MEALIE MARSH PLANTED HER rump in one of the rickety lawn chairs with badly woven plastic straps that they’d picked up for two bucks at last year’s Bass River Baptist Church bazaar.
This Saturday morning, she and Flossy had set them out along the shoreline of Cobequid Bay below the cliffs at Spencer’s Point. The tide had turned, offering a good hour of fishing. Mealie didn’t fish but Flossy knew she’d always jump at the chance to come out early to sketch.
This part of the shoreline was crammed with boulders pushed back against ledges of sandstone close to the cliffs but nearer the water’s edge, smooth stretches of hard-packed sand wove red swathes among the blue-pebbled beach. Mealie rocked her substantial frame from side to side, squeezing the aluminum struts solidly into the sand. Once in place, she withdrew a sketchpad and her battered wooden box of charcoal and pencils from the canvas bag she always toted around with her.
The bottom of the bag, an unappetizing coffee-pot brown, was the kind of thing Mealie’d never notice, though a delicate lilac line, which she’d just pointed out at the water’s edge on the far side of the bay, could fascinate her for hours. She gazed at it with singular unselfconsciousness, her lips parted and soft with the pleasure colour always gave to her.
Mealie didn’t just see colour in the refracted light of her coffee cup that danced on Flossy’s kitchen wall; colour was her language. She studied it: in the sky, fields, water and trees, the shadows on houses, in hair, on skin and in eyes. Flossy thought that Mealie probably perceived colour with far more intensity than all the rest of them and she had a primordial passion for red. Her earliest memory, she’d once confided, was of a pair of red fuzzy socks, a gift from distant relatives, that she refused to take off. Her mother’d had to peel them from her in the middle of the night as she slept. Flossy thought Mealie’s relationship with red might have been her most enduring. Whenever she dressed for a gala opening, there would always be a flash of red somewhere, at her neck, dangling from ears, across her shoulders or on her feet, sometimes all together.
Flossy reached for a Thermos by her chair, twisted the top and poured them each a cup of coffee. Mealie turned in her direction to speak; their eyes met.
“Hmn?” Flossy leaned towards her.
“Sleep?” Mealie enunciated carefully. When she was tired, Flossy didn’t hear as well.
“Not so much,” she shrugged.
On a morning as foggy as this, the barns, fields and forests normally discernible along the bay’s far shore from Noel to Maitland were no more than a blueberry wash above that pure lilac line. The pinky waters appeared lighter than the aluminum cloud mass loitering above.
“It’s manic-depressive,” Mealie muttered. Raising her voice so Flossy could hear, “it’s bipolar, the bay,” lifting an eyebrow and pointing with her chin. “Don’t you think?”
Flossy nodded. She watched as Mealie nosed the various pieces of charcoal and pencils around the wooden box that she’d set on a small tripod between them, nudging the cool blues and sober purples towards her and pushing the party colours out of the way. It was that kind of day.
The ends of Mealie’s fingers and thumbs were always brownish-black, as was the length of her little finger, which she used to smudge charcoal. As a result, there were often hieroglyphs at intervals beneath her eyes, on her chin or along her nose that Flossy did her best to tidy up; the acrylic on her eyelid and hair would have to wear itself off. Mealie kept a cloth with her to clean her hands but seldom took the time to get it out of the bag. Now mattered, mattered most. There had always been a characteristic urgency about her sketching, a need to snatch what she saw. That was, no doubt, why they still had her teaching the Life Studies classes at the Truro Teachers College at seventy-six. And she was young at heart; no one could ever guess Mealie’s age.
If Flossy ever wanted to get somewhere on time with her, though, she generally avoided the early morning or late afternoon because Mealie couldn’t resist a warm cast of light. Invariably you’d be stopped in her van on the side of the road while she disappeared into a ditch to sketch a milkweed pod she’d noticed or the mist hovering above an inlet. Though they were both a good age by now, Mealie was surprisingly agile. Flossy had to give her that. Never one to apologize for a delay — Mealie didn’t allow for regret — she simply expressed gratitude, fully expecting a compact of enthusiasm.
“Thanks, Pet, had to get a closer look there. They’re all fugitive this time o’ day — light, colour,” she’d say. Like so many things they’d known in their lives, beauty didn’t hold. It wouldn’t be there on the way back and you couldn’t always take the time to wipe your fingers in the right place.
The two friends seldom made it to Spencer’s Point together anymore, though they both loved this sheltered spot and clucked endlessly about coming more often. It was far enough from the highway that most of the sounds of people coming and going about their Saturday chores vanished to the roll of surf, seagulls and Aida, which played softly on the cassette recorder by Mealie’s leg. She was quite sure the fish were drawn to all Verdi’s operas, but Aida in particular.
“Like herding goats,” Mealie said, picking up the end of a conversation they’d been having in Falstaff on the way over. “Remember the time Jimmy found Gauguin on the cab of his pickup and couldn’t get him down?” She cackled and slapped her thigh. It made Flossy smile too. Her knuckle went to her nose. Jimmy was parked right in her driveway and was more than a bit wary of that surly old goat who stood his ground and stamped his front foot in warning when her brother tried to shoo him down. She was relieved that Mealie had given the goat to the Clarkes down in Economy who already had a couple of their own. On a damp day, with winds coming off the bay, she was sure she could still smell that musty old billy from two doors away.
Mealie was talking about her students, naturally, from the summer school session at the college “You can see it in the first week, Flo, maybe the first day,” she said. “They either have it or they’re wasting their time.” She took another sip from her cup, “And mine.” After introducing herself on the first day of classes, it was Mealie’s custom to place a fat-bellied eggplant on her desk for the students to sketch.
She raised her hand and flourished it like a sword above her head. “Essence, essence,” she hissed, as if her Life Studies students were standing right in front of her now, ankle deep in Cobequid waters. “Most of them couldn’t capture essence if it tripped over their easels and fell plump as an ostrich into their laps.” She shook her head. “They’re so dreadfully careful.” Some of Mealie’s charges wanted to be thought of as artists. These, she claimed, were the hardest to get at and the ones who had to make every wee stroke count. Mealie was happy if a stroke in a hundred caught precisely what she saw or maybe something better.
“If I wanted an eggplant,” she’d say to them, her voice sounding every bit like the county grader rumbling down the Station Road as she slapped the vegetable’s purple-black paunch, “I’d put this on the kitchen table. What more can you see? Flog it!”
Flossy knew what Mealie was doing this morning. She wasn’t so preoccupied by her students. In fact, by times she could seem indifferent to their success or failure. It didn’t mean she wouldn’t work hard with them, wasn’t encouraging or duly sympathetic about truant children or unsupportive spouses. No, Mealie above all was convinced that a real student didn’t even need a teacher; in fact, most teachers would hold them back, and the rest were without a doubt putting in time. This morning’s dismay over students was all for Flossy’s benefit. Mealie was working the row ahead of her, double-digging and softening the soil so that Flossy might come up behind and find the ease to talk about what had been so much on her mind over the last few weeks.
If only it were so simple.
Mealie wanted her cavalry to charge, seize something, an angle, a line, a spirit, anything. She always said you had to know how to waste to be an artist. Take a cleaver to the work, toss and begin again. Some just didn’t have it in them. “Move on, move on,” she’d marshal her pupils, twenty pairs of eyes gazing at a model shifting in her seat every minute, “don’t finish.”
Flossy longed to do just that. She wanted nothing more than to grasp this private moment and tell Mealie about Richard, whom she expected to walk through the door any day now. She was sure Marjory hadn’t told him. The very thought of it made her weak. With the first Elizabeth Bishop Society meeting next Saturday and Richard among the organizers, it was all but certain he’d drive up from the Valley to make sure the arrangements were in order at the Legion Hall, maybe even today. Flossy imagined him wandering in, as he always did when he was in the village, with Marjory and Ruth right there.
“Hello Richard, you remember Marjory. Oh, and here’s your daughter.” She closed her eyes; she thought she could feel the blood rushing through her arteries. It would serve Marjory Trotter right. Flossy should have got after her years ago but she much preferred to stay on good terms with both of them while ignoring the little problem of Ruth. Now, the little problem was a grown-up problem that had arrived on her doorstep. Mealie never had too much to say about Marjory Trotter but she didn’t make a point of staying around when she was in town either, not like Richard’s visits. All she’d say was, “How do ya suppose, on a planet as big as this one, those two ever found each other?”
Flossy had a pretty good idea. They were young, had gone to university together and were paired up on dates because they were the only two not already paired up with someone else. (For some reason, she thought of all those poems Elizabeth Bishop had written and left unfinished over the years. All of them awaiting their final couplet.) As graduation approached, the weddings tumbled along and all the couplets were swept up in a torrent of love all around. They too made plans for the future. Who, after all, really wanted to be free and twenty-three? Flossy’d never observed much spark between them but in those days of chaste expectation perhaps everyone expected passion to ignite sometime after the wedding. They had only lived together long enough to realize it wouldn’t, and, most ironically, for her to become pregnant. Richard, Marjory was to discover, and of course confide in Flossy, was homosexual. Back then, Marjory confessed she hardly knew what it meant.
So many things didn’t matter anymore, but Flossy’s friendship with Richard did. What if she were to go suddenly like Lavinia Gamble, sitting up in her armchair with half a glass of apple juice in one hand, Jeopardy on the television, and all of this came out after she was gone, no opportunity to give her side? Poor Lavinia hadn’t even spilled the juice. What would Richard think? And Mealie? Would even a good soul like Mealie Marsh try to find some generous light in which to see this, see keeping Richard’s daughter a secret from him all these years? If anybody could see beyond what was seeable, it was Mealie.
It had always been one of her finest qualities that she thought so differently from everyone else. Flossy counted on it. Among her students, Mealie adored the lean wolves that drifted into her classes, kept their heads low, watched and circled hard for three months, drew like demons, then vanished. They weren’t mewling for marks. She knew they’d be turning up in the galleries in a decade or two, she said, if they didn’t starve first. Not, sadly, her usual students who arrived punctually, brought muffins, attended every class, laboured for accuracy and scratched out nice pictures. (The only thing they did well, she’d cackle, was pay their tuition.) In fact, the older Mealie got, the more she said she wondered if art, seeing actually, could ever be taught, perhaps a small measure of technique early on, pointing out true north, but the ones who had it, had it long before they’d stepped over the threshold of her classroom. As for watching, she said you either did or you didn’t.
But Mealie was forever calling Flossy’s attention to things: colour, shadow, pattern, shape, tone, emotion. She could teach you what to look for in something beautiful to appreciate it even better. Looking out across the water again, she could see that Mealie was right about the bay. It was manic-depressive, something she’d perhaps felt more than thought. Nor was this the first time Mealie’s observations had lent her own feelings words. When the day was fine out here at the shore — Van Gogh sky reflecting off the water, sun shining, dancing diamonds on the surface — it was painfully spectacular, harsh to the naked eye. And when it wasn’t, like today with a fog brooding over it, this was the saddest, most godforsaken beautiful place she knew.
And Flossy had to admit she preferred this melancholy palette. It was, in all things, richer. You couldn’t see to the back of green on a day like this; blue was anchored on each horizon with flecks of purple; olive clods of fresh-ploughed earth sported lilac highlights and red could crawl inside you like blind obsession. She breathed deeply of the morning’s salty air. Every colour she knew had deeper saturation, energy, in the half-light of this gathering note of sadness. It made her look up close, attend, made her grateful to be alive. On the sunny, glowing days, she more easily forgot such gratitude.
The women had settled themselves near a channel gouged into the floor of the bay. This was Flossy’s preferred fishing spot. The channels weren’t visible from shore and if you weren’t from these parts you’d hardly believe they were there. Great fissures, carved like a river deep into the basin’s floor, allowed the tide a stealthy return to encircle sandbars then suddenly flood the entire bay. The bottom of this one was a good fifteen feet below where they were seated. It would wander another half mile east, running an oxbow to the land before hooking north to collect the flow of the Great Village River as it emptied into the bay. All along the edges of those channels and for twenty feet on either side lay a dangerous bed of gumbo that you could sink into up to your knees. Muck, Marjory and Richard muck.
“Mealie,” Flossy began, “did you ever get yourself into something that was messier than you imagined, then not know how to get yourself out?”
Scratching her wrist, Mealie thought for a moment. “Well, I guess that pretty much sums up two marriages gone south, Pet.”Her wry look met Flossy’s eye, waiting for the elaboration and when it didn’t come she went back to her sketching. Flossy watched her hand dodge across the page.
That eye. Thomas might have noticed it first from the few pictures and sketches Mealie brought home early on. She had an eye for sadness, he’d said, though never to Mealie directly. He wouldn’t have wanted her to take it badly. Flossy was sure Mealie already knew this about herself. In fact, she’d have laughed. At the several shows of her work over the years in Halifax at the Northgrave Gallery, Mealie said there’d always been one, at least one, kind older woman in a white blazer standing patiently at a little distance with a purse clutched between tummy and bosom to first apologize then ask if perhaps she’d ever painted any happy pictures.
The American tourists that arrived by the busload at the gallery run by the Cobequid Arts Collective rarely chose Mealie’s abstracts. They preferred pictures of lighthouses with lupines or colourful fishing boats at Peggy’s Cove, keepsakes of their trip to Canada. Nevertheless, if there was but one soul among five buses of tourists who liked her brooding lines, Mealie was amazed to discover the buyer paying any price she asked. Initially it puzzled her. Then she claimed it gave her insight into the depth of sadness among the well-heeled. “The poor, at least, still have their illusions to keep them warm.”
Flossy watched the swallows sweep low, tilt and roll after flies along a wide ribbon of water in the bottom of the channel, agile brown stars tumbling over white, snatching a dragonfly and darting away. Drifts of sandpipers fluttered in, dropped and scurried along the water’s retreating edge, plucking grains of sand from the wet land or creatures too small to be seen, indifferent to everything including the tide drawing them away from the women with each gentle lap. They both stopped to watch. The birds were catching breakfast, a layover on their annual migration from the Arctic to wintering grounds in Argentina. Flossy loved such creatures of the edge, pitiful knock-kneed runners with the courage every minute to chase alongside the vast and dangerous unknown for pickings of grain and grace.
The Bishop’s Pipers, she thought, remembering Elizabeth Bishop. She told Mealie about the Bishop’s cousin’s cows. Mealie listened attentively, her wholesome wide face looking particularly happy this morning.
Flossy decided to try again. “But did you ever do something for one person, a kind of favour, that ended up hurting another you never intended?”
Mealie leaned back and kicked off her sandals. She pushed her heels into the sand.
“I’m sure I have, Flo. You know better than most how I can shoot from the lip before thinking where it’ll land.”
Flossy looked away. Normally it was peaceful out here, comfortingly predictable. The place she came to settle her mind. The fog and clouds would burn off by noon on such a day. Here, sitting near the water, the rhythmic breathing of the ocean in and out, like some primal parent they could lean against, the women could be still. For well on two decades now, this shoreline had been a good place for Flossy and Mealie.
Today, though, was different. Fumbling with her fishing hook, Flossy held some pieces of squid at arm’s length. “Mealie …?” As with old friends, she didn’t need to finish every thought.
Placing the charcoal pencil against her stomach, Mealie leaned out over the sketchpad laid across her knees and sewed the squid onto Flossy’s hook.
“You’re losing your nerve, Flo. Fish can sense these things,” she said, as softly as Mealie’s voice ever got.
“Why is it I can’t even impale a piece of dead squid anymore?”
Mealie walked to the edge of the water and rinsed her fingers as her friend cast the line. A clean whir above their heads ended in a delicate plop precisely into the water in the centre of the channel. Flossy stood to draw in the slack.
She wore her fishing attire today, a navy dress and a grey sweater buttoned at the neck, which differed from her everyday clothing only in the straw hat and black rubber boots that reached almost to her knees and drubbed against her calves when she walked across the sand. Mealie, curly hair tufting out beneath a baseball cap, was in beige capris, with a charcoal smudge down her thigh, a blue and white checkered shirt and blue flip-flop sandals. The two had been here since seven.
Usually these mornings by the bay brought relief from the summer heat, but this month with the unrelentingly high temperatures there was little more than a moist warm stillness as if the air were stalled above them. From the look of it, she might have expected rain, but Flossy had a feeling they wouldn’t be getting any anytime soon. It was plain muggy. She longed for a good wet old Maritime day.
When they first began coming to Spencer’s Point after Flossy had retired from teaching and Mealie could find a free morning from her art classes, the two would drive down here, already dressed in their bathing suits, for an early swim in the bay, one as big as the other was tiny. The locals took to calling them the Big and Little Dippers and they served both as weathervane and considerable entertainment to those living along the bay within sight of Spencer’s Point.
“It’s here, Vickie.”
“What’s that?”
“Winter. The Dippers ain’t going in today,” Russel Corbett, Jr., from behind his new birthday binoculars, would announce to his wife standing over the stove stirring Red River Cereal. It, indeed, marked a finale of sorts, or a beginning — time to light the wood stove — when the women stopped swimming in the fall. It was not the literal change of season, of sun crossing equator, but an end to the draw-you-out days, when it was so much more pleasant to be outdoors than in.
In those times, the Dippers could stand a brief swim in the cold Cobequid waters up until the end of September and start up again for Queen Victoria’s birthday in late May. In more recent years they gave up swimming altogether, declaring the frigid Fundy waters an assault to the aging central nervous system.
First thing this morning, Flossy had placed her fishing rod outside the back door. When Mealie dropped by with scones and a basket of freshly picked tomatoes she noticed the rod and the can of squid beside it. She wouldn’t have been expecting a fishing excursion, particularly when there were guests in from Ontario, but Mealie had learned long ago that when Flossy put that rod out you either joined her or got right out of the way. Mealie dropped the food on the kitchen table and hiked home to gather her bag and sketch pad. Flossy picked her up in Falstaff.
“I’m too old to be putting things off,” she said as they sneaked off like teenagers who’d just crawled out of an upstairs window. Neither of them was much interested in the fish she might catch as Jimmy kept both of them well supplied from his weir. But fishing wasn’t always about fish.
Mealie was good about hanging around, waiting for Flossy to find the words to render sense to her worries and even patient when she couldn’t. She didn’t get bothered about many things these days, but when Flossy did she really did. Not like Thomas, of course, whose fears and imaginings from an upstairs bedroom could keep him awake all night and the rest of them skittering to protect him from any whiff of genuine bad news.
In spite of her best efforts, this visit from the Trotters was proving resistant even to Mealie’s ministrations. She’d told Flossy the kid should be staying at her own place; that they wouldn’t find her for three weeks among the flora and fauna taking over the kitchen. Mealie scraped her back from side to side against the chair’s plastic straps.
“Here,” Flossy said. Mealie leaned towards her and Flossy scratched between the shoulder blades.
“A little to the left, lower. Oh, right there. Right there,” she straightened up again, a gap-toothed smile stretching across her wide face. “That’s much better. Thanks Flo,” she said. “I think that’s just about the only thing I miss about my last husband,” she chuckled as her hand arced along the sketchpad. “Company got in okay, then?”
“Oh yes.” Flossy answered quickly then slumped into silence. Sitting a little farther back in her chair, Mealie waited. Flossy was well able to talk a good spontaneous hour about psychological realism in Shakespeare, Hopkins cadences echoed in Bishop or Woolf’s detachment from plot, but when it came to articulating the contours of her own fine feeling, dipping a finger into the warm wax of her heart, she was at a perfect loss.
“And?” Mealie prodded gently.
“Well,” she tended to swallow her first step when laying out bad news, “the youngster shaved her head just before they left. She doesn’t want to be here and hasn’t spoken a word to her mother since they arrived, maybe since Ontario.”
“Pluck,” Mealie chuckled, stopped sketching and picked up her coffee.
“Pluck,” Flossy agreed, rolling her eyes. “Mealie?”
“Un-huh?”
“Do you suppose if I were to live up on one of those poles like the Polish saints, you’d be able to send me a book now and again?”
“Take your fishing rod; we’ll cook up something.” She looked over at Flossy, “They weren’t Poles, Flo, they were saints on poles. The Stylites.”
“What if you toss and turn a lot in your sleep?” Flossy asked.
“They’d be on a bit of a platform, I’d think,” she said, frowning. “Be too hard on the arse to sit on a pole all the time, even for a saint.”
“You must be right.” They both returned to their pursuits. Flossy cast her line again, then worked it back in. She hadn’t caught anything. Two healthy, fat sneezes from Mealie reminded her of Marjory’s cold.
“Oh, they’ve brought us some Ontario bugs, too.”
“The spattered-on-the-bumper kind, or the sick-in-bed kind?”
“Very sick-in-bed.”
Mealie shook her head. “Some people just don’t know when to stay home.” She turned the page and looked through her wooden box for something. When she didn’t find it, she withdrew a purple and a blue and began shading one on top of the other. She was aiming for that line. Flossy looked across the bay.
“Mealie, do you remember Bubba from school? Bubba McKeen?”
She looked across at her. “I remember the McKeens,” she said, reaching for the Thermos, “I haven’t thought of Bubba in years.” She offered Flossy more, filling her cup, then her own. Cradling the mug with two hands she rested each elbow on an arm of the chair. “Frizzy hair, slight …?” Flossy nodded. Mealie was five years behind the rest of them, but with only two rooms in the Great Village schoolhouse, they’d all shared the same class at one time or another. For a moment Flossy thought it funny that they both still imagined Bubba as a skinny twelve year old, though she had to be well into her eighties too. It was the betrayal of age: though they were all more or less developing what Mealie liked to call ‘a case of the dwindles,’ they didn’t feel a day over thirty inside their heads.
“Jimmy bumped into her this week.”
“Oh yeah? Wasn’t she the one raised by her grandparents?”
Flossy knew she’d remember. No one from around those parts with any memory was likely to forget. The McKeens were an early Scrabble Hill family. Bubba’s father was a sea captain, when sailing was still a thriving industry on both sides of the bay, just about the time Flossy’s own parents married. On one of his trips to Boston, Bubba’s father met a woman he brought back to Great Village to marry.
Not so long after, the newlyweds were helping out at a barn-raising bee. This was when Mrs. McKeen was carrying Bubba, their first child. Just when the barn’s structural timbers were in place and everyone sat down to dinner, a single beam slipped, came down and struck Bubba’s father on the back of the neck, killing him instantly.
Her mother collapsed, took to her bed and went into early labour, giving birth to little Bubba at the home of her in-laws, who were preparing to bury their son. No doubt the McKeens had their reasons, but they removed the child and told Bubba’s mother that her baby hadn’t survived either. When she recovered enough to travel, she was encouraged to return to her own people in Boston, broken-hearted and twice bereaved. Bubba grew up in Great Village knowing her grandparents as her mother and father. It took a lot of collusion to keep such a big secret in a small place where everybody’s business is everybody else’s. The secret was kept for many years but somehow Bubba found out and it wasn’t the grandparents who told her.
“She never spoke to me after she found out,” Flossy said.
“You were her friend.”
Flossy nodded.
Leaning back in her chair, Mealie looked off towards the far side of the bay. Flossy put the fishing rod down. How many times had they come out here in all the years they’d been friends? How often had they taken a cup of tea of an evening and sat watching the shifting summer sky over this same bay from the back porch of the O’Reilly homestead when Flossy lived there, the same land, the same barns along the far shore, the same fields, cliffs, water, moon, sun, stars and there was always something out here they hadn’t noticed before, some new way of looking at it all. Mealie might point out a blush of colour creeping across the mudflats or the evening sunlight painting the marsh greens golden, something neither of them had seen before or seen in just that way.
“It’d be awfully hard to know,” Mealie finally spoke, “which would be the greater kindness: to tell her or keep it from her, Flo.”
“But how do you know, Mealie? How’s anybody supposed to know?”
“Can’t,” she shook her head. “Some things you just gotta trust your best instincts,” she sipped her coffee, “then trust how they turn out.”
There were only brief moments in a lifetime, Flossy was convinced, when people genuinely opened their hearts to each other,got anywhere behind the fortifications. And they were holy flashes, though she’d never seen them happen in a church. Mealie had made every effort to tease out her tatted worry and if there was ever a breach into which Flossy could take a small step today, knowing compassion’s long reach would be there, it was here and now, with Mealie Marsh, her dearest friend. But Flossy could not; she just could not bring herself to.
Was she like Jimmy that way? Here she sat quietly beside Mealie Marsh, her oldest, most accepting and forgiving friend, fully determined to talk about everything but what was bleeding her concentration. It was her own unfinished poem, her elusive couplet. Flossy just could not bring herself to bare her soul, did not have the words.