And what a world! For the next ten minutes he stood (swayed, actually) by himself, trying to make sense of it by going over in his mind what he believed to be true, allowing what he hoped were hard facts to surface, like gaseous bubbles through mud, into his wobbly consciousness. He wasn’t in Wellfleet, he was in Maine. He’d come here with a woman not his wife to attend his daughter’s wedding. To this same wedding his wife had also come, accompanied by a man who was not Griffin. His left eye was swollen tightly shut as a result of his being sucker punched (why?) by one of his brothers-in-law (which?). His father-in-law had, like a character in a fairy tale, got trapped in a tree. Highly improbable-all of it-and yet evidently true. It wasn’t someone’s opinion; no alternative theory had been advanced. He would have liked to talk it over with someone, but even his mother seemed to have abandoned him.
But hold on, he’d spoken to somebody after being yanked from under the hedge, hadn’t he? Who, though? And what had they talked about? It couldn’t have happened more than five minutes ago, but the memory was gone. He thought about joining the others over at the hedge where Harve was still imprisoned. Joy and Laura were over there, but so were Andy and Ringo, which made him super… what was the word? Unnecessary. The twins were there, too, and if he joined them without invitation, they might punch him again. He doubted this would actually happen, but couldn’t be sure. He still didn’t understand why they punched him the first time, and whatever their reason, it might still pertain. Super…?
Gradually, the dense Wellfleet fog in his brain began to lift, and then he noticed a woman sitting all by herself on a bench facing the ocean. Her scowl, together with how defiantly her arms were crossed over her chest, suggested that neither the hedge nor the crowd fixated on it was of the slightest interest to her. Griffin was aware he should know who this woman was, so he concentrated on her identity until it finally revealed itself. She was Dot, Harve’s second wife. Pleased with himself for recognizing her and anxious to test the coherence of his speech, he decided to join her. When he sat down, though, she said, “Go away,” without even glancing in his direction to see who it was.
Having only just arrived and feeling woozy from his journey, he was unwilling to depart quite yet, not until he’d discovered what she was doing all by herself, glowering at the unoffending ocean, when her husband had just been swallowed by a tree. An idea occurred to him that might explain it, so he said, “They can be tough…” He meant to go on but didn’t, his voice sounding remote in the echo chamber of his head.
She did turn to regard him now, her eyes narrowing. She seemed to be trying to decide if his sympathy was something she wanted, or if her misery was company enough. “That,” she said, pointing at his eye with her index finger, its tip sculpted to a frighteningly lethal point, “is what I feel like when I’m around those people. Like I’m being…pummeled. Bludgeoned. Battered. Cudgeled.”
That seemed to Griffin a tad overstated, but he knew what she meant, and having just struggled to construct a four-word sentence fragment, he envied her ability to summon so many impressive, violent synonyms. Clearly nobody’d punched her lights out recently. Together they swiveled on the bench to afford themselves a better view of what was transpiring at the hedge. People seemed to be taking turns talking to it. Had the bush been burning, the whole thing would have been biblical.
“All he ever talks about is that woman,” Dot said, as if she were able to see Harve at the center of the yew. “I want to scream, ‘She’s dead, she’s dead, she’s dead’.” When she said this, the volume in Griffin ’s head went down, back up, back down again, a wire loose somewhere.
“They were married a long time,” he ventured, benignly, he thought.
But she turned quickly and glared at him. “Then why marry me?” she demanded.
For the life of him Griffin couldn’t think of a reason for Harve or anyone else to marry her, and she must have seen this register on his face, because she was suddenly standing over him with her fists clenched. Good Lord, he thought, was she going to punch him, too? He barely knew her. “Superfluous,” he said, the word he’d needed earlier suddenly coming to him.
“Why don’t you just…”
When she paused, Griffin ’s mind raced ahead, supplying the words fuck off, though of course women in their late sixties didn’t say that.
“… fuck off,” she concluded, and strode away in the general direction of the parking lot.
He watched her go, then glanced at the spot where she’d been sitting, trying to decide if the woman had really been there, if the conversation had actually taken place. A couple minutes later his daughter, looking exhausted and despondent, sank down next to him on the bench and rested her head on his shoulder. Which was nice. “Where’s Andy?” he said, hoping that wherever he was he’d stay there for a while.
“He’s gone to get the car,” she told him, or at least that’s what he thought she said. She was sitting right next to him, but he could barely hear her. “You ready to go?”
“Where?”
She lifted her head to regard him. “The hospital?”
“Shouldn’t we wait until they extra… extratake…”
“Extricate?”
“… Harve from the hedge?”
“Dad,” she said, her mother’s sternness creeping into her voice, “we’ve already had this conversation.”
“When?”
“Ten minutes ago. You were supposed to wait for me by the tree.”
He was?
“Look at me,” she said, taking him by the chin. The sensation wasn’t nearly as pleasurable as having her rest her head on his shoulder. “Your eyes are dilated. Did you land on your head?”
He had no memory of landing at all, but the last thing he wanted was for her to be worried about him. “I’m fine,” he assured her. “People need to quit punching me and telling me to fuck off, but otherwise…” Unable to complete the sentence, he considered the word count impressive, nonetheless.
Behind them a chain saw roared to life, and its sheer volume reconnected something in Griffin ’s cranial circuitry. The world’s many varied sounds were again playing at their normal volume. Also, the earlier conversation with his daughter, the one in which he’d promised to wait by the tree, was suddenly there in its entirety. It was she and Andy who’d pulled him from beneath the hedge, he now recalled.
“I must be allergic to yew,” Laura said, scratching at her forearms.
“To me?”
She stopped scratching and looked at him.
“Oh. Yew. Gotcha.” Now that he looked at them, her arms were grotesquely swollen.