Strawberries in the Sea (15 page)

She left the bottle on the counter by the sink and blew the lamp out, and went to bed.

S
he lay awake for a while, not worried about his being out but about his mood. She had known of at least five suicides in the last few years, and, in the case of the one at Seal Point, nobody could believe that the girl was the type to kill herself. So it could happen with Edwin, who surely must sometimes find his deafness unbearable. She was frightened, but she didn't know where to search for him.

All at once she was sure that he was safe, at least physically. He might have come to the island because he felt a low coming on and thought he could work it off out here, away from the over-sensitive eyes of his parents.

In that case, she was no friend if she kept harassing him. Why had she herself come to the island? . . . She slid down into her covers and went to sleep.

When she woke up it was coming morning, there was a cool wind blowing in on her, and a robin was singing the same song over and over from one of the spruces just outside her windows.
Giddyup, giddyup, hurryup, hurryup, giddyup, giddyup
. . . . She shut the window on it and got shiveringly into her clothes.

Downstairs she looked into Edwin's room. He was a long narrow bundle in his sleeping bag, just the crown of his head showing. There were faint fumes of Jim Beam.

She didn't bother to build a fire. She made her coffee on the gas stove and drank it with the last of Mrs. Sorensen's yeast rolls; she filled her thermos with more black coffee to take out with her, and successfully won a little struggle about taking some doughnuts too. She left them behind, and the decision made her feel pounds thinner.

It was warmer outside than it had been in the kitchen, but it was cloudy and smelled of rain. In the lustrous gray-and-green harbor the gulls were washing themselves with silver splashings. Men were rowing out to their moorings and two boats were already leaving the harbor, racing abreast; one was Jamie Sorensen's
Valkyrie
, the other Matt Fennell's
Peregrine
.

Ralph Percy and Rob Dinsmore were talking on the wharf on the other side of Rosa's. On the wharf beyond that, Philip Bennett and his young helper were loading traps aboard
Liza
. From the next wharf someone was whistling with great virtuosity.

“Gonna rain for sure,” Ralph said. “Turd birds are whistling.”

“Beats me how he's got the pucker for it this early in the morning,” Rob said.

“It's not early for him, he probably hasn't been to bed yet,” said Ralph. “He's courting over to Brigport, I heard.”

“I thought they were out chasing herring again last night.” “Chasing women is more like it.” Ralph gave Rosa a burlesque wink. She was just going down the ladder to her skiff. “Oh hell,” Ralph said, “I suppose I better get moving and not let a woman shame me.”

Outside there was a southwest swell, gray as a gull's wings, and the horizon was obscured by a silvery smoke of mist.
Sea Star
was at her best in this kind of water, working with wind and tide as if with an intelligence of her own. Rosa found all her buoys, though some were just spindling in the fast-running tide. The traps had not been molested.

The gear fished well; she estimated around seventy-five pounds in the crate when she had hauled the last trap of the forty, which held three counters, four little ones, and a V-notched female to be thrown back with the shorts. “You'll pay your way, old girl,” she told
Sea Star
. The boat rode homeward through seas beginning to cap with crests that sparkled in the intermittent gleams of sunlight. As usual Rosa had been completely happy, everything else forgotten, even Edwin's disturbing behavior. She sang, “Oh,
swift
goes my
boat
like a
bird
on the
billow
,” and the song took her all the way up the west side and into the harbor.

Mark congratulated her on her haul and paid her one hundred and eight dollars and seventy-five cents. She was modestly proud of her gear. “It may be the way the heads are set,” she told him. “My father never set his heads like anyone else in Seal Point and we—I've always done it the same way since.”

She filled up with diesel fuel for the next day and took the boat back to the mooring, where she sluiced down the washboards and swept the cockpit with a wet broom. Hers was the only boat back in, and the wharves were empty except for gulls. She remembered her first morning here, the heat, the fog, the silence, and her misery. She was still miserable but there were times when she was less so; it was as if the basic and fatal disease remained but at intervals the pain could be beaten down by drugs.

She hung her oilclothes in the fishhouse and changed her rubber boots for sneakers. She had saved out five lobsters; Edwin liked them, and she hoped that would take the edge off their first meeting since last night. He was likely to be in a rotten mood for having made a fool of himself. Of course the cause would still be there, and maybe it wasn't too bright of her to think the lobsters would make a difference. Edwin had never seen fit to eat his way through difficulties the way she'd tried to do.

She felt hot and cranky now, imprisoned on the land after the freedom of the water. She resented Edwin for being a worry to her instead of the comfort she'd expected him to be, and found herself composing angry attacks on his self-pity. But the trouble was that everything could be turned against herself, and by the time she reached the lane she was arguing with some faceless antagonist.

Well, why is self-pity such a great sin, such a big crime? Maybe deafness isn't the worst thing in the world, maybe losing Con isn't, but for Edwin and me they are the worst things right now, and it doesn't make them hurt a goddam bit less because we haven't lost a leg or our eyesight or something.

She was glad everybody was inside eating dinner; in this mood she'd have been hard put to shout cheery greetings. And when she reached the house Edwin wasn't there. She felt a sharp thrill of anxiety and irritation. Then she saw that there were two full pails of water on the counter beside the sink, and the dishes had been washed, so he couldn't have been in too foul a mood. The whiskey bottle had disappeared. Taken it with him to finish it off?

On the table there was something new, an old glass mustard jar turned pale lavender by exposure, holding a twig of wild rose buds and a spray of wild honeysuckle. A note was propped against it.

I've gone to Sou'west Point to paint surf. Come on down and bring some grub. Don't forget the beer. Yours faithfully, Gauguin.

She was at once restored, laughing aloud in the silent house, and suddenly she was starved; she could hardly wait to consume warm lobster, bread and butter, and cold beer on the cliffs of Sou'west Point. She felt as if she could run all the way, light as a sand-peep.

She put on water to boil for the lobsters, then got out of her work clothes and washed up, and dressed in clean faded-blue jeans and a new shirt that had been too snug. It wasn't now, and she could take up three extra holes on her belt.

While she was waiting for the lobsters to cook, she went looking for the box of paperbacks Edwin had brought. She'd been too busy until now to go over them, but she anticipated carrying a stack of them up to her room for night reading.

The box was on the floor beside the chest of drawers in his room. As she leaned down to pick it up, she saw the sketchbook lying on the chest, and she wondered mildly why he hadn't wanted her to see it last night. Mischief, most likely; trying to needle her by being unexpected. Well, I can be unexpected too, Old Smart Alec, she thought. Sneaky. How about that?

She flipped open the book. It was the same one he'd had at Seal Point last week; she recognized the finely detailed drawings of an ornamental cornice, a newel post, and a corner cupboard. There was Jude's basset-beagle sprawled in sleep, and herself with the guitar from several angles. All these she had seen before. Then he'd done sketches coming out on the mailboat yesterday, and around the harbor in the afternoon; boats, ledges, ducks, and gulls, kids in a dory, men lugging traps. From last night, there was herself on the bulkhead, and a comic little impression of Ralph. The girls; he'd gotten the girls in while they all thought he was still working on Rosa. He hadn't missed the legs, which would be a relief to Ralph.

Now blank pages. So why hadn't he wanted her to see it? Simply to tease or even irk her, because that was the way he felt last night? . . . She leafed through the blank pages, not expecting to find anything more, and came to a drawing of a woman who knelt by a flat of seedlings, lifting out a plant.

She wore slacks and a shirt open deeply at the throat. Her long hair was swept around her head and fell in one long thick tress by her left cheek and down onto her breast. Her eyes were downcast, her face smoothed of all expression; she could have been praying, or blind.

The next page showed her in a sidewise pose, sitting on a stone wall. She was laughing, her head thrown back in complete abandonment to whatever was so funny. On the following page she wore a sleeveless blouse or dress and was pinning her hair up on top of her head. She was serious about it, but not blank-faced, there was the impression of a very faint smile but Rosa couldn't find it either around the eyes or the mouth. Still, the atmosphere of intimacy remained, as if she had known that Edwin was sketching her.

Nothing in the three drawings was closely detailed, yet in the grace of the lifted arms, the long throat, the shuttered face bent over the plants, the laughing one and the secretive one, Edwin had set down what he did not want Rosa to see.

She was both ashamed and shaken. The pure, fresh, almost childish joy with which she'd welcomed the picnic with Edwin had gone, leaving her excited in a different, depressing way. She laid the sketchbook back just as she'd found it, and left the room without touching the paperbacks. Five minutes to wait for the lobsters. She sat down at the kitchen table with her chin in her hands.

It had to be the woman for whom he was restoring the house. She and her husband were renting a place nearby. The man was away during the week, but she came on good days to work on her colonial garden. . . . And on Edwin? Attracted, as some women were, by a handicap? Finding him mysterious, or simply male and vulnerable?

Maybe she didn't know anything about it. But Edwin was in love with her.

“Oh God,” Rosa muttered. “Why does it have to be someone he can't ever
have?
”

The instant she said it, she thought of Con. And the lobsters boiled over.

She took the kettle outside and drained it over a thistle plant that had been pricking everybody's bare feet, and wrapped the lobsters in newspapers to keep them warm. At least she wouldn't have to makeconversation, and if Edwin sensed anything gloomy or distracted about her, he would blame it on Con.

But Edwin satisfied with a morning's work was hardly the frustrated love-sick man who'd accompanied her all the way to Sou'west Point. She almost doubted that one's existence after a while, and began thinking she'd seen the sketches through her own love-sickness. Edwin could have been drunk and foul-tempered the night before for any number of reasons besides this woman or any woman.

The threat of rain had passed over, sun flashed off the sea and warmed the sheltered rock shelf where they ate above the surf. Afterwards Edwin went back to work, making studies of gulls in flight or walking around amid the litter of sea urchin and mussel shells. She wandered by herself, almost as liberated out here as she had been on the water. Back on a green and sheltered slope she found a few sprays of ripe wild strawberries, with plenty of green and white ones. Everywhere there were great thickets of wild roses all heavily in bud, and each clump seemed to have its resident sparrows. On the side toward open sea daisies danced in a wind that should have destroyed them, and the precipitous shores dropped away in falls of rock to the surf. On the leeside there were pools of icy calm and a dazzling heat.

It was nearly suppertime when they started home. Rosa had piled up salvage, not in the hope of getting it all for herself but because she was a compulsive beach-comber. She carried everything she could but was forced to shed some of it by the way. Edwin refused to carry anything more than his paintbox and the lunch basket. He managed to look both indulgent and supercilious when she couldn't let a lone oar drift out to sea again, and sloshed around in wet rockweed untangling a length of good yellow nylon warp.

There was one lobster left, and she made Edwin a sandwich for supper, and had sardines and crackers herself. Her feet vibrated from tiredness and her eyelids were heavy. The memory of the sketchbook had become so faint it was transparent, if not actually invisible; Edwin drinking coffee across the table from her was nobody's victim, and his composure was contagious.

She mopped her wet eyes after a series of yawns to find Edwin's notepad before her. “Come on for a walk up around the orchard and the cemetery and out to Goose Cove.”

“How late did you sleep this morning?” she wrote indignantly. “I was awake at the crack of dawn, for heaven's sake, and I've been moving ever since.”

He laughed and got up. Except for some new sunburn over his tan, he looked absolutely fresh. She said, “Go ahead, have a good walk, I'm going to bed and read.”

It dawned on her that he might not want to be trapped by the girls again; they'd been so fascinated last night, especially Linnie, that they could very well be gathering now. She hurried to clear off the table, and brushed her teeth. Then she went boldly into Edwin's room without a glance toward the sketchbook, took the first half-dozen books off the top of the box, and went upstairs.

T
he smell of bacon and coffee aroused her in the morning. Edwin, washed and shaved and with the table set, looked as if he'd never had a problem in his life; or, if he had, he'd solved it. He insisted on serving her breakfast, and for some reason this made her feel very guilty about the sketches. But why guilt, if he had nothing to hide? She hadn't discovered a profoundly personal secret, just a new model, and a good one, certainly a change from her own familiar and unglamorous geography.