The Maytrees
Authors: Annie Dillard
Annie Dillard
FOR
C. R. C
LEVIDENCE
The Maytrees were young long ago. They lived on what still seems antiquity’s very surface. It was the tip of Cape Cod, that exposed and mineral sandspit. The peninsula here was narrow between waters. Its average elevation was fifteen feet. It spiraled counterclockwise from the scarps of Truro and came rumpling over dunes to the harbor, Provincetown, inside the spiral. The town name of Provincetown was for a time “Cape Cod.” Generations before Jamestown—let alone Plymouth—British fishermen loaded their holds with split cod.
No Wampanoag Nauset tribes, not even Pamets, settled on Provincetown’s poor sand or scrub woods; they were farmers. At river mouths as far north as Truro, however, Nausets stayed, and built permanent villages more thickly than in most of New England, for clams and oysters abounded, and south of the Namskaket creeks they found soil for squash and corn.
The Maytrees’ lives, like the Nausets’, played out before the backdrop of fixed stars. The way of the world could be slight, then and now, but rarely, among individuals, vicious.
The slow heavens marked hours. They lived often outside. They drew every breath from a wad of air just then crossing from saltwater to saltwater. Their sandspit was a naked strand between two immensities, both given to special effects.
Toby Maytree grew up in Provincetown and spent most of his life there. His father was one of several guards stationed on the backside, on the cliffs by the Atlantic. Like some other coast guards, Maytree’s father built for his family a rough shack on the bare sands near the coast guard station. Young Maytree and his mother camped out for summer weeks there in the one-room wood shack above the great ocean beach. They exchanged visits with the guards. Later, after the war, Maytree became a poet of the forties and fifties and sixties. He wrote four book-long poems and three books of lyrics.
His wife, Lou Maytree, rarely spoke. She painted a bit on canvas and linen now lost. They acted in only two small events—three, if love counts. Falling in love, like having a baby, rubs against the current of our lives: separation, loss, and death. That is the joy of them.
Twice a day behind their house the tide boarded the sand. Four times a year the seasons flopped over. Clams live like this, but without so much reading as the Maytrees.
They remembered the central post office—the post office where everyone met mornings and encouraged everyone else for the day and night ahead. They were young when passenger trains to Provincetown replaced freights. When he was eighteen, he joined crews all over the Cape to clear and rebuild after the big hurricane.
Toby Maytree wanted to engage the enemy—either one—in gunfight. Instead he spent the war at the San Francisco Office of War Information. He wrote broadcasts for Pacific troops. By then, Lou was in college. Later, married, both Maytree and Lou liked the idea of seeing the world. Neither, however, was willing to sacrifice free time for a job.
Maytree picked up cash by moving houses for friends and whacking up additions, at whim. They voted. They were not social thinkers, but their friends were. Their summer friends, in particular, harvested facts row on row from newspapers like mice on corncobs. The Maytrees were not always up-to-the-minute. Their city friends envied their peace.
She owned their house. Her mother bought it when Lou was a girl. Her mother and Lou had moved to Provincetown from Marblehead, Massachusetts, after the man of the family, a lawyer, left one morning for work and never came back. No one knew that ordinary breakfast would be their last. Why not memorize everything, just in case?
For a long time they owned no car, no television when that came in, no insurance, no savings. Once a week they heard world news on the radio. They supported striking coal miners’ families with cash. They loved their son, Pete, their only child. Between them they read about three hundred books a year. He read for facts, she for transport. Nothing about them was rich except their days swollen with time.
Lou Maytree’s height and stillness made her look like a statue. Her fair hair and her white skin’s purity contrasted with the red she wore year-round to cheer the scene. Her
courtesy, her compliance, and especially her silence dated from a time otherwise gone. Her size, her wide eyes and high brow, and her upright carriage gave her an air of consequence. Intimacy came easily to her, but strangers could not see it.
When she was old, she lived alone in the Maytrees’ one-room shack in the parabolic sand dunes. She crossed the backshore dunes into the bayside town Fridays and stocked up. A straw hat kept her face clear. Year after year her eyes set farther back and their lavender lids thinned.
Throughout her life she was ironic and strict with her thoughts. She went dancing most Friday nights in town. People said that Maytree, or felicity, or solitude had driven her crazy. People said she had been an ugly girl, or a child movie star; that she inherited fabulous sums and lived in a shack without pipes or wires; that she read too much; that she was wanting in ambition and could have married anyone. She lacked a woman’s sense of doom. She did what she wanted—like who else on earth? All her life she found dignity over-rated. She rolled down dunes.
Most of the few and unremarkable things Lou and Toby Maytree did occurred in their old beachside house on the town’s front street, and in fact in its bed.
Their bed’s frame was old pipe metal, ironstone. Lou Maytree painted its arched headboard and footboard white. Every few years she sanded its rust rosettes and painted it white again. This was about as useful as she got, though she stretched a dollar for food. One could divide their double bed
into her side and his side by counting four pipes over, but the two ignored parity. He slept with a long leg flung over her, as a dog claims a stick.
Once while he slept on his side, his legs thrashed and he panted. She pressed his shoulder.
Chasing a rabbit?
He exhaled and said, tap-dancing.
I
T BEGAN WHEN
L
OU
Bigelow and Toby Maytree first met. He was back home in Provincetown after the war. Maytree first saw her on a bicycle. A red scarf, white shirt, skin clean as eggshell, wide eyes and mouth, shorts. She stopped and leaned on a leg to talk to someone on the street. She laughed, and her loveliness caught his breath. He thought he recognized her flexible figure. Because everyone shows up in Provincetown sooner or later, he had taken her at first for Ingrid Bergman until his friend Cornelius straightened him out.
He introduced himself. —You’re Lou Bigelow, aren’t you? She nodded. They shook hands and hers felt hot under sand like a sugar doughnut. Under her high brows she eyed him straight on and straight across. She had gone to girls’ schools, he recalled later. Those girls looked straight at you. Her wide eyes, apertures opening, seemed preposterously to tell him, I and these my arms are for you. I know, he thought back at the stranger, this long-limbed girl. I know and I am right with you.
He felt himself blush and knew his freckles looked green. She was young and broad of mouth and eye and jaw, fresh, solid and airy, as if light rays worked her instead of muscles.
Oh, how a poet is a sap; he knew it. He managed to hold his eyes on her. Her rich hair parted on the side; she was not necessarily beautiful, or yes she was, her skin’s luster. Her pupils were rifle bores shooting what? When he got home he could not find his place in Helen Keller.
He courted Lou carefully in town, to wait, surprised, until his newly serious intent and hope firmed or fled, and until then, lest he injure her trust. No beach walks, dune picnics, rowing, sailing. Her silence made her complicit, innocent as beasts, oracular. Agitated, he saw no agitation in her even gaze. Her size and whole-faced smile maddened him, her round arms at her sides, stiff straw hat. Her bare shoulders radiated a smell of sun-hot skin. Her gait was free and light. Over her open eyes showed two widths of blue lids whose size and hue she would never see. Her face’s skin was transparent, lighted and clear like sky. She barely said a word. She tongue-tied him.
She already knew his dune-shack friend Cornelius Blue, knew the professors Hiram and Elaine Cairo from New York, knew everyone’s friend Deary the hoyden who lived on the pier or loose in the dunes, and old Reevadare Weaver who gave parties. Bumping through a painter’s opening, picking up paint at the hardware store, ransacking the library, she glanced at him, her mouth curving broadly, as if they shared a joke. He knew the glance of old. It was a summons he never refused. The joke was—he hoped—that the woman had already yielded but would set him jumping through hoops anyway. Lou Bigelow’s candid glance, however, contained neither answer nor question, only a spreading pleasure, like Blake’s infant joy, kicking the gong around.
Maytree concealed his courtship. On the Cairos’ crowded porch, she steadied her highball on the rail. He asked her, Would she like to row around the harbor with him? She turned and gave him a look, Hold on, Buster. He was likely competing with fleets and battalions of men. Maytree wanted her heart. She had his heart and did not know it. She shook her head, clear of eye, and smiled. If he were only a painter: her avid expression, mouth in repose or laughing, her gleaming concentration. The wide-open skin between her brows made their arcs long. Not even Ingrid Bergman had these brows. The first few times he heard her speak, her Britishy curled vowels surprised him. He rarely dared look her way.
One day he might accompany Lou Bigelow from town out here to his family’s old dune shack. He was afraid his saying “shack” would scare them both. Without her he already felt like one of two pieces of electrical tape pulled apart. He could not risk a mistake.
Robert Louis Stevenson, he read in his
Letters
, called marriage “a sort of friendship recognized by the police.” Charmed, Maytree bought a red-speckled notebook to dedicate to this vexed sphere—not to marriage, but to love. More red-speckled notebooks expanded, without clarifying, this theme. Sextus Propertius, of love: “Shun this hell.” From some book he copied: “How does it happen that a never-absent picture has in it the power to make a fresh, overwhelming appearance every hour, wide-eyed, white-toothed, terrible as an army with banners?” She was outside his reach.
O
F COURSE SHE GLARED
at Maytree that fall when he came by barefoot at daybreak and asked if she would like to see his dune shack. Behind his head, color spread up sky. In the act of diving, Orion, rigid, shoulder-first like a man falling, began to dissolve. Then even the zenith and western stars paled and gulls squawked.
Her house was on the bay in town. He proposed to walk her to the ocean—not far, but otherworldly in the dunes. She had been enjoying
Bleak House.
Men always chased her and she always glared.
She most certainly did not ask him in. His was a startling figure: his Mars-colored hair, his height and tension, his creased face. He looked like a traveling minstrel, a red-eyed night heron. His feet were long and thin like the rest of him. He wore a billed fishing cap. An army canteen hung from his belt. She had been a schoolgirl in Marblehead, Massachusetts, when he went West.
—Just a walk, he said, sunrise. We won’t need to go inside.
In his unsure smile she saw his good faith. Well, that was considerate, brickish of him, to say that they would not go in. She agreed. She had not seen the dunes in weeks. May
tree suggested she bring, as he did, a pair of socks, to provide webbed feet, and wear a brimmed hat that tied. In predawn light she saw the sunspokes around his eyes under his cap.
She followed him through the woods and up to the dunes. Morning dew under trees wet her socks. Sand stuck between her toes. She stuck her socks in her waistband. Heat would dry them.
Bursting uphill through scrubs into the open excited her. She saw a wild array of sand dunes inscribing a sphere of sea and sky. She saw three-hundred-foot dunes swirl around the horizon like a school of fish: bright side, dark side, moving downwind. The world of town vanished as if wind tore it off.
A low bump between dunes caught Lou’s eye. It angled on a flat behind them near the trees they came through. She and Maytree neared it in a crescent of shade. It was a sail, a rolled canvas sail, a mainsail. From the roll’s side, dark curls spilled like filling. They settled, these curls, on a green lobster buoy. It was their friend Deary Hightoe asleep and swaddled. Lou knew Deary slept in the dunes somewhere. She claimed to like the way starlight smelled on sand. Once Cornelius asked her how the smell of starlight on sand differed from the smell of moonlight. —More peppery. Beside Deary at the forest edge Lou saw, implausibly, a garden of shriveling chilis and kale. Deary woke, blinked, stretched, and opened the sail by rolling in it. Lou and Maytree moved fifteen feet to the slope where she fetched up.
—What brings you two out so early? While Deary talked and laughed—all her waking hours, it seemed—her mouth
bubbled at gums and corners. At thirty-five she was six years older than Lou, small of body and round of face. Lou knew that this month she was playing drums with the band at a seaside bar and restaurant. She must have found her way over and among the dunes in the dark when the place closed at two o’clock. Lou resolved to give Deary bushels of seaweed to mulch these dry plantings. How could she carry water out here? Any rain vanished in sand. For soil Deary seemed to be substituting garbage, leaf litter scooped from under pines, fish racks, scrub oak leaves hard as harpoon points, and two stranded rays, one of which tilted, like a plane turning, over a head of kale it shaded and fed.
There were unsolved crimes out in this wilderness including murder. Not many years after Lou and Maytree met, someone murdered the Woman in the Dunes. The killer beheaded her and cut off her hands. Searchers found the rest of her, raped. They found only one sandy hand. No one ever found who she was, or her killer, or her other hand, or her head. Deary’s Boston mother assumed she lived in a locked house in town.
Now Deary built a piney fire for making cowboy coffee. Her head was a globe. From a side part, her curls rose like a laurel wreath and set close behind her ears. A piece of green cloth, safety-pinned, bound one of her hands.
—What happened to your hand?
—I’m one step closer to death. She was enthusiastic.
—Who isn’t? Maytree’s height was drawing the smoke.
Deary crossed her legs. —You see, she said to Lou, as soon as you arrive, you start hurting yourself. You burn this
fingertip. Later you cut yourself—right there, on the side. Paper cut in the webbing, and years later, another beside where it healed.
Lou knew all along that Deary originated theories. —Another time you bang a knuckle, and maybe twenty years later you pinch its other side. With each injury you learn how that patch of you feels. It wakens. Until it heals, you’re aware of those nerves.
—This is a privilege?
—Of course. Every place you injure adds that patch to your consciousness. You grow more alive. And the point of all this is—she beamed up from the sand at Lou—that when you have hurt every single place on your body, you die! Once you have felt every last nerve ending, at least on your skin, then you have lived in full awareness. Then you die. Deary had a pleased toothy smile. Mysteriously, some years ago she earned the first degree MIT awarded a female in architecture. Her parents and grandparents were themselves educated.
The two left her before the sun got worse. Out of earshot Maytree told Lou that roaming in the morning from his shack, he often saw Deary sleeping loose. Sometimes she rolled in her sail near the ocean among beach peas. In storms she bivouacked by the swale’s hollow in heather.
Lou followed him up the highest dune. Lightly he was teasing her about her many boyfriends and suitors. Lou found climbing loose sand, she said to herself, hellacious. When she gained a step up she slid halfway back. The dune top was nearer than it looked. It was a socket of light. Far away the rimming sea met sky and spread. Drying to death,
like a fellow-crawling-in-a-desert cartoon, would not take long. There was no shade. She was hungry. From the high dune Maytree was trying to show her his shack on the horizon. Where could he mean? Would he touch her shoulder with his hand, or even arm, as he pointed? She had not let a man this close in years. Against blue sea she saw sand crests trace catenary curves against sky. Knee-high pines marked some hollows.
Beside the big dune’s base she saw a house that sand had pushed halfway over. A broken line of brush paralleled the sea in a long hollow. Pointing, Maytree said those few right-angled planes on the horizon, each apparently the size of a playing card in relation to the collapsing house and the scrub, were actually shack roofs. If so, the forest was bonsai. Must one crawl in the shacks?
She could oversee the whole map: Provincetown harbor and piers and Cape Cod Bay one way, limitless sea the other way, and this dunefield. Pioneer bay dwellers cut this backshore for firewood, grazed it, and its topsoil blew away, leaving a Sahara of dunes on the primordial sandspit. There was no rock anywhere, just that stretch of sand the coastwise current picked up from crumbling cliffs to the south and dropped here in a spiral.
Above the Atlantic’s rim she saw a rain’s fallstreaks curve. A stillness as of empty space marked all she saw. It was this loping shore of mineral silence people meant when they said “the dunes.” The surface of the moon might look like this: rudimentary.
Losing sight of the sea, they crossed more dunes and
dropped to a boggy swale. Trees grew below her knees and scratched her. Pollen scum lay on the swale’s water like spray paint.
Beyond the damp swale they used a soft jeep track in sand that snakes crossed. They regained sight of the reeling sea where far waves broke in rows. Then, whoops, by her bare feet she saw a coiled pointy-headed snake, thick—a rattlesnake? Maytree dove for it. It escaped into poison ivy. It was a hognose snake, he said. Its first defense in life was to mimic a rattlesnake even where no rattlesnakes lived. He brushed his hands on his pants. —Pity…He watched the poison ivy as he spoke. You can do tricks with a hognose snake. In her mind she replied, as if bored, Oh can you.
The foam rows lined up in the offing marked shoals—Peaked Hill Bars, graveyard of the Atlantic, people said here, as on other coasts. Lou heard Maytree pronounce four syllables, Peak–ed Hill Bars. That those green shoals wrecked boats and killed people everyone knew. They bewildered her. Each offshore surf line contained commotion but got nowhere, like someone’s reading the same line over and over. Sluggish waves rolled into wind. When they smashed, spin-drift blew back in clumps.
On the foredune’s crest, she saw the ocean’s color change. Maytree’s legs parted grasses and turned inland. She saw his shack. It rose off-plumb from driftwood stump corners. Her friend Josephine said of a shack like Maytree’s that it looked like a big waiting bonfire. Maytree was telling her his father first built it while he was on lifesaving duty at Peaked Hill
Bars station. Maytree said he had rebuilt the shack many times. Lou knew it would have an outhouse. But where.
He made no move toward the shack. Its deck was pine planks with popped knots. Its one room was twelve feet by sixteen feet. Lou could use a seat, so it was she who left him to sit on the first shack step, elbows two steps up. The sun was out and every second the sky’s hues perished with no fuss. Behind him sand gave way to a band of dark sea and light sky.
She saw him walk away. Thirty yards down a slope he primed a pitcher pump from a water bucket. He came back and sat at a proper distance on her same step. He refilled his canteen. He spent the war at a California desk and bought the canteen at Wall Drug. Wind blew his shirt. Now again he was teasing her about her many suitors, possibly because she had not reacted the first time. He was only a bit taller than she was. She watched blue shadows on his white shirt stretch and shrink as he moved. The shirt flattened on his shoulder and ribs and blinded her. She looked away. It must be an old shirt of his father’s. One of her arms felt one of his sleeves.
Only then did it strike her in fear that she could love this kind stranger. He knew everything, including, and perhaps specializing in, love. After VJ Day he came back near home for college. He returned to the West to cowboy for a few years. Then he came home at thirty. She knew nothing at all. How could he mistake her for sophisticated?
She opened her mouth to drink tinny water, but she did
not open her mouth to correct his impression. What could she say? Nothing had been said between them. Their intimacy’s height so far was drinking from the same canteen.
When Lou was a girl, her breasts grew both calamitously early and big. Boys came at her, shouting to one another. Alone or together, running, they competed to touch a breast, capture the flag. Had those boys put her off males forever? Throughout boarding school she thought all males younger than her teachers possessed neither fears nor noble hopes, let alone fine feelings—or even any inner lives at all. They were more like bumper cars than people.
Boarding-school boys rarely sought her. Considering her looks, and what one called her Betty Grables, they figured her dance card was full for years to come. In college she fell for a reckless cellist, Primo Dial, who played in the orchestra standing up. Whenever his music specified six or eight bars of rests, he lifted his music stand and cello at once, kept his eyes on the music, and wandered to set his stand in another part of the room. A new conductor fresh from Europe kicked him out. He took up the violin, the concertina, and blues harmonica. She had never heard blues. He dashed through town and its outlying cornfields making music. Lou was almost six feet tall. She laughed, held Primo’s thin shoulder, and belted. It was a discovery of her reserve that she could sing if she belted, and never minded people about. Primo played “Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby,” “Blues in the Night,” “Heart of My Heart,” “I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate,”
“Makin’ Whoopee!” “Alabamy Bound,” “Side by Side,” “Hey Daddy.” Sometimes instead of singing she percussed: play a rat, play a rat, play a rat-a-ma-que, or ligga digga digga digga boom, boom she-boom.
She queried herself absorbedly in those ragged and trying years—for all their quick pleasures, the earnest years. Always she felt she was born to some heroism—but what? Only to abstractions, especially loyal love, and especially the specific love in the interest of which she and Primo Dial kept kissing each other. They kissed all over Ohio. Walking hand in hand or making music, she often discovered behind them a line of flushed girls like young quail barely keeping up.
She asked herself: Would she rather have his love, or hers for him? Would she rather have Primo himself, guaranteed to love her and only her forever, or would she rather have her love for Primo Dial forever, intact and untainted come who may? Astounded, she realized she would choose her love over his. Was she so selfish? Of course, if she lost him, and she did, the love might well dim—an apostasy to think, but lots of lovers lose. She took the chance, as any lover does, witting or not.
When Primo Dial and his concertina left her that May for winsome twins who played glockenspiels, she cried the whole of a Provincetown summer. She fed her love willfully on forcemeats and tidbits from their strolling player days and dancing nights she knew by heart. She wrung her love. If the twins ever interrupted her memory, she reminded herself she liked them both. She drew her mind back to Primo. She liked
loving, renounced being loved, and only rarely thought of slitting his throat.
Lou, singing to herself in the house on the beach, kept her misery and love alive in her single heart. Who but a passionate theoretician, of the sort those years produce, would burn down the house to finish cooking—just to see how it came out—a half-baked principle? It had been an appalling summer she cringed to recall, another failed go at interior life. Yet something about her hypothetical choice was right.
In the shack’s outhouse Lou looked up now and saw a big blacksnake angled from the wall to float in the air over her head. Lou and Maytree started back. Every day she failed to tell him about herself and her solitude she led him further astray. She followed him up and down high dunes at the world’s ledge. She looked at his neck. What kept him from taking her hand? In this charged air any touch would probably arrest her heart and disarticulate her joints, and so forth, but he should act soon because it could only get worse.
