Nick assures me that we will see a moose in Oquossoc, at a place called the Height of the Land, a scenic outpost that overlooks Mooselookmeguntic Lake.
“Moose-look-at-me-guns, chick,” he calls it. “How can we go wrong?”
I am not convinced. It is too late in the season and our odds aren’t good, according to the bearded man at the gas station. I don’t know why, but I trust a man with a beard when it comes to moose, I tell Nick, and he shrugs and rolls his eyes, rubbing his smooth chin and scowling.
“The moose is the symbol of self-esteem,” Nick says. “You could learn something from a moose.”
He eats a handful of Swedish Fish and offers me the bag. There’s one left so I bite its head off.
“When you see one, it means you are confronting all the various planes of existence between the self and the environment.”
“Do you believe that?” I ask.
“Of course not, but doesn’t it sound sexy?”
“Absolutely,” I say, feeding him the tail.
I study the map, run my finger west along the red highway line until I find Oquossoc. Then I keep going—past Wilson’s Mills, over the Canadian border and into Quebec, north to Montreal, then to a place called Saint-Sauveur-des-Monts (what might that be like?), and on past recognition. I suppose we could eat grilled cheese sandwiches at a roadside diner in Saskatchewan and a man called Griz might teach us to play five-card stud, beating us every time. We could see a moose rise from the banks of Utikuma Lake like a past life, shaking off silver water slicks like bad memories. He will turn and look at us with quiet absolution as we drive on across Canada—into Alaska, perhaps, over breakneck mountain passes so clean, so rich, we eat dinner and pick our teeth with pine needles.
At last, we might come to our new home, a cozy place with a garden on the edge of everything, on a tiny teardrop of land that dangles in Norton Bay, which I imagine is haggard and bold and indifferent.
Here is a truth: I cry only when we make love.
“I know,” he says quietly. “It’s okay.”
I pull at the flounced curtains beside the bed, tucking my head inside them to stare through the window at the falling snow. Nick pulls me back onto the bed and wraps me up in the floral polyester blanket that scratches my bare skin and makes me laugh a bit too maniacally. He stares at me with concern. And so does that deer, whose tattered head hangs on the wall across from the bed, and who was witness to the whole routine—Nick’s round freckled back and the soles of my chapped feet making slow circles in the air. The fervent harmonies, the two pallid asses, and that final black wall that I beat with my fists until it lets me in, tired and defeated, crying helplessly on a concrete floor. In those moments, Nick is gone. I am alone, as I should be, and I feel like maybe I will cry forever. My body does not seem to know the difference between ecstasy and death, joy and pain, and I begin to wonder if they are just the same after all. Like energy, the needle vibrates whether the source is light or sound. When I cry, I suspect it has everything to do with the dead father, absent so long and then poof, auf wiedersehen, the week before my eighteenth birthday. Then, my sudden departure from Philadelphia, from my home, with all that sadness and mortality trailing behind me like the train of a wedding gown I can’t take off. Or else it is because, in those moments, I am gone, and I’m not yet confident that this man will still be here when I get back. It is the loss of control that terrifies me.
WE MET NANCY, the owner of this bed-and-breakfast, when we arrived in Oquossoc this afternoon. She is big-haired and ebullient. We are her first guests in many weeks and she is delighted to have us. She offers us dinner: tomato salad and a spicy chili with cornbread. Afterward, we sit by the fire and play Scrabble and I win, which means Nick has to call my mother “just to chat.” Nancy is watching Wheel of Fortune in another room. I can hear the clicking of the wheel while the contestants demand “Big money!” and Pat Sajak orders Vanna to “Show us an M!” and the crowd cheers wildly.
My mother answers and Nick says, “Hi, Susan!” too eagerly, squinting his eyes at me and frowning, so I know she is drunk.
She’s been doing this a lot lately—sitting in front of her computer all night and drinking a bottle or two of red wine. She plays word games and smokes cigarettes, her two dogs panting at her feet and walking in circles.
It’s not me she needs. I know that. But I can’t help but feel that I should be there with her, watching movies and shoveling her driveway, teasing the swollen tics from the bellies of her dogs and wiping their paws when they come in from the yard. My mother and I grew up together in many ways, waged some of the same vertiginous battles with my father, suffered over my little brother as he grew indignant and square-jawed. Our son, she’d sometimes say to me accidentally. What are we going to do about our son?
Just as often I feel as helpless as an infant and I wish for my mother, if just to force me out of bed in the morning, pick out my clothes, and make me eat.
Nick is gracious and talks to her for several minutes, as if he does not hear how her tongue has grown thick, the words running together like melting butter. I know that voice well, and after Nick says, “Bye, Susan. Yes, very soon. I miss you, too. Okay. Okay. Uh huh. Okay. Here’s Jess,” and hands me the phone, I say a few words and hang up quickly.
She is sad because Eric has taken to snorting OxyContin in her bathroom, still lying and stealing and denying in that same fucking straight-faced way as the husband once did, until she feels she’s gone completely nuts. I know how she feels, and yet I am unable to change it. And maybe Eric is, too.
I get up from bed to wash my face in the bathroom sink. The soaps are shaped like ducklings and clustered in a porcelain nest, which makes me laugh. When I get back, Nick and I lie on separate sides of the bed, wrapped in cocoons of exhaustion. I have already forgotten about my father’s death, three years ago now, about the amorphous desolation he’s left in his stead, about the spectacle I keep making of myself, and the tender way Nick sometimes presses on my chest, as if to soothe away the pain there, whispering, “Let it out, it’s okay. You can let it out.” My grief is childlike and pure and has little to do with the father himself—he only represents the incompleteness I feel, my own wretchedness. I feel my mind clamoring desperately to reclaim the higher consciousness of youth, those swift and heartbreaking moments of clarity that I lost forever on the day he fell down those stairs, seizing, and his bowel burst and shit poisoned his blood, already thin with booze, and his heart stopped, simple as that.
A blue-fanged raccoon chases me down to the riverbanks of consciousness, where I wake in a sweat and tangled in blankets. Nick is packing his suitcase in the flickering glow of the muted television, and I realize he is leaving me here, naked in this damp dark, my legs still half-buried in the alluvium. This was inevitable, I think. He’s finally had it with the theatrics. The melancholy that comes on like a tidal wave. The way I always want to eat at restaurants and hate to cook. The birthmark on my back that looks like a melting snowman. And how I never manage to remember which of his nieces is Courtney, and which is Britney. It could be any of these things or something else entirely; I know so little of myself sometimes. What I know so completely, in those first dusky moments after waking, is that this is a good, good man and I am sorry to see him go.
He turns and sees me watching, then leaps on the bed like a child on Christmas morning. He pulls back my eyelids with one hand and pinches my nose with the other.
“Wake up, chicken butt,” he coos.
He wears a grin of boyish mischief, his blue eyes stained pink from lack of sleep. He grabs a cup of hot coffee from the nightstand and holds it to my lips, the way you do for the infirm. I sip gratefully.
“I wish I had eyelashes as long and dark as yours,” I tell him. “It’s a waste on boys.”
“I wish I had boobs like yours,” he says. “I’d play with them all day.” He cocks his head to the side, just now considering the implications. “Well, maybe not.”
Outs
ide, a pitching snow fills the windows. It is still night, or somewhere in the slim fissure just before dawn, and dark branches slap against the glass. I feel a survivor’s exultation.
“Get up,” he says. “Put on a sweatshirt.”
I move slowly, clutching the coffee mug like a life preserver. If I let go, I’m going back down. I see that it is four in the morning, the witching hour if ever there was one. I grab my jacket and put on socks, padding behind him into the blinding hallway. There is music, I swear, and I hesitate, leaning in toward the wall, aware only of the flowered wallpaper, thousands of tiny lilies raining to the floor.
“What the hell is that?” I say.
“Nancy’s playing the piano. She does it every morning. I told her it wouldn’t bother us. We were getting up early anyway.”
“Of course you did,” I say, and he pulls me into the dining room and down the steps and out onto the terrace.
I’m not even resisting this, I realize suddenly, as the snow smacks my cheeks and the freezing wind drags me away from the edge of sleep. Nick is talking, but the blasts of wind are so loud I can’t hear him. His lips seem to be moving in slow motion.
“There,” he might be saying, pointing out over the hills.
To the south the sky is colorless and the land behind this frozen air is metallic and drained. Suddenly everything feels sped up, like a cartoon, which makes me gasp for air and grab instinctively for the terrace railing, my mug dropping into the snow and disappearing for good. We shouldn’t be here, not now, as the empty sky beats back a silver sun and the dead trees draw arrows for the stars. I think I see a figure in the distance, his long stringy legs braced against a slanting mountain bluff, two giant, splintering shinbones thrust like javelins into the ice. I pray, Don’t let go. I look for Nick, but he is at the bottom of a deep centrifuge, smiling up at me from a long time ago.
“There!” he calls out clearly, suddenly.
I see the black moose ambling out from behind a cluster of bushes, like a piece of night sky shaken loose. My heart stills. He is the distance of a football field away. The moose chews calmly on the spindly branch of a chrysanthemum, stamping his great hoofs in the snow. He extends his neck against the wind and then whips his head forward, tearing platinum gashes in the dark with his enormous antlers. From where we stand, he walks the horizon—one misstep, I think, and he’ll fall from the earth’s rim, crashing through the universe and bellowing out to the passing galaxies. I walk toward him slowly. I don’t want to scare him off. My feet are numb, the snow up to my knees. I imagine reaching out and stroking the coarse fur on his back, clumps of it snapping off like icicles in my hands and falling to the ground. I want to bury my face in his flank and press hard; I want to be inside where it is warm. I imagine the beast reaching back and softly nuzzling me on, snorting impatiently. I take a few tentative steps.
Nick squeezes my hand, checking, and I squeeze back. I’ve forgotten everything that’s come before.
SHE FEEDS THEM
GEORGIA STILL MOVES at great speeds, talks too fast, spills secrets as often as the tiny plastic cups of tartar sauce that dress the fried fish as it flies from the kitchen. Steaming heaps of haddock, clams, golden scallop nuggets, and one, two sprigs of fresh parsley. These are family recipes all, family business, and Georgia tends her post at The Crab Shack with the sharp eye of a ship’s captain and the intuitive gut-love of a mother. They find her six days a week, twelve hours a day, their prodigal daughter returned, and she feeds them. The customers are nearly all local, loyal, as attached to the woman who runs the place as they are to the grease bed of shucked oysters and oversized onion rings. Her brother, Abram, does the cooking along with Georgia’s two grown sons, Michael and Colin. For the four years I spent at the University of New Hampshire, I’ve been their only waitress—a feckless college kid with graceless speed.
Georgia left Portsmouth, New Hampshire, for the first time at twenty, moved to Reno, Nevada, and married Tim Tally, giving birth to two boys within a year and a half. This was 1983 and Georgia had been waiting tables at her parents’ restaurant since she was twelve and precocious, a brown bobble of curls and courtesy—a small-town pride and joy. She fed them and they missed her.
Georgia is a recovering methamphetamine addict. At the time of my employment, she had been clean for eleven years.
“I was one of those housewives that vacuumed for hours, zipping around like a wind-up toy. You know the kind,” she said.
But I didn’t, could not imagine hours of vacuuming. Her graying dark hair came loose from the ponytail, tight curls floating down her back, coating her white collared shirt in stray strands. She was always losing hairs, pens, thoughts. This is what we did at night after long shifts: I ate a salad with scallops and had a glass of wine. Georgia didn’t drink, but she talked and smoked pot and talked some more.
“I was addicted to meth for twelve years,” she said one night.
She swept one hand over the table, wiping bits of fried breading onto the floor. Her hands were swollen, masculine, knuckles large and chapped, nails bitten into straight lines.
“Tim Tally worked long days,” she said, “came home, fucked me, went to bed after four glasses of Jack Daniel’s. I was up all night doing bumps, baking peanut butter cookies, throwing them out and starting over, rocking babies back to sleep.”
He was always “Tim Tally.” Never just “Tim” or “Timothy” or “Mr. Tally.” I pictured him ruddy-faced and bowlegged and donning a suede cowboy hat.
Georgia has been back in Portsmouth for ten years, having answered the request of her brother, Abram, and her Greek Orthodox parents. They had pleaded with their recovering daughter to bring their grandsons home, to “leave that Tim Tally and his drugs, that barren soil and those wasted, amoral Southwesterners.” They had sucked her in, fed on her “good, Greek brain,” her “healthy Mediterranean spirit.” “Come home, Georgia. Come home and help your brother in the restaurant.” Eventually, she did—a slow, medicated flight over a shifting American landscape, greens and browns and beiges melting together and then apart, as if separated by a centrifuge. She thought those magnificent colors were as close to God as she would ever get. She watched with her forehead pressed to the small, rectangular window and fielded tugs from small boys who climbed over their mother’s lap, their little, restless fingers wound tightly into her mass of curly hair. She was thirty-eight and had been sober for nearly a year.
During the four years of my tenure, the routine at The Crab Shack rarely changed. On Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays, I came in for a few hours after my classes to work the dinner shift, and I returned on weekend mornings to work lunch. Her sons, both in their early twenties now, clanged around in the kitchen until well after the last customers were gone and the tables reset. They scrubbed pots and scraped the shimmery flakes of fish skin from the cutting boards, Led Zeppelin or Neil Young playing on an old boom box. On the few nights when I left alone through the darkened kitchen, the moon slid through the open door and caught on the stray scales scattered over every surface like silver drift snow. In the stark light of day, though, they were mostly invisible. The dining room disappeared when Abram flipped the last light switch.
“Get your purse from the office. I’m locking up,” Georgia would say, and then evaporate (or so it seemed) through the heavy swinging doors and into the kitchen’s blinding lights and cold steel fluorescence. She would share a quick joint with her son, Michael, and then stomp down the stairs and into the office.
“Smoke ’em if you got ’em!” she might yell out.
In the mornings, we started again. I vacuumed without enthusiasm and Georgia set the tables with blue paper placemats and bendable silverware, water glasses still warm from the dishwasher. She buffed each one before setting it down on the top right corner of the placemat. She filled salt and pepper shakers to the tip-top and ran a damp rag over dustless window sills. Downstairs, Michael slipped cans of Bud or Bud Light into his jacket pocket to have during his lunch b
reak and occasionally I found a warm Sam Adams stuffed into my purse at the end of the night. This I would drink gratefully during my walk home.
At ten to eleven every morning, Frank Hurley is always at the door waiting for Georgia to flip the sign and let him in.
“Mr. Hurley, how are you?” Georgia says.
She smiles and strides over to where the old man is standing. He wavers slightly as he drags one heavy foot after the other through the door. She takes his arm and helps him to his table, always number five, always the first to be seated on a Saturday. He throws his jacket into the booth and slides to the wall next to the window so he can watch for his brother. I come to know the idiosyncrasies of so many customers. I work five days a week, and in that time the customers at The Crab Shack become as comfortable and predictable as the woman who feeds them. Georgia knows all of their stories, when wives died and children graduated, when jobs were lost and legs broken and mortgages paid in full, their favorite sexual appetites, and the salad dressings they prefer. She brings the old man his cranberry tea. He sips tentatively for an hour until exactly noon when his brother, Charlie, finally arrives, cane in hand. Charlie has a thin wash of white hair that barely conceals his freckled scalp and the scabs from run-ins with doorframes. Though Charlie is younger than Frank, he looks much older. He spent his life scraping asbestos from the peeling walls and crumbling ceilings of tenement apartments in Boston.
While her parents are in Florida, six months of every year, Georgia sleeps in their bed, watches movies on cable television (she doesn’t have cable in her own apartment), works six days of every week, and never goes out. She talks on the phone to her only friend, Mitch, who still lives alone in Arizona and keeps various shotguns hidden in his empty mansion. Georgia’s parents’ house is midway between Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and Kittery, Maine, and Georgia and the boys share an apartment below the main house where her parents live. Michael and Colin are grateful when their mother stays upstairs. They drink beers together and arrive at work early or right on time. They, too, seldom go out. Colin makes some exceptions for his dates, though most often the girls must come to his house. They are sweet and courteous boys and often step out from the kitchen to shake hands and say hellos, first wiping their fingers on tattered white aprons.
If Only You People Could Follow Directions: A Memoir Page 12