At the town hall I collect leaflets about car registration, pick up recycling permits. Across from the town hall is the year-round farmer’s market, where I find fruits and vegetables and plants imported from local greenhouses. There are tomatoes and peppers, things I can’t buy fresh until the end of the summer. There are seeds, too: lettuce and cucumbers, zucchini, more vegetables than I can eat; then French tarragon and dill plants, some flower seed packets—someone else’s illustrations. These I’ll plant along with my vegetable experiment, Seth’s sad little plant. Growing things will be good therapy.
Just down the street is the Cape Wood Public Library, another building that looks like it’s just a house, so I almost drive past. As I pull into the driveway I see only one car parked out front. I imagine some elderly librarian behind the desk, alone and waiting for someone to come in, occasionally retreating to her upstairs living quarters to check on something cooking.
Inside the building the air is calm and musty. An ancient-looking radiator hisses in the front hall. The walls are book-filled shelves that tower behind revolving racks of paperback novels. A red oriental carpet runs parallel to a staircase, along which a sign posted to the banister reads CHILDREN'S UPSTAIRS.
The room to the left is carpeted a dull lint gray and decorated with leather-covered chairs and round coffee tables spread with magazines and newspapers. The main desk is a massive, laminated structure that doesn’t belong, that curves around the far corner of the room. Behind it is a closed fireplace, its former hearth now painted black, the mantel topped with an odd collection of statuettes in carnival colors. A young blonde-haired woman moves in the shadows behind the yellow-toned wood desk and lifts her face out from behind a hardcover copy of Pippi Longstocking.
“I love that book,” I say. I’m surprised at the ease of words flowing out of my mouth and think back to Cambridge, where I was so afraid of being recognized, scrutinized. I knew your husband, many would say, as if DEAD HUSBAND was written on my forehead. And deep inside I would feel that knot of discomfort and want to run away.
The woman behind the desk gives a quick, almost embarrassed-looking smile as she closes the book in her lap. “I’ve only read it about seven times,” she jokes. “Can I help you with something?”
“I’d like to see your archives,” I say. “Newspapers, if you have them.”
I follow her into an alcove off the large room, through a doorway above which the sign ARCHIVES is posted. The small room is dark, shaded by depressing brown curtains on the tall windows. Nestled in the corner, beyond shelves filled with small labeled boxes, are four cubicles with computers and microfilm machines.
“This is our mainframe,” she says, a blue wad of gum flying around in her mouth. “Do you need help?”
“No, thank you,” I say. “I’ll be all right,” I say. The young woman seems relieved and heads back to the front desk.
On the computer I search under NAMES, and type in ADELINE WINSLOW. Three reference numbers appear—three articles, all from the Maine Casco Herald. I find the microfilm slide and move over to the other machine.
One of these articles I already have seen—the one Paula sent to me recently.
Adeline Winslow’s death in August of 1980 was another once labeled “puzzling,”...
The next two articles are from August 18, 1980.
CAPE WOOD—One person is dead after an automobile accident that occurred at approximately 11:20 P.M. last night on the pass leading to Mackerel Point, along Casco Bay in Cape Wood. The victim, Adeline Winslow, 27, of Autumn Lane in Cape Wood, was pulled from the car and declared dead on the scene.
Witnesses from the nearby Stone Wharf Tavern saw the car swerve and break through the wooden side rail, skidding off the road and overturning into the water. The cause of death has been listed as drowning, as there was no sign of internal or other injuries. “There appeared to be a struggle to get out,” said Sgt. Robert Henderson of the Maine State Police.
Ms. Winslow’s accident is just one of many tragedies to occur within the area. It is reported that 37 deaths, including various drowning incidents, have occurred within the small bay within the past ten years.
Police are further investigating to determine if alcohol or some other element was a factor in the accident.
I move ahead to the obituary page.
ADELINE ROSE WINSLOW, of Cape Wood, accidentally, on August 17. She leaves behind a sister, Renee McGarry, also of Cape Wood, and a niece, Jenna Ann McGarry.
A longtime lover of plants and flowers, Ms. Winslow co-managed the Victoria Gardens in Yarmouth while she worked as a botanist for the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. She also volunteered at the surrounding schools, heading field trips to local parks and museums.
Visiting hours will be held from 11 A.M. to 1 P.M. on Thursday, August 19, at Watkins Funeral Home on Pine Street in Cape Wood. Funeral services will follow, at 1:30, at the United Methodist Church on Selby Road in Cape Wood. The sermon will be delivered by Rev. Alden Knott, resident pastor. Burial will be at the nearby Lawrence Kaplan memorial cemetery.
As I drive away from the library I think of how odd it is to see the words in print about someone I knew, someone I loved. It seems more like reading about a stranger, a celebrity, the same way reading about Seth was.
Except with Seth, there would be no follow-up articles two decades later, nothing left behind. There may have been if there had been some mystery to his life, if it later was discovered that he meant to crash his car that day. People might even have cared more if something so shocking had come up; it would have filled the television, the papers. I had expected something, at least—as the police followed up with me on the crash investigation. I expected an update, some new blurb on the news—some “Last week’s accident...” But to anyone but me, his was just another car crash on the evening report like the ones I had seen almost every day of my life.
For weeks after it happened, I visited the crash scene. I wanted to stand in the very spot where Seth took his last breath, to see the same road he saw before he died. When the route was not busy with cars I would park in the breakdown lane to inspect the skid marks and follow them with my eyes—his eyes, I imagined. The dark, blue-black streaks faded, though. With each passing day they faded more, until one day they were coated with snow.
Still, I looked for them.
Sometimes I’d examine the dirt alongside the two-lane highway, the grass beyond the guardrail. I searched for glass, metal, any piece of the car that could have been missed by the cleanup crew, so that I could be the only one to find it. Just to be involved.
These were things that didn’t cross my mind when Aunt Adeline died. Even years after the accident, when I learned that her car had gone into the water, I never thought about visiting such a ghastly scene. And even if I had thought about it then, there would be no sense—at age seven, at age thirteen—in looking for relics, souvenirs of death.
How morbid one becomes with age.
***
As I look out at the ocean from the jetty, the salt air stings my eyes, fills my nostrils. The granite feels sharp beneath my thin-bottomed sneakers, and the wind is cold. I can see the docks several hundred yards across the water and the boatyard behind it. Clusters of buildings line the inlet—fish markets and bait shops, a restaurant/bar, then a large barn-shaped structure with the sign FLEA MARKET SUNDAY 9-3 where the old youth center was.
The Mackerel Pass road, from which the jetty extrudes, has the same steep embankment of rocks the jetty has. Aunt Adeline’s car drove down this road, through the feeble wooden fence that now is a metal guardrail, tumbling down these rocks and turning upside down before it hit the water.
I wonder where, exactly.
The wind is rough and wet as I step back onto the road. I follow the outside of the guardrail atop the steep embankment of rocks that angles down into the ocean. I can’t see any sand or
rocky bottom where the rocks fade in, only the blackish-green water. A sign is posted along the embankment, NO SWIMMING ALLOWED.
I suppose I’ll never know what lies at the bottom, just ten to fifteen feet below the surface; perhaps tiny pieces of scrap metal left behind after they towed Aunt Adeline’s car out. Anything could still be down there—a piece of fender, a tailpipe, perhaps her watch. How would anyone even know if she had been wearing a watch?
The water looks dark and cold, the waves sharp. And it truly is green, as Mom once said—as opposed to the blue seen in postcards and in National Geographic. It’s not at all like those sunny, happy pictures, where the ocean is a clear, Caribbean blue, and the foam is spotless, like meringue against a crystalline beach.
There are two oceans, Mom used to tell me. There is one that is blue—a clean, bright Disney World blue, which simply is the mirror of a clear sky above. But look at the ocean on a cloudy day, she would say, and here lies the green ocean—the true ocean, full of algae and kelp and slimy creatures, evil lurking in the shadows.
part six
the thaw
{renee
twenty
Adeline could have almost anyone she wanted. She knew it and often rubbed it in Renee’s face with some bragging detail about the night before—the whistles or hollers made by handsome men on the street, the proposals she’d received at the youth center. When Renee dared to ask if this might happen to her one day, Adeline was venomous in her reply.
“Don’t count on it.”
Renee wonders if Adeline felt badly about making such comments, years later, perhaps, just before she died. The words on the sunflower stationery never seemed to suggest this; there was nothing there about guilt or apologies. But then maybe the note wasn’t for Renee at all.
Adeline hadn’t always been so cruel to Renee. They had been best friends as young girls, sharing bikes and Barbies, fighting only over doll clothes and coloring books. Years later, when Adeline entered junior high, she sprouted breasts, her skin became rosy, she garnished herself with jewels, and still she shared secrets with young Renee. Even in high school when Adeline began to date boys she sometimes would take Renee along to the movies or the arcade. It wasn’t until Adeline went off to college that she changed. Father had passed away the summer before, leaving Mother distraught and Renee lonely, but it was time for Adeline to go.
Mother and Renee did not hear from her too often, and when she came home she often was distracted. She spent much of her time on the phone with boys from college and no longer cared to hang out with her little sister. Soon it was evident that Adeline would even knock little Renee out of the way just to get attention from the boys.
Renee tried to get their attention, too, but she wasn’t comfortable painting her face or wearing push-up bras like Adeline. Even when she wore a simple skirt there was that feeling of eyes on her—eyes she’d once thought she wanted on her that now gave her a dirty, sticky feeling. She tried to dress and act the part anyway, but when Adeline came home her attempts were criticized.
The summer after her first year of college, Adeline was worse than ever. She would watch Renee giving herself one final look-over in the mirror, and just stare, making Renee crazy with her head-shaking and her little sideways comments. “Some people got it and some people don’t,” she would say.
Renee gave up on the dresses and rouge, but then found she could make friends with boys at the youth center anyway. It must have been in a tomboy sort of way, she figured. Just one of the guys, Adeline would remind her.
Renee knew it was true; she was one of the boys. But she hoped the boys would one day see through her blue jeans and ponytail and see her as a woman. More and more each day she grew hungry for this kind of recognition. And the more Adeline told her how plain or boyish she was, the hungrier Renee grew.
Until finally it happened.
jenna}
twenty-one
Northeast University was a world away from home even though it was only ten miles. There was the constant sound of automobiles, the squeal of buses and trains. The smell was of pavement and oil and newspaper ink, with an occasional whiff of salt air if the breeze pulled in from the coast. It was autumn, and the burnt, oily leaves curled into sidewalk corners and gutters, gathered and stuck in street drains. They swept before me along the hard gray steps of the art building, crisp, bright leaves against cold, gray granite.
Each day I took the bus from Westbridge center to the Green Line station just a few miles away. I saved money this way, not having to own a car, not having to endure the parking hassles at the University. And I needed to save money; I had only my small scholarship, my savings from my framing job, and a little from Mom and Dad—of which Mom made sure to remind me, as she wasn’t happy with my choice of direction.
“If you want to teach art, that’s fine,” she said, “but what else can you do with it?”
I could do lots of things, I told her, but she didn’t understand. I said I’d take my chances like many artists did, and perhaps end up poor but passionate, knowing that the choice was mine.
Maybe Mom just wanted me to end up teaching because that’s what she did. I should have asked her why she didn’t take her psychology education all the way to a private practice, ask her why she didn’t try to make lots of money. But I didn’t ask because I couldn’t imagine Mom being a shrink. I thought she should stick to terminology, classification. Textbook psychology.
I took psychology at Northeast University and found it intriguing, all this human mind stuff about why we did things, how human actions had consequences on the brain. The more I learned about it the more I couldn’t believe Mom filled her days with the subject.
But it was art that I really loved.
My paintings of plants and flowers were bright and extra-colorful, with unexpected outlining and shadows, things one might not see with the naked eye. It was these exaggerations of living things that got my work noticed, and I began to participate in local art shows, painting with my abstract flair. I soon got my first commissioned job, providing the cover illustration for a children’s coloring book. Three book illustrations followed, and one day I had my own show in which my work was described as “daring, vivid, on the verge of surreal.” A lily pad drawing was described by one reviewer as being plump and dewy, shimmering, “exuding innocent sensuality.”
Mom didn’t like my paintings. She said they were too suggestive: the succulent green of rockfoil and stonecrop, the floppy petals of a spiderwort, all those half-opened buds. “They’re too wet-looking,” she said, too plump. “Like they’re ready to explode.”
“Do you mean sexual?” I teased, but she corrected me.
“I mean like they’re alive.”
Mom would have liked my required graphic design course in which there were straight lines to draw and cut, where there was perpendicularity. We studied color and contrast, layout methods. I found this study too restrictive, too confined, and when I arrived home each day I felt the need to bring out my canvas and go wild with the brush. I wasn’t doing well in class, and the professor knew it. But if I could just swing a C I’d be happy and then go back to my painting.
Paula was another freshman in my class, and she also wanted to swing a C. But Paula was a graphic design major and wasn’t doing well—and not because she found it artisically restrictive, but because it restricted her from partying.
Paula and I didn’t have much in common except for the fact that we both were from Maine. She was a sports junkie and bar-hopper, while I preferred movies and going home at night. But hanging out with her was exciting; fun seemed to follow her around. Or maybe I’d just been neglecting to look for fun on my own.
Paula had many boyfriends, a different one every week, it seemed. She often took them back to her dorm and had sex, and each time told me she was in love. The sad thing to me was that it really seemed she was in love, and none of them eve
r stuck around for very long.
She tried to hook me up once with a sophomore name Derek. He shouted and belched and leered at each woman within his sight, even while sitting with me. After a few drinks he leaned close to me with his foul breath and told me he wanted to take me home.
After that night I realized just how different Paula and I were when it came to men, and I told her never to hook me up again.
***
Paula calls just as I’ve prepared my chisel and Unglue Magic mixture from the hardware store. Her voice has that tinge of reprimand that I remember well. You were going to call me, remember?
“Yes,” I say, “after I’d gotten settled in.”
She tells me how she’s trapped in her house, how she doesn’t see anybody. “It’s so hard when you have children,” she reminds me, and I back down to her, shrinking with the presence of my old friend’s voice the way I always used to.
“Sure, I’ll come over.”
It’s a thirty-minute drive to Paula’s house in Easton, just outside Lewiston. I drive down the stretch of Land’s End Drive, another Maine neighborhood where houses have replaced timber, where the road is straight, smooth, and bordered by nothing. The house plots are square, grid-like, the lawns perfectly manicured. I imagine the grass soon to be a bright and blinding green, without a blemish of rock or twig, without a single dandelion in the summer. Lime and fertilizer—some special concoction. Some poison.
The houses in this neighborhood are clustered into semicircles, deliberately facing each other as if to promote a front-door greeting, some social preservation. I picture the area from the air: my car cutting down the long, narrow line through the snap-in-place homes, then turning ninety degrees to the same congregation around the corner—like a giant Monopoly board.
I look for Paula’s road within the neighborhood of tree names—ironic, as there are few trees: the Oak, the Chestnut, the Maple. Finally there is Walnut, a gathering of smaller, less expensive-looking models—all ranches, all identical except for the shade of pastel and the shape of black mailbox. Well-blended, homogenized.
The One True Ocean Page 11