A Day, a Night, Another Day, Summer: Stories

THEY TURN THEIR BODIES INTO SPEARS

I

On the first night they took her to the locals’ favorite for lobster, she got sick, and they consoled her home with excuses. It must have been the boat to the island and the egg-white scum that spilled from the claws when she cracked them. It must have been the distance she had traveled to visit. Imagine their surprise! Suddenly their daughter’s girl knocking open the screen door, carrying a string bag of oranges, a few clothes, and some tapes, no plans, but an appetite, it seemed, for what the island fetched up in traps. Lobster, her favorite, although the face she wore on their walk back home was cast down and waxy. Ellen put her to bed while he looked at the sky and thought how sad a girl could be at twenty.

He was eighty. He had lived long enough to see the children’s children shrivel into age, and he wanted to tell his granddaughter what it meant, really, to be eighty and alive.

“That old!” she gasped when in the morning they spoke.

“Yes, I am, and I know things. Be happy. Don’t wait.”

He struck up the fire and stayed squatted to watch it take; in the kitchen Ellen frittered at their breakfast. Eat, drink. This was a treat for them, Ellen was saying; it was not every day their granddaughter visited, and they were happy to see her. Happy again, the word sprung wild as the islands regal wagging, fields of weedy purples and golds, red geraniums against the chalky houses. Their umpteenth summer here alone, his and Ellen's, and they woke to the weather, pleasure bent.

Old folks’ pleasure, maybe; maybe that was what the girl would call it. Seed-dry and slow — too many books, no TV; birds their only entertainment. Old folks they were with old folks’ ways. The temperature’s night plummet meant it was cold when they awoke, and he often made a fire.

He had been laying kindling when the girl scuffed in, wearing a blanket — no robe — next morning.

“Charlotte!” Ellen said. “Aren’t you cold?”

No, thank you, yes, thank you, no was his granddaughter speaking — the darling! Look at the bits of cloth she wore when she was dressed. No breasts. Jutted movement, bones — her bones, Charlotte’s — were handles, too visible. She had what so many girls had that made them turn their bodies into spears. Wing blades and wrist bones, bones, bones, a girl distinctly outlined, her eyes were fixed on the water.

“I haven’t been here in such a long time,” she said.

He reminded her of what she needed to know if she should go out in the boat. The cove. The lily pond. The ledge where the eagles nested.

They kept the house door unlocked.

“Crime is everywhere, Poppie. Even here,” she said, but he laughed.

He said, “You don’t need to drive anywhere, but I trust you with the car.” He said this although he wasn’t sure. Never had he seen the girl off but he thought she would fail. This girl, he thought, was so much like his daughter, and he watched as she swayed down the path swapping branches. Was she talking to herself?

II

Charlotte said her mother always expected to see a prettier daughter. This was on the porch, when they sat, the three of them, in the morning and watched the waves in their halfhearted slash against the shore.

Ellen said, “You mustn’t listen to your mother. She doesn’t know what she is saying.”

“I know,” Charlotte said. “Mom’s just being mean.”

“She is,” Ellen said and she put her arms around the girl and told her how pretty she was and how much loved.

Charlotte, cheered, told stories about her mother. “Mother says she is a very good camper.” Charlotte made a sound, a little like a laugh, but then, it seemed, she saw what he saw and, made afraid, turned quiet.

III

He thought umpteen years when he calculated time on the island with only his wife, but in total, as a family, it was fifty years — hardly umpteen — summer after summer in the cranky rusticator, brambled, slanted, bleached. Dishes of opened mussel shells blued the bathroom vanities, stones from the beach held back books. Faded top sheets in sea-glass colors — green, blue, yellow, pink — lifted in the wind unanchored by the blankets Ellen kept in chests. After breakfast every morning Ellen opened the bedroom windows wide to the sea and aired the house even as he nudged the fire downstairs. Years with and without a daughter. Without a daughter had been better.

“Your grandmother and I are here to be happy,” he said when Ellen was gone with her basket and shears. He said, “Try to be happy yourself while you’re here,” and he walked off the porch toward the water. If his knees could be oiled, he thought, he might reach the shore faster.

IV

“This is serious,” Charlotte said, and she lolled on the dock with him and talked about school and her father and the Wilderness Defense and her father (again) and the criminal amounts of money made on Wall Street. “I mean I’m glad for Daddy and all, but there are too many poor people in the country.”

“Swim!” he said. “The water is not so cold.”

V

Lunch, and he told the girl to eat her pickle before he did. What he loved about the girl were her girlish ways. How she broke up a muffin to find the berries and pelleted the cakey crumbs to feed the chickadees, the way she called to all living things in a clear voice, he loved this much about her, and the way she licked her lips or twisted her hair when she was thinking. Her far-off face when she was thinking, her ardent, flushed face. The shallow pan of breastbone, her close, pretty ear. Darling girl, his darling, he confused her sometimes with his daughter.

Ellen was saying, “They have said they will call us when they think we can visit your mother.”

He wished his granddaughter had gone somewhere else to rest. He wanted no more stories about his daughter. He was too old. Old, sick, set back by the same news that his daughter was not happy.

“That’s the least of it,” Ellen said.

“I was tired last night, Poppie, if that’s what you mean. I don’t get sick often.”

He asked, “So why don’t you eat instead of picking?” How he must look to her — beaked, lidded, wattled, a moody old man with shames and losses, very few friends, no hobbies. Crabbed, sullen, closed off, failed. All he had done was make money, money, money, enough to buy a summerhouse when he was yet young and then old, old for a long time, long enough for his daughter to squander lots of it — money.

He said, “You’d do well to think of what’s happened to her.” He was about to say more when Charlotte began to cry.

VI

How he had found his bedroom, he could not remember, but the sun through the trees stippled the blanket that covered him, and he knew, at least, that it was late afternoon, the bay calmed, the water too blue and sun scratched to look at. He knew he had slept and that the shrill part of the day was over; the house was very quiet. The quiet of the wholly present tense, the luxurious absence of melancholy, ire, and whatever other meanness switched him through the house, all was easy and now. Now and now and now. He stepped onto the porch with a dish of peanuts and his drink, his glasses, his book. Hearts ease at dusk, the sky orange edged at first, then “Ellen!” he was calling. “You’re missing this. Come look!” But she was already just behind him, humming approvingly at the plummy clouds.

But here she comes, blooded with sunset, his daughter and his granddaughter. His granddaughter saying, “It’s all right, Poppie. There’s no reason to be sad.”

“Jimmy,” Ellen said, “Charlotte is asking you a question,” and she was shaking him back to the porch and the girl who was grown.

His daughter is combing with her fingers what is left of her hair. Her face is flat against a screen. She is talking but he doesn’t know about what.

See the candles, the cake.

Balloons, brushed against, snap, and her fine hair stands on end, and her black patent leather shoes make staticky cracks, and a little girl cries, “They bite!”

The sunburn that had put him to sleep woke him to his wife asking, “Are you cold, dear?” saying, “Charlotte, darling, get Poppie his jacket, will you?”

“I’m not hungry,” he said. “I feel sick.”

VII

Ellen brought him beef broth and would gladly have sat on the next bed watching if he hadn’t said, “Go on, go on, go on,” and when Ellen asked again “Are you sure…?” he frowned at her until the door shut softly and she was gone.

He slept. His dreams closed abruptly, and he woke at spooky no-man’s-hours and stayed awake until the shape he knew for his wife became his wife. The room cohered. The table, the dresser, the lamp, the rug seemed no longer some dead man’s effects, and he stood, whole and unencumbered, watching the glaucous outdoor colors deepen. A windless hour and he could hear, or thought he could hear, the gurgle of low-tide muck, its stinky, hissing bounty.

He had had a daughter once. She picked the shore to fill glass globes with decorative reminders of the sea. Ever a brooder, weeping over the unretrievable summer, she let the anger rise in her, like tide, until it brimmed and spilled and ended in showy injuries, smashing the glass globes against the bathroom tiles and walking through the house in bloody feet.

The morning yellowed and he was well again and picked his way to the granite shelf that in the light had dried. Here he sat, for a long time sat, proudly agile, an old, old man — eighty! — in only a flannel robe, thin pajamas, and boiled wool slippers, all gifts his wife insisted on. “Wear them, Jimmy, or you’ll catch your death of cold!”

“Poppie!”

Charlotte, he saw, was zigzagging toward him, happy. “Poppie! Granmum says to come in and get warm.”

VIII

“Ellen, Ellen, Ellen, for God’s sake, please!” He was looking in the bird book for what had flown overhead.

He wouldn’t look at Ellen and he turned away from her in his chair, away from Charlotte, too. The girl took up so much room. “You’ve been on the phone for hours, Charlotte!” he said. Her cheerful response was unwelcome.

“Poppie!” she said and then piping sounds into the phone.

“Get off the phone, Charlotte. Now,” he said and he was standing. He was looking right at her and she was smiling.

She hung up the phone and waved a notepad and said, “This is my trip to Boston, Granmum. I’ll leave it here for now.”

He knew the kind of Kleenex crud a crying girl left behind. Notepads and numbers on notepads, numbers turned fat with writing over and over them, and over names and other numbers, cars, flights, addresses. He had found such wreckage before and called to his wife, “What is this?”