STRANGERS
The only grocery store on the island was closing. It had been closing for a while, but no one said much about it, because no one saw a point in guessing at what you couldn’t know. That’s what people said if someone brought it up, mentioning how the shelves were nearly empty, or what someone had overheard someone else saying. Doesn’t do much good guessing at it, someone would say. When what’s going to happen is going to happen anyway. Some people on the island had given in to it, but others understood the beauty of those shelves winnowing down. That what it required would be nothing short of the New England stoicism so little required now.
Gene toed a box aside. He put items carefully in his basket. He didn’t get too close to the rotting vegetables. At the checkout the woman told him it was official. I guess we’ve been figuring that, he said, bagging while she checked.
We’ll have to get groceries on the mainland now, she said.
Suppose that’s the only way, he said.
He paid, then handed the plastic bags to his grandsons to carry to the truck while he went around back to see if anything had been thrown out that he might want, but the Dumpster was nearly empty. The kids were already in the truck when he returned, so he got in and started it. He liked to look over while he drove — at the way the wind went through their hair, at the broken-down toughness of the truck — but he never said anything about it. What they must have thought of him, though they probably didn’t think much about him, probably just thought of him as a permanent thing.
It was a Thursday so their mother was coming the next day from the mainland. He tried to think of what he hadn’t found at the store to tell her to pick up, but it always seemed they got along just fine. Though she’d notice and say, There’s no orange juice for them, and what could you say to that? Seems they’re doing fine without orange juice, he’d say. She was always tired, seemed to him nothing was needed more than anything else.
At home the kids stayed outside and he put the groceries away, putting the plastic bags under the sink to use as trash bags. Kneeling, he found it hard to believe that there would be an end to these bags. He had been using them for as long as he could remember and thought they were always going to be there.
Their mother came over on the afternoon ferry. You look tired, he said when she got in the truck.
I’m fine.
I’m sure you’re fine, but that doesn’t mean you don’t look tired.
She turned, the light hitting her hair in a soft way, changing the amber to pink. I had a hot dog before the ferry, she said. It was terrible. Sort of wonderful, but terrible, too.
He liked picking her up when it was just him. He remembered when he used to wait for girls when he was young, and if they were beautiful, and you were sitting by the ferry, and there were boats and birds when they came, it felt full of hopefulness. He told her the boys were next door at Bea’s. They like it there, she said, the horses and chickens. We should at least get them a cat.
She had missed the morning ferry because she had fallen asleep after breakfast in the attic room she rented on the mainland for half the week. She wondered what was becoming of her. It wasn’t what she had anticipated when she took the job the month before, the way she felt in the morning with the window open and the ocean, seeing a sliver of it in the distance. It was the foghorn that woke her to find she had missed the ferry. She had a little rice and pickles, and ate on the kitchen floor, then called Gene. That’s fine, he had said. There’ll be some quiet for you. I’ve had so much quiet, she said. Everyone thought of how exhausted she must be and how she would need time to adjust, but they didn’t think of how she was alone in a room most of the time. The week before she had gotten a library card and taken out a stack of movies. She watched two the first night, liking how a movie lights a dark room. She left the popcorn bowl on the floor, and in the morning sat on the sofa, which was a wool plaid that gave the back of her legs a rash, and ate the popcorn with her coffee, then smoked a cigarette.
When they reached the house, Gene got her bag from the truck and she went inside to wash up, then they had a drink on the patio. Angelo’s is closing, he said.
I guess it will be easier for us because I can bring stuff over, she said.
Her back had a slight bend to it, and her shoulders hunched forward. She wasn’t quite so beautiful as she was quick, the way her thoughts carried her forward, even though you didn’t know what she was thinking most of the time. She pushed her bare feet in front of her and leaned back in the chair. They watched off in the distance, but different distances.
After the drink she changed into her bathing suit, then walked to pick up the boys while Gene went inside to think over dinner. He thought of how there weren’t vegetables and he was going to have to do a good job of covering up this fact. He had tried to grow a garden several years ago and found he was ineffectual, that he was only good at immediate things and that the vegetables, when not grown yet, were difficult for him to worry over. He walked down the street to the stand for corn and tomatoes. When Meghan and the kids came back he had the corn boiled and the tomatoes sliced thin on a plate with salt and pepper on them.
When Meghan returned to the mainland, she changed quickly after work then went to the Wharf, a restaurant along the pier with an outside bar. Women there were not very pretty, though there was something to them, with their skin so tan you felt if you pressed your finger the mark would stay for a long time. She wondered if their breasts were the same color. They wore cheaply made clothes that might not have been inexpensive, thin white pants, tank tops with straps that braided and crossed in back. Oddly straight hair. What this place must require of you, she thought. Her shoulder-length hair lifted and curled in the humidity, and she’d taken in her clothes herself. She looked the same as she did ten years ago. There was no style at all.
She kept her handbag at her feet, thought of the beauty of the island and wondered why that wasn’t enough to make you want to stay. When she took the job, people thought she’d find another husband, and then would move the children to the mainland. She looked at the men at the bar and imagined one of them as that husband. It seemed a funny thought now, even though she had thought, at first, that it was likely, as she would be working at the hospital. But she had found that the men at work had wives, or there was something off about them. She hadn’t accounted for the hardness in the people who were left, like her, without someone.
She sat near a wood column at the corner of the bar. It was made of driftwood. There was a net-and-driftwood design here that wasn’t on the island. There was no need there to remind yourself you were living on the water. A man put his hand along her back so as not to bump into her. When she turned, his face was hard, and he had the same skin, and his hair was lightened by the sun, and he had on a collar shirt. They all looked as if they had gone golfing, or like they had become middle school teachers because that’s the job you could find and it meant summers off, though their imagination hadn’t given them much of an idea for those summers.
There was a group of men who looked like teachers, and women in white pants across the bar, drinking heavily, and after a time one of the men separated and sat next to her. She thought she had come this time to start something with one of them, but when the man talked to her, she pressed her body back against the wood column.
She liked waiting for the ferry, liked the people waiting with coolers and old nylon packs that they’d been using for years. When the boat came, she stepped on and took a seat near the bow.
Gene was waiting on the island with the kids. The two boys were sitting on the bench together, and he stood behind. She gave him the paper bag of groceries. All her things fit in a second bag. He asked that she start getting plastic for the groceries so they could use them as trash bags. They talked quietly of household things.