North Haven Page 16

  Libby’s fingernails were black with dirt, the lines in her knuckles too, exaggerating the topography of her hands. A worm hung from the side of a small hole her weeding had created. She pulled it from the soil and placed it under the shady fronds of the day lilies she’d planted the year before.

  “What about you, Dan? You want kids someday?”

  “Only if I can sell them.” Feeling anything, she thought, must be hard for him. Has he loved anyone?

  Then there had been Riley. Riley with hair like August, dry, gold, and warm. She had loved Riley. Libby had brought her to the house one summer. Riley, who she loved so much her mother saw it in fifteen minutes, and saw her daughter wanting something no one should want. With Riley there had been something. She was the one. The one that comes back in your dreams, that you are afraid to see, but want to more than anything.

  Riley was married, but wanted to see something. To try something that had been gnawing at her for years. Like a dying woman wanting to see Paris, Riley wanted to fuck a woman. They had started there. Just fucking. It began as the fifty-cent tour of Paris, a map and a croissant, just that.

  It was in the ladies’ room at the Ritz café, of all places, after tea. Libby had chosen the swank spot on Newbury Street because they would never run into anyone they knew there. Tea had seemed safe, a place to put things on the table, a wedding ring beside a miniature berry torte, a steaming teacup, a slip of milk, the slow turn of the spoon. Libby’s slim ladies’ watch made of gold links keeping an eye on the time; Riley had to beat her husband home. Forty more minutes still. Fingertips touched. The top of a foot, the back of an ankle. The check paid while they folded and refolded their napkins. Leaving behind a good tip and two linen swans. Libby knew how to do that.

  A week later in their tour of Paris, they had moved from the double-decker bus tours, a straightforward overview, to lingering afternoons getting lost in the Louvre. They were lost in Libby’s bed. Finally they planned the trip to Maine. They were going to play house in a flat on the Left Bank; for a whole week they were going to pretend to be French.

  But after fifteen minutes with Libby’s mother they were not in Paris. They were on the cold green waters of the thoroughfare, and Paris was far away, a heat wave killing hundreds.

  The sun came through her straw hat in thin points. This hat had been their mother’s. The light fell across Libby’s face, and she could see the shadows move over the bridge of her nose; when she leaned forward, they moved over her arms, her gloved hands. She wondered if the sight of her in this hat, in this flower bed, was making Danny sad. He sat back in the chair, legs out straight, propped on the low rail, eyes closed, the sun bringing out his freckles. There was nothing for her to point to, nothing that he said. Only his weight. And the registrar’s office. It was in the air around him, like walking into an empty room and knowing someone had just blown out a match or a candle, the trace of sulfur or tallow in the air. Here on the open portion of the porch, between the two covered areas, the sun was hot. He picked at something on the palm of his hand. She tapped the bottom of his foot with the spade, leaving a dark arrow of mud.

  “Got a splinter?” said Libby. This house loves to leave pieces of itself under your skin.

  “What? No, it’s nothing.”

  “So, no girls I should know about? No one at school?” Or out of school. A possibility she hadn’t even considered. Maybe this wasn’t about their dead mother, the hat, the house. Maybe he’s heartbroken.

  “There are so many I can’t keep ’em straight,” said Danny, not opening his eyes.

  Maybe not. Libby wondered if he was this way with Gwen, with women in general. No wonder, no girls. Too bad.

  Libby stood up, and as she walked the tops of her tall rubber boots tipped from side to side like ringing bells, like green channel markers. She stepped over the lilies and the worm and into the aggressively bright patch of marigolds. Her mother had been trying to eradicate them for years now; Libby didn’t know why. But if the marigolds posed some unknown threat, she would pick up the battle where her mother had left off. They smelled sour and left pollen tangled on the down of her arm.

  Women were beautiful. Worth the time and effort. Men, with all their straight lines, were as intimate as an empty bookcase, everything out in the open. Women were curves and secrets and delicious melodies. As she walked, Patricia made a magical song, a downbeat, a quarter note, not so much bouncy as fluid. And breasts. That was the thing that made Libby feel sorry for gay men, no breasts anywhere. Not that she brought much to the table, breast-wise. But Carmen, Riley, and then Patricia brought forth cornucopias, a great feast set forth on the silver tray of lace and underwire, or better still in fresh sheets. This was something good, and kept her from pursuing the one or two men who asked her out, who called her in that desperate way men have when they can’t see why they are being denied what they want.

  “Where’s your lady, anyway?” Danny asked, head rolled to one side so that his long hair shaded his face, one eye closed under the awning of hair, the other squinted at her. She kept digging, trying to find the edge of the fan of marigold roots.

  “She had to work, couldn’t get away.”

  Libby knew Danny didn’t need to hear the story, to hear about another person he might lose from his life. Patricia was becoming more and more a part of things. A place for her at birthday dinners, at brunch. It wasn’t anything she had planned.

  Patricia had always flowed like a river, sweeping Libby right along with her, in a friendly way.

  Patricia wanted to move in, flood her small apartment with stones and reeds and frogs, fill every available drawer, bring drawers of her own. And so Libby found herself drowning. She loved Patricia in a way that felt like drowning. Or the idea of losing her, in an effort to preserve some arbitrary order in her apartment, felt like drowning. And yet bringing her in, welcoming her, felt just as bad.

  Libby’s love for Patricia felt barely containable. She looked at this woman and wanted to kiss her shoulder, run the back of a finger down her temple, slide her ponytail between the ring of her thumb and forefinger. Libby loved that Patricia diffused arguments with friends, coworkers, even school parents with the simple words, “Well, I am from Spain.” Mostly she meant, “Your stupid American customs are unimportant to me,” but people interpreted it as, “You’re the expert here, and I am simply a visitor.” Libby loved that during their last faculty meeting she and Patricia had ended up giving a spontaneous presentation on the Reggio Emilia approach. Libby lobbed out statistics about student-led learning, while Patricia filled the whiteboard with a drawing of a plant-filled classroom lined with windows. It was essentially a continuation of a conversation they had started the night before. It had begun as a diagnosis/if-I-ran-the-zoo prescription for their favorite student, a kindergartener, who asked questions like “How did mermaids evolve?” and whose parents believed in the educational properties of first-person shooter games.

  “You know we’d love to have her up here? Right, Bibs?” Danny asked. He had both hands up now, an impromptu visor. “That we’re cool with that?” He uncrossed his legs and scraped the mud from the bottom of his foot on the railing. Libby had the urge to tell him to rinse it with the hose, not to scrub his feet on the railing. But she knew this was the hat talking, so she kept her mouth shut.

  “Not everyone, I bet.”

  But she wasn’t just talking about Tom. She was glad Patricia hadn’t come, that she could sit in the dirt and postpone her decision, put it out of her mind.

  “The only thing Tom cares about up here is if the Whaler’s working. Keep her out of that boat, and you won’t have a problem.”

  Danny didn’t quite understand. He was in a different world from Libby or Gwen or Tom. By the time he was in high school there was the internet and cell phones, gay kids out at school. Then again, the summer he graduated, their father had died. Modern conveniences, technology, changing political climates—none of these could stop death. After their father’s death,
when Libby and Danny leaned against their mother and watched his ashes go into the sea, the ten years between them was nothing. The rest of the time, it was an ocean between them.

  “Tom has issues with more than just the boat,” she said. The house, her, lobsters, gays, Gwen, Medicare, mandated retirement. Now, with the offer, he had 3.1 million new opinions, new reasons to support his way of thinking. His politics and his life were all tangled together. She tried to keep things far neater.

  Though maybe that worked better in theory. She sat next to a clump of marigolds, slowly digging around their roots. Here she was battling Scarlet’s floral demons. Maybe she should do the opposite, plant marigolds all over their land. Invite the demons in. But she kept pulling them up. Just like she kept coming to family dinners, to Christmases, to the Fourth of July weeks up here. But those lines were much easier to draw in the rest of her life.

  Libby wasn’t out at the school where she worked. The distance between her life with women and the life everyone assumed she had was vast and hazy, a mountainous region enveloped in low clouds. Setting up her classroom in the mornings, she thought, I’m sure there are men out there that I could find attractive; I just haven’t met them yet.

  Patricia and Libby were careful at school. They would never leave together, never arrive together. Having met Patricia at work, having no way to reliably separate her two sides, gave Libby headaches, which often left her nauseated in the ladies’ room after breakfast. She laughed to think that, if she slept with men, she would’ve thought she was pregnant.

  Patricia was out at work. Unlike Libby, she saw no reason to hide. Being an administrator, rather than a teacher working with the kids, gave her a certain freedom. Patricia’s sexual preference, then, was public knowledge, like her love of cold apples or strong black iced tea. Some people knew, some didn’t. She never made any kind of announcement, and neither did she hide it. If the subject of spouses came up in conversation, if she needed to use a pronoun, then she did. There was no pause or pressure and no arousing curiosity or suspicion. She just was.

  This ease infuriated Libby; Libby saw herself as less of a lesbian than Patricia, and therefore better able to fit into mainstream culture. So why was it Libby who found herself skulking around with secrets, unable to relax? Patricia would laugh and tell her that no one who loved to fuck the way Libby did was part of mainstream culture, except maybe men. Libby wondered if that wasn’t an excellent reason to start sleeping with them. They, that great army of libido, liked sex the way she did, liked women the way she did. Common interests. This would’ve made her mother happy.

  The hat had a spray of fake lilacs on it; this was unlike her mother. It must have been a gift. Libby liked them, though, the fake flowers. She took off the hat and tucked a few tiger lilies beside the plastic lilacs in the hatband. The hat was becoming hers now, she thought, the dirt smudge now darker on the right, instead of the left side of the brim. Her mother had been left-handed.

  Suddenly she wanted to cry. To take her baby brother in her arms and cry into his long, unwashed hair. To tell him that she had fed him, put him down for naps as a baby. He knew this, she had told him before. She was sure he had grown up knowing that she, more than the others, took care of him. And here he was, like a salamander on a rock, gray on gray. He needed to be brought back from wherever he had been, wherever he left himself when he wasn’t at school. There would be no watchband secrets with this one.

  She didn’t need a baby. The boy, the house, she raised them. Even at ten, she raised them. She didn’t want to play house with Patricia. She knew how those games ended.

  Though her parents were eventually happy together, she had the inexplicable feeling that living with someone, being married to them, was essentially a terrible mistake. She remembered her early childhood. Before Danny was born her parents were, as she now understood, simply living out the drama of a teenage relationship with an audience of their own making. Those scenes should’ve been set behind bleachers and in detention halls, the tears, the bitter fights, the overacted violence.

  She understood them as ridiculous, in part, because of Gwen. Gwen had always, when their parents wept amid the ashes of broken china, made fun of them and whisked her away to a game or a secret place or some other protected zone. Gwen’s catalog of hidden spots was inexhaustible, in part because their parents let them go, wanting only each other, only to bask in another perfectly tragic moment between themselves.

  Libby did not want to live out her own Noël Coward play. She wanted what they had later, but since it seemed to take a new baby to achieve that, it was beyond her, a distant and dreamlike place, a place where you could breathe underwater. But hadn’t she tried that once, breathing underwater? It hadn’t worked.

  She didn’t want babies. She had her students, her fifteen little children who changed each year. With them she had all the attachment, she imagined, of a parent. But at the end of a day she could zip them into jackets, tie them into shoes, send them home to their parents, and have a deep, heavy, sloshing glass of wine. This was plenty of parenthood for her. She’d much rather have a dog. And so that was her plan, to have the lesbian fantasy of a wife who lived in the house just next door with the dog they shared, a Newfoundland, preferably, named Roscoe.

  Danny stood up and stretched.

  “Want a beer? It’s four thirty.” Meaning that it was a perfectly acceptable time for her to start drinking. Though when they were there, on vacation, really it was acceptable to drink anytime, as long as the drink was appropriate: Bloody Marys with breakfast, beers with lunch, beers as pre-cocktails, cocktails with hors d’oeuvres, wine with dinner, and port or whiskey after dinner. Not that you availed yourself of all these options, but the ingredients were on hand just in case.

  “No, I’m gonna clean up for cocktails and have a real drink. Thanks, though.”

  He walked out of the sun and into the shadow of the porch roof, and from the open screened door he turned. “Nice hat,” he called back. She knew he meant it.

  PART III

  SEVENTEEN

  ANOTHER SUMMER

  Their mother knows. She already knows, or thinks she does. Or she doesn’t want to. What she knows is this: there is someone. But having never seen this someone or even evidence of them, it is an internal certainty. It is a certainty best dismissed, tossed out alongside the remnants of a broken wineglass, along with the spent mothballs. There is no purpose to it, to the speculation. When sweeping the stairs under the moose head, she pauses and sits on the landing, the dustpan hanging from her hand; she thinks of the broken glass, of the family trips of which he opted out. She thinks of their girls, too young, and the boy, maybe not.

  She wonders what she must look like, this other woman who loves her husband. It’s not jealousy but a morbid curiosity. She walks down the long dim back hall, the side door a hopeful bright spot at its end. Past Tom’s room, the hallway smells of soil, camphor, the slick sharpness of kerosene, the metallic tang of oil on tools. This woman is her reflection or opposite. This woman is her in another space. The place where she didn’t marry the first man she loved, preserving herself like an Egyptian queen in gauzy dressings. Their wedding night came and went, she entombed in crisp white sheets in an epic bed at the Ritz-Carlton, while he stayed at the bar. Neither of them knew where to begin; it took time to find the starting line. Having protected her virginity like a gem hidden in the center of a temple, having been told again and again of its value, her only value, it seemed strange just to toss it away.

  The side screen door, only used for firewood trips and her own flinging of dust from a pan, creaks on hinges prickled with rust. She steps out into a patch of sun that seems to shine perpetually on that slim step.

  The two of them didn’t stay that way. He woke his queen, poured oil upon her forehead, and fed her grape leaves and thick liquor flecked with gold. And in the dingy top floor of a triple-decker they found, she thought, the appetite of gods, a divine devouring. Even here at this house, most es
pecially here, with their first asleep alone in the nursery, they made the second on the front porch at sunset, made the wicker divan weep softly. An errant heel kicked a tumbler from the rail; it smashed on a rock that was covered at one end by lichen. She thinks of that other glass, shards found long ago, tossed along the edge of the wood at the side of the house. He doesn’t drink wine.

  Three days later she has come back early from a trip to the mainland for supplies. She managed to catch a ride on the mail boat. Ned, their postman, thought her too pathetic standing in the parking lot at the ferry depot in her dirt-smeared gardening hat, a flat of tomato seedlings wilting next to a deflated paper bag from the pharmacy. With her seedlings tucked carefully in the hold, they flew past the ferry, lumbering out to open ocean like a tired dog to the food dish. From there Remy met her at the landing and drove her back in his truck.

  She pulls the flat from the bed of Remy’s truck. She worries that the blazing-hot black ribs of the truck bed have cooked her little seedlings, which are looking sorrier than ever. He doesn’t get out, simply holds a hand out the driver-side window before reversing up to the pump house and turning around in a chorus of thumps and scratching branches. She wonders how many decades must pass before he calls her Scarlet.

  Neither of them mentioned the car parked up the road. A little thing, Japanese, that shouldn’t even be allowed on a road like theirs, all hardscrabble and gullies. It is another wineglass, she thinks. The same, she hopes. She leaves the seedlings under the oak that dapples the meadow with its shadow and tosses her hat beside them. She wishes she were not a windblown mess. The sweat of a day on the mainland makes her shirt cling to her, her hair sticky with salt from the spray of the crossing; she had to sit on her hat to keep it from blowing away. Normally in this state she would drop everything on the back porch and walk through the house, leaving a trail of clothes, and head down to the dock naked, a treat for the lobstermen. Or this is something she did once, and she likes to think that is who she is, who she is when no one is home.