Among Other Things, I've Taken Up Smoking

by Aoibheann Sweeney

  Julie had her own room, with an empty white bookshelf she had lined with miniature horses and a small table with chairs and a tea set. All the bedrooms in the Peabody house had printed quilts and smelled of freshly washed sheets. Her mother was always somewhere in the house, folding things, while we played. She did have dolls, which were meant to be from different countries—the red-haired girl with the kilt from Scotland, the black-haired girl with the flamenco dress from Spain—but under their dresses they were exactly the same, and each of them had the same tiny shoes with cardboard soles and the same plastic feet with scored toes. I treated them with respect, trying to find the thing about them that would convince me they were truly from faraway places, but Julie treated them with awe, and arranged them back on the shelf in the same order every time, as if they had a logic she could never defy.

  When I was with Julie I always had the feeling I was too quiet and serious, but at home I was never serious enough. The alliance that had formed between my father and Mr. Blackwell was based on nothing if not their mutual seriousness. Though they seemed like opposites to most people in Yvesport—one too practical to get anything wrong, the other too preoccupied to get anything right—at heart they were both men without compromise. If my father went into town he rarely went anywhere with Mr. Blackwell, but I remember seeing them standing together once, dressed in their good clothes at Tim Ballard’s funeral, and to me they seemed more serious than the priest himself.

  I brought Julie over to my house only once, after I learned to drive the boat myself and just before Mr. Blackwell went back to fishing. I had forgotten my homework, which was not uncommon, but Julie wanted to copy it, and somehow she persuaded me to let her go home with me in the middle of the morning. Mr. Blackwell had shown me how to treat everything in the boat with care, and we had pored over nautical charts of the bay and all the islands, reading depth and distances in codes and tiny numbers, tracing channels and fishing territories so that I could use a compass. I always followed the exact path he drew for me, straight lines on the charts, using landmarks and buoys to guide me. But that morning with Julie I jumped into the dory and made a flashy show of starting the engine, which I managed in one pull, and told Julie casually that she didn’t have to wear her life jacket.

  It was late spring and the bay had the sharp sparkle it does when there is no haze. I had a quick thrill of pride at the way the house would look, hidden from view by the newly green trees, the lilacs just blooming. As we came out of the breakwater I headed straight for the channel marker until we were so close that Julie screeched. I veered off and she turned and grinned at me excitedly. I saw the Sylvia B. on the pier as we came around to the cove, and I remember thinking that it was odd; Mr. Blackwell was supposed to be on a trip, and if he came back early I always saw the boat at the town dock in the morning.

  Julie looked eagerly up at the house as I landed. “Is your father home?” she asked.

  I knew that minute that I had made a mistake. My father would not like being interrupted. And I didn’t know what Mr. Blackwell was doing; I didn’t see the washing on the line, or any sign of him working outside—a ladder against the house, or the wheelbarrow by the garden. As we walked up to the porch I was already thinking of excuses: the house was locked and I had forgotten the key; my father was asleep and we couldn’t disturb him; I had forgotten to do the homework and it wouldn’t be any good to her anyway. But my father came to open the door before we’d gotten there.

  He hardly glanced at Julie; he put his finger to his lips and shut the screen door carefully behind him. “Jonas is sleeping,” he whispered.

  “I came to get my homework,” I said, confused, not sure why he was using Mr. Blackwell’s first name.

  He looked at me. “Well, go and get it,” he said. “I don’t want you to wake him up.”

  I looked back at Julie, who gave me a nervous smile. I knew she didn’t want to be left on the porch with my father and impulsively I beckoned her inside with me before my father could stop us. Mr. Blackwell was lying on the couch, his mouth open, snoring peacefully. He had his head on a pillow at one end, and his large naked feet on the other. One arm was curled sleepily on his chest and the other was wrapped around his waist, his hand grasping his belt.

  “Was that Mr. Blackwell?” she whispered when we got to my room, as if she’d never seen him before.

  “Yes,” I answered, grabbing my homework from my desk.

  “What’s he doing?” she said. She had barely glanced around my room.

  “Sleeping, I guess,” I said. I had wanted her to see my neatly made bed, adorned with a quilt Mrs. Pierce had given us; I had wanted to show her the picture of my mother, which I’d never shown to anybody but Mr. Blackwell. But then there was nothing really for me to say about the picture, and she wouldn’t have understood that anyway.

  It did not surprise me that friendship was disappointing—I had probably disappointed her too, not looking enough at her little horses, her dolls. I turned reluctantly to go back downstairs, dreading Mr. Blackwell’s sleeping, my father’s ridiculous protectiveness. Loneliness descended on me like a cold fog. We passed by Mr. Blackwell’s feet—long, brown, and bony—perched on the end of the couch like two still birds, and then my father opened the door for us, mindful again of the squeaky hinges.

  “He hasn’t slept in days,” he said to me in a hushed voice.

  Julie was watching him curiously. He’d hardly been in town at all since I’d learned to drive the boat—it had probably been years since she had seen him. Suddenly I wished with a kind of vengeful despair that he was someone else, and that he’d said hello to her, and combed his hair, and smiled at us both. I turned away from him and headed back down to the boat. Julie followed me, ready to get back on the water where we could bounce over the waves and she could scream like she was really scared.

  4

  Once the market for herring was gone Mr. Blackwell’s trips got longer. Other fishermen started trawling for scallops, talking about salmon farms, and going into trucking. People in Yvesport blamed the environmentalists, who’d regulated the industry too late, or the canneries, who couldn’t keep up, or the packagers, who’d let sardines go out of fashion after the war years—some people even blamed the Russians, who had come over with their radars and their milewide nets. I noticed only that Mr. Blackwell slept more when he was around, and that my father started acting less concerned, and more impatient.

  The last time he had supper with us before he left me back in my father’s care was the summer before my fifth-grade year. He had said he would bring some fish for us and we waited until well past sundown for him to come over with it. I was drawing at the kitchen table, and my father had already gotten out the whiskey for the night.

  “Got you some lobster,” he said when he finally walked in the door, bringing the bucket straight into the kitchen.

  He gave me a cheerful smile, and I knew immediately that he was exhausted. My father loved lobster, but we rarely ate it because Mr. Blackwell had fished it before and seen too much of it. I knew he must not have managed to find anything else.

  My father took a sip of whiskey, watching him. “I suppose you had to go swimming after each one?”

  “Mark Cabbot’s engine had a cylinder that needed replacing,” he said unapologetically.

  “We got our tests back in math today,” I interrupted. I had done badly, but I wanted their attention.

  My father refilled his whiskey and poured another for Mr. Blackwell, and for a minute I thought he hadn’t heard me. “I’ve never found math very useful,” he said after he’d taken a sip. “Blackie probably thinks it’s the cornerstone of learning, however.”

  Mr. Blackwell looked at him. I’d never heard my father use his nickname. Without a word he walked over and picked up the drink my father had poured him. “Never liked math much myself,” he said, taking a sip.

  “You’re being modest,” my father persisted. “You were one of those boys who were good at engines, were
n’t you?”

  Mr. Blackwell looked into his glass, deciding whether or not to respond. “Seems to me your daughter wants to tell you how she did on the test.”

  I kept my eyes down, unwilling to take sides.

  “And fishing,” my father continued, as if he was in the middle of a sentence. “Engines and fishing.”

  “Not sure what that has to do with math,” said Mr. Blackwell.

  “Nothing. Except that neither of them actually take any real thought, do they?” He took another sip of his whiskey. “Which is why you like them.”

  “You got something on your mind, Peter?” Mr. Blackwell said, putting his glass down.

  “Nothing at all,” my father said, giving him an ugly, fake smile. He leaned back and opened his arms wide. “Nothing on my mind at all. Utterly blank. A blank slate.”

  Mr. Blackwell stood up with a sigh. “How should we cook up these lobsters?” he said, picking up the bucket with one hand and walking into the kitchen.

  “A fascinating question, cooking those lobsters,” my father said, leaning heavily on the table. “What’s for dinner? What’s for breakfast? We might as well start planning now. Maybe Miranda wants to make a pie!”

  Mr. Blackwell bent over the cupboard to find the big cooking pot, crashing around and noisily stacking the smaller ones on the floor beside him.

  “It’s above the sink,” I said.

  My father looked up at me as if he’d just noticed that I was in the room. Mr. Blackwell was still leaning over, hunting. “She says it’s above the sink,” my father shouted suddenly, at the top of his lungs.

  I held my breath as Mr. Blackwell straightened up. My father looked surprised, and even frightened, as if he hadn’t expected to be shouting either.

  Mr. Blackwell couldn’t look at him. “Thank you, Miranda,” he said, giving me a small pained smile before he reached up to retrieve the pot.

  My father was quiet after that, though not too ashamed to pour himself another whiskey while Mr. Blackwell and I made dinner. The lobsters boiled quickly; we cooked the whole batch. Mr. Blackwell set two aside for my father and me to eat and I brought them to the table with a baked potato and a dish of butter, the way my father liked it. Mr. Blackwell cracked the tails off the rest, removing the meat with one quick slice of his knife, smashed open the claws, and dropped in some mayonnaise for a salad, a pile of which he put on his own plate. My father tucked his napkin into his collar, and plucked off one of the skinny legs to chew on. The whiskey was slowing him down. I went at the tail of mine without much appetite. Mr. Blackwell finished off his meal in a matter of minutes and got up to wash the dishes.

  We always had a rule about not getting up from the table until everyone was done eating, but for once my father didn’t say a word. He was pretending to be intent upon the last of the meat in his lobster’s right claw. I was trying not to watch him, but I had never seen him that drunk. Mr. Blackwell, on the other hand, had probably seen my father drunk before, but not when he himself was sober. He cleaned the pots at lightning speed, wiped down the counter, and put the rest of the salad he had made in the refrigerator. I saw him glance at my father, as if he was about to say something—apologize, maybe for being late. But then he pulled his coat on.

  “I’ll see you around,” he said to me before he left.

  I nodded, trying not to look desperate. He must have known what would happen, that eventually my father would fall asleep in his chair, but at that point I didn’t know what to expect. I braced myself for more surprises—it seemed possible that my father might start shouting again, this time at me, or that Mr. Blackwell might even return, and shout back. The engine of the Sylvia B. roared to a start, and as Mr. Blackwell drove out of the cove, my father started back in on his lobster. In the silence I had the strange feeling that I was dreaming, and that nothing unusual had happened at all. If only I could keep eating, I told myself, the evening would continue quietly forward, and we’d wish each other good night, and in the morning I’d turn over in my bed and see the cove glittering with new daylight, and I would eat my breakfast like Julie did, and go to school like every other girl. But Mr. Blackwell had left, and I wasn’t hungry.

  I stood up and cleared my plate. “I’m going to bed,” I said, like a command.

  That night as I lay in bed waiting for the sound of my father coming up the stairs, I thought about what it would be like to see the island from far away, from high up, the way it looked on the charts and maps, the cove and the long arm of the point protecting the harbor. In Metamorphoses the gods were always soaring from one place to another, spying on nymphs from above; I felt them looking down at us, at Mr. Blackwell landing at the dock, at my father in the kitchen. But I knew they were in search of other things. They passed over the tiny boat, the harbor, the house, and the island—on their way somewhere else, somewhere busy, full of noise, alighting, turning their backs on the three of us, living on the island and refusing to change.

  That was the summer I tried to swim across the cove. After Mr. Blackwell rescued me, I didn’t see him until September, when he told me he’d sold the Sylvia B. and gotten a job at the boatyard. I was tying up our boat up at the dock on my way to school and he walked over with a paper bag in his hand and asked me if I wanted a cup of coffee.

  He knew perfectly well that my father wouldn’t allow me to drink coffee. He’d always kept a pot on our kitchen stove and though my father occasionally had a cup he had never let me near it. I looked up at him and for a minute I considered refusing. But I was afraid he might go away. When I said yes we walked up to a bench in the sun and he opened the bag. There were two cups of coffee and two cinnamon rolls from Suzanne’s bakery inside. He took the lid off my coffee and passed it to me, and put the two cinnamon rolls down on the bag between us. I took a sip of the coffee, which was horrible, burnt acid and black, but I tried to smile, as if I liked it.

  “That’s a girl,” he said, laughing. “Try the roll.”

  The roll was sweet, and wound around and around, each layer softer and more dusky with cinnamon filled with hidden raisins, until I got to the virgin-white core, baked through and buttery. I took little sips of coffee in between. I didn’t tell Mr. Blackwell how quiet it was in the house, or how I’d made a custard pie on my own, or that my father had stopped drinking, and that every night at about the time when Mr. Blackwell used to come over and they’d have a drink and make dinner, my father would look up into the air from whatever he was doing, as if he was listening for some faraway signal.

  Instead we simply sat beside each other in the sun and ate our rolls and drank our coffee. Since the first day of school when the teacher thought he was my father, we’d known how to keep a secret between us. If the gods had left us behind then maybe we had left them too—whatever we had, I thought, was not for them to touch.

  5

  In the end I didn’t mind having my father to myself. Often I stayed up with him until he went to bed. He wasn’t interested in helping me with my homework, and I drew at the kitchen table while he read and wrote. He was making progress on his manuscript; at some point he ordered a typewriter to be delivered to the general store, and I learned to use it. Previously I had been taking his manuscript pages to Mrs. Lynch, one of the secretaries in the school office, who would type them and give them back in a crisp manila envelope. She had a pair of eyeglasses on a thin chain around her neck and would put them on whenever she saw me coming. I often imagined turning those envelopes upside down to pour the pages into the sea as I drove home, the powdery smell of Mrs. Lynch wafting out of the envelope before the pages dropped onto the waves and sifted slowly to the bottom.

  I was more than happy to learn to type. We made up a game in which my father would dictate and I would wear a blindfold, and I would lose a point for every letter I missed. Sometimes I would pretend to be making a mistake and type in the wrong word just to make him laugh. When it was his turn he could hardly get any words at all. I mentioned to Mr. Blackwell that I was learni
ng to type and he said it was a shame my father couldn’t learn to type himself.

  When the channel froze just before Christmas, my father and I settled in for a few months without the mainland. The Sylvia B. was heavy enough to break ice almost all year round, but our own boat couldn’t get through it without damage.

  We had plenty of firewood and smoked fish, and we made cookies, and pots of tea, and some days he dictated and I typed. One afternoon we went out on the ice, and walked as far as the red channel marker. Its surface was rusted and rough and snagged on our wool mittens. On the way back I could tell my father was scared, and I sprinted in front of him and slid as far as I could, balancing with my arms wide. He smiled, watching me, and I stood there and waited for him to catch up. Snow flurries rushed between us, two black shapes without the world.

  “We ought to keep separate on the ice,” he said when he got close enough.

  It was Mr. Blackwell, I found out later, who sent over the Coast Guard. There must have been other children at Yvesport who didn’t go to school because of the weather that year, but I doubt the school authorities sought them out.

  The morning they came was beautiful, bright, and cold. I was drawing a picture of some dry sea heather, copying the way the branches split into the air, and I saw them coming from the mainland, breaking the ice. The boat had an extra fixture on the bow, and in the cold you could see the smoke as the engine revved before the hull heaved onto the ice like a fat seal, then sank back down on the water. They took almost three hours to go the distance I would have sped across in minutes on a calm day. I didn’t tell my father they were coming. I told myself I wasn’t sure if they were headed for us, but in the end there was no mistaking the dark trail straight to the island. Chief Nichols, the head of the police department, led them all up the hill.