Spartina (20 page)

He was about to tell her about his odd morning at the Wedding Cake, Schuyler making breakfast for Parker and him. He caught himself. He thought of Marie coming up from the salt pond in
her
oversized robe,
her
chatter,
her
odd combination of boneless laziness and glass-edged attack. Maybe these rich girls all started conversations the same way, letting the fizz off the top of the bottle.

“I’m just going to have coffee and soup, that okay with you?”

While she was at the stove, Dick looked again at the shelves against the windowless wall. Quite a few books. One row of nothing but bird books. Boxes of loose photographs, a few more matted and propped up, a few in frames. Two cameras. There were three tennis trophies, two of them filled with pennies, straight pins, and odd buttons, the third a little statue of a girl serving. The arm with the racket had broken off.

Under the lowest shelf there were plastic-mesh baskets and a cardboard carton, all filled with stuff, as if Elsie were getting ready to have a yard sale. A pair of girl’s ice skates, a skin-diving mask
and snorkel, cans of tennis balls, a jump rope, a lot of bicycle inner tubes, a swim fin with a torn heel. That was the first basket. Dick shoved it back against the wall with his foot. It wouldn’t go all the way. He picked up the handle of a butterfly net that blocked it, but the net was hung up on another carton. He gave up and wiped the dust off his hand.

Elsie was looking at him. “You’re as bad as my sister,” she said. “If you want to play with something, fine. But don’t go around straightening up.”

Dick reflexively stiffened against someone setting him straight. “Been here long?”

Elsie shrugged. “A year. Less. I’ve been fixing up the outside, putting in plants. I’ve got some furniture in storage but it doesn’t really go here, and I can’t afford new stuff. What’s the rush? I kind of like it with just the minimum.”

The one sofa by the fireplace and the one table by the window looked unrelated and forlorn. The sofa was a three-seater that had seen better days. The table was a rustic picnic table with benches, the cedar bark still on the legs.

The only other visible piece was a tall double-door wardrobe. It was carved and painted in some sort of old-time Italian or Portuguese way. It was faded, but still a beautifully made thing. Backed against the scarlet curtain, it made that corner of the room look like a side altar in a big Catholic church. It was a shame to have everything else so slack.

“It’s all passive solar,” Elsie said. “There’s a pile of rocks at the back of the greenhouse, and the heat flows …” She gestured sweepingly. She stopped. “Did you know you have the most terrible expression on your face?”

Dick was embarrassed. “It’s the benches and table. I like the wardrobe. I like the house and the pond.”

“Well, good. That’s the point. It’s just a shelter by a pond.” She
put her hands deep in her shorts pockets. “I did a lot of the work, I mean hammering and sawing. Ask Eddie. And he and I worked on the plan.… I know it may look drab on a rainy day.…”

“No. It’s …”

“But on a nice day you can float on the pond—we dredged it and fixed the little dam—you can lie there and—”

“I like your house. Eddie likes your house. He spoke to me about it. The air flow and everything.”

“I just haven’t gotten around to … I’m perfectly happy to get some advice. You have any ideas?”

“Nope.” He had no idea what she wanted. But she could get him talking, he just couldn’t keep his mouth shut around her. He said, “Well, maybe you could take the bark off your picnic table. Looks like a hippie girl with hairy legs.”

Elsie laughed. “That’s going outside. Eventually. Back to nature, where she belongs. And eventually I’ll get some chests for all that equipment.”

“Maybe you should put it out in your garage. Makes the house look like it ought to have hinges on the lid. Like a big toy box.”

Elsie looked hurt, laughed, then looked hurt again.

“Aw, hell, Elsie, I’m just …”

“Did you know you used to terrify kids when you worked at the boatyard?”

“I was mean to kids? Naw. I may have explained things kind of briefly to one or two boat owners. I wasn’t mean to any kids.”

“I didn’t say you were mean.”

“First time I worked in the yard, I was just a kid myself. That was before the Coast Guard. Before I was on Captain Texeira’s boat. I used to fall back on the boatyard when things didn’t work out.”

“That’s funny. Even when I was a kid I admired the way you’re good at things, the way you seemed to have worked out a good relation to things, I mean the physical world. I thought you and
Eddie—you around boats and Eddie back in the woods—I compared you with most of the men around.… You and Eddie seemed so real. And happy about … things.”

Dick laughed. “You’d have to leave out a long list of real screwups. That goes for Eddie too.”

“Oh, I know you and Eddie get into trouble. But that’s because you have your own rules … or at least your own sense of things. I’ve always liked the way you and Eddie treated this part of South County as though … well, certainly not as if it
belonged
to you, but as though it were open to you, part of your natural territory.”

“That’s a pretty picture all right. Natural territory.”

“Did you know the Indians—or, as Miss Perry says, the
red
Indians—didn’t
own
anything?”

“Well, that’s me and Eddie. But I’d like to have my natural territory so’s it includes, say, banks. The way it is now, I’m not in what you might call the natural business flow.”

Elsie didn’t go on with the subject. She brought the soup over to the picnic table. She said, “I know you don’t like this table with hairy legs, but it’s all we’ve got.”

Dick thought he’d spoken about money in some crude way. It irritated him. He said, “I see you got some tennis trophies. You going to join the tennis club when your brother-in-law gets it going on Sawtooth Point?”

Elsie smiled as though she saw through him. “Tennis used to be the way I punished boys. Now it’s how I try to meet men. So maybe I will. Increase
my
natural territory.” She got a picture from the shelf of herself and a man shaking hands over a tennis net. “That’s me at seventeen. I just beat him. The old headmaster at Perryville—he still had a pretty good game.” Elsie laughed. “Still! Old! He was only a few years older than I am now. He wasn’t even forty.”

“You got a long ways to go till forty,” Dick said. “What are you—more than ten years younger than me?” He looked at the
picture. “I remember you at that age there. You came down to the boatyard to tell me you were sorry my father died.”

“I remember that,” Elsie said. “It still makes me blush. I remember all the men in the yard staring at me, but by then you’d seen me, so I couldn’t turn back. I’d thought I’d be … I thought because I was doing a good thing I’d be invisible and it wouldn’t matter. I was just wearing my bathing suit. Sally wouldn’t come, but, then, she knew men stared at her, and I still didn’t quite believe they noticed me.… Well, I did sort of.…”

Dick said, “It was nice of you. No one else in your family ever said anything to me about my father. I appreciated it.”

“Well, our whole family was falling apart that summer.”

Dick nodded. “I remember all you Buttricks kind of disappeared for a while. But I saw you around some.”

“I was going to the Perryville School. I stayed on as a boarder for two years. We’d sometimes go sailing. The school had two boats in the yard where you worked—do you remember those two pond boats? All the kids were scared of you.… You were a famous grouch.”

“You were scared of me, were you?”

“Not me. But you
were
grouchy.”

“I don’t remember being grouchy to you school kids.” Dick was embarrassed.

Elsie laughed and said, “ ‘
School kids.
’ Good God. I certainly didn’t think of myself as a
school kid.
What a blow that would have been. I mean, maybe crackerjack sailor, or star rebel. But
school kid
 …”

Elsie went off with the soup bowls and came back with coffee.

“Tell me,” Elsie said. “What am I now? I mean, there I was then, little Elsie Buttrick, school kid. Now what? One of the Buttrick girls, not the pretty one. And maybe one of the Buttricks who had the nice house on the point. Or maybe—’Officer Buttrick,’ as you
sometimes say with a certain sneer. Or maybe I’m just one of the rich-kid crowd?” Elsie laughed. “I remember in college teaching myself to say tom
ay
to instead of tom
ah
to so the lefties wouldn’t hate me.” Elsie looked up. “So—is it A, B, C? None of the above? All of the above?”

He shook his head.

“Oh, come on. You can if you dare—where’s your nerve?”

Dick took a while. “I’m not so concerned about what you think of my nerve that I’d go ahead and make you feel bad.”

“Ooo. Well.” Elsie sat up. “Schoolgirl gets taken down a peg.”

“No,” Dick said. “You pushed yourself into that one.”

“In fencing that’s called a stop thrust. You just hold your blade out there when the other guy jumps in, and there she is with a new button.”

“You do fencing?”

“I did.”

“I guess there’s nothing you don’t do.”

“Just about.”

“Except let other people get a word in—”

“Oh, for God’s sakes! No one’s stopping you! But I guess that’s an answer in a way. What I think of as just my way of babbling engagingly,
you
think is obnoxious pushing.”

“Yup.”

Elsie said, “ ‘Yup.’ ‘Nope.’ Now I’ve made you go all swamp-Yankee.” Elsie smiled at him, started to say something else, didn’t, left her mouth open.

It made Dick laugh.

“Well,” Elsie said, “good. Now that we’ve got that all cleared up. Do you want a peach?”

Dick said yes.

Elsie went to get them, kept talking. “What I meant to get to somehow … I’ll just skip right to it. I had an eerie feeling not
long ago. It was about Miss Perry. I’m devoted to Miss Perry. I admire Miss Perry. What she’s like is one of those eccentric eighteenth-century English vicars who knew
everything
about the place they lived. Crops, flora and fauna, local geology, social facts,
everything.

“Miss Perry is pretty eighteenth-century in her formality too. You know how she’s known Captain Texeira for ages, how she adores him? She still writes him little notes saying, ‘May I call on you next Sunday?’ She only sees him once a month. And you know how much she likes you, but she only sees you on your kids’ birthdays. It’s all so crystallized it might as well be in a glass case. And there’s her one hour a week at the library reading aloud for children’s hour. She likes that. But I remember asking her about her other good works, which she’s not so fond of. She said she asked her father the same question when she was young and he said, ‘Life is a series of minor duties, most of them unpleasant.’ She said she was horrified at the time. I told her I was horrified now.

“Anyway, what happened was this. I started giving my ecology talks in the school, the ones Charlie and Tom came to. And I moved in here. One of the first days I was here, I came in, and I was just stopped cold—it was as if the house was haunted.… I thought, So this is what it feels like to be Miss Perry.” Elsie put the peaches down on the table, her fingers lingering on them. “It wasn’t so much a thought as a sensation. I felt her spirit, no, not her spirit. I felt the
form
of her life. I felt as though that form, that formal form, was hovering and it might suddenly crystallize the rest of my life.”

Dick was startled. It wasn’t the same thought he had yesterday, but it floated nearby.

Elsie said, “Of course it’s ridiculous, there are so many ways Miss Perry and I are … not just different but miles apart. But at the time the feeling was absolutely terrifying. It went away fairly quickly, though my reaction to it didn’t. I mean, every so often I find myself
underlining differences between Miss Perry and me.” Elsie laughed. “Which probably sounds pretty silly.” Elsie leaned over her plate and chomped down on her peach.

Dick said, “I was thinking the other day … something like that. One thing I was thinking is how my father was, how he left me things I didn’t even know about. For one thing, how hard it is not to be so …”

“Yes?”

“Not to be so goddamn gloomy.”

“That does seem to be the local problem,” Elsie said. “At least Miss Perry concentrates her melancholy all into one spell. That’s sort of formal too, every year at the same time. I can’t tell when I’m going to feel melancholy. It used to be whenever I went by our old house. Or smelled a certain smell, a sea-breeze-through-a-damp wooden-house smell … I used to blame everything on that house, on that one summer. That summer was the sun of my solar system. Now I don’t know, I’m more in outer space.… That was seventeen years ago. What were you doing seventeen years ago?”

Dick said, “That year. I remember that year. I got married in January, Charlie was born, my father died.”

“But Charlie’s birthday’s in June,” Elsie said.

“Yup.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to …”

“And I left the Coast Guard, went to work at the boatyard,” Dick said. “Don’t worry about it. Charlie came out nine pounds, so it was hard to call him premature with a straight face. I remember May’s mother giving it a try.”

Elsie laughed, then looked to see if it was okay.

Dick said, “And I built our house. May stayed with her parents in Wakefield while I was finishing it. I’d get off work at the yard, drive over, and keep going till after dark. Eddie Wormsley and me. Sometimes another couple of guys from the yard. That was just
before Eddie’s wife left him. He knew she was going, so he wasn’t too cheerful.”

Elsie said, “Ah. So it wasn’t just my family. It was a bad year for all of you. Almost enough to make you believe in astrology.”

“No,” Dick said. “To tell the truth, that time wasn’t bad for me. I liked all that work. I’d been bored in the Coast Guard. And I was glad I had at least that little piece of land left, and the house going up. And I had a son.”