Among Other Things, I've Taken Up Smoking

by Aoibheann Sweeney

  Her replacement showed up a minute later, a man I recognized from town. He had a handlebar mustache and big bushy eyebrows. His children went to Yvesport Elementary and I had seen him dropping them off. Mr. Blackwell knew him. “I didn’t think you were going to show up,” she said to him, filling a glass with ice water and bringing it to me absently.

  I took a sip anyway, glad to have it, though I couldn’t tell if this meant she wasn’t going to give me another whiskey.

  The new bartender was checking the inside of the refrigerator. “She need something?” he said, nodding at me.

  “Whiskey,” she said, opening another beer for herself. “I’m getting it. On the house,” she said quietly after she put it down, lifting her beer in a little toast before she took a swig and sat down next to me.

  “Thanks,” I said, lifting my own drink awkwardly and nearly missing my mouth.

  “Slow today?” said the other bartender.

  “The usual. That asshole who gets the Chivas came in.”

  He wasn’t looking at her. He brought in new ice and then started picking up the glasses on the shelf and squinting at them like they might be dirty.

  “You from around here?” she said, turning to me.

  “Crab Island,” I said.

  She shrugged as if she wouldn’t have cared even if she did know where it was. “I’m not from here,” she said.

  “It’s between here and Campobello,” I said. I couldn’t remember the last time someone had asked me where Crab Island was. You could see it from the breakwater. “Where are you from?”

  She shrugged again. “Arizona, sort of. My mom lives on the reservation.”

  Before I knew it I was glancing up at her face, searching for the telltale cheekbones, Mr. Blackwell’s turned-down mouth. “She’s only half Indian,” she said, with a wry smile, “but she gets money from the government anyway. I actually look more Indian than her, because of my hair.” She motioned at my whiskey with her cigarette. “Is that your lunch?”

  “Not really.” I blushed.

  She looked straight at me for a minute, and then took another drag of her cigarette. “Not like there’s anything else to do around here,” she said, looking back at the pool table.

  I looked at the men too, not sure how to respond. I had been under the impression that everyone in Yvesport had plenty to do. They were all busy, with their tests and boyfriends and basketball games and bra shopping. And I had my chores and going back and forth every day and dinner to cook. But I knew this was not what she meant. “I was supposed to take a test today,” I said. “For college.”

  “What happened?” she said, putting out her cigarette and picking up her beer.

  “I didn’t feel like it.”

  She laughed, a kind of snort of agreement. “I hate tests,” she said.

  I thought of the woods, and wished I could think of something else to say. I was quiet again.

  She looked at me. “I’m getting another beer. Do you know how to play pool?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Let’s go play with those guys,” she said. “You want to? I’ll get you another whiskey.”

  I must have forgotten about my boots by then, because the next thing I knew we were walking over to the pool table. She went to sit on the radiator and patted the metal beside her to indicate that I should sit down too. I perched on the end, holding my whiskey. The two men were concentrating on their game but after she got them fresh beers they looked more interested, and she introduced us. Her name was Susie. Soon I was learning to play pool, and they were drinking more beers, and one of the men, the one with the hat, was telling me about the supertanker they were on, which was being loaded at Estes Head. They were headed for China after they finished in the United States, and would be let off the ship for only one day at each port. It would take twenty-nine days to cross the ocean.

  I looked over at Susie, who was talking to the other man, and suddenly she was laughing, her face flushed. She looked younger, and maybe even a little shy, one hand in her jeans pocket as she listened.

  “Have you ever been to China?” said my sailor.

  “No,” I said, “have you?”

  He nodded. “Been there for a day.”

  “A day?”

  “That’s all we get,” he said. “Most of the guys go into town.” He lifted up his cap as if to cool off from the thought of what they did there, and I saw his hair underneath, short, but not shaved. “But I like to try to see some things. People around the harbor. They have these boats called junks with square sails.”

  I nodded, wondering if I was on my third or fourth whiskey. Somehow we’d ended up by the bar; he must have bought me another drink. He told me he was thinking of building a boat at home, and when he’d drawn the shape of it in the sand in China the man with the junk had drawn the shape of his hull too, and like that they had communicated.

  Susie came up alongside me, as if to tell me a secret. “They want to show us their boat.” Before I could answer she had slipped behind the bar and was gathering her jacket and keys. When she came back out she was grinning. She showed us a full bottle of whiskey under her jacket. “Come on,” she said, looking at me. “It’ll be fun.”

  Her sailor took the whiskey so that she could put on her jacket—denim, lined with wool but not nearly warm enough for October weather. She pulled her ponytail out from the back and shook it out with a little pride. “I bet you’ve never been on a supertanker before,” she said to me.

  Her sailor looked pleased. “I know the guy doing security tonight,” he said to his friend as we made our way toward the door.

  I found my jacket on the bar stool and pulled it queasily over my head, hurrying to catch up. The bar had grown murky and warm with sound as more people had come in, and I felt them watching us leave. Outside it was still raining, and the parking lot seemed huge, the town on the hill above us sinking into the afternoon. I was drunk and concentrated on getting across the parking lot. Susie told the men to get in the back of her car and I stood there swaying as they climbed inside.

  The car lurched into the rain, and the men passed the whiskey back and forth. I wondered if I might be sick. Someone shouted about music and the car filled with noise. Susie concentrated on the road. She drove straight down to the security check, where a man in uniform peered into the car and laughed at us. It was getting dark as we drove down to the loading docks, empty and lit with yellowish lights. Susie took the whiskey when we got out of the car and tipped it up into her mouth. The iron flanks of the supertanker rose up above her into the fog. I looked up toward the lights on the deck, softened by the mist, and felt my mind sharpen in fear. She wiped her mouth and passed me the whiskey and I drank.

  We had to go up the gangplank single file. It was like climbing a long ladder. Susie and her sailor went first, giddy and eager, and my sailor stayed behind, helping me with the steps. When we got to the top I walked out to the nearest railing. There was a metal coaming at chest height and I leaned against it and looked down, not at the water but at the dock below us—a tangle of pumps and gas pipes—and began to vomit.

  My sailor was kind; he kept the hair out of my face and rubbed my back through my raincoat. He led me to the foredeck to get a glass of water. I forgot Susie in the dazzle of fluorescent lights; soon there were more metal stairs and then his bedroom, with steel walls, a TV fixed high in one corner. It was as big as any bedroom, I thought as I pulled off my wet jacket and lay down. It even had a window—square, not round. My sailor sat on the edge of the bed murmuring things, touching my hair. I took off my boots and they wiggled to the floor. Then I took off my wool sweater, and my T-shirt with it, and he leaned forward and kissed my breasts through the thin cloth of my bra. I looked at his smooth haircut, the motion of his big head as he pushed up my bra to put his mouth on my nipples. He seemed far away and I felt tall, like my neck was longer than I had ever imagined. He is all the way down there kissing me, I thought, and I’m all the way up here. Alone. Wh
en he came back up to kiss my mouth he kept missing. I wanted to get inside him, to get in his throat and burrow down into him. I undid his belt and reached for his penis, which sprang stiffly from his pants, but felt rubbery and strange in my hand.

  I wasn’t sure what to do with it—I worked myself down on the bed and tried to put it in my mouth but it was too big and I was afraid I would bite him. He got my jeans off somehow, and then he was on top, inside me, looking down with a kind of shocked expression. The ceiling above us was metal. I moved back and forth with him, awkwardly, to feel more of him inside me, and then suddenly he pulled out and came all over my stomach. We lay there until we heard someone running in the corridor, and my sailor sat straight up and told me to put on my clothes. My whole body was like liquid, my stomach sticky and wet, and when I stood up the room swung out of focus.

  He helped me put my pants back on, and then my socks and my boots, as if I was a child. “You okay?” he said gently.

  His friend pounded on the door. “Greg! You gotta get her outta here.” When he opened the door his friend was standing there smiling. “Rinaldi saw me,” he said.

  My sailor put on his shirt and next thing I knew he was walking me back to the stairway. I held my coat in a tight bundle against my stomach and went down step by step, afraid to look up and see if Susie’s car was gone from the parking lot.

  She was waiting for me with her headlights on. I could see her smoking a cigarette in the driver’s seat when I got close enough, and she leaned over to unlock the door.

  “Did you get caught?” she said when I sat down, putting the cigarette in her mouth to handle the stick shift.

  “Not really,” I said, not sure what she meant.

  She laughed again, that same derisive snort. “Either you did or you didn’t.”

  “Well, they told me someone was coming,” I said. It didn’t seem like the right thing to be talking about. I felt sticky and strange, and I couldn’t tell if the same thing had happened to her. I wanted to ask, but something told me it was not allowed. We were both silent as we turned down the road toward McMann’s.

  “Do you think you could drop me off at the town dock?” I finally said.

  She rolled down the window just enough to drop out her cigarette. “You can stay at my house if you want.”

  “That’s okay. My father’ll be waiting for me.”

  She snorted again, a little exhale of breath, and I looked over at her. She was looking angrily out at the road, her eyes shining in the dark.

  “What?” she said, when she felt me looking.

  I didn’t tell her that my father wouldn’t be waiting, or that he would be asleep on the couch and have no idea where I had been. I didn’t tell her that I’d never done anything like that before. I just said “nothing,” the way I thought she would have, and turned to look out my window. I felt like I could hear our stories inside us like noise.

  When she finally dropped me off I said goodbye as if I didn’t care and slammed the door. But even as she drove away I didn’t believe I would never see her again. It was not until I was driving the boat back across the water that it occurred to me that I had finally met someone who was more lonely than me.

  9

  Julie and Donna both scored well on the test; in the spring Julie got into Bowdoin and Donna got into the University of Maine. Anne Marie Gleason, who was also in our class, got pregnant and didn’t show up for graduation. Mr. Blackwell mentioned it the one time he saw me in the spring. He said he thought she had it coming. I knew the chances were high that someone he knew had seen me that afternoon at McMann’s, and sometimes I wondered if he knew. I didn’t see the bartender around town, though I saw her car in the parking lot of McMann’s almost every day on my way home from school that spring.

  After school finished, Mr. Blackwell asked me if I wanted to work for him at the boatyard. I knew he’d hired boys from the high school every spring, but I had never known him to hire a girl. He’d never once asked if I was interested. It had been the same with the fishing, even when he had his own boat, though he knew perfectly well that I had never done anything during the summer but garden and cook for my father.

  I almost said no, just to see if it would make him angry. But the thought of being able to see him every day was too tempting. It hadn’t occurred to me that I needed to make money. I considered myself thrifty—more for the sake of efficiency than anything else—but my father had always given me the money I asked him for, whether it was for groceries or school supplies or a new steel ramp to be fitted on the pier, and I had never given much thought to where it came from. There was very little temptation in Yvesport for anything but the necessities.

  “What sorts of things will you be doing for him?” my father asked when I told him that night at dinner.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Probably painting, mostly.”

  “I should think you could find a better way to spend your time.”

  I suppose I’d anticipated that he wouldn’t like the idea: I’d made his favorite haddock that night with a sauce I knew he liked, using the black olives he’d had shipped from New York, along with my own canned tomatoes and garlic from the garden just to please him.

  “It’s only for the summer,” I said.

  “I see,” he said, reaching for his drink. “And then I suppose you have a much better plan?”

  I watched him take a sip, not sure how to reply. He was smiling, as if he was only teasing, but I could tell he was as surprised as I was at the way it had come out, a cruel spark.

  He’d been disappointed when I had told him I’d missed the admissions test and the deadline for college applications, but he hadn’t had any suggestions about what to do about it. Secretly, I thought it was possible he didn’t want me to leave the island anyway. I had been busy that spring, getting the garden ready for summer, quietly taking the exams they gave us at the end of school, and I had been looking forward, in my own way, to settling in for another winter. I had won first prize in the art contest at school, for a drawing of a narcissus flower with its head drooping toward the ground, and I’d taken off the ribbon before I brought it home and given it to my father without telling him. He hung it in the living room, and I’d thought vaguely that I might draw other myths too, and one day surprise him with a set of illustrations for his work.

  That night after supper I went for a walk. Mr. Blackwell had cut a path around the perimeter of the island and along the cliff at the back, and I knew each step of the way, day or night. Sometimes I’d try to trick myself, pretend I was in a new place: I’d look hard at the crag of the apple tree, or at the boulder that stood out at low tide, and try not to recognize it. But every turn and curve on the island was always more familiar, and before I knew it I’d be home, back in time for bed, or breakfast, or dinner.

  I stood for a long time looking at the bay. I often wondered if my mother had done this before the day she left the safety of the island and got lost. It was easy, even in the dark, to see the shape of the bay and each jut of land; heading straight out of our cove in almost every direction but one would have brought the boat to shore. In any case, my father had let her go. And so had I. But wasn’t it also possible that she had wanted to escape? She must have been lonely. Mr. Blackwell had never said she was happy, and the only thing people in town seemed to remember about her was that she was shy.

  I started work for Mr. Blackwell before the end of June. Though the lot was crammed full of boats in the winter, it was nearly empty in the summer, except for the few old schooner hulls the trade school was working on, suspended in midair like spacecrafts. There wasn’t much painting to do, since any boat that wasn’t in need of heavy repair was in the water. Instead, despite my apologies for my math skills, Mr. Pinter had me doing the books, which consisted of recording and adding up wads of yellow receipts he’d collected during the spring. Three boys from school were helping Mr. Blackwell rebuild an old sardine carrier that Butch Harris was planning to use for whale-watching tour
s. I watched them from the window of the trailer Mr. Pinter used as his office, climbing up and down ladders in the sun, walking across the deck of the huge white hull while I shuffled through wrinkled papers and mildewed files.

  I had only been working there for a week when I came home one night to find the other dory missing. It had been a while since my father had gone into town by himself and I felt immediately irritated by it. Guessing he might be late for supper, I started cooking fried scallops, his least favorite dish. But as it started to get dark I remembered Mr. Blackwell had told me a hurricane was brewing southeast of Florida, and I found myself going out twice to be sure the porch light was on. It had begun to rain. Finally I made a custard pie, out of guilt for cooking him such a punishing meal. By the time he came through the door I had a glass of whiskey ready, and reheated the scallops, and put everything out on the table as if I had only just gotten around to it.

  He ate quickly, as if he was hungry, and didn’t seem to notice how cold the scallops were in the center, or that they were scallops at all. “I spoke to Walter today,” he said finally, unable, it seemed, to contain his excitement. “They need your help at the institute.”

  “Who’s Walter?” I asked.

  “He runs the institute,” he said. “In New York.”

  “The institute?” I repeated.

  “Arthur’s institute,” he said impatiently. “The Institute for Classical Studies, with the library I set up. They need someone right away.”

  I looked at him. “In New York?”

  “That’s right,” he said, reaching for his whiskey. “I think it might be good for you.”

  I felt my stomach tighten. “What if I don’t want to go?” I said.

  “Then you don’t have to.”

  We were both quiet. I stared at my half-eaten scallops. “I made you a custard pie,” I said, my voice small.

  “Thank you,” he said, smiling.