all the way out to that damned seam they told me about. Where the lava is leaking out of the crack along the bottom, pushing the continents apart. But I never found it, I dived and dived and looked all over the bottom with those other fish, but I never found it and had to come back in. So I come skimming in to land as fast as I can go, cutting through the surface, streaking up to the coast and leaping out of the waves at last and bang here I am beached on the dry sand and can’t move except flop around this way and that. And that’s how it ends, every time, with me on that sand, beached, neither in ocean or land. The sun is drying me out, killing me. I should’ve told her that. Maybe if I let her know the kind of dream I was having she might open up and tell me what happened to her since we parted, what had made her change.
But I didn’t get to tell her, because right then was when the restaurant door opened and in stepped this woman I’d never seen before, dolled up in the ugliest outfit you could imagine, and stands there looking around. If I hadn’t been so mad at Stella I might not’ve reacted the way I did, I might not even have noticed her. What I said was “Look at that rig. Some people shouldn’t be allowed out in public.”
Well, it’s true. She looked as if she just stepped out of a freak show, or a movie. She was short and dumpy, and had on an old moth-eaten fur coat she must’ve found in somebody’s attic, and a long skirt that reached to the floor, and hair, she had it so thick and long that fourteen families of rats could be nesting in it. And probably were. She thought she was really something. You could tell by the way she held her head that she thought she was something, but she was ugly. She must’ve been thirty-five or more, dressed like an insane teenager.