by Susan Conley
THE WIND PUSHES SAM’S hair up and puffs out the sides of his sweatshirt. He looks like a lunatic. Why won’t he wear a coat? What’s wrong with a coat?
“Sam.” Charlie’s losing patience. “I’ll kill you if you make me late for school.”
Then Charlie stands, and the boat starts to rock. His cargo pants have the ratted-out pockets, and he’s got the patched black parka on, and Kit’s Patriots hat. The hat pangs me. Kit always wore the hat.
For a second I’m pretty certain we’re going to tip. But then Charlie lands in the stern, and Sam’s in the middle seat, and the boat rights itself.
“Please,” Sam says. “Please consider edibles, Mom.”
“I thought we covered edibles at breakfast?” I look across to the mainland, which is all green forest, except for a handful of summer cottages.
I know Sam wishes Kit and I could switch places, so I’m in the hospital and Kit’s on the boat. I’ve read about this phase where the boy needs the father more and lets the mother go. Part of me is honestly ready to be let go of, because I’m not as good as Kit is at saving Sam from himself.
Sometimes I think he’s confusing his grief over Liam with his grief for Kit. Kit will be back, I keep telling Sam. Your father will come home. Why can’t he see that?
* * *
—
ONCE UPON A TIME there were seven trawlers in the channel, but that was back during the cod era and the better prices.
Now there’s just Kit’s boat. And we are in what he calls the post-cod era. My hope today is to get a loan extension on the trawler from the credit union officer. A man who was in Kit’s tenth-grade biology class.
Charlie pushes the choke and pulls on the engine rope, which revs high because of the extra gas in the line. I’ve got on the dark skinny jeans still somewhat in fashion, and the down coat that makes me look like an amoeba. I tell Charlie please not to get me wet.
Sam says, “Edibles are good for muscle pain, Mom. They’re good for stress.”
“Since when is playing preseason basketball and going to Dunkin’ Donuts stressful, Sam?” Charlie is standing in the stern, steering. “Do you know I haven’t even gotten high yet, Sam? I haven’t even gotten drunk? That’s insane at my age!”
“Please don’t pretend you’re Dad, Charlie,” Sam says.
“You have to stop scolding him.” I look hard at Charlie, because this is something we’re working on—how he tries to parent Sam while Kit’s gone. It’s not good for any of us. He’s usually more patient. We all are with Sam. We root for him and hold Sam up.
Kit says I do this too much. Hold Sam up. We’ve argued about this, Kit and I, more than anything else except money. Because I’ll always hold Sam up.
“Lara would let me try edibles,” Sam says.
Lara is my friend who paints beautiful, moody oil paintings and says if she ever catches me wearing mom jeans she’ll airlift me from the island. She’s now the professor of visual arts at the college we went to together in Portland. A place my father once called the $15,000 bachelor of fine arts degree in weaving. Even though I never took weaving and was on full scholarship.
“Lara would understand me.”
“Oh really.” I look up at the sky. Please, someone help me.
* * *
—
WE CLIMB OUT OF The Duchess and take the dirt path up to the trees. There’s sap on the windshield again, but no one seems to care but me. We’re a one-Subaru family. Both boys have their licenses now, but Sam’s in the restricted period when he can’t have anyone in the car with him except immediate family.
“You know what I’ve realized, Mom?” Charlie says from the passenger seat.
“No, what?” I’m pawing in my bag for the keys.
“You never go out.”
“Out where?”
“You never leave the house at night.”
The car still smells like the dead mouse in the exhaust pipe last week.
“Where do you want me to go?”
“I need you to go out. I need you to go get dinner with Lara.”
Half of Sam’s McMuffin from yesterday is on the floor by the gas pedal. I nudge it back with my clog until it’s mostly under my seat.
“Lara lives in Portland. That’s almost two hours away. I can’t just go there for dinner. I’m being a mother, in case you didn’t notice.”
“Oh, we noticed.” Sam puts in his earphones and leans his head back on the seat.
“I need you to please go out this week,” Charlie says. “So Lucy and I can cook.”
It’s freezing in the car. I crank the heat. “So you can cook what?”
“I don’t know. Cook anything. We’re never really alone.”
I drive through the pine trees where the baby foxes live and think about my bedroom and how it’s such a nice bedroom with the view of the glassy water and the big tin sky. I don’t want Charlie to have sex in my bedroom, but I don’t want to insult him by implying that he would have sex in my bedroom. Still, where else would he have sex in the house?
We’re on the tar road now, and I want to formulate my strategy for Sam’s joint on Instagram, not a strategy for how not to let Charlie have sex in my bedroom.
“I’ll leave the house, and you can have Lucy over.”
Did I just really say that? What would Kit say?
“But wait,” I say. “What about your brother?”
“Sam can stay at Robbie’s.”
“So you can have sex with Lucy in the house?”
“Mom.” Charlie does not turn to look at me. “What are you saying?”
I’ve read that it’s important to talk to your teenage boys about sex. And that while the girls are having urgent conversations about pleasure and consent, the boys are having zero conversations. The boys are alone, and apparently want these conversations but don’t know how to initiate them.
Kit says that Jimmy never spoke a word to him about sex, and he turned out okay, didn’t he?
Still, who really wants to be on their own with this stuff if they don’t have to be?
But then I chicken out and don’t tell Charlie about the condoms I found in his room last week. It was a box of ten and there were only five condoms left. I was looking for the stapler he keeps in his desk. The condoms looked like a box of Band-Aids. Until then I hadn’t ever considered the idea of Charlie having sex. I’m still not close to over it. I put the box back where I found it and walked out of the room as if I were leaving a crime scene.
“What will you make?” I turn the radio on. It helps to have Hall and Oates in the car with me.
“Make when?” Charlie says.
“What will you make for dinner with Lucy?”
Charlie is here in the car with us but his mind is with Lucy. He’s crossed over some imaginary river with her and left Sam and me on the other side. This is confusing to all of us, in the way that no one understands exactly what’s happening when love strikes someone down.
“I don’t know, Mom.” He sounds irritated now, as if having Lucy for dinner were my idea in the first place.
It is amazing how the conversation becomes an indictment of me when I wasn’t the one who started it. This happens to me all the time.
“But isn’t that the goal?”
“Of what?”
“Of having dinner with Lucy? To make something to eat?”
“We’ll cook steak, maybe. Or pasta. We just want to be alone for once.” He looks out the window and sighs. Weight of the world on his shoulders.
“Isn’t that the reason we don’t leave you alone?”
“What are you talking about now?”
I take one hand off the steering wheel and put it on his shoulder and try to connect. “Honey, isn’t the reason parents don’t leave their teenagers alone in their houses on Friday nights b
ecause you’re going to have sex if we leave you alone, and we’re not supposed to want you to have sex?”
I regret it as soon as I’ve said it, but I can’t take it back. This is the thing with wolves. How many times they’ve made me want to take things back.
“Mom, I can’t believe you. I can’t. You’re just so wrong.”
He puts his hands over his face and turns toward Sam, who’s fast asleep or in a music coma. “I’m not talking to you anymore, Mom. I’m not speaking to you. It’s like I’m not here now.”
I pull up to the curb in front of the high school, and both boys jump out. The building looks like an imposing bank from the 1950s, and Charlie starts run-walking toward it. He hates to be late.
It’s unclear if Sam is planning on ever going inside. He sees some friends over on the stone wall by the flagpole and sits down between them.
I should get out of the car and ask him whether he intends to attend class today. But part of me is tired of confronting him. Maybe he can be the school’s problem for a little while.
TED CRAWFORD’S OFFICE IS a cramped white cubicle at the back of the Avery Credit Union. He is a pensive man on a good day and wears the kind of glasses that change color based on the amount of light in the room. The glasses are gray today, which makes him look more tired than usual, and I’d be tired too if I had to tell the fishermen I grew up with that I can’t pull them back from the brink. But Ted’s one of the good guys. He’s helped Kit and me out more than most would.
The credit union is downtown in the old brick pharmacy. Everything in this part of Avery looks up at the bridge. It’s been two years since Liam drowned, but I’m sitting in Ted’s cubicle staring out the one window, and I swear I can see Sam and Liam up on the bridge in their full catastrophe. Then I have to get a grip on myself. Why does everything on days like this still seem so desperate?
Ted tells me that although he would like to be able to help us, he’s sorry to report that in the end he can’t support another line of credit on the Jillian Lynne.
It’s taken me years not to feel embarrassed that Kit named the trawler after me. It is the custom here. And if on one level it’s flattering to have a boat named after you, it’s also a strange thing. I’ve had to stop myself from assuming that when someone like Ted talks about the boat, he isn’t really talking about me.
He says he heard about Kit’s injury, and he wants me to know that everyone in Avery is cheering for him.
“Thank you,” I say. “Really, thank you.”
But what I want to tell him is that cheering doesn’t matter and I don’t see how we can get out of this mess. At one time they might have caught all the fish there were to catch, but they know some things now about how to rebound a species, and Kit just needs a little help with the boat payments.
Ted says that he could probably do more for us if I got a regular job. “Something with steady hours, Jill.” He lays his hands out flat on his desk. “You know, where you file a standard W-2 and we see consistency.”
I tell him that I’ve got a job, and that the grants for my film came in right on time this year. Three of the state museums funded me, and the Humanities Council, and even the NEA. But Ted doesn’t know how on the drive in this morning I thought hard about applying for a job at L.L. Bean. They’re hiring for the winter season. It would be a long commute but good, reliable money.
* * *
—
I MAKE MY WAY out of the credit union and climb in the Subaru on Front Street and close my eyes and breathe. I’m going down to the village to film Shorty Kater. He’s been deciding all fall whether or not to sell his fishing pier to a developer from New Jersey, and he has news for me today.
Shorty is the son of Jimmy’s younger sister. If you say Sewall village around here, people know you mean Archers and you mean Jimmy. He’s got one of the biggest lobster boats on the coast and owns the lobster pound, and in this way he’s like a village king in Ireland. Everyone needs his blessing to do just about anything.
At first Jimmy didn’t want me talking to anyone for my film. He didn’t understand how a film was going to help save his village. He doesn’t go to films. Or only if they have Clint Eastwood in them.
I told him that you can lose only so much of your heritage before there’s no going back. I said we needed to protect the waterfront and that the film would help. It was our responsibility. I told him there were only twenty commercial fishing boats left in the state and twenty miles of working waterfront.
Maine’s a big place, I said then. Twenty miles. Twenty boats in the fleet. That’s it. Which is when I think I got him.
He’s a proud man and proudest of his village. I know he doesn’t want it to change into something it was never intended to be.
* * *
—
WHEN YOU COME UPON the village in a car, you’re looking down on it from the top of the hill, and it appears enchanted like in a children’s book with drawings of the place where fisherpeople live—fifty or so little wooden houses with dark green forest on three sides and a picturesque harbor at the bottom. People come from hundreds of miles away and from other countries to photograph it.
Candy’s store is in a clapboard house on the ledge above the harbor. She and Flip raised their three kids here. It’s a general store that sells milk and batteries and bologna and ice cream. In the mornings before the sun’s up, Candy makes eggs and pots of coffee for the fishermen and serves them at a counter in the back.
Flip’s icehouse is next to the store. A flat-roofed steel box where fishermen and lobstermen and oyster farmers and clammers and seaweed harvesters get their ice. Jimmy’s wharf sits beside the icehouse, and the pound is inside a wooden shed at the end of the wharf, where the boats tie up to unload.
Everyone knows everyone in the village. This isn’t meant to sound sentimental. Everyone knows where you’re going in your boat, and how your daughter did in the middle-school play, and if your marriage is off the rails. And anyone who’s not in some way related to someone in the village is a little suspect. I went to art school and make documentary films and wear clogs in winter, so I’ve never fully gotten over my outsider status.
Sometimes I think I’m shooting this film in the village to show that I belong here. When I’m actually making the film, I’m completely sure about what I’m doing. It’s only later that I wonder.
I EMBED IN A town and shoot everyone and everything. There’s nothing planned about it, really. The films become a conversation that often ends up talking about the purpose work gives people in Maine.
I’ve made a film about the mill town I grew up in. And one about the shoe factories in Lewiston. And the shipyard in Bath.
My films are not nostalgic. At least I try not to let them be. They don’t hold on to the past. I think they explore the idea of change and whether change has to mean suffering to people.
The first film I made features my father. In the opening scene he stands outside the mill in his one dark suit and military hair and looks like a handsome, earnest undertaker. He says the mill is empty now, except for the kids who smoke the marijuana and climb inside with their skateboards through the broken windows that line the western wall, along the parking lot.
In another scene my father says that he keeps hearing about all the new money coming into the state, but he and my mother don’t see it. This scene is shot at my parents’ farmhouse. The one I grew up in. You can hear my mother say Where is it? referring to the money. Then you hear her laugh and cough her gravelly smoker’s cough. The camera pans to her in the TV room, sitting in her plaid recliner by the window, knitting another afghan and breathing on her oxygen machine.
My mother used to sew clothes for people. Once a year she let my sister, Sasha, and me choose a back-to-school outfit at Sears. My mother loved Sears. She’d hold clothes up to her body in the dressing room mirror, but she never bought herself a
nything.
I have a sense that my mother was trapped in our town, but I don’t have clear evidence. It’s just a feeling, because I’ve sometimes felt trapped on our island. The afghan she knits in the film is the one she later sent to Sasha in Jacksonville, Florida, where Sasha runs a military catering company. I wanted to tell my mother that it’s hot in Florida and Sasha wouldn’t need the wool blanket. But my mother has partly constructed her own reality, and I believe she’s earned it.
Harwich is a harder place now, and fewer people live there. My parents are in their eighties and rely on my father’s pension and Social Security. The farmhouse is falling down around them, but they refuse to leave.
“Where on earth would we go?” my father says.
WE DID THE FIRST screening of the film in Portland, and a man found me in the lobby of the theater afterward and told me he’d recently moved to Portland because of all the good food. Then he asked where I came from. He wore a black leather jacket and had spiky gray hair that made him look like the older version of Sting.
I told him I came from Harwich.
“You’re from Harwich?” he said. Which he would have known if he’d read the credits at the end, where I thank the people I grew up with in Harwich.
He shook his head. “It’s amazing to me that you come from a town like Harwich and have made such a good film.”
I said, “Neither Harwich nor I has been insulted that well in a long time.”
He didn’t seem to hear me. He said he and his wife had been driving around the country with their dogs for months, looking for the place to live that had the best energy. They chose Maine, he said, because it hasn’t been ruined yet and it felt safe.
I wasn’t sure what he meant.
“We’re running out of good places in America.” He ran a hand through the hair. “Montana. Ruined. Too many people. Idaho ruined too. California and Seattle. Done. But I still get the right energy in Maine. There’s all the new money coming in.”