by MB Caschetta
Imogene shrugged.
“You’ll have to get busy. A lot of hearts to break around here.”
“I need a job.”
“What’s your skill?”
“House painting.”
“Plenty of work, too,” Cherry said. “You can go down to the end of this dock and find a cheap room for the night, until you get some money. Nice places to rent when you have a little cash.”
“I have some money,” Imogene said. “Not much.”
“You’ll do okay.” Cherry patted her shoulder. “There’s work.”
The woman under the Marlene Dietrich poster cleared her throat, nodding at Cherry. Imogene smiled and waved, but got no response.
“Bad place to start.” Cherry untied her apron. “Dalia McGregor. People call her Miss Dale. Lots of money, barely spends a penny of it. She’s the oldest woman on the island. Used to be quite a dandy in her time, I’m told.”
Imogene watched Dalia McGregor sipping gin. She was dressed in a linen suit, oblivious to the damp Atlantic heat, the shifting sand and stifling sun.
“She looks okay.”
“She has one of those outfits in every color, matching shoes,” Cherry said. “Sometimes she wears tailored silk pants and smokes a cigar. You should hear her tales about stealing other people’s wives, romancing the sisters of her business partners. Claims she had some lawyer’s mother once, and a banker’s masseuse. Even a nun. Miss Dale says lesbians were better before the advent of the automobile. More authentic.”
Imogene flinched at the word. But Cherry was smiling.
“What’s the matter, love, you got a crush on old Miss Dale?”
“Send her a drink,” Imogene said.
Cherry blinked.
Cherry poured gin into a chilled glass, placing it carefully on a tray, as if it were the first time she’d ever done it. “Going to start at the top and work your way down? Nothing wrong with that.”
As Cherry slowly headed for the table, Imogene went to the ladies room to change.
The bathroom was red and powdery. Imogene laughed out loud at a cup of tampons on the basin for the female customers. Henry would have a heart attack. Changing into a paint-speckled navy swimsuit and army fatigues cut into walking shorts, she sat on the john, tying her tennis shoes.
On her way back, she stopped at the pool table to rack up balls for a solitary game. Her mother should see her: making new friends, entertaining herself, not such a plain Jane after all. As soon as she got settled renting a room, she’d send Leslie a postcard telling her not to marry Earl Matthews.
Maybe she’d send Leslie a bus ticket.
Across the room, Miss Dale took a sip of freshly poured gin and scowled.
“Too warm,” she said. “Where’s the ice?”
Cherry nodded, turning back.
“Wait a minute,” Miss Dale demanded. “What’s the meaning of this? Who’s sending me a drink?”
Cherry studied Imogene’s figure by the pool table. “That newcomer wants to stay the season. She’s looking for work and a place to rent.”
She went to find ice.
“You over there,” Miss Dale called out to Imogene. “Come here.”
Imogene smiled and approached. “Hello.”
A crack in the glass frame above Miss Dale’s head lined the edge of Marlene Dietrich’s yellow Panama hat.
“Maria Magdalena.”
Miss Dale held out her hand. “Dalia McGregor.”
“No, I meant Dietrich,” Imogene said, taking the old woman’s hand. “Her real name was Maria Magdalena, like in the Bible.”
Miss Dale waited for her to finish, but Imogene was still pointing at the wall behind her. “You know what Hemingway said about her?”
“Hemingway?” said Miss Dale. “I met the man once—a perfect ass. Most of what he said was rubbish, as I recall.”
“He said, ‘It makes no difference how she breaks your heart, as long as she is there to mend it.’”
Miss Dale sniffed the air.
“If I could lie down under that print for the rest of my days, I’d be happy,” Imogene said.
“I prefer you not lie down while I’m sitting here,” Miss Dale said.
Imogene laughed. “I read somewhere that Dietrich had an affair with this woman, a writer, who at the same time was having an affair with Greta Garbo and Isadora Duncan.”
“You read too much,” Miss Dale said after a minute. “And if you’re speaking of Mercedes de Acosta, I never liked her either.”
Imogene’s smile faltered.
Miss Dale concentrated on the table. “I’m looking for a housekeeper.”
“I’m more of a house painter,” Imogene said, “but I know how to use a vacuum.”
“I’m getting too old to bend over. My offer is $200.00 a week for light housekeeping. I’ll expect you at eight a.m. Mondays and Wednesdays. Fridays noon you can take me shopping. Other errands, when I need them, by appointment, of course.”
Her tone made Imogene feel at home, as if she’d become one of the characters in her books.
“Are we agreed?” Miss Dale asked impatiently.
“Only if I can paint your house.” Imogene said, “Painting is what I love.”
“This is business. No extra money for painting.” Miss Dale glared. “You can live in the rental unit round back. It’s a mess. I’ll let you have what you want and haul away the rest. I haven’t bothered with rents and loud tenants for years.”
Imogene took in steel-colored curls, black eyes set deep in a round face, magnifying reading glasses perched on her nose. “Deduct the rent from my pay if you want, but I don’t paint for free.” Imogene had learned from her stepfather’s negotiating style. “You wouldn’t want me to. I’ll give you a good deal.”
“I don’t want you to paint.” The old woman took a sip and made a face at her gin. Imogene didn’t budge.
“I’ll think about it,” Miss Dale said finally, “but I think slowly.”
“Remember Marlene Dietrich in Blue Angel?” Imogene said. “Now that was a movie.”
Imogene opened her eyes to a musty studio, small and square with a hot plate and a refrigerator. The other side of the apartment was stacked with Miss Dale’s boxes.
Imogene had looked briefly through the stacks of books and letters, photographs, and old linen suits.
The night before, she’d fallen asleep on the first page of a book she’d salvaged from a dusty pile, Civilization and Its Discontents.
Now, in the tiny, brown-paneled studio apartment below Miss Dale’s kitchen in the early morning, she lay on a bare mattress, listening.
She could see through a part in the curtain. Miss Dale’s neighbors were men in large, straw-brim hats that sloped off the sun. The daintier one was shoveling peat moss. Miss Dale’s dog, an ancient Corgi, danced excitedly at her feet, looking like a little man: short legs and a big face, just like a dwarf.
Most of the time he growled.
“It’s a natural reserve,” the larger gentleman was saying to Miss Dale. “We should be given something for it. We do own it, after all.”
“What a strange thing.”
“What’s that, Dalia?”
“To think that all these years we’ve felt the need to own it.”
The other man stopped his shovel in mid-air.
Miss Dale gazed into their faces, then stepped back slowly from the fence as Imogene heaved open the filthy sliding glass door and stepped into the morning sun, dressed in a bathing suit and shorts.
“Good morning!”
The men gasped.
“Apparently so,” whispered the dainty one.
She stepped quickly across the splintering deck to catch up with Miss Dale and her dog, as they rounded the corner to the front of the house.
“What’s the matter, Miss Dale?”
“I simply prefer not to prattle with neighbors,” Miss Dale said. “This island is filled with people who think a piece of paper gives them the right to something. And
drunken hooligans who come across on the ferry, looking for trouble. I prefer to be alone.”
Her first day in Boat Deck, Imogene moved deftly around the ancient beach furniture and knick-knacks, dusting and vacuuming, mopping and shining, tangling more than once with the Corgi, whose name was Pablo Picasso.
The designs for Miss Dale’s house hung on the wall, showing how the ends of the house were bowed, the windows shaped like portholes. Just below the architectural blueprints, a sign with large type named it “Boat Deck House.” Located on the western end of the island, the structure was shielded from the main thoroughfare—primarily a beer bar, pantry, pizza joint, and a tourist trap with odds and ends for sunbathing.
Miss Dale ordered lunch mid-morning. “Tea and tuna fish.”
Imogene wiped the sweat out of her eyes. She hadn’t realized she’d have to cook the food she’d bought using Miss Dale’s list. She’d thought the old woman liked her enough to make room in her house, but it occurred to her Miss Dale needed someone with her twenty-four hours.
Imogene carried neat plates of food on the tray, wrapping a sandwich for herself and stuffing it in her back pocket. The light was perfect. “I think I’ll go down.”
“Whatever you like,” Miss Dale said.
Picasso barked twice, unenthusiastically, as Imogene packed her paints in a shoulder bag, and ambled down the walkway outside Miss Dale’s gate.
It took three weeks to clean away Miss Dale’s refuse, to haul the boxes out to the curb on garbage days, to clean the gutters and rake the lawn, which despite attempts to seed it, was mostly sand. Imogene made a home of the stuffy back room, managing to get the hot plate and refrigerator working again. She painted several large watercolors and smaller cards, tacking them to the wall. She wrote postcards to Leslie, tucking them away in a cigar box she’d found among Miss Dale’s discarded things.
One evening, Imogene picked at her meatloaf and vegetables as the sky started to fade into a starry evening overhead. Eyeing the old shutters, the peeling white-and-gray paint from the house’s trim, Imogene turned to Miss Dale, who was nuzzling old Picasso and feeding him string beans.
The house was finally cleaned up a bit, but she’d grown tired of housekeeping.
“It’s time,” she said.
Miss Dale followed Imogene’s eyes across Boat Deck House. “We’ll see about that.”
Imogene began scraping the next morning. Preparation was the most important part of the job, Henry had taught her early on.
Paint chips swirled around her ladder.
“It appears to be snowing around Boat Deck,” Miss Dale remarked.
“Hasn’t been painted in years,” Imogene said from her perch on the ladder.
“Hasn’t been anything in years,” said a passing neighbor over the fence. “Nice to see some activity over here, Miss Dale.”
Miss Dale looked out toward the sandy lawn and made a pronouncement: “The deer will overrun the people one day, you know.”
“Sure look bad this year.”
Imogene had already painted several deer as cards for Leslie, filling out their ribs with smooth brown strokes of paint. Most were scarred and mangy. Imogene had seen the day-trippers feeding them carrots, much to the disgust of Miss Dale.
“The beach erodes terribly every winter,” the neighbor said. “Soon there’ll be nothing left! I hope the Feds plan on compensating us.”
Imogene waited for the conversation to end before resuming her work.
“Strange, isn’t it?” Miss Dale said, “I mean, it’s very odd.”
“What’s that?”
“The way things last or they don’t.”
The neighbor shook his head with a smile, continuing down the length of the fence until it ran out.
Miss Dale clucked her tongue, continuing the conversation in her head.
*
The morning sky slipped into afternoon, spacious and low, while Imogene worked and Miss Dale watched. The sun spread out in a bright blaze like fire. Most afternoons, Miss Dale said she was too tired to go lie down in her room, so she dozed right there in a porch chair near Imogene, supervising the house’s makeover.
“There’s too much sun out here,” Miss Dale complained. She was sitting in the shade with Picasso, who growled in his sleep.
“So go inside,” Imogene said.
Miss Dale fretted. “The trees need pruning; the house is going soft. There’s more dust than can be wiped away.”
“I like to think of dirt as texture.” Imogene listened to the distant sound of young people laughing, having fun. An occasional tourist passed, striding across the boardwalks.
“You’re not a very good housekeeper, Imogene.”
Imogene clung to the top rung of the ladder with bare toes. “I painted some nice cards this morning down by the ocean.”
Dale sighed. “Don’t change the subject.”
Imogene said, “I promise to clean the house when I finish the first coat of primer.”
The days crawled by with Imogene on the ladder, slowly relieving the house of its ancient colors, nearly bare. The priming would take several weeks. Imogene found the work difficult without a crew or adequate equipment, but she enjoyed the sunshine and labor.
Miss Dale read in the shade from books in German and French.
Once a week pre-dawn, they took a short walk to the ocean, so Miss Dale could make her assessment of things.
“It makes some people believe in God—this ocean, it’s magnificent,” she said.
Imogene looked out across the Atlantic; she hadn’t thought about it like that before, but the idea made her feel that she too must have a place in the creation of things. “It’s a lot bigger than the Ohio River.”
Miss Dale walked precariously, holding onto Imogene’s arm as she bemoaned the shortened seashore, the damage of erosion to the beach.
“Hope I last longer than it does,” she said. “Looks like someone threw it in the dryer. I remember when it was at least 300 yards of pure sand.”
“You’ve got plenty of time,” Imogene said. “Healthy as a goat.”
Miss Dale swatted a fly. “This is my last year out here, I can feel it.”
“Nonsense.” Imogene looked down, smiling. “We’ll both be here next summer, and the summer after that.”
The sentence circled the air with the insects, buzzing around them.
“In the winter, the island closes down,” Miss Dale said. “Everyone leaves, except for a few workmen.”
“I’m hearty,” Imogene said. “I can keep this place running.”
“No need for that,” Miss Dale said. “I’ll need you in Connecticut. You can stay in the attic.”
Imogene dug her bare feet into the beach. “I hate to talk about the summer ending when I just got here.”
“Agreed,” Miss Dale said. “But I can smell my last summer.”
There was no arguing with some people.
“The first time I saw you, you seemed familiar to me,” Miss Dale said. “When you’re as old as I am you’ve seen many faces, probably all the kinds there are. You don’t think that much about it. But now I realize.”
“What’s that?” Imogene said.
“It’s the stage.” Miss Dale thought a moment, shading the last of the day’s sun off her face. “Women don’t get much in life. Some get a few hours, if they’re lucky, a time when they are exactly who they are supposed to be. It’s happening for you now. I can see it. You’re turning like a leaf.”
Imogene smiled. “I like that.”
“It is rather extraordinary,” said Miss Dale.
“Did it happen to you?” Imogene asked.
“I was sixty-eight. Can you imagine? After a life bereft of any kind of lasting love, children, acceptance—though not empty of glamour, mind you, and quite a bit of travel—I was getting ready to slow down. Suddenly I could feel it, the pureness of who I was, shining outward for everyone to see. Well, only strangers; I was abroad and alone. A full calendar year almost entir
ely without witness.”
Imogene tightened her grasp of Miss Dale’s arm: “I’m glad.”
“Unadulterated beauty,” Miss Dale said.
One night, while listening to the buzz of mosquitoes outside her room and Miss Dale sleeping just a thin wall away, Imogene heard a ruckus at the front of the house. Thinking it was Picasso taking his nightly prowl, she continued spreading her hand-painted postcards one by one onto the pillow to choose the perfect one for Leslie. She carefully inked a message and read it over several times. The scene on the front had turned out pretty: a long stretch of beach and the ocean ablaze with yellow sun. She hoped to paint many more. One for Miss Dale, maybe. She’d like to know her birthday.
Imogene put a stamp on the other side, addressed the card, imagined herself walking to the post office, but she put it in the underwear drawer with all the others.
Imogene had kept to a tidy schedule: one night a week, sleeping on top of the bedcover on Leslie’s large oak frame, which had been hauled many miles from Utica, New York. They’d had dinner occasionally and held hands in the movies. She’d never seen Leslie with her clothes off, though she could imagine it. In fact, Imogene had imagined it so many times she’d worn it down like a sliver of soap.
“What’s it like with Earl?” Imogene had asked her.
“What do you mean, like?”
In the silence, Imogene understood that Earl hadn’t gotten to her yet in that way. She wondered how Leslie kept him at bay.
It was a comfort to know, and she snuggled up to Leslie’s large bosom and her warm nightgown.
“Never mind,” she said, drifting off to sleep.
That was the thing about love: No matter how late it was in coming, no matter the form, you were never prepared. Imogene sprawled on the mattress in Miss Dale’s back room. The night was brisk, as if fall were coming sooner than planned. A loud banging and the sound of rolling garbage cans startled her. She sat up in bed, listening a minute, until a few more crashing sounds roused her into action. She pulled her shorts on under a T-shirt, found her flip-flops, and made her way out into the pitch dark.
“Miss Dale?” Imogene called. “Is that you?”
Imogene couldn’t see Miss Dale, her eyes still adjusting to the dark. She felt her way carefully toward the front path.