by Julia Glass
But here, at this market, I would linger and pretend to be indecisive. It meant I’d get to flirt, quite harmlessly, with the teenage boys at the counter. Jimmy was my favorite. Arms akimbo, he’d make a John Travolta dance of wrapping the fish, then of taking my money and making change. On his days off, I’d see him at the beach with his girlfriend, an au pair who worked in one of the big shingle houses by the water. He smiled and waved whenever he saw me. At twenty-seven, I must have looked middle-aged to him, so I liked the way he humored me. Often, in a single day, the banter I exchanged with Jimmy and the other boys was my only conversation. Me and those boys; Clem and her seals. I wrote to her, Celibacy is the pits. Mind if I borrow Luke for a month or two?
Sam called in the middle of August. Next Saturday, if the weather was fine, he planned to check out a lake north of where I was staying; could he drop by for dinner? What could he bring? “Just yourself,” I said, as my mother had taught me. Bring your earthquakes, I thought as I hung up the phone, hands shaking.
We would have filet mignon, I decided, with parsnip purée and haricots verts à la Marrakesh. I had been browsing through Mars’s recipe file in the study off the master bedroom. (Was this a crime? Were a chef’s private recipes, I wondered, like a playboy’s little black book?) For dessert, nothing too heavy: compote? granita? sorbet? These were fantasies I could fulfill.
Friday night, having put in a good six hours on Hilton Kramer’s blowhard protégé and my perfect tan, I was melting chocolate on the stove when the phone rang. NO, I practically shrieked aloud. (Three times that day I had called weather, to recheck the forecast: reassuringly, always sunny and clear.)
“Collect to anyone from Carmen. Thank you for using AT&T.” Followed by a cascade of mellifluous tones.
“CLEMENT,” I heard her yell, impatience loud and clear across the miles of crackling. “I’m in Bar Harbor,” she said. “I’m driving down there, can you give me directions?”
“Here?” I said. “To this house?”
“No, to Cape Canaveral. Of course to there.”
“I thought you were in Labrador until October.”
“Look, Lou, I’m in this handicapped space and I can see the meter maid prowling the lot. I’ll explain when I see you.”
“Clem, are you okay?”
“I’m fine, Lou. Now’s not the time. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“I have to tell you, tomorrow’s not the greatest—”
“Just get me there from Stamford, okay?” This was Clem’s businesslike voice, stubborn, unswayable. I’d heard her use it on Luke.
I gave her directions. I hung up. I scraped out the burned chocolate and started all over again.
Clem’s car is her trademark. It’s a green 1968 Alfa Romeo convertible, rebuilt from a virtual junk heap by one of her high school boyfriends. The car had been garaged in Bar Harbor before she took the ferry up north. She pampered that car like a lapdog. When our parents asked her to sell it, to raise money for graduate school, she told them she’d sooner work as a go-go dancer in the Combat Zone.
About three the next afternoon, I heard it roar into the driveway. I walked onto the verandah and waited. I was deeply annoyed by then. I’d assumed she would drive overnight and arrive by morning, giving me plenty of time to get rid of her, at least temporarily, by dinner.
She heaved a duffel bag out of the trunk and started up the hill. She waved when she saw me. At the top of the steps, she threw her bag down and said, “I left without telling Kurt. I’m in deep shit. Got any aspirin?”
“I’m just terrific,” I said. “Thanks for asking.”
Her laugh sounded oddly compliant.
When I came back from the medicine chest, I found her in the kitchen pouring herself a shot of vodka.
“To you. Port in a storm,” she said, and downed it. She took the Tylenol bottle, shook out two, and swallowed them.
“Are you going to explain why you’re suddenly here?” I said. “Because in about two hours Sam is arriving for dinner.”
“The fishin’ magician? Him?”
“Stop being so clever and sit down,” I said. She was pacing.
She paced into the living room and sat on the sofa. “I’m in deep shit.”
I was not going to play this game. I sat down across from her and waited. Clem closed her eyes and ran her hands again and again through her hair, combing it. In the humidity of summer, her hair goes feral. She ties it back in a knot and leaves it like that for days.
“What I need most is a shower.”
“That’s fair,” I said, and I showed her upstairs.
The water was still running twenty minutes later, and I was in the kitchen peeling parsnips, when I heard the front door open.
“Wow, some place! Hey you!” Here he was, just like that. I was stunned. In the two months since he’d fallen asleep in my living room, Sam’s hair had turned almost blond, his skin dark as tea. He set down a compound bucket and kissed me on the cheek. I looked down; the water was silver with fish. He grinned. “More in my cooler. Oh man what a day! What an incredibly, fantastically illimitable day.”
“Trout!” was all I could manage to say.
“Cool car. That come with the house?” The front door stood open behind him. His pickup truck was parked behind Clem’s Alfa Romeo—right up against its backside, like one animal sniffing another.
Don’t get paranoid, I told myself.
“That’s my sister’s. She’s here sort of out of the blue. I wasn’t expecting—”
“Well hey, there’s plenty to go around!” He tossed his Mets cap onto the hat rack, where it landed on a silk-flowered pillbox. Then he carried his bucket to the kitchen. I heard him set it in the sink. “Somewhere I can clean up? I smell like a trawler!”
I led Sam upstairs and gave him Mars’s study to change in. Clem’s belongings were strewn in a wanton meander all the way down the hall from the bathroom to the guest room: red sneakers, black lacy briefs, a beat-up copy of Arctic Dreams. “Hey,” she said, passing us on her way downstairs. She gave Sam a quick smile. I wish I could describe precisely the way Clem greets men; she sort of inhales her hello, in a terse, shy voice as if she’s run out of breath. Offhand but riveting. (Oh go ahead: be paranoid, I told myself.)
“And hey to you. A pleasure.” Sam gave her his wide glinty smile in return.
Clem had changed into shorts and a T-shirt. She wore three necklaces, thin gold chains with dangling gilt-edged seashells. “Something else I better tell you now,” she said when I came down. “You promise not to blow up.” A statement, not a plea.
I gave her a look that promised nothing. I dropped the naked parsnips into a bowl of cold water.
“Sometime probably in like the next half hour, Luke’s coming.”
“Gosh,” I said, “a party.”
“I need you to be serious.”
“I’m trying hard. But what I need is for you to tell me what’s going on.”
“I’ve got to meet him on neutral ground, we’ve got to talk.” Luke was in New Jersey that month, visiting his parents.
“Neutral ground.” I thought about that. “Well, I hope we all like trout.”
“I’ll clean them,” she said. “I’m fast.”
“Clem,” I said, “what aren’t you fast at?”
At five o’clock, we rode to the beach in the Alfa Romeo, Sam and I squashed in the back with a hamper of wine and hors d’oeuvres, Clem driving, Luke beside her. Luke strained at cheerfulness. He had arrived looking queasy and, toward me, embarrassed. He could barely look me in the eye as he presented me with a purple begonia plant.
“Me—bait all the way,” Sam was saying, “and no apologies. I’m too high-wire to stand around in some tempid river up to my neck in mosquitoes.”
“Oh,” said Luke, “I don’t mean to say that the other kinds don’t take skill.” He’d been describing how he once tried fly-fishing, how it seemed more like an art than a sport.
“Now deep sea—that’s the big c
hallenge for me,” said Sam, and then he began to tell what I realized must be his signature story, the time he’d been marlin fishing down in the Keys. This was the second time I’d heard it.
Clem’s jaw was set. She drives fast, on the hormones of a teenage boy, right down the middle of the road. She handles the wheel like a baker handles dough: easy, flip, loose.
“Clem,” I said, leaning forward, “we’re not trying to make a plane or anything.” Sometimes this sort of remark will make her drive faster.
“Sorry,” she said, and slowed down a hair. “I tend to forget about the battery. It’s held in for now with a coat hanger, very makeshift.”
Luke frowned, and Clem saw his look. “Lazy, what can I say?”
“Jesus,” he said. “One day.”
“What’s all this?” I asked.
“If you knew the first thing about cars,” she said, “you’d know that, at the speed I’m driving over these funky roads, we’re in danger of being blown off the face of the earth.”
“Oh come on.”
“Hey,” she said, raising both hands from the wheel, a habit I hate. “It’s like this: Car rams through pothole, battery crashes loose. Battery hits road and makes sparks. Sparks fly up and enter gas tank. Kapow!”
“Then GO SLOW,” I yelled.
“I am.” She let up on the gas again. “Some people make such a big deal about dying.”
“Ah. James Dean,” said Luke, “as we live and breathe.”
Sam laughed loudly, then dove back into his marlin safari.
“Are those the World Trade towers? You can see them from here?” said Luke. He screened his eyes and pointed toward the far right horizon.
“Don’t be silly,” said Clem.
“Could be,” Sam said. “You can see for eons on a day like this.”
“Nah. You couldn’t see New York City from here,” said Clem.
“The coastline does strange things,” I said. “You’d be surprised.”
“Strange how?” teased Clem, making an eerie Halloween noise.
Luke insisted, “I’m sure it’s New York.”
“Probably oil tanks in New Jersey.”
“Clem, honey, your geography’s warped.”
Luke and Clem stood side by side, glumly staring at the ocean, which glittered with the clarity of a gem. Except for two couples walking their dogs, we had the beach to ourselves. I shook out a large bedspread.
“This is heaven, man!” cried Sam, who seemed unaffected by the quarreling lovers’ general gloom. He romped around like one of the dogs, then stopped and crooked his hands into a frame. He looked up through it, as if to shoot a portrait of the sky. “Know what I’d like to be able to capture?” he asked me. “Those incredible amazing blue distances—Titian, van Eyck …”
“Yeah, great sky,” said Clem. “Mare’s tails.”
“Like writing,” said Sam. “Like a coded message from beyond.”
“Those aren’t clouds,” Luke said abruptly. “They’re jet trails.”
“Guess we just missed an air show,” said Clem.
“Look at the way they widen out. Any fool knows jet trails.”
“The Brie is melting,” I warned.
Luke sat on a towel. Clem remained standing. Slowly, she removed her clothes. Underneath, she wore a black tank suit, oddly modest. She is usually in the smallest of bikinis. Clem loves the sun, and the feeling is mutual.
Luke watched her intently; watched her hands pull down the suit, smooth back her hair, pull it tight to one side and knot it. She smiled at me, an apology. I looked at her scar, always uglier than I have remembered it, parched as old dry bone. Whenever I see her bare legs, I try not to look at it, the way you try not to look at a pregnant woman’s belly. To do so is unseemly—yet this, in a way, is what defines her.
“I’m going in,” she announced. The rest of us watched her swim far out, swiftly, then settle into steady laps until all we could see was the dip and arc of her arms against blue.
“Would someone like to open the wine?” I asked.
Sam said eagerly, “I’m for that.” For a moment Luke remained aloof, staring at Clem. Then he smiled and pulled a Swiss army knife out of his pocket.
“Your sister’s been in an accident,” my mother said calmly. I had just moved to Brooklyn. I was holding the receiver and looking out the window at a statue of Saint Lucy in front of the church across the street, holding her eyes on a spotlit platter. For a split second, I pictured myself as an only child all over again. That night, I had a dream in which my mother gave birth to a third baby: another sister, without eyes. In the dream, I was enraged, indignant. How dare she.
The accident that caused Clem’s injury was surprisingly ordinary. It did not happen the summer she crewed on a barkentine that was caught three days in a freak typhoon. Nor the summer she spent studying raptors, when in fact an owl whose broken wing she was securing with a splint sank its talons clear through the muscle in a forearm (a wound from which she has also kept scars, a faint constellation). Nor, miraculously, during her brief flirtation with hang gliding.
It happened in Michigan, just after Clem graduated from college. She had stayed on an extra week to be with Luke. Afterward, she was to head east, for her first job with Kurt.
Clem and Luke were biking to a lake. Clem, leading, came to an intersection with a street that she thought was one-way and so looked, economically, only one way. But it was not a one-way street, and at that moment a car was approaching from the other direction. If Clem did not have such quick reflexes, she would probably not have survived; but she saw the car from the corner of an eye and, just before it would have smashed her broadside, turned her bicycle sharply away. Still, the car sideswiped her. She might have escaped with bruises if the right front-door handle of the car hadn’t been broken. Jagged, it punctured the front of her upper thigh like the teeth of a saw. Running an inch deep, it tore straight down to just above the knee, where, by some fluke of how she fell, it made a U-turn and tore another six inches up the inner thigh, finishing off like a fishhook or a cockeyed smile.
Luke called my parents from the hospital, crying. His fault, his fault, all his fault, he kept saying. Clem downplayed the whole thing. At the site of the accident, according to Luke, she had instructed him—clearheaded; even bossy, I’ll bet—how to press his shirt on her wound while they waited for the ambulance. When it came, Luke was the one who fainted. “Hardly any blood,” Clem says if you ask her about it.
“Mostly lots of yellow jellowy ooze. All fat. Disgusting more than anything else.”
The doctor told our mother that Clem was the sort of patient who gave him migraines. She’d asked him to give her directions on how to change the bandage herself so that she could dash off on some sailboat way up in the maritime boondocks. “Sixty-two stitches!” he kept on scolding, as if our mother were to blame. “Sixty-two, if you please!” And frankly, he wasn’t confident that the flesh inside the hook of her gash had the blood supply to heal correctly. He wanted her in bed for six weeks. “Two,” said Clem. “This isn’t a flea market, young woman,” retorted the doctor. Three weeks later, she was aboard the Gannet; sometimes in pain, but, she wrote, madly in love with the Newfoundland coast. Her leg looked different every day, she said: like my own flesh-and-blood mood ring. But Dr. Indignant was right about the necrotic tissue. Nasty, but no infection. YES, I am keeping an eye on it, Lou. I do not plan on losing my leg. So no lectures when you write back. Send Almond Joy bars and a really good juicy novel. I sent her The Magus. She wrote back and told me it was perfect.
At the end of the summer, she tore up the card of the plastic surgeon her doctor had told her to call. “I’ve grown fond of it,” she said. “Of what?” I asked, bewildered. “The scar,” she said.
“What’s with you guys?” I whispered. We were in the kitchen. I was putting herbs in the baby Cuisinart. Clem was cleaning the fish. She had washed her hair and it shone like black plumage, matching her short cotton dress. Her necklace
s swayed away from her skin as she worked, bent over the sink.
“Nothing. Plenty,” she said, not looking up. “Everything’s the same … nothing’s the same. You know. Plus ça change, however it goes.”
We could hear Sam and Luke, on the verandah. Mostly we heard Sam, off on another of his fishing benders. The man was obsessed. Once in a while, I heard Luke murmur his approval. He was grateful, I think, just to be listening.
“You barge in here,” I said, “invite Luke, act like you’re running from the law, crash my date. You think you can stand there and tell me nothing?”
“Sorry.” The repentance in her expression was so unusual that I had no choice but to buy it. “I am sorry. I’ll tell you later. Trust me.”
We focused on food for a while, working quietly, listening to the men. Now they were talking about New York. Luke was talking about the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. “I saw it light up once, totally by accident. I was lost in New Jersey, and suddenly I’m driving up on this palisade—Jersey City? I still don’t know where I was—and I saw the bridge in the distance, and exactly then the lights went on: from one end to the other, these pale green bulbs, swooping up and down along the spans like a pair of birds flying in tandem. It was … I could feel it in my chest—right here—do you know what I mean?”
“Oh I do!” said Sam. “Right there!”
“It was something else,” Luke said. I glanced at Clem, to see if she was moved by the rhapsody in his voice, but she was intent on slicing a radish.
“It’s sweet, the way he’s so openly passionate,” I said.
“Yeah. It is.” She scraped the sliced radishes into the salad. “What next?”
I gave her a cucumber. “I’m on it,” she said.
The kitchen is the only place where Clem still follows my orders. She’s a good cook, but I’m better and she knows it. I like it when she phones me long distance for recipes. In her life, for the most part, I feel superfluous.