Reprisal (39 page)

"Without the umbrella?"

"Without the umbrella, yes, ma'am. Umbrella is ... fifty-two dollars.

Green-and-white is all we have."

"That's a lot of money," Charis said.

"It is--but this stuff is pretty tough." Jerry picked up a chair, and put it down. "It'll really last."

"--..Umbrella'll go three summers. Four, tops." Tom Lowell was standing by a croquet set behind them. "We meet again, ladies--don't mean to bother you. ...

Jerry, is Greg around back? Need some chain."

"Yes, he is, Cap."

"Okay. Mrs. Reed, Charis ...." He smiled and strolled away, nautical in worn cotton coveralls and black rubber boots.

"Anyway ... anyway," Jerry said, "it's really a pretty good set of outside furniture."

"Except for the umbrella," Charis said. ""Three summers. Four, tops.""

"Yes," Jerry said, "--b you're ladies. You're not going to beat it up as much, leave it open in the wind and so forth."

"So, with the umbrella?"

"Mrs. Reed, that would be ... a hundred forty-one, before tax."

"Hmmm."

"... I'll tell you what. If that umbrella--if that umbrella doesn't last five years, store'll replace it. And that's a promise."

"Right.--Charis?"

"I don't know if we need an umbrella."

"It's nice to have, though. Gives you some shade."

"Most people want an umbrella," Jerry said.

"... Well, Jerry," Joanna said, "we'll take it."

"I'll buy the chairs."

"Charis, you'll buy one chair."

"Two chairs, Joanna, I want to buy two chairs."

"Well, let me give them a check, and you can pay me later--or spend it for groceries or whatever."

"Glass-top set, with green-and-white umbrella." Jerry took a pad from his back pocket, carefully wrote out a sales slip. "We'll deliver that for you this afternoon, and we don't charge for delivery. ..."

"I'll give you a check.--Jerry, do you have a phone?"

"Yes, ma'am, we do. Down at the end of the counter."

"Charis, back in a minute. I need to call the gas station--the only gas station--to get my inspection sticker sometime this month."

Joanna walked down the counter. The phone and island phone book were tucked behind a large antique cash register decorated with embossed metal scrollwork.

Its cash-drawer handle was a steel flowered vine.

Cooper's was in the slender phone book under Bakeries. There was no other bakery.

"--Cooper's." A woman's voice, stony New England. Coo-pahs.

"I'm calling to order a cake."

"Order over the phone ...?"

"That's right."

"Well ... can I ask who this is? Because on cake orders, unless you're an old customer, we like to get a payment before we do the cake. Who is this?"

"My name's Reed. Joanna Reed; I live up on Slope Street.--It's a surprise and I'm with the person, so I can't come over now."

"Just a minute. ..."

A silence almost restful. Joanna had found it an effort, speaking on the phone.

"Hello--Mrs. Reed?"

"Yes."

"You just tell us what you want, and it's okay."

"Well, thank you. ... What she likes is coconut cake."

"No problem; we make a great coconut. Big cake?"

"No, a small one. It's probably just going to be for two people."

"Decorated?--Birthday?"

"No. I think ... I think just the cake."

"We have some little rosebuds. We can put those on around the edge, look real nice. ..."

"Well, I suppose rosebuds would be all right."

"They will look real nice."

"All right. Rosebuds."

"... Your order is in."

"When could I pick it up?"

"Pick it up tomorrow mornin'."

"Thank you."

"That's what we're in business for. Good-bye."

"Good-bye."

As they got into the Volvo, Lowell waved to them from down the street ...

climbed into the cab of a big, rust-spotted pickup.

"Well, your captain definitely likes you.--Saw you yesterday, had to see you again today."

"Charis, please. It's a small town."

"Not that small. He sees your car parked out here--and suddenly remembers he needs some chain?"

"Charis ..." Joanna started the car, pulled out into Asconsett's minor traffic.

"I'm not saying he isn't nice. I'm not saying he's out of line. I'm just saying he's interested, has some long-term intentions.--Oh, the phone. Are we going to try the phone company again?"

"Damn.--Oh, the hell with it. We'll get it fixed after the weekend."

"Okay."

"Do you mind?"

"No. No, I don't."

"Because if there's ... if there are calls you'd like to make--"

"Joanna, I don't want to make any calls."

"Then the hell with it."

"The hell with it."

... They finished planting the flowers by evening-the marigolds, geraniums, petunias, and pansies all watered with B-1 starter, and arranged in checkerboard patterns down each side bed. Patterns interrupted occasionally to accommodate those tall veteran flowers that had survived so long uncared-for.--The perennials were set out to plant--sandy soil manured and mixed in the two long back beds ... and checkerboarded there, too, but with more space between them.

"We have a garden." Charis put down her trowel and knelt back in evening's shadows, satisfied.

"Yes, we have a garden." Joanna's right knee clicked as she stood, and began to ache mildly. Penalty for many deep miles crawled through stone passages.

... "But we still have to plant the perennials. And then we'll have to keep up with regular fertilizing, and weeding."

"I know," Charis said. "But we have a garden!"

... They cooked dinner together like dancers, changing places in the kitchen as they worked, never in each other's way.

And while cleaning the spinach, cutting away the stems, then soaking the deep-green leaves in the big pot, stirring them to get the last grains of sand out ... while doing that, Joanna felt--not happiness, nothing so rich--but a relaxation, an almost contentment.

It seemed very important, made her hands tremble with its promise that pleasure in living would be possible. Not just bearing loss, with such relief from loneliness as Charis had given her. But more than that.

She cleaned the spinach, rinsed the pot, then set the steamer in. Charis was veining the shrimp-whole Louisiana shrimp, shipped frozen, and strangers to these seas. Little mindless things ... biomechanisms. Who was the Victorian British naturalist that lost his faith in South America? He'd been unable to believe in a God who mindlessly created redundant thousands of varieties of billions of beetles.

--But had the beetles a god of their own, uninterested in British naturalists?

A god the color of seasoned wood, and jointed like tremendous planks hinged together ... slowly folding and unfolding through the forest, making beetles, spilling them from its long cracks and crevices.

Dinner, eaten late, was delicious. Curried shrimp, brown rice, and the spinach. Vanilla ice cream.

"... How are you doing on the Sociology?" Joanna put down her notebook, and sat across from Charis at the dining table. A work table; they'd never eaten there. ... She and Frank hadn't eaten there, either.

"I think I'm okay." The girl--so neat otherwise--sat with her laptop behind a low semicircular heap of notebooks, reference books, textbooks, and orange Post-it notes. "--I've got Singleton in at least a little small-time trouble, with the Vietnam War. We got zip out of that one--no fab new markets. But he probably won't even notice. Won't want to notice. It's ... it's like it must have been for the Scholastics, dealing with the church's bullshit. If you don't go along with these professors' agreed-upon crap, they have hysterics."

"I've had them."

"I don't think so."

"Wait till you do that almost-certainly-unwise Longfellow paper. You show me that, I think I can guarantee some hysterics."

"I don't believe it. Joanna, I have a very good argument."

"We'll see. But if it ain't anchored in the text, honey, in the work--you're in trouble."

"Trust me, you will really like it. ... But you know what I mean. The professors ... I mean they yearn for a society like a medieval manor, you know? Someplace ordinary people can't just do what they want, are kept on a leash by their betters.-And of course, they're among the betters."

"Charis, that superior position is what they're used to."

"Then they need to get booted out of it!"

It was such a touching thing to hear, touching to see the girl's lovely and determined face. Still so young. ... "Sweetheart, you're talking about a mountain of self-satisfaction and light workloads-tenured faculty diseases with which I've certainly been infected--"

"No, you haven't."

"Yes, I have.--You know the best way to affect that so often misplaced pride?

It isn't with angry or silly papers. It's with very good work. --That is the only thing that truly impresses teachers."

"I shouldn't do Longfellow?"

"No. You should do Longfellow, though Benet might be more deserving. But do him well and thoroughly, not as an argument to annoy Chris Engletree--or do someone else."

Charis sat thinking ... considering it. As often, when the girl fell into reverie, when the energy of her personality, her display of elegance, was subdued, Joanna saw so much more clearly the child she'd been. Seen in stillness, in a softer face, in hazel eyes shadowed.

As she watched her, Joanna felt something new and old at once--and deeper than affection. It was a fondness very frightening, a certain harbinger of loss.

She woke to what she'd been waiting to wake her, sooner or later. The slow, whispering crush of gravel down the drive. ... The moon was down, its soft filtering light fading to dark. It was dreaming time, the hinge of the morning--but she was awake and not dreaming.

She got out of bed and went to her side window. Below, but in deeper shadow than before, Charis leaned into her little car's door post--pushing ...

pushing. The VW rolled slowly along like a bulky domestic animal, sleepy, wakened from its parking.

Joanna, suddenly angry, almost called down, "For Christ's sake ...!" But didn't. Charis was being too careful, too effortful, too quiet.

Taking her robe off the back of the rocker, Joanna put it on, and went into the dark hall and down the stairs, barefoot on cool uneven pine.

She unlocked the front door--but opened it only a little, concerned at the awkwardness of confronting Charis ... the rudeness of aborting all the girl's secrecy, her quiet and care.

She opened the door slowly, just wide enough to see the car roll out into the street. There was no moonlight, no tree shadows. The car was only a shape in night, with Charis a smaller shape beside it. A shape still shoving, moving the VW along ... possibly reaching in to turn its wheel ... then blending with it, climbing into it.

The car rolled away down the hill, its engine still off--and Joanna opened the front door, came down the front steps, and hurried out into the street. The cobblestones hurt her feet. ... She could see the car going downhill. Its brake lights glimmered, glimmered as it slowed a little.

"Now, what the fuck ...?" And asking aloud, Joanna supposed she knew the answer--had known it, really, the last time Charis had made her silent getaway. The girl was going to--not running from. ... There was someone else she cared for, in a life not so perfectly lonely after all. A boy, or man, apparently interested enough to have come out to the island to be near her for only an occasional night.--Someone too special to bore by being introduced to the so-tragic Joanna Reed.

The VW paused at the foot of the hill. Joanna heard its engine start ... saw its headlights flash on as it turned south. South, to town. But there'd be nothing open. Her lover must be staying at the inn, overlooking the harbor-expensive, for a college boy. Too expensive for a college boy.

The cobblestones were cold under Joanna's bare feet. She walked back up to the cottage's front door, and inside.

Jealous, she thought, and went up the stairs. Jealous of any shifting of the girl's attention away from sad, suffering Joanna. And jealous of Charis's having a lover--the rich affection, and the fucking. Jealous, when she should be glad for the girl --should be embarrassed that Charis felt she had to make such silent nighttime escapes to avoid upsetting her.

In the bedroom, Joanna took off her robe and draped it over the rocker. "Stop being such an ass," she said to herself, sat on the bed to brush the soles of her feet clean with her hands, then slid under the covers. "--ally are not the world. ..."

It was the size of the things was the trouble. Just the beginning of the year, some state bureaucrat had said larger distribution boxes, bigger double-walled septic tanks out on the islands.--Supposed to be effluent-proof, last forever and so forth. Whole thing was to protect sand crabs, protect sand fleas ... something.

Lowell leveled the filled bucket with the edge of his shovel, then leaned the shovel against the pit wall and went to the ladder.

... Let that state fool come out and dig a field and box hole, and then a major pit for a pair of big purple fiberglass tanks with those double walls.

They'd have to handle eight bathrooms in these two houses, plus--plus--four more bathrooms when the third house went in. Twelve bathrooms draining into a field mostly sand. ...

Out of the pit, Lowell went to the steel-pole tripod, and started hauling the bucket up--which bothered his sore arm more than shoveling did. ... Work had taken six hours a night-eight o'clock till two in the morning--for two, now three nights. And not done yet, since the little Kubota hadn't been up to the job. Bucket was okay for basic ditching, but couldn't reach to clear the bottom of the pit--which left a couple of tons to shovel and dump, Larry being too cheap to rent a big machine, ferry it in.

The bucket up and swayed over, Lowell tilted it slowly to empty sandy dirt over the spoil dam's planks.

... Shape the ditch so the inlet pipe had enough slope, then shovel out the pit, then hand-finish the box hole and field runs--all for an inspection would take maybe ten or fifteen minutes. ... Truth was, Larry Hooper didn't know what he was doing, putting in these houses. No surprise, man had been a lobster-boat builder; didn't know a whole lot about contracting.