Strange Fits of Passion (17 page)

"You've got a baby there," he said. His voice was deep and slow, hesitant, but he didn't sound surprised. He had a bit of the Maine accent; it was in the lilt of the words and in his vowels. But he spoke more like Julia Strout, his cousin, than Willis Beak.

I looked down at Caroline.

"She was teething—I just discovered that—and I was trying to get her to stop crying, so I brought her out for a walk in the sling."

"Looks like it worked," he said.

"Yes," I said. I smiled. "I've taken the cottage there."

That seemed to register. He looked in the direction of the cottage.

"I heard someone was there, and I've seen your car."

We didn't tell each other our names, and we didn't shake hands. Why? I thought at the time it was merely economical, as if we imagined we would not know each other long, or at all.

"I've seen you," I said. "And your boat."

"I bring it into town if we get some weather. Otherwise, I leave it till mid-January. We sometimes get a thaw in early January."

"Oh."

"Cold tonight, though."

"But you went out today."

"I did. Didn't get much for my trouble."

"Willis Beale was delivering some fish when we saw you come in. He said he thought you were crazy to go out today."

He made a sound, a sort of laugh. "Willis," he said, as if I shouldn't pay much attention to Willis. But I already knew that.

He was glancing out to where he'd have seen his boat if there were any light left, and I was looking at the side of his face. Ravaged, I remember saying to myself, by the elements or by something else. What was it about the face? The eyes—they were old eyes, or were merely tired. Yet I was drawn to his face, its shape, the sense of calm around the mouth, or what I took to be calm in the dim light. His body was lean, but you felt its weight, as if it were anchored to the sand. Or its stillness. I had a feeling of stillness when I watched him, when he moved.

A breeze came up, blew a strand of hair across his brow.

"I have to put her to bed," I said, shielding Caroline's head with my arms.

"Getting late," he said.

He bent down to retrieve the toolbox from the dinghy. I walked away.

We didn't say, "So long now," or, "Nice meeting you."

I was halfway down the beach when I heard the motor of the truck start up. For a minute I was walking in its headlights, conscious of my back in the headlights, and then they were gone, veering up the lane. I stopped to watch the progress of the truck, the jostling of the light on the rough dirt, the left turn onto the coast road, the swath of light moving south toward town.

There was a rhythm to my days. It established itself before I had even become aware of it, an insistent pattern pushing at the edge of my consciousness.

Each day I woke with the low rumbling of a motor on the lane. There would be just a hint of gray beyond the window, the first sign of daybreak. I would listen as one or several trucks made their way down the sand, and after a time I began to be able to recognize the sounds of routine: a truck door shutting, the dragging of an object along a truck's metal bed, the small splash as a dinghy was put into the water, the creak of wood under a man's weight, the slap of a wake against a larger boat. And then the other motor would start up, grumble a bit as if it wanted to quit, and there would be the quiet whine out to silence as a boat moved away from the mooring.

Each day I made the high double bed. I smoothed the sheet, drew up the quilt. There was about these gestures a monastic purity, a return to the single self. If the baby was not awake yet, I would go down to the kitchen and make myself a cup of coffee and sit in my nightgown and sweater at the table and watch the water change its colors as the day began.

At first I was unable even to read. I had the books, but for days they lay unopened on the table. I wanted just to look.

It was winter, the dead of winter, when everything was dormant, and yet I was continually surprised by the constant mutability of the landscape. Sometimes the tide would go out so far that what sea was left was only puddles. At other times, when the tide was high, the spit in front of me would seem to have shrunk to a spindle.

I knew so little. For the first few days, I couldn't predict the tides at all; they were a constant surprise. I somehow always had it wrong. I could spot the gulls, but there were other birds I had never seen before. Sometimes I thought I saw seals, I was sure of this, and yet when I'd look again, the dark hump I'd thought was a seal was only a rock with the water lapping against it.

I had my chores, of course. I took to washing the clothes by hand, boiling the diapers and putting the wash out on a line behind the house. I liked the way our wash looked—the tiny undershirts and my jeans whipping in the breeze.

There was industry all around me, and perhaps I took my cue from that. How could I be idle when every morning men came to the point to mend their broken pots and traps or go out onto the water? First there would be the trucks, then the sound of a boat's engine or a curl of smoke from the fish house. There might be three trucks on the point, or four. From time to time, I'd hear a voice or a bit of music, sometimes a shout and then a laugh. And in the early afternoon, I'd see the green-and-white lobster boat come from behind a pine-darkened island. This would be a milestone in my day, a mark of punctuation, and I never failed to watch the man in the yellow slicker perform his returning ritual.

But when the black truck had gone back up the lane, the day would seem to lose its momentum. The rhythms I had heard and understood and counted on disappeared, and those hours until darkness were somewhat harder for me to negotiate. I tried to fill them with a drive or a walk or a nap. But I understood that these were gestures of defiance, skirmishes against empty time.

Eventually, in the second week, I established a routine that suited me, that didn't feel at odds with the world around me. I bought a few skeins of yarn and began to knit, a sweater for myself and one for Caroline. In the mornings, when the baby napped, I would knit. My mother had taught me how when I was a child, but I hadn't taken it up again since I had moved to New York. I felt it as a link to her, to something she had given me, translated now into something I could give my daughter. I liked also the sense of working with my hands—a kind of counterpoint to the men working around me.

I called my mother once a week on Saturdays, from the A&P in Machias. It was a habit we'd established, and I knew she'd be alarmed if she didn't hear from me. I didn't tell her where I was or what had happened. I pretended everything was fine.

Willis came by almost every day, on one pretext or another. He might have fish for me or want to warm up in the kitchen. Once he had whittled a small wooden figure for Caroline. Each day he took a seat at the kitchen table. He would look at my face. The bruises were healing, I knew, and didn't appear as raw as they had when I had first come to the cottage. But when he examined me, I would look away.

I almost always let him in, from politeness if nothing else, and he seldom stayed long. I think he felt proprietary toward me. He never asked again if we could "fool around," as he had put it that day, but the question always seemed to be in the air: If he was persistent enough, would I not change my mind?

You will perhaps wonder why I permitted these visits and I sometimes ask myself that too. I believe I didn' want to alienate Willis—or anyone else from the town, for that matter. Nor did I want to draw attention to myself any more than I had to. I think I hoped that Willis would grow tired of my lack of response and stop coming.

After Willis had left, I would feed the baby and then make a lunch for myself. Usually I'd done my chores by noontime. Then I'd go out with the baby. If the day was reasonable, I'd put Caroline into the sling, and we would walk to the end of the point and back, or south along the rocks. I had bought for myself, on one of my forays into Machias, a pair of sneakers so that I could make my way better along the stones. Sometimes I'd look for things: smooth mauve pebbles one day, pure white shells the next. There were jars and cups of stones and shells collecting on the sills in the cottage.

After a walk, I'd put Caroline into the car, and we would drive into St. Hilaire. I shopped every day at the store there, selecting in the early afternoon what I would have for supper. I learned to weather the baleful glass eye, the small talk, and the questions—even, after a time, to look forward to them, a tenuous thread of connection to the town.

Two days a week, when it was open, I'd go to the library. I'd begun finally to read, and once I'd begun, I became hungry for more books. I read in the evenings and long into the nights, sometimes devouring a book a day. I hadn't ever had this kind of time, it seemed to me, and the books were a luxury I'd rediscovered.

The library was a poor one, I suppose, as libraries go—there wasn't much new in it—but it had the classics, plenty to keep me occupied. I read Hardy, I remember, and Jack London, and Dickens and Virginia Woolf and Willa Cather.

I looked forward to walking into that small stone building. There was a woman there, a Mrs. Jewett, who balked at first when I requested a library card, since I was only renting, but finally, after much wheedling from me, she gave in. An extraordinary reticence on her part, now that I think of it, since I was almost always the only visitor she had, and I know that she looked forward to these visits.

Eventually I took to going around to Julia Strout's for a cup of tea. Yes, I was sometimes lonely—even if I savored my solitude: an odd paradox—and it was this loneliness, after a long spell of gray days in the second week, that prompted my first visit to the tall woman with the gapped teeth. I'd come out of Everett's store and seen Julia Strout's house across the common. I thought: I could just stop by on a pretext—the kitchen faucet leaked? I needed extra blankets?—but when I climbed her porch steps with the baby in my arms and knocked on her door, pretext left me, and I said, when she answered, her eyes momentarily startled but her face not giving away much of her surprise, that I'd just come by to say hello.

I had not been inside her house before and had the idea that it would look fussy, if homely, with knickknacks and knitted tea cozies. Did I think this only because she was of a different generation than myself? But her rooms were not fussy, were rather surprisingly spare and inviting. I remember most of all her floors, burnished dark hardwood floors that she later confessed to me she polished on her hands and knees. She had a ritual, she said, of rising at six every morning and spending her first two hours cleaning and polishing, so that she did not have to think about chores the rest of the day. Her kitchen was quite large, with white vertical boards on its walls and a gray-green slate floor. She invited me into her kitchen and said she'd make us a cup of tea. There was a fireplace and a large round oak table. She was wearing that afternoon, as she always wore, a pair of thick corduroy pants and a sweater. I don't think I ever saw her in a skirt the entire time I knew her. She had strong, muscular hands and forearms, which I noticed particularly when she brought the kettle to the stove. I remember, too, that there were a great many books in her kitchen—not cookbooks but novels, biographies, and histories—and I had the sense that she lived in this room, at least in wintertime.

I put Caroline on the floor and let her creep around, always keeping my eye on her and the fireplace. Julia put the screen across, and she, too, kept watch, once getting up and bringing Caroline, who had wandered too close to the hearth, back to the other side of the room.

"You settling in?" Julia Strout asked as she fetched two mugs from her cupboard.

"Yes," I said. "The cottage is wonderful. Very peaceful."

"You have any idea how long you're going to stay?"

It was an idle question—I'm not sure she really cared—but it took me by surprise, and I must have hesitated, or she must have seen the alarm on my face, for she quickly added, "It's yours for as long as you need it or want it. There's no one else signed up for it."

"Oh," I said.

"Milk or brandy?" she asked.

"What?"

"I prefer brandy on a cold afternoon," she said, "but suit yourself."

"Brandy," I said.

I watched her pour large dollops of the amber liquid into the mugs. Perhaps she wasn't as sensible as I'd imagined.

She brought the steaming mugs to the table. I took a sip from my own. The liquor was strong, and I could feel it hit my stomach, the warmth spreading.

She sat across from me, took a swallow of her tea.

"Are you going to be looking for work?" she asked.

I wasn't sure of the answer to this question. I looked at Caroline.

"I don't know," I said. "I suppose I'll have to eventually. But there doesn't seem to be much work available. I'm not sure what I'd do."

"You have a certain amount of money," she said carefully.

"Yes."

"And when that's gone...?"

"Yes."

"I see." She turned in her chair.

"I like living alone myself," she said, "though this house is ridiculously big for just one person. The cottage is nice, though."

"Very nice," I said.

"I've shut off most of the rooms here. Can't imagine living with anyone else now. Comes from too many years on my own."

I heard the hidden message—that I did not have to be afraid of living alone. I took another swallow of tea. Caroline was making cooing sounds in a corner, entranced by the carved and spindly legs of a tall wooden chair she'd found there.

"You're on the run, aren't you?" Julia Strout said suddenly and plainly. "You've run away."

At first I didn't speak.

"You don't have to tell me," she said. "It's none of my business."

"I had to," I said finally.

She stared for a time at her knee, which was crossed over her other leg. She wore work boots, laced up over the ankle.

"Not a good idea to be alone with a baby all the time," she said. "I can always take her for a couple of hours if you want a break."