The End of the Pier (3 page)

Sam had waved his hand for her to shut up. “For the sake of the
argument
let's just say. Now, for all that cat knows, that's just the way things are supposed to be. One day something starts clouding up in its eye. Does it think, ‘Je-
sus
, but I better get me to a doctor,' or ‘I'm dying,' or ‘I'm going blind'? No. It just takes what comes and doesn't worry about it.”

The cat at this point had gone over to the edge of the pier and lain down, as if it were bored by all of this talk about its fate. Then it rolled over.

“You're just reading stuff into that cat's mind. Stuff that cat doesn't have any idea about and doesn't care.” Sam had popped another cap on a can of Coors for emphasis.

Maud hadn't answered. The conversation was going around in circles and she couldn't explain. She imagined herself in a room with a window suddenly shuttered against the light, imagined herself starting, sitting up, wondering what had happened. No, she thought impatiently, that wasn't it.

The cat had inspected the dish of milk now, but didn't drink it. Could it see it? That was stupid; it had one good eye. Anyway, it could certainly smell it. Maybe it was too cold. Maybe she shouldn't have put the carton on the ice. Just because she and Sam liked their drinks icy cold didn't mean the cat would.

Why would you want the poor cat to know?

Maud fingered the book in her lap—the book of American poetry—as if it were one of those little stoppered bottles she thought Indians used for magical purposes and it might release the answer. The cat was sitting nearer her chair, looking up at her with its clouded eye. It was worse than pity, what she felt. It was more like remorse and shame. Blood crept up her neck, heated her face as if a torch had been set to it, and she would have poured herself another drink except that a tremor had started in her hand so that she had to set the glass down. It was as if a task had been set for her: she must work out the answer to this problem about why it was worse for the cat that it didn't know.

For the life of her, she couldn't think of one single human situation that might fit the cat's. Again, she thought of a room, imagining herself asleep in the dark. She squinted across the water, where the lanterns were lifting and bobbing. It must be windier there.

The room could not be like a prison cell. It was important that it be a fine room, one with a very high ceiling and pale, prettily tinted walls. And at the end were two very high windows, long and narrow, almost like French windows but not reaching the floor. Curtains made of light stuff like chiffon would rise and fall in the breeze. The curtains were pale yellow. Every morning (except for the last one, when she would rush from the room, terrified, she'd decided)—every morning, she would wake slowly to see these soft, lemon-colored curtains billowing out in a wind blown from . . . where? what? From the water, the sea.

For this room would be somewhere in a warm country—Greece, maybe—where the east-facing windows with their delicate, blown curtains would frame two oblongs of blue sky. Maud rubbed her elbows and searched for the right shade of blue. She thought of her one piece of good jewelry, a ring that had been her grandmother's, an opal. The lemon-yellow curtains (it might be Cyprus, where the lemon trees grew) would blow in a wind off the green sea. The walls would be pink, and the ceiling perhaps garlanded; the bed a sort of filigree ironwork, and no furniture except for a wardrobe that would house her few dresses, all long cotton with straps, no sleeves. She would go with bare shoulders and feet.

Maud started when the music changed across the water, and realized she was a long way from the cat's problem. She was merely dreaming about herself walking in pale cotton dresses, hems to her ankles, walking across the cool stone of the floor.

This was the scene that would meet her eyes every morning. She would see the pale pink stuccoed walls (it might be a villa in Italy) and the frescoed ceiling, the pale curtains and the opal sky.

And then one morning she would wake slowly to partial darkness.
It would seem at first like one of those half-dreams, an inner darkness, something the mind knew was only temporary and would soon climb up into full light.

Only in this case it didn't. For one of the windows
would be missing.
The point, Maud thought, frowning, was important. It was not like waking into a slow and awful awareness that you couldn't see out of one eye, and jumping up and calling the doctor. But that the window was
missing.
Where it had been was only the wall, the wall grown over the place where the window had been. On one side of the room everything was dark, the curtains were gone, the pink drained from the walls, the figures holding garlands vanished from the ceiling.

It was all gone; the bed was dark; she could not make out the wardrobe.

And she could not say, “I'm blind in one eye.” She could not run out into the street in her terror and yell that her room was disappearing, that the wall had overgrown the window. No one would believe her. They would think she was merely some Greek crazy, gone mad like the one who had murdered her children. She would be completely isolated. She would be alone with no explanation. And this was what made her problem like the cat's.

Now she felt better, slightly. She felt a bit triumphant because she could explain to Sam how much more dreadful it was for the cat not knowing.

She visualized it again, that room, floating over the Aegean. Sea of jade, a sky of opal, the diaphanous curtains of milky yellow like dissolving pearl, a room of pure light, without the burden of furniture, of the past, of the future . . .

With its missing window vanishing from her mind's eye Maud felt her throat constricting.

She was relieved to hear just after that the sound of Sam's car pulling up. Maud squinted back at the headlights, which switched off, and she heard the door slam.

“Evening,” he said as he set about emptying the six-pack of
Coors into the tub of ice, shoving five into the space around the Popov bottle and setting one on the upturned barrel. Sam sighed and lowered himself into a chair. Before he said anything, he always had to line up his cigarettes and matches and pop the can of Coors.

Having done that, he settled back in the aluminum and wood-slatted chair, crossed an ankle over his knee, and rubbed the ankle. “It's the big one tonight, I guess,” he said of the party, and tipped the can back and drained half of it. Then he offered Maud a cigarette from his pack of Winstons. They sat back and smoked. “Had to break one up over at the Red Barn earlier,” he said. “Bunch of kids were on something. Then I had to go over to Spirit Lake and break up a fight at the hotel.”

Sam had been La Porte's sheriff for years. He'd started out as deputy and was now in charge of the four-man police department. He was easygoing and well liked.

“That place is crazy.” Maud shook her head. Spirit Lake was another summer resort town, two miles away, even smaller than La Porte, and even emptier in the winter. If people thought La Porte was a ghost town, well, it had nothing on the ghostliness of Spirit Lake in dead winter.

“Still, it's Labor Day. Guess you can't blame people for wanting to celebrate,” Sam said sympathetically. That was one reason he was well liked; he could make allowances. “Chad get off?”

Maud nodded, looking straight ahead. “I was about to write a letter to him today. I had it all worked out, but—”

“Why were you writing? He only just left. He's off to visit his friend. Isn't that what you said? That he was going to visit his friend in Belle Harbor?”

Maud squinched her eyes shut. Sometimes he drove her crazy. “I
know
where he
is.
Do you have to keep saying it?” Irritated, she tossed her watered-down drink into the lake and stuck her glass into the ice. “I wasn't going to
mail
it yet, just write it, that's all. Anyway, that's not the point.”

“Oh,” said Sam.

He was waiting patiently for her to tell him the point, but now she couldn't bring to mind exactly the way she'd felt when she'd tried to write the letter. Her fresh drink tasted tepid. “Never mind,” she said, though she'd forgotten the point herself.

Her saying that bothered him, so he urged her to go on.

“Well, just don't keep interrupting.” There was a silence while she tried to enter into the feelings she had had earlier when she was writing the letter. Trying to. All day at the Rainbow Café she had been fretting over the fight they'd had about where Chad's money was going. So when they'd got to the airport neither one of them was in an especially amiable mood. “This is what I don't understand,” she was saying about the letter. “The words were all there, as neatly lined up as boxed chocolates one after the other. They were clearly in my head. Now, why is it they wouldn't simply move down my arm to my fingers and right out along the page? I started writing and it all disappeared. It was like the ink just dried up in my mind.”

Sam said nothing, but she knew he was thinking the problem over. Sam wasn't much of a letter writer.

“The words just—frizzled.”

“Frizzled?”

“You know—curled up around the edges. Frizzled. Burned. Turned to ashes.”

“Hmm.”

She knew it took Sam a while to think things like this over. Sometimes he made no comment at all beyond a “well” or an “oh,” but that was one reason she liked to talk to him. If Sam couldn't think of a helpful reply, he made none at all, except for the times when he was being deliberately (she thought) obtuse. But usually, when her full thought was out, if he couldn't add to it, he didn't try to take away from it by saying something like others might: “Have a hard time writing myself,” or “Try again,” or something like that which demeaned her point. And he never
tried to cheer her up, even though he often found her in a bad mood, to say the least. Most people would probably have thought his silence strange; after all, wasn't that what friends were for? To cheer you up?

No, friends knew the difference between that downcast, hangdog, lowdown feeling people called “blues” (music the party across the water never played, for some reason) and what Maud had. And what Maud had was something unnameable and probably unnatural, unless you wanted to call it “depression.” That was probably the only word anyone could come up with, but it didn't help her much.

After the lull in the dancing the combo started in on “Brazil.” She was glad she'd never left anyone behind in Brazil or it would probably have started her crying.

Another boat—or was it the same black Chris-Craft?—ripped by near the far shore. “Isn't that the same one? Where do they go, anyway? There's nothing at the other end of the lake.” There wasn't anything at either end as far as she could make out, except for the Red Barn, which wasn't much but what the name said. They sold beer and half-smokes and had a jukebox and one of those big TV screens like the wall of a house caving in on you.

It showed up, the depression, in the way she'd been about to weep over the cat's eye and the loss of the high-ceilinged room. It wasn't natural to cry as much as she did, and god only knew, to cry over
what
she did. Oh, she imagined a lot of people cried over music, songs that put them in mind of their dead sweethearts in Brazil and so forth. But she'd go straight as a board, freeze up right in front of the milk-shake machine at the Rainbow if someone played “Blue Bayou” or Elvis sang
“I'm so lonesome I could cry.”
It was like her hand was electrified, holding the aluminum milkshake container, unable to release it.

You don't cry just looking at your own cat because she's sleeping with her head on her paws; or over a black car because its rear wheels are up on blocks; or at a rock you see by the side of the
road; or a band of wrens waving on tall stalks and then suddenly taking off. At least she thought you don't. And it nearly went without saying she'd put away all the pictures of Chad when he was four and seven and ten and even sixteen. It might be that when she had the roll developed that they'd taken before he left, she'd just tuck them in the album without looking at them, as if they might burn her eyes out.

It looked to her like she had two choices: crazy or depressed.

The issue seemed to be settled a few days ago when she'd picked up a copy of
Time
(or was it
Newsweek
?) that featured an article on depression.

It was epidemic, almost. It was growing among young people (which didn't help her own case). But there were different kinds. She read all of the symptoms with interest, not surprised that the tendency to cry was one. Fatigue. That fit. Although you didn't really score yourself, the idea was that if you had perhaps three or four symptoms you were depressed; five or six, seriously; more than six, almost clinically. And it counted, also, which ones you had. Any thoughts of suicide were, of course, rather serious. A
lot
of thinking about suicide was pretty dangerous, and
attempting
it—this seemed to come across to the reporters as a surprise—was the clincher. There were twelve symptoms. Maud checked and saw she had all of them except one.

It wasn't exactly what you wanted to write your mother about. But her mother was dead. It wasn't exactly what you wanted to write your son about, either.

“I don't know,” said Sam.

“What? You don't know what?” His voice had brought her out of her reverie.

“Whether it's the same one.”

“What same one?”

Sam turned and gave her one of his long looks. “The boat, for god's sake. You asked if it was the same . . .”

Maud had forgotten what she'd said. “You're so literal.”

“You forgot, didn't you?” He took a pull at his Coors, smiling in that exasperating way he did when he'd caught her out in some small thing. “You were just sitting here mooning over something and forgot what you were saying.”