The Secret of Hailey's Comments

by Kristy Tate

  “So, where are you going?” Artie asked, rubbing at a spot of green on her jeans.

  I grimaced. I hadn’t decided. I was being banished- Gram’s word. She’d poked her long red fingernail at me and said, “Cabbage, you need a holiday. No Hailey’s Comments for at least a month! You’re becoming jaded and cynical. Why this last letter was downright nasty-mean. Did you read it?”

  “I wrote it!” I glanced down at the copy and the phrase chocolate crazed crones caught my eye. It had seemed funny at the time. Harold had glared at me, silent disapproval written across his bushy eyebrows.

  “You need a holiday,” she’d repeated. “White hot sand, turquoise water, handsome young waiters carrying umbrella drinks, somewhere foreign where they don’t run Hailey’s Comments. I don’t want you to even think about the column! I’m sorry sweetie, and believe me it pains me to say this, if you aren’t gone for at least a month, if you don’t come home all rested, relaxed and in a happier state, I’ll have to think of replacing you.” That’s when she gave me the package from Cleo’s Closet. Hot pink and lime green frilly panties, matching bras, flamingo and leopard underwear, a collection of bath salts and lotions. “Everyone needs a secret something,” Gram had said.

  When I protested, she’d held up her hands. “You know I love you and believe me this hurts me more than it hurts you, but you need this. Hell, America needs you to go on vacation. You need a romance with someone young, sexy.”

  O-Toole snorted, bringing me back to the present, and I remembered Artie’s question. “I was thinking of somewhere quiet and remote,” I told Artie.

  “Remote?” Artie asked. “Quiet? No. Foreign, maybe. You need someplace populated with men.” Artie liked men and men liked Artie.

  I liked men too, but the thought of an exotic love affair left me cold. Then I remembered the brief moment I had stood in Mr. Everett’s arms and a warm tingle ran through me. I ignored it. “Well, generally speaking, men are half the population,” I said, pulling at my new zebra bra that kept riding up.

  “Handsome, delicious, men.”

  Artie, with her messy art students, and her haphazard chaotic school, seemed the perfect opposite of fastidious Gram, but maybe they weren’t so different after all. I sighed and wondered what would happen if Grammy Hailey and Artie met and discussed my loveless life.

  “Someone like Lindsey’s dad, or Savannah’s uncle--”

  “Mr. Everett?” I dropped one of the smocks, bent down to pick it up and then dropped another. “He’s her uncle?”

  Artie slapped her hand down on the paint splattered table so hard her earrings jingled. “I can give you his number!”

  I shook my head. Men, delicious or otherwise, definitely needed to be avoided. “I’m not interested. Have you seen his car?” I wasn’t opposed to wealth—I had my own share of it—but I was opposed to flashy wealth.

  “What’s to dislike about a giant Mercedes?”

  I shrugged.

  Artie’s gaze flicked away, as if she had a question but she decided against asking. “Okay, so you want to go somewhere foreign where there are modest, humble, unmarried men…sounds like a cucumber field.”

  I cleared my throat. “I want to paint and I don’t want to lug all my supplies on a plane. Flying and foreign are out.”

  Artie thought for a moment, then her face lit up. “Wait, I know. This is brilliant. I know just the place! Remote—oh my gosh, so remote—Lister Island. It’s in the San Juans. My Aunt Lucy lives there. I’m going for a memorial service. I’d love to have you there. It’s boring, boring, boring.” She blinked rapidly, a tell I’d seen a million times while watching her lie to parents about their children’s artistic abilities.

  “I just want to paint.” I hadn’t told anyone, but I wanted to enter my work in the Crystal Hawthorne Memorial Art Contest. The winner had their work displayed in the Hawthorne Gallery. Even during my years at the art institute, I hadn’t really been able to immerse myself in my art because I’d always had an internal running dialogue with the Hailey’s Comments readers. Maybe for one month I could let go of the Royal Loyal’s distractions and just paint. Maybe I’d go batty with boredom and loneliness, but I could always go home. And of course, I’d have Wyeth, my goliath of some unknown poodl-ish parentage.

  “You can’t drive on the Island,” Artie said, her voice speeding up with excitement. “Most people have scooters and golf carts. The roads are more like dirt trails. There’s a store, a tiny church, and a sweet old lady runs a lending library out of her house. You will love it. The cottage is on the beach…it’s pretty isolated. Come into the office. I’ll show you some photos on my computer.”

  Artie pulled up photos of two old undelicious-looking men in rockers on a front porch of a store called Norman’s, a steepled church, and a small marina. Cotton candy clouds hovered above the dark gray stretch of Puget Sound. A tiny cottage sat on a Scottish Bloom covered bluff overlooking a quaint seaside village.

  “It looks perfect,” I said.

  Artie blinked rapidly in reply.

  #

  Juggling dog leash, luggage, art supplies and a package of food stuff, Wyeth and I made our way to the Kingston ferry. Wyeth carried a pack loaded with his food supply. A beagle in line behind us bayed in outrage at this clear violation of doggy labor laws.

  The ferry carried us across the gentle Sound. Someone once said the Puget Sound is for those who like the sea but distrust waves. I glanced around at the passengers: retired couples, mountain bikers sporting compression shorts and helmet hair, vacationing professionals clad in spanking new REI gear, the occasional commuter lost in a lap top.

  Wyeth and I sat on the top deck and let the June-wind tug at us as we slid by Orcas, Lummi, and Lopez Islands. Somewhere behind us lay the skyline of Seattle. Gulls wheeled over our heads, calling to the shore ahead to announce our arrival. A dark gray cloud settled over both the harbor and my thoughts. In a few days the world would read Hailey’s Comments, written by the real Hailey Clements. Would anyone know? Or care?

  “Most people already know right from wrong,” Gram had told me long ago. “They write to me merely for validation. I give credence to their judgment.”

  Merely implied scant sufficiency—nothing more, nothing less—but I’d decided there’s nothing mere about validation. Validation as an artist had become supremely important to me. I craved it. I wanted someone to tell me the hours I spent behind a canvas mattered, that I had the power to connect and move others. I loved teaching children to play with paint. But a small part of me longed for the galleries, the tiny black dresses, and the recognition and adulation. I hoped the larger, nobler part of me just wanted to share and inspire others the way art inspired me.

  “Woof.” Wyeth interrupted my ruminations on the futile life of the unappreciated artist. I placed my hand on his wooly coat. Wyeth’s tail began to beat on the oak floorboards when a child peeked around a chair to look at him.

  “Would you like to pet him?” I asked.

  The golden-haired six-year-old nodded, but she stayed on the far side of the plastic chair. She sucked on her index finger and watched Wyeth. Her wide, blue eyes stared at him then looked at me. She wanted to step from behind the chair, but Wyeth intimidated her. She wore a red, white and blue sailor dress with a large chocolate milk stain down the front. The child removed her finger. “He’s a really, really big dog,” she said.

  Her mother at the next table looked up from her crossword puzzle book and smiled at me, making me her conspirator in child care.

  I ruffled Wyeth’s ears. “Yes, he is, but he’s very friendly.”

  She looked at us with wide eyes. “He’s really ugly. Did you want an ugly dog?”

  That was a very good question. Most puppies, like babies, are cute, even the ugly ones, and then you feed it, clean up after it, train it, fall in love with it, then keep on loving it even after it’s grown ugly. “I guess I do now,” I replied. He always looked and smelled better after a bath and trim, but lately I
’d been too preoccupied to groom Wyeth. It’d been weeks since he’d had a bath. I realized I’d make a terrible mother.

  “I have a poodle named Princess,” the little girl told me. “She wears a pink coat.”

  I tried to imagine Wyeth in a pink coat. “Wyeth is actually part poodle,” I told her. “And part lots of other things.”

  “It must be the other things that make him so ugly,” she said.

  “Woof,” Wyeth barked, as if he knew his heritage and appearance were under scrutiny.

  “I’m half pixie,” the girl told me, still clinging to the white plastic chair, studying me through the slotted back. “My dad calls me Pixie Trixy.”

  “My dad calls me Chicken,” I told her.

  “Chicken?” Pixie Trixy looked so stunned she momentarily let go of the chair. “I wouldn’t want to be called Chicken.”

  “Actually,” I said, leaning forward, placing my elbows on my knees so I was more at her eye level, “a chicken is a much nicer bird than a red-headed buzzard—that’s what he calls my gram.”

  The girl stepped out from behind the chair. “What does your mom call you?”

  “I never knew my mom,” I told her quickly, refusing to feel the pang that invariably accompanied this conversation I’d endured too many times. “I was raised by my grandmother.”

  It wasn’t until a sixth-grade sex education movie I realized it was impossible not to know my mother’s identity. In the world of single parenting, paternity can be a shadowy guess, but maternity is, or at least should be, indisputable knowledge. Unless your father won’t talk about it, and your gram feigns ignorance. My father disliked discussing anything emotionally messy. He was a charming, handsome, generous, good-natured emotional infant and my gram was the world’s highest paid know-it-all. She had an opinion and a view on everything and everyone, but she knew nothing about my mother, Mally Dunn. Nothing at all.

  “The buzzard?”

  I nodded. “I’m afraid so,” I said solemnly.

  “That’s very sad.”

  “I love the buzzard…and my dad, too,” I said. “Only my dad calls me chicken, everyone else calls me Emma.”

  Pixie Trixy cocked her head at me. “It’s a good thing you aren’t really a chicken, otherwise your dog might try and eat you.”

  I looked down at Wyeth who was licking his hind leg. “I think I’m safe,” I told Pixie Trixy.

  Watching the sun catch and dance on the ocean spray from the ferry’s wake, I realized for the first time in a very long time I was not only safe, but incredibly free. Lost in a fairyland of tall pines, blue water, endless sky, and Pixie-Trixies, I could be whomever I invented. I didn’t have to be a chicken.

  “Woof,” Wyeth said as the ferry ground to a halt just shy of Friday Harbor. From the stern I watched the slowly approaching dock. Below me men in orange slickers bustled, a twist of rope as thick as my thigh in their arms. As they tied us up I leaned over to Wyeth and told him, “We’re almost there.”

  #

  Wyeth, my luggage and I sat on a bench near the marina and watched a tide of tourists wash past. Artie’s young cousin, Jeff, was supposed to meet us and ferry us to Lister. I had a sign that read “Jeff” pinned to Wyeth’s carryall. Wyeth didn’t seem to notice, and neither, apparently did any Jeffs. After a while, I fumbled in my bag for my cell phone. One missed call from Gram. We had promised we wouldn’t speak. My vacation was to be completely Hailey’s Comment free. I thought about calling her back, but I was interrupted by a young man in his late teens. He wore jeans, a flannel shirt over a Metallica T-shirt and a silver stud in one ear. He flipped his long, lank black hair out his eyes.

  “Hey,” he said. “Emma?” He spoke slowly, with a pause between syllables. I remembered Artie had said he was partially deaf but was an adept lip reader.

  I smiled and nodded.

  Jeff reached down to take my luggage. He leaned toward my painting I had rolled into a tube. I grabbed it. “I’ll take that!” I said it so loudly that a group of suited Asian men turned to stare. I waved at them then turned to follow Jeff onto his boat.

  The official thrice-weekly ferry service to Lister Island was a flat boat that in other, more festive locations, could be called a party boat. Jeff loaded the ferry and with a puff of exhaust and a roar of the motor, we moved away from the crowded Friday Harbor landing. The engine’s din drowned the noise and bustle of the onshore tourists.

  Distance and water came between us and the other islanders. On shore, everyone seemed to belong to someone else, a part of a larger party, a communal celebration I was pulling away from. I felt an unfamiliar and not unpleasant wave of solitude. “We’ll have to make our own party now,” I told Wyeth.

  He woofed, not in response, but at a low-flying pelican.

  #

  A small cluster of wooden, Queen-Anne-style buildings surrounded a patch of gravel. I recognized the store called “Norman’s” from Artie’s photos. The tired-looking church with peeling and fading paint stood apart from the cluster, its slightly askew steeple pointing toward God. A low stone wall encircled a small cemetery filled with tombstones and a riot of dandelions, buttercups, and honeysuckle. Most of the grave stones appeared ancient, but in the center lay a patch of freshly turned soil ringed with dying cut flowers.

  A few houses of similar style, age and disrepair stood in the town circle. One had a sign in the window that read, “Miss LaRue’s Lending Library” in large red handwriting and followed in blue by, “Homemade Turkey Jerky and Cherries for sale.” A bowl of cherries, stems still attached, sat near the gate. They looked old, only appealing to the host of bees swarming above the large, wooden bowl. “Life is a bowl of cherries,” I’d written to a reader, “sweet, sometimes tart, and always riddled with pits.” I smiled and hoped I would get to meet Miss LaRue.

  Tall pines, ferns, and thatches of blackberry bushes surrounded the town square. A number of dirt paths, like wiggly spokes from gravel wheel hub, cut through the trees. I wondered where they led and which one would take me to my cottage. Artie had said the cottage and the Dunsmuir house were a two-mile walk from the marina on the opposite side of the island.

  Jeff handed me off the boat and onto the wooden dock. “Welcome to downtown Lister,” he said in broad vowels. “Booming metropolis and home to wild night life.”

  “A party place,” I said in return, but Jeff didn’t respond. He walked away with my luggage. Carrying the tube holding my painting, I followed him to a golf cart with a faded yellow top and scratched rain curtain. Jeff loaded the cart and motioned for me to go inside the store.

  I tied Wyeth to a weathered post holding up a lopsided porch. He thumped his tail against the porch’s uneven and worn wood. The screen door sat slightly off its frame. I pulled it open and went inside the cool, dark store. Narrow aisles of sundry goods ran in straight rows along the walls. A couple of plastic picnic tables flanked with white plastic chairs reminiscent of the ferry stood in a small opening near the check-out counter. A girl with dark skin, eyes, and long braid perched on a stool behind the counter. She lowered her Teen Vogue magazine when I entered. She had a tiny diamond stud in her nose that blinked at me in the dim light.

  “Lucy isn’t here,” the girl said. “She was expecting you and everything, but she had a cow emergency.” She didn’t have to ask my name. She knew who I was because of who I wasn’t. I wondered what it would be like to live somewhere where everyone knew who did and who didn’t belong on the island. I introduced myself and extended my hand. The girl looked at my hand briefly before reaching out with her own.

  “Raven Lopez,” she said in a bored voice.

  “What would a cow emergency entail?” I asked. “Would it be udderly awful?”

  The girl didn’t smile and replied with a totally deadpan face, “Full of bull, no doubt.”

  “Cud one,” I smiled.

  Raven smirked. “I’ve heard all the cow jokes.” She pushed some forms across the acrylic counter. “Here, you can fill out the ren
tal agreement, but you’ll have to wait for Lucy to give you the keys.”

  After the forms, I wandered up and down the aisles. A fine layer of dust sat on the cans of soup and packages of Oreos. I selected a box of Raisin Bran and wondered what I would eat for a month.

  “You can buy produce from Jenson’s,” Raven said. “They also sell milk, meat and homemade breads.” She cocked her head toward a vague direction. “They’re down the road.”

  “Thanks,” I said, paying for the cereal. “If you think Lucy will be much longer, I’ll go down there now.”

  Raven shrugged and returned to her magazine. I wondered if she dreamed of living away from Lister, far from the village scrutiny.

  I didn’t see Jeff so I left my things in the cart, retrieved Wyeth and headed for the dairy. I was sure I could smell it.

  #

  The dirt road took me past the cemetery. I stopped to read the gravestones, my eyes seeking out the ancient black stones lined with a green mossy film. Hester Biggs, beloved wife and mother, 1906-1965. Lawrence Craven, may God bless his soul, 1890- 1950. There was a new headstone which must have belonged to previous the owner of my cottage. While unnamed, it did include the years that this individual had lived: 1920-2018 a long life, spanning world wars, revolutions—a sexual and otherwise—pandemics. She had weathered them all before dying in her sleep. A cautionary red rope circled the gaping hole in the earth and a heap of dirt stood beside it, waiting for the coffin. Artie had said Helen’s memorial was to be held on Saturday.

  “‘There they alike in trembling hope repose, The bosom of His Father and His God,’” a quiet voice spoke beside my ear.

  Startled, I put my hand to my heart. I turned to see a small priest. His white collar contrasted with his tan, weathered skin, and his white Rockport tennis shoes looked inconsistent with his black, sharply pleated pants. He had green eyes and thin gray hair that lifted in the gentle breeze. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to frighten you,” he said, his voice kind. He squinted at me then widened his eyes as if surprised.