The things my mother did alone before, she did now with Norman. They ran together. She taught him tai chi. He taught her to drink scotch and champagne — rather than the fruity rum drinks she drank before — although he said she taught him to moderate. They’d begun to gesture alike, share expressions, finish each other’s sentences.
“You know what it is about your mother?” Norman would say. And my mother would answer that with something different each day. Norman said he lost thirty pounds and twenty years being around my mother. They talked with and around me for ten minutes or so, asking me how I liked it on the island, whether I could get used to that kind of life, and then they’d disappear somewhere, carrying a blanket, a checkered tablecloth, a wicker picnic basket with wine bottles peeking out.
One time I was on my way over to visit and through their living room window I saw my mother walking on Norman’s back. He was agonized. His balding head was bright pink. He was completely naked, his flesh tanned and bundled at the base of his spine. She was in shorts and a T-shirt walking on top of him. She is a tall, strong woman, and, on top of Norman, she filled the room. I stared, fascinated, and then I saw my mother look over for a second. She caught my eye and smiled, a sly and heartless grin that scared the hell out of me. I tore from the window to the gravel road to the grass that ran down the coastline. I ran over wet rocks and seaweed and a long grass field until my face poured sweat and my lungs hurt.
After that I avoided her. I stopped my visits. When I heard her voice in the kids’ house, I locked myself in Lauren’s room or I escaped out the kitchen door. She left me notes and I didn’t respond. If Norman came by alone, to change a lightbulb or check the flower beds, I’d talk to him and try to act normal. I tried to forget my image of him, naked on the floor, grimacing in pain.
They kept to their routines, though. I still saw them in low crouches in the white light of morning. They still took boat trips in the afternoons.
In our last week, the fog had begun to scatter. At noon one morning I woke late and heard Walt playing a sad, dreamy song on the saxophone. I pressed my ear on the wall to hear. My ear vibrated. It surged warmth. I walked that morning to the general store with Charles and Nan. Norman had a charge account at Percy’s, and when we walked through the door, Percy jumped to attention as if we were something important.
“What can I do for you, Charlie?” he asked. Behind the glass at the front counter were fresh donuts, glazed and powdered, long twirling crullers and fat Danishes smothered in cheese or fruit, wild cinnamon rolls twirled around like long boa constrictors. And then there were meats: sausages, salamis, hams, and, on the shelf over them, hard crusty rolls and bagels and croissants. Charles pointed and Percy lunged to keep up, piling things with metal tongs into a sack. On the shelves behind Percy were pickled fish and imported crackers, tins of Danish cookies.
Nan had a list out and she filled a cart with vegetables and fruit and fish. Then, as if they were afterthoughts, she dropped boxes and cans into the cart — cereal, crackers, pasta, soup — like the guy who wins fifteen minutes to pull everything off the shelves at the P&C.
“Whatever you want you should get it now, Lou,” she said. “This is our shopping for the week.” They charged two cases of beer and four bottles of red wine and asked that everything be delivered.
When I saw my mother and Norman walk through the front door of the store, I ducked back into the freezer room. I waited there in that cold metal box, watching through a crack. I saw Nan talking to them, saw them buy cheese and a loaf of bread, and then I watched them leave. By the time I left the freezer room I was shivering and my lips felt hard and brittle.
At the counter I bought a brownie and I walked with Charles and Nan down the road with it.
In the afternoon it began to rain and music streamed through the house. Walt drank a beer on the porch and I asked him for one.
“Hey,” he asked Deborah, “is it cool? Can Lou here have a beer?”
“I don’t know,” Deborah said. She looked at me from the side of her eye.
“Sounds pretty treacherous. First a beer, then what?”
Walt opened a beer for me.
“Here you go, Skipper,” he said.
He sprawled himself atop an old mattress. There were wicker benches and seats in the other corner of the porch, but no one ever sat on them. They were like roped-off museum pieces. Walt was bare chested and he wore what looked like a doctor’s green scrub pants. His face was flecked with patches of beard, like a comic book pirate. He sang along to “Wild Horses,” his vowels and consonants indistinguishable.
I walked with my beer to the front of the house where Nan rubbed sandpaper over an old desk.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“Nothing really, just trying to get some thinking done. Is that a beer?”
“Yup.”
She didn’t look at me or stop what she was doing.
“What are you thinking about?” I asked.
“Nothing important.” Her arm worked fast, as though she were driving something unspeakable out of the desk. I wanted to help her sand. I wanted to think alongside her.
“Can I sand too?” I asked.
“Lou? What’s the deal with your mom? What’s this all about?” she asked.
When I walked back to the porch, Walt and Deborah had switched from beers to harder stuff and they were saying nasty things about people I didn’t know.
The rain had let up a bit so I jogged down the road past Percy’s and then walked along the ocean. After a half hour or so, I headed inland through a wooded area, over patches of shrub and vine. Then I cut to the other island.
The downpour began soft and warm and the wind spread over my face. My high-tops filled with water. I decided not to care about anything.
When I made it back to town, I hung out in the video arcade. I played video games, one after another until I’d spent everything in my pocket — sixteen dollars. I played until it was one o’clock and they closed the place down.
When I arrived back at the house, I heard voices downstairs: Deborah’s and a male voice I didn’t recognize, a date, I guessed, because there was low jazzy music and the flicker of candles and incense. I sat on the newly varnished stairs awhile listening to the conversation floating through the air like cigarette rings, thoughts unfinished, questions not answered. It didn’t seem as if they were talking with each other at all. They were confessing, giving up parts of themselves.
The man talked about a sailing trip he took with eleven people, as part of Outward Bound. They stayed on the boat six days, no cabins or bathrooms.
“We hung our butts over these little white pails. We got to know each other, that’s for sure. There was nothing to do except get to know each other. I know a little about everyone on the boat, more than I know about most of my friends.”
“No bathrooms,” Deborah said, as if making a mental note on a house she might buy. “What did you sleep on?”