by Amy Hoffman
A gray-haired woman in silver sneakers leading a huge black dog on a leash turned away, disappointed that they had arrived too late for a run on the beach. The beach was gone; water lapped the bottom stairs, and ducks flapped around in the shallows. I watched them fish: some species tipping into the water, pointed tails in the air, webbed feet working frantically to keep them inverted, others plunging down completely, to pop up like bathtub toys yards away.
A girl I used to date wore a perfume called L’Heure Bleue, and it came in a bottle just that deep shade of spring sky after sunset, when it’s so saturated that the color runs out and stains everything, walkers bundled in sweaters against the crepuscular chill, houses, dogs, ducks, me—all indistinguishably bleue.
I had gotten a phone call. These things happen.
It was great news, sort of: a job offer. My dilemma was that it was at Pratt Institute, back in Brooklyn, where I used to pick up a studio class or two each semester. The school was looking to replace a painting teacher who would be going on sabbatical. So it wasn’t permanent, but it was full time, the kind of thing that gets your toe in the door. With maternity leaves and other sabbaticals and sudden departures by temperamental divas, if you’re good, you can become a fixture. At one time I would hardly have believed my luck, an offer like that coming out of nowhere, just as I was again losing both lover and home, unsure of where I would land.
With Baby, everything had become tears and recriminations—at least, on my part. I was definitely no fun anymore. No more worries about squares; that was smashed to bits. Baby had her moments of sadness and regret, when she would try to coax me into her bed—but it was obvious to me that these were only brief interruptions in the irrepressible exhilaration of early love. Mi’Kay was no Broony, no Nora, even. She wasn’t just a thing. She was the thing.
“I’ll never forget you,” said Baby, reaching out for a final hug as I picked up my knapsack from the back of her kitchen chair, to walk out her door for the last time. I avoided her arms.
And Mr. Ruis was sticking to his threat to evict Miss Ruby. “Who needs him?” she said when she decided to move in with Tony, at least as a trial. Tony was so full of satisfaction and pride as she helped Miss Ruby pack that she went around puffed up like a little rooster—or maybe the resemblance was because of the haircut one of her sponsees had given her, high and tight, the few gray curls left on top sticking up like a comb. She and Janelle had bonded as survivors, on the day of the Swim as they held up their signs, and now they were plotting actions together. Tony was eager to chain herself to something, but Janelle no longer endorsed that sort of thing, and she sent Tony out to collect more signatures—this time, to stop the dumping of sewage in the bay. “You’d think that would be pretty basic,” Janelle had said, shaking her head. “P-town. Jeez.”
“You’ll stay on our couch, Nora,” Miss Ruby invited me. “Until we find you a place.”
“That’s right,” said Tony. “You won’t be the first to sleep on the thing.”
That didn’t make it attractive. I went back and forth in my mind about a million times, the college waiting for my response, Miss Ruby and Tony offering to buy a new mattress, and even Janelle trying to persuade me to stay, as we felt our way toward becoming true friends in the wake of our mutual abandonment. She was moving on, climbing out of illness and anger, recovering her sweet, outgoing nature and even picking up a few new, P-town clients for her business. But I was sad and agitated.
If nothing else though, I had the momentum of my artwork, and that evening, drenched in blue, standing at the point where the parallels converge and looking back at the town, black now against the fading sky, I thought about how you sometimes have to step away from the easel to get a useful perspective and see the whole picture, and once and for all I decided to go home.
Janelle
There was something I had to do first, though. Bob let me take over a corner of his patio one sunny day, when I reminded him that I no longer had a studio to work in—although he looked at me suspiciously when I showed up with my pads and pencils. He pulled Teddy out of his pocket and poked the toy into my knapsack. “Teddy want to know,” he said in his squeaky voice. “Where spray paint?”
“Threw it away,” I said. “I learned my lesson. This is something different.”
“I should hope so,” he said in his normal bass, replacing Teddy and going back inside.
When Janelle arrived, he bustled out again with complimentary lattes. “Brunhilde quit, if you must know,” he told me when he set mine down. “Barely a day’s notice. She just came in the other morning and announced that she was going back to her German girlfriend. With the season coming on and everything! I’m really pissed.”
“Good riddance,” I said.
“I know you girls didn’t always see eye to eye,” said Bob, shaking his head. “But she was a natural with the coffee machine. My best barista ever.”
“Oh, come on,” I said. “It can’t be that hard to learn.”
“You don’t understand,” he grumbled. “She had the touch. Very special. I don’t suppose you’d consider coming back?”
“Wow, Bob, I’m honored,” I said. Even though we had become friends, I had never thought he would trust me as far as that. “But I don’t think I could ever take Broony’s place.”
When he had gone, Janelle said, “Okay, where do you want me?”
“Stay right there.” I pointed at her. “Across from me. You know, find a comfortable position, and then don’t wiggle around too much.”
“The old routine,” she said.
This wasn’t the first portrait I had painted of her, after all. “Exactly,” I said.
She took a sip of coffee, and I waited for her to put her cup down. “So here we are,” she said. “Our big idea. Who would’ve thought.”
“A long, strange trip,” I agreed, glancing up at her, then down at my sketch pad. She looked, frankly, older and more tired than in the previous portrait I had made: her face thinner and her dimples more deeply carved, her eyes darker and more searching. Her tufts had filled in, and just recently she had bleached her hair blonde, despite her misgivings about the chemical exposure. “For summer,” she said. “I can’t see myself as gray just yet.”
I wouldn’t put her against an indoor background this time. I would paint her in front of a blue sky, with ovals of clouds, m-shapes among them to signify the gulls, big ones for the gulls, smaller ones for the pigeons, the way children draw them. They show each other: This is how you make a bird.
“I like your new hair.”
“A couple of the white women in my support group told me theirs grew back curly. I thought mine might grow back straight. Cancer’s so perverse.”
“I wouldn’t put anything past it.”
“Mutation, growth, transformation—you’d think it would be something positive.” She paused. “We both ended up in a mess, didn’t we?”
I had intended to apologize for bringing Baby into her life, and for the way she had proceeded to rip off so much from Janelle—me, Mi’Kay. Or at least, I imagined that was how Janelle saw it. “I’m sorry—” I started.
“Don’t,” she said. “You’re not.”
“No,” I said. “I guess not.” I couldn’t regret Baby, not yet, nor wish nothing had happened between us, and that Janelle and I were still together, and figuring out how to rebuild our lives together in Provincetown.
“She didn’t even know me,” said Janelle. “It wasn’t personal. It’s just the way she operates. Without thinking.”
Caddishly, I thought. “I can see why you think she’s like that,” I said, resisting agreement. Baby was Baby—her own woman, with her own set of rules. “It was me, too, though.”
“Oh, believe me, I’m aware of that,” said Janelle. “I’m working on that.” She paused. “I figured out why I like coding so much. Because with computers, you create your own little universe, and it makes sense. Zero, one. On, off. It does what you tell it. Not like this out here,
with all these variables. Mi’Kay was never going to stay with me. I knew that from the start—”
“Me and Baby too! It was just supposed to be—”
“She was like one of those birds that gets caught up in a hurricane and blown off course, into some strange new environment. A parrot among the pigeons. She was getting over cancer too, remember. She needed to settle down for a while and figure out where she’d landed—and there I was.”
“You have your good points,” I said.
“I’m trying to figure out what they are, exactly.”
“And so what if she’s a parrot? All they can do is repeat what people tell them.”
“And be beautiful.” She leaned across the table to look at the sketch I was making. “Look how serious I am, Nora. Can’t you make me look at least a little happy? We’re out here together. We’re trying. It’s a nice day.”
I tore off the sheet and started a new drawing, in which Janelle was smiling—not just at the nice day but at me, as I hoped she eventually would. “I’m going back to the city,” I said.
“Roger told me.”
“He said I could stay with him, until I find my own place.”
“Also the lady at the post office—”
“—Sylvie—”
“She said you’d been getting a lot of fat envelopes, return address Brooklyn, because you got a big glamorous job.”
“She’s such a busybody! Do you think she steams the envelopes open?”
“Nah, half the time she’s wrong.”
“Roger thinks it’s weird that lesbians stay friends with their ex-lovers,” I said.
“He thinks everything lesbians do is weird,” said Janelle. “He’ll get over it.”
Present Tense
An unexpected perk of my teaching job is that my department gives me a studio, a real one, with walls and big windows and heat and hot water in the sink. I’ve been making self-portraits. Even though I don’t think my installation will ever all fit together perfectly, which anyway is not the point—do the patterns of a life ever become that clear?—it was persistently missing a piece. Which was: me. The artist herself. So I’ve gone from standing back to get a view of the whole thing to close-ups.
I mount a mirror on my easel and force myself to stare into it. At first all I see is the sagging of my cheeks and softening of my jawline, the gray in my hair: time to find a new colorist; the Moldovan girl was nice but she didn’t do me any favors. I put down my brushes and get on the phone to Roger, see if he knows anyone. He’ll ask around.
Stop, focus, sit back down, go deeper. I try to interpret the cryptic lines and discolorations of my mature face, and what they say about my life experience and character.
I develop a new pallet, different from the one I used for the other portraits, more primary, less subtle. Less nice and pretty. Then I abandon even that for ink wash, a medium that’s supposed to capture the evanescent spirit of the thing, underneath its literal façade. I look, look, and look. What do I see? I don’t know.
It’s exhausting after a while, and I have work to do for my classes, so I put my art things away and go home. I have a home. I only had to stay with Roger for a month, because the daughter of a colleague at school was moving out of her apartment. It’s small but sunny, and I feel lucky to have it, even though it’s a fourth-floor walk-up. By now I’m so used to the stairs I don’t notice them, and my calves have gotten round and hard again, like they were when I first met Janelle.
My students just handed in their midterms—I had them write papers instead of simply take an exam, so they’re all mad at me. I told them it would be good practice, and they said they’re artists, not writers. But, you’ll have to write, I insisted. You’ll be writing grants, artist’s statements—let’s be professional here. They don’t believe me, and now I have a huge pile of essays to correct. I’ve given myself a quota: five a day. When I finish, I reward myself. I put on a jacket, stick my wallet in my pocket, do up the complicated Brooklyn locks on the door, run down the stairs.
There’s a diner on my corner, the kind with no sign and no name, and cake stands full of pale, puffy muffins ranged along a sticky counter. Someone, sometime, must buy them. The coffee is bitter and burnt—somehow always burnt, even when the surly waitress makes a fresh pot because she sees me coming. She’s got these short razored-off black bangs and red lipstick and a diamond chip in her nose, and she’ll consent to walk around the block with me when she goes on break.
She could be trouble.
Afterword
This book is a novel. Any resemblance of its characters to persons living or dead is coincidental—almost. Margot’s persona is based on that of the late, much-missed street performer Miss Ellie Castillo (1931–2011); Margot’s character, behavior, and personal history, however, are my fabrications. To read about the real Miss Ellie, visit https://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=73791145.
Although the campaign against mosquito spraying that Nora organizes is fictitious, Protect Our Cape Cod Aquifer (POCCA) has worked for many years to stop the spraying of water-contaminating herbicides under power lines on the Cape by the region’s electrical company, Eversource. To learn more, visit https://poccacapecod.org/.
The Silent Spring Institute has studied the elevated incidence of breast cancer on Cape Cod. View their results at http://silentspring.org/research-area/cape-cod-breast-cancer-and-environment-study. For information about black women’s particular risks from breast cancer, visit http://www.sistersnetworkinc.org/breastcancerfacts.html and http://www.bwhi.org/issues-and-resources/black-women-and-breast-cancer/.
For narrative purposes, I’ve taken the liberty of moving the date of the annual Swim for Life from September to May. The Swim benefits Provincetown’s AIDS, women’s health, and community groups. To learn more or donate, visit http://swim4life.org/.
To read more about the Hat Sisters, Tim O’Connor and his husband, the late John Michael Gray, and the fabulous millinery in which they regularly appeared at fund-raisers for LGBT and AIDS organizations, and other arts and charitable nonprofits, visit http://www.therainbowtimesmass.com/hat-sisters-legacy-lives-farewell-john-michael-gray/. I don’t know whether they ever danced the Swim.
There’s nothing amiss with the bottled water sold at the Provincetown Stop & Shop.
The Green Teddy may remind some people of Joe’s Coffee—but it really has nothing to do with it.
Provincetown, amazingly enough, is totally real.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to the artist Barbara Cohen for telling a story at a dinner party that became the seed from which this novel eventually grew—and for not minding that I used it. Thanks also to Urvashi Vaid and Kate Clinton for inviting me to dinner that night, for giving me space to write in their Provincetown home over numerous weekends, and for their endless support and encouragement.
The night I heard Barbara’s story I was on my way for the first time to a residency at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. During that residency and many since, VCCA has provided precious time and peace to conceive and work on this and other manuscripts.
A poster by the Provincetown artist Peter Clemons that depicts the waters of ocean and bay swirling around the tip of the Cape has long hung in my kitchen, and as I wrote The Off Season, it inspired me to think of the area’s geography as circular rather than as the end of the line. So it feels just perfect to have Peter’s colorful image on the cover of my book.
E. B. White wrote, “It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.” Like Charlotte, Anita Diamant and Stephen McCauley are both.
As editor in chief of Women’s Review of Books, I am fortunate to have a meaningful day job, as well as awesome colleagues at the Wellesley Centers for Women—especially Ineke Ceder, who is not only a friend but also an incomparably sharp-eyed proofreader. WCW executive directors Susan McGee Bailey and Layli Maparyan have created a unique workplace that honors creative work of all kinds.
Thanks to Raphael Kadushin, my editor at the University of Wisconsin Press, who responded with such enthusiasm to my manuscript, and to the two manuscript reviewers whose kind praise and insightful comments helped me to greatly improve this novel.
Thanks to Carole DeSanti for the word cad.
Thanks especially to friends and colleagues Robin Becker, Richard Burns, Mary Cappello, Brian Cummings, Ruth Danon, Meg Kearney, Debbie Nadolney, Anne-Marie Oomen, Natania Rosenfeld, Betsy Smith, and Jean Walton; and to my sister, Priscilla Morrissey; my niece, Rachel Morrissey; and my parents, Sigmund and Serena Hoffman.
Although Roberta Stone is my wife, and therefore I’m thanking her last, as is traditional, she did not do any of the things wives are generally acknowledged for, like type my drafts, help with my research, or cook my meals. Yet every day she inspires me, holds me, makes me laugh, and makes me think. Love you, honey.
