Spartina (42 page)

Elsie stopped, her hands in mid-air. “I’m being a bitch, aren’t I? What I don’t like is I’m harder on women than on men. Is that right? Have you noticed that? Or in this case is it that the two of them are both spoiled, but Schuyler is at least redeemed by his work? So I’m just … Of course he is being monumentally self-centered these days.… But, then, he’s still funny. Of course maybe she’s just as funny but doesn’t say it. But, then, that’s her fault for not speaking up.”

“ ‘But, then,’ ” Dick said. “ ‘But, then.’ But, then, maybe he talks so fast she can’t get a word in.”

“Ah.” Elsie straightened her legs. “Okay.” She pulled her uniform skirt up above her knees to sun her legs. “You know the way I talk to you has changed. The only other people I talk to like this are my sister and Mary Scanlon. I used to talk to you more the way I talk to Jack, sort of put-up-your-dukes.

“I realize I’m just pouring out now, but it’s because I may not get to see you so much.… Still. I’ll try. It’s funny because at the same time I’d like to just sit here and not say a thing.” Elsie reached in her lunch box and unwrapped a sandwich. “Here, have half. It’s huge. Mary made it. She baked the bread too.”

Dick took half. Cheese and bean sprouts and fancy mustard. The bread was cut so thick, he had to stretch his mouth open. He watched Elsie smooth her skirt between the back of her thighs and the hatch cover. The problem hadn’t gone away, but here he was eating Mary Scanlon’s bread, being warmed by the sun, cooled by the sea breeze, and feeling the blue sky press closer and
bluer and yet open up out to sea, channels of light into the distance.

Everything might be okay. Days like this day might be ordinary. May might say, “Well, all right, Dick, but don’t you do it again.” She might say, “Well, she’s a nice girl and you can go on being friends so long as you behave yourselves.” She might say, “I always wanted a little girl and Elsie’ll just have to bring her around as often as she can.”

Spartina
swung a little on her mooring. If he was going to tell May, it would make sense to wait until he’d been out a couple of times and some money was coming in. Get the house back in shape. Maybe get her a dishwasher.

Dick burst out laughing at himself.

Elsie looked over at him, pleasantly curious.

He said, “I was thinking along, and I got to where I go out and buy May a dishwasher.”

Elsie looked puzzled, then laughed.

“If you tell her,” Elsie said, “you don’t think she’ll leave you, do you?”

“No. Now I’ve thought about it, I don’t think so.”

Elsie said, “I hardly know her.”

“If I’ve got a halfway-decent number of pots left out there, I can make seven, eight thousand dollars by Christmas. Net. That’s more loose money than we’ve seen …”

“There isn’t anything I can do,” Elsie said. “I can’t think of anything that wouldn’t just make it worse. There isn’t anything, is there? I can’t even imagine her mind.”

“I’ll be doing more than imagine one of these days.”

“You’ve made up your mind, have you? Maybe you could wait till Christmas, when I’ll be gone. Wouldn’t that be easier?”

Dick nodded. He said, “I guess I ruined your picnic.”

He was about to say something else, when he surprised himself
by taking hold of her stocky slack calf, running his hand up behind her knee. He pulled his hand back.

Elsie cocked her head. “That’s something else I’ve wondered about. I mean, you could say to yourself, ‘In for a penny, in for a pound.’ Or ‘Might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb.’ Or you could say … what?”

Dick shook his head.

Elsie said, “I’m sorry, I’m being flip, but I can’t stay this earnest for very long.”

Dick shook his head again.

Elsie said, “I see. I’ve lost my looks, my girlish figure is gone.”

“Come on, Elsie. Quit fooling around.”

“I’m just kidding, for God’s sakes. I mean you’re the fellow who started playing with my leg—not that it wasn’t nice, absent-minded though it may have been. No, look, don’t mind me. Okay? I’ll start over, I’ll be serious.”

Dick said, “You go ahead and be whatever way you want. You can say anything you want about this pickle, and it’d be true.” Dick paused. “Maybe not. I wouldn’t want to say we’re like Parker and Marie.”

“What?” Elsie said. “What do you mean? What are you talking about?”

Dick thought he’d told her. It worried him he wasn’t keeping straight what he’d told who and what he hadn’t. He said, “Parker and Marie.”

“What
about
Parker and Marie? Do you mean Parker told you he’d … Parker might
say
he had, Parker might say
anything.
Or do you mean their characters in general? Of course in some horrible way it makes sense. She’s furious at Schuyler.… You do mean something in particular?”

“Yes.”

“Well, how do you know?”

Dick was sorry he’d brought it up. He felt the mattress, it was pretty well dried by the sun. He got to his feet, picked it up, and headed for the cabin.

“Where are you going?” Elsie said. “You can’t leave now.”

He went below, tossed the mattress onto a bunk, and came back on deck.

“Tell me,” Elsie said. She made room on the hatch cover. “Sit down and tell me.”

He wondered how on earth he’d ever thought he’d like telling Elsie this story. He must have thought that she’d see what was funny, that she’d make it lighter. Now he was irritated at her eagerness. He was embarrassed. And he was fearful that one way or another the story would stick to them.

“Dick, for God’s sakes,” Elsie said.

He told her, not looking at her. He started with his walking around the Wedding Cake and his reflections on his great-uncle Arthur. That made her impatient. When he got to Parker’s car she shut up. He told it step by step, trying to make it far away and funny, right down to the two pairs of sneakers doing their barn dance—“Duck for an oyster, dig for a clam.”

Elsie said, “Good God.” He looked up. She put her feet together and pulled her skirt down over her knees. “There’s a grisly little tale.” She puffed her cheeks and blew out her breath. “Poor Marie. I’m sorry I was so mean about her just now.” She shook her head. “I mean,
Parker.
Poor Marie. And that sort of thing gets worse as you get older.… And Parker is such a tick.… He looks like a possum snout. I wish you hadn’t told me about it.”

“You told me to tell you.”

“Well, once you brought it up …” She paused and looked baffled. She said, “You did bring it up.”

Dick saw it coming now. He couldn’t think fast enough how to fend it off.

“In fact,” Elsie said. “Well, shit. That’s just mean. We aren’t … I don’t see how you could think of …”

Dick said, “I said we
weren’t
like Parker and Marie.”

“You said you
hoped
we weren’t like Parker and Marie.”

“What I said was—I wouldn’t want to say we’re like Parker and Marie.”

“That’s worse,” Elsie said.

Dick said, “What I meant was …” He shook his head.

“What
do
you mean?” Elsie said. “What could you possibly mean?”

“All I meant was, it got to me.”

She said, “ ‘It got to me, it got to me’—what does that mean? It means you think we’re just one more possum-snout fuck.”

He shook his head, but she didn’t see him. She hugged her knees to her and lay her forehead on them.

“No,” Dick said. He stood watching her for a few seconds. In the silence he heard noises from the yard, the tractor throttle going up a notch, the ringing of an end of chain. As if he was falling into her mind, he sensed a close darkness, and then, fresh and bare as a pulled-up root, her wish. It was so close to his senses it was as if he plunged his face into it. He felt the sting of her feelings like the smell of a root drilling up his nostrils. She wanted her child—and what she was going to do about having her child—to come out of what was good in her, and she wasn’t sure what that was. Everything in her could go either way. For all her quick nerve, she still wasn’t sure she’d absorbed enough good from doing a job, from living here, from wanting to be rooted in this heap of hills, rockbound ponds, scrub woods creased with streams running down to the salt marsh. All this tag end of a glacier: half tumbledown and useless disorder, half a fertile accident for ingenious, stubborn little forms of life accommodating to the old wreck and spill of rock, on and on to the way it was now, still half a disaster,
half a wonder. Here it was again tumbled down and flooded, and here they all were, plants and animals, at it again in the old accident.

It seemed to him he caught this picture from her, and along with it her wish to be formed by it, her wish to be complete by aligning herself with invisible forces, even though she only half-believed in their coherence, and only half-believed they could apply to her.

But her wish was so strong he felt it, and felt her buried half-belief too, like his own in its distrust of people and in its hope for the rightness of the natural world. He kept on sliding into her sense of things until it seemed for an instant they were swimming together, coming up for air in the flat-rock pond by her house, coming up together by the overhanging rhododendron, their coming up setting floating green leaves bobbing around them—instead of facing each other askew on board
Spartina
in sight of the boatyard, within hearing of the tractor, the squeak of a long nail being pulled out of hard wood, the tractor chain ringing again as it went slack and fell.

B
ut there they were, two bodies in the sun, what they’d left of the food sitting on warm waxed paper.

Elsie sat up straight.

Dick said, “Elsie …”

“Yes.” She came up snappish.

Dick said, “Forget all that about Parker and Marie. It didn’t get to me on account of us. At least what we have is an honest mistake.”

Elsie laughed. She said, “So that’s what it is. Great, that’s great.” She laughed again, hard enough to annoy him.

Dick set his mouth shut. She’d had her feelings hurt and now she was going to stab at him a couple of times, until she cheered herself up. He didn’t mean to put up much of a fight. He was still considering his discovery that the better part of energy and power in Elsie’s life didn’t come from being a rich kid. It came from ordinary life. When he put it like that it sounded so simple it sounded dumb. She wouldn’t be pleased to hear it, at least not in the mood she was in now.

Elsie said, “You can’t just say forget it.”

“I’m sorry you took it wrong.”

“I’m not so sure I did. Maybe you’re thinking about my sneaky ulterior motive. But maybe you’re worried that
you
had some creepy little thrill. Maybe what you saw in Parker was something you hadn’t admitted to yourself, some little element of class rage. Don’t lose your nerve—go ahead and admit it.”

“You’re on the wrong track, Elsie.”

“No, I’m not. I’ll tell you one thing you couldn’t have built this boat without.”

“I know. Without that money you got for me.”

“No, something more important than that. You wouldn’t have got this boat built unless you were furious. Hours and hours—no,
years
of class rage. You shouldn’t have named her
Spartina
, you should have named her
Class Rage.
”

Dick felt himself twist with that. He got up, turned away from her, and held on to the wire of the lifeline. It was too thin to grab hold of hard enough. He said, “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t know about this boat.” He felt the thin piece of truth in what she said, the sharp little wrongness of it. He’d
been a son of a bitch, he’d been bitter and hollow and stupid, but not about
Spartina. Spartina
had come through him untouched.

He said, “What’s this class-rage shit? When I think of the dead-beat rich around here, these assholes with their toy boats, I think of them one by one.” He saw that wasn’t a very good answer, so he said, “And what I think of them—or you—is nothing to do with my boat. Nothing! You want to call something class rage, call your kid class rage.”

Before he felt the harm of what he’d said, even before he felt astonishment, he felt the air go dead between Elsie and him, as though she’d stopped transmitting or receiving.

He turned around but didn’t look at her. He said, “Aw shit, Elsie, I don’t mean that. You pissed me off.”

“I know,” Elsie said. He looked at her. She wasn’t mad. She looked at him calmly. She said, “I meant to get you mad. I shouldn’t have.… It’s a dumb thing to do. Of course I got back a little more than I bargained for.” She waved what he’d said away with the back of her hand. She sat comfortably, her weight and energy all within her again, balanced. She said, “Sometimes when I’m impatient for what’s next, I either make jokes or start a fight. I used to think it was pretty neat of me, it showed I was a live wire. I guess what it is is a way of being intimate and heartless at the same time. Where were we? I mean before …”

Dick said, “Slow down.”

“That’s true too,” Elsie said. “I sometimes think if I slow down or stop I’ll get caught, I’ll be seen, I’ll be visible some way I don’t want to be. What’s odd is I’m perfectly willing to be seen being bad … well, bad in some clever little way. But I’m secretive about being good. I mean, there is a part of me that’s just a plain dull good girl.”