The End of the Pier

TO KENT, BILL AND JAMES W.

who would tell me, if they knew

Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,

Why, when the singing ended and we turned

Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,

The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,

As the night descended, tilting in the air,

Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,

Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,

Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,

The maker's rage to order words of the sea,

Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,

And of ourselves and of our origins,

In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

“The Idea of Order at Key West”

—WALLACE STEVENS

T
he Rainbow Café treated any day before a holiday like big money. Maud wondered as she set the hot beef sandwich and mashed potatoes on the counter just why Shirl expected this surge of extra business. The only people at the counter had been Ubub and Ulub Wood, and they'd eaten what they always ate, the daily special. Ubub and Ulub had other names, but they'd been long forgotten. It was either Dodge Haines or Sonny Stuck who'd decided to call them by the letters on their license plates—UBB and ULB. They drove twin Ford pickups, black and battered. No one could figure out just how they'd managed to get those trucks battered up in the same way, so that the only thing that distinguished one from the other was the tag.

Maud hadn't wanted to go to work this day, and then she had. She had meant to stay home, but it was the Labor Day weekend, so she had settled on going in an hour later than she usually did. Shirl hadn't even noticed, despite her prediction of their getting in a crowd.

She drew a cup of coffee in a white mug and put that in front of Ulub, who didn't say anything; he never did. Maud wondered if he ever had. Since he always wanted the special, Shirl and Charlene always knew what to give him. Ubub did the talking, what there was of it, for both of them.

Shirl was ringing up a take-out order of doughnuts and coffee, sitting on a high stool behind the register and shoving the stuff across the black counter at a teenage kid. She handed him his change and a venomous look as if he'd made her open the register at gunpoint. He left.

When the teenager left and was walking past the window, Shirl started talking about “the little creep” to Maud. Not the one who'd left, but her son. Probably, any kid that age brought her son to mind. His name was Joseph, and she only called him by name when she wasn't in a white rage with him, which was seldom. Everyone else called him Joey. He was “the little creep”; his father, who'd left them flat after Joey was born, was still “the big creep.” Charlene kept telling Shirl she should be glad he wasn't getting stoned and flying off rooftops.

“The little creep's too lazy to fly, and of course he ain't doing drugs—it'd cut into his shoplifting time.” Joey had hooked some sunglasses from the SuperSaver Discount Store the day before. Shirl had called this down the counter to Charlene as she shoved a plain white bakery box at a customer. Lemon chiffon was always the special pie of the day except at Thanksgiving and Christmas, when Charlene wiped off the blackboard and wrote in “Punkin.”

Joey would come in nearly every day for lunch and Maud would get him his favorite—beef stew—and butter four slices of bread for him. He was usually off school, suspended but not expelled, and Shirl acted like a parole officer. The boy had a pale little face and a smile like smoke, hardly there and quickly dispersed, as if there'd been something in the past worth smiling about, a memory that had guttered out.

Shirl would shuffle towards him and start in, calling him “Joseph this” and “Joseph that,” ask him all sorts of questions: did he mow the lawn, rake the leaves, shovel the snow? depending on the time of year. She didn't stop until he'd eaten the fourth slice of bread, when she'd stick another cigarette in her mouth and shuffle away. Then Maud would pour him a second cup of coffee. He'd smile that vanishing smile at her, give her his condolences for having to work there, ball up his napkin, and leave. It was a ritual whenever he was suspended from school for breaking into lockers or calling the math teacher a pervert, a sleazeball, a scumbag. Five
days a week Maud would watch him come in and go out and remember something about gates of ivory, gates of horn. She'd had three years of college, mostly literature courses, and loved to read. Still, she couldn't recall where those gates were, or just what they meant, except some important passage to somewhere, somewhere final.

As she hung her apron on the peg and took down her coat at seven o'clock that evening, she thought how Joey would be going back to school the day after Labor Day.

Then she stopped thinking about Joey and school, for that only made her think of Chad, and he was gone.

•  •  •

That was why she hadn't wanted to go to work. She had really wanted to come down here, where she was now, to the end of the pier.

Maud sat on the end of the pier watching the party across the water. It had been going on, it seemed, all summer, and she wondered, as people do about the tree in the forest: did it simply stop when she wasn't around to hear it? It had been just before the Fourth of July when she'd noticed the lights and come down here and looked across the wide lake at Japanese lanterns like strings of Christmas lights. The first time she'd simply stood for a while, squinting over the water, hearing the faint strains of music.

The next night she'd come down with her martini glass and sat on the edge of the dock, her bare legs dangling over the edge.

The night after, she'd come with a wood-and-aluminum chair and a cold bottle of Popov vodka, and in the following nights and weeks she slowly furnished the end of the pier.

After the Fourth, she'd brought down a small table and a Colonel Sanders plastic tub filled with ice in which she'd stowed her ready-mixed-martini Popov bottle. Then, when Chad came home from college, she'd got him to haul down an old rocker from the bedroom of the cottage that sat back along the path in the woods.
He told her it wasn't a pier, it was a dock, and he couldn't imagine why she'd want to sit out here for hours at night.

Chad had been sitting in the aluminum chair, drinking beer, looking around the lake frontage, checking out the marshy grass—the pier was in a little cove—and the tree with a heavy root above ground like a bent knee, a tree praying in the matted grass and weeds.

He sighed, world-weary at twenty, and asked her, “Why do you keep working at Shirl's?”

“Because it's dark and quiet, I guess.”

He pulled another beer from the carton; there was a little sucking noise as he uncapped it. “I hope that's not what life is, just something dark and quiet.”

“If you're lucky,” she'd said.

In the darkness his head turned. “Come on, Mom.”

It hadn't been the real question, anyway. It wasn't “Why do you work at Shirl's?” but “Why do we live in such a nonhappening place, why didn't you finish college and get your English degree, why didn't you get a great job, become an executive, maybe, or at least marry one, someone we could have lived with instead of
him
, why don't you own your own restaurant, why is that a cube of ice in your glass and not the moon?” Maud said, “Shirl likes you.”

He was lighting a cigarette, and the flame from his disposable lighter lit up his profile and went out. “Shouldn't she? I'm polite.”

“Polite isn't the point. She doesn't like
anybody.
But she does you. She's always holding you up to Joey, and even
he
likes you.” Maud shook the Popov bottle free from ice crystals. “What do you talk to her about? She won't let Charlene or me wait on you.” Maud was extremely pleased by this.

“Her feet.”

Maud twisted the bottle back into the plastic tub and turned to him. “Her
feet
?”

“She's got corns and bunions. That's why she's always wearing slippers.”

“I Concentrate on You”—they liked Cole Porter over there—came floating across the lake.

“It's the first time she ever offered anybody a job since I've been working there, and that's ten years. You liked it up here, then.”

“When you're ten you like practically anyplace except jail. Anyway, I don't think I'd've made a fortune in tips at Shirl's. Don't they play any real music over there?”

“You can't dance to the Grateful Dead. They like to dance. I'm not
saying
you should've taken the job—just that she offered it. And Lorraine said Jewel Chapman would've loved to have you work at the feed store.”

“There's just not enough money in it. You want me to earn money for school, and there's a lot of house painting in Hebrides—”

“I'm not
saying
 . . . Oh, well.” Hebrides was twenty miles away; without a car he could only stay here on weekends instead of all summer long.

Today he had left, which was why she hadn't wanted to go to work. But some part of her knew better, that if she didn't go in, she'd just sit around the cottage all day, like a mourner returned from a funeral. They had taken the local taxi to Bakersville to get the small plane to the city to get the large plane to get the space shuttle . . .

Maud stared up at the night sky, looking for an airplane's tiny red light, like a red star trailing across the sky, as if his plane might have doubled back. She thought that pinpoint of red light, throbbing along, must have replaced the sound of a train whistle for pure melancholy.

He'd left early, two days before he had to. “Mom, I was wondering . . . Would you mind. . . ?”

Whenever Chad started with that, she knew she'd mind. “I-was-wondering-would-you-mind” was a group of words that had taken on a life of its own. Yes, she'd mind, though she almost always said no, she wouldn't, because what followed was never
truly unreasonable, just painful. It always had something to do with going away, leaving before he actually had to. “Disappearing” was the way Maud thought of it; Chad called it “leaving for college.”

•  •  •

The latest addition to the pier's decor was a lamp Maud had found in the crawl space beneath the cottage eaves. It was black iron with clawlike legs and had a stained beige shade of faded roses. She'd got Chad to rig several extension cords together so they would stretch back and plug into the outlet at the rear of the cottage. Maud read a lot. When there was a lull in the party across the lake, when everyone had gone in from the terrace and battened down inside and she couldn't make out the music, she'd switch on the lamp and read whatever she'd brought down with the vodka.

Lately, she'd been bringing to the pier her old college anthology of American poetry. She'd come upon a poem by Wallace Stevens called “The Idea of Order at Key West,” the point of which she was trying to grasp. This was not for her a mental exercise or a desire to further educate herself in the world of poetry. It was very important to her (although she couldn't have said why) that she understand this poem. A lot, she felt, would then be revealed to her. She'd read parts of it to Sam, who couldn't understand it either, and seemed more interested anyway in complaining about the lamp.