John Casey - Spartina

“You told me to tell you.”

“Well, once you brought it up …” She paused and looked baffled. She said, “You did bring it up.”

Dick saw it coming now. He couldn’t think fast enough how to fend it off.

“In fact,” Elsie said. “Well, shit. That’s just mean. We aren’t … I don’t see how you could think of …”

Dick said, “I said we weren’t like Parker and Marie.”

“You said you hoped we weren’t like Parker and Marie.”

“What I said was — I wouldn’t want to say we’re like Parker and Marie.”

“That’s worse,” Elsie said.

Dick said, “What I meant was …” He shook his head.

“What do you mean?” Elsie said. “What could you possibly mean?”

“All I meant was, it got to me.”

She said, “ ‘It got to me, it got to me’—what does that mean? It means you think we’re just one more possum-snout fuck.”

He shook his head, but she didn’t see him. She hugged her knees to her and lay her forehead on them.

“No,” Dick said. He stood watching her for a few seconds. In the silence he heard noises from the yard, the tractor throttle going up a notch, the ringing of an end of chain. As if he was falling into her mind, he sensed a close darkness, and then, fresh and bare as a pulled-up root, her wish. It was so close to his senses it was as if he plunged his face into it. He felt the sting of her feelings like the smell of a root drilling up his nostrils. She wanted her child — and what she was going to do about having her child — to come out of what was good in her, and she wasn’t sure what that was. Everything in her could go either way. For all her quick nerve, she still wasn’t sure she’d absorbed enough good from doing a job, from living here, from wanting to be rooted in this heap of hills, rockbound ponds, scrub woods creased with streams running down to the salt marsh. All this tag end of a glacier: half tumbledown and useless disorder, half a fertile accident for ingenious, stubborn little forms of life accommodating to the old wreck and spill of rock, on and on to the way it was now, still half a disaster, half a wonder. Here it was again tumbled down and flooded, and here they all were, plants and animals, at it again in the old accident.

It seemed to him he caught this picture from her, and along with it her wish to be formed by it, her wish to be complete by aligning herself with invisible forces, even though she only half-believed in their coherence, and only half-believed they could apply to her.

But her wish was so strong he felt it, and felt her buried half-belief too, like his own in its distrust of people and in its hope for the rightness of the natural world. He kept on sliding into her sense of things until it seemed for an instant they were swimming together, coming up for air in the flat-rock pond by her house, coming up together by the overhanging rhododendron, their coming up setting floating green leaves bobbing around them — instead of facing each other askew on board Spartina in sight of the boatyard, within hearing of the tractor, the squeak of a long nail being pulled out of hard wood, the tractor chain ringing again as it went slack and fell.

B ut there they were, two bodies in the sun, what they’d left of the food sitting on warm waxed paper.

Elsie sat up straight.

Dick said, “Elsie …”

“Yes.” She came up snappish.

Dick said, “Forget all that about Parker and Marie. It didn’t get to me on account of us. At least what we have is an honest mistake.”

Elsie laughed. She said, “So that’s what it is. Great, that’s great.” She laughed again, hard enough to annoy him.

Dick set his mouth shut. She’d had her feelings hurt and now she was going to stab at him a couple of times, until she cheered herself up. He didn’t mean to put up much of a fight. He was still considering his discovery that the better part of energy and power in Elsie’s life didn’t come from being a rich kid. It came from ordinary life. When he put it like that it sounded so simple it sounded dumb. She wouldn’t be pleased to hear it, at least not in the mood she was in now.

Elsie said, “You can’t just say forget it.”

“I’m sorry you took it wrong.”

“I’m not so sure I did. Maybe you’re thinking about my sneaky ulterior motive. But maybe you’re worried that you had some creepy little thrill. Maybe what you saw in Parker was something you hadn’t admitted to yourself, some little element of class rage. Don’t lose your nerve — go ahead and admit it.”

“You’re on the wrong track, Elsie.”

“No, I’m not. I’ll tell you one thing you couldn’t have built this boat without.”

“I know. Without that money you got for me.”

“No, something more important than that. You wouldn’t have got this boat built unless you were furious. Hours and hours — no, years of class rage. You shouldn’t have named her Spartina , you should have named her Class Rage. ”

Dick felt himself twist with that. He got up, turned away from her, and held on to the wire of the lifeline. It was too thin to grab hold of hard enough. He said, “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t know about this boat.” He felt the thin piece of truth in what she said, the sharp little wrongness of it. He’d been a son of a bitch, he’d been bitter and hollow and stupid, but not about Spartina. Spartina had come through him untouched.

He said, “What’s this class-rage shit? When I think of the dead-beat rich around here, these assholes with their toy boats, I think of them one by one.” He saw that wasn’t a very good answer, so he said, “And what I think of them — or you — is nothing to do with my boat. Nothing! You want to call something class rage, call your kid class rage.”

Before he felt the harm of what he’d said, even before he felt astonishment, he felt the air go dead between Elsie and him, as though she’d stopped transmitting or receiving.

He turned around but didn’t look at her. He said, “Aw shit, Elsie, I don’t mean that. You pissed me off.”

“I know,” Elsie said. He looked at her. She wasn’t mad. She looked at him calmly. She said, “I meant to get you mad. I shouldn’t have.… It’s a dumb thing to do. Of course I got back a little more than I bargained for.” She waved what he’d said away with the back of her hand. She sat comfortably, her weight and energy all within her again, balanced. She said, “Sometimes when I’m impatient for what’s next, I either make jokes or start a fight. I used to think it was pretty neat of me, it showed I was a live wire. I guess what it is is a way of being intimate and heartless at the same time. Where were we? I mean before …”

Dick said, “Slow down.”

“That’s true too,” Elsie said. “I sometimes think if I slow down or stop I’ll get caught, I’ll be seen, I’ll be visible some way I don’t want to be. What’s odd is I’m perfectly willing to be seen being bad … well, bad in some clever little way. But I’m secretive about being good. I mean, there is a part of me that’s just a plain dull good girl.”

“Is that right?” Dick said. “Just a dull good girl — no more to it than that?”

“Of course there’s more to it than that,” she said agreeably.

“Then don’t exaggerate,” Dick said. “Don’t swing back and forth so hard.”

“Okay, chief. Whatever you say.”

She was now as tucked in as a tern on the water, rising and falling with the waves that pillowed her.