The Off Season

by Amy Hoffman

  She was right, anyway. I couldn’t leave my stuff with her indefinitely. The situation with the boxes was not as bad as it had been at first, since I had been plundering them for daily necessities, clothes and books and art supplies. I had been avoiding going through the rest of the contents, though; they were mostly remnants of my life with Janelle—vacation photos, birthday cards, a set of towels we had bought together that I had ended up with because after we had used them a few times she had condemned them as “too thick.”

  “How can a towel be too thick?” I had said. “Isn’t that what’s desirable in a towel?”

  “These are like bathmats,” she had said. “Thick and hard. Towels are supposed to be thick and fluffy. And they’re an ugly color. Turquoise. What were we thinking?”

  “I’ve been living without the stuff for this long,” I told Patsy. “Maybe I should just toss it into the street on garbage day.”

  “Don’t do that. The town won’t pick it up! We’ll get fined if you put those boxes out. You have to take them to the dump. And correctly sort all the recyclables, you know.” She began enumerating categories: “Clear glass, green glass, beer bottles, water jugs. Coke bottles, Diet Coke bottles, daily newspapers, weekly newspapers. Oh, and Amazon boxes, all other boxes, soup cans, cat food cans, yogurt cups, and Styrofoam packing peanuts. Books—well, we don’t recycle the books, they go on shelves for people to take home with them. Along with any bubble wrap—for the compulsive poppers. Everything else is trash.”

  “Wow, that sounds complicated.”

  “It’s not so bad. There’s bins for everything, and they’re labeled pretty clearly. It just takes time. I’ve spent hours. But I don’t mind; no one does. I run into congregation members and friends; we catch up. The dump is a true community space! I’ve often thought we should hold services right there. Ecology Sundays.”

  “I wonder what your board would think of that,” I said.

  “Ha!” Patsy burst out. “Don’t ask! They are completely out of sympathy with creative spiritual expression.”

  “Are they giving you that hard a time?” I said. “I’m sorry to hear it; you certainly don’t deserve it.”

  “No, no,” she said. “Things will be fine. I was being ungenerous—one of my sins.”

  “Unitarians have sins?”

  “Metaphorically. One of my flaws, okay?”

  “Well, I don’t think you’re ungenerous,” I said. “Look how much you put up with from me.”

  “You’re very kind, Nora. But please don’t repeat any of this. Everyone must find her own path, after all.”

  Mine was obstructed by boxes. I had suggested it facetiously, but thinking it over, I decided that throwing my stuff out wasn’t a bad plan. There was simply no space for it in my current living arrangement. In my room at Miss Ruby’s, I could barely turn around—“What do you need to turn around for?” Miss Ruby said. “Turn around in the living room!”—and in the shed, I needed the space for my paintings and my sitters.

  Tony was up for any project that involved the use of her truck, so when my manager at work finally decided that I had done enough penance for Janelle’s protest, and I got a Saturday morning off, I asked her to drive me to the church office. “Patsy will be so surprised when she comes in for Sunday services and the place is all cleaned up,” I said.

  Tony waited with the flashers on and the motor running while I hauled out a dozen boxes and loaded them into the truck bed. “I’d help, but if I get out, we’ll get a ticket,” she called as I trudged back and forth. “You know what they’re like around here.”

  I thought I knew what she meant. The town expressed its ambivalence about tourism—needing the jobs yet resenting the invasion—through its parking regulations. During the summer, the meters were kept ticking away twenty-four hours a day, to squeeze out every possible quarter from visitors’ pockets, and even during the off season the street signs were kept deliberately confusing, in the hope of catching the stray vacationer in a tow zone. “Don’t you have a town sticker?” I asked.

  “Yeah, but so what? I had a little fling with the meter maid—years ago now, but let’s just say it didn’t end well, and she still has it in for me.”

  “But that’s unfair. You should fight tickets like that!” I said.

  Tony just snorted.

  At the entrance to the dump was a little shack, and Chuck Pina was sitting in the doorway. “Nora Griffin!” he exclaimed, jumping up and pumping my hand. “Congratulations, my friend! Great showing at the STM!”

  “Special town meeting,” Tony explained. “Guy knows everything—town meeting regs, recycling system.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “It’s nice to see you again. I thought you worked at Town Hall.”

  “Recording people’s petitions is hardly a full-time job. Although sometimes there are so many of them, it almost seems like it could be. I do this on weekends.” He turned to Tony. “There’s a space over there.” He gestured toward a surprisingly crowded parking area.

  “It’s always busy like this,” Tony explained. “Scavengers.”

  I thought she meant the flock of bedraggled seagulls that was circling the dump, but when I cut open the first box, I found myself immediately surrounded by people. “Lemme see that,” said one woman, peering over my shoulder. “Nice!” I had picked up a photo of me and Janelle, holding hands in front of our building in Brooklyn. I had asked a passerby to take it on the day I had moved in with her, and I had had it blown up to hang in our bedroom. “Can I have it?” she asked, gently tugging it from my hands.

  “I guess so,” I said, although it seemed odd that she would want a photo of a couple she didn’t know—even though I thought we had looked especially attractive that day—the significance of which she couldn’t possibly understand.

  “What I really want is the frame,” she explained. “I’ll probably tear up the picture.”

  Oh, tear up my heart, I thought. It wasn’t the first time that I wondered how I could have let things go this far. “Let me just take a last look.”

  “What, is that you? That skinny thing with the mop of black hair? Wouldn’t have made the connection, you know? You were a baby! And the black outfits—were you guys coming from a funeral?”

  “It’s New York,” I explained, letting go of the photo. The frame collector walked off with her find, and I berated myself, No more Janelle-and-Nora. Clean out the remnants.

  The whole morning went like that. Every time I opened a box people bunched around me more closely. Chuck tried to shoo them away, and finally he picked up a box and carried it over to the row of recycling bins, the crowd trailing after him. Pulling out a clock radio, he began explaining to me how to figure out which bin to put it in: “It’s plastic, so you might think it goes over there in number seven—but it’s also battery operated, which trumps the plastic, so see, it has to go into that bin on the end. Fifteen.” He started walking toward it, but a man cut him off and held out his hand. “I’ll take that,” he said. “What great stuff! I thought of skipping today; glad I didn’t!”

  “Watch, it’ll all come back around,” Chuck told me. “Once they get it home and try to figure out where to put it. People’s houses are small around here. They don’t have basements or garages.”

  “Exactly my problem!” I said.

  “It’s the same trash, week in and week out,” he said mournfully.

  When I opened a box of books, all hell broke loose. “The Letters of Vincent van Gogh!” exclaimed the frame lady, snatching the book and waving it over her head. “This is a treasure!”

  “Wait a minute! Where’d you find that?” I said, grabbing it back from her. I didn’t know how it could have appeared with my things. “I’ll hang onto this one.”

  She glared at me. “You should’ve thought of that before!” she said. “Once you drop it off here, it’s supposed to be fair game.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “But I don’t think a garbage dump has to be fair.”

  Chuck Pina n
odded.

  The Buddhists are right, I thought, to preach nonattachment to the material. It’s so inevitably unimportant, unattainable, or ephemeral: a set of scratchy turquoise towels that neither individual would have bought on her own, the purchase of which could only have been made by the pair together, going for thickness and brightness and forgetting the fluffy factor. No couple, no towels.

  I wondered if Chuck Pina could tell me where the bin was for that kind of thing.

  The towels were gone, anyway, along with the rest of my things. Under Chuck’s supervision, I broke down the cartons, tied them up with lengths of special biodegradable string that he provided, and piled them into All Other Boxes. I climbed into the truck cab with Tony, who had stayed inside, protected from the crowd and observing the whole procedure, and she drove me home.

  Margot and Marcus

  The storm on the day of the town meeting turned out to be the last Nor’easter of the season, and as warm, or at least warmish, days became more common, it seemed to me that Baby was spending more time than ever with Broony. Swimming, she said. I surprised myself by being somewhat less unhappy about this than I might have been. I had been getting it through my head that if I wanted to persist in my Baby entanglement, I would have to reconcile myself to her glad carpe-diem nature—but also, I was becoming preoccupied with my own project, even as Baby was with hers. My studio beckoned at all hours. And in the end, I thought, which of us would have more to show for it?

  “It’s temporary,” Baby said, pulling me toward her one pretty April morning and covering my face with kisses before she ran off. She propped herself up on one elbow and, uncharacteristically, unpracticed at such a thing, attempted to reassure me. “Just until the Swim for Life is over. It’s just a thing.”

  “A thing?”

  “You know,” said Baby. “Not like with you.”

  “Thing One and Thing Two,” I said. I could almost see her demons, dancing on her shoulders. Lying in her bed, watching the sun silver-plate the wavelets on the bay, I remembered the freezing horizontal rain that the Cape also specialized in, and pulled the covers more tightly around us.

  Baby laughed. “Oh hush,” she murmured. “Don’t move, don’t think; let’s just stay like this. You’re my best thing.”

  After a while, my arm fell asleep. “Ouch,” I said.

  “Uh-oh, now I’ve really gotta run,” said Baby, giving me a quick kiss on the cheek and throwing off the covers. Rummaging around in her dresser drawers, she produced her wet suit and yellow daisy bathing cap, stuffed them into a gym bag, and rushed out.

  “I think you forgot your pink towel,” I said, but she was gone.

  After she left, I went directly to the studio. As I had been spending more and more time working on my mural, the place had gotten a little chaotic—not completely out of control but busy. I had filled a couple of big newsprint pads with drawings, and the sketches and paintings based on them, in various stages of completion, were hanging around the room, tacked to the exposed wall studs. With this work around me, I had evolved a process completely different from anything I had done before. Instead of focusing on one painting at a time, as I used to, I was doing all of it at once: pencil sketches, canvas priming, underpainting, blocking out of shadows and lights, filling in details. It was turning out to be helpful to be able to contemplate the ways the pieces complemented and interacted with each other—or didn’t—and when I had had enough of one, I would work on another for a while. Before, I would have considered flitting around like that terribly undisciplined. When I had encountered a barrier, technical or imaginative, I had believed in slamming against it relentlessly until I busted through—not turning away or circumventing it. But pounding away day after day leaves you feeling bruised, not to mention demoralized, and I was learning instead to clear paths through the underbrush—around, under, up, and over.

  As a result, pieces were falling into place. Miss Ruby and Tony had been among my first sitters, and I had hung the portraits of them, which I was still touching up, with the mural section that depicted, within the grid of Provincetown streets, an expanded close-up of one particular side street, and one particular dilapidated little house, a cross-section of which revealed Miss Ruby’s recliner and some of her cats.

  In addition to the people I had already painted, I wanted to include an image of Margot. In my mind, she had become representative of Provincetown and its possibilities, even though I didn’t know her at all, really, and I definitely hadn’t always seen her that way. When I had first encountered her, singing in front of Town Hall next to her sign, “Living My Dream,” which she would prop against the child’s red wagon she used to drag her loudspeaker down Commercial Street, I had thought she was grotesque. Her long blonde wig, her leather miniskirt, her knockout gams and seventy-year-old face—the combination just seemed pathetic. Whatever her life had been before, had she really always been dreaming of this? A wig, a skirt, a pair of fishnet stockings, and a few songs made famous by that old capo Frank Sinatra? I averted my eyes from her performances. They embarrassed me—if not Margot, or anyone else for that matter: she always drew a crowd. The tourists would clap along.

  After a while I got used to her. She was out in all weather—as intrepid as the gay motorcycle clubs (not the kind that own motorcycles) who march in sweltering late June LGBT pride parades, dressed hat-to-boots in black leather. I began to admire her grit and even her warbling. She didn’t lip-sync or resort to falsetto but sang full-throated. Hers wasn’t exactly a man’s voice. Or a woman’s. It was just—Margot’s. I began to nod to her when I passed her on the street and to throw fifty cents or a dollar into her collection basket, on which a note explained that the change wasn’t for her: after a lifetime of employment in the finance industry, it reassured her listeners, she was quite secure and enjoyed being able to donate the money to the Provincetown animal shelter. Margot was a lover of strays.

  And then of course she had signed my town meeting petition—one of the few people who had done so fully understanding what it was for. I caught up with her one day as she was packing up after her last song and asked if I could paint her portrait.

  “Who could say no to that invitation?” said Margot. “Would you like me to pose like this”—she planted her feet and flung her arms open wide—“or in my street clothes?”

  “I thought those were your street clothes,” I said.

  “Oh, come on, sweetheart, you’ve seen me a million times in front of that fish counter in the Stop & Shop.”

  “Deli,” I said, embarrassed that I had no idea what she was talking about. As far as I knew I had never seen Margot anywhere but in front of Town Hall, doing her act. “Can I try you both ways?” I asked.

  “Why, I’m all aflutter!” Margot put a hand to her chest and wiggled her fingers. “No one’s asked me that for a dog’s age!” She smiled at me, and suddenly I could see the older gentleman I had waited on a few times. With his white hair combed back from a receding widow’s peak, big translucent ears, and gray cardigan sweater, he looked European, or somehow not of this century—although not of a past one, either. He always left a tip, not common practice. “I’ll bring along a change of costume. When and where shall we meet?”

  I told Margot how to find my studio, and we made a date. I wasn’t sure who to expect, my customer or Margot. As I waited, I flipped through my newly rescued copy of the Letters of Vincent van Gogh, realizing sadly that the book didn’t have its old charisma, from when I was in college. Perhaps I had learned too much: I couldn’t take seriously Vincent’s constant pronouncements about art and, especially, love, knowing that in his life, he couldn’t get along with anyone—as much as he longed to—much less love them.

  When I opened the door, there was my customer, dragging a small tangerine-colored suitcase on wheels. I was disappointed: a drag queen would have been a more interesting subject, I thought; the man before me in his street clothes was not nearly as colorful. In fact, he looked quite gray.

  �
��It’s Marcus,” he introduced himself. “I felt ever-so-mildly fatigué this morning, and it’s restful, on occasion, not to have to encounter one’s fans on the street, don’t you think? It happens, at my age. But I can change if you’d rather.” He indicated the suitcase.

  “Let’s start this way,” I said. “Since this is how you’re feeling. Is that how it works? That you choose every morning when you wake up?”

  “My goodness, no,” said Marcus, lowering himself onto the plastic chair. “That would be trying. There’s usually no choice necessary if I’m not going out. I have a few lovely at-home kimonos, which are also suitable for receiving the occasional special guest. Of course, there are times when loungewear just won’t do, you know, such as for work in the garden or kitchen or making simple repairs. For those tasks I have a very practical coverall. Not elegant, you understand, but practical, such as a mechanic or perhaps one of our Cape Cod fishermen might wear. The Marine Supply emporium carries a variety of butch colors—khaki, gray, a kind of blue herringbone affair.

  “If I’m going out, though, unless I’m in a great rush, or as today, feeling a bit under the weather, Margot emerges.”

  I had begun sketching, but Marcus’s ears were giving me problems, overdominating the picture. Oddly, I had never noticed anything unusual about Margot’s ears; maybe they were flattened by the wig. “Turn your head just a little toward me,” I said. “Do you mean that you’re not quite in control of Margot?”

  “No, I wouldn’t say that. I suppose it’s more that I invite her to appear. She is such a delightful . . . manifestation. I feel truly fortunate to have discovered her. Dis-covered, if you see what I mean. I’m not sure how to describe it to you. Or anyone, really.” Marcus sighed, then continued. “The queens in this town don’t seem to understand what I’m talking about. They consciously invent their personae—the name of their first pet, plus the name of the street they lived on when they were eight, that sort of thing. Whereas Margot, she—well, she just is. Naturally and organically.”