Strawberries in the Sea (2 page)

“Ayuh. If you're lonesome, just put on twenty-five more pounds. Create your own group.” She slapped her belly, and Jude flinched slightly but forebore to glance around.

“Look, Jude, let's get this over with,” she said. “I'll need two witnesses. Will you be one? I can get Leona Pierce for the other.”

“Sure,” he said. “Anything to help you get rid of that critter.”

She kept her mouth shut. When the waitress came she took the coffee but refused the eclair. “Look, will you put that and five more in a box for me? Thanks. . . . For Lucy, if you don't want any, Jude,” she said. “She can stand it, but I've got to stop eating sometime.”

“Now don't go to the other extreme and starve yourself.” He went on in a more hushed voice, bearing out the funeral motif. “I guess I don't need to ask what you're doing in town today, all dressed up and so forth. I'm sorry, Ro.”

“Don't be,” she said briskly. “The way I see it, I'm lucky to've had three years, and I wouldn't give that up, no matter what—” Her throat grew tight and she sipped coffee.

“Well, if that's the way you look at it, it's your business,” said Jude, but his tone scorched her and she thought, You think I'm a fool as much as Con ever did. . . . Even to think Con's name swamped her in the adoration and ache for something so glitteringly beautiful that without it she had no life whatever. As the wave retreated she had hardly the energy to hold her cup, yet she had to keep drinking, her eyes downcast to avoid Jude's.

“What about the place?” he was asking. “He signed off yet?”

“Yes.”

“Good!” Jude slapped a palm down. “Of course he wouldn't mind that much, not with what he's stepping into. Now what about
Sea Star
?”

“Oh, we're going to sell her, but he's using her till the new one's ready.”

Jude wagged a long bony forefinger at her. “You make sure that you handle the sale, my girl. If he does, you'll never see the money.” When she didn't answer, but kept staring at the other people, he asked softly, “You letting him have it all?”

“Well, he's a man, Jude, he has to have more, and where he's starting out with a family on the way —”

“Oh, my God, now I've heard everything.” Jude pushed away his pie and sat back, shaking his head, looking over his glasses at her and then shaking his head again. She thought, You haven't heard everything, Jude. You haven't heard that I made him a present of the boat the first Christmas, not just the gear and Papa's colors.

Jude said, “You sell some shore property so he can have a forty-footer built with every damn gadget but an elevator, and then he tells you he's got a woman in the family way so he has to have a divorce. And now you're about to stand fairy godmother to the three of them. My God, Ro, where's your wits? Where's your pride?”

“Maybe I've got neither left,” she said thickly, “but, like you said a while back, Jude, it's my business.” She started to get up.

“Oh, sit still. I guess you got a right to run things your own way. No use saying anything, you've got that stubborn McKinnon streak.”

“Well, the Webster strain don't help any.” They grinned at each other and she sat down again. “But you see, Jude,” she began placatingly, “I knew Con had a roving eye. He was born with it, and he can't help it any more than he can help his red hair. I knew that when I married him, and you can say what you like about the property and all, he had plenty of other chances, and he wouldn't have tied himself down to one woman if he hadn't had good intentions.”

“Good intentions for
him
. And he didn't tie himself down none.”

She ignored that. “And maybe if we'd had a baby right off he'd never have gone wandering. A man wants a son. Papa was good to me, but I know how it must've hurt him, never having a boy to carry on the name.” She kept turning her spoon over and over, watching the reflection of the pink lights on the stainless steel. She'd wanted a red-haired baby so bad, boy or girl didn't matter, so bad it was as if she'd had it and it died.

“You've got two boys, Jude, so you can't know what it's like to want them and see the time going by and yourself getting older without them.”

He didn't answer, and, though she'd have resented almost anything he said, she resented his silence even more. “He needed an anchor,” she said. “A family would have been that. And after a while he wouldn't have run around any more.”

When she stopped she heard the echo of the words in their falseness. Bitterly she said to the spoon, “Women wouldn't leave him alone. While he was on the loose it was like they all had a chance, even the married ones who wouldn't step out of their own dough dish, nossir, but they'd
dream
about it plenty. And they couldn't stand thinking he'd picked somebody like me to marry. It put them down, you see. They just couldn't get over it. Now they're all—they're all—”

She shut her teeth down on her lower lip and picked up her cup, which slopped as her hand shook. Jude said with a humiliating gentleness, “If you've got it all reasoned out, why, that's about all anybody can do. I hope you've done some reasoning about your future.”

“I've got the place and most of the land except that piece on Back Cove I sold. And I've got the boat,” she lied. “I've kept up my lobster license too. Never told him, the way he felt about women lobstering, but I paid up every year just in case he got an infected hand from a bream bone or a kink in his back, and needed help aboard the boat. So I can always make a living, as long as they don't make a law saying women can't run a string of gear.”

Jude laughed, and she demanded, “You think that's what puts men off me? They want something frail and womanly, instead?”

“My God, Ro, there's plenty of men would look at you if you'd give 'em a chance. You're all woman, and you can't hide the fact.”

“Why, Jude, how you talk,” she teased him. “And you looking like a minister. . . . And I sure can't hide the fact that there's quite a lot of woman to squeeze into dungarees.”

But he was serious. “They knew you were around, all right, but all you saw was Con. He showed up like the one new penny in a handful of change. Some of that could have been fifty-cent pieces or even silver dollars, but all you saw was that one penny shined up enough to put your eye out. You ain't the first woman to do so, nor the last.”

She wanted to ask what she could ask no one: could she help it for coveting the coppery dazzle above everything else? And was she sorry now? If she said loudly, “
No
,” Jude would be shocked. She almost said it anyway, to stuff his sermons back down his throat. Instead she said airily, “Jude, are those Wileys still renting your place out on Bennett's? I heard something on the short wave the other day, fellers talking back and forth while they hauled, and it made me wonder if they'd moved off.”

“Ayuh, they moved off a couple of weeks ago. Soon as school finished out there. The youngest boy finished the eighth grade and he'll be going to high school in the fall, and his folks don't want to board him out over here, they're scared of all this drug business and fast cars and so forth. The old man's going lobstering in the bay, out of Limerock.”

“So the house is empty?”

He was still innocent. “Yes. An older boy works for Owen Bennett, so he lives with them.”

“I sh'd think you'd rent your place to summer people.”

“It'd need some fixing up and a lot fancier toilet than it's got now, if I can mention the fact at the table.” They both laughed. “No, some fisherman'll come along and want it. I guess we'll sell it this time. My kids are all away from home except Edwin, and he's no lobsterman.”

“Sell it to me,” said Rosa. “How much do you want for an option?” She was opening her bag and taking out her billfold. “Fifty, a hundred, two hundred?” She began counting out bills between the coffee cups.

“Good God, put that stuff away!” He shoved the money back at her, his face red and his eyes jumping behind his glasses as if she'd started taking her clothes off in public. She looked purposely stupid and amazed, and he said rapidly, “Now listen, Ro, I'm not letting you do anything foolish while you're still in shock. What do you want with a place way to hell and gone over the horizon? Home's home, and you'll feel better about it after you get the stink of Con out of it. You belong in Seal Point, and he's the foreigner. Our folks settled there before the Revolution, and roots count. Without 'em you're a vessel without ballast.”

“Next thing you'll be telling me I ought to join the D.A.R. so's to take up my mind,” she said. “Sure I'm in shock. I've got to divorce my husband. I've got a couple of months to get through first, and I'll be damned if I spend 'em in Seal Point with everybody clacking and staring and oozing pity like pork fat when they're not snickering.”

“All right!” His mouth snapped tight on the words. “Go on out there and use the house for the summer, if you want to, and welcome to it.”

“Take fifty dollars for an option to buy, just to humor me?”

He wasn't amused. “Twenty-five, and you'll get it back when you move back in here. And it's just to humor you.”

She smiled at him in genuine affection. “Thank you, Jude.” The rigidity went out of his face. “You always were the damndest little mutt,” he said. “If you smiled more often like that, you'd find out something. . . . Look, the Wileys were clean enough, but he was no hand to fix things up. I sent out shingles to patch the roof, but he never put them on, and there might be some windows need puttying.”

“I can camp out somehow. I'll go out on the mailboat next Monday.”

“I'll get the keys to you before then,” Jude said.

She wished she could go now, launching herself like a gull from a roof on Main Street straight out over the broad blue wind-wrinkled plain of the bay; to be transmuted into everything that she was not and could never be, and never come back to Seal Point or be seen again as Rosa Fleming.

D
riving the pickup home barefoot, she was of half a mind to throw the shoes into the first alder swamp she passed outside Limerock. She never wanted to wear them again, or any of the clothes she wore today, as she'd never worn again the clothes she'd bought for Papa's funeral. But they were practically new, and it would be a criminal waste for nobody to have the use of them, just because the sight and feel of them turned her stomach. She would do with them what she'd done with the funeral apparel: put everything in a carton and leave it just outside the entrance to the town dump. The carton would be gone in an hour, and some defeated soul from the Quarry Road would be trying the clothes on and feeling fancy and gay for a change.

I'll throw in all the make-up too, she thought cynically. That green eye-shadow ought to make some hovel into a happy home.

A vision of Bennett's Island lying on the sea was superimposed on the familiar view ahead of road and spruce woods. It was a place where Con had never been and where nobody would know about him and her. She had gone there often in the years when her father had run a lobster smack to the outside islands. Awkward with her height and puppy fat, she'd been too bashful to go onto the island itself; she used to sit on a nailkeg in a dim corner of the store on the wharf, licking an ice cream cone or drinking pop, and watch the island people come and go. All of them, even the children, were as mysterious to her as the island itself with its unknown fields and woods.
Anything
could lie beyond the visible part of the village;
anything
could go on in the heads and behind the eyes of these island people who moved as casually in their exotic ambience as ordinary people did back at Seal Point.

She'd been around sixteen her last trip out there, and Papa was beginning to fret about making a boy of her. She'd just gotten up enough courage to promise herself that next time she was going to walk around the harbor and across the island to the other side and see what was there when he gave up smacking, saying the run was too long and too tough for a rheumaticky man. But later he made a few trips with
Sea Star
in the first year of the boat's life and the last of his, taking out bait and bringing back lobsters as a favor to his successor when the younger man was having engine trouble.

“It's a favor to myself too,” he told Rosa, “and even more to the boat. She gets tired of slogging around that string of traps every day. She says, ‘That why you had a new boat built, Cap'n? To go round in circles, day in, day out?' No, she'd like a chance to spread her wings and head out to sea and just
go
.”

“Well, so would I,” said Rosa. “How about me going next time?”

He shook his head. “No, no. You and I, we'll take a sail out some pretty Sunday, but when it's a business trip it's no place for a woman.”

It was no sense arguing that a weekday trip would be better than a Sundayfied one. “All right, just as long as we get our sail.”

“We will, we will. That's a promise, Punkin.”

By then he wasn't even happy about her helping him with his traps, as if he thought he was cheating her out of a girl's life; he seemed to think that when she wasn't in school she ought to prefer to cook, to garden, to make new curtains, and spend happy afternoons doing fancy-work for church fairs. Somehow all these activities would magically turn her into the kind of girl who was taken to movies and dances and was eventually married in the Seal Point Baptist Church, with everyone there.

About once a week she assured Papa that while she didn't mind cooking for him and her, and raising vegetables in summer, she didn't want to do anything else but be on the water in
Sea Star
, with maybe some mackereling and clamming on the side. This always made him look worried.