Strawberries in the Sea (27 page)

“All right,” Leona said. “Anything to redeem myself.” She did well. All the way home her words made an opaque screen behind which Rosa was alone with herself. She made comments or explanations at the proper intervals, and was mildly surprised at her virtuosity in hearing what Leona said while she was watching in ruthless detail the christening and the launching of the boat.

At Seal Point she thanked Leona for helping her out, refused lunch, and went into the house still obsessed with the launching. For the first few months, the boat had been
Rosa Fleming
. But for how much of that time had she been secretly
Phyllis
to Con? The acute hurt of this had deadened somewhat with time, but she could remember it perfectly as she walked through the silent house, without self-pity but as if the revelation had been some terrible phenomenon of nature.

As the day moved on, she had the increasing sensation of being dismissed from life. But because she was still breathing and walking around instead of lying down dead, she had been obliged to attend to these legal technicalities so that the others could get on with their lives. Otherwise she didn't exist for them. She could have made them recognize her existence if she'd refused the divorce; they'd have called her wicked and spiteful, but they'd have known she was still around, all right. She could have asked for enough alimony to make Con feel the pinch. Back when he first told her about Phyllis, she could have done something about stopping funds for the new boat. But she hadn't.

So she had condemned herself to death as far as they were concerned. She had cooperated in causing her own nonexistence. But the weirdly comic thing was the way people kept telling her that the divorce would cut Con away from her like the core of a boil and she would be healed and begin to live.

With what? she asked. No. The best I can hope for is that it will stop hurting. Like when you die.

The tide was high at approximately four-ten this afternoon. Phyllis would break a bottle of champagne over
Phyllis
's bow, and Con would stand with his arm around his wife and possibly a son (or two) and watch his boat slide down the ways. . . . Rosa looked up the number of the Limerock Airfield and asked what the chances were for a flight out to Bennett's Island around three this afternoon.

“Good, because I'm going out anyway to pick up a party on Brig-port,” the owner told her. “I'll have to land you there because there's no airstrip on Bennett's.”

“I know that, and I'll find a way to get home.”

She called Lucy and then Leona, telling them both that she had a chance to fly out this afternoon, and that she'd write. Leona began frantically juggling her schedule so she could drive Rosa to the airport, but Rosa stopped that by say ing she'd already called a Limerock taxi. This wasn't strictly true, but at least she had the number written down.

At the small airfield, the little bright-colored planes were tethered in a semicircle, like butterflies on leashes. Over the Airport Lunch the wind sock stood straight out in the afternoon wind from the southwest. Rosa had never flown before; she had always suspected that the plane would develop a freak engine failure the instant she was a passenger, even if it had been completely overhauled just the day before. Something would have been left out, something would have reached its fracture point, or threads would have worn down to the fatal smoothness; the plane would suddenly plummet into the bay with only an oil slick to mark the end of Rosa Fleming.

But today fear was cast out by the necessity to get away. The pilot was chatty, and from up here the choppy water looked merely crinkled. In fifteen minutes, just about the time she had decided she was enjoying it, they touched down on the Brigport airstrip, a field that had once been pasture. There were no houses in sight, nothing but woods on three sides, and then the sea glittering to the horizon. While the pilot, still talking, was taking out her bags, an elderly Buick came lurching along a dirt road out of the woods, carrying the passengers for the return trip.

Rosa rode to the harbor with the boy who had driven his mother and sister to the plane. He was laconic but friendly. When he found that no one was meeting her, he offered to take her across to Bennett's. He had a big dory with a twenty-five-horse motor; another boy and two girls came too, the boy in jeans and rubber boots, the girls with long trailing hair, shorts, bare feet. They reminded her of Vic and Linnie, who seemed to have been removed from her by years, not weeks.

Centurion
was anchored in the harbor with the seine boat and dories tailing astern. There was no one visible aboard; seiners slept whenever they could. Rosa wondered without any real curiosity if there'd been a confrontation yet. The sight of the purse-seiner had recalled Jamie to her for almost the first time since she'd left the island last week. Con had obsessed her completely.

No more, Con, she promised him. No more. You've had enough of me. But she glanced at her watch. Almost tip-top high water. . . . The big dory left the moorings behind, the engine roaring, and they went out through the Gut and into the southwest chop. The dory smasheda cross it in bursting clouds of spray. Rosa, in the bow, was dry, but the girls shrieked and laughed as they were drenched, and the boys' faces streamed water. As the seas deepened in the full sweep from the southwest up between the islands the dory lurched, rose, dropped as if she'd never stop the downward plunge. The girls in their soaked and clinging clothes held tight to the gunnels, a little scared behind their screams of laughter.

At the moment when
Phyllis
slid down the ways, Rosa was hoping the dory's caulking would hold. This was followed by relief when they entered the harbor, and then she realized that the boat had been launched by now. She experienced a different sort of relief; a letting-go, a surrender at last.

They tied up at the lobster car. “Come on up to the house and I'll give you something hot,” Rosa offered, but the girls, smoothing back their long wet hair like mermaids, said they weren't cold and their clothes were drip-dry. She thanked the boy, who refused pay but allowed her to buy soda all around. It was a quiet time at the wharf, most of the children had gone to Schoolhouse Cove. Mark Bennett wasn't around either, and his blond, quiet wife was tending store, sitting outside on the bench reading between customers. She said to Rosa, “You didn't come all the way from Limerock in that dory, I hope.”

“Believe me, it felt like it, out there in the middle,” Rosa said, and they both laughed. She bought a bottle of milk and a loaf of dark bread and walked home. No one was around the Percy house; Marjorie would be overseeing her children at the beach. Just as Rosa turned into her own dooryard the first boat came home, and the harbor began its gradual awakening to the life that always seemed suspended in sleep when the men were out and the children not visible.

With a catch of guilt she remembered not even glancing toward
Sea Star
. She ran upstairs and looked out her bedroom window. Of course the boat was all right. She'd been left for less than a week and there'd been no northerly storm to rake the harbor. Tomorrow they'd go to haul, but the prospect gave Rosa no lift. She sat on the edge of her bed, heavy-headed, squinting against the afternoon dazzle; she heard the wind and the rote muted by closed windows to an echo of the blood-sound in her ears.

It was over. And so what?

Jamie came up in the late afternoon, when she was lying on the grass in the yard trying to read but being constantly overcome with an unpleasant drowsiness. She sat up, blinking sandy eyes at him and running her hands through her hair. He stood looking down at her, his hands on his hips. He looked and smelled scrubbed, his sport shirt crisp and blue, his hair cropped since last week.

“Well,” he said tersely. “You go through with it?”

“I did.” She yawned.

“How do you feel?” He dropped down to his heels beside her, the better to look her in the eye; she was not to escape him. She yawned for camouflage and said, “Sleepy. It was noisy in there.”

“You know what I mean. You relieved? Want to laugh, or cry, or swear, or hit somebody, or what?”

She considered, and then said, “What. That's it.”

“
You
.” He doubled a fist. “If I didn't know better I'd think you were drunk.” He sat down beside her and hauled up his knees to rest his arms on them. “I suppose you're trying to tell me politely that it's none of my business.”

“It's just—nothing.” It was an effort to talk. “All the trouble was a long time ago. This was just a technicality. So, you see, it doesn't amount to anything.”

“Yeah, but I read this stuff about divorce having a traumatic effect, even when you've been expecting it. So you shouldn't sit around by yourself and brood. Now I have to go out tonight, but—”

“
Centurion
's back, I see,” she interrupted.

“I know. But they set out by the Rock last night, and we did staving in Bull Cove. Might be they've got the message.”

“You don't sound convinced.”

“It never does to take anything for granted,” he said. “I'd never take you for granted.” He smiled for the first time. “Welcome back. And stay a while.”

“I intend to.”

He put his arm around her and took her chin in his hand, and kissed her. She neither responded nor rejected. He held her off a little and looked into her eyes as if he would never give up the search. “The first time I've kissed you as a single woman, and it's not going to be the last time, by God.”

“Maybe so, Jamie,” she said, “but for now. . . . Look, I'm too tired to be anything but honest. I just don't feel anything about anybody. I'm beat. It's as if I'll never feel anything again.”

“But you will,” he insisted. “You're young and healthy. All the trouble is what you just said. You're tired, you're beat. But you'll bounce back higher than you were before.”

“Thanks for that promise.” She felt unexpectedly tearful.

“I know, see?” He held her face and kissed her on each cheekbone, on her nose, and on her mouth. “There. I'm not putting pressure on you. I won't even come near you till you give me the word. But if you want me, just whistle.” He put two fingers in his mouth and demonstrated so well that Tiger and Rory Mor both began to bark. “Can you do that?”

“Bark or whistle?” She had to laugh and he was delighted that she could joke. “I'll practice,” she promised, “I used to do it, but after I nearly blasted my mother's eardrums out she told me it wasn't very ladylike, so quit it. At least in the house.”

“You must have been quite a kid. Hey, maybe if we'd grown up together you'd never have married that highbinder.”

“Meaning I'd have married
you?
” She shook her head. “You'd probably have treated me like one of the boys. You only like me now because you saved me from a watery death.”

“Listen,” he began truculently, and then grinned. “I forgot. I'm not putting pressure on you.”

“And I appreciate that.” She walked down to the lane with him. “Good luck tonight or shouldn't I say it?”

“You can say it. The fish are out there, and they'll be in if nobody breaks 'em up. Want me to save you some? Most of us have got all the bait we can use, and we'll sell to the factory now, but I can keep some out for you.”

“I'd like to salt down a hogshead full.”

“I suppose this is treating you like one of the boys. I should be
giving
you herring, like roses or candy.”

“I can see your crew putting up with that.”

“Me too. Remember, I'll be around. Just put your head out the door and whistle.”

He left. She knew he felt as sure of her as he was of driving away
Centurion
for good. What was his was his, and the whole world had better know it. He said he'd never take her for granted, but he was taking himself for granted, and of himself he had no doubts. So it added up to the same thing.

Still, he had helped, the conversation had been like an anchor thrown out to keep her mind from constantly drifting back toward the mainland and wondering how the new boat looked on the water and if Con felt the slightest twinge of guilt. Probably not; for him she was really dead and buried now.

What was it Vic had quoted, kidding Linnie? Something Rosa had seen in her own high-school books.
When I am dead, my dearest, sing no sad songs for me
. She'd tried it for music, but it didn't have the same appeal as the salt-water poems.

She took down her guitar and sat on the kitchen floor in the corner as she'd done in the early days here, and sang again
Let us breathe the air of the Enchanted island
.

She returned to her lobstering without joy. Something was lost between her and
Sea Star
, and she was saddened by her lack of spirit, or as saddened as she could be in this neutral zone she now inhabited. She salted away the fresh herring without the mouth-watering satisfaction the lobsterman usually takes in handling good bait. She drove herself to finish the scraping and painting in the house, but she felt so heavy and sleepy that sometimes she couldn't make the effort. Inasmuch as she could be glad of anything, she was glad that she had lost the urge for the compulsive eating which had fattened her in the spring.

Betsey and Holly came up to see her, bringing their guitars. The fog-bound boys had left, and the girls wanted to do some serious work before they went off to school on the mainland. But they found Rosa poor company. She begged off playing the guitar, saying she'd burned her finger that day. They volunteered the news that Vic and Linnie were having a good time sailing and playing tennis and going to summer theaters with men.

“That's fine,” Rosa said. She was barely interested. The girls were like dream figures gliding transparently across dim landscapes. Sometimes she wondered through her narcosis if she were losing her mind. Could one simply sink deeper and deeper, like a lobster trap going down to the dark?