The Vagabonds (31 page)
They get in the Taurus and drive through town and stop at the stop sign for Route 6 and, crossing it, take Gull Pond Road down to the ocean and park at the parking lot’s guardrail. Joanna is cradling the urn in its box, and she kicks off her shoes. David does the same. They open the car doors and stand at the crest of the dune, then descend. The wind is high, with ice in its teeth, and spume lifts off the waves.
There are dog tracks and footprints and bird tracks and weeds. Much of the beach is hard-packed sand, not porous as in summer weather, and they move rapidly away from the cleared level of the parking lot to where the dunes are high. There are blown drifts of snow. Gulls have settled at the tide line, preening, staring out. At length Joanna stops beneath the shelter of a massive dune—its top green distant bramble, its striations orange and ochre and brown—and asks him, “Here?” “Here,” he says, and pries loose the cap. They fumble a little, shivering, arranging the direction of the ash and bone because the wind makes eddies, blowing, and they each take a handful and toss it away but it falls at their feet nonetheless. Then David scoops out a hole in the dune and they pour their mother in and tamp it down with yellow sand and watch the wind eradicate the imprint of their hands. There are pieces of driftwood and clusters of kelp. Joanna puts the empty urn in the pocket of her parka and they reverse direction and walk back.
2003
T
he spring is slow in coming; deep snow stays on the ground. Then, when the rains come, snow washes away and ice in the harbor breaks up. David continues his visit to Wellfleet and is a welcome companion, but after some weeks he grows restless and by the Ides of March leaves. The days grow warmer, the nights do not freeze. When her daughter turns sixteen Joanna throws a party and is pleasantly surprised; it is not the disaster she feared. Leah’s friends are well-dressed, well-behaved—or at least they try to be—and her high school guidance counselor, who doubles as an acting coach, says Artemisia’s wonderful, she’s got a talent to
die
for. I don’t need to tell you this, I’m sure you’ve known it all along, but your daughter’s the real thing. If every year I had
one
student like her, I’d thank my lucky stars.
Increasingly, she does. Her lucky star is in ascendance, and the money helps. Joanna finds a carpenter to cap the chimneys so no more grackles can fall down the flue, and he fixes the leak in the upstairs back bedroom and replaces the back hallway stairs. She hires a painter to spruce up the kitchen, first stripping off the wallpaper and dealing with the plaster where it cracks. He also paints her bedroom and the living room and as soon as it is warm enough will do the outside trim. These improvements have been long deferred, and it makes her happy to deal with the repairs. The manager of the Cape Cod Five Cents Savings Bank now smiles and nods when she comes through the door, and he always has a pleasant word about the weather and how much he likes what she’s been doing to the Bay View Inn, that new entrance by the porch . . .
The money changes things. There’s no point pretending otherwise; inheritance has changed the way she lives. In Hyannis, at the Subaru dealership, it gratifies her to write out a check for a new L.L. Bean Outback and not to finance it. When she first drove Trusty-Rusty into the lot the salesman barely glanced up from his desk, imagining—or so Joanna imagines—that she was just another bargain hunter on the edge of poverty, just a flustered lady customer, but when she takes the chair in front of him and crosses her legs in their stockings and says, I’m here for the top of your line, Walt—his name is printed on the brass desk plaque—I want the very best you have, he caps his pen and looks at her attentively. Then he discourses on the virtues of the new Subaru suspension system, the ABS and GPS and V6 engine and the surround sound and extended warranty and customer satisfaction while Joanna only half-listens, and then she says, I hear you, Walt, I want that white one there.
She has never been so far in debt as to max out on credit cards or fail to meet her mortgage, but lately things were dicey and the hole was growing deep. Last fall, for example, she should have locked in the fuel-oil price and guaranteed deliveries at that price all winter; now the cost of oil is twice what it was in September, but now it doesn’t matter; she can pay. She leafs through catalogues from Crate & Barrel and the Pottery Barn and Williams-Sonoma with the cheerful certainty that whatever she wants she can buy. As David had suggested, she gives Trusty-Rusty to Leah, first replacing the muffler and tires; she also gives her daughter an IBM ThinkPad and cell phone and sponsors an acting-class visit to Manhattan for spring break.
Oklahoma!
has closed, and no one wants to see
Gypsy,
so they settle on
Urinetown
and the musical of
The Producers,
which costs her an arm and a leg. But it’s no problem, she tells Leah, she has an arm and a leg left—a whole new supply of arms and legs!—and warbles the Billie Holiday song,
Them that’s got shall get,
Them that’s not shall lose . . .
Li-li knows the second phrase, and they sing the next lines together:
So the Bible says,
And it still is news.
“What a voice she had,” Joanna says, and Li-li drops an octave and pretends to hold a cigarette in one hand and glass of whiskey in the other, singing, “God bless the child, that’s got her own, that’s got her own . . .”
Because she wants to trim her weight, Joanna continues to smoke. She limits herself to six cigarettes daily, and this seems sufficient; on Independence Day she plans to go cold turkey—but not just yet, not now. Three mornings a week she joins Maisie at The Bare Necessities, and it’s a habit she’s happy to keep; the friends drink Lemon Zinger tea together and discuss their exercise and diet regimens and neighbors and the grim news of the world. “There’s nothing we can do,” says Maisie, but anyhow each Saturday noontime the two of them and a dozen other townspeople stand in front of the town offices on Main Street, holding placards that say “NO MORE WAR” and “GIVE PEACE A CHANCE.” When the war breaks out they continue to stand in silent protest on Main Street, but the heart has gone out of it, hope’s going dim, and with that macho gang in Washington peace never had a chance . . .
Sometimes it is pleasant weather or a light rain falls; sometimes people smile and honk approvingly but more often they roll down their windows and shout. Fat old men wait till she’s watching and turn their thumbs down at her or their middle fingers up. A van that has its windows lettered with the sign “PISS ON IRAQ” keeps circling in the parking lot, and sometimes Joanna sees it at the dock or idling past her house. She thinks maybe Harry’s inside the white van, or one of his old army buddies, and this doesn’t frighten her but nonetheless she’s saddened by the bigotry in town. She plants marigolds and tulips in the rowboat, and she remembers “Flower Power” and how people once believed that marigolds might make a difference to the future of the planet; she cleans and repositions the cranberry rake on the porch. In April the forsythia starts, and the first hyacinths bloom.
When Claire calls it surprises her; they have been out of touch. Joanna had written, of course, and called, but her sister had deflected all offers of assistance. Two deaths in a single week, she had commiserated on the phone, are two too many, and if you could use some company I’m happy to come out and help. Claire thanked her and refused; she could manage by herself, or anyhow she had to try, and there was nothing anyhow that needed to be done. The way she said this was, however, so soft-voiced and forlorn that Joanna repeated I’m happy to help. No, Claire said, I mean it, I have to learn to do this by myself. Are the girls all right? Joanna asked, and Claire said, no, not really, in Mom’s case they’d been expecting it but everything about Jim’s death has been a shock. Was there any warning, asked Joanna, had anything been wrong with him? and Claire said no, nothing at all.
So when her sister calls to say I won’t pretend I’m managing, I can’t pretend these weeks have been easy and I’m wondering if maybe we could come for the weekend—the three of us, there’s a sale out of Detroit with companion tickets to Providence and it would be a great escape for me and the girls—Joanna can’t refuse. I have to admit it, Claire admits, I’ve been terrified to call. But she has planned it already; she’ll rent a car at T.F. Green and arrive on Friday morning and be out again by Monday afternoon; she’s reserved the tickets and the car but there’s no penalty attached if she cancels the tickets by midnight, and she wanted to make certain Joanna wouldn’t mind. Don’t feel you have to say yes, she says, if this isn’t a
good
time. Then her voice breaks, bereft again, and she says it’s school break for Becky and Hannah, but she can’t bear to send them south and stay home alone. The girls have been wonderful, really, and when she asked them what they wanted they said a visit to Wellfleet, they really really missed their cousin and wanted to catch up. “You don’t mind, do you?” Claire repeats, and Joanna tells her, “No.”
The three of them do visit; their appearance is a shock. The girls are almost Li-li’s age—Becky is fourteen and Hannah fifteen—but she hasn’t seen them in two or three years, and this is the time of adolescence. Becky and Hannah are changing, of course; they have grown beefy and pimpled and, there’s no other word for it,
Midwestern.
They wear braces and use words like “pop” when they ask for a soda and say “awesome” and giggle together unstoppably; they’re like something out of
90210
or
Married with Children
or one of those canned-laughter sitcoms Li-li refuses to watch.
But somehow the cousins get along; three’s company, it seems. That too was the name of a sitcom,
Three’s Company,
and the girls are so fresh-faced and innocent-looking they might as well be on TV. Leah drives them up to Provincetown and they spend the afternoon ogling men and women on Commercial Street; it isn’t tourist season yet, not warm enough for full display, but nonetheless Becky and Hannah are excited and come back burbling about what they’ve seen—the couple with handcuffs and a greyhound, the ones who shave their skulls or wear chain links and a djellaba, the ones who embrace in the shops.
The three girls play music together, Becky playing the guitar and Hannah banging away at the upright piano Joanna is considering replacing and her daughter performing songs from
West Side Story
or Lucinda Williams or just singing scat. They whisper and cackle together like ladies from the Monday Club who’ve known each other all their lives and never were apart. It’s good for them, Joanna thinks, to know that they have family,
are
family, and to spend time on the porch . . .
The real shock is her sister; Claire has changed. Her hair is going gray, and she has allowed it to, and she’s letting it grow out. She wears no makeup and has been gaining weight and there’s a tear in the sleeve of her blouse that doesn’t appear to concern her; in any other woman these things might not be notable, but given the way she used to behave it’s a genuine shift of behavior. On arrival Claire asks for a drink. There’s something slurred about the way she speaks, and giddy in the way she moves—a lurching-forwardness that seems so out of character Joanna wonders if her sister’s ill or maybe on medication. She doesn’t know which, or how to ask, and wonderingly she watches her guest pour herself a second glass of Chardonnay, and then a third and fourth.
On their first evening in Wellfleet, Joanna prepares bay scallops in cream sauce, fresh asparagus, wild rice, and the meal is, she has to admit it, delicious. The cousins talk about how strange it is to be a tableful of women—five of them, and no men in the room—and how much they miss their father. We none of us have fathers, do we, Becky offers musingly, as though there’s no distinction between Jim’s death and being the child of divorce. It isn’t the same, Hannah argues, it isn’t the same deal at all.
The girls finish their berries and wander away to listen to music—there’s this CD she burned Art insists they must hear—while the adults remain at the table. Joanna has been telling Claire about the problems with the Wellfleet dump—the difficulties of allocated water and septic system monitoring and enforcing Title 5 and how the town officials here are either functional illiterates or flat-out corrupt; she’s beginning to think next time around she might make a run for selectman, because
somebody
has to do it,
somebody
has to stand for the principles of conservation and long-term not shortsighted land use, and it might just as well be her; strange as it seems she’s got a conscience now, a
consciousness,
or at least the beginnings of a commitment to what she supposes is called civic duty—when she sees Claire has fallen asleep. Her sister is wheezing, breathing stertorously, and her head has dropped back on the chair. Joanna stops talking; Claire startles awake—but for that first glazed wide-eyed instant it’s clear she doesn’t know whose house she’s in, or why . . .
“Are you all right?”
“Not really, no.”
‘‘Tell me about it.’’
She shakes her head.
“Why not? I won’t be . . .”
“What?”
“Surprised, I guess. Shocked.”
“You’d be surprised.” Claire finds this funny, or seems to, and laughs and then goes silent.
“What’s wrong?”
“Can we talk about it tomorrow?”
“You must be tired . . .”
Claire nods. “I’d prefer to, you know, wait a little. Get my sea legs . . .” Again, she smiles. “No time like the present, correct? Why put off till tomorrow what you can do the day after?”
Joanna stands. She clears the table, carrying the dishes and the cutlery and place mats and dinner napkins and bowls. Claire empties the bottle of wine for herself and makes no move to help. This too is unlike her, uncharacteristic, and when Joanna returns from the sink she sees her sister is crying.
“Oh, sweetie, what
is
it?”
“Jim. Being here. The way you seem so, so
together.
Did I remember to tell you those scallops were terrific, did I tell you that?” She wipes her eyes rapidly, helpless. “The way I’m not. Not together, I mean.” Great tears are rolling down her cheeks, her eyes are red-rimmed, brimming, and she seems a child again.