The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims (131 page)

So it was that when Ruth returned from visiting her mother in Concord, she went right to Mrs. Pommeroy’s house, and found her cutting the hair of the entire Russ Cobb family. Mrs. Pommeroy had all the Cobbs there: Mr. Russ Cobb, his wife, Ivy, and their youngest daughter, Florida, who was forty years old and still living with her parents.

They were a miserable family. Russ Cobb was almost eighty, but he still went out fishing every day. He’d always said he would fish as long as he could throw his leg over the boat. The previous winter, he’d lost half his right leg at the knee, amputated because of his diabetes, or “sugars,” as he called it, but he still went fishing every day, throwing what remained of that leg over the boat. His wife, Ivy, was a disappointed-looking woman who painted holly sprigs, candles, and Santa Claus faces on sand dollars and tried to sell them to her neighbors as Christmas ornaments. The Cobbs’ daughter, Florida, never said a word. She was devastatingly silent.

Mrs. Pommeroy had already set Ivy Cobb’s frothy white hair in curlers and was tending to Russ Cobb’s sideburns when Ruth came in.

“So thick!” Mrs. Pommeroy was telling Mr. Cobb. “Your hair is so thick, you look like Rock Hudson!”

“Cary Grant!” he bellowed.

“Cary Grant!” Mrs. Pommeroy laughed. “OK! You look like Cary Grant!”

Mrs. Cobb rolled her eyes. Ruth walked across the kitchen and kissed Mrs. Pommeroy on the cheek. Mrs. Pommeroy took her hand, held it for a long moment. “Welcome home, sweetheart.”

“Thank you.” Ruth felt she was home.

“Did you have a good time?”

“I had the worst week of my life.” Ruth meant to say this in a sarcastic, joking manner, but it accidentally came out of her mouth as the unadorned truth.

“There’s pie.”

“Thank you very much.”

“Did you see your father?”

“Not yet.”

“I’ll be done here in a bit,” Mrs. Pommeroy said. “You take a seat, sweetheart.”

So Ruth took herself a seat, next to silent Florida Cobb, on a chair that had been painted that dreadful trap-buoy green. The kitchen table and the corner cupboard had also been painted that frightening green, so the whole kitchen matched terribly. Ruth watched Mrs. Pommeroy perform her usual magic on ugly Mr. Cobb. Her hands were constantly at work in his hair. Even when she wasn’t cutting, she was stroking his head, fingering his hair, patting him, tugging at his ears. He leaned his head back into her hands like a cat rubbing against a favorite person’s leg.

“Look how nice,” she murmured, like an encouraging lover. “Look how nice you look.”

She trimmed his sideburns and shaved his neck in arcs through foamy suds and wiped him down with a towel. She pressed her body against his back. She was as affectionate with Mr. Cobb as if he were the last person she would ever touch, as if his ugly skull was to be her final human contact on this earth. Mrs. Cobb, in her steel gray curlers, sat watching, her gray hands in her lap, her steel eyes on her husband’s ruined face.

“How are things, Mrs. Cobb?” Ruth asked.

“We got goddamn raccoons all over our goddamn yard,” Mrs. Cobb said, demonstrating her remarkable trick of talking without moving her lips. When Ruth was a child, she used to lure Mrs. Cobb into conversation only to watch this trick. In truth, at the age of eighteen Ruth was luring her into conversation for the same reason.

“Sorry to hear that. Did you ever have trouble with raccoons before?”

“Never had them at all.”

Ruth stared at the woman’s mouth. It honestly didn’t budge. Incredible. “Is that right?” she asked.

“I’d like to shoot one.”

“Wasn’t a raccoon on this island until 1958,” Russ Cobb said. “Had them on Courne Haven, but not here.”

“Really? What happened? How did they get here?” Ruth asked, knowing exactly what he was about to say.

“They brought ’em over here.”

“Who did?”

“Courne Haven people! Threw some pregnant raccoons in a sack. Rowed ’em over. Middle of the night. Dumped ’em on our beach. Your great-uncle David Thomas saw it. Walking home from his girl’s house. Seen strangers on the beach. Seen ’em letting something out of a bag. Seen ’em row away. Few weeks later, raccoons everywhere. All over the goddamn place. Eating people’s chickens. Garbage. Everything.”

Of course, the story Ruth had heard from family members was that it was Johnny Pommeroy who had seen the strangers on the beach, right before he went off to get killed in Korea in 1954, but she let it slide.

“I had a pet baby raccoon when I was a little girl,” Mrs. Pommeroy said, smiling at the memory. “That raccoon bit my arm, come to think of it, and my father killed him. I think it was a him. I always called it a him, anyway.”

“When was that, Mrs. Pommeroy?” Ruth asked. “How long ago?”

Mrs. Pommeroy frowned and rubbed her thumbs deep into Mr. Cobb’s neck. He groaned, so happy. She said innocently, “Oh, I guess that was the early 1940s, Ruth. Goodness, I’m so old. The 1940s! Such a long time ago.”

“Wasn’t a raccoon, then,” Mr. Cobb said. “Couldn’t have been.”

“Oh, it was a little raccoon, all right. He had a striped tail and the cutest little mask. I called him Masky!”

“Wasn’t a raccoon. Couldn’t have been. Wasn’t a raccoon on this island until 1958,” Mr. Cobb said. “Courne Haven folks brought ’em over in 1958.”

“Probably a skunk.”

“I’d like to shoot a raccoon!” Mrs. Cobb said with such force that her mouth actually moved, and her silent daughter, Florida, actually started.

“My father sure shot Masky,” Mrs. Pommeroy said.

She toweled off Mr. Cobb’s hair and brushed the back of his neck with a tiny pastry brush. She patted talcum powder under his frayed shirt collar and rubbed oily tonic into his wiry hair, shaping it into an excessively curved pompadour.

“Look at you!” she said, and gave him an antique silver hand mirror. “You look like a country music star. What do you think, Ivy? Isn’t he a handsome devil?”

“Silly,” said Ivy Cobb, but her husband beamed, his cheeks shiny as his pompadour. Mrs. Pommeroy took the sheet off him, gathering it up carefully so as not to spill his hair all over her glaring green kitchen, and Mr. Cobb stood up, still admiring himself in the antique mirror. He turned his head slowly from side to side and smiled at himself, grinning like a handsome devil.

“What do you think of your father, Florida?” Mrs. Pommeroy asked. “Doesn’t he look fine?”

Florida Cobb blushed deeply.

“She won’t say nothing,” Mr. Cobb said, suddenly disgusted. He plunked the hand mirror down on the kitchen table and dug some money out of his pocket. “Never says a goddamn word. Wouldn’t say shit if she had a mouthful of it.”

Ruth laughed and decided to get herself a piece of pie after all.

“I’ll take those curlers out for you now, Ivy,” Mrs. Pommeroy said.

Later, after the Cobbs had gone, Mrs. Pommeroy and Ruth sat on the front porch. There was an old couch out there, upholstered in big bleeding roses, that smelled as if it had been rained on, or worse. Ruth drank beer and Mrs. Pommeroy drank fruit punch, and Ruth told Mrs. Pommeroy about visiting her mother.

“How’s Ricky?” Mrs. Pommeroy asked.

“Oh, I don’t know. He’s just, you know . . . He flops around.”

“That was the saddest thing, when that baby was born. You know, I never saw that poor baby.”

“I know.”

“I never saw your poor mother after that.”

“I know.”

“Oh, it’s bad.”

“It didn’t sound to me like something we couldn’t take care of out here. What did he need? He didn’t need much. Some medicine. That’s easy. Jesus, Mr. Cobb takes medicine every single day for his sugars, and he manages. What else did Ricky need? Someone to watch him. We could have done that. That’s a person’s
child;
you find a place for him. That’s what I told her. She cried and cried.”

“Everyone else said he should be in an institution.”

“Who said? Vera Ellis said that. Who else?”

“The doctors.”

“She should have brought that baby here to his home. He would’ve been just fine out here. She still could bring him out here. We’d take care of that child as good as anyone else.”

“She said you were her only friend. She said you were the only person out here who was nice to her.”

“That’s sweet. But it’s not true. Everyone was nice to her.”

“Not Angus Addams.”

“Oh, he loved her.”

”

“He liked her as much as he likes anyone.”

Ruth laughed. Then she said, “Did you ever meet someone named Owney Wishnell?”

“Who’s that? From Courne Haven?”

“Pastor Wishnell’s nephew.”

“Oh, yes. That great big blond boy.”

“Yes.”

“I know who he is.”

Ruth didn’t say anything.

“Why?” Mrs. Pommeroy asked. “Why do you ask?”

“Nothing,” Ruth said.

The porch door swung open, kicked by Robin Pommeroy’s wife, Opal, whose hands were so full of her huge son that she couldn’t operate the doorknob. The baby, on seeing Mrs. Pommeroy, let out a crazy holler, like a delighted gorilla toddler.

“There’s my baby grandson,” Mrs. Pommeroy said.

“Hey, Ruth,” Opal said shyly.

“Hey, Opal.”

“Didn’t know you were here.”

“Hey, big Eddie,” Ruth said to the baby. Opal brought the child over and bent down, heaving a bit, so that Ruth could kiss the boy’s enormous head. Ruth slid over on the sofa to make space for Opal, who sat down, lifted her Tshirt, and gave a breast to Eddie. He lunged for it and set to sucking with concentration and a lot of wet noise. He sucked at that breast as if he were drawing breath through it.

“Doesn’t that hurt?” Ruth asked.

“Yeah,” said Opal. She yawned without covering her mouth, showing off a mine of silver fillings.

The three women on the couch all stared at the big baby locked so fiercely onto Opal’s breast.

“He sucks like a regular old bilge pump,” Ruth said.

“Bites, too,” said the laconic Opal.

Ruth winced.

“When did you feed him last?” Mrs. Pommeroy asked.

“I don’t know. An hour ago. Half hour.”

“You should try to keep him on a schedule, Opal.”

She shrugged. “He’s always hungry.”

“They say that?” Ruth asked.

“I just made it up,” Mrs. Pommeroy said.

“It’s nice how you made it rhyme like that,” Ruth said, and Mrs. Pommeroy grinned and punched her. Ruth had missed the delight of teasing people without being afraid they’d burst into tears on her. She punched Mrs. Pommeroy back.

“My idea is, I let him eat whenever he wants,” Opal said. “I figure if he’s eating, he’s hungry. He ate three hot dogs yesterday.”

“Opal!” Mrs. Pommeroy exclaimed. “He’s only ten months old!”

“I can’t help it.”

“You can’t
help
it? He got the hot dogs himself?” Ruth asked. Mrs. Pommeroy and Opal laughed, and the baby suddenly popped himself off the breast with the loud sound of a tight seal breaking. He lolled his head like a drunk, and then he laughed, too.

“I told a baby joke!” Ruth said.

“Eddie likes you,” Opal said. “You like Roof? You like your Auntie Roof, Eddie?” She set the baby on Ruth’s lap, where he grinned crookedly and spat up yellow soup on her pants. Ruth handed him back to his mother.

“Oops,” said Opal. She heaved the baby up and went into the house, coming out a moment later to toss a bathroom towel at Ruth. “I think it’s nap time for Eddie,” she said, and disappeared into the house again.

Ruth wiped the hot, foamy puddle off her leg. “Baby barf,” she said.

“They feed that baby too much,” Mrs. Pommeroy said.

“He makes the necessary adjustments, I’d say.”

“She was feeding him chocolate fudge sauce the other day, Ruth. With a spoon. Right out of the jar. I saw it!”

“That Opal isn’t very smart.”

“She’s got great big boobs, though.”

“Oh, lucky her.”

“Lucky baby Eddie. How could she have such big boobs when she’s only seventeen? I didn’t even know what boobs were when I was seventeen.”

“Yes, you did. Jesus, Mrs. Pommeroy, you were already married when you were seventeen.”

“Yes, that’s right. But I didn’t know what boobs were when I was twelve. I saw my sister’s chest and asked her what those big things were. She said it was baby fat.”

“Gloria said that?”

“Kitty said that.”

“She should’ve told you the truth.”

“She probably didn’t know the truth.”

“Kitty? Kitty was born knowing the truth.”

“Imagine if she’d told me the truth? Imagine if she said, ‘They’re tits, Rhonda, and someday grown men will want to suck on them.’”

“Grown men and young boys, too. And other people’s husbands, knowing Kitty.”

“Why did you ask me about Owney Wishnell, Ruth?”

Ruth gave Mrs. Pommeroy a quick glance, then looked out at the yard. She said, “No reason.”

Mrs. Pommeroy watched Ruth for a long moment. She tilted her head. She waited.

“It’s not true that you were the only person on this island who was nice to my mother?” Ruth said.

“Angus Addams, for instance.”