Bitter Sweet (7 page)
To Eric, this ritual trip to the bakery had become as enjoyable as Pete Nelson’s pastries. He returned up the hill in blithe spirits, carrying a white waxed bag, bounded into the house and poured two cups of coffee just as
Nancy
entered the kitchen.
‘Good morning,’ she said, for the first time that day. (To
Nancy
it was never a good morning until her makeup ritual was complete.)
‘Good morning.’
She wore a bone-coloured linen skirt and a boxy shirt with dropped shoulders, immense sleeves, and an upturned collar, covered all over with tiny green and purple cats. Who but
Nancy
would wear purple and green cats and look - chic? Even her belt - a twisted hank of purple sisal with a buckle the size of a hubcap- would have looked stupid on anyone else. But his wife had panache, and indubitable style, and access to the discount rooms in the most elegant department stores across
America
. Any room Nancy Macaffee entered became eclipsed by her presence.
Watching her cross the kitchen in purple shoes, her hair confined in a neat, low tail, her eyes shaded and mascaraed, her lips painted one colour and outlined with another, Eric sipped his coffee and grinned.
Thanks.’ She accepted the cup he handed her and took a careful sip. ‘Mmm . . . you look like you’re in a good mood.’
‘I am.’
‘What brought the smile?’
He leaned against the cupboard, eating a fat, glazed doughnut, occasionally sipping. Just trying to imagine you as a polyester mama - say, two hundred pounds, wearing double-knit slacks and hair rollers every morning.’
‘Don’t hold your breath.’ She raised one eyebrow and gave him a smirk. ‘See anybody at the bakery?’
‘ Two tourists, Sam Ellerby, the Hawkins girl, and Pete stuck his head out of the kitchen.’
‘Any news?’
‘Nuh-uh.’ He licked his fingers and downed the last of his coffee. ‘What are you going to do today?’
‘Weekly sales reports, what else? This job would be ideal if it weren’t for all the paperwork.’
And the travel, he thought. After a full five days on the road, she spent her sixth, and often half of her seventh, doing paperwork - she was one damned hard worker, he’d give her that.
But she loved the glamour associated with such stores as Bonwit Teller, Neiman-Marcus and Rocco Altobelli - all her accounts. And if travelling came along with the job, she accepted its drawbacks in exchange for that glamour.
She’d had the Orlane job when they moved back to
‘How about you?’ she inquired, slipping on a pair of glasses, studying the weekly newspaper.
‘We’re full today, so is Mike. Taking three charter groups out.’ He rinsed his cup, put it into the dishwasher and donned a white skipper’s cap with a shiny black bill.
‘So you won’t be home till seven?’
‘Probably not.’
She looked up through her oversized horn-rimmed glasses. ‘Try to make it earlier.’ ‘I can’t promise.’ ‘Just try, okay?’ He nodded.
‘Well, I’d better get to work,’
Nancy
said, snapping the paper closed. ‘Me, too/
Coffee and juice in hand, she touched her cheek to his. ‘See you tonight.’
She headed for her small downstairs office while he left the house and crossed a short stretch of sidewalk to a clapboard garage. He raised the door by hand, glanced at
Nancy
’s ultra-respectable steel grey Acura and clambered into a rusty Ford pickup that twelve years ago had been white, had possessed a left rear fender and had not required wire to hold its tailpipe up. The vehicle was an embarrassment to
Nancy
, but Eric had grown fond of The Old Whore, as he affectionately called it. The engine was still reliable; the company name and phone number were still legible on the doors; and the driver’s seat -after all these years - was shaped precisely like his backside.
Turning the key, he mumbled, ‘All right, you old whore, come on.’
It took a little encouraging, but after less than a minute on the starter, the old 300 straight- six rumbled to life.
He gunned her, smiled, shifted into reverse and backed from the garage.
The ride from Fish Creek to Gills Rock covered nineteen of the prettiest miles in all of creation, Eric believed, with Green Bay intermittently visible off to his left; farms, orchards and forests to his right. From the flower-flanked Main Street of Fish Creek itself the road climbed, curved and dipped between thick walls of forest, past private cottages and resorts,
heading northeast but swinging to the shore again and again: at the picturesque little village of Ephraim with its two white church steeples reflected in glassy Eagle Harbor; at Sister Bay where Al Johnson’s famous goats were already grazing on the grassy roof of his restaurant; at Ellison Bay with its panoramic view from the hill behind the Grand View Hotel; and finally at Gills Rock beyond which the waters of Lake Michigan met those of Green Bay and created the hazardous currents from which the area extracted its name: Death’s Door.
Eric had often wondered why a town and a rock had been named for a long-forgotten settler named Elias Gill when Seversons had been there earlier and longer, and were still here, for that matter. Why, hell, the name Gill had long ago disappeared from the area tax rolls and telephone book. But the heritage of the Seversons lived on. Eric’s grandfather Severson had built the farm on the bluff above the bay, and his father had built the house tucked beneath the cedars beside
Some might not call Gills Rock a town at all. It was little more than a smattering of weatherbeaten buildings stretched like a gap-toothed smile around the southeast side of the harbour. A restaurant, a gift shop, several wooden docks, a boat landing and Ma’s house were the primary obstacles keeping the trees from growing clear to the water’s edge. Scattered among these were smaller buildings and the usual paraphernalia peculiar to a fishing community - boat trailers, winches, gasoline pumps and the cradles in which the big boats were dry-docked over the winter.
Turning into the driveway, the truck pitched steeply downhill and bumped over the stony earth. Maples and cedars grew haphazardly between patches of gravel and among the collection of huts near the docks. The roof of the fish-cleaning shack already sported a line of gulls whose droppings had permanently streaked the green shingles with white. Smoke from the fish-smoking shack hung in the air, pungent and blue. Permeating it all was the ever-present odour of decaying wood and fish. Pulling up beneath his favourite sugar maple, Eric noted that Mike’s sons, Jerry Joe and Nicholas, were already aboard the Mary Deare and The Dove, vacuuming the decks, icing up the fish coolers and putting in a supply of refreshments. Like himself and Mike, the boys had grown up around the water and had been going out on the boats since their hands were big enough to grip a rail. At eighteen and sixteen Jerry Joe and Nicholas made responsible, knowledgeable mates on the two boats.
Slamming the truck door, he waved to the boys and headed for the house.
He’d grown up in the place and was unbothered by its doubling as the charter fishing office.
The front door might be closed at times, but it was never locked; already at
it was shoved as far back as the buckled wood floor would allow and propped open by a six-pack of Coca-Cola. The walls of the office, panelled with knotty pine, were covered with lures, spoons, insect repellent, a two-way radio, fishing licence forms, Door County maps, landing nets, . two mounted chinook salmon and dozens of photos of , tourists with their prize catches. On one rack hung yellow slickers for sale, on another a rainbow of sweatshirts lauding
Severson’s charter fishing, gills rock. Piled on the floor were more six-packs of canned soft drinks while on a card table in the corner a twenty-five-cup coffeepot was already steaming with free brew for the customers.
Circling the counter with its vintage brass cash register, Eric headed for the back, through a narrow door into a room that had once been a side porch but now housed a supply of Styrofoam coolers and the ice machine.
On the far side of the porch another door led into thekitchen.
‘Mornin’, Ma,’ he said, walking in.
‘Mornin’ yourself.’
He reached into the cupboard for a thick, white cup and poured himself coffee from a chipped enamel pot on a chipped enamel gas range - the same one that had been there since he was a boy. Its grates were thick with charred boiloyer, and the paint on the wall behind it wore a yellow halo, but Ma was unapologetically undomestic - with one exception: she baked bread twice each week, refusing to put store-bought bread in her mouth, claiming, ‘That stuf’ll
kill you!’
She was mixing bread dough this morning, on an old gateleg table covered with blue oilcloth. To the best of Eric’s memory that oilcloth was the only thing that had been replaced in the room since 1959 when the antique wooden icebox had gone and Ma had bought the Gibson refrigerator, which now was a yellowed relic, but still running.
Ma never threw anything away with a day’s use left in it.
She was dressed in her usual getup, blue jeans and a tight aqua-blue T-shirt that made her resemble a stack of three inner tubes. Anna Severson loved T-shirts with slogans. Today’s bore the words i do it with younger men, and a picture of an old woman and a young man fishing. Her tight, nickel-coloured curls held the fresh shape of home-permanent rods, and her nose - what there was of it – held up a paar of glasses that were nearly as old as the Gibson and their lenses nearly as yellowed.
Turning with the cup in his hand, Eric watched her move to a cupboard to unearth bread pans. ‘How’re you today?’ he inquired. “Huh?’
“That ornery, huh?’
‘You come in here just to drink my coffee and give me grief’?.’
‘That what you call this?’ He looked into the cup. ‘It’d make a truck driver wince.’
‘Then drink that coloured water in the office.’
‘You know I hate those buffalo board cups.’
‘Then drink your coffee at home. Or don’t that wife of yours know how to make it? She get home last night?’ “Yup. About ten-fifteen.’ ‘Ha.’
‘Ma, don’t start with me.’
‘That’s some kind of life, you living there and her living all over the US of A.’ She smeared lard in a bread pan and clunked it down on the oilcloth. ‘Your dad would of come and dragged me home by the hair if I’d’ve tried something like that.’
‘You haven’t got enough hair. What’d you do to it, by the way?’ He pretended a serious assessment of her ugly, tight curls.
‘Went over to Barbara’s last night and had her kink me up.’ Barbara was Mike’s wife. They lived in the woods not fifty feet up the shoreline.
‘Looks like it hum.’
She slapped him with a bread pan, then plopped a loaf into it. ‘I ain’t got time for hair fussing and you know it.
‘You had your breakfast?’
‘Yup.’
‘What? Glazed doughnuts?’
‘Ma, you’re meddling again.’
She stuck the loaf in the oven. ‘What else are mothers for? God didn’t make no commandment named “thou shalt not meddle,” so I meddle. That’s what mothers are for.’
‘I thought they were for selling fish licences and booking charters. ‘
‘If you want that leftover sausage, eat it.’ She nodded towards an iron skillet on top of the stove and began wiping the flour off the oilcloth with the edge of her hand.
He lifted a cover and found two nearly cold Polish sausages - one for him, one for Mike as usual - picked one up with his fingers and leaned against the stove, eating it, pondering.
‘Ma, you remember Maggie Pearson?’
‘Of course I remember Maggie Pearson. My hair ain’t kinked up that tight. What brought her up?’
‘She called me last night.’
For the first time since he’d entered the room his mother stopped moving. She turned from the sink and looked back over her shoulder.
‘She called you? For what?’
‘Just to say hello.’
‘She lives out west someplace, doesn’t she?’
‘
Seattle
. ‘
‘She called you from
Seattle
just to say hello?’
Eric shrugged.
‘She’s widowed, ain’t she?’
‘Yes.’
‘Ah, that’s it then.’
‘What’s it then?’
‘She always was sweet on you. Sniffin’ around, that’s what she’s doing. Widows get to sniffin’ when they need a man.’
‘Oh, Ma, for cryin’ out loud,
Nancy
was right beside me when she called.’