The Maytrees

by Annie Dillard

  The narrow town favored bicycles over cars. Presently some men appeared far up the silver road, cap flaps down. A mainland man walked between two adult cyclists. She did not know him, which usually meant nobody did. Taller than the others, he wore a brimmed felt hat and a double-breasted coat down to his flat shoes, suggesting the silent-movies landlord who says to war widows with children, “You must pay the rent!”

  Dr. New drove up in his Ford and nodded at Maytree, who lowered Petie—Whoop—to recline on the backseat, and Lou climbed in front and cranked the window down. The driver of the car who hit Petie neared. He stood against a telephone pole and crossed his arms. By then many witnesses had told her, told them all, that the car pushed the bike off the road by hitting it. The man’s coat’s shoulders lifted and he looked up as if sighing. As the Ford pulled out for the hospital, Lou saw him look expressionless at Maytree, who had started in a low voice,

  —Why in the living hell…The crowd closed in to hear. Not much happened in winter on land.

  —It was probably not the stranger’s fault, she said. She was waiting at the hospital. How would she feel if they owned a car and she hurt a child with it? She saw Petie and other children flying over handlebars all around town, everywhere she drove her putative car. Low-flying children. They would be a danger in themselves. The poor man. Poor everyone. Petie had wide bones. Tomorrow, she and Maytree could maneuver their own ironstone bed down two sets of stairs to the half-basement by the beach. Petie could recuperate handy to bathroom and kitchen, they could see and hear him to help him, and he could watch through panes the day change, the tides, and the stars.

  That night Lou watched Maytree pour brandy in a glass. He still wore a navy blue sweater under his overalls. Petie had a broken leg. Did she want brandy? She shook her head. She sat at the green kitchen table.

  Brandy he drinks? The tenth-anniversary-present brandy from four years ago we’ve sipped on Christmas mornings only?

  It was okay if he did not move. The cast was heavy; its edges scraped. In his own bed that night under low eaves, whenever he drowsed he rolled over his handlebars again and hit the street. Odd—his friends usually broke their collarbones. He heard raised voices from the kitchen. Once he heard his name. His mother came in, stooping under the eave; she soothed him and sang him “Take Me Out to the Ballgame”—how touching of her, really, though funny. He used to like the song when he was little. His parents had always been swell. After another sleepy interval of handlebar-flying, his father entered with his hair sticking up, sat lightly on the bed, and handed him a flowery teacup of brandy.

  —Brandy all around? his mother said.

  —That ought to help, he said, and pretty soon it did.

  —It might not all be the man’s fault, she had said when they came down.

  Gently Maytree knocked over his chair and cursed back and forth and in toto implied in rare words that he, by contrast and on balance, found the man grievously at fault. The series ended “son of a sea-cook.”

  Maytree sat and covered his face with his hands. Lou found herself by habit checking whether his sweater’s elbows rested on spills. He rubbed his eyes. These last two or three weeks, something bad had worsened. Lou did not know what, but it was her, something about her. He had been close-shaven or unshaven, gone to the dunes, sleepy, jumpy. In her company he wrapped himself in misery like a robe. Between them self-consciousness bulked as a river silts its channel. They sat to smoked mackerel and turnips and plied Petie with questions. Only these few weeks. They chewed and chewed. She dumped her plateful and washed. She sought to avoid him and secure privacy.

  Sometimes these past weeks at dawn he started between them a deliberate chat. —And what’s your plan for the day? His bad acting was worse than silence. When friends came by, both of them roused: they ate, and Maytree told knock-knock jokes.

  During all their other years’ short silences—but not this one—while they slept, while stars held fast their spots beyond the window and seas concussed the beach, they woke together as if at a temblor. They turned and rolled. They met and sought and hit. Then they talked under the blankets, holding each other’s arms or ribs or hands. She searched out his eyes in the dark, and regarded him in the long way of longing and knowledge, and in the longer way of love. There had not been much of that this past year.

  At the green kitchen table Maytree was biting his lips from the inside. This meant a speech. He bit his lips from inside before he chewed Pete out. It meant a speech he would rather skip and she would rather miss. She held her head erect. A gust shook the glass and jerked the lamps’ reflections. She rose to wash dishes.

  Now he was crying. He rose and held her as if he just remembered something. Tears traced his face creases and dripped. She held him. Crying—Maytree? He had sniffled a bit when his mother died. They disliked drama.

  —I will always love you. Believe me.

  Now what. She removed her arms and stepped back. Fast as shock she knew now what, what alone could come next, and her blood in every vessel tripped. Not her Maytree. Never her Maytree, who loved her, as he just unsaid.

  Maytree and who? She waited for it. She squared her shoulders. If this was not shaping up to be Maytree’s finest hour, it might as well be hers.

  He composed his mouth and backed till the old stove stopped him. Why could he not have launched this speech when they were both looking out at something, or tending to Petie with his broken leg? Did she know him or not, this wet-faced epistomeliac? He put his hands in his overalls’ pockets, slid them out at once, crossed his arms, and finally uncrossed his arms to stand before her as if before a firing squad.

  —I’m moving to Maine.

  He’s moving to Maine.

  —When?

  —Tomorrow. Petie will be fine with just you. I’m sorry.

  —Where in Maine?

  —An island in Casco Bay. Why?

  —I’m just used to…it’s a habit. She thought she might take a seat.

  —When will you come back?

  She saw Maytree draw a breath and in his decency let it out in silence.

  She would not ask why. An island in Maine was just the place for a carpenter poet. When had he seen this island, if he had? Last summer, when he crewed on Sooner Roy’s schooner Joyce Shatley for three weeks. Who else was gone then?

  —I never did love…anyone…

  Go, you idiot, she merely thought, and he stopped cold. At the kitchen table she held her head still and cocked, as a robin listens for worms.

  He waited standing, as if his being less comfortable at this moment would be his just deserts, all of them.

  Everything familiar to her altered, as if she only now remarked his red lids, his lips he was still nibbling from within, the deep pair of lines by his mouth, the hollow cheeks his smiles cracked, his—very fine!—small oval head—enough. My. Time expanded. What was keeping him?

  Reappraising Maytree and his every act and word for the past few years could wait. She would have the rest of her life to pace lost ground. How were she and Petie to live? On alimony, like everyone else. In fact, she bought almost nothing, food and fuel. Maytree was evidently ceding their house. She would not run to her mother in New York, unless for funds. She had no say. She had a son with a broken leg.

  Maytree had not moved. Truly? He stood forlorn as a clown. Give him not the hook but the gaff. He rubbed his face and felt for his Luckies and went out. Her kitchen: its limed walls where they hung their friends’ frenzied paintings, the dry money plants whose ovals clicked in the vase, the kindling box, mismatched chairs, the cast-iron gas stove whose warming oven took wood, the Bakelite radio, red pie chest, blue teapot, iron kettle; applejack on a shelf with poetry books, a shell sculpture, a cotton bag of chessmen, the stenciled breadbox, and her apron on a china hook. Petie was asleep upstairs, or drunk if he drank that whole cup.

  Tomorrow? Just like that? He must have been packing in secret. When did he decide, make lists, figure, and pack—so that at this last minu
te, on the day Petie broke his leg, he was set to go?

  How were he and Deary going to live? Both elbows on the green table, she rolled her head’s weight from one fist to the other. No reason to be surprised. This sort of thing happens all the time.

  MAYTREE WALKED FAR ON the black beach. His hot eyes cooled. Invisible clouds blocked the sky and its atmospheres where noises of people dissolve. The sea beside him, a monster with a lace hem, drained east.

  What happens to a person! Of all life’s pitches, you notice only the curve. Or, late, the beanball. He had not meant to say that about his loving her! A brutal, terrible thing to say when you leave someone, even someone who made allowances. Low tide smelled like green pennies.

  Before Lou, Maytree had traveled here and there around the heart, the raucous heart. Byways, dim-lit bars always changing hands. Once a great handful of girl out west told him—I never did love you, I just thought I did. They were watering their horses at an irrigation ditch. How mean of her to salve her spitcurled conscience by trying to take away their past! In the kitchen he had started to use those very words on Lou—they sprang readily to mind, as wounding words do—but he stopped himself.

  He heard but could not see water. The beam from Wood End Light flicked. Count on me, it said to helmsmen. To him it said nothing.

  Probably not the man’s fault! The car flat-out rear-ended the bike. Thank God he was leaving. Past time. He might have stuck around not knowing that Lou’s universal solvent had unmanned him. How he had admired it in her, that deep patch of calm! She seemed to live from it and expand it year by year. Now he despised it. An inner self that expands to include more and more runs to compassion, for which he had no belly. A woman’s forgiveness weakened a man’s arms and back. So did its sob sister, pity. It would not stand up to fight. Who could prevail against it? Conrad called pity a form of contempt.

  Probably not the man’s fault. Let’s see her forgive this one, his leaving her for Deary. He passed the garbage fire. Reef Thayer nodded,—Dark night.

  Holding Petie in his arms that afternoon, seeing his unmarked skin, Maytree wanted to take him to Maine, to let Deary mother him as she longed to. His leaving condemned Petie to being spoiled. And stuck with Lou’s pauciloquoys.

  One long-ago summer day, Petie was little, playing in low waves. Maytree watched Lou swim out to the bars and stand up wet. There were two kinds of stinging jellyfish out there, as well as Portuguese men-o’-war and sharks. She looked to be standing on the sea’s skin offshore in dazzle. When she came in, he asked, How was the water? and salty Lou kissed him. Petie, old charmer, reached out his chilled jelly arms to be picked up. Not a baby lover, Maytree loved Petie more the older he got. Of course he had to cede her everything, including Petie. What cost. He must really be in love.

  Seaweed around beer bottles made another tide line. He saw the high tide line—shell bits and turnip parings, paper, fish racks, shark cartilage, culch. A line of stranded baitfish. Driftwood full of salts that would make blue and green flares in flames. For all he knew, those new black clouds bottomed just above his head.

  Even the mudflat was matte. Last spring in the mud at Drummer Cove, two men oystering the bay at low tide got stuck. Their struggles drove their boots and legs deeper. It was April in an area of summer cottages; no one heard their shouts. Drummer Cove off Blackfish Creek had a ten-foot tidal range. When the tide came in, it drowned them. Later at a sunny half tide their torsos stuck out again, bent. The harbormaster in his boat dragged their bodies out chained under the armpits.

  On the black beach he stepped on a jellyfish mesoglea, the hard gel that spread the medusa from which the bloodless colony dripped. He felt the thing give under him like raw meat and his foot slid.

  Of course he thought he would love Lou and stick by her forever. He believed a lifetime was not long enough. (Why did he bother to train his memory if it was only going to torment him?) Of course, through almost all human history, life expectancy was eighteen. His honoring his fourteen years’ marriage to Lou would probably have set a world endurance record once. He already spent with one person several monogamous lifetimes. He was forty-four. He never really loved Lou. He saw that now. He loved only himself in her eyes. Her silence was paper on which he wrote. She always thought and felt precisely what he hoped. She loved making him happy. Was he his own or not?

  When he was alone with Deary, he saw that her own desire scared and sapped her. He must relieve her. Absurdly, in the past week his duty was not to stir her. And today that blue-spangled jerk broke Petie’s leg.

  If he had known when he was fifteen how completely women would color his life, that he would sacrifice project, position, and ambition for this woman or that, and drop all he gained; if he knew that a woman’s happiness could float or sink his own, decade after decade—why, he would have jumped ship. Jumped ship before he met the girl with a spitcurl in Wyoming. Tonight was no time to relay his sorry wisdom to Petie, Petie whom he was forfeiting for a woman’s stubbornness over a technicality. Some uncharacteristic natural mercy prevents boys’ foreseeing what they would do for one woman or sacrifice for another. It was just as well.

  Would he walk all night? The beach’s debris spread wider. He remembered reading that on a beach Ian Patterson encountered the sole of a human foot. The writer thought at first he was seeing a shoe sole. But it was someone’s plantar skin, callused, striated with ridges like isobars. Its toes were gone. And the dogs had eaten Jezebel by the wall of Jezreel, ate her all but her palms.

  His tongue felt tidal ridges on his palate. A night without stars restored a person to his place. He offered himself as proof to favor his plan: Would a good man like him leave his family for no extraordinary reason? He was moving not from but toward.

  Forty-two is the most dangerous age, the Japanese say. He soldiered on two years past that. Why use strength of mind to fight love? Love was stronger. The bout was rigged. Willpower was an idea that appealed to everyone, especially kids. Was it not by using teeth-clenching force of mind that his grandfather stopped drinking, that Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile, that boys stanched weeping and men marched sleeping? As a force, willpower proved almost null. Attraction beat strength of mind every time. Reading and writing poetry drew him. He loved it because he knew it. As a way out of himself it was a chance, however small, of his hand’s catching from nowhere the gift of writing something good, however small. He could not force himself. Neither would Roger Bannister have trained unless his hope of breaking the four-minute mile inspired him. He, Maytree, had no more strength of mind than any other decent man.

  Lou would be asleep now. She would get over it. The solitude of immensity lay round about him. A piece of mono-filament snagged one shoe. He found and pocketed the hook. From nowhere, snow touched his mouth. It must be snowing into the water and mud.

  Lou’s being an angel was the damned trouble. Or was it Deary’s fixity. No: there was no trouble—he frowned—only joy. He never thought to be in love again. Since Lou he sought only Lou. He hated sneaking. It marred his love and respect for Lou. This afternoon while they tended Petie in the hospital and at home, Deary had driven a borrowed clunker of a car ahead to Maine with their things. They would meet over the bridge off-Cape. Best go right away. Goonight Lou.

  EARLIER HE COULD NOT believe it of Deary. Except now he must. It was true: free spirit Deary forbade him her bed. She denied him, Deary the biddable, the generous warm heart. No hanky-panky. Made betrayal sound cute. He had never suspected her of this quirk. The much-married and much semi-married Deary who slept loose in sand? Who enjoyed one boyfriend after another? And he, her true old friend, could not be one?

  Deary balked on a fall day. They had rowed and floated down the Herring River. They spilled into light. Among marshmallows they saw a brown cow. Later he and Deary were back at the shack. She sat two steps down and rested her head on a box. One dimpled arm looped under his knee. Up his trouser leg, she fingered his hamstring.

  —You don’t wan
t Lou to find out? Neither do I. The only person apart from Petie she loves more than you is me.

  —No, that’s not it at all. Of course I don’t want Lou to find out.

  He waited. A habit he picked up from Lou. A pepper scent of winter already, sea dense. How could falling in love, surely a good, drop one like a mantrap into lies? Was love a fruit that soiled your hands? My, she was relaxed. They had just been kissing on the bed. He felt like a child again, humiliated and in thrall, and at his age. Or as if he were courting Lou, who had similarly held him off—but he had expected Lou to hold him off.

  —I’ve never had a love affair. She pulled his knee toward her. He welcomed the strain of misery that thinned her voice.

  —What, never?

  She unhanded his knee. —And my loving you all of a sudden has nothing to do with it. I’ll never have a love affair.

  —What, never?

  —It’s a decision every woman makes again and again.

  In the distance blue crescents of cast shade draped from dune cornices and blowouts. Deary who loved him and desired him, who played snare drums in a bar careless of her ever-looser dresses, was too good for him? When it was breaking his heart even to imagine stooping so low and risking, and losing, Lou? His wife to whom he was forever joined in love?

  —What about the flyboy from Otis? Rudy Dupeau?

  Dupeau spent his leaves with her. —You lived with him. She stood to face him from the bottom step. —A nice change of scene for him. He slept twenty-four hours. Hands on hips. —I made him cornbread, boiled kale with fatback, hotted up some clams. He griped about the higher-ups, polished his shoes, and slept some more.

  He must have looked skeptical.

  —Certainly, we kissed. It settled him down.