Anna Noyes: Goodnight, Beautiful Women

I was homesick every day. But I didn’t want to go back home, to the bathroom mirror covered in toothpaste splatter and the woods behind the house full of camouflaged traps and bleached bones, and the middle-of-the-night infomercials — the “Set It and Forget It” chicken rotisserie and the knife that cut through a can like it was butter.

I stole Nicorette from Dad’s bedroom and let Mandy pop four pieces into her mouth, thinking she was chewing regular gum. It made her throw up.

Why do I do what I do? When I was little I’d wake up in the night and pee in the wicker wastebasket in the living room. I did this for months. The house was thick with the smell, and Dad blamed it on the dog. I knew he was thinking of getting rid of our dog, and I did it again, and he got rid of her. I really don’t know why, I just did it because.

I began calling my dad at bedtime and begging him to come for me. When he finally came, Mandy and I could hear his truck’s muffler from a mile away. The cats sprung from their chairs to hide under the bed. I met him in the dark drive with my garbage bag of clothes. Grace had kept my clothes neatly stacked in Mandy’s dresser, smelling of ocean mist detergent.

I scrubbed the dishes piled high in Dad’s sink, but rings still stained the coffee mugs, and the pot always held the black outline of rice grains where the rice had burned. When I called Mandy, Grace answered. “This is too hard,” she said. “We love you, but you know it’s been too hard.” I hung up and went over to my cousin’s and did whippits until my lips were numb.

All I can remember of the poem I slipped under Mandy’s locker door is that it started “If there is a thing called love” and talked about her being like my sister. Mandy never wrote me back, but she wasn’t mean about it.

Instead of school, I snaked the sink drain, wiped the black fur off the top of the ceiling-fan blades, cleaned the boathouse of old bait, and hosed down the cement where blood from field dressing deer had stained. I liked the sound of dirt sucking into the vacuum. I found pills stashed in a Folgers can beneath Dad’s bed, and a rusted tackle box full of hooks, and with them another picture of Mom. She had her back to the camera, but I knew it was her from her long hair, as thick and wavy as a pelt. I tucked the picture into my pillowcase so I could feel its scalloped edge on my cheek.

It turned out Drill Kane was looking for a helper. My dad warned me about Drill — said as a teenager he stole lobsters from another man’s trap, and when they’d fished together Drill hadn’t tied the bait barrels down snug, and choppy waves sent them sliding overboard. He had my dad’s type of weatherworn face but was fifteen years younger, with blond curls that got him picked on.

At the wharf Drill looked me over, circling, squeezing my biceps. He was shorter than me but he strutted like a bantam. The numbers 207 were tattooed across his throat, and I touched the area code with my fingertips. “That hurt?” I asked, but he just swallowed against my fingers. Drill dressed me in his old oil gear and it fit fine, but his boots and gloves made me look six years old.

“You’ll do,” Drill said. He bought me a new pair of boots that were still too big, so if I got caught on a trap it would drag the boot underwater instead of me. She was a beauty, Drill bragged, twenty-eight feet long, fiberglass, a John Deere engine he put in himself. Her name was the Theresa, after Drill’s scabby-faced ex-girlfriend, but these days she’s called the Kimberly Rose.

Being home with Kimmy now, I miss mornings alone on the bow most of all, when the wind wasn’t stirred up yet, and light was just coming soft over the islands. I miss feeling the flex of new muscles that I didn’t know I had, and the ache in my arms from hauling traps, and in my legs from bracing for balance on the slick deck. It felt good to be starved by the time we were done setting traps, feeling quick and light, and after that first day the boat’s smell didn’t bother me at all. It was with me all night, no matter how clean I got. Salt. In my dreams I’d bait traps and drop traps and empty traps and stack them.

We couldn’t talk over the sound of the engine, or when we did we yelled ourselves hoarse. In Alma Harbor I pointed to the trees that hid Grace and Mandy’s house and shouted, “I lived there,” and Drill shouted, “Only summer people live there.” It felt like trespassing, checking traps in their harbor, but I was unrecognizable in Drill’s gear.

I remember a lobster with no claws, wriggling like a snake beneath the others in the trap. Drill called it a pistol, said it shot its arms off to get free or because it got scared. He passed it to me, but I spooked when I held it, flung it overboard.

A lobsterman drowned, and for his funeral we joined a chain of boats that circled the harbor, our bow crashing up and down against the wake of the boat speeding in front of us. The Theresa was small against the others. Drill pushed her to the highest gear, the engine clunking and huffing blue exhaust. When we docked, it was so strange to be still again. My stomach pitched. I staggered up the dock ramp and puked. Drill said, “Little wimp,” and we got in his truck and he pulled my head down into his lap and patted my hair until the feeling passed, his hand rough and noisy and warm against my ear.

One day out deep the engine quit. We drifted, and Drill refused to radio for help and burned his hand tinkering with the motor. Streaked with grease and swearing, he stripped his oil gear and jumped in. I jumped in too. He swam out too far for me to join him, and I waited for him in the water, a pure, cold pain that I couldn’t get used to. When he swam back I wrapped my arms around his neck. “Doesn’t it feel like I don’t weigh a thing?” I said, and he said, “Feels like I’m holding nothing at all,” and we bobbed together, numb, breathing.

That was the difference between them: Drill looked at me like he’d known me forever, and Dad looked at me like I was a stranger sneaking through the room.

Back then I didn’t think too much about the times Dad touched me, except in a magical way, in which I thought the reason why my body grew so curvy so early was because of his hands. Everyone could see, like he’d watered me and I was a plant that grew overnight. But I didn’t hate him.

The tree stump didn’t kill my dad right away, just tossed him through the windshield and left him bleeding inside. He crashed on the shortcut road out of Treelaw, and no one passed by for too long, and his lung collapsed. The hospital called me in the middle of the night. I put my hand on his chest. He had tubes in his nose and his lips were dry and he kept licking them. I held my hand over his heart. I didn’t hate him.

Winter was a tarped boat and the windows dark by three thirty. I let Drill’s home absorb me into its own private smells and shadows and comfort. I painted buoys and mended traps and knit pockets for bait out of twine. Winter turned the skin at the nape of Drill’s neck pink and raw. He shaved his blond curls. “You be the pretty one,” he said. His scalp was covered in old scars that shined when the light hit them.

In our fridge there was just clam bellies and a jug of skim milk for Coffee Brandy. I bought a bag of oatmeal heavy as a baby so I could make hot breakfast and found brown specks crawling in it and picked them out for one bowl’s worth, swallowing without looking at my spoon. I stayed in bed for days, fingering cigarette burns in the sheets, my muscles turning soft. My period skipped, and then it skipped again. Sometimes I lifted Drill’s pet snake from its cage and it coiled on his pillow like black rope. Instead of sleeping I watched its slow blinking.