Authors: Annie Dillard
W
ITHIN TWO HOURS OF
their crossing the Sagamore bridge, on a motel bed, Deary welcomed Maytree into her arms with gales of laughter that beaded on her gums. Then she slept palms together under her cheek like a charade for
sleep.
Maytree prized fidelity like everyone else. He looked at the motel’s knotty pine ceiling. Was he evil, and Deary evil? Who has not loved twice? More than twice? Who has never broken a heart? Should his first high-school sweetheart have stayed true to him as she grew on ahead? He saw her often. Jolly, she wrangled grandchildren.
Surely he must have been, at thirty when he courted Lou, shallow. Nothing had ever vaulted him to such an elated pitch as his slow awareness these past weeks of good old Deary Hightoe, during a general glance he saw only peripherally—of her high-arched eyes’ across Cairos’ porch scorching the skin on the side of his face as a flatiron burns.
He recognized that when, after two years, his infatuation with Lou dwindled, neither love nor happiness withdrew. Often he fell in love with her clarity or her eyelids afresh, and he whistled “Clancy Lowered the Boom.” After eight years
or so, had he forgot to marvel at her depth of spirit their intimacy revealed? His lasting marriage mightily outweighed and banned the puny flirting and responding-to-flirting that topple others. He and Lou trusted; they confided. They made love with less urgency and more sustenance. Theirs was not a fire they rushed to douse, but one they fed slowly. They loved and reared Petie. They maintained the shack as a demented project. She listened to him; she always knew what he was talking about; she laughed. They loved and read good novels, good poetry. Had he stopped loving Lou? Not at all. His abiding heart-to-heart with her merely got outshouted.
By equating fidelity with neither flirting nor responding to flirting, Maytree left a flank open. He never flirted with Deary. She never flirted with him. They fell in love, love unlooked-for. The same thing took place at least once before. Relieved, oblivious then, he read it in a book and copied it. “Try and realize”—Levin told Oblonsky—“that this is not love. I have been in love but this is not the same thing. It is not my feeling but some external power that has seized me…such happiness does not exist on earth.”
Try and realize. Maytree admired Tolstoy’s giving Levin the truth to say and his making fun of it fondly.
They rented on the Maine island they saw with Sooner Roy. Maytree repaired five of the twelve wood-framed houses on the island. Deary baked gingerbread in square pans and steamed for it a translucent lemon sauce. He saw her carry the gingerbread on heaped, waxed-paper-wrapped plates. She billowed through woods and fields all summer barefoot to give it
to neighbors. She took turns with Maytree rowing ashore for food, gas, lumber, asphalt tile. They bathed in a clawfoot tub. Once while he knelt to dry her she asked, How many roofs could you do a year? He laughed. Her flesh dipped wherever he pressed—pure woman.
—I’m not a roofer. Now your other side.
—I’ll give your harness bells a shake, she said when it was his turn. He smelled her vapor. He noticed, not for the first time, that rowing had callused her palms.
Increasingly he found her working over ruled books and newsprint tablets at their table, wielding a knife-sharpened pencil. She told him, surprised daily, that she liked keeping his business books. Business? he thought; I charge only materials and time. She told him that, short of burning cash, there was no more expensive way to light a room than burning candles. She bought three Aladdin lamps, and prophesied the week two years hence when the lamps would finish “paying for themselves”—a usage that always amused him. She replaced her torn filmy clothes first with shirts and dungarees, then with blouses and slacks.
On the bed she curled under his arm. Of course, she told him, she missed Provincetown and its sky. Of course she would take Maytree home to die, or he would take her—promise? Maytree humored her. He tried not to think of Provincetown at all, not to remember Lou and Petie. Who would both hate him now. He had chosen his own disgrace. He would probably do it again.
Maytree worked at building both on the island and off. Old Mainers had settled rivers and coves. These new people
built on bare coasts and hilltops, as if they meant to heat with wind. He turned down most jobs, to save his mornings for poetry. On a September day Deary looked up from a ledger.
—You could take up lobstering. Her baby face! She was older than him, let alone Lou; she sprang to her impulses like a child.
—Lobstering? For a living? Sun heated his shirt and clavicle through the window.
—For half a living. The other half is working on houses.
—The other half is poetry, my love. We don’t need more money.
Best not tell her how dramatically, if he got rich enough to learn lobstering and to start up, local lobstermen would discourage him.
—How many roofs can this small island need? How many summer people’s screened porches? He bent his nose to her hair; its smell stirred him.
—I thought you liked the island. Shall we move to the mainland?
—Could we? To Camden? We can get our licenses.
What? He kept forgetting she had a degree in architecture. By suppertime they were moving to Camden.
Maine’s beauty was not of sky but of earth. Sunlight hit black spruces and died, or sprawled in fields. This cold forest stopped his eyes. Brown needles underfoot became his sand. He smelled black humus and rock like wet pipe.
Their new house smelled of mildew and smoke from a long-ago house fire. Deary insisted they buy a respectable, meaning too-big, house. He heard everyone split and stack
wood. Year-round he heard chain saws. They got their licenses.
Maine, he found, had social classes. Educated people sat at dinner parties discussing the news and drinking—all of a sudden—wine. Only the children knew how to enjoy themselves. Enjoyment required, in his view, at the very least, easy people, a record player, or a drummer, or a piano player, or a deck of cards and chips, jokes or funny stories, or some sort of ball. And not before or after dinner, but alongside a big buffet. He granted his was a general failure to mature.
Once Deary whispered from his lap, I miss being poor! And could they adopt a baby? He felt her lips and breath. He knew she was only keeping him abreast of her flitting thoughts. Yet he never knew—
connaître, wissen
—what she was in essence. On the Cape he had fancied her not quite of this world, Ariel asleep on sand. Or was she of this earth, earthy?
S
IX YEARS AFTER
M
AYTREE
and Deary flew the coop, Lou and Cornelius were making a mess eating sea-clam chowder at her green kitchen table. Lou saw the sun spread like a gull for its landing on the sea. Cornelius had wandered in from the dunes for food and mail. Lou knew that five or six times a year, for these six years, his mail included a letter from Maytree. A new one came today. He read it and passed it across the table. Lou saw that Maytree had typed the letter and Deary appended a note, apparently written against a ruler, wishing everyone—
everyone
twice underlined—all best. Did they give architecture degrees to people who bubble-dotted their i’s? Like the others, this letter of Maytree’s was easygoing and reticent. To Lou, Maytree and Deary both had changed into old friends whose life together she followed with an affectionate interest almost like Cornelius’s. For years she had read his letters without turning a hair.
It shamed him, Maytree wrote, to be a builder filling the coast. How many rooms could the new people actually need? —As many as they can pay for! Deary wrote in the margin. What wives would clean the houses? New people asked for many bedrooms because they truly believed their children
and spouses and grandchildren and their own friends and their friends’ children would pass all their summers, if not all their free time, there with them, simultaneously. The empty bedrooms amounted to cargo cult, clearing airstrips to attract planes that never came.
Lou liked reading Maytree’s letter in his familiar voice. That they were once, to put it mildly, intimate, belonged to the realm of far-fetched facts, like Io and Ganymede’s circling Jupiter. Lou pictured his freckled stick figure slap-dancing on a shake. Deary managed his business. How? Lou and Cornelius had to laugh.
The next day she ordered Maytree’s new book from Wesleyan. When it came, she saw it was a long poem: boy-girl twin halves—Plato’s old thought. He set the twins in modern Greece. From his usual poetic line he had subtracted a foot. Perhaps the cold took his breath away.
That November Lou began painting again. It was never too late to record the faces you love. She thought watercolor suited beginners. Pete’s frontal portrait looked like a beady-eyed fanatic or a police sketch. Next Lou painted Jane Cairo in profile, too-small hands holding
Victory
. Perhaps if she could draw. She burned her tries. People praised her humility because she so seldom spoke. They did not know her ambition: a show in town.
One year she found a scheme and stuck with it the long balance of her life: foreground of disturbing beach, middle distance disturbing sea, and sky above, disturbing. Iced trash, tarnished waves, clouds like glyphs. Graywacke stones, dirty sea ice, stubby far plane. Waves of varying length, like words,
and in parallel lines, like type, moved left to right on prevailing westerlies. So watching storm waves in the bay made her eyes move just as reading did, and seas looked like lines of italic type she tried to read. She painted Nekkar in Boötes (“ox driver”), and the elusive “loincloth.” She liked nocturnes. Vega was a blue dot that taught nothing. Scorpio reared over chalkline breakers. Hercules held his club fast over the roof gutter. Soon in Provincetown’s expanding glare Hercules would not have a club, or even arms.
In thin oils she depicted clumsy beaches and clouds. Their foregrounds and middle grounds showed jetsam and wrack, stained waves, brown bottles, steamer shells, broken china, waxed paper, church keys, foil, nails sticking through in lumber, clamshells, tires, purses, shoes—only two or three objects on each canvas. With a sable brush she graphed each torn string of a crab trap against dirt pink sky. Color was local. It allowed an ocean like red marcelled hair. Everything was littoral. Sandpipers pecked child footprints in mud. Storm sea like a ripsaw blade, and clouds in a mumble nearing. She would no more scumble a cloud than kill a child.
One evening of those twenty middle years she was watching Pete sop gravy from his plate with a biscuit. She had already handed him that day’s mail: a letter to him from Camden in Deary’s hand. He threw it away and smiled without guile. Lou could imagine his fearing that his father was making it clear he wanted nothing to do with him. Pete had moved to two rooms a few streets over. His friends and their ways called his tune. It took years for her and Maytree to grasp that
he was not going to college but to sea. When she used to wash his face, he screwed his skin so hard it got dark as a tire.
Just as few men love their wives so much as their daughters, few, if any, women love anyone so much as their children. Parents love adopted babies with the same passion. Often she missed infant Petie now gone—his random gapes, his bizarre buttocks. How besotted they gazed at each other nose-on-nose. He fit her arms as if they two had invented how to carry a baby. While she walked, he patted her shoulder in time with her steps. If he stopped patting, she stopped walking. If his pats speeded up, she stepped lively. He was driving her; they both died laughing.
Later she washed his filthy hair and admired his vertebrae, jiggled his head in toweling that smelled like his steam. She needled splinters and sandspur spines from his insteps as long as he let her. Every one of those Peties and Petes was gone. That is who she missed, those boys now overwritten. Their replacement now sat at the green table wiping crumbs onto his plate. Pete’s friends came by to get him for a party no one wanted to attend without him. He was good-natured; could he also be the life of the party? Did she ever know a noisy fisherman?
His friends hauled Pete away. She confronted the sink. How she wished she could see all those displaced Petes and Peties once more! She imagined joining picnic tables outside by the beach and setting them for 22 Peties and Petes, or 122, or however greedy she was that day and however divisible Pete. Together the sons at every age and size—scented with
diaper, formula on rubber nipples, salt-soaked sand, bike grease, wax crayon, beer, manila, engine oil, fish—waited for dinner. Who else knew what each liked? It was a hell of a long table. She gave herself a minute to watch them—Petie after Petie barefoot near his future self and past. They pinched or teased or shoved one another. All but the babies ignored the babies. What mother would not want to see her kids again? When this sort of thing got out of hand, Lou called herself “Poor Mom.” She dreaded “Poor Mom,” her periodic walk-on role as grieving and piteous victim. Lou spied her from a distance floating long-skirted over the sand, hands on face. Lou gave the hag a short hearing to shut her up, and tea in a cup. “Poor Mom,” she commiserated: her child grew up.
A bank wrote her. Her vamoosed father, who left their Marblehead house and never came back, had died in Edgar-town—so near, all these years, and here he was, gone—and left her money she split with Pete. She bought telephone service because Pete might need to reach her from any port.
She wrote Maytree and Deary to stop alimony. She described Pete’s new boat and detailed his fish hauls. She reported that Jane Cairo had washed ashore for good. Chiefly Lou wrote to persuade him and Deary she was content, good-willed, and long past regrets. She urged them to take a vacation to the Cape.—Everyone misses you both. Please come and stay here. Or move back! Was this a bit thick? Well, they both knew her.
In the next few years she painted two canvases she could bear. One showed kapok spilt in clots from ripped red cush
ions, a blue kite in a dead man’s float, and gassy sky. Another was cirrus cloud high over a rusted-out boiler in a dune. She read the Russians again, just about every novel, and Cather,
Middlemarch,
Hardy, Hemingway, Conrad, etc. One night Jen and Barrie twisted her arm until she agreed to let them hang some of her own paintings in a locals’ show. The night before it opened, she used her key to break into the gallery and steal her stuff back.