Strawberries in the Sea (4 page)

He and Rosa talked while they ate, Edwin reading her lips part of the time, and she reading what he scribbled on the notepad he carried. This wasn't always necessary, because they were so used to each other that she could understand many of his gestures and some of his most subtle shifts of expression. Once during the evening he wrote swiftly, “Stop reading my mind,” and she laughed; the sound astonished her, it was as if they'd forgotten propriety and laughed at a funeral.

Con was always made uncomfortable by their conversations, and could never talk easily to Edwin. His poise and nonchalance would be shaken, he was no longer the dancer on the high wire delighting all with his nimble grace, and soon he would leave. Edwin had never showed any reaction to this, but after a while he came very seldom, so it had been a long time since he had been here.

Her precarious peace shivered. She asked desperately, “What's your new job?”

He wrote about the old house he was restoring for some summer people. Money was no object, he was given a free hand. The woman was planting a colonial garden, so she was there sometimes, but she left him to himself.

“They know it's no sense trying to bend my ear,” he wrote. “So they make big circles around me. The mad genius. I might blow up, who knows?”

“What about if you need a helper?”

“He'll have to be a mind-reader, unless I can get my father, but he's got a camp to build this summer. How about you? I forgot, you're leaving.”

She shrugged and sat looking down at her cup, lost in Con again. Edwin left the table, and she didn't know where he went or how long he was gone until he came back from the sitting room with her guitar. He handed it to her, and gestured with his head at the low rocker, then pulled his sketchbook from his jacket pocket.

She sat woodenly with the guitar across her knees. “No!” she burst out. “I can't stand to touch the thing. I'll never play it again, never! I'll kick it into kindling first.”

He gave her a narrow, cold glance, then wrote on the pad and held it up before her eyes. “Don't be so goddam sorry for yourself.”

“If I'm not sorry for myself, who the hell's going to be?” she demanded. “No, everybody either thinks it is good enough for me, or else now I'm over the measles so everything's fine!”

Impassively Edwin watched her digging around for a handkerchief, and then gave her his. Of course it had to be linen, fresh, and folded in crisply ironed creases. “You make me feel like a slob,” she said indignantly.

She blew her nose, put the guitar on the table, and went over to the sink. She ran cold water into the basin and plunged her face into it, opening her eyes under the surface to flush and cool them. When she felt for a towel, it was put into her hands.

When she had finished drying, Edwin was smoking a cigarette at the back door. The harbor was invisible in the dusk. A scent of lilacs and grass came through the screen, and a faint, damp, easterly breath that could mean fog.

She stamped her foot to get Edwin's attention, then picked up the guitar and sat down in the rocker. He walked around, looking down at her from several angles and then sitting on his heels to gaze up at her. She was used to it and concentrated on tuning the guitar, reacting with a slight but genuine pleasure to familiar motions and sounds. Presently she began to play and sing softly to herself.

Literature studied in her high-school English classes had meant nothing to her as literature. She had simply realized that some things made good songs, and thus they had become her own, some of them more private than others. So tonight she sang scraps of Shelley—“
Many a green isle needs must be In the deep wide sea of misery
,” and the descriptive passages of
The Forsaken Merman
—“
Now the wild white horses play, Champ and chafe and toss in the spray
.”

Once a young teacher in love with the language used to chalk daily messages on the blackboard in the hope of seducing his students into the same passion. A passage from Meredith had accomplished it with Rosa, though the teacher had never discovered what lay behind the calm, stolid face. And no one else ever heard her tune, because it was not the sort called for at sing-alongs.

Now, safely unheard by Edwin, she sang it for herself.

As she sang it Bennett's Island rose on the horizon like an island in a myth, and her consciousness flew toward it like the gull she had wished this morning to become.

At the end of the song she found herself back in the kitchen, suddenly aware of the incredible events of her life, remembering that this morning the divorce had begun. Her heart was beating hard. She ached to do something wild and terrible in screaming defiance of everybody.

Edwin sat at the table, drinking more coffee and eating more pie. He was always neat and composed in his motions, he looked thoughtful in a particularly tidy way, as if his thoughts would never get away from him into jungle territory. The sight of him there shedding tranquility like light returned her to herself. She put the guitar down, stood up and stretched, poured coffee, and reached for the sketchbook.

He had her in a few merciless lines, the extra flesh piled on by weeks of compulsive eating, but also the apartness of the singer lost in the song.

“Gone away,” he had written under the sketch. She realized she couldn't even remember when he had finally begun to draw. He was watching her, both wary and quizzical, and she half-smiled and pushed the sketchbook back at him.

When he was ready to go she gave him the spare set of keys to the place, and a carton of frozen food from the refrigerator.

“The eider ducklings will be out now,” he wrote. Then he added, “We had a path behind the house to the cove.”

He hadn't been there since he was eleven years old. She looked into his eyes as she said, “I'll look for it,” wondering what he was trying to tell her; if he felt homesickness or indifference. She walked out to the car with him. The fog was coming in, still only in pale smoke like shreds. Edwin put his arm around her and hugged her, and kissed her cheek. She knew by the tightness of the embrace that he was concerned for her and wished her well.

When he had gone she lingered outside, absentmindedly drawing down a branch of lilac to smell the damp blossoms, listening to the foghorns beginning. Seal Point Light sounded close enough to be just off her wharf, Ram's Head was muffled by distance, others were still farther away. When she shut her eyes her head reeled. The day had been so long that now it seemed as if her appointment with the lawyer must have been a week ago instead of early afternoon. She would have to sleep tonight, from sheer weight of fatigue.

She had moved downstairs, away from the bed she and Con had shared, to the big room off the kitchen and living room that had been her parents'. It hadn't been much help, but it had been handy for making all the cups of tea and coffee and cocoa she'd drunk at midnight or at two in the morning through the recent weeks.

In bed tonight she couldn't sleep after all. She could only go over and over the visit to the lawyer's office. It was as if she had attended her own hanging and her ghost was still anxiously loitering about the scene of her violent death because it didn't know yet it was dead. But Con still lived, he was solidly of this earth, involved with life, wound up in it, making love and begetting children, moving from one bed to another as if it were no more than changing his socks.

She shivered and her teeth chattered, she pulled extra covers up tightly around her and lay staring into the foglight waiting for the spasm to subside.

Lilacs and fog came in at the windows, the foghorns, a dog barking. Poor Con, no wonder he'd looked stunned and sick when he walked out today, with her screeching after him like a harpy. He was caught in a cleft stick, all right, and she was squeezing it together on him.

Oh, poor Con, she thought, growing voluptuously warm with pity. She understood. She of all people knew what it meant when he said, “She turns my guts inside out just by looking at me.” All right, so it was another woman he was talking about, and no amount of moaning and whining was going to change that. But, if that was the way he felt about Phyllis, he was no more to blame than if he'd come down with pneumonia. She knew; it was the way she felt about
him
.

So, if she wasn't going to be around this summer, what was the harm in his using the wharf and fishhouse? Besides, to leave them unused would be pure spite, like throwing those perfectly good shoes into an alder swamp.

She got out of bed and went into the kitchen without putting on any lights till she got to the corner where the telephone was. Then she switched on the pin-up lamp so she could see to dial. But as she lifted the telephone her own excitement repelled her. Sure you just don't want to hear his voice again? she jeered. Sure you don't want him rampsing in here tomorrow morning and hugging you up?

She put the telephone down. Con wouldn't be back at his boarding house for the night yet, anyway. He'd be at Birch Harbor. She'd have to give the message to Sam or Geneva Rowland.

And, if you're willing to talk to one of them, especially Geneva, she thought, that proves—what? Only that you do want Con to come here tomorrow. You don't care how or why, as long as he comes and you can eat him up with your eyes. And you won't go away if he's using the wharf, because you know he'll come into the house each time till he gets you where he wants you. . . . And you're such a damn soft custard of a woman you'd take anything you could get.

She shut her eyes, folded her arms and pressed them against her breasts until they hurt. After a few moments she put off the light and went back to bed.

S
he was overtaken by sleep like a blow on the head and woke up just as suddenly, as if someone had called her or shaken the bed. The light was paler; you couldn't call it brighter, it had the dead quality of dense fog. It was almost four by her watch.

She went out into the kitchen and put the tea kettle on the gas stove, then went through the entry and out onto the back walk in her bare feet. The weathered planks were velvety under her soles, and the mild wet air cooled her hot eyes. She could see the fishhouse and wharf down the slope, and to the end of the wharf. Its one gull on his favorite corner spiling stood like an ink drawing against space. The harbor had disappeared. Something startled the gull, and he raised his wings and took off, and vanished. Anything else that went down that wharf and over the end would also vanish. It would continue to exist in its own world beyond the wall, but for the watcher here it would have ceased to exist.

It would be so simple.

She hurried back into the house. The tea kettle was boiling and she made a pot of coffee and then dressed in jeans and a warm shirt, with wool socks under her sneakers. She carried a mug of coffee around with her as she worked; she made her bed, she stowed away her toilet articles, she brought in a carton from the entry and loaded it with food from the bread box, the pantry shelves, and the refrigerator. She poured the rest of the coffee into a thermos bottle and wrapped bread and butter sandwiches in waxed paper.

She wheeled one load down to the end of the wharf, and came back. This time she added her rubber boots. She hadn't worn them for a long time, since Con had eased her out of lobstering a year ago, saying the new hydraulic hauler did so much of the work that he didn't need someone to plug lobsters and keep the bait irons filled. Besides, he told her tenderly, his fingers in her hair, he liked to think of her at home. She had accepted this humbly, ashamed that he'd had to tell her what should have been obvious: a man wanted to be alone sometimes, his work should be his own. Nobody else's wife went.

Her only rebellion had been silent. She renewed her lobster license, because she'd had one ever since Papa had given her the dory and ten traps when she was twelve years old, and she felt as incomplete without one as without a driver's license.

The new boat was to be eight feet longer than
Sea Star
, and he planned to go farther offshore and try for lobsters and rig up for shrimping in the winters. Rosa had been proud and happy to sell the shore lot at Back Cove so he could have the boat of his dreams. “Tell you what,” he told her in bed. “You're going with that boat too, you'd better believe it. We'll have her fixed up so in the slack time next summer we can go cruising along the coast. Poke into all the gunkholes, go slumming at Bar Harbor—how about
that?
”

“Oh Con,” she said. “You make life so much fun! I don't know anybody that has as much fun as we do.”

“And we'll have more instead of less,” he promised.

In late spring, with the new boat half built, he told her about Phyllis. Rosa was probably the last person in Seal Point to know how long he'd been seeing Adam Crowell's young widow. Adam had been a prosperous seiner, and had eventually bought the sardine factory that gave work to a good part of both villages. When he dropped dead aboard a carrier one summer evening, he left his wife well provided for. However, he did not leave her pregnant, and, as Con told Rosa, it wouldn't have been possible to make anyone believe it. “Adam's been dead just a dite too long,” he said.