John Casey - Compass Rose

“That’ll be fine. I know the way now.”

Elsie hesitated. Did May have a misgiving after all? She took a breath and said, “You really liked the play? Parts of it seemed odd to me. Maybe I was nervous.”

“We were all nervous for Rose. But then it seemed she was born to do that sort of thing. Tom and I are going again tonight.”

“But not Dick?”

“Dick and Charlie wanted to, but they took Spartina out this morning. Dick got one of his feelings. Or could be he heard something from Captain Teixeira. He didn’t say, but then he never does. Took his harpoon, so he has swordfish in mind.”

Elsie managed to thank her for taking care of Rose’s costume. She thought of Dick on Spartina , all his thoughts at sea. She thought of Dick in this house with her. She wouldn’t kiss him by surprise this time, not like the time he was holding baby Rose. This time would have nothing to do with Rose, nothing to do with May. He’d be here and she wouldn’t go near him at first, she’d move around the room, bring him a cup of coffee and put it down without touching him. When he looked at her, she’d look back and smooth her skirt, smooth her skirt over her hip bones and wait for him to stand up.

She washed her face, went down to the pond, pulled off her knee-length T-shirt, and waded into the cold water up to her shoulders.

She was back inside and dressed when she heard Deirdre outside the door. Deirdre was flushed, her curly hair matted from her bike helmet. She was wearing a red uni-suit very like the one Elsie had in her closet.

“I should get a mountain bike,” Deirdre said. “Get off the main road. Route One is all traffic and guys slowing down and beeping.”

“Some of the back roads are smooth enough for your road bike.”

“You ride, right? Maybe you could show me. And maybe we could go canoeing. I hear you have an old canvas canoe. Or is that Rose’s? I don’t want to touch anything of hers or May’ll have another fit. Of course, what she’s really mad about is me and Charlie.”

“You look like you could use some water.”

“Oh, yeah,” Deirdre said. She unzipped her uni-suit six inches and fanned herself. They went in and Deirdre drank and drank.

Elsie said, “But Charlie knows that you and Walt … I mean …”

“But if Walt tells things to Tom, Tom can’t help repeating what he hears, especially if he thinks it’s funny. May and Charlie don’t think anything like that is funny. And they’re not exactly at ease with the idea of a liberated woman. Charlie only had one girlfriend before me. And he still feels guilty, like he marked her somehow. I told him I wasn’t ever in love with Walt, it was just a thing. Boy, was that a bad idea. Of course, I was probably in a catch-22. Bad if I was in love with Walt, just as bad if I wasn’t. Maybe worse. I don’t know. All I know is I have to be careful, and I don’t like having to be careful. Charlie read a little bit of this sci-fi thing I’ve written, and some of it’s pretty sexy, and he brooded. It didn’t take a mind reader. Had I done all that stuff? I was going to say it’s all made up, but that would have left him uneasy in another way, so I said it was stuff the women talked about around the campfire when I was running Women in the Wilderness trips. Which is a tiny bit true. And he said he found it hard to believe that women go into detail, and I said some women do, more than you know. And he said, ‘So you’re going to tell some woman about us?’ I said, ‘I just listen.’ Which made him laugh for the first time in a long while.”

Deirdre lay on her back on the floor and pulled her knees to her chin. She said, “No, thanks. But do you have a banana? Or some cranberry juice? Something with potassium.” She sat up, spread her legs, and lowered her chest between them. In a muffled voice she said, “You probably had some of the same problems with Dick.”

Elsie waited until Deirdre sat up. She said, “I’ll get you some cranberry juice.”

Deirdre said, “Oh, shit. I’m sorry. None of my business. I wasn’t fishing, I just thought you could maybe reassure me, like tell me that things just settle down by themselves.” Deirdre lay on her back and put her hands over her eyes. “I should remember I get high after I exercise. And you’re probably coming down after last night. That must have been something, your daughter up there … The thing is, I’m worried about Charlie out on that boat. After Charlie took off this morning I needed a good hard ride and someone to talk to.”

Elsie put the cranberry juice on the table by the window. Had she ever been like Deirdre? So at a boil about herself? She sat at the table and looked at Deirdre, who was doing some sort of breathing exercise. Had she ever told adventure stories about herself like Deirdre’s white-water story? With some nature mysticism thrown in? Yes. Had she ever told stories about her sex life? Yes — not part of her repertoire lately, but yes, she’d told Mary Scanlon about Johnny Bienvenue, and yes, in her red-dress days she’d said some things that counted as sexual swaggering.

Deirdre got up and sat across from her. She said, “Oh, thanks,” when she saw the cranberry juice, put one hand on her chest, and took a swallow. She leaned forward and looked Elsie in the face. “It’s not just that we look alike.”

“Oh?” Elsie leaned back in her chair. “I hadn’t really … And I’m a good bit older than you.”

“Maybe chronologically. Your biological age is what counts. We both keep in shape. But the reason we look sort of alike is we’re both free women. We’re not slaves of the glass city.”

“Walt said something about … He said Phoebe’s a slave of the glass city.”

“Yes. Good. So you know the story.”

“No, just what Walt mentioned.”

Deirdre nodded. “I’ll bring you the book. Are you into science fiction?”

“No,” Elsie said. “Unless you count Ovid’s Metamorphoses. ” She wasn’t sure why she threw that in. She said, “That was years ago, when I was doing Latin with Miss Perry.” She didn’t like the eager claim Deirdre was making, but she didn’t like herself as a snob.

Deirdre was unrebuffed. “I don’t know about Ovid. But sure. All that Greek stuff — sort of science fiction.”

“Ovid was a Roman.”

“I really want you to read it. It’ll make our getting to know each other go faster. You’ll see what I mean. It’s not just that we’re both outdoors people. We make our own rules. We’re like sisters.”

Penance, Elsie thought. It’s part of my penance to come face-to-face with this doppelgänger, this would-be doppelgänger.

Deirdre said, “And I know I could learn stuff from you that would help. I mean, it’s eerie that you hooked up with Dick, and here I am with Charlie. What I don’t get is how come May hates me and she seems sort of okay with you. You slept with her husband. I’m just sleeping with her son.”

Elsie sat up so fast her chair creaked.

Deirdre stood. She said, “I should put some water in this cranberry juice. I should be rehydrating.”

Elsie laughed. The woman was like a kid’s paddleball game. She smacked out a thought that got as far as somebody else, but then her attention reached the end of its elastic cord and bounced back to herself.

“What?” Deirdre said. “Is it because I’m so intense about nutrition? No, wait, I get it. I’m wired. I used to get like this when I’d been alone in my cabin, and I’d bike into the general store and I’d be way too on. It made some of the old codgers laugh, too.” When she got to the kitchen sink, she put her glass down. Her shoulders fell. She turned and said, “After a while they got to like me.”

“Oh, Deirdre,” Elsie said.