by Amy Hoffman
“Nora,” said Miss Ruby. “Jeez.”
“Norma, Nella, whatever,” Tony said, reverting to her usual manner. “If you want to make yourself useful for a change, the bags are out in the truck bed. Miss Ruby here has had enough for one day, I agree with her on that one.” Tony gave her a little pat on the shoulder, and Miss Ruby smiled up at her. I hadn’t noticed before that she had a dimple in one cheek.
Apparently, Iron Chef night, like so many of our other amusements, was now off the calendar. When I brought the bags in, Tony explained that we would go vegan for at least one day each week. “One of the kids was talking about it at meeting,” she said, hacking up a turnip with a cleaver she had produced from a drawer. She had assigned me the onions. “Amazing shit. Her hair even grew in thicker.” She looked over at the alopecic Miss Ruby, snoring in her chair, clearly contemplating the next steps in Miss Ruby’s makeover.
When Tony had finished cooking, she shook Miss Ruby awake, which Miss Ruby didn’t seem to mind at all; in fact, she seemed eager to attempt the next step in Tony’s program. We sat down together to eat, plates on our laps. “All that walking works up your appetite,” said Miss Ruby, nodding as though this was an effect well known to her, and popping a slice of tofu into her mouth. Her eyes widened. “What the hell, Tony?” she said. “I thought this was some kind of marshmallow.”
Actually, Tony’s cooking wasn’t bad, if you dosed the dish with enough soy sauce and tabasco. I passed Miss Ruby the condiments. “Thanks for cooking, Tony,” I said. “This tastes very healthy.”
She looked pleased with the compliment and pointed her fork at me. “Well, sure, Ninny,” she said. “Something healthy is always going to taste better than those boxes of chemicals you guys were addicted to.”
“Bleh,” said Miss Ruby, trickling tabasco onto her brown rice. “It needs sparking up.”
“Your taste buds are just fried from the cigs, Rube. They’ll come back eventually.” Tony stood and carried her empty plate to the sink, then found her cap and squashed it onto her curls. “Sorry kiddos, but I gotta run,” she said. “Enjoy.”
“Meeting,” explained Miss Ruby. The truck pulled away outside, and when we could no longer hear it, she hauled herself out of her chair and got a couple of beers from the refrigerator. “Low cal,” she explained, before I could say anything. Settling back down and aiming the clicker at the television, she sighed. “Much better. And guess what else? I grabbed us some popsicles for dessert when Miss Drill Sergeant was busy looking at yogurt.”
“Ben and Jerry’s?” I asked hopefully, about our favorite brand.
“No way! Weight Watchers—I’m on a diet, girl! That Tony,” said Miss Ruby. “I like to tease her, but the woman’s got sense. She’ll never understand, though, that you’ve got to sweeten things a little.”
“What’s your history with her, anyway?” I asked. Since her afternoon with Tony, Miss Ruby looked livelier—she even had some color in her face—and Tony herself was marginally mellower.
“You know,” she said, waving her hand. “We go back. I’ll tell you about it some time.”
“That’s what everybody in this town says. About everybody else.”
“Check out the freezer,” she reminded me.
And then I saw it: My next artwork. My masterpiece. And by that I wasn’t thinking, necessarily, of something that would be the pinnacle of my career, but rather the transformative project. The one that would make a difference—if only to me. “Miss Ruby,” I asked. “Can I paint you?”
“What? What?” said Miss Ruby, alarmed, as though I had proposed slathering her with a lead-based concoction.
“Sit for me,” I said. I would start with her portrait and move on to her connections, the webs and overlapping circles of relationships. The P-town vortex as a giant mural.
“Oh, well then,” said Miss Ruby. “Sure. That’s something I’m good at.”
Philosophy
A few days into the new year, to my utter shock, Janelle called. “Uh, hi,” she said.
“You have this number!” I said.
“Research,” she said. “Tracking you down was pretty simple.”
“Especially since I wasn’t hiding,” I said, wondering where this was going. “If you remember, you threw me out on the street. With nothing. I could’ve, I don’t know, died or something.”
“Not you,” said Janelle, falling silent.
Finally, annoyed, I said, “Well, bye. Thanks for getting in touch.”
“No, wait,” said Janelle. “This isn’t easy.”
“For me either!” I said. “What do you want? Why are you calling me?”
“I’m sorry I did that,” she said. “Threw you out like that, without even talking about it. I’m trying to be more rational now, more philosophical.”
“Philosophical,” I said.
“A little,” she said. “Although I don’t think I can ever trust you again.”
“No, of course not,” I said, furious now. “I mean, how could you? After all our years together, and all I did for you, and I step out once. I mean, I feel terrible about it, okay? I’m awash in guilt, and I miss you every day. But don’t tell me you never thought about it yourself. Or did it, for all I know.”
She took a deep breath. “I made a resolution. I’m going to give back your sea glass. I’m sorry I took it, Nora. I know it’s part of the way you were trying to support yourself. I can drop it off at the Teddy. To be honest, I don’t want to come across any more stuff in the house that reminds me of you.”
“Oh,” I said. “Thanks. I would appreciate that.” I didn’t say that she could keep her old sea glass, or that I would be working on something new and bigger and more significant than craft-fair jewelry.
Janelle was still talking, her words coming quicker and louder and angrier, about her illness. Or rather, about what I had been trying to think of as her former illness, for which she had been treated and cured. “You know what? It’s here too, I found out. The cancer. Do you have any idea how many women on the Cape get breast cancer?” she said, somewhat accusatorily.
“No, but—”
“I’ve been looking into it. There’s a proven cluster. I moved here, right?—”
“We moved here,” I corrected her. “Both of us.”
“—and I thought I was in some pristine place. But humanity’s been screwing around with the natural world, and you can’t just do that and not suffer the consequences. These clusters are turning up all over the place. So Roger’s going to help me. We’re checking out the sea water, the aquifer.”
“Aquifer?” I said.
“Fuck, Nora! Don’t repeat everything I say! We’re going to start a public education campaign. I’ve been reading up on how to do it. We’ll put up posters—‘Do you know what’s in the water you’re drinking?’ Stuff like that. Then, when we’ve attracted some attention, we get moving. Protests. Lobbying. Start locally. Get the Stop & Shop to carry organic produce. Close down the dry cleaners.”
Good for Janelle, I thought. Her plan sounded like an amazingly healthy way to channel her personal trauma into socially useful activity. But I wasn’t feeling ready for rationality and health. “What dry cleaners?” I said. “Provincetown doesn’t even have a functioning laundromat, which I’ve always wondered about, why they can’t—”
“Any dry cleaners! Maybe there’s one in Orleans. It doesn’t matter; it’s just an example. We can’t let this keep happening. It’s not just me.”
“But it is you,” I said. “Didn’t we come here so you could rest, take care of yourself?”
“I need to do this,” said Janelle. “For healing. I’m serious. I’m still so mad—well, at you, of course—”
“Of course,” I said. “Why not? I just—”
“It’s the whole situation.” She paused and then admitted, in a low voice, “I’m afraid the anger’s going to make me sick again. I need to get it out of me, get rid of it.”
“But that’s superstition!” I said.
What, I wondered, could Janelle have been getting up to while I had been out of the house? She and I had had many conversations about the obnoxiousness of this sort of thinking. Angry men never seemed to get accused of giving themselves cancer. The repressed anger–cancer link was just a way to shut women up.
“It’s how I feel, Nora. Even if it’s wrong, it’s deep; I can’t shake it.”
Public Education
Baby had never heard of a Cape Cod cancer cluster. “But that means nothing,” she said, instantly convinced. “Think about it. Word gets out, and even the tourists won’t drink the water. They might avoid the place altogether. And what’s that, compared to somewhat fewer year-round lesbians?”
“Exactly. I’ve been thinking.” About Janelle, and about how I had betrayed her, in her time of need. And about her research and her plans. Janelle was a geek, who had never done anything political except to watch the gay pride parade every June—because I dragged her to it, so she could cheer for me and my artist friends when we marched by. We had organized a Guerilla Girls–type collective, and we did street theater with big homemade masks, and postering and graffiti-tagging to advertise antiwar demonstrations, antiracism demonstrations—whatever was going down.
It was just unfortunate that, unlike the women I thought of as the brave revolutionaries, I was always terrified of getting caught, even with a mask on, or of offending some old lady. I had proven myself useless at passing out leaflets and engaging total strangers in rational conversation about topics we probably didn’t agree about—because I didn’t want them to get mad at me. Janelle’s environmental campaign brought up my old worries, but at least I knew the drill.
And I owed her. Maybe, I thought, she would forgive me. “I could make some posters.”
“We’ll stick them up all over town!” Baby couldn’t wait to get started. Her reaction wasn’t quite what I had expected. I guess I had anticipated something more like polite concern. Instead, there she was, ready to throw herself into the cause. It made me feel even more caddish: women were suffering and dying up and down the Cape, and all I could think about was my ex- and current girlfriends comparing notes, whereby they would discover just how selfish and insensitive I was.
“It’ll be great!” Baby continued. “Wheat paste, staple guns—just like the old days. You’ll make us an inspiring image!”
“And no pink,” I said. “No ribbons.”
Baby held up her palm for me to slap her a high five. “The photocopying’s my treat.”
After that we did lots of smooching and appreciating of each other’s imaginative and physical talents, and I forgot, for a while, my anxieties about Janelle, Janelle and Baby, Baby and staple guns, painting supplies and boxes, and a whole stack of other problems that often kept me up at night.
Vegan Pizza
I asked around in town, but like Baby, no one admitted to having heard anything about a Cape Cod breast-cancer cluster. I did hear a lot of stories about the mammogram machine at the hospital in Hyannis, though. “I wish they’d get a new one,” Reverend Patsy confided. “I’ve counseled several congregation members, in terrible crisis, and then it turns out to be a false positive. Better than a false negative, I suppose.” She lowered her voice. “But I think the technician is a sadist. I don’t say this lightly, Nora. I can tell you from personal experience, that machine hurts more than a normal one. And then the technician claims she has to repeat the procedure because the films didn’t register correctly the first time around. I’ve come out literally bruised.”
I had run into her after my shift. The sun had broken through after a series of raw, drizzly days, and year-rounders had poured onto Commercial Street from their winter hideouts. Checking my cash register totals, Bob had been pleased. “It’s Christmas come again out there,” he said, rubbing his little Teddy bear between his fingers. “I don’t know where they all come from.” This was disingenuous: Bob had an uncanny ability to project the ebb and flow of his customers, not just from season to season but from day to day. It must have been his corporate background. Even though the Teddy was just a little coffee shop, he was getting a great return on investment.
Patsy had been sitting on the bench outside Spiritus, bundled up in a winter coat, enjoying the bright afternoon and a slice of pizza. When she saw me, she had beckoned enthusiastically and patted the space next to her. Most of my boxes were still in her office, and I had never yet made it to a Sunday service, so I felt a little guilty about sitting down with her, but she didn’t seem to have noticed my lack of faith or organization. “It’s vegan,” she said. “They do a mean pie with tofu mozzarella if I call ahead. I’m sure they’d warm up a slice for you, too, if you want to try it. It’s quite good; I find I don’t even miss the dairy.”
“I’m sorry I haven’t done anything about those boxes,” I said, fending off the vegan slice. First Tony, now Patsy. Enthusiasms blew through Provincetown like the ever-changing cloud formations—especially during the icy fogs of winter, when the horizon line separating gray sea from gray sky vanished, and it seemed there was nothing to focus on but self-improvement or self-destruction. AA or the A-House bar, veganism or Lucky Charms. “I’m not even sure what’s in them. Maybe you should just recycle them.”
“Oh, for goddess’s sake,” she said. “I don’t even notice them anymore. And I’m sure the contents are important to you in some way, or you wouldn’t have bothered packing them.”
“Thanks, though,” I said. She was attributing to me more self-awareness in that chaotic moment than I deserved. “I’ll get them out of your way this week, I promise. It’s time I got myself sorted out.” Reverend Patsy looked up from her pizza and nodded in agreement.
My Studio
Back at Miss Ruby’s, the sound on the TV was turned down to a murmur, and in the recliner in front of it, Miss Ruby and the cats were deep into their Sunday afternoon nap—far more restorative, she believed, than their usual, weekday nap. I tiptoed past them into my room and sat down on the bed to assess my situation. The house was generally more habitable than when I had first arrived, without all the cigarette smoke and hairballs, but my room had barely enough space for a twin bed, a dresser, and a stack of boxes. The house next door, which must have been built before the invention of zoning and setbacks, was all of about five feet from Miss Ruby’s cottage, blocking any possibility of light or air through my lone window.
One of my favorite paintings in the world was the one by Vincent van Gogh of his little room in Arles, with his wooden bed and red blanket, and his towel hanging on a nail next to the washstand. If I really studied it, it would start to make me dizzy. The perspective was off. One of the chairs was really big and looked like it was blocking the door. Because in fact the room wasn’t a real room. It was a room in the artist’s mind. Where, Van Gogh wrote to his brother, one could retreat to “rest the brain, or rather, the imagination.”
It always made me want to simplify my life. But the genius Van Gogh painted outside, whereas in Provincetown it was either windy or buggy. Occasionally, it’s true, you might see an artist setting up on a side street, the easel a great draw for the passing tourists. Sometimes the painting sold before it was dry. But that wasn’t the way I worked.
I began sketching various rearrangements of my stuff, but transforming the space into a studio seemed hopeless. I could make jewelry sitting on my bed with a tray, if it came to that, but that was just a sideline. To create my masterpiece—and even to sketch out the posters—I needed more room.
Outside my door, I heard the thump of a bunch of cats landing on their feet. The volume on the TV went up. “Hey, Nor, you in there?” yelled Miss Ruby. “Why’s the door shut?”
“I didn’t want to disturb you,” I said. “You looked so peaceful.”
“Sunday,” she agreed, with a satisfied yawn.
“I’m trying to figure out where I can paint,” I said. I showed her my sketches.
“I don’t see why that’s such a giant problem,” said Miss Ruby, han
ding the pages back to me. “Go out in the shed.”
“What shed?” I asked.
“Jeez,” said Miss Ruby. “You know, the one in back of the big yellow house.”
“Jeez yourself,” I said. “I can’t just move into some person’s shed.”
“Why not?” asked Miss Ruby. “You wouldn’t be the first. All these years, the summer guys are just here to party, and I don’t think Joe Ruis has ever set foot in it—”
“Who?”
“—you know, the landlord.”
“You have a landlord?”
“Well, yeah, Nora, did you think this dump was mine? When I buy something it won’t be this old hovel. Joe owns the whole block. Probably the next one too.”
“Even if he doesn’t care, I wouldn’t feel right. What if I get caught?”
“By who?” asked Miss Ruby, holding out her hands. I grabbed them and pulled her up from the chair. “Opportunity knocks, girl,” she said, smoothing her hair and stumping off to the bathroom. “You know,” she called back, “Tony might just be right about the vegan stuff. I can see in the mirror, my hair looks fluffier.”
“So, beans and brown rice tonight?” I teased her. “We can mix in something green—how about brussels sprouts?”
“Not sprouts,” said Miss Ruby. “The poor kitties hate the smell.”
In the morning, I went to look at the shed. Despite Miss Ruby’s blasé attitude toward private property, I didn’t feel comfortable barging right in, so I circled the building—basically, a wooden box—and peered in the windows, which were mostly intact. I yanked on the door, half-hoping it would be locked, but it opened easily, and I found myself in a chilly, empty room with a dry sink against one wall; above it was a splintery wooden shelf scattered with shards and a few crusty pots of gray soil and dead stems. The place was dirty and probably crawling with spiders, and there was no electricity or heat or water. It wasn’t Brooklyn, or even the little room in my home with Janelle, but with some scrubbing and a couple of warm sweaters, I thought I could make it work, at least in the daytime.
