Strawberries in the Sea (19 page)

“Well, I've got to get back to work,” he said finally. “Start her up again, so I'll be sure.”

The diesel began without difficulty. “See?” Rosa said with pride. “She always does her best as long as I don't forget to feed her.”

He started up his own engine, and she untied the line that held the two boats together. “Thanks again,” she called, but he was on his way out, fast, and he didn't look back.

T
here was something to be said for nearly getting drowned. It had knocked everything else out of her mind. She hadn't thought of Con at all this morning, and, even while she and Jamie had been talking about Edwin, he seemed as distant as if she had made a great journey away from him, in time as well as space.

At the wharf Mark Bennett filled her tanks and said, “Well, you're initiated now. You're one of the club.”

“Are you the uncle that got Jamie out there one time?” she asked. She wasn't self-conscious now; people ought to have narrow escapes quite often, it flooded away a lot of the junk like a spring tide cleaning off the beaches.

“It was Owen,” said Mark. “Like to burned the boy's ears off. Blistered them, anyway. I guess Jamie thought a stormy death would've been kinder.”

“Anybody who forgets to gas up ought to get their ears blistered,” said Rosa.

“He blister yours?”

“Nope, he was very restrained. He gave me coffee and gingerbread.”

“Jamie's a good boy. He probably knew you were suffering enough without him rubbing salt into the wounds.”

She bought a couple bushels of bait, and Young Mark and the cat closely supervised the bailing of herring from hogshead to her buckets. As she was getting back aboard the boat the boy said suddenly, “Do you like to bag up?”

“I love to. Always did. Do you?”

“When I get the chance,” he said grumpily.

“Mark's looking for a job,” his father said. “Trouble is, his legs aren't long enough and his hands aren't big enough yet.”

“I had that trouble once myself,” Rosa told the boy. “But it's something you grow out of, believe me.” She was swaddled in contentment, everything a part of it; the sun, the gentle motion of the boat, the solemn child, the man standing by the scales smiling, the cat washing up, the good acrid scent of herring; and being alive. Yes, that was it, being alive.

Back at her mooring she spent an hour filling bags. Mark had offered both herring and bream, both fresh; the bait boat had been out yesterday. She would always take herring over bream, her father's personal preference from the days before the radfish plant opened in Limerock, when the men seined or torched herring for their bait, salting away a whole season's supply in hogsheads in their baitsheds. Even now her toes could curl in ecstatic memory of how those damp cool planks had felt under bare feet when she, like Young Mark, had longed to get into the herring and was still too small.

She stuffed bags without hurrying, now and then tossing a herring to a gull that hovered hopefully near the boat. It was tranquilizing work. She could hear the surf along the windward side of the island and on the outside of the breakwater, she heard the tide rip hissing by the harbor mouth, but the boat hardly moved. The fast-growing eider ducklings paddled and up-ended in the floating rockweed around the ledges, too big now for the blackbacks to grab—she remembered Jamie's analogy—and the herring gulls sat on spilings and fishhouse ridgepoles with their breasts to the wind. Children were playing among the rocks on the Campions' shore, and most of the women had taken advantage of the drying wind to get washings out.

When she finished bagging up, she cleaned up the boat and scrubbed her arms with salt-water soap, and rowed ashore. Her yard was scented by the hot wind-stirred spruces. From beyond the woods she could hear the water crashing into Barque Cove and the stones being tumbled about in the surf.

As she'd have been tumbled. She felt a qualm but it didn't last. She was safe now. Alone but not lonely, because she had her life for company. . . . She felt a different qualm when she went inside and saw one of Edwin's pipes in the scallop-shell ashtray, and in his room his dented pillows and the book he'd been reading.

Oh never
mind!
she thought. You can't do a damn thing about it. We all have to dree our own weird. . . . Even Con. Now why did I think that? Because everything's fine for him. Of the three of us, he has exactly what he wants, just the way he wants it.

She got out of her hauling clothes and into clean slacks and shirt, and made up a packaged soup for her lunch, which she ate out on the back doorstep. Her daisies were going by; maybe she'd borrow Ralph's lawn mower and wrassle that around the place, but should she take a scythe to it first? . . . No hurry, she thought. I've got nothing to hurry about. After this morning, it was not bitter knowledge.

Linnie came up from the lane, Vic slouching gracelessly along behind her with her hands in the rear pockets of her jeans. She gave the impression of being unwillingly in tow. When she caught Rosa's glance she sucked in one cheek and opened her eyes to saucers.

Linnie spoke with a hard clarity. “Did Edwin go back to the mainland or just to Brigport?”

“Back to the main.” To soften it she added, “He had to get back to work.”

Vic sat down in the midst of the daisies and picked one. “He loves pie, he loves me not,” she recited. Linnie gave her a sad if not martyred look. “Wasn't it awfully sudden?” she asked Rosa. “I mean, did you get a telephone call for him, or something?”

“No, but when he came he only intended to stay three or four days.”

“Oh.” Linnie collapsed bonelessly on the grass. She studied something there with intense interest. Vic said, “Do you know any love songs, Rosa?”

“Not today,” said Rosa.

“I know a lot of good things you could set to music. ‘When I am dead, my dearest, sing no sad songs for me—' ”

“I am going to burn that book,” said Linnie, “if you don't stop quoting from it.”

“
Victorian Love Poems
,” Vic said to Rosa. “We found it in the attic. And, you know, it's really great in spots! I guess people have always felt the same about love. There's not much difference between some of those poems and a lot of the pop songs now.”

“I wouldn't know,” said Rosa. “I'm no expert on love.”

“Who is?” Vic sounded elderly. “Maybe it's all made up anyway. You read the poems and sing the songs and watch the movies, and you think, This is how it's supposed to be. But maybe it's not that way at all. It's all a big put-on.”

Linnie got up very neatly without touching her hands to the ground for balance and walked to the path as if she were carrying a book on her head. Vic and Rosa watched her go. Vic twisted a thick strand of hair around her neck. “I could die sometimes when I see Jamie,” she said suddenly. “When I don't expect to, or when I know he's coming, either way, the minute I see him—wow.” She pressed a fist against her chest. “It's almost enough to make me sick. But I wouldn't have it any other way. Oh, sure, I'd like to have him feel the same way about me. But maybe I couldn't stand it. I'd probably burn to a crisp like a moth in a lamp.” She made a monstrous face, cross-eyed and slack-jawed. “But if this is all it's going to be, well, I'd rather have this than nothing.”

“Why?” Rosa asked.

“Because I like being in love, I guess. It changes everything you see and hear. You've never been so alive in your whole life . . . and maybe not having Jamie makes it even better. We might start fighting right off. Or get all torn up about being separated. Or even—you know”—She colored a little—“go all the way, and then the bloom's off and the whole thing gets to be one big pain or it turns ugly.”

“How old did you say you were? A hundred and ten?”

“Three hundred and ten, and I'm really the reincarnation of just about any gorgeous female you can name. See, I've had more than my share of being a great sex symbol, so for this life I have to be the kind that men never notice except to ask if they've got the notes from the last Ancient and Medieval History class.”

“Seems as if you ought to remember some of the tricks from the old days.”

“That's against the rules,” Vic said seriously. “You can't remember a thing from the past unless there's a cosmic accident where something breaks through like a dream.”

“Do you
believe
all this?” Rosa asked. “You sound it.”

“Nope, but it's a great line at parties. I'm going to study palmistry this fall, and that'll give me a chance to hold hands with all the boys.” She got up. “Well, I suppose I'd better track down Linnie.”

“Maybe she wants to be alone.”

“Not for too long. I mean, it's not that kind of suffering. It's like what I just said. It's the state of being in love.”

She looked down at Rosa. “We'll all recover, I expect,” she said, almost as if she were including Rosa.

When Ralph came in from hauling, Rosa borrowed his scythe and hand lawnmower, and was working in the yard when the girls came back in late afternoon. They had been eating wild strawberries and their lips and fingertips were red. They were both in high spirits. Linnie gave Rosa a small plastic container full of berries, all hulled. “I washed it out in salt water, so it's clean,” she said. “Oh, it was just gorgeous out there this afternoon. I've got so much spray in my hair I've got to go home and wash it, and my shorts are soaked. I'm covered with salt.”

“We forgot to tell you something when we went through before,” Vic said. “We were so emotionally disturbed and so forth. Weren't we, Lin?”

“Oh, shut up,” said Linnie amiably. “Look, they're having a big supper and dance at Brigport the Fourth and almost everybody's going that can crawl. Jamie's taking a bunch, so how would you like to go with us? It's going to be moonlight on the way back, and everything.”

“If it's stormy or foggy I'll die,” said Vic. “You know something? Siegfried can't avoid dancing with me. I mean, he'll be there, so of course he'll dance with me. At least once, anyway, just for good manners.”

“Now Vic,” Linnie said kindly, “remember what I told you. He might just take it into his head to stand outside the hall all evening. There's always a bunch that does that.”

“I'm thinking positive,” said Vic. “I can't let that evening go to waste. I may ask
him
.”

“Listen, you'll be too busy dancing with everybody else. If you can move a foot you'll never sit out a square dance.”

“I was thinking of something wildly sexy like a waltz,” said Vic. “You said they do waltzes at these dances. I'm glad my mama sent me to dancing school.”

“But I never said
Jamie
waltzed! My goodness, he'd think he was compromised!”

They left, hilariously arm in arm.

T
hey had taken it for granted that she was going with them. Late in the morning of the Fourth, when she came in from hauling they were waiting for her. The hour was hot and still. Cloud reflections lay nearly motionless on shining waters all the way across to Brigport. The Bennett girls fished dreamily from a dory in the harbor, and the two older girls, with younger children circulating around them like small bright-colored fish, sat on the end of the Sorensen wharf in their bikinis, brushing and combing their newly washed hair. Farther around the shore young boys played in an inviolate masculine world.

“We're leaving at five, Rosa,” Linnie called.

“Oh gosh,” said Rosa. “Look. I appreciate you asking me and everything, but I couldn't last out an evening. I wake up so early, I'm out on my feet by dark.”

“You don't have to stay all evening,” Linnie argued. “You can go over with us and come back with my father and mother. They're going to the supper, and some of my uncles and aunts are going with them.”

“And so are her cousins and her uncles and her aunts,” sang Vic. “Her uncles and her cousins whom she reckons by the dozens.”

“They'll stay for some of the dance but not too late,” Linnie said. “The people with little kids come home early too. Oh, come
on
, Rosa. You're young! Don't you want some fun? You like to dance, don't you?” She looked disappointed. “Maybe you don't. You never said.”

“I do like it, and I like square dances best,” Rosa assured her. “But honestly, I don't want to go tonight. Don't worry, I won't weasel out of your show when the time comes.”

A little girl patted Linnie's arm. “Hey, Linnie, what are us kids going to do in the show this time? I can say the piece I did for Memorial Day. You weren't here then. It goes like this—” Linnie was surrounded, and probably deafened, by the rest.

Rosa changed from boots to sneakers in the fishhouse, which by now was almost tidy, at least more roomy. Every time she looked at the clean bench she was tempted to start building traps, but the forty were doing well enough for her, and they were enough for her to manage alone. She walked home thinking of her lunch, and of painting the house. She hardly ever thought of noon at Seal Point when she was going home like this. Sometimes the memory of the high-ceilinged rooms, cool and shady after the summer glare outside, passed through her mind, and the scent of fresh-cut grass here always evoked the thick lush lawns of home, but never homesickness. Crossing the well-field, she smelled the hot noon scent of the new-mown hay in the Sorensen field, and instantly recalled the barn at home, though it had been a long time since the loft had held hay.

But she was not nostalgic. Perhaps it was because she would not allow herself to be. To dwell on the house at Seal Point would be to arrive inevitably at the months and years spent in it with Con, and she could not trust herself to that. She was pleasantly anesthetized here, moving at a cautious, unjarring pace from one project to the other. The important thing was not to run out of projects.