Spartina (21 page)

Elsie said, “Yes. There was baby Charlie. I don’t envy my sister anymore except for her children. Last year I even went to an agency and asked about adopting.” Elsie laughed. “Now, there was an odd scene.…”

Dick said, “You better talk to Eddie Wormsley about that. He got his son back from his ex-wife when the kid was ten. Practically grown up, or so Eddie thought. The kid was a good kid too. But, my God … you talk to Eddie about that.”

Elsie said, “I talked to Mary Scanlon about it—”

Dick said, “Mary? Mary doesn’t have a kid.”

“No, no. She and I were joking about …” Elsie fluttered her hand and said, “Our spinsterhood. You see, she works evenings, I work days, so we were talking about sharing a daughter. Add a room for Mary out there.” Elsie gestured to the side. “And I’d move my room over to that side. And we’d get Miss Perry to be the honorary grandmother. We might keep some slots open for male relatives. My brother-in-law for rich uncle.” Elsie’s hands flickered back and forth with each idea. “And a black-sheep uncle … You think you might like that one? Rogue uncle …”

Dick laughed. “Mary Scanlon and you. That’d be a pair all right.”

“I don’t know why you say that,” Elsie said. “Mary speaks well of you. In fact she’s very fond of you.”

Dick said, “And I like Mary. I like Mary fine.”

“Then, what?”

Dick shook his head.

Elsie said, “Then it’s something about me!”

“No. I like you fine too. It’s the pair of you. I was thinking of some poor guy walking in here, he’d get skinned on two sides at once.”

“I don’t know why you say that. Mary and I could very well be the two nicest people for miles around—”

“That’s right. Could be.”

“But just because we’re independent women … Of course maybe you just feel threatened.”

Dick laughed. “That’s what I said—if the two of you got going, I surely would.”

“Well,” Elsie said. “So that’s what you think. I suppose you prefer women to be like Marie Van der Hoevel, little whispering voices, and tiny narrow feet, pale noodle legs. You probably can’t even tell she’s meaner than Mary and me put together.”

Dick checked himself. He didn’t want to get into talking about Parker and him mixing with Schuyler and Marie. Dick said, “No. But, then, I don’t know Marie. Just from the clambake. Didn’t look like she was having much fun.”

“Well, it’s her own fault,” Elsie said. “No, I shouldn’t say that. Schuyler’s impossible sometimes. But really I’m glad they’re both going to stay here. And that is a measure of how few friends I have left around here. There’s Mary Scanlon, but it’s hard to see her, the hours she has to work. So really my best friend is Miss Perry.… I really do love her, but … I grew up here, and everyone I knew then has moved away. New York, Boston … Away. I see my sister, but now that she and Jack have two children, it’s not the way it was. It’s still nice, but … One thing I admire about Miss Perry is her friendships. Of course her best friend died, old Mr. Hazard. But she has Captain Texeira.…”

Elsie stopped short, sank onto her elbows, her fingers on her forehead. “I suppose I’m afraid of being here the way Miss Perry is
here. But at the same time I admire the way she’s here. And I want to stay here, I want to be here. I
believe
in staying here. It’s just so hard sometimes. Of course it’s my own fault.… I can be so difficult. I’m not really, I’m …” Elsie put her hands over her eyes, said “Oh shit,” and began to cry.

Dick was alarmed. He felt a sharp sympathy for Elsie, as quick as a piece of paper being ripped down the middle. He had no idea what to do. It seemed like years since May had her crying fits. Or since he’d been nice to May when she did cry.

Dick held out his napkin to Elsie. When it touched her hand she made a noise so much like a growl that he pulled back.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Give me that.” She wiped her eyes and blew her nose and went right on. “One thing I was thinking is that we ought to be able to do anything. I mean, compared with plants and animals, we can see the whole world. But everyone seems to end up … shriveled into a corner. Have you ever seen a water shrew? They’re little, smaller than my little finger. They’re almost blind. They have to eat and eat.… When they make a new nest, they have to scout the fastest way from their nest to the water so birds won’t catch them. They can only afford to feel out the path once. If there’s a stone in the way, they run around it, if there’s a twig, they hop over it. Then that’s their path. If you take away the stone and the twig, they still run around the place where the stone was, they still give a little hop where the twig was. They’re wonderful, but when they’re in their preprogrammed mode they’re just absurd. I
like
being an animal, but not that part. I mean, I’m grateful for being alive, I like having to do most of what I do, I just wish I wasn’t so … caught by … I don’t mind the real problems, the real rocks and twigs. It’s being in a maze of things that aren’t really there that makes me … it makes me sad for Miss Perry, it makes me sad about myself. When you live by yourself, you spend so much time going around rocks that aren’t there. You spend lots of
time making sure you’re
not
something. That you’re not afraid, that you’re not lonely, that you’re not absurd.” Elsie looked up at him. She looked a little bewildered. She said, “Do you know what I mean?” She rolled her hand on the table so it touched his. The touch straightened his spine.

Tough little Elsie Buttrick. Far-off, fast-talking Elsie Buttrick, as quick and neat as a tern skimming the water. Dick had been alarmed to see her crumple, he was glad to see her rise again.

She stood up, picked up her coffee cup, put it back down, and shoved it aside. She took both his hands, and he floated to his feet. He bumped the corner of the table. When she touched his cheek, they were clear of the table, in the center of the room.

She said several things but he didn’t take them in. He felt weightless, but when their bones touched he felt their weight against each other, as though they were small boats at sea rising on the same swell, jostling, fendered by their flesh.

He had one complete sting of conscience when they drifted apart for an instant. Elsie shoved aside the red curtain and they floated through.

Elsie said, “It’s okay, it’s all right.” He didn’t say anything. His mouth felt numb, his hands felt numb, even though he could feel her transmitted through them. She was transmitting her skin, her teeth, her breath, and her odd fit of tears for herself. And her sixteen-year-old self from seventeen years before—it came back to him now on a single beam of memory that as she’d walked up to him she’d pulled at her swimsuit. He saw it again—as she’d crossed the boatyard, she’d slipped her fingers under the edge of her red swimsuit ridden up on her haunch and slid it down with a neat inside-out twist of her hand. And said she was sorry about his father’s death. Now she was only a step closer. She reached him now. He felt that everything that was happening and the sensations that were about to overcome him were as remote as
that memory. Her sharper full-grown face was as remote as a star, light sent years ago reaching him now, fixing him on the surface of the sea.

E
lsie shocked him. Not because they’d gone to bed, though that too put him in a state of shock. He understood that state of shock, felt the form of it, absorbed it. He knew that he was absorbing it willingly, that he was being bad, that he was going to come to Elsie’s house again, that he would be harmed by what he was doing, that he was willing.

But in addition Elsie shocked him in a way that he hadn’t foreseen: she didn’t hide anything. It was more than that—she as much as said that now they could say anything to each other. What she looked forward to as much as making love was telling him things and giving him the run of her house and in the same way the run of her whole life. He wasn’t sure about taking the invitation. What it turned out to feel like was that he was the one being opened up, that he was the one being penetrated by what she told him.

It was little things at first. The next afternoon he came to give her a ride to the Volvo dealer to pick up her car. When she climbed into his truck she laughed and said, “I certainly couldn’t have ridden my bike today. I forgot how stiff I feel after, I mean when I haven’t done it for a while.” He must have looked startled. She added, “No, don’t feel bad, it’s nice, I hobbled around all morning thinking of how nice.…”

He thought, Why shouldn’t she say that? But that “haven’t done it for a while” came from a distance.

Another time, several days later, they went swimming in her pond. They managed to squeeze the two of them into one large inner tube. They floated around, kept on floating even after it began to drizzle. She tucked his arms under her shoulders. The drizzle was a little warmer than the pond, it made his body feel oiled.

She said, “When I first slept with a boy—I was still at the Perryville School. My girlfriends who’d done it warned me I’d be disappointed. And I
was
in a way. But in another way I was amazed. I thought, What a wonderful way to get to know someone. I wanted to go to bed with all the men in the world.” She laughed.

They drifted into the rhododendron branches. Elsie reached up and shoved against a branch. They spun slowly to mid-pond.

“I mean, it didn’t take long at all to stop actually sleeping with everyone I liked. It was
why
it wasn’t a good
idea
that puzzled me. And I’m still glad I thought that thought. And I’m glad that later on I thought, Why have sex at all? Almost the Catholic position. So to speak. Sex is just to have babies and the rest is a bad French novel. That was theoretical too. I still had my share of bad French novels.”

Dick didn’t feel he could complain. He just wished she wouldn’t talk that way. He also felt ashamed that he wished she wouldn’t, since he was doing what she was talking about. And he was equally ashamed that he was glad she talked that way, since it let him off the hook, he was just one more of her bad French novels.

He liked talking to her about almost anything else. He even liked hearing her talk about sex when she got off the topic of her sex life in general and just talked about the two of them. “I noticed the way you looked at me at the clambake,” she said. “Admit it. That was just plain lust. I understand—it was early in the summer, you hadn’t seen anyone in a bathing suit for a long time.”

“No,” he said.

“Be honest, now. When I was helping you with the clams, wearing my bathing suit and your old rubber boots, and my thighs were turning pink from all the steam. Come on. Just for an instant you had evil thoughts. Say it. ‘I had evil thoughts.…’ ”

He said, “Hell, Elsie, I thought you were being a good scout.” It drove her nuts.

“You jerk!” She regrouped to get the better of him. “Too bad for you, then. There were at least five guys at that clambake who thought I was cute as hell.” She started to count on her fingers.

“Okay, okay.” He would have liked to think that when she pulled on the boots and waded in to help him she’d looked good by accident. He wished it all to be an accident. But he could give up that little clambake accident. What he really didn’t want to hear was that she’d drawn the look Charlie gave her, that she’d enjoyed Charlie’s look. “You’re right,” he said. “I burned my fingers twice on account of looking at your legs.” But that was just a cloud of ink he squirted so he could slip away.

This was one of the many times he felt her urge to draw everything in him up to the surface. The farther down it was, the more she wanted to get at it. Sometimes he felt the pleasure of it, he liked the feeling that she put all her skimming and diving into getting at him. But, once in a while, he felt a third, completely different way: that all the skimming and diving, all her sexual eagerness (which could get as edgy and probing as her conversation) were just the small broken-off pieces of her that swam to the surface—that really she had a quieter, larger nature in her. He still liked all that top-water busyness, he was still charmed by her tern-self—and so was she, it probably felt good, as good as flying and wheeling and swooping. But he also got a sense of that part of her that wasn’t so sparkling with seizures and escapes. Far below all the different things that she thought she was, that she wanted to be, that she feared to be, there was a part of her that was more gently defined, more easily receiving
and more easily flowing out, defined less as a shell or carapace or hard shore against the waves and more as a bay as it becomes deeper and vaguer, undefining itself into the broader sea.

That sense of her, but also his connection to her childhood (sharpened by their talking, and splintered into their sexual thrill), and his tender admiration and liking for her were all troubling thoughts. So then he would think of the thoughtless fainting of their first falling into her bed. If the whole thing had stopped after that time he wouldn’t have felt so guilty. It had washed over him, a freak wave.

He still didn’t know what he was doing, but he did know he was coming to Elsie on evenings he told May he was going to the Neptune, and on afternoons when he said he was going to get something for the boat.