Almost Famous Women

by Megan Mayhew Bergman

  Soon the men began to gather at the dry, chalky fountain, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, possible because Clare had finally allowed rooftop gardens where people could grow burly, rustic tobacco, which they stuffed into cones of dried seaweed. It was illegal to use pasture space for anything but food crops, but they all agreed the tobacco helped keep things mellow. Now nearly everyone smoked, especially today. Even Summer Hutchison, the seventeen-year-old golden girl of the island, lit a nori cigarette and held it between her teeth as she walked toward the picking house, bucket in hand. She smiled at everyone she passed, licking her dry, chapped lips. She was always cheerful because she was in love, and no one on Timothy was really in love those days. They came to each other’s beds because they were bored or obligated, but Summer was in love and the co-op’s women agreed it made her pleasant to be around, and so they began to talk about weddings in the picking house, telling stories their mothers had told them about their own weddings, of tossed rice and horse-drawn carriages.

  “We could make a veil from an old net,” Jade Sleeman said. “We’d drape it like this,” she added, gesturing toward her dark cropped hair. Her daughter Lela played underneath the table, stacking empty oyster shells on Jade’s toes while the women worked. Jade was thin but strong; her mother had been a horsewoman and a polo player before exile.

  Summer smiled. The sun, and there was too much of it, caught in her hair, lit it up like pale stained glass.

  “We don’t have any nets to spare,” Clare said without looking up from the rockfish she was skinning, blade expertly snaking underneath the scaled flesh. When she did look up, gazing out of the window, she could see the men at the fountain, smoking, browned from working all summer long on the artificial reef, which they’d fashioned out of the timbers and iron that washed ashore from a shipwreck they figured sat just east of the island; the pieces tumbled toward them in the strong western current. Though they rarely wore shirts they began pulling them on, and though it was forbidden she knew many of them had stuffed their pockets with gull jerky and marmalade.

  But not Javier Lewis, she thought. Javier, hardly twenty, was honorable, and that’s why she tolerated this talk of weddings, because he and Summer were the future of Timothy. They respected tradition and understood what had to be done. She could see Summer looking for him through the big windows, in between feeding empty shells to Lela underneath the table. Clare imagined Summer and Javier with a child. Surely it would be a towheaded baby, kissed constantly, worn on Summer’s back as she waded into the water to fish.

  “Okay, girls, let’s wrap up,” Clare said, rising from the wooden table. She plunged the hunks of rockfish into a bucket of brine. As she stood she ducked the emergency rations, salted fish dangling from twine overhead like strange ornaments, drying in the harsh sunlight. She wiped her hands on a towel and left the picking house. She could feel the men’s eyes on her as she walked to her house, June close behind, the sound of her bare feet on the sand barely perceptible. A mother knows the sound of her own child, she thought.

  “You get the basket and I’ll get the shells,” Clare said. She opened the cabinet and retrieved the large white enamel bowl her mother had brought over on the boat, the only boat to have landed at Timothy in fifty years. For years she’d waited for the boat to come back, as her parents had done, hoping that exile applied to only one generation. But here she was, living in someone else’s vacation home built centuries ago, the last of the books rank and spotted with mildew, food scarce, and many of the villagers suffering from malnutrition and melanomas. Here she was, trying to remember her mother’s stories about shampoo, television, and shopping malls.

  June, always compliant, had prepared the basket of food that morning: three roasted and salted gulls, five oranges, two jars of marmalade, and two bottles of boiled rainwater. June checked it over one last time, added another jar of marmalade, and scooped the handle over her shoulder.

  Clare paused at the door of her home and took a deep breath, bracing herself. She reached for June’s hand and squeezed it, their skin warm, their hands callused. As they stepped outside into the humid air, the village stared back at them from the fountain. They were talking—she heard bits and pieces of conversation about nori and oysters, a shark that had been spotted near the reef—but she couldn’t help but notice the way the conversation died as the door of her house creaked open.

  Clare could see Javier standing next to Summer Hutchison and her father, Jim, who managed the rainwater plant. She nodded at everyone and walked toward the fountain with the enamel bowl balanced on her hip. Without being told, June walked quickly down to the beach to set the food basket by the pile of driftwood and rope, knowing instinctively that there wouldn’t be time after the lottery.

  Clare looked down at her daughter’s silhouette on the beach, skinny and browned, long auburn braid hanging down her back. June had placed the basket next to the driftwood but was staring at Hope House, a distant, skeletal structure falling into the ocean, standing on rickety posts as waves crashed against the front door at high tide. The second summer of exile a big storm had come and taken the easternmost end of the island and a row of waterfront homes on the central beach, and Hope House, nearly a mile offshore, was all that remained of East Timothy. No one boated or swam out there anymore; the fishing was good, but the sharks were numerous and the boats weren’t reliable.

  “Let’s move on with it, Clare,” Jim Hutchison said.

  Clare was thinking about how the big storm happened the year that the elders decided there were too many mouths to feed. She looked up at Jim. There was the sound of wingbeats and the black swarm of dragonflies moved over them, there and gone as they often were. The sound jarred her into the present.

  “We’ll take our time,” Clare said, setting the bowl on the edge of the fountain. She wanted to keep proceedings calm; it was the only way to avoid a dangerous frenzy, to maintain control.

  “Easy for you to say—you’re exempt!” Huck Sleeman said, one tattooed arm around Jade. Lela played at their feet with a doll made of seaweed, sticks, and a square from an old quilt.

  It was true. Clare’s mother, Jennifer, had saved the exiles with agriculture. She’d coaxed saltwater rice paddies, orange trees, and surprising gardens from the island, which she tended to with rainwater and burlap guards to reduce salt burns. While the men had wasted their time building a boat that would never be seaworthy, Jennifer had accepted their plight and started the women’s co-op, outlining a rigorous fishing schedule. She was a midwife, a nurse, a leader, and because of her contributions to an improved life on Timothy, Clare and June were exempt from the lottery, and their matriarchal line was considered the closest thing the island had to a monarchy. Being exempt from the lottery was a relief but it was also a burden, a guilty feeling, and Clare had spent the last month filled with a sense of unease, hot and sleepless in her bed.

  Jennifer. To even think of her mother’s name harkened to a different time and a mainland no one but Bruce Haverford knew. Bruce with his long white beard and rambling stories about baseball. He was seventy-five now, and sat in his flimsy lawn chair with its rusted joints, waiting for her to start. She made eye contact with him as she unfolded the list. He nodded curtly.

  “I’ll start with the heads of households,” she said. “When I call your name, each member of the household will draw a shell.”

  “Formalities,” Huck said. Clare felt as though she could see a snarl on his face, and it reminded her of what she’d worried over in bed these last nights when she couldn’t sleep: how precarious her position was here on the island, her daughter’s. What if people decided they wanted a new way? All she had on her side was tradition. Not brute force, not divine right, and luck—God, to speak of luck on this island was to lie. No one here knew luck, save for a good fishing day.

  Just as Clare turned to offer the first shell she saw Summer’s mother, Beth Hutchison, hurrying up the sandy path to the village square, her thick gray hair held back by a red scarf.
She held her youngest daughter Kate’s hand. Beth locked arms with Jim and touched Summer on the back. “I let the day get away from me,” she whispered. “I forgot. How could I forget?”

  Javier nodded at Beth politely. His eyes returned quickly to Summer. He was thinking of the hushed nights when he had come to her in the shallow, dark water and they’d stood there alone looking out at the dim horizon. She worried about her future, as they all worried, and he assured her that if things got bad she could make it on her own, that he would come join her, that nothing could keep her from him. He reached for her hand and held it tightly.

  “Thought we’d have to start without you, Beth,” Jade said.

  “Kate and I were just hanging up the last of the laundry!” she said. “You wouldn’t want us all to be wandering around naked tomorrow.”

  There was polite laughter, but it died down quickly.

  “Some of us have to get back to work, Clare,” Huck muttered.

  “Anderson,” Clare called out. “Who’s drawing for Anderson?”

  “I am,” a woman said, reaching for the shell. She didn’t dare peek at whatever was carved into the white, pearlescent inside. She cupped the shell facedown in her hand and receded into the crowd.

  “Bentham,” Clare said. “Bentham,” she repeated when no one came up.

  “He’s sick,” Huck said from the back. “Laid up with some gut problem.”

  “Someone has to draw for him,” Clare said. She tried to keep an emotionless face, a fair face.

  “Fine,” Huck said, weaving through the crowd, reaching into the bowl. He held the shell up then laid it facedown on the fountain. “This one here’s for Bob.”

  “Bruce Haverford,” Clare said, thinking to herself: dear Bruce. Last of my mother’s friends. Last of the original exiles. It was a dubious distinction, she thought. She loved him for his age and experience, and yet wasn’t he part of the reason they were here?

  Javier helped Bruce rise from his chair and kept one arm on him until he was steady. Bruce shuffled toward the bowl, reached in for a shell with a solemn face, and retreated. “Thirty years,” he said to himself. “Thirty years I’ve done this.”

  Clare moved down the list of names: “Hutchison, Jackson, Sleeman.”

  “Go on, now, Huck,” Jade said. “The moment you’ve been waiting for.” Each member of the family took a shell. Jade held on to Lela’s.

  “It seems like we just had a lottery, doesn’t it?” Beth whispered to Summer, who was still clutching Javier’s hand.

  “Lewis.”

  “Get up there, boy,” someone said. Javier dropped Summer’s hand and went to claim his shell. He was an orphan, the last of his family. Sometimes that gave him the feeling that he was lucky, that he’d had his share of misfortune when it came to the lottery. He worked hard to be a trusted, valuable member of Timothy.

  June stood next to her mother, silent, and watched Javier. She thought he was beautiful, and sometimes she hated Summer for having his attention the way she did. The other boys were young, too young.

  “Who’s ready for a residency at the Hope House?” Huck asked, smiling stupidly with his bad teeth. But no one laughed. “Shut up,” Jade hissed. “Just be quiet for once.”

  “Sleep on the second floor,” he said. “Spear fish from the front door. That’s my plan. Don’t worry about me when it’s my turn to go.”

  “Shut up,” Jade said again.

  You could hear someone scream from the Hope House, June thought. She’d learned that last year. That was the part she really hated. Or when people tried to come back. When people made it close to shore, all starved and raving mad.

  You could see the shells burning holes in people’s hands, Clare thought. It had always been this way, ever since the first time her mother had read the names. What if we just tried to get by? Outlawed children and died out gracefully? she wondered. But you couldn’t keep people from getting pregnant, and they had to allow themselves the consolations of joy, didn’t they? That had been her mother’s thinking.

  “We won’t have to do this much longer,” someone said. “Next big storm and the ocean will wash right over us.”

  What if they turn on me? Clare was thinking. What if the system fails?

  “Watson . . . Zanini . . . ,” she read.

  Javier was thinking about how he’d build his boat with the driftwood. You had thirty minutes to make a boat, and then the shells started coming at your head. Just like everyone else on the island, he’d planned for a day like this. The current moved northwest. You could take the food basket and go, but everyone knew the waves were too much for a small raft, the current too strong. There was Hope House, but no one ever lasted at Hope House. No one had ever lasted.

  “I wish you’d read the number,” Beth said quietly.

  Clare could hear the dragonflies. They weren’t far away. She felt as if she was drifting in and out of her body. She felt as if her mother was inside of her, speaking for her, giving her the strength to do the right thing. The right thing, she repeated to herself.

  Everyone was quiet because they knew it was time to turn over the shells. In a minute they would know.

  Javier started to get a strange feeling in his heart, something dark and irritable, a feeling beyond sadness. Jade Sleeman lowered her gaze and began mumbling a prayer. None of them really knew how to pray but they’d been taught, and if they had not been taught they’d seen the exiles years ago bowing down in front of the driftwood cross, the one bleached by the sun and surrounded by semicircles of shells, which sometimes people kneeled upon until they bled.

  No one moved, no one dared breathe until Clare raised her hand. All at once everyone exhaled except for Summer, who dropped her shell, the one that had the cross etched inside instead of a number. She began backing away from everyone, staring at them like a startled animal, nostrils flared, mouth open. Her mother fell to the ground, crying. “It isn’t fair.”

  “Everyone took the same chance,” Jade said, as her eyes followed Summer down to the beach. “It’s always been this way.”

  “It’s the way it has to be,” Bruce said from his chair, rising. “There isn’t a choice.”

  “Clare,” Beth said, repeating the name over and over again.

  June reached for Clare, but she was distant, thinking of her own mother, her scent, something like burned skin, cooked onions, and carrots fresh from the earth. She thought of her mother’s sins, and the ways she paid for them. The way they all did.

  Jim Hutchison crouched as if he might be sick. Someone handed his youngest daughter, Kate, a conch shell, an old one that had an exposed, cream-colored spiral. She looked at it, and then at her sister.

  June moved forward, waiting. She’d never cared so much about a lottery. She’d never had such mixed feelings.

  Javier stood at the front of the crowd, staring at the beach. Summer was already down there, working to build the driftwood raft, the basket of food by her side. He guessed that she had about twenty minutes left. Jim placed a hand on his shoulder, but Javier shrugged it off. He remembered something Summer had said one night as he held her weightless in the water, kissing her neck. Her legs were wrapped around his body, her pale hair long and loose, the moonlight glinting off her damp forehead, the skeleton of the Hope House on the horizon. She’d whispered, “Sometimes I think I’d rather die fast than go it alone and die slowly.”

  “But you wouldn’t,” he’d said. “Because I’d find you, and we’d make it. We’d get to the Hope House. We’d survive.”

  But as she looked up from the raft to find Javier’s face, her fingers tying the wood together as they’d practiced, Summer saw something in his eyes, something he hadn’t expected would be there himself, and she stood up from the pile of wood. She started back toward the village as she was not allowed to do, and it was an invitation. It was a request. Though she’d never seen a ballet in her life, she opened up her body like a dancer, arms out, eyes shut, and thrust her chest forward to willingly receive the
rocks and shells that found it.

  Tiny Davis

  Photo reprinted with permission, copyright © Jezebel Productions, Inc.

  HELL-DIVING WOMEN

  The bus driver quit last night, and Ruby is behind the wheel of Big Bertha again, going fifty down I-95 in the dark, the bus jostling and rattling over hot tar. It’s late August, and even with the windows down the sweet, muggy air hangs over the women, heating the tops of their instrument cases, warming the expired cold cuts Tiny asks Ruby to keep in a bag behind the driver’s seat so she can make sandwiches and sell them to the other girls for a profit. I gotta hustle, baby, she says, sending Ruby out to buy the meat at the nearest grocery store while the girls practice.

  The band lives on the road, gig to gig. They stay up late, practice in the gymnasiums at colored schools, do each other’s hair and makeup, call home if there’s a home to call. The days are starting to run together, Ruby thinks. The nights at the clubs too.

  How long can it go on? Ruby wonders. Sure, there’ll be an end. There always is—I just can’t see it. Why work so hard? Why travel so much? We sure as hell ain’t getting rich. We’re getting tired.

  Ruby blots her face with a handkerchief. She’s thinking about Tiny as she drives, watching the cotton undulate as the big bus passes field after field. Last night Tiny started a set with her signature line: “I make my living blowing! Horns, that is.” Ruby was having a drink—she was rarely onstage, though she wanted to be—and heard the bartender mutter something about “that fat dyke on the trumpet.” It hadn’t set well with her. She’d gritted her teeth, started sweating, angry as hell. But she couldn’t think of the right thing to say. No, she thinks. I knew the right thing to say but I didn’t say it. Scared as a cat at the dog pound lately.