Stern Men (17 page)

“When did you decide to paint your kitchen?” Ruth asked.

“Last night,” Mrs. Pommeroy said.

“Isn’t this a disgusting color, Ruthie?” Kitty asked.

“It’s pretty awful.”

Mrs. Pommeroy stepped back from her windowsill and looked at her work. “It is awful,” she admitted, not unhappily.

“Is that buoy paint?” Ruth guessed. “Are you painting your kitchen with buoy paint?”

“I’m afraid it is buoy paint, honey. Do you recognize the color?”

“I can’t believe it,” Ruth said, because she did recognize the color. Astonishingly, Mrs. Pommeroy was painting her kitchen the exact shade that her dead husband had used to paint his trap buoys—a powerful lime green that chewed at the eyes. Lobstermen always use garish colors on their pot buoys to help them spot the traps against the flat blue of the sea, in any kind of weather. It was thick industrial paint, wholly unsuited to the job at hand.

“Are you afraid of losing your kitchen in the fog?” Ruth asked.

Kitty hit her knees laughing. Gloria frowned and said, “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Kitty. Get a-hold of yourself.” She pulled Kitty up.

Kitty touched her hair and said, “If I had to live in a kitchen this color, I’d vomit all over the place.”

“Are you allowed to use buoy paint indoors?” Ruth asked. “Aren’t you supposed to use indoor paint for indoor painting? Is it going to give you cancer or something?”

“I don’t know,” Mrs. Pommeroy said. “I found all these cans of paint in the toolshed last night, and I thought to myself, better not to waste it! And it reminds me of my husband. When Kitty and Gloria came over for dinner, we started giggling, and the next thing I knew, we were painting the kitchen. What do you think?”

“Honestly?” Ruth asked.

“Never mind,” Mrs. Pommeroy said. “I like it.”

“If I had to live in this kitchen, I’d vomit so much, my head would fall off,” Kitty announced.

“Watch it, Kitty,” Gloria said. “You might have to live in this kitchen soon enough.”

“I will fucking
not!
”

“Kitty is welcome to stay in this house anytime,” Mrs. Pommeroy said. “You know that, Kitty. You know that, too, Gloria.”

“You’re so mean, Gloria,” said Kitty. “You’re so fucking mean.”

Gloria kept painting her wall, her mouth set, her roller layering clean, even strokes of color.

Ruth asked, “Is Uncle Len throwing you out of your house again, Kitty?”

“Yes,” Gloria said, quietly.

“No!” Kitty said. “No, he’s not throwing me out of the
house,
Gloria! You’re so fucking mean, Gloria!”

“He says he’ll throw her out of the house if she doesn’t stop drinking,” Gloria said, in the same quiet tone.

“So why doesn’t
he
stop fucking drinking?” Kitty demanded. “Len tells me I have to stop drinking, but nobody drinks as much as he does.”

“Kitty’s welcome to move in with me,” Mrs. Pommeroy said.

“Why does
he
still get to be fucking drinking every fucking day?” Kitty shouted.

“Well,” Ruth said, “because he’s a nasty old alcoholic.”

“He’s a prick,” Gloria said.

“He’s got the biggest prick on this island; that’s for sure,” Kitty said.

Gloria kept painting, but Mrs. Pommeroy laughed. From upstairs came the sound of a baby crying.

“Oh, dear,” Mrs. Pommeroy said.

“Now you’ve done it,” Gloria said. “Now you’ve woken up the goddamn baby, Kitty.”

“It wasn’t me!” Kitty shouted, and the baby’s cry became a wail.

“Oh, dear,” Mrs. Pommeroy repeated.

“God, that’s a loud baby,” Ruth said, and Gloria said, “No shit, Ruth.”

“I guess Opal’s home, then?”

“She came home a few days ago, Ruth. I guess she and Robin made up, so that’s good. They’re a family now, and they should be together. I think they’re both pretty mature. They’re both growing up real nice.”

“Truth is,” Gloria said, “her own family got sick of her and sent her back here.”

They heard footsteps upstairs and the cries diminished. Soon after, Opal came down, carrying the baby.

“You’re always so loud, Kitty,” Opal whined. “You always wake up my Eddie.”

Opal was Robin Pommeroy’s wife, a fact that was still a source of wonder to Ruth: fat, dopy, seventeen-year-old Robin Pommeroy had a wife. Opal was from Rockland, and she was seventeen, too. Her father owned a gas station there. Robin had met her on his trips to town when he was filling gas cans for his truck on the island. She was pretty enough (“A cute dirty little slut,” Angus Addams pronounced), with ash-blond hair worn in sloppy pigtails. This morning, she was wearing a housecoat and dingy slippers, and she shuffled her feet like an old woman. She was fatter than Ruth remembered, but Ruth hadn’t seen her since the previous summer. The baby was in a heavy diaper and was wearing one sock. He took his fingers out of his mouth and grabbed at the air.

“Oh, my God!” Ruth exclaimed. “He’s huge!”

“Hey, Ruth,” Opal said shyly.

“Hey, Opal. Your baby’s huge!”

“I didn’t know you were back from school, Ruth.”

“I’ve been back almost a month.”

“You happy to be back?”

“Sure I am.”

“Coming back to Fort Niles is like falling off a horse,” Kitty Pommeroy said. “You never forget how.”

Ruth ignored that. “Your baby’s enormous, Opal! Hey, there, Eddie! Hey, Eddie boy!”

“That’s right!” Kitty said. “He’s our great big baby boy! Aren’t you, Eddie? Aren’t you our great big boy?”

Opal stood Eddie down on the floor between her legs and gave him her two index fingers to hold. He tried to lock his knees and swayed like a drunk. His belly stuck out comically over his diaper, and his thighs were taut and plump. His arms seemed to be assembled in segments, and he had several chins. His chest was slick with drool.

“Oh, he’s so big!” Mrs. Pommeroy smiled widely. She knelt in front of Eddie and pinched his cheeks. “Who’s my great big boy? How big are you? How big is Eddie?”

Eddie, delighted, shouted, “Gah!”

“Oh, he’s big, all right,” Opal said, pleased. “I can’t hardly lift him anymore. Even Robin says Eddie’s getting too heavy to carry around. Robin says Eddie’d better learn to walk pretty soon, I guess.”

“Look who’s gonna be a great big fisherman!” Kitty said.

“I don’t think I ever saw such a big, healthy boy,” Gloria said. “Look at those legs. That boy’s going to be a football player for sure. Isn’t that the biggest baby you ever saw, Ruth?”

“That’s the biggest baby I ever saw,” Ruth agreed.

Opal blushed. “All the babies in my family are big. That’s what my mom says. And Robin was a big baby, too. Isn’t that right, Mrs. Pommeroy?”

“Oh, yes, Robin was a great big baby boy. But not as big as great big Mr. Eddie!” Mrs. Pommeroy tickled Eddie’s belly.

“Gah!” he shouted.

Opal said, “I can’t hardly feed him enough. You should see him at mealtimes. He eats more than I do! Yesterday he had five strips of bacon!”

“Oh, my God!” Ruth said. Bacon! She couldn’t stop staring at the kid. He didn’t look like any baby she had ever seen. He looked like a fat bald man, shrunken down to two feet high.

“He’s got a great big appetite, that’s why. Don’t you? Don’t you, you great big boy?” Gloria picked up Eddie with a grunt and covered his cheek with kisses. “Don’t you, chubby cheeks? You have a great big healthy appetite. Because you’re our little lumberjack, aren’t you? You’re our little football player, aren’t you? You’re the biggest little boy in the whole world.”

The baby squealed and kicked Gloria heftily. Opal reached out. “I’ll take him, Gloria. He’s got a ca-ca diaper.” She took Eddie and said, “I’ll go upstairs and clean him up. I’ll see you all later. See you later, Ruth.”

“See you later, Opal,” Ruth said.

“Bye-bye, big boy!” Kitty called, and waved bye-bye at Eddie.

“Bye-bye, you great big handsome boy!” Gloria called.

The Pommeroy sisters watched Opal head up the stairs, and they grinned and waved at Eddie until they lost sight of him. Then they heard Opal’s footsteps in the bedroom above and all stopped grinning at the same moment.

Gloria brushed off her hands, turned to her sisters, and said, sternly, “That baby’s too big.”

“She feeds him too much,” Mrs. Pommeroy said, frowning.

“Not good for his heart,” Kitty pronounced.

The women returned to their painting.

Kitty immediately started talking again about her husband, Len Thomas.

“Oh, yeah, he hits me, sure,” she said to Ruth. “But I’ll tell you something. He can’t give anything to me any worse than I can give anything back to him.”

“What?” Ruth said. “What’s she trying to say, Gloria?”

“Kitty’s trying to say Len can’t hit her any harder than she can hit him.”

“That’s right,” Mrs. Pommeroy said with pride. “Kitty has a real good swing on her.”

“That’s right,” Kitty said. “I’ll put his head right through the fucking door if I feel like it.”

“And he’ll do the same to you, Kitty,” Ruth said. “Nice arrangement.”

“Nice marriage,” Gloria said.

“That’s right,” Kitty said, satisfied. “It is a nice marriage. Not like you’d know anything about
that,
Gloria. And nobody’s kicking anybody out of anybody’s house.”

“We’ll see,” Gloria said, real low.

Mrs. Pommeroy had been a romp as a young girl, but she’d quit drinking when Mr. Pommeroy drowned. Gloria had never been a romp. Kitty had been a romp as a young girl, too, but she’d kept at it. She was a lifetime boozer, a grunt, a dozzler. Kitty Pommeroy was the example of what Mrs. Pommeroy might have become if she had stayed on the bottle. Kitty had lived off-island for a while, back when she was younger. She’d worked in a herring-canning factory for years and years and saved up all her money to buy a fast convertible. And she’d had sex with dozens of men—or so Gloria reported. Kitty had had
abortions,
Gloria said, which was why Kitty couldn’t have babies now. After the explosion in the canning factory, Kitty Pommeroy returned to Fort Niles. She took up with Len Thomas, another prime drunk, and the two of them had been beating each other up ever since. Ruth couldn’t stand her Uncle Len.

“I have an idea, Kitty,” Ruth said.

“Oh, yeah?”

“Why don’t you kill Uncle Len in his sleep some night?”

Gloria laughed, and Ruth continued, “Why don’t you club him to death, Kitty? I mean, before he does it to you. Get a jump on him.”

“Ruth!” Mrs. Pommeroy exclaimed, but she was also laughing.

“Why not, Kitty? Why not bludgeon him?”

“Shut up, Ruth. You don’t know anything.”

Kitty was sitting on the chair Ruth had brought in, lighting a cigarette, and Ruth went over and sat on her lap.

“Get off my goddamn lap, Ruth. You got a bony ass, just like your old man.”

“How do you know my old man has a bony ass?”

“Because I fucked him, stupid,” Kitty said.

Ruth laughed as if this was a big joke, but she had a chilling sense that it may have been true. She laughed to cover her discomfort, and she jumped off Kitty’s lap.

“Ruth Thomas,” Kitty said, “you don’t know a thing about this island anymore. You don’t live here anymore, so you have no right to say anything. You aren’t even
from
here.”

“Kitty!” Mrs. Pommeroy exclaimed. “That’s nasty!”

“Excuse me, Kitty, but I do so live here.”

“For a few months a year, Ruth. You live here like a tourist, Ruth.”

“I hardly think that’s my fault, Kitty.”

“That’s right,” Mrs. Pommeroy said. “It isn’t Ruth’s fault.”

“You think nothing is ever Ruth’s fault.”

“I think I wandered into the wrong house,” Ruth said. “I think I wandered into the house of hate today.”

“No, Ruth,” Mrs. Pommeroy said. “Don’t get upset. Kitty’s just teasing you.”

“I’m not upset,” said Ruth, who was getting upset. “I think it’s funny; that’s all.”

“I am
not
teasing anyone. You don’t know anything about this place anymore. You haven’t practically
been
here in four goddamn years. A lot changes around a place in four years, Ruth.”

“Yeah, especially a place like this,” Ruth said. “Big changes, everywhere I look.”

“Ruth didn’t want to go away,” Mrs. Pommeroy said. “Mr. Ellis sent her away to school. She didn’t have any choice, Kitty.”

“Exactly,” Ruth said. “I was banished.”

“That’s right,” Mrs. Pommeroy said, and went over to nudge Ruth. “She was banished! They took her away from us.”

“I wish a rich millionaire would banish me to some millionaire’s private school,” Kitty muttered.

“No, you don’t, Kitty. Trust me.”

“I wish a millionaire would have banished
me
to private school,” Gloria said, in a voice a little stronger than her sister had used.

“OK, Gloria,” Ruth said. “You might wish that. But Kitty doesn’t wish that.”

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Kitty barked. “What? I’m too stupid for school?”

“You would have been bored to death at that school. Gloria might have liked it, but you’d have hated it.”

“What’s
that
supposed to mean?” Gloria asked. “That I wouldn’t have been bored? Why not, Ruth? Because I’m boring? Are you calling me boring, Ruth?”

“Help,” Ruth said.

Kitty was still muttering that she was plenty goddamn smart for any goddamn school, and Gloria was staring Ruth down.

“Help me, Mrs. Pommeroy,” Ruth said, and Mrs. Pommeroy said, helpfully, “Ruth isn’t calling anyone dumb. She’s just saying that Gloria is a little bit smarter than Kitty.”

“Good,” said Gloria. “That’s right.”

“Oh, my God, save me,” Ruth said, and she ducked under the kitchen table as Kitty came at her from across the room. Kitty bent down and started whacking at Ruth’s head.