Twenty-five
At first, Mary decided not to think about it. She decided to tightly fold up the facts in her head again and again. Mary could do that. Mary could lock away parts of her mind, of her heart. Mary could hide things.
But sometimes she’d lie in bed and stare up at her ceiling and listen to Diane laughing with Barry in the bedroom across the hall. And she’d let her mind unfurl itself, the inconceivable future spread out for her examination.
It was summer. The Water’s Edge had paying guests. And Diane was in love. Or seemed to be. She was dressing nicely. She was dabbing drops of perfume behind her ears. She was pulling the loosening skin of her face taut and looking in the mirror.
Mary was out of school and spent her time helping her mother around the motel. Or, more often, not. More often, she’d walk down long stretches of beach, past where the tourists sat, with their umbrellas and coolers and distended flesh. She’d walk to the point where the beach became a state park that no one went to, where the dunes were roped off to protect the nesting sites of tiny shore birds that rushed the sand as the waves retreated and hurried back to the grass when they advanced. Mary would sit and watch them, holding still enough that they stopped avoiding her, that they didn’t widen their berth as they went back to the safety of the blades. Mary would sit and watch them until they no longer realized she was there.
Once, without thinking, Mary grabbed one. Her hand moving independently of her mind, she took the little bird. Bringing her nose near its beak, she looked into its black eyes, which didn’t register terror, as she might have expected them to. At first, the bird held still, then its legs bicycled around, and it let out a peep. “You have to be careful,” she said. Then she set it gently back onto the sand, and with a fury of flutters, it was gone. “Now you have a good story,” she said, over her shoulder.
She felt different; she knew she did. But it wasn’t in any way she might have expected. She wasn’t retching into the toilet in the morning. She wasn’t suddenly craving pickles. Instead, she was simply hungry. Hungry and so tired that she’d fall asleep on the sand, her limbs angled out around her, her black hair hot from the sun.
“Were you at the beach all day?” Diane would ask, inspecting the red hue to her skin, the bloom of tiny freckles on her nose.
“Yeah,” Mary would reply, letting her bag drop on the floor. “I went for a walk.”
Diane would stop and square her hand to her hip. “Well, I needed some help getting the rooms cleaned up for check-in!”
Mary would roll her eyes. She’d walk right past Diane.
“Don’t you think I’d like to spend my days at the beach?” And Mary would start down the hallway to her room. “You really are a piece of work, Mary Catherine Chase!” Diane would call after her. Adding, when she heard Mary’s door shut, “What would your grandfather think, huh?”
If Mary knew that she was pregnant, it was an abstract understanding. She wasn’t panicked. Not really. The boy was coming back. He’d told her so. He’d return in the fall just as the winds changed and the earth was leached of green. He’d sail over the sapphire sea in his white boat. He’d come right to her. They’d whisper their plans, and she’d leave that night, her black hair waving in a sky as dark as pitch.
The day Mr. Pool had a huge catch of albacore at the trenches off the coast, Alice called over to the Water’s Edge. Mary was lying in bed, pressing her hands into her belly, feeling the taut roundness that was forming there, pushing it from side to side, up and down. As if she could prove that it wasn’t part of her. That it was something alien. Diane appeared in her doorway, her arms crossed in front of her. One of Mary’s hands casually flattened against the plane of her belly; the other slid toward the book that lay beside her. But Diane hadn’t noticed anything. Diane was looking at Mary’s face.
“You have any plans tonight?” she asked. It was early evening, and she had her hair in rollers. Mary assumed that Barry was coming over, as he often did to spend time with Diane. She couldn’t leave the Water’s Edge, not really. Not in the summer.
Mary didn’t look up. “No,” she said, her knees angled up, her back against her pillow.
“No friends you want to see? Allison hasn’t come over in a while.”
“She’s babysitting for the O’Nearys,” Mary said, though she hadn’t spoken with Allison in months. She turned to angle her back toward Diane, her open book in her hands.
“Well, Mrs. Pool just called,” Diane finally said. “She said Stan got a bunch of tuna and the charter group he was with didn’t want it. She’s putting it up tonight. Wanted to know if we wanted some.”
“Do we?”
“You like tuna,” responded Diane. “I like tuna.”
Mary remained silent.
“It’s probably going to take Alice all night to get that fish canned. I’m sure she’d love some help.”
Mary carefully folded down the corner of her page, running her finger along the crease. She knew that Diane was worried about her, was wondering why her teenage daughter slept all day and went for walks alone, why she didn’t see her friends. Why she seemed to be putting on weight. “Okay,” Mary said. She liked helping Mrs. Pool in her pale-blue kitchen. She liked the amicable silence. “I’ll go over.” And the relief on Diane’s face was undisguised.
The processing was already underway by the time Mary arrived. She stepped into the warm humid kitchen, letting the screen door clatter shut behind her. Mrs. Pool was hunched over the white stove, the coil burner below the pressure canner glowing red. On the small kitchen table lined with newspapers were mountains of pink flesh, slick and shiny, and the fan overhead cast its whirling shadow around the room.
Mary stepped up beside Mrs. Pool. Without saying a word, she rested her hand on Mary’s back and smiled.
“Mom said you needed some help.”
“More like some company,” she said. It was the great tragedy of Alice Pool’s life that she could never have children and the great grace of Diane’s, for it was the childlessness of the Pool household that created a void the Chase girls helped to fill.
“What should I do?”
Alice tilted her head toward the piles of fish behind them. “You can get it into jars. Get it ready.” In a box on the floor were clean mason jars. On the table, a small cutting board and a knife.
Mary pulled out the chair and sat down. “Are you going to can all of it?”
“I think so,” said Mrs. Pool, as she peered down at the gauge on her cooker.
“How full should I make them?”
“You can pack it right up to the bottom thread,” Mrs. Pool replied. “Just get it into chunks first.”
Mary took one of the large hunks of meat. It was still cool and smelled only of seawater. Then she brought her knife against it, and with an elegant stroke, the meat was severed in half. Mary didn’t mind this kind of work. When she was younger, she used to go out with Mr. Pool on the boat, and he’d taught her to run a blade along a fish’s spine, to remove all the bones and innards with a few deft slices.
They worked for more than an hour before either of them uttered a word. If Mary appreciated one thing about Alice Pool, it was her ability to stay quiet. When Mary was alone with Diane, Diane was on a constant quest for information. How is math going? Is Angie Barclay’s mother feeling better? Have you seen Kathy lately? Ann? Laura? But Alice Pool didn’t ask questions. Alice Pool just quietly hummed.
When she finally did speak, it was a statement. “Stan says that the Japs eat fish raw.” Her voice was distant and light, as if lifting to meet a passing thought. “They don’t even cook it first.”
“Why?” asked Mary.
“Beats me,” said Mrs. Pool. “They’ve got some funny ideas.”
And with Mrs. Pool’s back to her, Mary made a clean slice of fish and plucked it up with her fingertips. She brought it close to her face and turned it from one side to the other for inspection. Then she passed it through her lips whole and let it fill her mouth. She bit down and felt its cool, firm resistance. As she watched Mrs. Pool—the soft roundness of her shoulders, the dromedary droop of her neck—Mary felt the lovely slow-release pleasure of hiding something.
“Didn’t Mr. Pool used to live over there?” Mary finally asked. Mary knew the answer but wanted to hear it again all the same. Though no one was aware of it, Mary had looked through Mr. Pool’s photo albums, seen the picture of him in his sand-colored uniform, read the bundle of yellowed letters written by his parents, and by a young, besotted Alice.
“Mmm-hmm,” replied Mrs. Pool. “After the war. He was stationed in Okinawa.”
Mary had found Japan on a map, run her finger along the crescent nation. “I want to go there,” she said. “Someday.”
Without looking up, Mrs. Pool chuckled.
Mary and Mrs. Pool canned more than a hundred pounds of tuna that evening, enough to line the pantry shelves with a winter’s worth of fish.
And after the last batch had been put into the pot, after Mary gathered up the wet piles of newsprint and brought them to the metal garbage can in the shed, she walked back to the kitchen and let the screen door again clatter shut behind her. She watched Mrs. Pool for a moment. “I guess I’ll go,” she said.
Mrs. Pool turned around and stepped toward Mary, pulling her into a hug. And perhaps it was the weariness from the hours of canning that made Mary forget. Or perhaps it was that Mrs. Pool’s embrace came so naturally, without the shifting, cautious hesitation that had started to precede all of Diane’s. But when Mrs. Pool rested her hand on Mary’s back, when she gently pulled Mary’s body into her own, that round hardness that had formed so insistently in her belly made its presence known—an orb between them. And before Mary could react, before she could sliver away, Alice Pool gave a small but certain gasp, then pulled back. With her hands on Mary’s shoulders, Alice’s frightened eyes probed Mary’s.
“Well,” said Mary, her face registering neither acknowledgment nor guilt. “I better get home.” And she pushed out the door into the night. Mary didn’t look back as she walked across the scrubby grass to the Water’s Edge, but if she had, she would have seen Mrs. Pool standing on the brick walk watching her, her apron still on, moths circling the bright beam of the floodlight above.
Glancing briefly through the glass of the door to the Water’s Edge office, Mary saw Diane and Barry sitting on the couch, white containers of Chinese takeout in front of them. The television was on, and Diane’s foot was under the coffee table, rubbing Barry’s ankle.
The bell of the door clanged when Mary pushed it open.
Diane straightened up, nudging Barry, whose eyes had been fixed on the television. “Hi, honey!” she said. “How’d it go with Alice?”
Mary assessed the spread of food in front of them. She was hungry. She was always hungry now. “Good. We’re finished.”
Diane clucked in amazement. “That’s great. Right, Bare?”
Barry nodded. “Yeah, nice job,” he muttered, before turning back to the television.
“Okay, well,” said Mary, with a stony calm. “Good night.”
“Night, hon!” called Diane.
And that night, as Mary walked back to her room, she knew it was all just a matter of time. That, really, it always was. Because, though Alice Pool had no children of her own, she would know the meaning of what she had felt in Mary’s stomach. She had felt it before. She had been the first one to know about Diane, too.