The Off Season

by Amy Hoffman

  I spent a day carrying buckets and rags back and forth from Miss Ruby’s cottage to the shed and a second day dragging over some of my boxes and arranging the contents around the room. By the end of my task, I discovered I had more drawing and painting materials than I had remembered, and in a forgotten closet in the church, Reverend Patsy found me a card table and one of those ubiquitous, white monoblock chairs.

  Our poster campaign wouldn’t be the first that Provincetown had seen; after Hurricane Katrina the local Buddhist nun/masseuse/restaurant hostess (for the most part, customers took her shaved head in stride) had plastered the telephone poles with “build levees not bombs” signs—but hers were modest, 3×5 requests. Baby and I were imagining something splashier. I set up my easel with a big piece of newsprint and waited for some inspiration for the posters.

  It was slow, as inspiration always is. After all, I could still barely bring myself to put together the words Janelle and breast cancer in a sentence. With a piece of charcoal I sketched her in profile. Like so many women, she had never much liked her breasts: They were bigger and saggier than she thought she deserved, given how sturdy and compact the rest of her had always been. She believed their weight had stretched down her aureoles until they were shaped like teardrops—an exaggeration. But who sees herself as she truly is? Not even Janelle. I drew other profiles: mine, Baby’s, Miss Ruby’s, imaginary women with all sizes and shapes of breasts. “Most women who get breast cancer have no risk factors,” I scrawled over the drawings. “Except living on this earth. Clean water now!”

  “Our first installment!” said Baby when I unrolled it to show her. “It’s beautiful!” She planted a big purpley-red kiss on my check and re-rolled the poster. “I’ll bring it over to Dorothy and get her to print us up a bunch.” Dorothy owned a T-shirt shop. “This is good timing—slow season, she’ll be bored. After New Year’s she starts getting ready for summer, her studio turns into a twenty-four-hour baby-dyke sweatshop, and she wouldn’t stop silk-screening to run over her own grandmother.”

  Wheat Paste

  I started assembling the materials for a night of illicit postering. I put up a big pot of wheat paste to simmer on the stove while Miss Ruby and Tony were absorbed in a junior high school field-hockey tournament on local cable, so I didn’t think they would pay much attention to anything I was doing. “Sticks! Sticks!” Tony was shouting. “The Nauset girls are clobbering Danny Pereira! That ref ought to be fired! He shouldn’t be allowed around kids!”

  “We’re creaming them anyway,” said Miss Ruby. “Come look, Nora!” she called. “What are you so busy with in there? Another new diet?”

  “Not exactly,” I said.

  “Flour and water?” said Tony. “That’s no diet. You’d be as scurvied up as the Franklin expedition inside a week.”

  “So what is it, Nora?” persisted Miss Ruby.

  “Ninny’s secret recipe,” said Tony.

  “Nora,” Miss Ruby corrected.

  “Actually, it is kind of a secret,” I said.

  “But not from us, right?” said Miss Ruby.

  Cheering erupted on the TV, and Tony leaped up and pumped both fists in the air. “Goal! Pereira scores again! Ha! Ha! This is what that ref doesn’t get. And those Nauset players. All the kids have to wear the same uniform, and if it’s a skirt, it’s a skirt. Otherwise, where’s your team cohesion?”

  “It’s to put up posters,” I explained. “About breast cancer.”

  “Breast cancer,” said Tony.

  “Because of the cluster, you mean?” said Miss Ruby.

  “Wait a minute; you said you didn’t know about any cluster.”

  “I don’t like to think about that stuff,” said Miss Ruby. “We’ve got to live here, so what can you do?”

  Tony gave her friend a withering stare. Then she turned to me. “Nora,” she said. “Tell us more.”

  “It’s not that big a deal,” I said. I could just see it: first Tony and Miss Ruby, and next thing I knew, the Town Crier guy who ran around all summer in a sweaty Pilgrim outfit having his picture taken with tourists in front of Town Hall would be ringing his bell and announcing who was behind the posters, and the police would be knocking on my door in the middle of the night. “There’s not that much to it.”

  Slowly, Tony untucked her T-shirt and pulled it up to her neck, revealing a bony, scarified chest. “Put me out of commission for a while,” she said. “A couple years, actually. And your friends—some come through. Some don’t.” She jerked her head toward Miss Ruby.

  “Don’t I know it,” I said. She had caught me.

  Miss Ruby looked away, her cheeks slowly turning a remarkably lurid red.

  “Yeah, that’s how she got her name,” said Tony. “Blushing for her sins.”

  “Didn’t I say I was sorry?” Miss Ruby muttered. A Siamese jumped up on her lap and began howling as Miss Ruby stroked her. “Yes, you like that, don’t you?” she purred at the cat. She looked at me. Sighed. “Nora, my dear, I want you to know, it was hella complicated. Tony’s in twelve step for a reason.”

  Tony glared at her. “The program’s anonymous, remember? That’s hitting below the belt, Rube.”

  “Just don’t wreck my cooking pot with your paste stuff,” Miss Ruby told me.

  Tagging

  The wheat paste was in the refrigerator, the posters printed, and the night moonless, with a high wind rattling the trees and rolling garbage cans and anything else that was not tied down along the street. Perfect weather. No one would bother to investigate a little extra racket outside. The plan was for Miss Ruby to transport our supplies on her scooter while Tony, riding pillion, kept a lookout. Baby and I would do the actual postering.

  Baby and I had finished stowing the paste, brushes, and staple gun on the scooter in Miss Ruby’s driveway when Baby felt around in her coat pocket and, opening her fist, revealed a squashed joint and a book of matches. “Have a hit?” she asked.

  “I don’t think so. It makes me paranoid,” I said. “I’m anxious enough already.”

  “This stuff’s different,” said Baby, lighting the joint and taking a deep drag. She cupped her hand under my chin and tilted my face up to hers—as Janelle had once done, in quite different circumstances. Baby’s lips on mine, she opened my mouth with her tongue and exhaled into my lungs. Pulling away, she took another hit and handed the joint to me. Figuring I had nothing left to lose, I puffed on it, and we shared it back and forth a few more times, until finally she dropped the spent reefer and ground it out under a new white sneaker. Even she had had to admit that the tak-tok of her boots was just too distinctive. “Now,” she said, “we’re ready to go.”

  “Ready,” I said giddily.

  Baby looked at me with a slow smile. “Feeling more relaxed, sweetness?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  “What did I tell you? Look at those stars,” she said. “They’re as big as Christmas balls.”

  Baby took my hand and led me down the street, and Miss Ruby and Tony passed us on the scooter, honking and waving. In that buoyant moment, I believed that the cluster didn’t exist, that no one would notice our posters on their property, that the Cape aquifer was pure and clean, and that Baby and I would go back to her place after our escapade and have great sex to the crashing of waves and the hooting of foghorns. And at least some things turn out the way you imagine.

  We quickly developed a routine. Miss Ruby would pull up to a light pole, trash can, or other promising object, and I would unroll a poster and hold it in place while Baby slapped on the wheat paste, which she mostly managed to do without dripping it all over our jackets and shoes, or gunned it with the stapler. We started in the East End, sticking up a poster every block or two, and it was late and cold enough so that we didn’t encounter anyone except an incurious cigarette smoker/dog-walker and a woman with several wooly scarves wrapped around her head, who was completely absorbed in cursing out her invisible companion.

  When we reached the middle of town, t
hough, someone turned a corner in front of Baby and me, bright blonde pigtails glowing. “Broony!” whispered Baby. “Let’s say hi.”

  “Are you kidding? After we’ve gotten this far with no one seeing?” I grabbed Baby’s arm. “Let her keep going and maybe she won’t notice us.” And in fact, as we ambled behind her, she turned the next corner off Commercial Street. “Phew,” I said.

  Baby said nothing.

  After we put up the last poster, on a light pole across from the post office, Miss Ruby putted off to take Tony home. Baby reached into her pocket again. “I brought us a surprise, for a grand finale!” she said. “Check this out.” She pulled out a can of purple spray paint and rattled it at me.

  “Brilliant!” I said. I admit my judgment was not what it should have been. Postering signposts and light poles: okay. Tagging the Green Teddy patio: not okay.

  We took turns writing our message, passing the spray can back and forth and giggling: “F-U-C-K C-A-N-C-E-R!” Then we stepped back to admire our work. “Janelle is going to be amazed when she sees all this!” I said.

  “You didn’t tell her about the posters?” asked Baby.

  “Nope—I wanted it to be a surprise. It’s been so hard to figure out how to help her—but she was really into the idea of an environmental campaign. She’ll love this.”

  Baby answered me with a kiss. “You’re a good person,” she said. “Don’t let anyone tell you different.”

  The next morning, Baby said, “I can’t wait to see Bob’s reaction.”

  My head was still fuzzy. Baby and I had fallen into bed feeling so pleased with ourselves, and then with each other, that it hadn’t dawned on us that the rest of the world might not share our insouciance. We had persuaded ourselves that the patio looked fantastic, better than ever. “Come with me to the Teddy,” I offered. “I’m on first thing.”

  Broony wasn’t scheduled to work but she popped up exactly in time for my shift—for the sole purpose, I’m sure, of ratting me out. “It was the new girl,” she announced as she and Baby and I converged on Bob, who was standing in the street and staring at his patio, frantically stroking GT. “I saw on my way home from the gym.”

  This seemed suspicious. Confronted, I said, “The gym? In the middle of the night? Brunhilde, were you spying on us?”

  “You think Germans are spies? You are an American bigot!” Broony pointed at me triumphantly. “‘The middle of the night.’ You betray yourself! Off to jail! Baby will miss you, for sure. Or perhaps she will not! Perhaps she will have other preoccupations.”

  “Broony, really!” said Baby.

  “Nobody goes to jail for defacing a patio,” I said. “In this country they fine you for that, if anything.”

  Bob put Green Teddy back in his vest pocket. “Sorry to break up this lovely gathering,” he said. “In this country they fire you for that.”

  “Oh, come on, Babs. I’ll clean it up,” I offered, although I should have known better than to use his drag name at that moment. “I got carried away. But I’ll fix it.”

  “Bob,” he corrected me, adopting his most corporate manner. “To you, Mr. Robert Johnson. I don’t think you’re taking this seriously, Nora. But if I find you near my patio again I will have you picked up, for trespassing and property damage. And I’m hiring a pro. This mess is going to be totally erased.” It wasn’t that Bob didn’t endorse our cause, of preventing breast cancer and environmental destruction. He was a person with women friends and a conscience. And like all Provincetown businesspeople, he was also, rather confusingly, wary both of any issue that had the potential to drive away his customers and of the crowding and overdevelopment he profited from. “The Teddy can’t get involved in these slogans and things. I hate to let you go,” he said, relenting a little, “but what were you thinking?”

  “It was for Janelle,” I tried to explain. “And then me and Baby—”

  Baby interrupted me. “She wasn’t thinking anything, Bob! The spray paint was my idea!”

  “Not true; Nora is the one!” Broony yelled. “I saw!”

  “Ladies, ladies,” said Bob. “Peace.” He pointed at Broony. “You. Calm down.” Then he pointed at Baby. “You. Don’t try to cover up for her.” He pointed at me. “And you. You can pay for the cleanup.”

  “I guess it was kind of my fault,” I admitted. “It was stupid. I’m really sorry, Mr. Robert—”

  “No, no, no!” Baby said. “This is wrong!”

  “Not wrong,” muttered Broony.

  “I thought it would be fun,” said Baby. “I’ll pay.”

  “But I got into it as much as you,” I told her. I didn’t want her paying. Letting my girlfriend get mixed up in my finances, I had learned, just led to problems. I didn’t have the cash to compensate Bob all at once, but we set up a plan for me to pay him in weekly installments until Memorial Day. My brief barista days were over.

  Stop & Shop

  So that’s how I ended up working behind the deli counter at the Stop & Shop.

  In fact, it was a far more practical job than the one I had had at the Teddy—more hours, better pay, more predictable coworkers. I had anticipated a less interesting atmosphere, but that was before I understood that hardly anyone came through Provincetown without making at least one trip to the grocery store. In the summer, the undisciplined children of straight couples scampered down the aisles pushing shopping carts. They caromed off Margot, buying Wheaties for her grandkids; off arthritic fishermen buying shrimp rings; off bikinied lesbians buying maraschino cherries for Manhattans on the roof deck; off freshly showered, sweet-smelling gay men buying pork tenderloins for the grill; off the day manager, looming large in her purple apron, who stopped them in their tracks: “Quit it, ya brats!” In the winter, for locals, the store was a major social hub.

  Sometimes, as I handed over Janelle’s order of feta cheese or potato salad, I got the feeling that she pitied me for having slid down so many rungs on the social ladder, but I reminded myself that the vocation of the artist is quite different from that of the tech whiz, and that I was fortunate, in Provincetown’s resort economy, to have a steady day job that didn’t involve cleaning hotel toilets. She didn’t see herself as at all implicated in my situation. “I guess you meant well, but defacing every surface in town wasn’t a great way to get people to trust us. And taking that sort of risk just isn’t like you. Did whatsis talk you into it?”

  I ignored her implication that I was hopelessly timid and easily pressured. “I was moving out of my comfort zone,” I explained, trying out a phrase I had heard from Tony. “Anyway, the Teddy patio is hardly every surface in town. And Bob’s forgiven me. We have an arrangement, and I go over there for a latte every week. He even asked if I had an extra poster he could hang up in the shop. He thinks it’ll be a collectors’ item.”

  “So now you’re the next Keith Haring?”

  “Maybe.” I doubted it, though. My new job, combined with my exchange with Miss Ruby of services and a token payment for room and board, and my studio squat, enabled me to support myself—which was, after all, what I had wanted in the first place, and what had led to my meeting Baby, the crisis with Janelle, and everything that had followed. The income made my life more predictable, and it kept me in art supplies.

  But it curtailed the time I had for the actual art. Standing on my feet for an entire shift was exhausting, and it was too dark and cold to work in the shed in the evenings when I got home. I often ended up spending my days off cleaning and running errands for Miss Ruby, and when my chores were done, I couldn’t resist playing around with Baby. We spent sweet afternoons having sex and napping and cooking dinners for two. She led me over the trails that wound through the dunes and out to the bay. We watched seals haul out to sun themselves on the sand and were harassed by gulls. One morning I even let her lead me all the way across the jetty, after she agreed to wear her wheat-pasting sneakers rather than her cowboy boots.

  She asked from time to time when I would design another poster, but sinc
e Janelle had shown so little enthusiasm for the attempt Baby and I had made to start her awareness and action campaign, and the outcome for me had been so completely disastrous, I decided to postpone that. Having made such a fuss about needing a studio—if only to myself—I was embarrassed to have used it so rarely. My next day off would be spent there, I announced to Baby, no matter how tempting her affections or how lovely the weather. I had to get started on my mural. “That’s right, sweetheart, you do your thing,” said Baby.

  “I mean, I do want to see you,” I backtracked. I didn’t like her agreeing so easily not to see me.

  “Go to your shed,” she said. “I know you artistic types. If you’re not doing your work, you get all anxious and guilty and become a general drag to be around.”

  “Oh no, not that!” I said, trying to make light of her comment—but the last thing I wanted was for Baby to decide I was a drag, so I was stuck with my resolution.

  The Mural

  January in New England is mostly cold and dreary, but every once in a while there’s a freakish day that reminds you that in some parts of the world, it’s spring. I pulled on an extra sweater and propped open the door of the shed with a moribund potted plant, to let in the fresh breeze. The day was almost cloudless, except for a few wisps of cirrus near the horizon, ornaments that made the blue around them seem bluer, and you could actually feel rays of the sun warming your face or your back.

  I had bought a tall roll of newsprint, and I measured long sheets and pinned them up around all four walls. Then I sat in the doorway in my wobbly plastic chair and stared at the paper and thought about the landscape and the seascape, how the birds see them and how to represent them. Sea grass, beach roses, poison ivy, and cranberries. Birches and gnarled, wind-stunted pines. Skunks, raccoons, coyotes, foxes, and deer. One year, a bear—he swam the canal and ambled up to Provincetown, snatching food from people’s garbage cans all the way. A crosshatch of streets, the slash of Route 6, dashes of color—cars, gardens, houses. Foam-capped waves, seals, diving ducks and skimming ducks, whales and dolphins. Ferries, scallopers, pleasure boats, and kayaks. Fishes, pebbles, lobsters, clams, and kelp.