by Barry Rachin
Two thoughts came to mind. When her spouse, Jake, cleared out, a subtle settling process took hold. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. All the white noise of his endless finagling, scheming, angling and parasitic machinations fell away. The din dissolved instantaneously in blissful silence. Maddie bathed in the lush tranquility, luxuriated in the rich nothingness of total peace. No more bah, blah, blah. Maddie wandered about the house with a shitty grin, looking as though she had lost her sanity. But she lost nothing. Rather, the woman had regained her fundamental essence.
One day in late October after her divorce, Maddie drove to the outlet stores in Kittery, Maine and walked the malls. She made the two-hour drive alone in the late fall with the windows rolled down and a chilled breeze stinging her cheeks. The season long over, nobody was there other than a few diehard tourists. It didn't matter. Maddie felt a rush of sublime serenity. On a whim, she took the interstate 95 north straight through Boston, slicing across the lower edge of New Hampshire up around Rye Beach and Portsmouth. She could have never done such a thing when Jake was around.
Actually, that wasn't totally accurate. She could have taken him along for the ride, but then there would be the endless prattle, the mindless nattering that sapped her spirit - the blustery blather of a lost, clueless, unsalvageable soul. Independence had its downside. Maddie still suffered bouts of loneliness and self-recrimination; or maybe it was guilt for going against the grain, thumbing her nose at social convention. But that didn't last long.
* * * * *
Finishing the yard work, Maddie went indoors to pack. After supper, she was taking her daughter, Angie, for a Cape Cod weekend getaway. They had a cousin's cabin through Sunday - a mini¬-vacation in Mashpee. Climbing the stairs, she entered the girl’s bedroom. Angie was curled up on the bed reading a paperback. On the cover of the book was a picture of a bearded Hindu poised in full lotus position. A chalkboard hung from the mystic’s neck by a rawhide string.
“Is that required reading, or are you off on another spiritual odyssey?”
With the breakup of the marriage, Angie developed a spiritual wanderlust. A short flirtation with Mary Baker Eddy and the Christian Scientists played itself out in trips to a musty reading room on Huntington Avenue and an occasional Sunday service. That lasted a sum total of three months. Later Maddie found several Hari Krishna brochures wrapped in a furry tangle of dust bunnies under her daughter’s bed. She never broached the issue.
More recently, Angie had gone off with a friend to spend the weekend at a Sufi commune in upstate New York. The teens drove the entire length of the Massachusetts Turnpike, through the scenic Berkshires crossing over the state line heading westerly toward the Catskills. Nothing came of that either. There were no metaphysical earthquakes. The girl returned from the land of the whirling dervishes with a bad case of diarrhea and craving for junk food.
Angie threw the book aside. “I’m hungry. Could you fix me a Mexican omelet?”
In the kitchen Maddie cracked a couple eggs and scrambled them briskly with a fork. She diced some sweet onion together with green pepper and warmed them in a pan until the translucent onions turned pearly. While the vegetables were cooking she laid a row of sliced pepperoni on the edge of a plate and opened a bag of cheddar cheese. "Mr. Osborne is leaving his wife."
“Cripes!" Angie bellowed, making a sarcastic snorting sound. "At the rate we're going, there won't be a married couple - happy or otherwise - within a five-mile radius."
"That's a bit extreme." Maddie added a dash of salt and pepper; when the vegetables were sufficiently caramelized, she slid them directly from the pan into the egg and then poured the batter back into the pan. Drizzling cheese over the egg, she topped the concoction with a layer of pepperoni. When the egg began to sizzle, she added a splash of water and covered the pan, poaching the extravagant omelet. Steam - that was the trick. The bottom never burned and it came out perfect every time.
Maddie lifted the lid. A cloud of sweet smelling moistness floated toward the ceiling. Folding the sides of the omelet toward the middle, she added another tablespoon of water then lowered the lid. "Everything's on the hush-hush. The wife apparently doesn't know yet." Maddie slid the egg onto a plate, placed a dollop of sour cream on top of the omelet then rounded off the concoction with a splash of mild salsa.
Finding a seat at the kitchen table she watched as her daughter ate. The two shared little physical resemblance. Angie was big boned with a fleshy nose and bronze complexion. Not pretty in the traditional sense but attractive, sensuous even, in her quirky, understated way. “This is wicked good!” The girl smeared more salsa on what was left of the omelet. The oils from the pepperoni bled into the egg staining it with an orange glow. "I wouldn't mind a guy like Mr. Osborne for a step-father."
"Well that's not going to happen," Maddie shot back just a bit too insistently.
"Why not?"
"For God's sake, the poor slob isn't even separated much less divorced! More to the point, his wife doesn't know that her husband's moving out." Maddie was feeling queasy; as though she might need to lie down to clear her head. “About that weird book,” she pressed, shifting the conversation elsewhere.
“It’s no big deal!” Angie replied. After a moment she added, “Swami Muktananda got disillusioned with the material world, so he took a vow of silence.”
“Language being corrosive to the spirit,” Maddie added. How many times early on in the marriage had Maddie wished Jake had taken a similar vow?
“At first he communicated by scribbling brief messages on a chalk board. Then, after a couple years, the swami announced that he would put away the board and begin speaking again. But when the moment arrived, he had a change of heart, went into spiritual seclusion and never spoke another word for the remainder of his worldly existence.”
Maddie squirted a stream of dish detergent into the sink and let the water fill. “You’re not planning - ”
“For God’s sakes,” Angie exploded, “it's just some dopey book!”
Maddie tapped her daughter on the wrist. “Are you packed for the trip?”
“All set.” Angie rose from the table and began putting food away. The women were only taking bare necessities - a couple changes of underwear, towels, sheets and no cosmetics. There was no one Maddie had to impress on the island. Rather, she had planned the trip as down time - a chance to decompress, recharge her emotional battery.
* * * * *
The drive to Cape Cod was uneventful. Few people were heading south. The sugar maples and oaks gradually gave way to scrub pine rooted in bleached soil. A huge hawk sat far up in a scrawny pine tree just outside of Fall River. As they sped past, the bird spread its massive wings and flew off to the north, on an updraft of super-heated air. “Your father’s stopping by to see you Tuesday,” Maddie said. The predatory bird had nudged her memory, a free association of sorts.
“Whatever.” Angie curled up in a fetal position next to her mother with her knees jammed up against the dash. They reached the Bourne Bridge that took them across the Cape Cod Canal in record time. Halfway around the rotary, they picked up route six that meandered all the way to Hyannis, where the Kennedys lived and, still further north, to Provincetown.
Finally they reached the causeway that connected the island where the cabin was situated. “What the heck is that?” Angie pointed to a large bushy object perched on top of a telephone pole. The pole was forty feet tall and tilted at a queer angle. A staccato, chirping whistle filtered down to the marshy wetlands.
“Osprey nest.” Maddie replied. With their white breasts and bellies, Ospreys were one of the largest birds of prey in North America. The wingspan alone could reach well over five feet. The Ospreys fed almost exclusively on fish. "The birds are protected under the endangered species act and with good reason.”
A large bird suddenly appeared, soaring in from the bay and landed on top of the rickety structure. “They look like they can fend for themselves,” Angie replied.
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Maddie shook her head. The species had gone into a steady decline since the early nineteen fifties due to pesticide poisoning. But after the ban on DDT, the massive birds bounced back. They built their nests frequently on manmade structures like telephone poles, duck blinds and even channel markers. Easing passed the pole on the thin slip of roadway, they found the cabin a short distance nestled between a row of holly and slender birch trees. What little light remained quickly bled out of the sky and the New England night arrived serene and darkly beautiful. From the upstairs bedroom Maddie looked out over a calm bay. Too far away to be seen, the island of Martha’s Vineyard rose out of the Atlantic waters due south. Nantucket, the former whaling center, sat only a handful of mile off to the east. The women quickly arranged the linen, washed up and got ready for bed. Angie shuffled into the bedroom barefoot. “Why doesn't Mr. Osborne love his wife anymore?"
"I don't know."
"Does he have a girlfriend?"
"No. He said he wasn't cheating and I believe him." Maddie sighed and pulled my daughter close, rubbing the nape of her neck.”
She squeezed her mother’s hand. “I’m tired. Goodnight.”
A thousand questions in search of a thousand and one answers. It was an old Arabic saying Maddie read somewhere, possibly in college, the implication being that a person, no matter how sincere and earnest, can search a lifetime and still come up short. She listened to her daughter’s steady breathing – deep and serene. The sleep of youth with little to no excess emotional baggage. As tired as Maddie was from the drive south, she hovered on the edge of sleep but could not slip across the threshold. Was there some bit of unfinished business?
Why was Trevor Osborne leaving his wife? Kimberly wasn't a bad person. There was nothing inherently wrong with her. But neither was there very much of anything right about the woman. She was a trophy wife, a meaningless appendage. Kimberly Osborne was Jake in drag.
* * * * *
In the morning they watched the harbormaster cruise up the channel from the breakwater. During the summer he checked permits for anyone digging clams. Locals waded out waist deep with a wire clam rake, which they scraped along the sandy bottom. When they hit a hard object, they scooped it up. Mussels, smallish clams, succulent quahogs, even spiny starfish were all fair game.
They drove back across the narrow slip of land that connected the island to the mainland. Wild tiger lilies, yellow with speckled mouths and lavender-fringed blossoms fading toward porcelain centers, rimmed the inland grasses. High up in the telephone pole, the osprey was feeding her young. Maddie pulled off the road onto the stiff marsh grass so they could get a better view. “Osprey eggs seldom hatch at the same time," she explained. "There could be a lapse of five days between first born and the last chicks." As Maddie explained it, the older chick dominated the younger ones. If hunting was good, there’s no problem among the chicks. But if food was scarce, older ones wouldn’t share even to the point of starvation. The women craned their heads far back but all they could see was the huge basket-shaped nest fashioned from twigs and branches.
The twosome ate breakfast at a bagel shop near the rotary then drove out to South Cape Beach. The beach was empty except for an occasional surf caster and older couple searching for polished sea glass. The bluefish had been running since late June and sea bass were also still plentiful.
A flock of grayish-brown whimbrels bobbed easily on the calm water. Near a hillock in the distance, stiff plume grass and salt spray roses bloomed close by a marshy wetland where phragmites reed rose four feet out of the water on elegant, plumed stems. Angie meandered near the shallow surf, dodging stranded horseshoe crabs and rubbery stalks of seaweed. A pale jellyfish floated by, sucked in toward shore then thrust back to sea by the whimsical currents. They skirted a cove and, on the far end, found a middle-aged man laying out the frame of a smallish kite on a terrycloth beach towel. Thirty feet away a team of three men was flying similar bat-shaped kites in precision drill. "Those are synchronized flying kites," Maddie said. With a hand shielding her eyes from the bright sun, she stared up into the sky. “Very expensive.”
Angie followed the trio of kites as they pirouetted in a perfect figure-eight then hovered motionless for a fraction of a second before darting off in another combination of twists and turns “Next month there's an oceanfront festival off Newport. Kite clubs from as far away as Connecticut and New Jersey will be competing. My parents and I went every year.”
The festival featured teams from all over New England. The more sophisticated models were constructed of lightweight, space-age metals and colorful fabrics. Four-member groups took turns running through a series of choreographed maneuvers, with the team leader calling out directions seconds in advance of each, new routine.
"Too bad!" Angie said, gesturing with her eyes. The end kite on the far left suddenly veered off in the wrong direction from the other three. "He missed the call." The young girl had never seen anything quite like it. The kites dived and soared in perfect - or, as in the previous, botched effort, near perfect - unison, covering a span of a hundred feet out toward the ocean.
"See how they adjust the height and direction,” Maddie said, “by moving their hands."
Angie had been too busy enjoying the acrobatics to notice how the men handled the strings. But now she could see, as the kites tacked in a new direction, the three sets of hands moving in and out, up and down, accordingly.
"Kites are easy,” Maddie thought on the walk back. Angie was skipping about in the tumbling surf. “When something goes wrong with the routine, you adjust the line or check the metal kite frame. With human nature it's not so simple.” Maddie glanced over her shoulder at her daughter bringing up the rear. Angie looked up and smiled - a quirky, darkly beautiful expression that pulled her malleable features at cross-purposes.
“There was a letter from the court,” Angie said.
Up ahead a tall man in his thirties was surfcasting with a metal lure that sailed far out over the breaking surf in a looping arc. “I asked the judge for a few extra dollars alimony, but it wasn’t meant to be.”
Angie put her hands inside the pouch on her windbreaker. “Why didn’t you ask dad directly?” Maddie had asked Jake on several occasions - more like begged. But she had no desire to tell her daughter. “He doesn’t get it, does he?” Angie said, anticipating her mother's unspoken thoughts.
“No, I guess not.”
Monkey syndrome. That’s what Maddie called Jake's affliction. Baby monkeys developed at the same rate as humans up to a certain fixed point. Then the primates hit an intellectual brick wall and stopped learning. Jake was a conniver, an ace at using the system to beat the system, but as a parent his potential petered out shortly after his daughter was born. Now, strangely enough, Angie had come into her own and, in myriad ways that Jake could never comprehend, outstripped her father.
They hung back to the left of the surfcaster, watching him heave the monofilament line out over the water. “Any luck?”
“Not today.” He kept jerking at the rod with a spastic pumping action to simulate an injured minnow on the end of the line. “Too windy… fish aren’t cooperating.” He gestured with his head so they could pass safely.
“Dad’s got this new girl friend,” Angie said.
“What happened to Gloria?” The young girl shrugged. “What’s the new one like?”
Angie flicked her hair back over a shoulder. The sun caught the blond highlights in the dusky, chestnut colored strands. She didn’t answer right away. “She’s nice enough.”
Another unwitting victim. When an Osprey caught a fish, it always carried the prey back to the nest tail down so its flight was unencumbered. Maddie imagined Jake carrying his latest romantic quarry back to the domestic nest in similar fashion but kept the cynicism to herself. A soft breeze was blowing now diagonally across the beach. They could smell the pebbly seaweed drying in the damp sand. Up ahead another fisherman was threading a sea worm onto a barbed hook. The worm was
blood red and slimy, its tiny legs and pincers writhing in agony. In a pail next to the fishing gear was a half dozen flounder, flat and smooth. “I’m going to take a vow of silence,” Maddie spoke in a confidential tone. “Show up to school on Monday morning with a chalkboard on a string.”
“And how exactly are you going teach eighth-grade English?”
“Don’t know. Haven’t thought that far ahead yet.”
A chalkboard and a string. Maddie was talking nonsense, but behind the silly blather hid a darker reality. The brown-skinned holy man could parade around with a goofy chalkboard dangling from his scrawny neck. But maybe he was a colossal faker - that’s faker, not ‘fakir’, as in religious mendicant - and who would know the difference? He never spoke a solitary word just smiled incessantly. Enlightened soul or simpleton - besides levitation, mind travel to distant cosmic galaxies and sleeping on a bed on rusty, sixteen-penny nails, did the mystic possess any practical skills? Could he teach eighth graders how to conjugate a verb? Navigate a fifteen year old through life's mind fields? Maddie was tired of all the phony baloney, the verisimilitude, the appearance of truth, the sham. Maybe the bearded yogi in the geriatric diaper was on to something. Or just maybe he was laughing at humanity behind his silvery whiskers.
* * * * *
On Sunday morning a damp chill gripped the air, but the sun quickly rose over the bay nudging the temperature up to a comfortable eighty degrees. Crossing the inlet, the Osprey were feasting on the remains of a large fish. The mother held the mangled body in her beak while the fledglings ripped the flesh to pieces.
They cruised south on Route 28 into the center of Hyannis where the harbor was filled with private yachts and sailboats. On the main square bordering the wharf, they found a few boutiques open early but came away empty handed. But for the colonial New England architecture and oak trees, they could just as easily been on Beverly Hills’ Rodeo Drive. They bought cappuccinos and croissants at a gourmet pastry shop and lounged outside on metal folding chairs with their food.
