John Casey - Spartina

“You got a long ways to go till forty,” Dick said. “What are you — more than ten years younger than me?” He looked at the picture. “I remember you at that age there. You came down to the boatyard to tell me you were sorry my father died.”

“I remember that,” Elsie said. “It still makes me blush. I remember all the men in the yard staring at me, but by then you’d seen me, so I couldn’t turn back. I’d thought I’d be … I thought because I was doing a good thing I’d be invisible and it wouldn’t matter. I was just wearing my bathing suit. Sally wouldn’t come, but, then, she knew men stared at her, and I still didn’t quite believe they noticed me.… Well, I did sort of.…”

Dick said, “It was nice of you. No one else in your family ever said anything to me about my father. I appreciated it.”

“Well, our whole family was falling apart that summer.”

Dick nodded. “I remember all you Buttricks kind of disappeared for a while. But I saw you around some.”

“I was going to the Perryville School. I stayed on as a boarder for two years. We’d sometimes go sailing. The school had two boats in the yard where you worked — do you remember those two pond boats? All the kids were scared of you.… You were a famous grouch.”

“You were scared of me, were you?”

“Not me. But you were grouchy.”

“I don’t remember being grouchy to you school kids.” Dick was embarrassed.

Elsie laughed and said, “ ‘ School kids. ’ Good God. I certainly didn’t think of myself as a school kid. What a blow that would have been. I mean, maybe crackerjack sailor, or star rebel. But school kid …”

Elsie went off with the soup bowls and came back with coffee.

“Tell me,” Elsie said. “What am I now? I mean, there I was then, little Elsie Buttrick, school kid. Now what? One of the Buttrick girls, not the pretty one. And maybe one of the Buttricks who had the nice house on the point. Or maybe—’Officer Buttrick,’ as you sometimes say with a certain sneer. Or maybe I’m just one of the rich-kid crowd?” Elsie laughed. “I remember in college teaching myself to say tom ay to instead of tom ah to so the lefties wouldn’t hate me.” Elsie looked up. “So — is it A, B, C? None of the above? All of the above?”

He shook his head.

“Oh, come on. You can if you dare — where’s your nerve?”

Dick took a while. “I’m not so concerned about what you think of my nerve that I’d go ahead and make you feel bad.”

“Ooo. Well.” Elsie sat up. “Schoolgirl gets taken down a peg.”

“No,” Dick said. “You pushed yourself into that one.”

“In fencing that’s called a stop thrust. You just hold your blade out there when the other guy jumps in, and there she is with a new button.”

“You do fencing?”

“I did.”

“I guess there’s nothing you don’t do.”

“Just about.”

“Except let other people get a word in—”

“Oh, for God’s sakes! No one’s stopping you! But I guess that’s an answer in a way. What I think of as just my way of babbling engagingly, you think is obnoxious pushing.”

“Yup.”

Elsie said, “ ‘Yup.’ ‘Nope.’ Now I’ve made you go all swamp-Yankee.” Elsie smiled at him, started to say something else, didn’t, left her mouth open.

It made Dick laugh.

“Well,” Elsie said, “good. Now that we’ve got that all cleared up. Do you want a peach?”

Dick said yes.

Elsie went to get them, kept talking. “What I meant to get to somehow … I’ll just skip right to it. I had an eerie feeling not long ago. It was about Miss Perry. I’m devoted to Miss Perry. I admire Miss Perry. What she’s like is one of those eccentric eighteenth-century English vicars who knew everything about the place they lived. Crops, flora and fauna, local geology, social facts, everything.

“Miss Perry is pretty eighteenth-century in her formality too. You know how she’s known Captain Texeira for ages, how she adores him? She still writes him little notes saying, ‘May I call on you next Sunday?’ She only sees him once a month. And you know how much she likes you, but she only sees you on your kids’ birthdays. It’s all so crystallized it might as well be in a glass case. And there’s her one hour a week at the library reading aloud for children’s hour. She likes that. But I remember asking her about her other good works, which she’s not so fond of. She said she asked her father the same question when she was young and he said, ‘Life is a series of minor duties, most of them unpleasant.’ She said she was horrified at the time. I told her I was horrified now.

“Anyway, what happened was this. I started giving my ecology talks in the school, the ones Charlie and Tom came to. And I moved in here. One of the first days I was here, I came in, and I was just stopped cold — it was as if the house was haunted.… I thought, So this is what it feels like to be Miss Perry.” Elsie put the peaches down on the table, her fingers lingering on them. “It wasn’t so much a thought as a sensation. I felt her spirit, no, not her spirit. I felt the form of her life. I felt as though that form, that formal form, was hovering and it might suddenly crystallize the rest of my life.”

Dick was startled. It wasn’t the same thought he had yesterday, but it floated nearby.

Elsie said, “Of course it’s ridiculous, there are so many ways Miss Perry and I are … not just different but miles apart. But at the time the feeling was absolutely terrifying. It went away fairly quickly, though my reaction to it didn’t. I mean, every so often I find myself underlining differences between Miss Perry and me.” Elsie laughed. “Which probably sounds pretty silly.” Elsie leaned over her plate and chomped down on her peach.

Dick said, “I was thinking the other day … something like that. One thing I was thinking is how my father was, how he left me things I didn’t even know about. For one thing, how hard it is not to be so …”

“Yes?”

“Not to be so goddamn gloomy.”

“That does seem to be the local problem,” Elsie said. “At least Miss Perry concentrates her melancholy all into one spell. That’s sort of formal too, every year at the same time. I can’t tell when I’m going to feel melancholy. It used to be whenever I went by our old house. Or smelled a certain smell, a sea-breeze-through-a-damp wooden-house smell … I used to blame everything on that house, on that one summer. That summer was the sun of my solar system. Now I don’t know, I’m more in outer space.… That was seventeen years ago. What were you doing seventeen years ago?”

Dick said, “That year. I remember that year. I got married in January, Charlie was born, my father died.”

“But Charlie’s birthday’s in June,” Elsie said.

“Yup.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to …”

“And I left the Coast Guard, went to work at the boatyard,” Dick said. “Don’t worry about it. Charlie came out nine pounds, so it was hard to call him premature with a straight face. I remember May’s mother giving it a try.”

Elsie laughed, then looked to see if it was okay.

Dick said, “And I built our house. May stayed with her parents in Wakefield while I was finishing it. I’d get off work at the yard, drive over, and keep going till after dark. Eddie Wormsley and me. Sometimes another couple of guys from the yard. That was just before Eddie’s wife left him. He knew she was going, so he wasn’t too cheerful.”

Elsie said, “Ah. So it wasn’t just my family. It was a bad year for all of you. Almost enough to make you believe in astrology.”