In the morning she was positive that she would see Owen today. She ironed Barry’s shirts, mended socks, went over her own clothes; she couldn’t sit down after that, but washed the sun parlor windows inside and out, and while she was working on the outside Kathy called that she’d just taken some Finnish coffee bread out of the oven. Van was suddenly very hungry—her stomach growled with hunger.
Maggie Dinsmore was there, and the table was half-covered with patchwork squares. “Ain’t this nice, though!” Mag cried. “We don’t get together often enough. Don’t have the time. We’d ought to make time.”
“People are always saying, What do you find to do out on that island?” said Kathy. “Well, I’m busier than a three-legged cat with fleas. There’s the butter, Van. Can you reach it?”
“Make a long arm for it, as my father used to say,” said Mag. Van let them talk. If she smiled now and then it was enough, and it was easy to smile; she felt recklessly gay.
Out of the talk about quilt patterns, dandelion greens, Finnish ways of cooking herring, husbands’ choices of food, children’s idiosyncrasies, birds, this morning’s news, emerged one fact that slashed the high wire under her feet. “Went in real early,” Maggie was saying. “The kids are staying with Joanna for the weekend. My, I dunno when those two been off alone anywhere. Of course it’s not really alone, getting up to Waterville to see Joss at her school. . . . It’s not going on a trip like honeymooners.” She sat back laughing like a mischievous child. “Rob told Owen it was real dangerous staying in those fancy motels. Likely to make a baby.”
“That Rob,” said Kathy. “He’s like Terence, never know what these mild quiet ones will come out with. Just the same,” she added, “I plan to have a second family when this batch gets grown up some. I think it keeps you young.”
“Barry says you folks’ll be starting on a family pretty soon,” Maggie said kindly to Van. “Anything definite yet?”
“Nothing to be sure of,” said Van. Her voice seemed to come from somewhere else in the room. She got up. “Well, as much as I’d like to sit here, I’ve got to get back to my windows or I’ll lose my momentum. That bread is wonderful, Kathy. So long, Maggie.” It was a small gem of a performance. She even spoke to the children in the sandpile as she went past them, and called Tiger by name when he pranced furrily at her. She went into the house, up to her room, and into bed.
Barry stood over her, talking in a hushed voice. “What’s the matter? You sick? Anything to do with you going overboard the other day and it’s just catching up with ye?”
“No,” she said to the wall. “And don’t talk as if you’re standing over a coffin. I’m not dead yet.”
“You got a kink? Kathy told me you were up and down that ladder scrubbing windows. Easy to put your sacred lilac out that way.” He snorted with amusement, and she knew what he’d say next. “As old Ed Bushnell used to call it.”
She sighed without sound and pulled her knees up closer to her belly, shutting her eyes against the obstreperous apple-blossoms on the wall paper. “Sick headache?” Barry pursued. “Bilious?”
“It’s too simple for you to understand, I suppose,” she said into the tight-closed dark. “I’d just like to be left alone.”
He said with triumph, “You got a hair crosswise, that’s it. Somebody said something. Now what?” He was sternly and yet indulgently amused. It was a new tone for Barry. He was a man who now made more in a day than he’d ever made in a week. He was a Bennett’s Island lobsterman. He might not be a Bennett, but he walked in their boot tracks and knew them by their first names. He stood over his wife making protective, slightly bored, husbandly sounds in a pleasant room in a house for which he was paying the rent. She remembered, while his voice came dimly to her as if the dark were beginning to fill her ears, her early fancy that all meaning departed from this place when the men were away from it. She had become a part of the nonsignificance, the nothingness, and Barry had taken on new flesh and blood.
He was no longer talking. He had gone away. He used to leave her like this in the double bed on Water Street. No, not quite like this; he was whistling now, outdoors. He had such an engrossing life apart from her that he would not think of her again until he came back into the house, unless someone mentioned her to him, and why should they?
Later he offered her supper. She refused it. It was an unspeakably long night, and somewhere in it the foghorn at the Rock began to blow. She saw the fog, a wall moving imperceptibly closer, a wall you could put your hand into and through, and still a wall for all that.
The window filled with gray muffling light. Birds began to sing, but no engines sounded.
No one came near her that day. There was no way of telling time as the fog light stayed the same, if you could call it light. It was merely the absence of darkness. She slept and woke, haunted by a line. And dreaming through the twilight that doth not rise nor set. . . . Something about forgetting. It was not a day for hauling, and Barry came in at noontime, whistling again. “You up?” he called up the stairs to her, and then when she didn’t answer he called in a more subdued voice, “You asleep?” She still didn’t answer and he went back to the kitchen.
He made his own dinner and listened to the radio while he ate, and then went out again. Presently she heard the hammer from the fish-house. She could tell when he finished building one trap bottom and started another. She got up and started downstairs, and was genuinely frightened when she became dizzy and thought she was falling forward. If she broke anything, not enough to die of, she’d be at everyone’s mercy; she wouldn’t be able to keep them away from her, they’d come through the wall, pitying, comforting, touching . . . and triumphant. Now we have got her down we will be nice to her and she can’t do a thing about it.
The thought got her up and out into the kitchen. “I suppose I should eat,” she said aloud. “Because they won’t let you starve to death.” No, if you wanted to die without interference the best way was to make it quick and violent. But she’d been unable to drown herself.
She buttered a slice of bread and made a cup of tea and took the food upstairs, where she ate sitting cross legged on the bed. If only Barry had some shells for his rifle, she could manage it, but she couldn’t buy bullets without calling attention to herself.
There was almost a full bottle of aspirin downstairs. If you took it down on Sou’west Point, by the time they found you you’d be good and dead, or close to it. They’d handle you then, but you wouldn’t care. . . . Suddenly she rolled over on the bed in a gulping huddle, weeping without shame or caution in an almost voluptuous surrender. She passed from that into new sleep, heavy and dreamless, and woke to a clear red sunset light. Barry was talking downstairs. He seemed to have been talking forever.
“She’s been sleeping most of the day. Tonight I went up and took a look, and she was out like a light. But she gets these spells. Always has and always will, I figger.” He was blithely authoritative, shrugging off somebody’s officiousness with the expert’s nonchalance.
“You sure she doesn’t need a doctor?” Kathy said. “Dr. Torrey can fly out and land in Owen’s field.”
“Nope. She’ll sleep it off and be fine. You see, Kathy”—he became earnestly instructive—“she’s what you might call high strung. She has these kind of cycles, see? Well, you’re a woman, you understand,” he said modestly. “Lordie, on Water Street, she had spells when she wouldn’t speak for a week, and I just waited on her when she wanted something, brought her little things to tempt her appetite, kind of, and never fussed at her.”
You’re the goddammedest liar that ever feet hung on and was called a man, Van thought.
“You’re awfully sympathetic, Barry,” Kathy told him. “A lot of men wouldn’t know what to do when a woman feels that way.”
“Well, it’s easy for me,” said Barry. “You see, she’s my wife. And I love her. It’s as simple as that, Kathy. I love her.”
Oh shit, Van thought.
“And it doesn’t matter what,” said Barry. “I understand her and I’ll always be right here when she needs me. And I can darn a sock and dump a slop pail and cook a meal of vittles as good as any woman.” He chuckled at that. Kathy’s laugh was preoccupied.
“I’ll bet you can, but don’t turn your nose up at this lobster chowder. Put the bowl in the refrigerator and it’ll do you for dinner tomorrow. And put this loaf of bread in your breadbox.”
“I thank you kindly. Terence is a damn lucky son of a sea cook.”
Kathy laughed again and said, “I’ll bob in tomorrow and see if there’s anything I can do. It’s sewing circle tonight, and it’s cleared off so nice. I wish Van felt better.”
“She will, tomorrow.” He went out with Kathy.
Yes, she will, thought Vanessa. Tomorrow the aspirin. And I’ll be doing Barry the biggest favor anyone did him. For the rest of his life he’ll be the brave, sensitive man who waited hand and foot on a nutty wife.
Outside, men’s voices called back and forth across the dooryard. “Some pretty out now, ain’t it?”
“Ayeh, but it’ll come off to blow like a man, wait and see.”
Barry didn’t come back in. Comfortably insulated from all pain, her past and her future cut off so that she was weightless, she thought of the morning; smiled; and slept.