by Mary Robison
“Lemme see that,” Raymond said.
The storm was hammering the inn. Above the wind’s roar, there were thuds as strayed tree limbs slammed the walls. From a floor above came a little shattering noise, the explosion of window glass.
Raymond examined the medal.
I said, “Raf gave that to me. He claims it’s what’s kept him alive through wars and vile presidents.”
“ ‘O Mary conceived without sin . . .’ ” Raymond read aloud. “Some break, no original sin. Hell of a starting discount,” he said.
“I don’t know,” I said, taking back the medal. “It doesn’t seem right using this as a lucky piece.”
I went to the window, cranked it open, unlatched and pounded apart the shutters. I whirl-whipped the chain a few revolutions and cast the medal into the snow in the side yard.
“Don’t worry, it wasn’t blessed by priests or anything,” I told Raymond. “Although Raf probably dunked it in drinks and baptized it a few times.”
Raymond emerged smiling from the shower, wearing my blue terrycloth bathrobe and his head in a towel burnoose.
“What kind of band are they?” I asked, from a cross- legged position on the bed.
“Gimme me the choices,” Raymond said.
“Well, I don’t know what’s up with bands these days. I suppose they could be political, or heavy metal thrash, or postmodern punk, or retro-paisley-acid rock, or a neo-folk group, like troubadours.”
Raymond shook off the towel and used it to blot his hair. He said, “The first thing is, they don’t have guitars or drums or nothin’. And they can’t sing; they couldn’t carry a tune in a Peterbilt truck. They’re bankrolled by one of ’em’s father—that one that wears the beret? What he told me is they’re a theoretical band out on a theoretical tour. Which all just means they don’t play music, but talk about how they would play it if they was real, not theoretical.”
“Yeah, but, Raymond, think of all the bad songs they’re sparing the world,” I said.
“It’s a quieter, better place,” he said.
I said, “In fact, I wish there were theoretical poets who never wrote. That’d clear the decks for me. What’s the name of the band?”
“None. The beret guy said a name would legitimize ’em as havin’ a profit motive, and that’d make them whores of commerce. But I believe they tried thinking of a name, and couldn’t come up with any,” Raymond said.
The band and other storm victims were in the sitting room now, dozing or drowsily watching flames snap on the driftwood in the fireplace.
I went past them and into a utility closet. I gathered flashlights, boxes of storm candles, every filled hurricane lamp. In three trips I toted the stuff to the registry desk. I buckled on a belt with an encased flashlight, and pocketed a box of blue-tip stick matches.
Dottie already had a flashlight and lamps waiting on her nightstand in the Commodore’s Suite. She was watching her portable TV: the Patriots losing to the Jets.
Fredo rested on his side, half under the bed’s pinwheel quilt.
Without much notice, Dottie was smoking a joint and, with her free hand, stroking Fredo’s ear. “So, Paige,” she said to me. “You’ve got problems.”
“Two problems, yes,” I said.
“Stop him! Stop him!” Dottie yelled at the television.
She drew on her cigarette. “Don’t ask what I’d do, I’m in the same position. Between Mario and Paul? You couldn’t know Paul. He’s a fellow I date, a vet from Hampham. I mean a pet vet. Anyway, the point is . . . just a second. First and ten, way to go! What they do decides . . . I’ve forgotten what.”
I said, “So have I. Blow that stuff the other way, Mother. Couldn’t I just live here and have Raymond and Raf take turns visiting me?”
“It would have to count as both your birthday and Christmas presents,” Dottie said.
“Raf’s a bad husband,” I said. “I deserve a good husband. Why do I still want Raf?”
“He’s an awfully good time,” Dottie said.
Fredo stirred and peered about as if looking for something.
“Your jingle ball’s in the kitchen,” my mother told him.
The dog disappeared, whimpering as he hunted his toy.
“Let me ask something,” I said. “Did it ever bother you, Mario’s being known as an artist and that his statues and sculptures will endure long beyond us?”
“Bother me? No. Oh, no. I couldn’t live with it, though; I had to make my own way.”
The lights went, and as the blowers on the furnace died I heard a sagging noise. I was traveling a dim hall. I set down my lamp, removed its glass chimney, adjusted the frayed wick, fired it with a stick match.
In the lamp’s light, moving toward the kitchen, I fitted storm candles into the inkwell-like holders along the way.
“I knew it,” Dottie said in the kitchen. “Fourth down, seventy-five yards from their own end zone, fourth quarter, power out.”
Her face in the lamp shadow seemed one-dimensional.
She twisted a stove knob and a burner’s blue ring of flame rose with a poof. “Gas is O.K. I’ll go see about the pilot.”
Her mules bonked on the stairs down to the dirt-floored cellar. She called back, “The furnace has an electric pilot but you can relight the ignition by hand!”
The rectangular window over the sink was vaguely green and smeared with the reflection of my lamp.
I heard Dottie swear. I heard a whimpered curse. From far down on the Point Road I heard sirens, but their shrieks got no closer and intermixed with the yowling wind.
Raymond appeared. In the light wash, his suntan deepened, his teeth looked more even and white. “What’s happening? I heard a snowplow.”
I said, “I think it’s the Mass. troopers, trying to clear the Point Road. Then the salt and sand crews’ll try to keep it clear.”
I ladled chowder into mugs. My hair got moist from the soup’s steam. My sweatshirt had the smell of burnt hickory.
Behind me stood Pat Gilly, a lobsterman from the village. In his fist he squeezed a bulky stein that brimmed with frothy beer. Pat had ginger hair, freckles, a lot of size.
For the third time he said, “By God, I love your big ass, Paige.”
“Thank you again, Pat.”
“This is the worst since seventy-eight. In that one, we lost every tree in our yard and half the roof of our house. What a girl you are, tall as I am, only smart.”
“Thanks, Pat. Drink up.”
I loaded two more cups of chowder and passed them to Heather, the brawny teenager from the rock band. She’d been helping me.
“I like bein’ your assistant, but I miss my shaking stick,” Heather said. “It burned up.”
“We’ll get you another. Just take those around and hand them to somebody,” I said.
“I’m beach trash,” said Pat Gilly.
“Me too,” I said.
Pat said, “But I’m God-fearing. I fear God and I pray. I’m not ashamed of it.”
“Me neither. You should go check on your kids, Pat. See that they have blankets and pillows and something to eat.”
“They ate. They ate before the wagon brought us over,” Pat said.
“Then you could make sure each has had his goodnight kick in the head,” I said.
“Look at your ass,” Pat said. “You are the girlie!”
“Pat, here comes your wife. I think it’s your wife and she’s gonna hear you praising my buttocks.”
“She ain’t here, she dropped over in the saloon. Anyway, she knows I like your big butt.”
“I’m careless with hot stuff. Really sloppy with it. You should stay back,” I said.
Dottie surfaced in the kitchen, dusting her palms, her face flushed and merry. “Everybody’s fed, just about. We have three more arriving from the Will O’Lee Rest Home. The Petkin boys are out on ski-mobiles collecting folks. I’m giving away gallons of beer. Want me to help bowl that
chowder?”
“No, but you could kill Pat for me. All he’ll talk about is my can.”
“In jest, Dot,” Pat Gilly said.
“Act right,” she told him.
“With Paige? Hell, I’m friends with her husband. Raf and me are great friends!”
“Shut up about him,” I said, and left the kitchen.
In the taproom, there were twenty or so blanket cocoons on the floor. People stood or leaned. Couples held on to one another. Two Gilly children squirted by.
I saw a few older women from the village. “So kind of your mother,” one said as I passed.
A second asked, “Sweetheart? Do you have any aspirin?”
“In a minute. Can you wait a little bit?”
“Cold twists my bones,” the woman said.
I stepped over a body wrapped in an afghan.
Drafts leaking from the loose front entrance doors kept the foyer cleared, but a crowd had formed in the sitting room, where the fireplace flared and candles were glowing. The restaurant beyond was crammed. In there, women stood on line for the washroom.
I made it to the Admiral’s Suite and showered. I ate a tangerine in the hot spray, pinched the rind and dripped juice onto my head as a hair rinse.
Shadows blackened the bedroom. I groped around, clenching a towel at my chest.
Just before dawn I woke with my head on Raymond’s bare shoulder, his arm caught under me.
In the dark, I found my flashlight belt and dressed; tiptoed out and walked the egg-and-dart-papered hall.
There were sleeping bodies everywhere now: in the taproom, on the bar itself, behind the bar. In the sitting room, swaddled bodies lay on the couches and crisscrossed on the rugs. The fire was down to a last bump of smoldering wood.
I kept my flashlight’s beam lowered but here and there shined on a startled face.
In a corner, a young couple chatted. Near them, a woman rocked an infant in her arms.
All the storm candles had burned away.
Dottie leaned on the mantel. I went near, and when she said nothing, I tipped my flashlight up at her profile. She was asleep.
“You’re some kind of horse,” I said.
“I’m right here,” she muttered.
“No you’re not, Mom. Go to bed.”
“I’m standing watch.”
“You’ll be no good to anybody tomorrow. It is tomorrow. You must hurt and you must be wrecking your poor legs.”
She had me follow her into the chilly hallway, away from the crowd. “The furnace is giving us a little heat but the blowers are out. It’s going to stay bitter cold all morning. We’re down to instant coffee but we have tea. It’s stale, but nobody’ll know the difference.” She heaved a deep breath and hugged herself, hugged the sleeves of her navy-blue cardigan. “What else? We’re out of fruit juice and yogurt,” she said.
At sunup, the winds calmed, the snow stopped. The storm had passed.
I waded all over the side yard, searching with my flashlight. It felt eighty below and my cheeks froze and stuck to my stocking mask after ten minutes of burrowing, but I recovered Raf’s miraculous medal and hung the icy stiff chain on my neck.
Monday morning had the festive oddness of a canceled business day.
The storm victims had drunk the entire beer supply and two kegs of hard cider that Dottie stored last Halloween.
Many of those milling in the main house were hung over and ill, or just impatient to get home and start digging out.
I went for a short hike to see if the roads were clear enough for Raf to manage.
The bluffs were frosted with ice and snow. The sky had crude ashy strokes that were backlit and ember-orange. Pinned to the horizon was a cargo ship that had ridden out last night’s weather.
I saw below, rumbling around on the Point Road, troopers, gargantuan sand trucks, a couple of uniformed National Guard.
Raymond helped me cook breakfast. We made gallons of tea, heated biscuits and chick peas with chicken gravy.
“Something I’ve never seen,” Raymond said. “Eight industrial-sized cans of chick peas.”
Care
THE LIGHTS CAME BACK on and the TV over the bar started talking. There were cheers and shouts from all over the first floor.
“That was fast, actually,” Dottie said.
“Tell me,” said a villager. “In seventy-eight we were down for nine goddamn days.”
I went to the Admiral’s Suite, to my room, and found four kids up on the bed playing a card game.
“See if you can find your parents,” I said. “Because I think you get to go home now.”
I picked up the phone, heard a dial tone, tried my Brook- line number.
I got a ring.
“Yeah?” said a groggy Raf.
“Are you with anyone?”
“Just the triplets. What’re you doing?”
“I’ve been looking for you for months,” I said.
“You’re at the Seahorse? I tried to get out there. We had a touch of bad weather.”
“Making me call you,” I said. “I’m hanging up.”
“Wait, wait, wait, wait.”
“No. Sorry to bother you, go back to sleep,” I said.
“The fucking phone was out, in fact. And I have no ground transportation,” Raf said. “Last night, swear to God, I tried to walk to the inn.”
“Well, if that’s true, it was dumb.”
“It was love,” he said.
On my dresser stood the wine bottle Raymond had de-labeled and not drunk.
I said, “Don’t start doing this. It’s really not fair.”
“I made it to Storrow Drive, then the ninety-three entrance but nothing was moving. And I was getting disoriented, like hypothermia. My brain went white although I was sober, speaking of not fair. Then this Triple-A truck with chains picks me up and brings me back as far as Boylston and I hiked on home. Look at my fucking fingers!”
“What?” I said. “Black?”
“No, but quivering. They’ll feel a lot better once they get into your jeans.”
Raymond moseyed into the room and stood behind me in the mirror. “There you are,” he said.
“Look, Raf,” I said into the phone, and Raymond slumped. “I just don’t know any more, you know?”
Raf said, “I do. I know for both of us, is the great thing.”
Raymond hunted around the vanity table, picked up a vagrant cigarette and slanted it behind his ear.
“Paige? This goddamned storm, I mean, it was ill timed,” said Raf.
I sighed. I said, “I’ll try to make it into Cambridge. You could meet me at the faculty club.”
“Aw, not the fuckin’ fac . . .” Raf groaned before I put out his voice with mine.
“Raymond’s here,” I said.
Raymond made signals at me. “No, no, I don’t want to talk to him,” the signals said.
There was nothing from Raf’s end for a bit. “Pru with him?” he said, finally.
“No. Evidently that’s over.”
“So he’s with you,” Raf said.
“Since the storm, yeah. He came up and he’s been with me,” I said.
Now Raf sighed. He said, “Well, you needn’t think of it as a storm, Paige. More as a kind of winter carnival. Every goddamn dream-come-true. We need to fuckin’ talk! So how is the old singing cowboy? Diggin’ in those spurs?”
“Don’t you dare,” I said. “Where have you been?”
“I’d have to hire a detective to tell me for the first part of where I’ve been, but I think some Mexico was involved, and I either got elected to office in this little town or I was detained in their jail.”
“If I were betting, I know where I’d put my money.”
“All I remember is a courthouse. And then I was exported, probably. And anyway, ever after, I’ve been hanging with Mario.”
“Mario!”
“Yeah. He who bounced you on his kn
ee?”
“A lie,” I said.
“No, it’s true, you can ask him. I like his place. We could live in Providence. You ever thought about moving there?”
I said, “The faculty club about five and leave your suggestions with the triplets.”
Raymond broke in. “What suggestions?” he asked me. “Is he giving you trouble?”
“I heard that,” Raf said on the phone.
By noontime, most of the emergency guests were gone. The rock band had left, Raymond told me; left in a group, and not in theory but in fact.
“Aw, and I never got to know them,” I said.
Walt Barber, the Cape Head policeman, showed up along with a young highway patrolman. Walt looked pasty, red- eyed. He hadn’t shaved in a while. “I’ll take tea, coffee, Coke, anything with zip,” he said.
The patrolman said, “We’re lucky. Everything’s melting. The armory’s about emptied out. We can run whosever left down there. We got supplies for them. Roads to Wasnascawa are clear.”
“Good work, boys,” Dottie said.
“Nobody’s slept,” Walt Barber said. “I wish I could’ve been here last night. Appears you had like a New Year’s Eve party.”
“Not too bad,” Dottie said.
“You won’t get paid back for it, though.”
“I know,” she said.
Walt Barber said, “You can try. But you know the condition of the Cape Head coffers.” He stood erect and turned out his empty trouser pockets.
“I know that,” Dottie said.
He nodded, bit down a yawn. “Phew, I’m an old fucking guy.”
“Watch that mouth,” Dottie told him.
The patrolman said, “I’ve heard such words before, ma’am, believe me.”
I asked, “If I tried to get into the city, could I make it?”
“I’d say fifty-fifty. I’d say don’t try, unless it’s an emergency,” Walt Barber sad.
I looked over at Raymond, leaning on a wall in all his Southwestern colors, haggard and handsome.
“It’s an emergency,” I said.
I squished out to the Dutch barn, got positioned in the smoke-colored car, fired up the engine, and waited for the heater to breathe warm before chugging around front to collect Raymond.
