The Dependents

by Katharine Dion

  “Thanks,” said Dary.

  “It’s true. It’s their fault for growing up. It was different when they were young.”

  “Now I resent that,” Ed said. “I resent the idea we were living for them.”

  “Not just for them,” Gayle said.

  “Just mostly,” Ed said with a wry, disdainful smile.

  “You’ll regret it if you sell,” Gene promised.

  “How is that possible,” Ed said, “when I’ve never regretted anything in my life up to now?”

  “It’s not just the cabin you’d be giving up,” Gene said. “It’s the whole experience. The air and everything in it.”

  “I have plenty of air. The trees make it for me every day.”

  “It’s that deep lake smell, isn’t it?” Gayle said wistfully. “It makes everything all right.” She went to the tee and played her turn, a solid if unremarkable hit. There was some speculation from Ed about whether she could have done better if she hadn’t been chatting (the Ashes abstained from this conversation), and before long Gene found himself hitting the orange ball up a ramp and over a waterway. He thought he had hit it with good power, but it plunked into the water.

  “Your head,” Ed said.

  “What?”

  “At the last moment you moved your head.”

  Ed stepped up to take his turn. He was a tall man, over six feet, and the putter looked too small for him. In the last decade he’d lost some muscle but he still projected an aura of good health, the leftovers of a lifetime of exercising every day. For years he had tried and failed to persuade Gene to get up with him at five a.m. to run along the river, a circuit that ended at a coffee shop where a group of sedentary retirees greeted him reverentially. Now he hit the ball with a swift, precise stroke. It cleared the waterway and came to rest about a foot from the hole. “See if you can do any better,” he taunted Dary.

  She played her turn. Her ball cleared the waterway easily and rolled to a stop between Ed’s ball and the hole.

  “Not bad,” Ed conceded.

  “Spoken humbly by the man who taught me to play,” Dary said. “Telling me it was important in life to excel at one or two pointless games.”

  “If you hadn’t listened,” Ed said, “you wouldn’t have seen a unicorn.”

  “What unicorn?” said Gene.

  “Are you talking about the time Mom saw the pony?” Annie said.

  “Yes, honey.”

  “She knows?” Gene said.

  In the end, Ed told the story. It took place when Dary was not quite a teenager and Michael and Colin were still little boys. One day Ed had driven with the kids out into the country, looking for a miniature golf course they had heard about. It turned out to be a run-down farm that the owners had attempted to convert into a tourist attraction, a strange little place with a hay-bale maze and a rudimentary nine-hole course that was open only during the summers. There was also a small, derelict petting zoo on the grounds—the kind of place, Ed said, that had been developed with more attention to the billboards than the paddocks for the animals. One of the penned-up animals was a very forlorn-looking pony. Its coat was slick with gelatinous gray patches, as if something under its skin was rotting, and there was a horn affixed to the center of its forehead, which had become partially unstuck. The pony began stamping and thrusting, twisting violently in an effort to throw it off. This terrified young Michael and Colin. Ed was making an effort to redirect their attention when without any warning Dary reached over the fence and tore off the pony’s horn, ripping off some of its skin along with it. The animal bared its teeth and brayed malevolently at them. Where the horn had been stuck to its head, little orbs of yellow pus started to spring up on a wound. Ed ordered everyone back into the car.

  “How awful,” Gayle said.

  “But that’s just it—it wasn’t,” Dary said. “Not in the end.” She told them how in the car on the way home, Ed had talked about how good intentions sometimes have unpredictable consequences. He reassured her this wasn’t her fault.

  “Well,” Ed said, looking pleased. “I guess I do all right sometimes.”

  Someone changed the topic, and the game resumed. Ed and Gayle were taking Annie and their son Colin’s daughters camping over the weekend, and there was some talk among the adults about what preparations remained for the trip and whether the mosquitoes were likely to be bad that year. Gene didn’t hear the rest of it. His mind veered away, drawn back to an aspect of Ed’s story he couldn’t explain. He was still thinking about the wretched pony, how it had existed for the others for a very long time. Had Maida known about it? If the others knew, it seemed likely she did too. But then why had she never mentioned it to him?

  On the way home the Ashes stopped in Wheeler, a seaside village with unpretentious shops and restaurants, the same attractions that had drawn Gene and Maida to it for their honeymoon half a lifetime ago. Annie wanted Dary to buy her a souvenir, a novelty T-shirt or maybe a ceramic figurine of leaping dolphins. While they were inspecting trinkets in a shop, Gene told them he was going down the road to see something and would be back in a bit.

  “Don’t forget,” Dary called after him.

  “I know where the car is,” he said.

  “I mean to come back,” she said.

  He walked down the row of shops with their sun-bleached signs and casual disarray just inside the door, the retail spaces dense with racks of brightly colored swimsuits and beachy sarongs, and sometimes a wall covered with what was now called “active” footwear. The little shops all looked like a variation of one another, which maybe in some counterintuitive way helped explain their survival. If the town was to be redesigned, it would never have five versions of the same shop, and maybe not even one survivor from among the current contenders. But there was something inherently charming, almost calming, about pausing in front of the Beach Stop or Seagull Alley or Wave Haven and knowing before you walked through the door that somewhere inside there would be a towel blazoned with an orange-to-pink sunset and a marked-down bodyboard in soft blue foam. He hoped these shops would go on surviving forever, in part because his memory of the town depended on them.

  He walked on, passing a bar where happy hour began at 11 a.m. and ended at 6 p.m. every day of the summer. Two teenage girls standing on the street corner were selling melons from the back of a dusty pickup they didn’t look old enough to drive. A convenience store advertised the sale of “ice cold Ice.” After three blocks the commercial strip dwindled and ceded to bushes and shrubs marking property lines. The sidewalk disappeared, leaving him beside the road in a gully sprinkled with gravel and strips of old tire jerky.

  It wasn’t much farther.

  He turned down a gravel drive, and there was a boy in a dun-colored uniform coming the other direction carrying a bicycle over his shoulder. The way he carried it seemed to rob the frame of any weight, and this same quality of weightlessness was borne into his body as he mounted the bicycle in the street. He didn’t appear to jump and throw his leg over it so much as resume his natural form. The boy’s figure grew small against the row of bushes. It was beautiful how from a distance his legs seemed to become part of the bicycle, as if he was spinning his own disappearance, a boy creating a rent in the horizon with that steady, circling motion of the wheels that were also his legs. A nick of silver, a smudge of air—then the boy was free, on the other side of the visible world. Gene couldn’t say why it moved him. And yet there it was, the swollen feeling in his chest.

  This too was grief and it was this infusion of it, even more than the suffering, that made the experience of sorrow a kind of madness. Why this freak susceptibility to ordinary dull occurrences suddenly revealing themselves as the world’s valentine to itself, the splendor tossed off so casually it made you feel that incidental, unwarranted gorgeousness was actually the hidden power of the universe? Why the avian commotion in his chest? The sheer rawness of his senses didn’t explain it. He couldn’t understand why, in the midst of feeling it might be desirable
to die, the splintering of the air in the late afternoon by a boy on a bicycle could exist as a complete joy. Each time he had narrowed it down, saying grief was this or that, it sent him a flock of birds in his chest.

  He crossed an island of shaggy grass that diverted cars onto a crescent of gravel running along the front of the Sandpiper Inn, a two-story white clapboard that wasn’t overly maintained. The shutters were lopsided, the porch sagged, and the seat cushions on the porch rocking chairs had faded to a colorlessness that conveyed rustic charm. There was a restaurant on the first floor and during their honeymoon the smell of frying grease in the mornings had overpowered the sea air and clung to the linens. The cottages, with quaint names like Eagle’s Lookout, Plover’s Perch, and Crane’s Cranny, fanned out behind the inn along a winding boardwalk. Gene recalled that the path led to a small gray beach craggy with jagged rocks.

  He still remembered the clerk who had checked them in after the wedding. The reception had taken place in the backyard of the house belonging to Maida’s uncle. With the exception of a few friends, most of the guests were family and the party had the stifling atmosphere of a family occasion. When Ed cued “Earth Angel,” the song Gene had picked out for this moment, he was too uncomfortable to dance with his bride in front of his family and hers, and they had only held hands and looked at each other, smiling stupidly, until the Penguins cooed their last note. Having escaped the party at the earliest possible moment, they arrived at the inn giggly and breathless, and the boy at the front desk—he was a young man, really, jocular and handsome—had checked them in with a knowing half-smile. Gene in his nervousness got confused about whether he was supposed to pay for the room before or after, and the boy said, “After what?” with a smirk. As Gene fumbled first with his checkbook and then with the pen, Maida started a conversation with the boy about the tattoo on his arm. It was a kind of mermaid, a buxom woman naked from the waist up with a green fish’s tail, and as they talked, a teasing rapport sprang up between them. When Gene looked up, the clerk was lifting his shirt to show Maida how the tattoo continued around his torso. The end of the tail was buried in his pants, and for a moment Gene wondered if he was going to take these off too. Suddenly his head felt stuffy and his throat burned. But just as he thought he might have to sit down, Maida slipped her hand into his and gave it a squeeze. Then he understood she was entertaining the boy’s story as a sideways flirtation with him. It was a kind of performance to excite him for what was about to happen between them in the cottage.

  Now in the humid office of the inn, with the late-afternoon sun streaming through the blinds, Gene explained to the woman behind the desk his connection to Cottage No. 5, the Pelican’s Nest. He asked if he might pop his head in and take a look around. She told him there was some work being done on the plumbing, but if he didn’t mind that, the cottage was unlocked and he should go ahead.

  Some mud-streaked towels lay on the floor but the cottage was empty. It was as simple as he remembered it. The windows had no glass, only screens, and if you wanted to shutter them you had to do it from the outside by releasing the hook-and-eye closure that kept the hinged boards from flopping down in the wind. The single room was adjoined by a closet-sized bathroom lacking a tub, and both the walls and the floor were painted a watery coat of white that the knotty pine showed through. The mattress on the full-size bed wasn’t very firm and when he sat down he sank until it seemed his tailbone would connect with the box spring.

  How strange those first hours of marriage were! There had been the rush to put miles between them and the wedding guests in Colton. But alone in the cottage the demented urgency he had felt in the car evaporated. Somehow having what he wanted within reach—not only within reach but expected—dampened his desire.

  For several long minutes they sat on the bed wordlessly holding hands. Maida was wearing a white satin top overlaid with lace and her mother had braided matching white ribbons into her hair. Her expression took refuge behind all this ceremonial white. He realized he would have to be the one to take responsibility for their loving.

  Already he had been intimate with her mouth, her breasts, her stomach, her inner thighs, and two days before the wedding he had reached his hand inside her. In response, she had wriggled around in an accommodating way. She had also tried to bring him to pleasure using her hands and been almost successful. But in the end he had to help her, because their rhythm was off.

  In the cottage she closed her eyes when he touched her and this was a relief, the potential for awkwardness somehow halved if it was only felt but not seen. To surmount his own sense of absurdity, the absurdity that so much courtship and ceremony came down to this, he found it easier to concentrate on her pleasure rather than his own. She was quiet and acquiescent, and her silence roused him to more frantic activity. He imagined motors in his hands, small motors under his tongue, and he told himself he couldn’t stop until she cried out in pleasure. But she remained virtually soundless, her quiet absorbing not only any sound she might have made but also his grunts and whimpers. He had no idea that he would feel so alone.

  But later, drifting in and out of the balmiest sleep, he wondered in a kind of rapture what exactly had taken place. There were various names for what had transpired between them and none of them was satisfying. None of them explained why his tenderness for her had enlarged when it was already full, or why his innermost life felt more deeply bound up with the woman sleeping next to him.

  2.

  ED HAD INTRODUCED them.

  Gene had met Ed in the spring of his junior year at the University of New Hampshire, after they were matched by a student organization that offered academic tutoring. Gene’s course of study in business communications allowed him to take some English classes toward the requirements of the major, and he was determined not to waste the opportunity. Somewhere—and not from his parents, neither of whom he could remember ever reading a book—he’d gotten the idea that to be a person who read books was to be someone who was alluring to other people. The allure had something to do with solitude, but also with intimacy—the flash of connection that was possible between two people who had read the same book. (It hadn’t escaped him that the prettiest girls at the college were studying literature.) The power of books was mysterious, and the mystery had an almost erotic dimension, because it required a kind of relentless pursuit that might or might not result in the book giving itself up.

  The year before he’d done all right in a class on the nineteenth-century novel and slightly better in a Shakespeare course in which they got to watch films of the plays. Neither, however, had prepared him for his junior-year survey class in poetry, in which the withered, shrunken appearance of the aging professor provided a startling contrast to the unsparing, blunt comments he scrawled across Gene’s papers. Each time one of these heavily annotated papers was returned to him, Gene was disappointed that the sense of momentousness he had hoped to capture hadn’t been adequately conveyed. He was embarrassed to have wasted everyone’s time—the professor’s, but also his own—and his contrition was not any less because of the general irrelevance of poetry. He found a tutor and began to spend Thursday afternoons in Ed’s apartment tracking ankles in Dickinson, apples in Rilke, and birds in Stevens in order to find out which ideas these ankles, apples, and birds stood for.

  The apartment was a run-down series of rooms that Ed and his flatmate, Braxton, ironically called “Old Glory” for the American flag the previous tenant had left pinned crookedly to the wall above the fireplace. Gene didn’t know many students who lived in their own apartments—either they lived in the dorms, as he did, or they lived at home. Ed’s apartment had a peculiar odor, a sophisticated amalgam of the cigarettes smoked nearly constantly by Braxton, doughnuts fried each morning in the bakery down below, wet coffee grounds left all day in the sink, a sweet chemical smell that Ed said came from the mousetraps in the kitchen, and the moist, earthy emanations from the potted plants Ed had stuck all over the apartment to combat the other smells.
The apartment was often missing the pieces of furniture you might think were crucial to student life—sometimes the desk, often the chairs—and if a missing piece was inquired about, the inevitable answer was that it had been borrowed by the neighbors down the hall or broken during one of Ed and Braxton’s frequent parties. There were not enough chairs, but a section of the living room floor was covered in pillows made of richly textured fabrics. Whenever by some automatic habit Gene picked one up and set it on a chair, Ed said mildly: “Leave it on the floor, Ashe. That’s where it goes.”

  It turned out that Ed was not a literature student—he was majoring in molecular biology—but since he had done well in literature courses (and in art history, political science, philosophy, and economics, as well as in the courses required for his major), the academic organization had listed him as available to tutor in any subject. Ed’s off-campus housing and general fluency with college academics had led Gene to believe that Ed was older than him and probably from a city. But neither turned out to be true. Ed was just a junior like him, and he had grown up in the small town just across the river from Colton.

  Ed had joined the tutoring organization rather impulsively, because the two young, attractive women who ran it had asked him to. He had skipped the training session, resolving to participate according to his own style. His manner of teaching was indirect—so indirect that Gene sometimes worried that he wasn’t learning anything. Inevitably their conversations drifted away from the text they were supposed to be studying toward any number of unrelated topics: whether it was relevant to know they would eventually die, whether happiness was something the self manufactured or whether it was largely the function of your relationships to others, whether romantic love was a worthy pursuit and if so whether that made it interesting or dull. By the time they returned to the text Gene would have forgotten about ankles and apples and birds altogether, and he would have to prod Ed to consider whether a particular line was or wasn’t trochaic meter.