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  TO KENT, BILL AND JAMES W.

  who would tell me, if they knew

  Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,

  Why, when the singing ended and we turned

  Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,

  The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,

  As the night descended, tilting in the air,

  Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,

  Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,

  Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.

  Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,

  The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,

  Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,

  And of ourselves and of our origins,

  In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

  “The Idea of Order at Key West”

  —WALLACE STEVENS

  PART ONE

  Maud

  ONE

  The Rainbow Café treated any day before a holiday like big money. Maud wondered as she set the hot beef sandwich and mashed potatoes on the counter just why Shirl expected this surge of extra business. The only people at the counter had been Ubub and Ulub Wood, and they’d eaten what they always ate, the daily special. Ubub and Ulub had other names, but they’d been long forgotten. It was either Dodge Haines or Sonny Stuck who’d decided to call them by the letters on their license plates—UBB and ULB. They drove twin Ford pickups, black and battered. No one could figure out just how they’d managed to get those trucks battered up in the same way, so that the only thing that distinguished one from the other was the tag.

  Maud hadn’t wanted to go to work this day, and then she had. She had meant to stay home, but it was the Labor Day weekend, so she had settled on going in an hour later than she usually did. Shirl hadn’t even noticed, despite her prediction of their getting in a crowd.

  She drew a cup of coffee in a white mug and put that in front of Ulub, who didn’t say anything; he never did. Maud wondered if he ever had. Since he always wanted the special, Shirl and Charlene always knew what to give him. Ubub did the talking, what there was of it, for both of them.

  Shirl was ringing up a take-out order of doughnuts and coffee, sitting on a high stool behind the register and shoving the stuff across the black counter at a teenage kid. She handed him his change and a venomous look as if he’d made her open the register at gunpoint. He left.

  When the teenager left and was walking past the window, Shirl started talking about “the little creep” to Maud. Not the one who’d left, but her son. Probably, any kid that age brought her son to mind. His name was Joseph, and she only called him by name when she wasn’t in a white rage with him, which was seldom. Everyone else called him Joey. He was “the little creep”; his father, who’d left them flat after Joey was born, was still “the big creep.” Charlene kept telling Shirl she should be glad he wasn’t getting stoned and flying off rooftops.

  “The little creep’s too lazy to fly, and of course he ain’t doing drugs—it’d cut into his shoplifting time.” Joey had hooked some sunglasses from the SuperSaver Discount Store the day before. Shirl had called this down the counter to Charlene as she shoved a plain white bakery box at a customer. Lemon chiffon was always the special pie of the day except at Thanksgiving and Christmas, when Charlene wiped off the blackboard and wrote in “Punkin.”

  Joey would come in nearly every day for lunch and Maud would get him his favorite—beef stew—and butter four slices of bread for him. He was usually off school, suspended but not expelled, and Shirl acted like a parole officer. The boy had a pale little face and a smile like smoke, hardly there and quickly dispersed, as if there’d been something in the past worth smiling about, a memory that had guttered out.

  Shirl would shuffle towards him and start in, calling him “Joseph this” and “Joseph that,” ask him all sorts of questions: did he mow the lawn, rake the leaves, shovel the snow? depending on the time of year. She didn’t stop until he’d eaten the fourth slice of bread, when she’d stick another cigarette in her mouth and shuffle away. Then Maud would pour him a second cup of coffee. He’d smile that vanishing smile at her, give her his condolences for having to work there, ball up his napkin, and leave. It was a ritual whenever he was suspended from school for breaking into lockers or calling the math teacher a pervert, a sleazeball, a scumbag. Five days a week Maud would watch him come in and go out and remember something about gates of ivory, gates of horn. She’d had three years of college, mostly literature courses, and loved to read. Still, she couldn’t recall where those gates were, or just what they meant, except some important passage to somewhere, somewhere final.

  As she hung her apron on the peg and took down her coat at seven o’clock that evening, she thought how Joey would be going back to school the day after Labor Day.

  Then she stopped thinking about Joey and school, for that only made her think of Chad, and he was gone.

  • • •

  That was why she hadn’t wanted to go to work. She had really wanted to come down here, where she was now, to the end of the pier.

  Maud sat on the end of the pier watching the party across the water. It had been going on, it seemed, all summer, and she wondered, as people do about the tree in the forest: did it simply stop when she wasn’t around to hear it? It had been just before the Fourth of July when she’d noticed the lights and come down here and looked across the wide lake at Japanese lanterns like strings of Christmas lights. The first time she’d simply stood for a while, squinting over the water, hearing the faint strains of music.

  The next night she’d come down with her martini glass and sat on the edge of the dock, her bare legs dangling over the edge.

  The night after, she’d come with a wood-and-aluminum chair and a cold bottle of Popov vodka, and in the following nights and weeks she slowly furnished the end of the pier.

  After the Fourth, she’d brought down a small table and a Colonel Sanders plastic tub filled with ice in which she’d stowed her ready-mixed-martini Popov bottle. Then, when Chad came home from college, she’d got him to haul down an old rocker from the bedroom of the cottage that sat back along the path in the woods. He told her it wasn’t a pier, it was a dock, and he couldn’t imagine why she’d want to sit out here for hours at night.

  Chad had been sitting in the aluminum chair, drinking beer, looking around the lake frontage, checking out the marshy grass—the pier was in a little cove—and the tree with a heavy root above ground like a bent knee, a tree praying in the matted grass and weeds.

  He sighed, world-weary at twenty, and asked her, “Why do you keep working at Shirl’s?”

  “Because it’s dark and quiet, I guess.”

  He pulled another beer from the carton; there was a little sucking noise as he uncapped it. “I hope that’s not what life is, just something dark and quiet.”

  “If you’re lucky,” she’d said.

  In the darkness his head turned. “Come on, Mom.”

  It hadn’t been the real question, anyway. It wasn’t “Why do you work at Shirl’s?” but “Why do we live in such a nonhappening place, why didn’t you finish college and get your English degree, why didn’t you get a great job, become an executive, maybe, or at least marry one, someone we could have lived with instead of him, why don’t you own your own restaurant, why is that a cube of ice in your glass and not the moon?” Mau
d said, “Shirl likes you.”

  He was lighting a cigarette, and the flame from his disposable lighter lit up his profile and went out. “Shouldn’t she? I’m polite.”

  “Polite isn’t the point. She doesn’t like anybody. But she does you. She’s always holding you up to Joey, and even he likes you.” Maud shook the Popov bottle free from ice crystals. “What do you talk to her about? She won’t let Charlene or me wait on you.” Maud was extremely pleased by this.

  “Her feet.”

  Maud twisted the bottle back into the plastic tub and turned to him. “Her feet?”

  “She’s got corns and bunions. That’s why she’s always wearing slippers.”

  “I Concentrate on You”—they liked Cole Porter over there—came floating across the lake.

  “It’s the first time she ever offered anybody a job since I’ve been working there, and that’s ten years. You liked it up here, then.”

  “When you’re ten you like practically anyplace except jail. Anyway, I don’t think I’d’ve made a fortune in tips at Shirl’s. Don’t they play any real music over there?”

  “You can’t dance to the Grateful Dead. They like to dance. I’m not saying you should’ve taken the job—just that she offered it. And Lorraine said Jewel Chapman would’ve loved to have you work at the feed store.”

  “There’s just not enough money in it. You want me to earn money for school, and there’s a lot of house painting in Hebrides—”

  “I’m not saying . . . Oh, well.” Hebrides was twenty miles away; without a car he could only stay here on weekends instead of all summer long.

  Today he had left, which was why she hadn’t wanted to go to work. But some part of her knew better, that if she didn’t go in, she’d just sit around the cottage all day, like a mourner returned from a funeral. They had taken the local taxi to Bakersville to get the small plane to the city to get the large plane to get the space shuttle . . .

  Maud stared up at the night sky, looking for an airplane’s tiny red light, like a red star trailing across the sky, as if his plane might have doubled back. She thought that pinpoint of red light, throbbing along, must have replaced the sound of a train whistle for pure melancholy.

  He’d left early, two days before he had to. “Mom, I was wondering . . . Would you mind. . . ?”

  Whenever Chad started with that, she knew she’d mind. “I-was-wondering-would-you-mind” was a group of words that had taken on a life of its own. Yes, she’d mind, though she almost always said no, she wouldn’t, because what followed was never truly unreasonable, just painful. It always had something to do with going away, leaving before he actually had to. “Disappearing” was the way Maud thought of it; Chad called it “leaving for college.”

  • • •

  The latest addition to the pier’s decor was a lamp Maud had found in the crawl space beneath the cottage eaves. It was black iron with clawlike legs and had a stained beige shade of faded roses. She’d got Chad to rig several extension cords together so they would stretch back and plug into the outlet at the rear of the cottage. Maud read a lot. When there was a lull in the party across the lake, when everyone had gone in from the terrace and battened down inside and she couldn’t make out the music, she’d switch on the lamp and read whatever she’d brought down with the vodka.

  Lately, she’d been bringing to the pier her old college anthology of American poetry. She’d come upon a poem by Wallace Stevens called “The Idea of Order at Key West,” the point of which she was trying to grasp. This was not for her a mental exercise or a desire to further educate herself in the world of poetry. It was very important to her (although she couldn’t have said why) that she understand this poem. A lot, she felt, would then be revealed to her. She’d read parts of it to Sam, who couldn’t understand it either, and seemed more interested anyway in complaining about the lamp.

  Sam was always fussing about the lamp, telling her to get rid of it. “It’s dangerous,” Sam kept saying, though he was pretty vague about the danger. She asked if he was afraid it would electrocute the fish if it fell into the lake, and he said it would probably blow fuses all over the place. What was dangerous about that? she asked him. Just blowing a fuse?

  “Well, but don’t you think it must look kind of strange if they”—he nodded towards the party—“look over here? And see someone sitting under a lamp? It would look strange, I think.”

  She told him she needed the lamp for reading.

  The only person she knew who understood about books, how they would make you feel rooted to the ground and to the past, somehow, the way TV never could, was Miss Ruth Porte. Miss Ruth came to Shirl’s every evening except Thursdays and weekends for her dinner. She always sat in the high-backed rear booth, the side not facing the big television screen that rattled and wept its way through the day. It drove Miss Ruth Porte crazy, she said. Why didn’t they bring along a book—Miss Ruth liked Jane Austen—if they wanted entertainment?

  Miss Ruth would smooth her hand over her vellum-covered Jane Austen, carefully wrapped in plastic, and say, “It’s just like family, her people. It’s the kind of thing these new writers don’t understand, that readers want to feel this is a family they can almost walk and talk amongst. Writers these days”—it was never clear who they were—“only want to write about breakups and breakdowns, everything unraveling and everybody going to the devil.” She would pause then over her menu, open it and close it several times, not satisfied with the expression of whatever notion she had. “It doesn’t have to be good family—the dear Lord knows most families aren’t, and certainly Miss Jane Austen knows it. Let’s see, what’s the special?”

  Maud would stand patiently with her small book of checks and pencil for taking the order. Often she would make comments about whatever book she was reading, not because she wanted to soft-soap Miss Ruth (who was the last of the Porte family and rumored to be rich) but because there was hardly anyone else to talk about books to. Besides Wallace Stevens, Maud was reading F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Miss Ruth was very enthusiastic, saying he was much, much better than Ernest Hemingway, despite what the Book Mark people thought. This was a reading club that met every Thursday night, which was why she didn’t come into the Rainbow Café.

  Miss Ruth would always inquire about Maud’s son, Chad, whom she thought to be “splendid, just splendid,” and it was no idle compliment. It was right in line with what everyone else seemed to think, and Maud wished they’d stop talking about him as if he were a visiting divinity. Everyone seemed hanging around waiting to get anointed or something. He knew what to say to people, it was as simple as that. God only knew where he’d got this instinct, for it surely hadn’t come from her. She considered herself what they call pathologically shy, which was one reason she liked working at Shirl’s. All the customers were used to Shirl’s surliness, which had spilled over onto Charlene and Wash, the cook, and even the two part-time girls who came in when there was what Shirl thought of as a rush.

  Maud, compared with everyone else, was considered a real find. Shirl’s customers were always asking her what she was doing working here, and she would always answer “Just lucky, I guess,” with a little wink, and they would laugh. When they all sat in a line at the counter—Dodge and Sonny and Mayor Sims and sometimes even Wade Hayden from the post office, and Ubub and Ulub—and reacted to something in unison, turning their heads right or left, it would put Maud in mind of a decrepit chorus line, and then she would have to laugh, too.

  She knew it mystified the customers that she was working as a waitress when she had all of that education. It was hard to make people understand that education or not, there were some people who had no ambition in that way, who didn’t want a profession, and who didn’t want a lot of money, and she was one of them. So with her three years of college and her timid smile, she imagined they took her for someone with a sad past, like a duchess in exile.

  • • •

  Two speedboats ripped by, crossing in each other’s wake. The pier
felt the reverberation, the slap of the churning water, before it closed behind the boats, smoothly and seamlessly.

  Maud stuck an olive on a cocktail stirrer. The dish of olives sat on the wooden barrel she’d found behind the house. The stirrer had come from a small, flat box of six she’d found in the crawl space. Each had been carefully niched into an inner strip of white cardboard. They were clear glass topped with pink glass flamingoes, the sort of thing people never buy for themselves, but give as gifts. This one had never been used, or never been given.

  Another small craft cozied up to the dock over there. By now there were at least a dozen, more than usual because it was the Labor Day party. The guests didn’t all come by boat, of course; most of them probably drove down some old road on the other side of the house.

  Now from this silvery-white boat emerged the party-goers. She was too far away to see what they actually were wearing, beyond brief blobs of gold or blue or red, but she knew some of them must be wearing long gowns that made it difficult to maneuver out of the boat. The high, trilling voices of the women, the brief whoops of laughter from the men that accompanied their emergence from the silver cocoon of the rocking boat suggested to her that they were rescuing their hems from trailing in the water. Others would come down to the dock, with their drinks and cigarettes—she could see the coal ends throbbing on and off. They helped the new arrivals up and then all trooped back to the party, towards the patio. She wondered where the latecomers had come from. Was there another party farther down the lake that took precedence? That was hard to believe. Probably from their small cocktail parties in their smaller cottages they had met briefly with this as the final destination.

  This scene was repeated endlessly, until the dark lake over there was divided by strips of light from the boats, so many that it sometimes resembled a small marina.

  Maud had always been quite sure they were not ordinary people and that they were in some way acutely blessed, as one might be who would remain in a state of grace for a season. She never came to the pier during the day to see what the house over there looked like then. And she knew that this was the last party, the Labor Day party, for La Porte was basically a summer place, where the summer people threw open the shutters of the big Victorian houses right after Memorial Day and shut them after Labor Day. Then La Porte became a ghost town. To hear Shirl talk it was always a ghost town; the summer people came in their shorts and Docksiders, hung over and tan as only the rich seem to get, to do little more than buy the Sunday paper and milk.