Strawberries in the Sea (13 page)

“So, he should have taken us for luck,” said Vic. “I could inspire him.”

“To more swearwords,” said Linnie. “Come on, kids, Rosa's got things she wants to do.”

“Lin's hard as nails,” Vic complained, getting up. “Because she was never in love, that's why. What
I
could do with that hair and those eyes. All wasted on
her
.”

The younger girls considered this wildly funny. Vic's primly sour expression was comic enough, but Rosa wondered what lay beneath the clowning. At seventeen—or at twenty-nine—you could agonize over yourself, not just your looks but the whole clumsy, hateful, hopeless parcel.

Linnie said, “But I love Rory Mor, don't I?” she leaned down to pat the dog, who pranced stiffly around her.

“There's something seriously wrong with that family,” Vic said to Rosa. “She loves her dog and her brother worships herring.”

“I love Rory Mor as a son,” said Linnie with dignity. “After all, I became his mother when he was seven weeks old. I can't explain my brother except that maybe he's metamorphosing into a seal, the way that Kafka character turned into a cockroach.”

“
What?
” asked Holly.

“Come
on
. Thanks an awful lot, Rosa.” The others added their thanks. Rosa almost said, “Come again.” She'd enjoyed them after all.

S
he had been sleeping very heavily every night until this one, which was full of busy dreams. Half the time she dreamed she was awake and fretting about not being able to sleep. Toward morning she woke up in reality. It was still dark, and she heard an engine in the harbor. It was running in little muted purrs, with rhythmic stops as if for breath. She would not have heard it if there had been any breeze stirring the spruce boughs or making a run on the shore.

She lay there listening, at first too involved with the last dream to be curious about the engine. There had been a confrontation with Phyllis, whom she had not seen in life since a church supper in the winter when they had all three sat together, and she'd thought how very brave and cheerful Phyllis was, after losing a man like Adam Crowell.

And all the time Phyllis had Con. Rosa had already lost him, and the other two knew it. The memory of that night had been burned into Rosa's brain as if with the branding iron they used to burn license numbers on traps and buoys. After a while she had succeeded in not consciously brooding over it, but it had sometimes returned in her dreams. It had been one of the things she hoped to leave back in Seal Point. But here it was, polluting this house.

In the dream they were at the church supper, but every one else except Rosa and Phyllis was invisible, though present. Con was there, unseen, but close. Phyllis wore the same wine dress with the round frilly collar that set off the delicate, wide-eyed-waif face.

“This time I
know
,” Rosa said to her. “I know what you are and what he is. But he's still mine. Whatever he is, he's still mine.”

She knew suddenly that a terrible power was hers to use if she dared, and she dared anything to keep Con. She had only to keep her eyes steadily on Phyllis's, never glance away or even blink. . . . And it worked. The face wavered, dissolved, and vanished under the strength of Rosa's gaze.

With an exaltation unlike anything she'd ever known, she cried out to all the unseen presences; “Now Con is mine forever!”

It was her own voice that woke her, the sound of Con's name on her lips. Then she heard the engine. She lay there clutching to herself the anguish of knowing how her dream had deceived her, while the boat crossing the harbor softly breathed, paused, breathed again.

Stealthy. Sneaking in or out? Con, coming out to steal
Sea Star
back?

She got out of bed and went to the window. The lights were moving very slowly along the far side of the harbor shore, well away from
Sea Star
' s mooring. Then the engine stopped altogether and the lights went out, or else the boat had glided on her own momentum out of sight beyond the fish houses.

The herring crew coming in.

She sagged and at once became conscious of the predawn chill. She went back into her sleeping bag. The dream had become worse than ridiculous; it was disgusting that she could make such a fool of herself even in her sleep. She tried to think about the men out looking for herring, the boat cruising slowly across the quiet seas of a summer night, the long shimmering streaks of reflected starlight in the slick places, the black shapes of land and ledge, the cold salt smell, the bow wave and the wake glowing with white fire. But it was no escape; it only made her wish with a grinding envy that she were a man, free to choose and then to act, free to hunt and then to take, and not only herring.

She had chosen to come here, she had acted, but it was not to hunt and take, it was to escape. She'd run away, but not from herself. She was stuck with someone who was nothing but a fool and the others were right to despise her.

It wasn't conducive to sleep. She went downstairs and built a fire, made coffee and toasted yeast rolls on a fork over the flames, then sat before the open oven door with her feet on the hearth while she ate and drank.

Suppose it had been Con out there in the harbor? At least for a few hours of the night he wouldn't have been sleeping in Phyllis's arms. Officially he was a boarder at the Rowlands', but that was a fiction and everybody knew it.

For a long time it had been physically impossible for her to imagine them together. She used to feel that her head wanted to burst and her heart race itself to death. Now she had become used to it, though sometimes it could still surprise her. She took her coffee mug out to the back doorstep and saw the light growing over the eastern trees, and heard the first tentative voices of the dawn chorus. The daisies and buttercups on the uncut lawn glimmered like stars. A rooster crowed from the Sorensen barn.

She could get ready now to go to haul, but the traps should soak for another day. She could start puttying again as soon as the dew dried off, but from now till then what in hell could she do? Her head began to ache.

Finally she took two aspirins and went back to bed. She half-feared the room would be haunted by her dream, but daylight and the warming-up of engines promised safety of a kind, and she fell asleep.

When she woke up it was after nine o'clock, and her first conscious thought was that the windows on the sunny side should be dry enough for her to work on. If only Edwin had sent along the other things. I suppose this is how a drunk feels, praying for another bottle to get him through the day, she thought with grim humor.

She was standing on her lobster crate puttying the small panes in the upper sash of a kitchen window when the boat whistle blew outside Eastern Harbor Point. When the boat had left and the people had gone home, she'd go down to see if Edwin had sent her what she asked for. Close by her the bees worked around the heavy curled heads of lilac. She felt companionable with them, and the sun was pleasantly hot on her head and back.

I wish I was the only person alive, she thought. She imagined herself wandering alone and free on this place, with Con and Phyllis no longer existing; not dead, she could never endure to think of Con dead, but vanished as the girl's face had vanished in her dream. No bodies to lie close and warm, nothing left to ache for the loss as she ached.

Meanwhile she went on puttying; the small panes reflected her frown of concentration. They also reflected spruces, sky, the bright yellow flash of a warbler, and then, as she shifted her position, a man came into the mirror world.

It was Edwin.

The crate teetered under her as she turned and jumped down. They embraced hard, laughing, then he held her off with his hands splayed out over her sides, fingers digging brutally for her ribs.

She tried to grip his wrists and get free, but he was too strong. “Yes, I've lost some,” she protested, “but I haven't been here a week yet. Give me time! Or did you just come out to check on my diet?”

He grinned, and nodded at what he had carried up from the boat, zipper satchel, bedroll, and paint box.

“For how long?” she demanded.

He held up three fingers, four, and shrugged.

“Are you through with your job this soon?”

He took out his pad and wrote, “Waiting for the thumb latches and hinges. Hand-forged on order. Takes time.” He picked up the wheel-barrow and started away with it. She carried his things into the house, deciding to let Edwin live in the new and private world she'd been creating.

When he came back he had two big cartons holding all that she had asked for. He had also brought his tool carrier, a box of paperbacks, and food; steaks, salad makings, a large wedge of store cheese, honey, the black cherries she liked, French bread. There was also a dozen fresh doughnuts.

“Fried at six this morning,” he wrote. “My mother thinks food will cure anything.”

“Well, it won't,” Rosa said. “I've tried it. But Lucy's doughnuts are something else.” She put some in the oven to warm, and made coffee. They took the food out into the yard, and while they ate he gave her what news there was. She kept waiting for him to mention Con. When it didn't happen she was irritated with him, whether he had kept Con out of it from consideration or from indifference. At the same time she was relieved that he'd given her nothing new to chew on. She had enough to poison her now.

He got up finally and went to the entrance of the path, and stood looking into the woods. After a moment he beckoned to her. He led the way out to the cove, looking around him without having to watch where he put his feet, his hands in his pockets. Walking behind him Rosa contemplated with admiration the poise of his head and the ease of his shoulders, remembering how when he was small he carried his head very stiffly, his shoulders hunched almost to his ears sometimes, his elbows crooked but pressed in tight to his sides, his fists doubled in perpetual readiness to meet an attack.

Rosa had always been in awe of him in those days, afraid of his strange cries and explosions of temper. Their friendship hadn't begun until he was in his early teens and had come to terms with his deafness. Or rather, the world had come to terms with it, and had begun to reach him.

They went down to the beach, and stopped, she thought, to watch the ducklings diving amid the floating rockweed. But his face was wiped clean of expression, as if his vision were somehow turned inward; he was not only deaf to the outer world, but blind also. When he was like this he was a stranger, and it always gave her a pang of both awe and loss. Their comradeship then seemed to be pure delusion on her part, a kindly humoring on his, and she would feel awkward with him, even timid. She moved slowly away as if lost in her own thoughts, pretending to be interested in a pink-and-white striped stone, a big mussel shell, the name on half a styrofoam buoy split by a propeller.

When she looked around again Edwin was sitting on a bleached log, filling his pipe. He still seemed very much in his own world. She sat down at the other end of the log, wondering what old memories crowded and jostled him now. It was on Bennett's Island that his mother teetered on the edge of insanity, denying his deafness because she thought it was a disgrace, a punishment for mysterious crimes that nobody knew about, not even herself. Jude had been too gentle, too helpless. The children ran like wild goats on these shores. Rosa remembered when Lucy had been brought off and taken to Bangor, but she had been a child then herself, and knew nothing of the circumstances.

It was his sisters who had told her later how it had been with them on the island until a new teacher corralled the little flock and found out that Edwin was deaf. When the family left the island, Edwin had been tutored by a teacher in Limerock and then sent to a school for the deaf in Portland. Knowing Lucy today as a cheerful, busy, middle-aged woman and Edwin as a talented and independent man, Rosa found it impossible to view their past as anything but a hazy nightmare dreamed long ago. But what of those who had actually lived through it, and returned now to its setting?

Timorously she kept glancing at Edwin's aloof profile, and was afraid he would not stay. Suddenly he turned to her with a smile that made him hers again, and took hold of her knee and shook it. Then he tipped his head back toward the path.

They took the mattress off the bed in the small downstairs bedroom behind the living room, and carried it out to sun on a ledge that showed among the daisies of the lawn. She pried open the window, and swept and dusted the room. Edwin went to work re-hanging the toilet door, building a new frame for it from her salvaged lumber, and she returned to puttying windows. She whistled now while she worked. She felt almost completely contented, and wished no one out of existence, though she didn't single Con and Phyllis out for consideration one way or another.

After their noon meal of steak and salad, Edwin took the wheelbarrow and went off to the fishhouse to get the shingles. She saw a sketchbook in his hip pocket as he left, and knew he wouldn't be back right away. She unpacked the cartons he had brought her, and put away the contents; then she turned the mattress in the sun on the ledge and lay down on it, watching the daisies and red clover tremble against the sky, and fell asleep.

She woke up chilly because the shade of the house had moved over her, but happy with the immediate consciousness of Edwin's presence on the island. Her first impulse was to go to the store for the makings of one of those high, thick-frosted chocolate cakes they both liked but, hands on her flattening belly, she resisted with a kind of holy ferocity. She dragged the mattress into the bedroom and put Edwin's sleeping bag on it, and two pillows with fresh cases. Upstairs in the front bedroom there were some extension screens, a few of them not too far gone with rust to be used, and she brought one down for Edwin's window. The only furniture left in the living room was a wicker rocking chair and a couple of small stands, unless you counted the gaudy linoleum square on the floor. She put a stand beside Edwin's bed, with one of the clean dish towels from home for a cover. This called for a filled lamp and a newly washed chimney.