The End of the Pier (6 page)

It was a compliment she had tucked away in her mind like a petal in a book and looked at again and again for thirty years. Only Chad, who'd told her she looked more like thirty than forty-seven; and Sam, who had told her (to her utter astonishment) she was the most comfortable person to be with because she was as serene as a nun (when she wasn't mad)—only they had ever said anything as nice. Ned had never paid her a compliment she could remember.

Maybe it was her “serene” smile that made Dr. Elizabeth Hooper react in kind. It was probably because Maud was the only one in the Rainbow (except for Ulub and Ubub) who hadn't tried in some way to wheedle out of her why she kept coming through La Porte. Charlene had found out Dr. Hooper was a psycho-whatever because a cousin of a friend of an aunt of hers knew someone who'd gone to see her. Or so Charlene said.

But no one could find out what she was doing in
La Porte,
going back and forth, and sometimes staying overnight at Stuck's rooming house near the end of Main. There was much speculation about whether she'd been called in by Miss Ruth to pay personal visits to Miss Ruth's crazy Aunt Simkin. Shirl, who was never hard-pressed to mind her own business, still felt “funny,” she said, about asking Dr. Hooper why she came through town.

It was, Maud supposed, because Dr. Hooper was a psychiatrist, and people who'd never read about it or been to one (as Maud had while she was married) thought they could read your mind and probably suck your soul out of your body. The way Shirl talked about them, leaning on the counter, moodily smoking a cigarette and polishing a glass, head doctors were about as safe to be around as mass murderers or that Boy Chalmers fellow who they said had murdered Nancy Alonzo and done the same thing to those two women in Hebrides. She threw down the towel and shuddered. It hardly bore thinking about.

So she went back to thinking about Dr. Hooper. Maud would watch Dr. Hooper's flickering glance at Shirl or Charlene and wonder if perhaps she
could
see what was going on in their minds.

It was Maud who always waited on Dr. Hooper and who always saved back a piece of lemon chiffon pie if they were running short. It was true that Shirl made the best pies of anyone around except for Jen Graham, who ran the hotel over in Spirit Lake, and this particular pie was especially popular: the filling was a pale cloud of whipped-up lemony filling, and the crust was melt-in-your-mouth baked meringue. That Shirl had begged the recipe off Jen Graham
and then started claiming the pie was her original creation, just about everybody knew, although Shirl thought it was a deep, dark secret and a real sleight-of-hand performance on her part to wheedle a recipe out of Jen. The Rainbow's big white pie boxes were always carted away by customers after eating a slice of lemon chiffon for dessert. So they often ran out of it. Even Chad loved it, and he hated lemon pie.

Dr. Hooper was in the Rainbow Café the third weekend of every month, Fridays and Sundays, eating her pie and drinking her coffee, and often writing a postcard or two, sometimes a letter. It always amused Maud to watch Mayor Sims maneuver around behind Dr. Hooper, leaning back and staring down his nose in his attempt to make out what she was writing. Dr. Hooper always caused a mild stir, probably because she was their mystery woman. Her appearances in La Porte and the Rainbow were as dependable as the turning of day into night.

It was Dr. Hooper herself who had finally, some months ago, started a conversation. She had asked Maud what school her son attended. It had so surprised Maud that Dr. Hooper knew she
had
a son, Maud had slopped coffee into the saucer when she was refilling the cup.

Dr. Hooper said, “I heard the owner”—and here she looked off towards Shirl—“talking about him. She seems to think very highly of him.” Her smile was slow; she seemed to deliberate before every action, and she looked serious even when smiling. “That's unusual,” she added, before going back to cutting through her wedge of pie.

Maud held the coffee pot aloft, thinking the statement mysterious, inscrutable, just the sort of non-small talk she'd expect from Dr. Elizabeth Hooper, if she ever spoke at all. Dr. Hooper certainly wouldn't go in for “Well, we're getting weather,” as Sonny Stuck had said that day. Still, to introduce the subject of Maud's own son was a pretty heady subject for conversation.

Forgetting specifically what she'd asked, Maud answered, “Well
. . . thank you.” Then, feeling foolish with that response, she'd gone on: “I mean . . . why is it unusual?” Ignoring Dodge Haines and Sonny Stuck holding up their cups for refills, Maud had just set the pot back on the Pyrex burner and got a clean napkin to mop up the spilled coffee in the saucer. Dodge called to her, but she paid no attention. Let Charlene wriggle on down there.

Dr. Hooper said, “It's unusual for older people to be impressed by anyone twenty or so.”

“Twenty. He's twenty.” Nervously, she began to shine up the milk-shake container.

Dr. Hooper nodded solemnly.

“I have a son myself. He's fifteen. He's in a prep school up north.” She fiddled with a menu. “That's why I go through La Porte; it's right on the way. But I usually have to stay overnight, because it's quite a trip. I stay at the rooming house down the street.”

As if everybody didn't know. Mildred Stuck, who rented out rooms, thought having a New York
psychiatrist
staying at her place made her Queen of the Rainbow Café, nearly; she'd even had the brass to sit right down in Miss Ruth Porte's booth and start braying about her “clientele.” But it was clear she didn't know a thing about Dr. Hooper or she would have told Miss Ruth.

Maud's mouth opened, but no words came out—that's how amazed she was that Dr. Elizabeth Hooper had a son away at school, just as she, Maud, did. She wanted to ask about him, but before she could think of anything sensible, Dr. Hooper went on.

“Adults—I mean
older
adults—” and she smiled slowly again to indicate she didn't mean to suggest Maud's son wasn't “adult”—“usually haven't much respect for younger ones. For young people. And I imagine”—again, she smiled slowly, as her glance strayed toward the end of the counter and Joey, drinking a Coke—“that she'd be hard to impress. She seems rather disappointed in her own son.”

Maud blinked, looking from Shirl, who was complaining to
some customer about his handing her a twenty when (“the damned fool must have known”) it was Labor Day weekend and all change disappeared on holidays (to hear Shirl tell it)—looking down to Joey, then back to Dr. Hooper, sipping her coffee, and wondered if Shirl was right after all, if there was some sort of mind reading going on. Not soul sucking, of course, just mind reading. How stupid, she thought. Anyone with a grain of intelligence and any powers of observation wouldn't have to hang around the Rainbow for long to know Shirl was “disappointed” with Joey. And this woman was a psychiatrist.

“People . . . parents . . . I seldom hear them paying compliments to young people.” Frowning over her coffee cup, seeming to give this point her gravest consideration, Dr. Hooper added, “Indeed, I never do.”

As Charlene flounced by behind her and grabbed up the coffee pot (it was
Maud's
turn at the counter, after all), Maud stood her ground and asked with deadly seriousness, “Why do you think that is?”

“Well . . . there doesn't seem to be much respect for young people. Their parents certainly don't have much for them, in the sense they seem to be more problems than people. I expect it might be because everyone feels so guilty—the parents, the children. It goes back and forth, gets passed around the table and back again.” She replaced her cup and folded her hands before her, her expression, her position a little like someone kneeling in a pew. “So your son must be quite unusual.”

He
was
unusual; but Maud didn't think she should blatantly agree. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Shirl, who was banging open the display case to get at the pies, staring at her. But Shirl would turn to stone before she'd interrupt a conversation with Dr. Hooper, since Shirl herself was dying of curiosity to know about her.

“I guess people seem to like him,” Maud said. “I guess he's able to talk to adults more than most kids his age. He seems, well,
comfortable with them, I think. I remember when he was, oh, six or seven . . .” This was ridiculous, she thought, busying herself with polishing up the milk-shake container; she couldn't stand here and reminisce. And there was that familiar tightening in her throat; that would be just fine, wouldn't it—in answer to a polite question on this woman's part, suddenly to start crying? Yes, that would be fine.

Dr. Hooper was finished but not leaving, turning slightly back and forth on the wooden counter stool. She slid the conversation effortlessly into something more general. “I don't mean to say that it's just children that have a hard time of it.” Her tone was slightly apologetic, as if it were she and not Maud who was making things difficult, conversationally. “So do parents. Parents are so often forced to desperate remedies.” She grew silent, her eyes down-turned. “What do you think?”

That Dr. Hooper thought her opinion truly mattered astonished Maud and drew her eyes from her fun-house reflection in the aluminum container up to Dr. Hooper's mild brown gaze. Maud rocked a little on her heels, as if her body were being pushed by the sudden force of all of the unanswered questions she had about herself and Chad, about her depression over the sense of loss, about the . . . betrayal. The word simply clicked into place in her mind and shocked her. “Betrayal.” Her face grew stiff with the exertion of trying to keep this disloyal, irrational thought from showing there. But the word dragged a rush of other irrational notions with it—the notion that she'd been tricked, tricked into believing childhood would last forever. Believing it in her crazy, mixed-up way. Face it: what she felt this very minute was that
he
had tricked her, his six-year-old-ness, his child-ness had tricked her; and she felt, even as Dr. Hooper was taking the three one-dollar bills from her purse and still looking at Maud with those luminous eyes—Maud felt the rage beginning. It would spread as it always did, burning in her constricted stomach muscles, raying out through her limbs, upward to her face like a hot, angry blush,
and then settling in a tight sore lump that she feared would fester and burst.

All of this went through her mind in a moment, less than a moment, and she saw herself, as if she were standing away from herself, writing up Dr. Hooper's check with a little frown of concentration that was supposed to suggest she was merely considering her answer. Wetting her lips, she wrote down the pie and coffee, a dollar eighty-five, afraid this woman had seen this inexplicable, murderous rage which was subsiding as quickly as it had come. She added the tax slowly, afraid to look into Dr. Hooper's eyes for fear that Dr. Hooper had seen clear through her, through her carefully ironed apron and sprigged cotton dress, her freckles, pale skin, and light eyes, to a woman with all of the characteristics of a psychopath. The question still hung in the air,
What do you think?,
and what Maud wanted to say was, “I think I could kill someone, I could be one of those parents who could kill their own children, and it terrifies me that I could, even for one-tenth of a second, actually stand in that person's shoes, feel that person's arm raising the knife or the gun” . . . but to turn, Maud wondered confusedly, on whom? The knife seemed to twist backward into her own heart, the gun rise to her own temple. And the murderous anger returned while she drew a line on the check to tote up the pie, coffee, tax—returned, receded in waves, and left behind it the stuff of depression like detritus for the birds on the beach.

As she slowly tore Dr. Hooper's check from the pad and repositioned the oblong of carbon paper, she wondered, how in God's name could all of this go through a person's mind while she was writing on a dirty-white check with “Thank You” scrolled at the top in faded blue ink?

She placed the check by Dr. Hooper's cup, fixed the small, tilted-up smile on her face as she slid the book of checks back into her apron pocket and answered the question. “Well, I think most parents don't know how they feel or what to do, and maybe it's
because of all the decisions they have to make—not the big ones, the little ones, the ones that seem to come up every minute, and you have to make up your mind in a split second without being able to get anyone's advice, and where the odds are always against any decision being right because what you think is in everybody's best interests isn't at all, since a lot of the time you don't even want everybody's best interests, don't even know what they are, not even your own. . . . Maybe that's why I don't blame Shirl. Or anyone.” Maud stopped suddenly, closed her mouth as if slamming a tiny door, feeling that what was behind it, a rush of thoughtless words bursting out, unbidden and unchecked like some horror-film poltergeist, so alarmed her that she just had to clamp her lips together, try to paste on again that little hooked smile to let Dr. Hooper know she wasn't irrevocably crazy.

But Dr. Hooper merely nodded in her thoughtful way. Her long, elegant fingers placed the three one-dollar bills with the check (it was always the same amount) as she said, “I've never heard a parent say that.” Her own smile was a little like Maud's, closed-mouthed, tilting up.

Is that good or is that bad? Maud wanted to ask.

•  •  •

But Maud had been surprised that Dr. Hooper had come in just this morning, apparently on her way “up north,” for tomorrow was Labor Day.

“Well, he sometimes goes back to school early. Before he has to.”

Immediately, Maud felt an even closer bond. She hung on to the silver milk-shake container, her hands jittering up and down, and told Elizabeth Hooper that Chad himself had left early to visit a friend of his. Probably, she couldn't keep the irritation—or was it sadness? they seemed to overlap—out of her voice, and she cut up Dr. Hooper's lemon chiffon pie pretty ruthlessly. Then it occurred to her that if Dr. Hooper's son had gone back to school already, he obviously wasn't riding with his mother.