Compass Rose (48 page)

“It wouldn’t fit in my pocket, so I stuck it under my belt. Just a sec. It slipped down some.” He put his hand in. “Damn, it’s in there tight.” He undid his belt buckle and tried again. “Wait. It’s gone down the leg.” He stood on one foot and raised the other. “It’s way in there.” He dropped his pants below his knees. “Okay, there she is.” He held it out with one hand, clutched his pants with another. She didn’t want to take it; it would be accepting that version of herself. But he wasn’t going to be able to pull his pants up unless she took
it. On the other hand, she got some satisfaction from seeing him hobbled.

Walt waggled the book. The glossy cover—the caricature of her as an Amazon rippling with sexual muscle and witchery—blurred in the pale available light. She could take it and be done with it.

Walt was looking over her shoulder. He said, “Hey, Rose. Didn’t mean to wake you up.”

“I’m not Rose,” Sally said. “Who are you? Oh, Walt. What are you doing here? And pull up your pants.”

“I’m just bringing Elsie her book. It got stuck—”

“That book,” Sally said. “You’ve caused quite enough trouble with that book. In the middle of Jack’s speech. It’s been a very trying evening, and I have to say part of it has been your fault. All those lewd jokes.”

“That was Phoebe,” Walt said.

“Don’t quibble. It’s very late. Just take your book and your motorcycle and leave.”

Walt’s head was down. Elsie was about to feel sorry for him, but he was just tucking the book under his chin while he buckled his belt. “Relax, I’m not hanging around. But it’s Elsie’s book.” He handed it to her. He wheeled his motorcycle to the steep part of the driveway, jumped on, and rolled away silently.

“I never liked him,” Sally said. “I never liked him, and I never trusted him. My God, Elsie! What happened to your dress? He didn’t try anything, did he?”

“No. That was me. I yanked the zipper off. Down by the pond.”

Somewhere near the bottom of the hill Walt’s motorcycle coughed twice and then revved.

Sally said, “I’m getting foggy. Must be that pill.”

The motorcycle faded away.

Elsie went in with Sally and sat by the bed. Sally said, “You’ll listen for the phone?”

“Yes. You can go to sleep. I can hear the phone out here. It’ll be all right.”

She went down to the pond to get her shoes and the rest of her clothes. A relief to be alone. She’d been holding on to herself all night.

She slipped her dress off. The air on her body was cool. She stuck out her right leg. It looked good, but everything looked good in this soft night glow. How long would she look good?

A cooler puff of air. The wind was backing to the southeast. Fog before long.

Sally was three years older and looked good. Of course, Sally was the pretty one. Pretty dresser, too. But even in Rose’s pajamas and getting on her high horse with Walt, she looked good.

A first wisp of fog in the treetops.

In two years Rose would go away to college. May dreaded it.

She waded in up to her knees. A frog, then another and another, plopped into the water. She pushed in, gave a little frog kick, and glided, steering herself with her trailing hands. Just another frog in the pond. Did a frog take pleasure in the slip of water along its skin? She turned onto her back and floated. May dreaded Rose’s leaving, but unless Rose went far away, easy enough for a mother to show up. They had days for that sort of thing. And here with the house to herself, on a day when Dick came back to port, she could offer this freshwater pond as a comfort, let him wash away the salt.

Unnatural mother to wish her child gone.

Now that she was floating quietly, the frogs were back on the bank or on their lily pads, croaking in chorus from one side of the pond to the other. The noise used to annoy Mary Scanlon. She said she got over it by imagining one side was saying, “Frog’s legs! Frog’s legs!” and the other answering “Supper! Supper!” A cook’s-eye view of nature.

The fog was coming on, shrouding the oval of sky over the pond.

And then Mary had made her claim on Rose, luring her into their duets. Did Mary know how they closed her off? That her own singing was no better than the two-note croaking all around her. Now that it was getting darker, it seemed louder.

Be fair, be fair. Mary’s singing lessons had been the making of Rose. And if Mary laid claim to part of Rose, she’d earned it. Perhaps there was no such thing as purely unselfish giving. Here she was herself in the pond, in the land that Miss Perry had given her. And it was Miss Perry’s making a pet of her that started her own immersion in nature … She remembered Miss Perry’s coming to a halt on one
of their walks in the woods. Miss Perry had turned to her and said, “Do we stand outside of nature, or do we stand inside it? Is nature everything
but
us? Or is it simply everything?” Miss Perry peered at her and added, “I don’t expect an answer. It’s an unanswerable question.” But Miss Perry went on asking it. She’d given a little sideways hop with both feet. “Outside?” Hop. “Inside?” Hop.

It must have been years ago. Not many hops in Miss Perry after that. And finally Miss Perry had to cling to Elsie’s arms to lower herself onto the toilet seat.

All right, then—whether calculated or not, there was an undertow to giving. She herself wasn’t exempt. She had used her dutifulness to Miss Perry as a counterweight of goodness, not just in the balance of her own conscience but in hoping that Dick would weigh it in her favor.

The fog had settled, settled in so low and thick she couldn’t see it as fog. She held up her hand to see if she could feel the drift of wind. Nothing. Too many trees. She had an instant of panic, then laughed at herself. She was in her own little pond. She was a stone’s throw from her house. She dog-paddled toward shore, feeling for the bottom. She crawled onto the bank, stood up, and took small shuffling steps, hoping to run into her shoes or clothes. Maybe she’d left them farther from the bank. She took a sideways step and then inched forward. Turned and tried the other way. Nothing. All right—leave them till morning.

The frogs had stopped. Now she couldn’t tell where the pond was. She closed her eyes, tried to imagine where she stood. It only made her dizzy. She was breathing too fast, little shallow breaths. She made herself breathe deeply. She managed to calm her panic but then imagined everyone was laughing at her—Warden of the Great Swamp, Free Woman of the Wilderness. Everyone could see her standing there, ridiculous and naked.

The frogs began to croak again. At first the noise was everywhere. Then she heard the last half of a croak, a frog who ended late. She stuck her arm out toward it, the other arm away from it. Think slowly. Follow that arm away from the pond. The house is up. Away and then up.

She turned herself carefully and took a step. She jumped when something touched her leg. It stung her shin. She jerked sideways and fell. Thorns. She was lying on thorns. She saw red dots in front of her eyes as if the pricks and scratches were sending signals into the dark. The pain was fresh for a moment. It eased a little when she lay still. She was on her side. She pushed herself up to her knees. The frogs began to croak again. Had she stopped them by crying out when she fell? Or had being pricked and scratched blotted her hearing?

Stupid, stupid girl. She was in the bullbriars on the wrong side of the pond. How had she got so turned around?

With her finger she found a tendril across her shoulder, plucked it off, and held it away from her as she stood up. Another tendril scratched the side of her thigh. She slowly turned toward the frog noise, groped with her free hand, hit another branch of thorns. She stood still, holding briar shoots in each hand. Was it Mr. Salviatti who’d called this down on her? Him and his Saint Francis, who threw himself into a thornbush to rid himself of lust. Unfair. Yes, she’d gone to Dick and taken him by surprise. Unfair to call that lust. It was years of loving him that carried her, not lust. And when she saw Dick and Rose in Rose’s skiff she’d tipped her balance toward his wish, toward his grace with Rose.

She inched her fingers down the branch in front of her and bent it until it broke. She floated her hand ahead of her, touched another shoot. How many between her and the pond? She shivered, part panic, part cold fog.

Walt in the tower room. She’d let the ladder rungs rattle down before his motorcycle even stopped ticking with heat. Walt and his motorcycle, a prick on wheels. She’d fainted in Captain Teixeira’s radio shack from shock but from shame as well. All right then, thorns for that. She took a step toward the pond, scratched her legs, her arms that she held crossed in front of her. She kicked her legs free, tripped and fell forward, her knees on the bank, her hands sliding into the water.

She caught her breath, pulled herself into the water. The scratches stung. To make sure she was going straight across she measured the
depth—waist deep, shoulder deep—and dog-paddled until her hands touched bottom. She clambered out. She felt the comfort of grass on her palms and knees. She got to her feet, took two, three, four uncertain steps. She could tell she was going uphill only because her calf muscles stretched. She put her hands out. She touched the wall. She trailed her hand along it, around the southwest corner. A steeper bit up to the northwest corner. Slower now, one hand on the wall, moving her feet carefully until they found the doorstep. She sat down.

She couldn’t go inside, not yet. Her panic had shrunk her. Inside she would stay pressed into herself. She realized she was rocking forward and backward. She filled her lungs several times until she could sit still.

She touched her legs. She couldn’t tell if she was bleeding. Of course she couldn’t. She was still wet from the pond, still a little stupid.

She lifted her head as if she saw or heard something. It was here, exactly here on this doorstep, where she’d been nursing baby Rose when Dick had got out of Eddie’s truck, when he’d stood awkwardly in front of her and said, “Here we are,” and waved his hand to take in South County from Narragansett to Westerly. Poor man, seeing her with baby Rose, Rose who’d fallen out of the sky. He hadn’t known what to say. Even with Rose in her arms and her breasts full of milk, she should have made room to consider what she’d done to his life.

And then how slow she’d been when they were lying under the evening star in Eddie’s backyard and he’d said, “We live in South County.” She’d kept on trying to say, “We live in nature,” while he was working his way to saying, “I’m sort of an awkward father.”

She’d tried to think it might be no more than one of his moody turns, that she’d descended on him so fiercely that he had to push back to get his balance. She was wrong. It was too tightly woven and finished, as hard as one of his cable splices. She understood and she didn’t understand. It was like the word
cleave
—to split, to hold together.

At least she was a desire he was forbidding himself, a desire strong enough to need forbidding.

Now she would forbid it, too, for him and Rose.

Would it be harder when Rose went off to college? For an instant she saw herself alone in her house, but she veered off to see Rose lugging a duffel bag into her dorm room, meeting a roommate. Oh, Rose, you’ll have to go through your story all over again. You’ll be on your own, no Mary Scanlon crooning songs into your ear, no May doting on you, no father to build you a skiff.

And when you come back, will you be changed?

Elsie imagined Rose in front of the house. A car door closed. Rose was standing next to someone from her new life. Rose said, “This is where I grew up.”

What? Elsie sifted Rose’s voice out of the fog again. How did Rose say it? Over her shoulder? And then tilt her head and point with her chin? What? That’s it, Rose? That’s your little nod to where you were everybody’s darling?

No. She would be the Rose who smoothed the back of Captain Teixeira’s black suit coat before they went into the graveyard to bury Miss Perry. She would be the Rose who said to Captain Teixeira and her, “You two should go in together.” When Captain Teixeira told Rose what the priest would say—“The earth and the sea shall give up their dead”—Rose nodded once and touched his arm, another womanly gesture. Elsie herself had needed that warning; perhaps he’d had her in mind, too. What would women do without the comfort of old broad-backed men?

She hugged her knees. She felt the cold fog on her back, cold breath of the sea. She’d been conjuring little ghosts out of it, snippets of Rose and everyone around Rose; she’d been rattling Miss Perry’s bones … as if the fog were taking part in her story. Too big for a story, it was part of the same thing over and over, the sun heating the surface of the ocean, vapor rising into clouds and fog, blowing over the land, turning back into water and running back into the sea, carrying bits of earth, the earth made of cracked and crumbled rock and the dead matter of everything once so busily alive.

She let go of her knees and stood up. She smacked the sides of her legs to warm them. She needed some of her old sassiness, too. Okay—here’s an answer to Miss Perry’s unanswerable question, “Do
we stand inside nature or outside it?” In the end, inside it. But not yet.

She went back inside. She looked out the big south window. The fog was still thick, but in the east a faint gray light was pushing into it. All the people who’d come to her in her vigil were asleep, asleep in their houses along this bit of coast between the hills and the sea. Rose, Dick and May, Mary Scanlon and JB, the Tran family, old Mr. Salviatti, and even older Captain Teixeira.

Here we are. We live in South County.

The chief acknowledgment is to Anthony Winner, who gave careful criticism and encouragement from the beginning of
Compass Rose
and for years before and after.

Christopher Tilghman, who read the next-to-last draft and helped define the large triangle of time.

My assistants over the years (and fellow writers and artists): Will Boast, Tara Yellen, Kimberley Stromberg, Hannah Holtzman, and Memory Blake Peebles (who discovered the cover and co-suggested the title).