Lance Mannion

Stepping back from the literal

Most days it's like being outside
a glass telephone booth
in a strange town, the door
jammed shut and the phone
ripped out.  Then, that morning,
last September, for instance,
you and I take the canoe to the river
and push off, letting the current
carry us, dipping our paddles
only to hold off the banks overhung
with chokecherry, poison ivy,
wild highbush blueberry tangled
in swamp rose.  We steer off
a platoon of turtles sunning
on a half-sunken log, doughboys
keeping watch across a watery
no man's land---there it begins,
the stepping back from the literal...

---from Job Description by Brendan Galvin

Kathy looks for Robby...or Rob...or the D-Man...whoever

This scene from my story "Her Life" follows the last excerpt I posted and comes immediately before this one.

“What did you say the last name was?”  The girl at the hostess’ desk ran her finger down the list of reservations in her book.

“Doyle.”  Kathy couldn’t believe it.  How could this girl work at the same place as Robby and not know him?  How could you come so close to him every day and not be aware of him?

“He works here?”

“Yes.”

“We have a lot of people on the staff.  I don’t know half the guys on the grounds crew.”

“He works on the boats.”

“That’s why!  I never see those guys.”

She wasn’t all that pretty.  Kathy didn’t think so anyway.  Thin, with a long face and a long nose, perfect but rather large teeth.  The dress she had on was nothing special either, a tube of cotton held up by her tiny breasts.  Kathy had the better figure, better legs.  Her khaki shorts were from a catalog company girls like this bought all their clothes from and her yellow top with the spaghetti straps was pretty—you couldn’t really tell it came from Sears.  Like the girl she was braless.  But the girl carried herself with a confidence that made you feel as if she was beautiful, and her hair, which fell thick and straight to the middle of her back, was brindled six shades of brown and gold.  Kathy suspected that if any guys saw them together she’d be the one turned invisible.

“Here,” the girl said at last.  “Your reservation’s not until seven-thirty.”

Kathy resisted the urge to say, I can tell time.  “He was going to meet me here right after he got off work.”

“Oh.  Well.  You can wait for him in the bar, or you might want to try the dorm.”

“Thanks.”

If Robby had been in the restaurant, he’d have been waiting for her right there.  Kathy hurried through the French doors and walked with her head down straight on through the bar and out another set of French doors onto the terrace by the pool.  The yacht club owned a complex of buildings on Nantucket Sound.  The restaurant and bar, in a rambling old mansion with many cedar-shingled additions, room after room filled with table after table of tourist family after tourist family, were open to the public.  Down by the water, at the far edge of the manicured lawn that sloped away from the pool was the boathouse and a private dining room and pub for members.  Kathy drifted across the lawn a ways, then turned, went through a gate in the tall hedges, and found herself back in the parking lot, looking at her car—Robby’s car, the SUV he’d inherited from his parents when they’d traded up to a Land Rover and which he had loaned her for the day so she could drive up to Nauset with Kara and Charlie (A year in jail had made Stephen too sun-sensitive to go to the beach with them, thank God.)—and next to the car, but running toward her, was a beautiful young man with a goatee whom for one heartbeat she mistook for Robby.

He was one of the parking valets who had stopped her in the driveway on her way in.  Tall, broad-shouldered, in sky blue polo shirts with the yacht club’s insignia embroidered on the breast, they’d stood, one on either side of the car, and leaned in at the windows, demanding her keys, not as if offering to do her a service, but as if taking a toy from a careless child.  She asked the running valet where to find the dorm, but he blew by her before he could answer.  He turned around, however, and backpedaled up the driveway long enough to point, waving his finger in the direction of a long three-story building behind a line of trees at the edge of the property.  Then he faced himself uphill again and hustled off, as if parking cars was a competitive sport, which, for these guys, Kathy guessed, it probably was.

There was another not really beautiful but beautiful somehow anyway girl with golden hair sitting behind a counter in the front hall of the dorm.  This one did know Robby, although she corrected Kathy when she asked for his room number.  “Oh, you mean Rob.  Room 15, top of the stairs.”

The door to Room 15 opened on another goatee on another handsome face over another perfect body.  This body was naked except for a thin pair of gym shorts that were less modest than a fig leaf would have been.  The boy’s hair was wet and his skin glistened as if he’d just come from the shower.  He cradled a lacrosse stick, holding it across his chest like a soldier’s rifle, and, although there was absolutely no other resemblance, Kathy couldn’t help thinking of the guard outside the Wizard’s palace in the Emerald City.  Nobody gets to see the great Robby!  Not nobody!  Not no-how!

“The D-Man!” Robby’s roommate said after a pause, having responded at first to her asking for Robby with a quizzical frown.  “He’s still on the docks.”

“Oh?”

“You’re—“

“Kathy.”

“Kathy.  Right.  I almost said Kelly.  Where do you go to school again?”

“Harvard.”

The boy nodded.  “That’s right.  You want to wait for him?”  He made no move to get out of her way.

“No, thanks.”  She started off down the hall, but the boy called after her.  “When you find him?”

“Yeah?”

“Tell him to call his fucking father.”

“Is there something wrong?”

“Fuck if I know.  Guy’s just been calling like every fifteen minutes.”

She saw him, on the last boat tied up at the end of the pier, the low sun behind him, lashing something down.

“Robby?” she said, shading her eyes.

He straightened but did not look around at the sound of her voice.  Another Not-Robby.  This was getting depressing.

“Hello?” she said.  The boy came to the rail.  “Have you seen—“  She didn’t know how to ask for him.  “Rob, Robby Doyle?”

“Who?”

“The D-Man?”

“Van Gogh?”

Was she the only one in the world who called him by his right name?  “I guess.”

The boy pointed out across the harbor.  “He took his crayons and coloring books and went thataway.”

Last cup

Monomoy Coffee Company.  Ten minutes till closing.  Saturday night.  Last nighttime cup of coffee on Cape Cod till next summer.

Sharks, seals, foxes, pink jellyfish, and the occasional tarantula, concluded

To be revised with the addition of fiddler crabs.  Part one is below, here.

The ten-year old has declared this The Summer of Lighthouse Beach, because we spent more time  there this year than he remembers having done on other vacations.

I think of it as the summer of seals and invisible foxes.

The teenager is trying not to think of it as the summer of the pink jellyfish.

Something in my description in my post Tricksters in the night of the animal cry outside the window the other night struck a chord in fightingdem, who's a regular visitor to the Mannion Zoo and Wildlife Sanctuary and he wrote in wondering if what Uncle Merlin and I thought was a coyote might have been a fox instead.

I had been asleep about an hour one night when I heard this screaming sound outside my bedroom window. Thinking Cheney had been shooting someone in the face again and I had slept through the shotgun blast I looked out the window only to see my cat streaking up the steps of the deck. I went downstairs to let the cat in, but in the morning did a little search on google because I had been seeing foxes in the neighborhood for awhile. The links to the "cry" sound of the fox was dead on.

He sent along a link to a page of fox calls and cries.

Son of a gun.

Now I really wish I'd caught up with it or at least gotten close enough to see.  I've been on the lookout for foxes on the Cape for years, since I read any essay by my favorite Cape Cod writer, Robert Finch, just before the blonde and I came here for our honeymoon.

The essay's called "Foxes on the March."  It's included in Finch's collection, Common Ground.  In the essay he describes the doings of a family of foxes he met on a salt marsh up in Orleans in behind the dunes at Nauset Beach.  It happened that our bed and breakfast was right by Nauset so I spent a lot of time---well, as much time as a guy on his honeymoon wants or dares to spend away from his bride---wandering that marsh, on the lookout for those foxes and scenes like this one Finch saw:

Spread out on the new green of the marsh hay was an entire fox family, two adults and four pups, in full view.  The vixen and her pups were together on one side of the little tidal creek near the edge of hte marsh, while the father sat alone on the other side, watching them.  The female was colored like the male, reddish in front, shading to dark gray, nearly black, on her rear parts, with a long , thick, white-tipped tail.  The pups were all reddish-blond, like the one I had seen the morning before sitting by its den.  The mother lay on her side licking one of the pups all over, while a second stood nearby waiting its turn.  A few yards away, closer to us, the other pair wer play-fighting and rough-tumbling in the wet, glistening grass.

In all the years since I've met up with only one other fox besides the invisible one I tracked into the grumpy neighbor's driveway last week.  This one was in the parking lot behind a restaurant on a Sunday morning, and it wasn't doing anything cute or wild or particularly foxy.  It was eyeing a garbage can, just like any stray canine would.  A car pulling out of the lot chased it away.

One of the reasons we spent more time at Lighthouse Beach and avoided our other regular swimming hole at Oyster Pond this year is that on our first visit to the beach there the teenager was stung by a jellyfish.

It was a pink jellyfish, not to be confused with the Portuguese Man-of-War, which will drift up this way in warm weather and whose lazy intrusions have closed beaches along Nantucket Sound this year.  A Portuguese Man-of-War isn't a true jellyfish.  It isn't even an it.  It's a they.  They're a they.

According to Dorothy Sterling in The Outer Lands, an indispensible guide to the natural history of the Cape, the islands, and the Cape's geologic cousin, Long Island, a Portuguese Man-of-War is:

actually a complex colony of animals made up of sevaral different kinds of individuals.  Although it is often hard to tell where one individual ends and the other begins, some are responsible for capturing food, others for eating, and still others for defense and reproduction.

The Portuguese Man of War's "stinging cells contain the most powerful poison known in marine animals" but the sting of a pink jellyfish is not anything to sneeze at.

Oyster Pond has always been home to moon jellies.  Pink jellyfish, however, seem to come and go.  This is one of those years when they've come and brought their friends.

In cold northern waters, where they can stretch out and be themselves, pink jellyfish---which are also known as red jellyfish and Lion's Mane---can grow to be eight feet in diameter, their tentacles two hundred feet long.  Along the Cape, though, they don't get much bigger than a foot across, and in Oyster Pond they're small enough to fit in a Mason jar.

Still, you don't want even one of the tiny pond-dwelling ones to sting you, and the teenager warned us about them when he spotted a couple while we were swimming off the raft out in the pond.

The jellyfish got him as we were swimming back in towards the beach.

He said it felt like a half dozen bees had stung him up and down his forearm.  Fortunately, the lifeguards had some meat tenderizer in their first aid kit and that did the trick.  Within half an hour, the teenager was wading out into the shallows with his net and specimen jar, determined to exact some revenge.

I try not to let my imagination get ahead of things and start planning the boys' future careers for them.  I hope that their talents and inclinations and good sense will take them down paths to jobs that will make them happy and secure and encourage whatever interest or enthusiasm has captured them at the moment, figuring that one day one of these will be the one that marks them for its own.

But if he decides that's what he wants to do, the teenager will make a fine field biologist.  He has excellent vision and is a keen observer.  He remembers everything.  And he likes animals, all kinds, even the many-legged, creepier kind.  He is cautious but not afraid.  A couple summers ago we went up to the Audubon Sanctuary in Wellfleet for a presentation on lizards and reptiles featuring...lizards and reptiles, the latter being mostly snakes and turtles, including a snapping turtle of uncertain temper.

In addition to the snakes, turtles, iguanas, and company, the zoologist running the show had brought along a special, extra-species guest star.  He asked for a volunteer to come up and pet it and hold it.  Only one kid put up his hand.

No more fiddler crabs this year.  No more jellyfish, no more seals or coyotes, foxes, or ospreys.  We leave the Cape in the morning.

Regular, mostly animal-free blogging will resume Monday.

Time for one last night time coffee run.

Goodnight.

Kathy's ex-husband is out of jail and feeling thirsty

The scene that follows the previous installment of my short story, Her Life, is too long and talky to post here.  So I'm skipping ahead to the next scene.

All night long the bar in the low-ceilinged room upstairs at Coleman’s had been packed.  Finally, only a few minutes before last call, it was beginning to clear out.  Bone-weary, sad, hot, and irritable, Kathy leaned on the bar with her chin on her fists and stared across the room and out through the open terrace doors.  The umbrellaed tables outside were empty.  All except one.  And at that one sat three college girls celebrating one of their birthdays with a fourth round of Cajun martinis.  Kathy accused them of blocking the breeze.

“Margarita, babe.”

“Shit!”

“Look what the cat dragged in,” Kara brayed.  She stood behind Stephen, her arms around his shoulders, her breasts flattened against his back, and leered at her sister.  “Daiquiri for me.”  She got a kick out of having Kathy wait on her.  Kara must have dragged Stephen in here just to annoy her.  Stephen hated Coleman’s.  All the fish nets and plastic starfish, the tourist kids picking out lobsters they’d be too grossed out to eat from the tanks downstairs—That’s us, he liked to say, All us locals, we’re on the menu.  Fucking catch of the day’s what we are. Fucking lobsters in a pot.  No other reason to exist 'cept to make their vacations fun.  Worth a post card.  "Come see the colorful locals in their native habitat, fawning all over us for fucking minium wage."

“Don’t seem surprised to see me.”

“I’m not.”

“Figured I’d turn up, huh?”

“Yes.”

“Have a way of doing that, don’t I?”

“Doesn’t he look great?” Kara sat herself down on the stool next to Stephen, turned toward him, with her legs crossed and her chin cupped hin her hand and her elbow resting on her knee, so that she leaned forward, her tits practically spilling out her blouse.  She tucked her foot under his leg and rubbed it up and down along the back of his calf.  Catching Kathy’s glaring eye, she said, “I’m not going to share.”

Stephen said, “Could look at me, you know.  Been over a year.”

“I remember what you look like,” Kathy replied.

“Couldn’t get me out of your mind, that it?  Dreaming about me the whole time?  Orgasms waking you up at night, visions of my handsome face make you sit up screaming my name?”

“That was me,” Kara said.

“Good to see you again, Kath.”  He flashed his Aren’t I Devastating grin.  Usually it bought him no arguments.  Kathy said, “Wish I could say the same.”

“Oh man!  I’m hurt.  I’m truly hurt!”

“Kathy,” Kara said, “Our drinks.”

What could she do?  They were customers.  Customers said fetch, she fetched.

Sharks, seals, foxes, pink jellyfish, and the occasional tarantula

Revised.

One winter, just about 20 years ago, a storm surge sent a wave up and over the sandbar that had protected Lighthouse Beach from the open ocean.  When the wave receeded it drew itself backwards like a saw and made a cut in the sandbar.  It wasn't much, the shallowest of trenches, but it was enough.

Each succeeding wave sent water spilling down through the sandbar, digging the trench deeper and wider and it wasn't long before the bar was broken in half and then completely swamped and then sunk and then erased.   The headlands were now wide open to the sea, and the sea went to work.

The bottoms of three streets that had ended at the formerly placid backwater lagoon were carved away.  A half dozen homes were undermined, swamped, demolished, and carried off on the waves.

This happened in less than an instant of time measured in a geologic time.  In human time it took several months.  Slow as the process might have been tracked on a calender, it was inexorable.  There was nothing the people who owned the houses could do but watch their property being eaten by the sea.

Another big storm came along four years later and dredged the new channel deeper, opening up that stretch of land under the lighthouse even more nakedly to the ocean.

But when the Atlantic was finally done deconstructing it began to build.  What it built was beach.  (This is pure figure of speech.  Building beaches is also a form of unbuilding.  Sand that's dumped here has been torn away from somewhere else, and it's only here on a rest stop anyway.  Eventually---there are a more than a few millennia in that eventually, of course---everything that is now Cape Cod will be piled up against the southern New Jersey coast.)   A big, wide, gorgeous, sandy, post card picture of a beach.  But a changing beach.  The ocean won't leave it alone.

Every year we return to a rearrangement of shoreline.  I mentioned this year that the beach now has a curve it didn't have before.  It swings outward towards Portugal where it used to run parallel to the Iberian coast.    There's also a second point, this one closer in to the Lighthouse and an acre of shallows between it and the next jut.  Monday, the Mannions and Uncle Merlin walked out from the new, first point and out across those shallows, aiming at the high surf crashing on the far point where the boys intended to give their boogie boards a workout.

It's a good hike, and takes time, especially if you're stopping every dozen yards to swim.  By the time we were halfway between points a fog from Nantucket Sound had rounded around the elbow of the Cape and we walked into it.

Uncle Merlin decided that with the air suddenly so much cooler he'd be more comfortable if he just swam for it.  He's a powerful swimmer and with a few strokes had pulled himself out of sight, lost to us in the fog.  He wasn't worried about actually being lost.  But he began to hear a roaring that sounded to him like the two-cycle engine of a jet ski.  Then something broke up out of the water ahead of him.

The big, black head of a seal.

Then the breeze shifted, the fog shredded, and he saw that the water was full of big, black heads, and beyond them was a small island that was black with big, fat, tubular bodies, dozens of them.

Uncle Merlin decided it would be a good time to stop swimming.

We had caught up with him, by this time, and the five of us spent the better part of an hour alternately watching seals through the binoculars and swimming in the low breakers.

We didn't sing to them, although commenter ajay recommends it, having serendaded seals himself in his time.

...they like anything melodic. We always tried Scots songs and hymns when I was a kid. The seals used to get interested, swim closer inshore and sing back. Very eerie experience.

Thirty years ago, almost all the gray seals had been driven off the Cape.  Too many people, too many boats, too few fish.  It's estimated that there were as few as twenty left in the 1970s.

Conservation, habitat protection, regulated fishing, and, probably, some natural selection have combined so that now the seals' numbers are reckoned to be around 6000 on the Monomoy Islands, which is just south of Lighthouse Beach.

Seals attract attention.

Not just people's attention.

As I said, we were out there Monday.  On Saturday somebody else was out there enjoying the seals.

On Saturday, Paul Bremser was at Chatham's Lighthouse Beach preparing to go surfing. He had one leg into his wetsuit when he heard someone yell, ''Shark!''

He looked up to see a big fin circling a seal, just beyond the breakers about 75 feet away.

''After it came around in a full circle, the shark came off from the back side and cut him in half with one bite,'' said Bremser, a commercial fishermen with 28 years of experience fishing out of Chatham. The seal tried to swim away as a pool of blood spread around it. The shark went down, then the seal dropped out of sight.

''It's a classic, textbook, attack pattern for a great white,'' said Greg Skomal, shark expert for the state Division of Marine Fisheries.

The sight of a great white shark hunting down seals among swimmers and surfers is not comforting and could be the start of a disturbing trend.

That's from Tuesday's Cape Cod Times.

''With an increasing seal population, in all likelihood we may see a redistribution of white sharks to target that,'' Skomal said.

Great.

Two years ago, Skomal tagged a 14-foot, 1,700-pound great white that was trapped in a shallow lagoon and coastal waters off Naushon Island for two weeks.

But, he noted, great whites are still extremely rare in our waters. No great white has ever been hooked in the 19 years of the Martha's Vineyard shark fishing tournament, with more than 200 vessels participating each year. And Skomal has been trying in vain for two years to find another great white to tag, after the tag fell off the Naushon beast soon after it was freed.

In hundreds of years, Massachusetts has had only three possible attacks by great whites, the last one in 1938 in Buzzards Bay.

''You don't have very high attacks on people, even in South Africa (where there are far more sharks),'' Skomal said.

<snip>

Chatham Town Administrator William Hinchey said the town had increased patrols on land and sea following the incident Saturday, but had seen no evidence of sharks in the area. He said the town would continue beefed-up patrolling into the near future.

Skomal ruled out seal eaters like the Greenland shark, which prefers deeper, colder waters far offshore, and the tiger shark, a tropical species found 60 miles or more out in the warmer waters of the Gulf Stream.

He said he would be coming to Chatham to look for the shark and tag it.

End of Part One.

Not much film at 11:00

Parking lot above Lighhouse Beach.  Friday morning.

Storm Watch

Chatham began battening down the spiritual hatches yesterday afternoon, preparing for Tropical Storm Beryl to do its worst to our collective mood as well as to roofs, windows, and boats.  Conversations finished up and down Main Street with, "Stay dry," and "Don't get blown away."  A happy TV guy interviewing tourists out in front of the bookstore was thrilled by the possibility Beryl was going to knock us all six ways from Sunday and fill our shoes with water.

"I love weather!" he exclaimed to a couple he had frozen in front of his camera and he threw an arm over the woman's shoulder and pulled her to him for a hug.

At 10:30 last night I went out to find a cup of coffee and get a feel for what might be blowing in.  The air was heavy and humid but there was no wind and although the sky was clouded over, the clouds were high, and there were breaks where stars shone through.  But the streets felt swept of people, and the shops emptier and darker than usual for this time of night.  And Daisy's, my late night hope for coffeee, had closed earlier, a handwritten note taped to the front door apologizing for that---insincerely, I thought.

Fortunately, the Anytime Cafe was living up to its name---it doesn't always, there have been plenty of times when I've gone there and it's been closed---and put into port there.  There were no other customers.  A tall, burly, boyish college worked the counter and a there was a waitress still on the clock, dark-haired, pale, with a comical grin, but pretty and with an air of practicality and skill---someone who knew how to do her job well and got a kick out of it.  Both greeted me cheerfully, with no sign that they felt cheated out of a chance to close up early by the arrival of another customer.

While the counter guy was getting my coffee, another employee, another college kid, skinny, with thick wavy hair and wearing a long apron came out from the back room pushing a broom that he leant on for a second to watch the silent TV on the wall.  Colorful arrows swirled and darted over a green map of the New England coastline.

I asked the counter guy if he'd heard the latest forecast.  He said he hadn't been paying attention.  The TV had been on mute.  He, the waitress, and I had a short conversation about how trying to follow the weather news on TV can be maddening, frustrating, and useless.  No matter how much you tell yourself that that this storm might be the storm, the weatherfolk and news chatterers have cried wolf so many times that you just can't help tuning it out.

The counter guy said that the news people are all afraid that another Katrina will blow up and they'll miss getting the jump on the competition in covering it.  He remembered how a few summers back sharks were all over the news the way hurricanes have been this year.  There'd been a couple of shark attacks in local waters and the TV news types went on Jaws watch 24/7.

Turned out, according to the counter guy, there were fewer shark attacks than average that summer.

Heading down Main St with my cup of coffee I came upon a small crowd on the sidwalk looking up at the second floor porch of a storefront where another TV crew had set up.  A reporter was waiting to go live.  The lights were on, spilling enough onto the street below that the crowd down there was as brightly illuminated as the reporter himself, and the cameraman was waiting with his camera shouldered and aimed.

The reporter was not the same guy I saw hugging tourists earlier.  He was younger, thinner---very thin, in fact, with a narrow, sharp-featured face, all nose and long jawline under his baseball cap.  He held his mic at the ready and was moving his jaw side to side, compressing his lips comically, loosening up his talking muscles.

A couple of long mintues pass and then, without any signal that we civilians could hear, the reporter wore an earphone, he started talking to the camera.  He was good at it.  He treated the lens as if it was the eyes of whatever anchor he was connected to back at the station---at one point he missed something the anchor said and, asking for the question to be repeated, leaned his head toward the camera as if it was talking and he needed to get in closer to hear it better.

Turned out he had nothing to report.  All he could do was talk about the weather the Cape has had, the tropical wetness that turned New England into a terrarium all spring.  "There's no correlation," he was quick to point out, not wanting to be caught predicting anything.  "But it's often the case that the patterns of the spring will continue through July and August."  Which was to say that hot, wet, muggy Junes have been followed by hot, wet, muggy summers during which there have been hurricanes and tropical storms and there have been hurricanes and tropical storms in other summers too and around here most hot, wet, muggy summers go by without the Cape sinking or washing or blowing away.

But in other developments:  the reporter switched gears and topics instantly and smoothly.  "We got to spend the day with the Harbor Master!"

Cut to tape.

This morning was cloudy and blustery with signs that there'd been rain in the night.  I walked down to the beach.  The storm, what there'd been of it, had left behind three TV news trucks, with their satellite dishes raised.  There was a crew down on the beach, standing on the water's edge, a power cable snaking down the stairs and out to them across the sand.  The crew from the second truck had gotten permission from the Coast Guard to set up in the lighthouse.  The cameraman, a young man with a ballcap on backwards was away from his equipment, leaning on his arms on the glass and staring morosely out at the not very wild ocean.

The third crew were in their truck drinking coffee and glaring out at the beach and the awful bleakness of a non-story undeveloping before them.

By the time I came back with the blonde and the boys an hour later, the trucks were gone.  The wind had died and the clouds were breaking up.  There were some good sized breakers but that was just hide tide.
_____________________________

Seacoast towns and fishing villages like Chatham have to be wary of storms, and if a hurricane comes along forcing the Cape to be evacuated, it'd be a nightmare.  But the weather news these days is just a matter of improvised storm watches.  TV covers weather all the time as if catastrophe lurks in every stray cloud and any snowflake might be the start of a historic blizzard.  I've often wondered who the audience for all this weather news is.

Now I know.

It's Tom Watson.

Tom, a self-confessed lightningphobe, is convinced that nature is out to get him, and it's out to get him with the most determination and most cruelty in summertime, as he reports in The Isobar Scene.

A dead man's coat

On top of the bluffs across the Mill Pond there's a house that used to be owned by David Angell, a writer and producer for Cheers and a co-creator of Fraiser, who was onboard one of the two planes that slammed into the World Trade Center on 9/11.

Angell and his wife, who was on the plane too, were in the middle of renovating the house when they died.

For the next two summers the house sat vacant and unfinished.  Outer walls were left unsided, sheathed in plywood, window frames were blank, the frame of an extension stood bare and, although I'm tempted to call it skeletal, it simply looked like what it was, an organized pile of neglected lumber.

The Angells had no children.  No one I asked seemed to know if there were any heirs or what would happen to the house now.  Whenever people talked about it, the concensus was always that the house would never be completed or occupied.  Someone could be counted on to say something like, "They'll never sell it now" or "I wouldn't live there.  How could anybody, knowing..."

This is the kind of thing that's said about houses where some tragedy has occured, usually a grisly murder.  People who don't believe in curses or ghosts will shudder at the very idea of living there.  Their own imaginations would haunt them well enough, without anything having to reach out through their TV screens to grab them.

But, outside of the movies, I've never seen or even heard of a house with a bloody history being left permanently abandoned.  Shortly before I moved to Fort Wayne there was a double homicide in the neighborhood where the blonde had found us an apartment.  A gay couple was murdered in their living room by a thug one of them had met in a bar and brought home.  For weeks afterwards the yellow police tape was left wrapped around the house.  Then, one day, it was gone and there were cars in the driveway and lights on in the windows at night.

By 2004, work had begun again on the Angells' house and that summer we could see lights on inside when we went down to the dock and looked across the pond at night.  There are three big houses close together on that bluff, and this morning I was walking by the pond and I couldn't even remember which house was that house, and of course there's nothing about it to tell me which it is.  Its awful history is just a story now.  The house is alive with some other family's summer memories.

This is as it should be.  The earth belongs to the living, as Jefferson liked to say, the dead are not even things.

The story of the house's revitalization always makes me think of a story from Thoreau's journals, a Cape Cod story, as it happens.  Here it is.

June 18, 1857.  A youngish man came into Small's with a thick outside coat, when a girl asked where he got that coat.  He answered that it was taken off a man that came ashore dead, and he had worn it a year or more.  The girls or young ladies expressed surprise that he should be willing to wear it and said, 'You'd not dare to go to sea with that coat on.'   But he answered that he might just as well embark in that coat as any other.

Kathy tells Robby the truth---most of it, at any rate

Continued from here.

He wasn’t asleep when she returned.  The light on her dresser was on and he was kneeling up on the bed, dialing the phone on the night stand.

“Who are you calling?”

“Charlie.”

“Charlie?”

“You made me nervous.  I want to make sure he’s not going to come walking in on us.”

Kathy didn’t say it, but she thought it was a good idea, calling to check.  It’d be just her luck, Charlie barging in, all weepy and full of loneliness and self-pity, and there she is, in bed with the guy he’s decided is his new best friend.  She angled her way from the door to the foot of the bed and stood by the window, pretending to look out.  Really she was peeking back over her shoulder to admire Robby’s body.

“That was my sister,” she said.

“I heard.”

“What did you hear?”   

“Just voices.  Why?  Were you talking about me?”

“Of course.”

He knew she was watching.  He straightened himself up on his knees, squared his shoulders, tightened his ass.  His back was three-quarters to her.  Still, she could see him growing aroused.  She almost laughed out loud at his vanity, and would have if she had not found it so appealing and if she had not been made breathless by the sight of him.  Kathy had never been with anybody this perfect.  And Robby had never had a woman who cared that he was beautiful.  In his world, despite all the classes they took on “gender issues” and all the bullshit they spouted about sexual equality, women received and men gave.  All the admiration flowed one way.  Girls he knew expected their boyfriends to be gorgeous the way they expected them to be pre-law or pre-med or future MBAs.  The men they dated were accessories to their own beautiful bodies, jewelry that called attention to the wearers.  Over the course of eight summers, Kathy had waited tables with dozens of these girls and she had come to the conclusion that they would all be just as content to be made love to by their own bedroom mirrors.  When they looked at a guy like Robby, they saw only their own reflections.  For girls like that, Robby stripped for sex the way he stripped for work at the yacht club.  Kathy was the first woman who admitted getting wet at the sight of him, and he was taking advantage of the fact.  Not that she minded.

“He’s not picking up,” Robby announced with a worried frown.

Kathy sat down on the bed. “Forget Charlie.  He shows, he shows.  What do we care?  What does he care?”  She shrugged off her robe.  Robby looked at her and smiled.

“Maybe he’s asleep.  I’ll let it ring a couple more times.”

She let her eyes drift over him and onto the print on the wall behind him.  She’d driven the nail for it in the perfect spot, so that it hung there at eye level for any guy kneeling behind her.   She called it her Japanese etching, although it wasn’t so much an etching as a cartoon.   And it probably wasn’t Japanese.  It was just that all the characters in it were naked samurai warriors and naked geisha girls.

It'd been a joke birthday present from Kara, who hadn't believed she'd have the nerve to hang the thing.

Some guys got a kick out of it.  It inspired them.   Some guys never even noticed.   A couple had laughed out loud.  One guy it had turned off completely.  Turtled him right up.  He fell back on the bed cursing her.  Called her sick and twisted and a crazy bitch.  When she laughed at that, he tried to hit her. But since he was using his good hand to cover his crotch, he swung at her weakly, like a girl, and barely clipped her.  She’d thought about taking the picture down after that.

She’d never gotten around to it.

Earlier tonight she'd been glad.

Robby'd liked it.

He said it symbolized something about her.

“What?  That I’m a Japanese whore with a thing for S and M?”

No!  Not at all, he said.

“Well, to tell you the truth, I’ve got a little of that in me.  You ever decide I deserve to be punished—“

He was talking about her soul, he said.  Choosing that picture, where she picked to hang it, it was a work of conceptual art.

“Go to hell!”

“I mean it.  You have the soul of an artist.”

“Bullshit!”   

But she was laughing.  And he did mean it.   After they tried following the examples of some of the samurai and geishas, finding only one couple that wasn’t recommending the impossible, and then lay there holding onto each other, Kathy thinking she might still be coming as she tried to regain control of her breathing and wondering how she had lucked into this one, he talked to her about the Asian collection at the MFA up in Boston and described his favorite paintings, most of which were by Chinese not Japanese artists.  But there was one painter, not so old, though his style was ancient in some ways, very modern in others, an influence on the Impressionists, Monet owned copies of his prints, he was Japanese.  Would she like to go up to Boston some time, to the museum, let him show her what he was talking about?   

If someone had asked her that even two hours ago she’d have said she couldn’t think of anything more boring.   

“Yes,” she'd said, “Yes, I would like that very much.”

Now she frowned at the pure-white geishas and the hung-like-horses samurai. 

A work of conceptual art, my ass!  The picture was stupid.  And she was stupid for hanging it there.  He didn’t know her.  If he thought she had the soul of an artist, he didn’t know her at all.  He looked at her, he saw somebody else, somebody more like the girls he was used to.  The someone he thought she was was all in his head, he’d made her up.  When he left the Cape at the end of the summer he’d take his invented Kathy with him and never for a moment miss the body he’d left behind.

Robby slammed down the phone.  He grinned.  “I woke him up.  We’re safe.  Hey!  What’s wrong?”

“Charlie.  My sister.”  She sighed, wiped the tears out from behind the lenses of her glasses.  “Robby.  Do you know how old I am?”

He shrugged.  He hadn’t thought about it.  “Twenty, twenty-one.”

“I wish.  And you're sweet.  Or blind.  Or a liar.  I’m twenty-six.”

“Really?  My sister’s twenty-six.”

“Old, huh?”

“Don’t tell her that.”

“I’m twenty-six, and I’ve been married.”

“No kidding?  What happened?  Didn’t work out?”

“Puts a lot of stress on your marriage when your husband’s in jail.”

“What?”

“My ex-husband, he’s sort of a criminal.”

“What sort of criminal?”

“Robbery.  Burglary.  He hit a cop once.”

“Wow.  No wonder you divorced him.”

“That’s not why.  I mean.  It was one reason.  He was screwing around on me, too.  But you know what?  That wasn’t it either.  I would have put up with that, that’s how dumb I was, am.  But he.”  This next piece of news was going to be a lot tougher to deliver.  “He hit my daughter.”

“Your daughter?”

She leaned back across the bed, her head touching the wall.  She ran her finger over her belly.  “Didn’t you notice the scar?  That’s from my Caesarian.  I got pregnant my junior year in high school."

“Was he the father?”

“No.  The father was some other guy.  He was never in the picture.”

“Where is she?  I didn’t see any signs, you know?  That a kid lives here?”

“I send her to live with my mother in Plymouth during the summers.  I just work too much, you know?  The diner every day, Coleman’s on the weekends.  When school’s out I can’t keep track of her.  Charlie calls her the Reverse Fresh Air Fund kid.”

“Probably wise.”

“I don’t know.  My mother didn’t do such a good job with me and my sister, did she?”

“She did fine with you.  I think so anyway.”

“I don’t.”

Robby made his way over to her.  He knelt beside her, staring at her belly, not showing off anymore, and, she couldn’t help noticing, definitely drooping.

“So now you know what an idiot I am, huh?”

Robby shook his head.  He took her hand and placed it on him.  Then he bent and ran his finger along the scar, tracing the path he was about to follow with his kisses.

Castaway

When I talk about solitude, I am really talking also about making space for that intense, hungry face at the window, starved cat, starved person.  It is making space to be there.---May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude.

I like to think that as a writer I'm an extrovert, spending most of my time at my keyboard or notebook out and about in the world, so to speak, and not all that interested in chronicling the inside of my own head.

A delusional thought for a blogger, and a three-minute random browse through my archives would turn up a dozen proofs of how I'm kidding myself.

But at least when I'm down here I do more looking outward than inward.  I make sure of that.

Every year when we come to the Cape one of the first things I do, if not at the bookstore around the corner our first night in town, then at the library the next afternoon, is find a book I haven't read yet about Cape Cod.  Then I settle down to read as much as I can of it in a night to fill my head with all the information I can about the Cape, reminding myself of stuff I already knew and, with luck, discovering lots I didn't, about the people here, the history, the geography, the flora and fauna, and the weather.

This gives me a checklist of things to keep my eyes open for, and the rest of the vacation I'm on the lookout for whatever it was that I picked up from that book.  I don't always find the same things the author found, but I find something.

The first book that inspired and guided me this way was, naturally, Cape Cod by Henry David Thoreau.

I read that one the first time when I was in college and it inspired me to drag two of my friends down here one October weekend and follow Thoreau's path up the beach from Eastham to Provincetown.  That's about a 30 mile walk, and slow going on sand.  And it turned out that one of the things I failed to learn from Thoreau, although it seems impossible that I missed this, was that he hadn't walked the whole way in two days.  He had done it over the course of several visits.

I staggered into Provincetown all alone, my two friends having given up, left the beach, and put out their thumbs just before Wellfleet.

I can still recreate that walk step for step, though, and an awful lot that I've learned since about the Cape I learned trying to find in other books the names and explanations for all that I saw along the way.

I re-read Cape Cod just before the blonde and I got married and I brought it along on our honeymoon, along with the book that is still my favorite, Common Ground by Robert Finch.

His Outlands is just about as good.

Finch is to my mind the best of the Cape Cod writers, although John Hay is a close enough second that I find I often prefer to re-read his books to Finch's.  That may be just because I think I've committed Finch's essays to memory and I "re-read" every time I take a walk here.

Over the years I've put together a small library of about twenty books about the Cape and I've probably read about half as many more that I've borrowed from the real library.  I could read a hundred more and not feel I've come close to being done, but, amazingly, and dismayingly, I've had a hard time this year settling on a book.

I thought I had one.  Darwin's Audubon by Gerald Weissman.  The books I choose to read don't have to be specifically or exclusively about Cape Cod; they just have to have a Cape connection and offer me some guidance in finding my way around here and knowing what to look for.  Weissman is a physician, biochemist, and professor of medicine who writes generally about science and medicine, but he used to work at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole and the essays in the first of his books I read, The Woods Hole Cantanta, although not all about Cape Cod, were informed by his experiences in Woods Hole, both as a scientist and a summer resident.

But Darwin's Audubon hasn't grabbed me so far.  The Cape seems very far away from the essays I've read.  It's interesting to know that Darwin thought of Audubon as being a scientist and not just an artist with an eye for birds and relied on his work when writing The Origin of the Species.  But it's not information I've been able to take to the beach with me, even when I've been watching the birds there.

I almost switched to A Year by the Sea by Joan Anderson.   But it didn't take much skimming for me to realize that this was not a book about Cape Cod, it was a book about being Joan Anderson alone with herself on Cape Cod, and I was not part of the intended audience, the book's aimed at women who want to be alone with themselves on Cape Cod.

Might have been unfair of me to dismiss it out of hand as a woman's book, but it didn't help that the book jacket made clear that Anderson has developed a cottage industry based around her books of self-help for women who have suddenly found themselves, mostly by way of divorce, apparently, alone with their thoughts for long periods of time and who like it that way.

What is it about women, I asked myself as I put A Year By the Sea back in its place on the shelf in the bookstore, that makes them so enamoured of the idea of solitude?

And why are they so interested in telling each other about it?

Seems an oxymoronic pursuit.

Men don't do that.  Solitude drives men mad.  Maroon a man on a desert island and he'll either go out of his mind in a hurry or he'll find ways of not being alone.  He will come home with long tales of the lives of breadfruit.

Strand a woman on a desert island and after she gets over her ecstatic feelings she'll build a desk in the most secluded spot she can find and spend her days writing with a pen made from seagull's feather in ink made from berry juice about how she's amazed herself with all the wonders she's discovered while exploring the depths of her own heart and soul.

And after she's rescued her book will be the bestseller.

This was a ridiculously sexist thought and just plain stupid of me, considering that the very first grownup book of nonfiction I ever read was Walden.

And it was especially dumb when one of the classics of Cape Cod literature, Henry Beston's The Outermost House, a love letter to solitude if ever there was one, was right there, face out on the shelf.

As it happens, I don't particularly like The Outermost House, too much of weather reporting, both outside Beston's shack and inside his head, and at any rate in some ways it's not a chronicle of solitude as much as it's the story of a would-be recluse who's a failure at his calling and spends most of his time on the lookout for interruptions to his solitude.

But still I have this prejudice.  Women writers want to be alone with their thoughts in order to write about their thoughts.  It's not that men don't want to be alone with their thoughts; it's that they want to write about the things going outside their windows while they are thinking.

Partly this prejudice is based on what the women I know have said about their desire to be alone.  It seems to me that women have a harder time finding time to themselves.  The demands of their marriages or partnerships, their feelings of duty to their parents and children and friends won't leave them alone.

Their very friendships with each other offer no relief.

Women don't seem to have the ability that men have of being friends without talking.

If I were more persuaded by evolutionary psychology I would say that this is because of the way gender roles evolved in hunter-gatherer societies.  Gathering is a very social activity, you have to talk about what you're picking, compare your finds to others', plus there's time to talk and no reason to be quiet as you're not going to scare away the nuts and berries.  And the children are along and they need to be entertained and scolded and fussed over. 

Meanwhile, a man who couldn't keep his mouth shut while out hunting was a postive danger to himself, the rest of the party, and the community.

But whether or not what people had to do to survive 10,000 years ago has a determining influence over how people behave now is beside the point.  The point---my point---is that it seems to me that women's lives are to a greater degree than men's a matter of contiunal enforced sociability, so it shouldn't be any wonder that the desire for time alone, for quiet, for the chance to keep company solely with one's own self and listen, for once, only to the voices inside and not to the chatter of others, should be strong and attractive to the point of compelling.

It's hard for me to imagine a man walking out of his marriage just to be alone for a while, as Anderson did.

But I can not only imagine women doing it, I've known women who have or who have wanted to.

My prejudice that women who find themselves alone at last are then compelled to write about it, which is a way of saying talk about it, is based on one woman.

May Sarton.

I am here alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my "real" life again at last.  This is what is strange---that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life unless there is time along in which to explore and to discover what is happening or has happened.  Without the interruptions, nourishing and maddening, this life would become arid.  Yet I taste it fully only when I am alone here and "the house and I resume old conversations"

I've had a longstanding prejudice against May Sarton, and it's because  for years I kept confusing her with Anne Sexton.

My prejudice against Sexton is probably unfair too, but what I've read of her and her work have made me think of her as a dangerous narcissist and narcissism, even when it's expressed through sexual adventuring, is boring.  I don't like Henry Miller either.  Somehow I got it into my head that Sarton was Sexton, or very much like her, so I avoided reading her poetry, her novels, and, most energetically, her journals.

But on top of my anti-Sarton as Sexton bias, was my belief that her journals were women's books, like Joan Anderson's, extended descriptions of what she observed after a day staring into the mirror of her own soul.

The value of solitude---one of its values---is, of course, that there is nothing to cushion against attacks from within, just as there is nothing to help balance at times of particular stress or depression.  A few moments of desultory conversation with dear Arnold Miner, when he comes to take the trash may calm an inner storm.  But the storm, painful as it is, might have had some truth in it.  So sometimes one has simply to endure a period of depression for what it may hold of illumination if one can live through it, attentive to what it exposes or demands.

I've often thought of spending a year on the Cape.  I've been here for parts of all four seasons, but I would like to be here for the whole of all of them, to observe each one through the course of its development and watch as one blends into the next.  When I think of myself doing this, after having won the lottery so that I can afford it, I see myself living not here in Chatham, but farther out, up beyond Wellfleet, but not all the way to Provincetown, somewhere around Truro, I guess, which is to say I see myself in a small cottage in what's the loneliest and most untrafficked part of the Cape even in summer.  In the winter out there, without having to try too hard, you can go a week without seeing another human being.

This is a dream of solitude.  And, bet on it, I'd be writing about it the whole time.  Now, it's not the alone-ness I want.  I want the lack of distractions so that I can concentrate harder on the things I usually only get to observe cursorily and in passing when we're here on vacation.

I don't see myself as being truly alone even.  The blonde and the boys are there and not there, I feel their company even though I don't see them beside me.  They're probably down here in Chatham, and I'm dropping in on them regularly, which sounds like I'd be cheating on the whole experiment, doesn't it?

But it's almost impossible to be alone anywhere, even if you're dilligent about withdrawing into solitude.

And now it is time that I laid aside, at least for a few hours a day, the world that pours in here from outside, and resumed my own life in this nunnery where one woman meditates alone.  But there is no way of "laying aside" a knock at the door.

May Sarton's Journal of a Solitude is really a chronicle of solitude contstantly interrupted.  She opens the book by telling about her friend and handyman Perley Cole's slow dying in a nursing home and her visits to him there as she did her best to keep him company in his last days.  Entry after entry that follows is about Sarton's escaping either from solitude into company or from company back into solitidue, so much so that how to manage being with company seems to be the real theme of the book.

By now you've probably guessed that I've found my Cape book.

Sarton wrote Journal of a Solitude in New Hampshire, and except what cultural and geography and history New Hampshire and the Cape share in being parts of New England, there isn't anything specifically about here that I can learn from reading about there.

But I'm learning a lot, nevertheless.

About writing, which is good.

About the stupidity of my own prejudices, which is better.
_____________________________________

The blonde likes to sleep in a bit when we're down here, rising just in time to organize us and get us out the door to whatever adventure we've scheduled for the day.  But this morning she was up early for her.  I suggested that she take the opportunity to go for a long walk or a bike ride.

She was suspicious of my solicitude.

"Why are you pushing me out the door?" she wanted to know.

"I just thought you'd like some time alone," I said, with loving understanding.  "I know how you women crave and need time to yourselves."

"It's not women who build Fortresses of Solitude," she said.

How hard it is to run this place

I have three favorite places to go for coffee down here, each one my favorite at different times of day and under different circumstances.  One's for morning, one's for after dinner, and one's for whenever I happen to be passing by it and get a whiff of what's brewing inside.

Last year the owner of my morning place sold out.  The new owner never seems to be enjoying her work.  She's a thin, blond woman with curling hair and features made plain by worry and resignation.  She looks as if she's forcing herself to grit her teeth and bear it without complaint, as if all the headaches and worries of running a business are part of a penance she's serving.

This morning, guy ahead of me tells the counter girl that one of the carafes is empty, one is mislabelled---it's supposed to be the house blend but it's raspberry creme---and a third splashed into his cup something that the label says is Columbian but smells suspiciously of hazelnut, meaning it's wearing the wrong name tag too.  The counter girl is flustered and apologetic, but the owner doesn't speak up, although she's standing right there, making a breakfast sandwich on a butcher's block.  She doesn't apologize, doesn't give immediate orders to the girls to fix the problem, and doesn't make a move to fix things herself.  Her jaw tightens and her expression is full of frustration, exasperation, and...martyrdom.

She says something, pretty much to herself, about someone being a funny, little Scandanavian something or other, referring, I guess, to whichever employee out back who made the coffee this morning, not angry as much as reminding herself that she'll never hire any more exchange students with suspect English language skills.

Then, without lifting her head, she shifts her eyes from the cutting board to give the complaining customer a hard look.

He was trying to be polite and helpful, actually.  But her look is a blaming look, as if the face of his deciding to come in for coffee this morning upset the time-space continuum and caused the little Scandanavian so and so to make those mistakes half an hour before he walked through the door.  It seems to me that she thinks he should understand, without having to be told, and as if it was his concern, how hard it is for her to run this place and not made it any harder for her by causing trouble by pointing out mistakes.

As if you can own the view

Oyster Pond.  Six thirty, Saturday morning.

Morning scene: Generations

Early Saturday morning, biked down to the landing on an inlet called the Oyster Pond River and walked along the shore, looking out across metallic blue water at the sunlit backside of Stage Harbor Neck and the old, blind lighthouse there, white as an oil painting against the sky.  Beach grass on the neck green as bottle glass in some spots, yellow as wheat in others.

High tide, no beach, just a soggy path along the water's edge.  Short cliffs off to my left grown over with bayberry, bearberry, beach plum, and beach heather, and lines of Cape Cod roses like red banners hung vertically from the clifftop.  Go to take a picture of the some beached rowboats with the roses in the background and scare angrily chirping barn swallows up out of the blossoms.

Little shorebirds working the blackened seaweed along the path ahead of me.  Probably sandpipers, but maybe sanderlings.  The sun's behind them, they're mostly in silhouette and they won't let me get close enough to get a good look at them, even through my binoculars.

Dory chugs in and out between the boats anchored in the river, paralleling the shore.  Older man at the wheel in the open cockpit, sixty if a day, but trim and fit, wearing shorts and a Hawaiian shirt both faded from long wear, and a red baseball cap, even more faded, bill backwards.  Steers with one hand on the wheel, his other hand shading his eyes as he scans the shore on this side, watching me as if thinking I might be someone he knows, someone he is expecting to meet along here.

Plover skims the drowned grass at the waterline.

Group of five people arrive at the end of the lane down to the beach where my bike lies in the sand.  Hard to say if they're together or if their arriving at the same time is just coincidental.  I'm too far up to hear them say anything.  But I can't see any interaction as they split into three separate groups---no signs of goodbyes being said or plans to meet up later being made.

Two tall college guys in ballcaps and carrying fishing rods and tackle boxes walk away upriver.

A man around my age in shorts, life vest, and stone colored Australian bush hat, the ties tight under his chin, sets down a black and yellow kayak and sets to work preparing it for a trip out into the river.

The last two members of the group are an elderly couple, past seventy, both of them, he round-shouldered and bent a bit, wearing a sun hat with a wide, floppy brim, she more wiry, taller, but with a bit of a stoop too, hatless, her white hair, toussled, unbrushed this morning, looking stiff in the breeze.  She's wearing thin wrap around shades.  Together they wade out to a skiff anchored fairly close in to shore and load it with tubs and buckets and a pair of clame rakes.  She holds the boat by the gunwale to steady it as he climbs in.  He unties the line to the buoy and grabs an oar to pole the boat backwards, bringing it close in, practically beaches it so she can get in.  As she does, she pushes off with her leg.  She sits on the bench in the stern.  He takes the oars.

He rows them straight out into the river, aiming at the neck and the clam beds over there.  The blond oars flash gold in the sun after each pull.

Night scene: "Watch your little feet, lady."

Late last night as I was on my way home after taking the picture  of the Squire for the post below:

Fender bender at the street corner up ahead.  Nothing serious.  A pair of bewildered and sheepish looking drivers stand beside their cars, looking at the kissed bumpers, wondering what to do.  A tall, barrel-chested cop in a reflector vest hurries up through the crowd behind me, moving people aside with his hands.  Big hands, and a light touch on a shoulder makes an impression.

I manage to get out of his way without his having to make an impression on me, but ahead there's a group of thirtysomethings, two men, three women, walking four abreast, with one of the men trailing slightly behind, blocking the cop's way.

The cop strides up and, seeing a gap between two of the women, angles his way between them, saying to one of the women by way of an excuse me, "Watch your little feet, lady."

The woman, a short brunette in an oversized sweatshirt that looks very new, takes offense at his tone and his choice of words.

"What did he say?" she asks her friends.  "Watch your little feet, lady?  Is that what he said?  Watch your little feet, lady?"  She's incensed.  "Watch my little feet!"  She raises her voice and calls after him, but not really loud enough for him to hear, "You watch your little feet!"

The Brig at midnight

The model for the bar where Kathy's failed to pick up her rich tourist in my story, Her Life.  Chatham Squire.  Ten minutes till midnight, Friday.

Kathy and her sister share their thoughts on love

The excerpt I posted last weekend from my story, Her Life, comes two thirds of the way through the story.  This is pretty much where the story begins.

...they heard the sound of the bolt snapping open in the front door.

“God,” she said under her breath, “I hope that’s not Charlie.”

“Charlie?  What would Charlie be doing here?”

“He comes by sometimes.”  She reached for her glasses.  “He has a key.”

“You gave him a key?”

“Quiet.”  She stood up, scanning the room for her robe.  Robby caressed her bottom with the backs of his fingers.  He kissed her left cheek.  “Stop that!”

“I don’t understand why you don’t want Charlie to know about us.”

“I just don’t.  It’s none of his business.”

“If it is Charlie, he just opened your refrigerator.”

“He’s allowed.”

“He’s allowed to know the contents of your refrigerator but not the contents of your bedroom.”

“That’s right.  Look.  He’s a friend.  He comes by late at night sometimes when he’s feeling down.  If I’m up, we talk.  If I’m asleep or out, he makes himself a sandwich and puts on some music, smokes a little grass.  In the morning I find him asleep on the couch.”

“He’s kind of pathetic, isn’t he?”

“Kind of.  Where is my robe?  Do you see it?”

“You should greet him like this.  Make his night.”

“Give him a heart attack, what it would do.  There it is.”  Kathy dug her robe out from under a pillow at the foot of the bed.  She bent and kissed Robby on the mouth, and said, “Remember my place.”  At the door she looked back quick and saw him in the moonlight, lying flat on his back, his arm across his eyes, already falling asleep.

“You are so beautiful,” she whispered.  “Except for that stupid goatee.”  But every other guy sprouted one of those these days and at least his was a pretty color.  She reminded herself:  I’m not in love.

It wasn’t Charlie.

“So I’m at the Brig.”  Kara started right in.  She was sitting at the table in the dark.  The streetlight outside the kitchen window lit half her face and, shining through the beer in front of her, made the bottle glow amber from inside.  “You know how they got the three bars in there, the big one in back for the tourists and college kids and the two up in the front windows for us locals who are there just to drink?  Well, I’m up at one of the ones in front, staring out over the bartender’s shoulder at the street, just sitting there having one more cigarette, and this guy going by outside looks in at me and does a doubletake, his eyes going all wide, like this.”  Kara demonstrated.  “And I smile, because I think, naturally, he’s got an eyeful of my tits, right?  I figure I smile nice, maybe he’ll come in.  Cause he’s nice looking.  Old, forty maybe, but nice looking, and he’s got that summer tan and the polo shirt.  Money.  And looks.  I think, I’ve struck gold!  Dummy me.  The look on his face?  It was, I can’t describe it.  Fuck that.  Course I can.  Pure pity.  Asshole was feeling sorry for me.”

Kathy turned on the light.  Both sisters winced.  She turned it off again.  “Sorry.”  Sitting down at the table, Kathy slid Kara’s pack of Winstons over, tapped one out, and pulled her sister’s hand over to light it on her cigarette.  “Why would he do that?  Feel sorry for you?”

Kara laughed.  He laughter had turned harsh.  Her laugh was the laugh of a middle-aged woman who smoke and drank too much.  Kara had always been precocious.  She said, “Why do you think?”

“I have no idea.”

“Because...What he saw wasn’t what I thought I was, a hot babe with ten miles of cleavage wearing her best Come Fuck Me smile.  What he saw is what I am.  A poor pathetic go nowhere loser drinking all alone at ten minutes to closing.”

“You’re not a pathetic loser.”

“Yeah, right.”

Kara was eleven months older than Kathy.  When they were kids, and even up until only a couple of years ago, people had often mistaken them for twins, they’d looked that much alike.  That’s why Kathy had never gotten contacts.  Kara said Kathy wore the glasses to make people think she was the smarter one, and what did she care if they did, as long as they knew Kara was the sexy one.  But Kathy wore them to make sure people didn’t confuse her with Kara and expect the same things.  She didn’t need them anymore for that, Kara had gained so much weight.  He legs were still good, and she’d packed it on in her chest as well as in her butt, so she had bigger boobs, and Kara was pleased about that.  But her face had changed.  Her features seemed to have shrunk.  Her eyes were little black slits.  And her skin had turned red.  Kathy thought her sister was ugly now, which is why she’d turned out the light.  More than to spare their eyes, she’d done it to spare herself the pain of feeling sorry for her big sister.

Kara said, “Oh well.  He probably had a real tiny dick.  Those types always do.”

They were quiet for a long time, sitting together in mirrored poses, heads back, holding their cigarettes near the tips of their first two fingers, bringing them languidly to their lips, exhaling the smoke toward the ceiling with identical sighs, losing themselves in thought after every puff.  Kara stared at nothing in the shadowy air of the kitchen.  Kathy stared at nothing in the drifting fog outside the window.  It was a muggy night, but cool, with enough of a breeze to luff the curtains.  Their apartment was on the third floor of a four-story gabled house on Main Street.  There were five other apartments below theirs, one above.  Their landlord ran a liquor store on the first floor.  Late at night, with the sidewalks emptied of tourists, with few cars passing by on the street and those few going by solitarily, long, silent gaps of time between each one and the next, Kathy believed that she could hear the surf growling and sighing its way to shore, although the beach was a mile away.  Maybe she only heard it the way you heard the ocean when you put a seashell to your ear.  She listened now and heard something.  Whatever it was, waves on sand or blood in her own ears, it made her sad.  Irritation with her sister came over Kathy like a headache.

“Is this all you plan to do with your life?  Go to bars hoping to get picked up by rich tourists, come home and beat yourself up when it doesn’t happen?”

“I don’t plan to do anything.  Whatever happens, happens.”  Kara stood and walked over to the sink.  She ran water over her cigarette and threw the butt in the wastebasket.  “Is there any pot in this house?”

“Where it always is.”

Kara opened a cabinet, moved cans of soup and tomato paste around, and found the coffee can in back.  “You want some?”

Kathy shook her head.  Kara lit a joint.  She left the coffee can sitting open on the counter.  Kathy frowned at her.  Kara held the smoke in her lungs, coughed it out.  She took another drag and, holding it in again, managed to squeeze off, “Tonight was the big night for you.”

“Yes.”

“How was it?”

“Wonderful.”  Kathy strained all the emotion out of her voice.

Kara jerked her chin toward the bedroom.  “He still in there?”

“Yes.”

Kara nodded knowingly.  She took another hit, let it out with a rush, exclaiming, “God!  I am so horny!  I don’t suppose you feel like sharing?”

“No!”

“Whatever.”

“God!”

“Just a suggestion.”

“How can you think like that?”

“I thought you might be in a giving mood.”

“You’re awful.”

“I was only kidding.  Jeez.  When did you get so greedy?”  There was a long silence while Kara sulked.  Finally she said, “We used to share Stephen.”

“Stephen.”  Kathy sneered out the name of her ex-husband.

“Yes.  Stephen.  You were a lot more generous then.”

“I was a lot more stupid.”

“I thought you were fun.”

“I was fucked up, is what I was.  Stephen!”

“Stephen was your husband.  This guy, you’ve had what, three dates with?  And tonight’s the first time you fucked?  With your husband, it was like, Hey, Kara, come have a piece of my pie.  Like he was a dessert you couldn’t finish by yourself.  This guy—“

“Robby.”

“Robby.  Guy you hardly know, you’re all, Back off, sis, he’s mine!  I’d say you were mixing up your priorities.  What’s so special about this one?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“He’s not special, Kath.”

“Drop it, ok?”

“He sure as shit doesn’t think you’re special, lay you odds on that.”

“Like you’d have any idea.”

“I have a pretty good idea what’s going to happen when summer’s over.”

“So do I.”

“He’s going to go to law school like you said.”

“Maybe.”

“He’s going.”

“He says he wants to stay here.”

“Stay here.  And do what?”

“Paint.”

“Paint!  Houses?”

“Don’t start with me, Kara.  I’m trying not to think too hard about this.  I’m just trying to take it one day at a time.”

“He knows you got a eight year old daughter?”

“I’ve told him.”

“And a ex-husband?”

“Yes.”

“Who’s a criminal?”

“Yes.”

“He’s going.  Trust me, come Labor Day it’ll be like, See ya later, bye.  It’s been real, and it’s been fun, but it hasn’t been like real fun.  Jesus.  How did you do this to yourself?  Why get yourself mixed up with a guy like that?  Who do you think you are?  The Little Mermaid?  This isn’t a fairy tale, sis.  In real life the prince doesn’t marry the peasant girl.  He just fucks her, knocks her up, and leaves her for the next knight in shining armor she’s dumb enough to think’s come to rescue her, even with the hard-on poking out his chain mail telling her what’s the only thing on his mind.  And he’s such a little boy!  What is he, twenty-two?  You are way too old for him.”

“He’s twenty-one.”

“He’s a baby!”

“Five years, that’s not such a big difference in ages.”

“For guys his type it is.  Twenty-one for him is a whole lot younger than it was for us.  The difference between him at twenty-one and us at twenty-six is like the difference between him and a kid in junior high school.  He’s a baby, Kathy!”

“I know.  I’m being careful.”

Kara looked at her sister sadly.  “I hope so.”  She took a last drag on the joint and offered the roach to Kathy.  Kathy waved it away, then changed her mind.  Kara handed it over.  She said, “You sure you don’t want to share him?  Make him grow up in a hurry.”

---from Her Life, a short story by Lance Mannion.

"Would you prefer blogging or non-blogging?"

The plan for last night was to go to the drive-in to see Pirates of the Caribbean 2.  That's what I thought the plan was, anyway.  But Mother and Father Blonde are down here on a visit and, offering to watch the guys, inisted that the blonde and I go out for an evening alone together.

The blonde liked this idea. She says it's something married couples are supposed to do once in a while.  She says we used to do it regularly ourselves.

"We did?" I asked.

"At least twice a month."

"Did I enjoy it?"

The question annoyed her for some reason.

"Yes, you enjoyed it!"

"As much as I'd enjoy Pirates of the Caribbean?"

Almost wound up spending an evening alone alone with a blanket on a chair on the front porch.

Fortunately, the brand-new teenager is a romantic and he stepped in to smooth things over and push us out the door before I could make things worse.

So off we went, poking around town, with no particular destination, thinking we might get something to eat.

We tried here first, because it's relatively new and we'd never been there before.  But while it seemed like a good place to sit and watch the Red Sox game, sitting and watching the Red Sox wasn't the blonde's idea of a hot time on the town.

We moved on to here, where the overwhelmed hostess, half-crying and half-laughing, told us that they'd been hopping all night, no let up and none in sight, she was going out of her mind and we were out of our minds if we thought we were getting in without having booked a table for tonight yesterday.

So we moved on again, and if the Red Nun was too casual, and the Impudent Oyster too popular, then Christian's was just right.

We were given a table upstairs in an alcove with a window overlooking the street.  It was as romantic a setting as the teenager could have wished for his parents.  And at one point I looked across the candlelit table, stared deep into the blonde's big blue eyes, and I was overcome.  I couldn't help myself.  I was carried away by the moment.

"Blonde," I said softly and meaningfully, "Those Republicans sure are crazy, aren't they?"

And I was off.

Blabbed on nonstop for half an hour, covering all the usual topics, essentially blogging without a keyboard.  Couldn't help myself.  It was embarrassing.  I don't like it when I do this. I started this blog in the hope that having a daily rant on the internet would take away my desire to rant in real life.

Hasn't worked that way.

Eventually it was time to go and I had to shut up.  But as we left our table and emerged from the alcove a woman at the table just around the corner from ours stopped me.

"Was that you talking about what the Democrats should do?" she asked.

I was mortified.

I had tried to keep my voice down and had counted on the piano drowning me out, but she was sitting too close to escape.  I began to apologize, saying I hoped I hadn't ruined her meal raving on and on like that.

"Nonsense," she said, "I was agreeing with everything you said.  Right on!"

She really said right on.

I still felt like a fool.  I said so.  "People don't want some loudmouth bloviating all through their dinner," I said.  "I should keep my yap shut."

"Oh don't worry," she said, "After all, this is a Blue State, isn't it?"

"The bluest," I said.

She begged to differ on that one.

"I'm from California," she said.

"That's pretty blue," I said.  "But there're no Orange Counties in Massachusetts."

I had her there.  "That's true.  Orange County is pretty bad."

I agreed and was about to say something about Schwartzenegger and maybe ask her how she thought it was that the three bluest states, California, Massachusetts, and New York, all had Republican governors.  But suddenly she gave a sharp cry of pain and began rubbing her shin and glaring across the table at her male dinner companion, who was trying to look innocent, and my collar got suddenly very tight around my neck as the blonde grabbed it from behind and began dragging me out of there.

Learned my lesson there.  From now on I confine my blogging to the keyboard.

On the way out the blonde had to powder her nose so I was left alone downstairs with my thoughts.  I would have sunk deep into a gloom of remorse and self-recrimination but the TV happened to be on.

The A's and the Sox were tied at three in the bottom of the seventh with Jason Varitek coming to the plate.

I'm just no good on these romantic nights out.
_________________________________________

I didn't monopolize the conversation completely during dinner.  The blonde told me about the book she's reading, A Death in Belmont by Sebastian Junger.  She says it's very good, compelling, and creepy.  She got carried away too and she offered to do something she has never offered to do before---write something for Lance Mannion.  She asked me if I'd like her to write a review to post.

I said I sure would!  But she began to back-pedal immediately.  Your readers don't care what I have to say about a book, she demured.

Ok, readers, let her know she's all wet on that one.

Morning beach

Chatham, looking south from Holloway Street.  Monday, 7 AM.

Tricksters in the night

Late last night, Uncle Merlin and I the only ones awake, each of us focused on our respective computers, when we startled out of our virtual realities by a screaming outside the front windows.

Animal screaming. 

My first thought was that an owl had got a rabbit.  But it kept screaming.  And it moved around the house.

It sounded to me now like a hawk.  A loud hawk.  A loud, very big hawk.  A hawk that would make an eagle insecure about its size.  Unless it was an eagle.  I've never seen an eagle around here.  I can't remember seeing a hawk either.  There are hawks all over the Cape, but not in this neighborhood.  I saw an osprey this morning.  Took a fish out of the Mill Pond.  But I don't believe any of them, ospreys, eagles, or hawks, ever work nights.

A screech owl, maybe?

A screech owl with a megaphone.

I went outside to look, as if it wasn't night, as if it wasn't pitch dark.

Uncle Merlin didn't come with me.  He had an important auction to monitor on ebay.

The screaming continued.  A sharp, raspy, single note scream with pauses of three and four beats between them.  I followed the sound out into the backyard and "watched" as it whatever it was seemed to rise up into the top of tall old oak behind the house next door.  I tracked whatever it was with my eyes, as if if I stared intently enough I would develop super night vision and the thing would suddenly become visible to me.

Suddenly it was at ground level again and swinging around the neighbor's house to the street again.  I chased after it, chased it down the street, chased it halfway up somebody's driveway, where I suddenly realized that it wasn't in the air anymore, that it probably never had been.  Sound plays tricks in the dark.

Whatever it was had stopped moving, and I stopped too.  We remained that way, "staring" at each other.

The screams had been dying for a little while now.  Softer, they sounded to me more emotional, irritable, angry but not at me, at someone particular, but there was also a note of loneliness, as if whoever was irritating it was also breaking its heart.

I swear that's what I heard at the time, because in a moment you'll be accusing me of 20/20 hindhearing.

The screaming stopped but it, the screamer, was not silent.  It was making a quiet noise in its throat, like the moaning of a sad dog.

There was enough ambient light from the house at the end of the driveway and I thought I could now see a gray-white shape sitting in the far corner of the yard.

Sitting up, like a dog on its haunches.

The front door of the house opened and a tall, white haired man stepped out onto the front stoop.

"Who's that?" he demanded in a far from welcoming voice.

"Hi," I said, "I'm from the up street.  I heard a weird noise and I'm trying to find out what it is."

"It's a bird," he said.  He didn't say it in a helpful way.

"That's what I thought when I heard it the first time.  But I never heard a bird that loud."

"Bird," he said again.

I got the hint.

"Well," I said, "Goodnight."

He didn't say goodnight back.

The ghostly shape at the corner of the yard had disappeared.

I wandered off.

Uncle Merlin was waiting for me on the front porch as I walked back up to the house.

"I think it was a coyote," I said.

There have been coyotes on Cape Cod since 1985.

"I know it was," he said.  "She was looking for her pup."

"How do you know that?"

"I saw the pup scurry across the backyard after you went out.  It was headed your way."

That explains the screams then, she was calling for him.  Unless what was screaming was what the coyote had between her jaws.

"Then I think I'm glad I didn't catch up with her," I said.

"She probably wouldn't have liked it if you'd come between her and her pup."

"Probably not."  I thought about what might have happened.  "They're not all that big," I said.  They're not.  The first time I ever saw one in the daylight I thought I was looking at a very large fox for a second.  "And they don't really want to have anything to do with us.  Wouldn't have been like coming between a mother bear and her cub."

Coyotes keep their distance from people.  They aren't timid, just respectful.  They have been known to follow people out walking.  Trail them down the street.  One can be behind you and you wouldn't know it.  They're probably hoping you're a litter bug.  Coyotes will eat pretty much anything.  Taxidermist opened one up once, it had been killed by a car, and found a Burger King hamburger box in its belly.

"Not an experiment you'd want to try," Uncle Merlin said.

"No, it isn't," I said.  "Would have liked to see them though.  I've only seen two others."

The first time I saw one was on the beach late at night.  If you run into a coyote in the dark on a beach when you are not expecting to meet one, when you don't even know yet that there are coyotes on Cape Cod and would never guess that an animal you've always thought of as prefering deserts where they can sit on rocks and howl at the moon at night and chase roadrunners by daylight, you do not think, Oh, a dog.  You think, oh damn, a coyote.  Coyotes slink with a guilty, thieving, shifty look that identifies them as distinctively as a sign around their neck.

"I see them all the time," Uncle Merlin said.  "One comes around wanting to play with Al."

Al is Uncle Merlin's dog.

Coyotes avoid people, but they try to mix with dogs.  They really do come around looking to play.

With dogs they're own size or bigger.

Little dogs annoy them.

Or make them hungry.

Maybe.

Some little dogs and cats have chased after coyotes and disappeared.  The dogs' and cats' owners have watched them rush of into the woods after a coyote and that's been the last they ever saw of their pets.

Hasn't happened all that often, but it's given coyotes a bad reputation.

I'm not saying it's undeserved.  But coyotes have helped the populations of ground-nesting birds.  Coyotes will eat most anything, like I said, except, apparently eggs and birds.  Animals that eat eggs and birds---skunks, raccoons, possums, and cats---avoid places where they might run into coyotes.

Uncle Merlin's dog is not little.  He still doesn't let Al loose when there are coyotes in the neighborhood.

"But you let me loose," I said.

"I was involved," he said.

"On ebay," I said.

"I'm the top bidder."

"Good for you."

"You probably weren't in any danger."

"Nah," I said.  "I was fine."

"Sure you were."

"Wish I could have seen it though."

"They'll be back," he said.

"Yep."

Uncle Merlin went back inside and shut down his computer and said goodnight.

I stayed up for a while, listening.