“Over there,” Tom said, his plastic spoon between his thumb and index finger, pointing at the empty grassy park that looked like something large had been present there once. “That’s where the chicken plant was — smack against the harbor. The state shut it down finally.” Tom furrowed his thick brow as if the events were grave.
An asphalt walking path circled the grassy sward. A man in a silver wheelchair was just entering the track from a van parked up the hill. He began patiently pushing himself around the track while a little girl began frolicking on the infield grass, and a young woman — no doubt her mother— stood watching beside the van.
“How do you know about all that?” Nancy said, watching the man foisting his wheelchair forward.
“A guy, Mick, at the co-op’s from Bangor. He told me. He said now was the moment to snap up property here. In six months it’ll be too pricey. It’s sort of a last outpost.”
For some reason the wheelchair rider she was watching seemed like a young man, though even at a distance he was clearly large and bulky. He was arming himself along in no particular hurry, just making the circle under his own power. She assumed the little girl and the woman were his family, making up something to do in the empty, unpretty park while he took his exercise. They were no doubt tourists, too.
“Does that seem awful to you? Things getting expensive?” She breathed in the strong fish aroma off the little harbor’s muddy recesses. The sun had moved so she put her hand up to shield her face. “You’re not against progress, are you?”
“I like the idea of transition,” Tom said confidently. “It creates a sense of possibility.”
“I’m sure that’s how the Rockefellers and the Fisks felt,” she said, realizing this was argumentative, and wishing not to be. “Buy low, sell high, leave a beautiful corpse. That’s not the way that goes, is it?” She smiled, she hoped, infectiously.
“Why don’t we take a walk?” Tom pushed his plastic chowder bowl away from in front of him the way a policeman would who was used to eating in greasy spoons. When they were college kids, he hadn’t eaten that way. Years ago, he’d possessed lovely table manners, eaten unhurriedly and enjoyed everything. It had been his Irish mother’s influence. Now he was itchy, interested elsewhere, and his mother was dead. Though this habit was as much his nature as the other. It wasn’t that he didn’t seem like himself. He did.
“A walk would be good,” she said, happy to leave, taking a long last look at the harbor and the park with the man in the wheelchair slowly making his journey around. “Trips are made in search of things, right?” She looked for Tom, who was already off to the cashier’s, his back going away from her. “Right,” she said, answering her own question and coming along.
They walked the early-September afternoon streets of Belfast — up the brick-paved hill from the chowder house, through the tidy business section past a hardware, a closed movie theater, a credit union, a bank, a biker bar, a pair of older realtors, several lawyers’ offices and a one-chair barbershop, its window cluttered with high-school pictures of young-boy clients from years gone by. A slender young man with a ponytail and his hippie girlfriend were moving large cardboard boxes from a beater panel truck into one of the glass storefronts. Something new was happening there. Next door a shoe-store space had been turned into an organic bakery whose sign was a big loaf of bread that looked real. An art gallery was beside it. It wasn’t an unpleasant-feeling town, waiting quietly for what would soon surely arrive. She could see why Tom would like it.
From up the town hill, more of the harbor was visible below, as was the mouth of another estuary that trickled along an embankment of deep green woods into the Penobscot. A high, thirties-vintage steel bridge crossed the river the way the bridge had in Wiscasset, though everything was smaller here, less up-and-going, less scenic — the great bay blue and wide and inert, just another park, sterile, fishless, ready for profitable alternative uses. It was, Nancy felt, the way all things became. The presence of an awful-smelling factory or a poisonous tannery or a cement factory could almost seem like something to wish for, remember fondly. Tom was not thinking that way.
“It’s nice here, isn’t it?” she said to make good company of herself. She’d taken off her anorak and tied it around her waist vacationer-style. The beer made her feel loose-limbed, satisfied. “Are we down-east yet?”
They were stopped in front of another realtor’s window. Tom was again bent over studying the rows of snapshots. The walk had also made her warm, but with her sweater off, the bay breeze produced a nice sunny chill.
Another Conant tour bus arrived at the stoplight in the tiny central intersection, red-and-white like the ones that had let off Japanese consumers last night at Bean’s. All the bus windows were tinted, and as it turned and began heaving up the hill back toward Route 1, she couldn’t tell if the passengers were Asians, though she assumed so. She remembered thinking that these people knew something she didn’t. What had it been? “Do you ever think about what the people in buses think when they look out their window and see you?” she said, watching the bus shudder through its gears up the hill toward a blue Ford agency sign.
“No,” Tom said, still peering in at the pictures of houses for sale.
“I just always want to say, ‘Hey, whatever you’re thinking about me, you’re wrong. I’m just as out of place as you are.’” She set her hands on her hips, enjoying the sensation of talking with no one listening. She felt isolated again, unapprehended — as if for this tiny second she had achieved yet another moment of getting on with things. It was a grand feeling insofar as it arose from no apparent stimulus, and no doubt would not last long. Though here it was. This beleaguered little town had provided one pleasant occasion. The great mistake would be to try to seize such a feeling and keep it forever. It was good just to know it was available at all. “Isn’t it odd,” she said, facing back toward the Penobscot, “to be seen, but to understand you’re being seen wrong. Does that mean …” She looked around at her husband.
“Does it mean what?” Tom had stood up and was watching her, as if she’d come under a spell. He put his hand on her shoulder and gently sought her.
“Does it mean you’re not inhabiting your real life?” She was just embroidering a mute sensation, doing what married people do.
“Not you,” Tom said. “Nobody would say that about you.”
Too bad, she thought, the tourist bus couldn’t come by when his arm was around her, a true married couple out for a summery walk on a sunny street. Most of that would be accurate.
“I’d like to inhabit mine more,” Tom said as though the thought made him sad.
“Well, you’re trying.” She patted his hand on her shoulder and smelled him warm and slightly sweaty. Familiar. Welcome.
“Let’s view the housing stock,” he said, looking over her head up the hill, where the residential streets led away under an old canopy of elms and maples, and the house fronts were white and substantial in the afternoon sun.