by Maria Flook
“May you live as long as you want and want to as long as you live.”
“Where did you hear that one?”
“That’s a chestnut. Rennie told me that one.”
“Why do you want a nurse anyway? You could stay at home and try that new girl next door.”
“Haven’t had the pleasure yet. Besides, Rennie says she’s a pyro.”
“A pyro? Maybe that’s your type.”
“Christ, this stinks. Does this arm reek?” Willis waved the new cast under Federico’s face.
“Smells like you’ve been hanging Sheetrock, smells like that white mud.”
“Where do I drop you off?” Willis couldn’t follow the yellow line without feeling it slice through his eyes. “Where do I set you down?”
“No hurry,” Fritz said.
“I’m asking, where?”
“Split up now? It’s still early. We just started. I thought we were going for a pitcher. I’m thirsty.”
“Jesus, you’re a long streak of piss. Right here.” Willis crushed the brake pedal; the suspension shivered with the hard stop. Fritz got out of the passenger seat and stood beside the car. They were in the middle of nowhere, halfway out on Ten Mile Drive. The surf was tearing into the silence. Other than that, it was the dead of night.
Fritz leaned in the window. “Come on. You don’t look so good. I don’t care if you can’t take it. Who’s going to know but me? I’ve got Darvon at the house,” he told Willis. “I’ve got Empirin—”
“Empirin? Since when do they still sell Empirin? What’s the shelf life on Empirin?” Willis moved across the seat, hunched over and vomited. Pain moves all around the body, finally into the gullet, into the acid rising now, into his throat. A fiery gloss of sweat sealed his eyelids shut. He rolled onto his back.
Fritz said, “Okay. So, now what are we doing?”
Willis laid the back of his heavy arm over his eyes.
Fritz said, “All right. If it’s nothing to you, I’m driving. Time for the switch. Nothing personal. I’m behind the wheel. As of this minute—” His nerves were showing. He didn’t find pleasure in taking charge.
Fritz went around and got behind the wheel. He rode Willis over to Rennie’s house on Easton Way. The house looked over the water and the cliff erosion was getting bad enough to give it a tentative appearance. The foundation shelf was beginning to tilt. Fritz pulled slowly up the drive.
“Don’t hit the bike,” Willis said. Rennie’s three-wheeler was parked by the cement walk. The handlebars were threaded with gaudy plastic blossoms. Rennie used the big tricycle to go into town. She put her shopping in its roomy double fender baskets. The shrubbery was overgrown in briery dikes around the first floor and Fritz couldn’t see if Rennie Hopkins was still awake. Rennie was often awake at night if she was having pains from her recent operation; some of her intestine had been removed. The surgeons discovered that the cancer had migrated into other organs, so they closed her up, already defeated. They didn’t have all of it.
Fritz parked the car beside the tricycle and he took Willis to the door. They had to stoop to get under the trellis, which was growing too low with thorny vines. Rennie met them and Fritz helped her lead Willis inside. The woman’s nightgown was too long and she batted its full skirt behind her, one side, then the other. Her billowing nightdress made an immediate impression; it was like the transient appearance of a good fairy. Rennie had seen Willis like this before. She pushed him down in a kitchen chair.
“Not in the mood for this, Rennie,” he told her.
“Do not insult the crocodile until you have crossed the river,” she told him.
He looked over his shoulder at the double sink, trying to avoid the eye-to-eye with his stepmother.
“Well, what happened?” she asked him.
“He got clobbered,” Fritz said.
“Shit,” Willis said, his chin resting on his chest.
Fritz helped Rennie walk him upstairs. From the bedroom window they could look across the water to the Cliff Walk. Most of the big houses were dark, except for Ochre Court, one of the big halls at Salve Regina College. Butter-yellow window shades glowed like squares of English toffee. “Willis got into a little trouble tonight,” Fritz said.
Rennie said, “I’ll tell you what I think, Willis doesn’t get into trouble. Trouble gets into him.”
“Whatever which way,” Fritz said.
“It always happens to his kind. In love with love.”
Fritz said, “Point. Myself, I don’t think it’s worth the personal cost.”
“Now, explain this to me. Was Willis using his arm as a club again?”
“Not this time; one of those Salve girls smashed his arm with a rock,” Fritz said.
“A Salve girl? Now, that’s pathetic.” Rennie shook her cloud of hair. “You go through them. From one to another,” she told Willis, “like bumper cars.”
The men liked the vision. They laughed.
“I speculate she was a little bitch, the fox terrier type,” Fritz told Rennie. “Willis tells her to get lost. He tells her she’s coed history and she got up on her hind legs—”
Rennie said, “A rule of thumb: treat a tramp like a lady and tease a lady like a tramp.”
Fritz said, “Maybe Willis couldn’t pinpoint what she was. This girl attacked him. We got the arm reset tonight at the hospital.”
Rennie said, “We did? We went to Newport Hospital? We have to pay for the emergency room if we go to that private hospital.”
“When you break something you can go over to the Navy hospital,” Willis said.
She wasn’t listening to him. “When did this happen?”
“Who keeps track of time,” Willis said. He reclined on his bed and crossed his arms over his breastbone, pinching his eyes tight and blinking them open again.
“That’s twice it’s been reset. What did that last doctor tell you? If you break your arm a third time you’ll have a permanent deformity,” she told him.
“What do they know?”
“I should think that they know quite a lot. War being their forte, they know about patching people up.”
“Why don’t you shut up.”
“Don’t say ‘shut up’ like that,” she said.
“Christ, he’s terrible, isn’t he?” Fritz told Rennie. Fritz was shaking his head, almost grinning.
Rennie shrugged; she knew it was the pain talking. Rennie was experienced in all levels of late-night misery. Her first two husbands, both fishermen, had been killed at sea.
Her first husband, Bill Hopkins, fished on the crew of the Teresa Eve, a sixty-foot eastern-rigged dragger. In 1964 the Teresa Eve was lost coming back overloaded from the scallop grounds. The catch was left on deck unshucked instead of being bagged and stowed in the hold. They were loaded up, with an estimated seven hundred bushels, but the captain went back for another tow. Bill Hopkins had survived many storms—he once rode out a seventy-knot whole gale—but that night the weather shifted and they hit what they call “a queer sea.” Captain Alberelli was following one mile behind the Teresa Eve in the Karen and Marcy. He said it was a black night—“real stone black.” There wasn’t much wind, hardly any wind at all to bring a sea that high. He saw enough freakers that night, he put his crew below. He testified at the Coast Guard hearing that the Teresa Eve must have caught one at the quarter. The loose catch would’ve shifted, and if she had her scupper plates fastened and the scallops clogged up all the cut-outs, the water she took on wasn’t freed. From what they could figure out, she went down stern first, she didn’t roll. Divers found her sitting upright, gear stowed, pretty as you please, boots lined up, slickers on hooks, paperwork still in its envelope in the wheelhouse. There was a heavy concentration of loose scallops in the immediate area around the wreck, a thick carpet suggesting the weight of the catch was more than substantial.
Whatever happened, happened fast. Captain Alberelli on the Karen and Marcy watched her lights go out as if someone had “flipped a switch.”
Alberelli looked back at his radarscope and the target was missing. When the Karen and Marcy steamed over to search, her crew heard voices from the water. They shined lights, but the dark swallowed all but eight foot of their beams. They searched for the location of those cries, but after several passes in the dark, the voices stopped. All six crew were lost.
Some of the bodies were recovered the following winter, pulled in unexpectedly with tows, but Bill Hopkins remained missing.
Five years after that, Rennie’s second husband, Sonny Costa, a lobsterman, died in a boiler mishap just four hundred yards off of Point Judith.
Rennie was one of only a few New England women to be awarded the title “Kiss of Death.” The title was handed down by tiers of gossip which swelled from village to county, from county to the state lines, then it went state to state. The “Kiss of Death” distinction required at least two husbands dying at sea; one alone didn’t earn the dooming label. If a woman lost two or more husbands at sea, she earned the title without question. That was that.
Rennie was known as the “Kiss on Aquidneck Island.” When Good Morning America broadcast live from Newport, they taped a story on the decline of the New England fishing industry. They heard about Rennie and asked to do a spot with her. They wanted to film Rennie on the widow’s walk at the Captain Whitehorne House. A publicist told Rennie that her story was a romantic fable.
“In a coon’s ass,” Rennie said to the ABC intern. “I never wear it on my sleeve.”
She stood over the bed and rubbed the heel of her hand across Willis’s sweaty hairline.
He didn’t want it. He grabbed her hand and threw it off. “Just shut the door on your way out,” Willis told Rennie.
She walked out of the room.
“And you.” Willis motioned to Fritz Federico.
Fritz was dismissed; he left the room without any hurt feelings. Rennie stopped Fritz in the kitchen. “You can have a corn fritter, pan-sized, or your usual. Corn fritter or buttered johnny cake?”
“Either one?” Fritz said.
“Killer, you name it,” she said.
“Only two choices tonight?”
“Decide soon or I withdraw my invitation.”
Willis leaned back against his pillows. He was used to the weight of his cast, its steady pull. His arm tingled if he didn’t feel the weight, so he let his arm drop over the side of the bed. The stretching sensation kindled stabbing needles. These little needles didn’t bother him and he was falling asleep. Then he was awake.
He didn’t sleep. Before daybreak, Rennie came back into the room. “Here,” she told him. “Don’t you want these?” The foil card caught the hall light and glittered.
He told her, “No. I don’t want it.”
“You look horrible,” she told him.
“I’m driving a truck today.”
She said, “You are not. You can’t drive one of those monsters in your condition.” She placed the silver row of morphine in an ashtray beside the bed.
“Look,” he told her, “a honeymoon habit was all I wanted.”
“There was Morphine Sue and the Poppy Face Kid, climbed up snow ladders and down they skid—”
“That’s nice, Rennie, that’s real charming. You can keep your poetry rhymes to yourself.”
“I’m not finished. Let me tell you about Cocaine Lil, she had a cocaine dog and a cocaine cat. They fought all night with a cocaine rat.”
He turned on his left side and lifted his broken arm so the blood would run out of it and the throbbing would stop. Rennie patted his hip. Her tenderness was firm, no-nonsense; it eased him more than it irritated him. Rennie would have been quite willing to administer the rectal painkiller if he had allowed her to. Rennie seemed to find her own relief and comfort in these midnight acts of bedside service. Willis brushed her hand from his hip. “Go to bed,” he said. She left the room.
Whenever Rennie placed her maternal reins on him, he tossed them loose. That gossamer harness belonged in the hands of a ghost. His real mother was dead and he didn’t much like to watch Rennie wrangle with Wydette for the privilege. He wouldn’t give up Wydette; he wanted them both. Outside, the light was rising. A yellow warbler started to sing: sweet, sweet, sweeter-than-sweet. He listened to its tentative first phrases until the bird was rolling along and Willis was sunk in woolly, dreamless morphine.
Chapter Four
On Saturday afternoon, Holly joined a crew of volunteers working on the oil spill. The Audubon leader instructed her: This creature is salvageable. This one is too poisoned to return to the sea. She fingered a coal-black scallop, rubbed it against the heel of her hand, but the grime was clinging to its notched shell. She was making a collection of dirtied sea litter—gluey skate eggs, tar-encrusted moon snails, tainted weed—for a display at the prep school. Her job as a prep cook at Saint George’s School included several peripheral duties, one of which was attending to the glass cabinet in the front hall; Holly thought the polluted shellfish and dirty kelp would be a good educational exhibit.
When Holly was finished at First Beach she returned to the duplex to continue unpacking. The refrigerator smelled stale and she washed out the bins, then she unpacked some dishes so she could eat dinner. She had a package of Chinese noodle soup and she tore open the cellophane with her teeth. She broke the noodles over the churning saucepan and stirred the stiff clump. She looked around the kitchen. The cupboards showed circles of fingertip grime around the ceramic knobs. That would be easy to spruce up with a little Spic ’n’ Span. The linoleum was pocked where the heavy kitchen table legs had sunk in; around every chrome foot there were several interlocking circles, like the Olympic logo. She blinked in another direction and saw flames rising on her front porch. Tongues of mottled orange and spirals of smoke drifted waist level.
Fire lifted and swerved in the wind. She dropped her mixing spoon and ran over to the screen door. Her porch was burning. She couldn’t identify its source. Just then, another swatch of fire floated toward her cottage. Big sheets of fire drifted in the wind and caught on her railing. She went outside and stamped on the burning litter. It was still coming, sheet after sheet. Holly looked across the drive. The woman next door was setting fires. Large square pages floated to Holly’s side, flames curling and twisting the edges. Holly recognized the woman from the week before. The woman stood with her hands on her hips, although she didn’t have any figure, any hips. A man was standing beside her. The man was a good ten years older than Holly and dressed in a full-length jogging suit like a NASCAR driver. He was folding a big map but the woman jerked it from his hands and tried to light it on fire. He grabbed her wrist and peeled her fingers open. He took a plastic butane from her hand.
He walked over to Holly to make sure the fires were out and he helped her collect the sooty leaves. They were architectural drawings. Floor plans. Holly recognized the demarcations showing the living room, kitchen, dining areas, the tiny crescents drawn with dotted lines to show which way the doors opened. Bathroom fixtures were inked in, square sinks, and the toilets like tiny Bartlett pears.
“I’m sorry,” he told her.
“What is this?”
“It’s a villa at Château-sur-Mer, but my mother’s not ready to go.”
“No, I should say she’s not,” she told him. She could smell his sweat tingeing his synthetic jogging sweater as he stooped over the curls of ash.
He said, “My mother’s got cancer. Maybe that explains this kind of behavior, I don’t know.”
“Your mother doesn’t look sick,” Holly said.
“Today she’s wired. Another day, she’s doubled up.”
“That’s terrible,” Holly said, “but aren’t there two people over there? A sick fellow and his nurse?”
“That other one, he’s a stray. Wait here, I’ll clean this up,” he told Holly. He walked across the clamshells and into Rennie’s house to get some cleaning solvent. He didn’t look at his mother, who waited at the top of the stairs. Her hair was in two taut braids th
e blue-white color of cement block; everything about her looked strong and tricky. She came down the stairs and walked over to Holly, but Holly wasn’t sure how to greet her.
“I’m not an arsonist at heart,” the woman said. “Some people start fires for less reason than this.”
Holly didn’t know what to say.
“You moved over here from town?” the woman said.
Holly looked at her and nodded.
“I saw you consorting with the enemy. I’ll forgive you. I’ll just assume you didn’t know what you were doing.”
“Excuse me? Those scraps hit my porch. What was I supposed to do?”
“My oldest is putting the screws to me. I almost died last fall. That’s what they think. He says I should sit at Château-sur-Mer and play Euchre. He says I’m running out of time, but he means I’m running out of money.”
“I see,” Holly said. She didn’t want to hear any more.
“I didn’t mean to frighten you. I was making a point—”
“I guess so,” Holly said. The woman opened her hand. Holly wasn’t herself; she stared at the woman’s hand. The woman kept her hand open until, at last, Holly accepted it.
“Rennie. Rennie Hopkins,” she said, pumping Holly’s hand.
The woman was at least sixty-five; she was tiny and hardly a hundred pounds, but Holly felt her grip. It reminded her of those schoolyard games when children hold hands and the leader jerks her fist to make the whole line whip.
“I’m Holly Temple. I work up at Saint George’s School. I cook.”
“You’re renting your place from Nicole Fantasy?”
“Isn’t her name Fennessey?”
“Fennessey. Fantasy. Nicole goes around in another dimension.”
Holly said, “Oh. I don’t know anything about that. I haven’t seen her today. I don’t know when she gets home.”
Rennie lifted the back of her hand to her lips and whispered. “Miss Fantasy—Fennessey to you—comes and goes, depending on her customers.”
“Her customers?” Holly was just about to ask Rennie what she meant when another car pulled up the clamshells, going too fast. It was a large, old sedan; its rear end fishtailed as the driver braked hard. The clamshells sailed, hammering the clapboards. The driver stepped out of the car and left the door swinging.
