John Casey - Spartina

“I was covering my chest. I was embarrassed when I first got bosoms. No bosom was okay. And real bosoms would have been okay … weird but okay. My sister and mother and Mrs. Bigelow all walked around as though they were normal. That was the summer I was thirteen.”

“I guess. You still called me Mr. Pierce. I went into the Coast Guard right after, I don’t think I saw you again until you were sixteen. That summer with you and your baseball hat was the last time we farmed Sawtooth Point. We picked a hundred and thirty bushels of sweet corn an acre. Your father came out one evening when I was in the field, offered me a ten-dollar bill to pull the poison ivy out of the raspberry bushes. I said sure, I’d get around to it. But then it turned out Mrs. Bigelow, who was the one put him up to it, she had in mind I was to do it right then. Because you were all going to have raspberries for dessert that night. She was nearby, just hanging back on the lane by your tennis court. So when she heard me say I’d get around to it, she came up to coax me. I didn’t mind being a part-time farmer for my old man on top of working at the boatyard, but I wasn’t keen on becoming Mrs. Bigelow’s gardener. I didn’t say anything for a bit. I wanted to be obliging, but I didn’t want her to get in the habit.… I still hadn’t said anything when she reached into your father’s pants pocket, pulled out a five-dollar bill and slipped it into my shirt pocket. She said, ‘To insure promptness’—and she made that little sound, you know, sort of a little two-note laugh she used to put on the end of everything—”

“Yes — actually it had three notes, it was a little rising trill. We used to call it Aggie’s hemi-demi-semiquavers.”

Dick laughed at that.

Elsie said, “Could you tell she was fucking my father?”

Dick didn’t know where he was.

Elsie went on, “I didn’t know she was, not then. I didn’t find out until I was sixteen. The year you came back. We’d all been on Sawtooth Point together ever since your father sold us the two house lots. Our two families built the tennis court together — that is, we got Eddie to, but Dad and Timmy Bigelow were out there, Mom too. Aggie didn’t do outside work, but she made lemonade. And the blue canoe. The blue canoe belonged to all of us. My sister found out first, then the Bigelows’ son, then me. Then my mother. She says that wasn’t the only reason they got divorced. Timmy — Mr. Bigelow — didn’t find out for years and years. Just last spring. Some burglars thought their house was an empty summer house and broke in, discovered Timmy and Aggie. They tied them up. They broke open a box they thought was Aggie’s jewelry box. It was old love notes from my father. The notes were lying there at Timmy and Aggie’s feet after the burglars left. They, I mean Timmy and Aggie, had to lie there together for hours. Nobody came until morning. They lay in front of all those strewn billets doux .… The burglars opened them. I guess they were looking for bonds or something. Timmy could read them — well, of course he knew the handwriting, but he could read some of the lines … fond and apparently graphic letters.” Elsie laughed. A little venom in it. She said “Oh, Aggie … ‘Lay not your treasures up on earth where thieves break in.…’ You know, if Timmy wasn’t so sweet the whole thing would make me laugh. If he’d been the kind of man who could have laughed at her, just laughed in her face … Because it’s so pathetic. Now she’s an old hag. She’s got something wrong with her, I mean, she’s sick with something and completely dependent on Timmy. But I’m afraid he was just hurt, lying there facing this secret that was ripped open in front of them.”

Although Elsie was being kind enough about old Mr. Bigelow, there was a bitter triumph in her voice when she talked about Mrs. Bigelow that Dick found repellent but fascinating. When Elsie broke in on his story, he’d been irritated, then stunned by her story. He still felt irritated, maybe because Elsie was putting his story in its place, just a complaint from the handyman, pretty much of a nothing story really, nothing like the inside story. And yet he was thrilled, in fact a little turned on by her malice.

Elsie said, “You know, I remember Aggie’s jewelry boxes. They were covered with some kind of silk quilting. When Sally and I were little, she used to take us up to her room and fix our hair. I had long hair then. She’d take out her bracelets and let us try them on. And sometimes she’d put makeup on our faces — it felt wonderful — she had cool, light hands. I used to close my eyes and wish it would go on forever.… I used to wonder — I mean afterward — where she and Dad did it. Now I wonder where she kept that box of secrets. And did she take them out and read them late at night? Maybe it didn’t matter about not having Dad, maybe all she needed was a secret. And at last it’s been ripped open.”

Dick said, “Does that happen a lot in the big-house set — some guy running off with someone else’s wife?”

“Oh, they didn’t run off. After it came out — except to Timmy — Dad just split. It wasn’t ‘Women and children first.’ It was ‘Every man for himself.’ Maybe that got to Aggie, that she was more hung up on him than he was on her. She got her hooks into him because he was weak and she lost him because he was weak. So she got what she deserved. Except for Timmy. She doesn’t deserve Timmy. I really adored Timmy when I was little. He’s too nice, though. I never wanted a boyfriend like him.”

“I wish you could have just heard yourself. There wasn’t anyone in that story you didn’t scalp. And Aggie—”

“I can say anything I want about Aggie. You know why I started working for Natural Resources? I mean, I believe in saving nature … but part of why I started is that I get to be in the same sphere as Aggie — her favorite place in the world is this part of South County. She’s one of the four grown-ups who discovered it. Anyway, I get to be here too, but in the job I do, I’m her opposite. She’s an idle, feminine, scientifically ignorant, snobbish, physical coward. I’m a hard-working, tomboyish, scientifically educated, socially declassed jock with enough nerve to go out in rough weather in a small boat.” Elsie paused. Dick was about to take her down a notch by bringing up how pale around the gills she’d been on account of the sharks, when Elsie looked up at him and said, “Otherwise I’m exactly the same kind of bitch Aggie is.”

Dick knew she meant it, but he didn’t know which way she meant to go with it. Away from him? Toward him? Maybe it was just one of her solo aerial maneuvers, one of her swoops to see how fast she could go.

He said, “Well, neither one of us is about to get a good-conduct ribbon.”

“I wasn’t thinking of good conduct. I was thinking of my bad character. My secret, outlaw nature. You’ll end up with good conduct again. Won’t you?”

Dick didn’t say anything for a moment. Then he nodded and said, “Yup. I’m not running off anywheres.”

“You’ll go home. That’s right. You should go home. I wouldn’t want you anywhere else. Safe and sound. And I’ll be here, locking up the big bad secret.”

Dick wasn’t sure if she was stinging him or stinging herself. He said, “Well. You want me to go now?”

“Oh, for God’s sakes!” She made an exasperated humming noise. “You know, sometimes you’re … For God’s sakes, where’s your sense of …”

“Of what?” Dick said. “Direction?”

She was revving too fast to think he was funny. “Where’s your sense of … play, your sense of timing, your …” Elsie took a breath and said, “Your sense of me!”