Elizabeth Gilbert - Stern Men

CALCOOLEY made the arrangements for Ruth Thomas to visit her mother in Concord. He made the arrangements and then called Ruth and told her to be on her porch, with her bags packed, at six o’clock the next morning. She agreed, but just before six o’clock that morning, she changed her mind. She had a short moment of panic, and she bolted. She didn’t go far. She left her bags on the porch of her father’s house and ran next door to Mrs. Pommeroy.

Ruth guessed that Mrs. Pommeroy would be up and guessed that she might get breakfast out of the visit. Indeed, Mrs. Pommeroy was up. But she wasn’t alone and she wasn’t making breakfast. She was painting her kitchen. Her two older sisters, Kitty and Gloria, were helping her. All three were wearing black garbage bags to protect their clothes, their heads and arms pushed through the plastic. It was immediately obvious to Ruth that the three women had been up all night. When Ruth stepped into the house, the women lunged toward her at the same time, crushing her between them and leaving paint marks all over her.

“Ruth!” they shouted. “Ruthie!”

“It’s six o’clock in the morning!” Ruth said. “Look at you!”

“Painting!” Kitty shouted. “We’re painting!”

Kitty swiped at Ruth with a paintbrush, streaking more paint across Ruth’s shirt, then dropped to her knees, laughing. Kitty was drunk. Kitty was, in fact, a drunk. (“Her grandmother was the same kind of person,” Senator Simon had once told Ruth. “Always lifting the gas caps off old Model Ts and sniffing the fumes. Staggered around this island in a daze her whole life.”) Gloria helped her sister to stand. Kitty put her hand over her mouth, delicately, to stop laughing, then put her hands to her head, in a ladylike motion, to fix her hair.

All three Pommeroy sisters had magnificent hair, which they wore piled on their heads in the same fashion that had made Mrs. Pommeroy such a famous beauty. Mrs. Pommeroy’s hair grew more silvery every year. It had silvered to the point that, when she turned her head in the sunlight, she gleamed like a swimming trout. Kitty and Gloria had the same gorgeous hair, but they weren’t as attractive as Mrs. Pommeroy. Gloria had a heavy, unhappy face, and Kitty had a damaged face; there was a burn scar on one cheek, thick as a callus, from an explosion at a canning factory many years earlier.

Gloria, the oldest, had never married. Kitty, the next one, was off-and-on married to Ruth’s father’s brother, Ruth’s reckless Uncle Len Thomas. Kitty and Len had no children. Mrs. Pommeroy was the only one of the Pommeroy sisters to have children, that huge batch of sons: Webster and Conway and Fagan and so on and so on. By now, 1976, the boys were grown. Four had left the island, having found lives elsewhere on the planet, but Webster, Timothy, and Robin were still at home. They lived in their old bedrooms in the huge house next to Ruth and her father. Webster, of course, had no job. But Timothy and Robin worked on boats, as sternmen. The Pommeroy boys only found temporary work, on other people’s boats. They had no boats of their own, no real means of livelihood. All signs pointed to Timothy and Robin being hired hands forever. That morning, both were already out fishing; they’d been gone since before daylight.

“What are you doing today, Ruthie?” Gloria asked. “What are you doing up so early?”

“Hiding from somebody.”

“Stay, Ruthie!” said Mrs. Pommeroy. “You can stay and watch us!”

“Watch out for you is more like it,” Ruth said, pointing to the paint on her shirt. Kitty dropped to her knees again at this joke, laughing and laughing. Kitty always took jokes hard, as if she’d been kicked by them. Gloria waited for Kitty to stop laughing and again helped her to stand. Kitty sighed and touched her hair.

Every object in Mrs. Pommeroy’s kitchen was piled on the kitchen table or hidden beneath sheets. The kitchen chairs were in the living room, tossed on the sofa, out of the way. Ruth got a chair and sat in the middle of the kitchen while the three Pommeroy sisters resumed painting. Mrs. Pommeroy was painting windowsills with a small brush. Gloria was painting a wall with a roller. Kitty was scraping old paint off another wall in absurd, drunken lunges.

“When did you decide to paint your kitchen?” Ruth asked.

“Last night,” Mrs. Pommeroy said.

“Isn’t this a disgusting color, Ruthie?” Kitty asked.

“It’s pretty awful.”

Mrs. Pommeroy stepped back from her windowsill and looked at her work. “It is awful,” she admitted, not unhappily.

“Is that buoy paint?” Ruth guessed. “Are you painting your kitchen with buoy paint?”

“I’m afraid it is buoy paint, honey. Do you recognize the color?”

“I can’t believe it,” Ruth said, because she did recognize the color. Astonishingly, Mrs. Pommeroy was painting her kitchen the exact shade that her dead husband had used to paint his trap buoys-a powerful lime green that chewed at the eyes. Lobstermen always use garish colors on their pot buoys to help them spot the traps against the flat blue of the sea, in any kind of weather. It was thick industrial paint, wholly unsuited to the job at hand.

“Are you afraid of losing your kitchen in the fog?” Ruth asked.

Kitty hit her knees laughing. Gloria frowned and said, “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Kitty. Get a-hold of yourself.” She pulled Kitty up.

Kitty touched her hair and said, “If I had to live in a kitchen this color, I’d vomit all over the place.”

“Are you allowed to use buoy paint indoors?” Ruth asked. “Aren’t you supposed to use indoor paint for indoor painting? Is it going to give you cancer or something?”

“I don’t know,” Mrs. Pommeroy said. “I found all these cans of paint in the toolshed last night, and I thought to myself, better not to waste it! And it reminds me of my husband. When Kitty and Gloria came over for dinner, we started giggling, and the next thing I knew, we were painting the kitchen. What do you think?”

“Honestly?” Ruth asked.

“Never mind,” Mrs. Pommeroy said. “I like it.”

“If I had to live in this kitchen, I’d vomit so much, my head would fall off,” Kitty announced.

“Watch it, Kitty,” Gloria said. “You might have to live in this kitchen soon enough.”

“I will fucking not! ”

“Kitty is welcome to stay in this house anytime,” Mrs. Pommeroy said. “You know that, Kitty. You know that, too, Gloria.”

“You’re so mean, Gloria,” said Kitty. “You’re so fucking mean.”

Gloria kept painting her wall, her mouth set, her roller layering clean, even strokes of color.

Ruth asked, “Is Uncle Len throwing you out of your house again, Kitty?”

“Yes,” Gloria said, quietly.

“No!” Kitty said. “No, he’s not throwing me out of the house, Gloria! You’re so fucking mean, Gloria!”

“He says he’ll throw her out of the house if she doesn’t stop drinking,” Gloria said, in the same quiet tone.

“So why doesn’t he stop fucking drinking?” Kitty demanded. “Len tells me I have to stop drinking, but nobody drinks as much as he does.”

“Kitty’s welcome to move in with me,” Mrs. Pommeroy said.

“Why does he still get to be fucking drinking every fucking day?” Kitty shouted.

“Well,” Ruth said, “because he’s a nasty old alcoholic.”

“He’s a prick,” Gloria said.