Strange Fits of Passion

by Anita Shreve

  She was skin and bones, like them New York models is, undernourished, 'n' I'll tell you something else. You're goin' to think this is strange, but I had the feeling she was pretty. You wouldn't think I'd say that, now would you. But she was. You could see, even with the dark glasses 'n' that hurt lip, she was meant to be a little bit of a looker. She had red hair; alive it was, I've said it since: not orange, like you sometimes see, but red-gold, real pretty, the color of polished cherrywood. Yup. Cherrywood. And a lot of it, fallin' all around her face, framin' it. (Course, I'm partial to redheads. My wife used to be a redhead once; she had pretty hair too, all pinned up at the back of her head. But that's gone now.) It was like ... let me try to explain this to you. You see a beautiful ancient statue in a picture book, and the statue has been ruined. An arm is gone, or the side of the face has been chipped away. But you know, lookin' at the statue, that once it was perfeet and special. You know what I'm sayin'? That's how you felt when you looked at her, that something special had been damaged or broken. The baby had that hair too. You could see it in the fringe, outside her cap, 'n' later, of course. Have you seen her yet?

  Have you met Mary yet? Well, I've seen her a few times since ... well, you know. And I can tell you right now, she don't look the same as she did last winter when she came to us. But you take my word for it, 'n' you write this down when you do this article of yours. Mary Amesbury was a looker.

  Not that it ever did her any good. 'Cept with Jack. And that's another story, in't it.

  You have to talk to Jack. You talk to him right, he'll tell you some things. Maybe. He's close, our Jack.

  Willis will talk to you. Willis will talk to anyone. I only mean that Willis likes to talk, and he was there. He lives in a pink trailer you might of seen just south of town, with his kids and his wife, Jeannine. And speakin' of Jeannine, I'll tell you something confidential. You don't repeat this now, or put this in your article there, but you're probably goin' to hear this around, so I'll tell you now, about Willis. It's said of Willis—that is to say in connection with Willis, the way whenever anybody ever talks about Julia they always say how Billy went from the cold afore he went from the drownin'—that Willis's wife, Jeannine, has three ... that is to say ... well, breasts. They say that the third one, a little bit of a thing, is located on the right side, up in the hollow where the shoulder meets the collarbone. I've never seen it, of course, 'n' I don't actually know anyone who has, but I do believe it's true, although I would never bother Willis about it. And Jeannine is as good a mother as they come. Everybody says so, 'n' so I wouldn't want nothin' bad said about Jeannine. It's from inbreeding, tell you the truth, but don't you go repeatin' this in your article there. This is private town business, not for the world. Just an aside, don't you know.

  Now, you asked me about the town. You come to the right place. I guess you could say I'm a little bit of the town historian, but I 'spect you know that already, which is why you're here.

  I was born here, lived here all my life, like Julia and Jack and Willis. Muriel, she come over from Bangor when she got married. Her husband left her—that's another story—'n' she stayed. We're a fishin' town, you've seen that, lobster mostly, clams and mussels and crabs when the season's on. The main business in town is the co-op on the wharf there. We ship down to Boston. There's some blueberry farms too, just inland; they ship all over the country in August. But the lobsterin' is what we're all about. Me, I inherited the store from my father, never any question about what I was goin' to do. But Willis and Jack, now, they're lobstermen. And Julia's Billy was, afore he died. They're a different breed, you know, not your average Joe. Independent is a nice way to put it. They can be a cussed lot. It's in the blood, lobsterin', handed down from father to son, the way minin' is in a town, because that's the only way to make a livin' here. Don't get me wrong. This is a good place to live, in its way. Can't imagine livin' down where you come from. But it makes you hard, stayin' here. You got to be hard, or you won't survive.

  Now, the lobstermen, most of 'em, they'll haul their boats just afore Christmas, 'n' they won't put their pots back in till the end of March or so. Willis, for example, he drives a truck for a haulage company in January and February. Then in March he'll start gettin' his gear in shape. Some of the men, though, they don't pull their boats till January. Jack don't, usually. Well, he's got a difficult home situation, don't he? His wife, Rebecca, had what we call the blues real bad. Some of the women, they get them in the winter. It's a dreary thing—they can't stand the water when it's gray for days on end, and they start to go a bit melancholy on you, cryin' all the time, or they cut off all their hair, till it gets spring, and then they're OK. But Rebecca, she was melancholy summer or winter, a trial to Jack, though if you want to know the truth, maybe he's not the sort of man she ought to have married. Jack keeps to himself, he does, pretty quiet. Maybe a bit disappointed in life too, if you want to know. He had himself two years at the University of Maine, don't you know, more'n twenty years ago that was, on a track scholarship, but his father got both his arms broke on a shrimp boat and the family run out of money, so Jack come home to take care of his father. He took over the lobsterin' and married Rebecca. He did his best with the kids. He's got two, nineteen and fifteen their ages are, I think; decent kids. The boy, he's in Boston at school there now. Northeastern, I think it is. Jack's puttin' him through.

  But anyway, Jack, he'll go out in a thaw or when it's not blowin'. Works on his pots the rest of the time at the fish house over to the point. That's where he keeps his boat—the Rebecca Strout. They name 'em for their wives. Well, at least on this part of the coast they do. Elsewheres they name 'em for their sons, don't you know. That's where she was, by the way, over to the point. Mary Amesbury, I mean. You've seen the cottage?

  You understand that when they do go out, summer or winter, the water's still so cold a man can't last ten minutes in it. That's what happened to Billy Strout—Julia's husband, Jack's cousin, don't you know. Got his foot caught in a tangle of pot warp, and he went over. Not uncommon, sorry to say. It was November, if I remember correctly. They say he went from the cold afore he went from the drownin'. The medical people up to Machias, they can tell when they get the body. Sometimes we don't ever get the body, but Billy, he washed up over to Swale's Island. We knew, of course, the day it happened. It's a disturbin' sight, I'll tell you, someone findin' the boat, unmanned, the motor still goin', movin' in slow circles. That's how you know. Course, Billy was a drinker, part Indian from his mother, don't you know, so that may have been the problem right there.

  I can't allow as Julia was all that sorry to lose him, tell you the truth. Don't write that, either.

  Anyway, the town.

  About four hundred people, give or take a few. The young ones in their early twenties, they go off, some come back, live at home a few months, go off again, hard to keep track, till they lose heart and settle down here for good, or go off for good. We've sent four boys to Vietnam, and we've lost two. Their names is on the town memorial over there. Most of the boys, they're already lobstermen and feedin' families by the time they get the call—and a lot of 'em don't go. We got some patriots in town, but most folks don't think the war has much to do with us up here.

  The town was first settled in the seventeen hundreds by the French over from Nova Scotia, which is why we have a French name, like Calais or Petit Manan further south. During the War for Independence, the town was mostly British, I'm sorry to say, so that after the war, they tried to get rid of anything foreign and rename the place Hilary, but it never caught on. There are some families can trace their roots back to the war, others that come from Bangor or over from Calais. We had Indians here too, but now they're on the reservations down to Eastport. I say reservations, but we're talkin' about cinder block housing projects that'd make you sick to look at. Unemployment and alcohol—it's a sin. What we did to 'em, I mean. Anyway, it's not a problem I can solve.

  We got a library, open two days a week. Elementary school. For hi
gh school, the kids go over to Machias. The church, the post office, my store. Tom Bonney got sick of lobsterin', tried to start up a marine supply store, don't you know, but it didn't take off—most of the men, they make their own pots, and the gear gets handed down father to son. And Elna Coffin tried to get the co-op to go in with her on a clam shack, but like I say, we're out here at the end of the road—not a road to anywhere—and they wouldn't back her.

  Those houses over there, they're from the shipbuilding days. A hundred and fifty years ago, this town was big in shipbuilding. We had a hotel too, but it burned down; was at the other end of the common. We had twenty-five hundred people in the town at one time, if you can believe it. You'll see some of the houses on the coast road, abandoned a lot of them. Old Capes, some farmhouses. These houses here now, there's two still in the family, but the people in 'em don't have two sticks to rub together, and they're livin' in only one or two rooms in the winter. Shut the rest off. One of the other houses belongs to the schoolteacher, and the fourth is Julia's. Julia does her best to keep the house standin', but it needs work, you can see that. She come from a bit of money years ago, and she went to college too. Up to Bates. Her mother sent her. Nearly killed her mother when Julia up and married Billy Strout. Anyway, Julia had some money afore Billy run through it, but she kept the house, and she's got the three cottages. We get a coupla dozen summer people. Water's too cold 'n' we're too far north for most people. And the black flies are wicked in June. Still, you wouldn't believe the rents people from the city are willin' to pay in the summer, just to get away from it all. Julia makes a bit of money rentin' out June to September. Uses it to live on the rest of the year.

  You read the tourist brochures, the shortest paragraphs are about St. Hilaire. And you won't find a single advertisement for anything in town. There's nothin' here.

  So that's about it, as far as the history of the town is concerned. I can't think what else to tell you. 'Cept that we never had a murder as long as I can remember. We've had some violence, what you would call aggravated assault, and I've had to bring in a coupla lobstermen took some whacks at poachers. Dennis Kidder got both his hands broke bad. And Phil Gideon got shot in the knee last year. You take your life in your hands you fiddle with someone else's pots.

  And another thing. I know I just said the word murder, but you won't find many people in town refer to the events of last winter as murder. They'll call it "that awful business up to Julia's cottage," or "that terrible story about the Amesbury woman," or even "the killing over to the point." But there's not too many willing to say the word murder. And to tell you the truth, I guess I feel the same way too.

  Mary Amesbury

  I drove along the coast road leading out of the village. I was driving only twenty-five, but less than a mile from the store, I felt the rear wheels slip out from under me so that for a moment the car skated sideways to the road. My stomach lurched with that feeling you get when the earth seems to have deserted you, and I whipped my hand around to hold the baby basket in place. I straightened out the car, put it into first, and inched even more slowly than before through a nearly silent landscape. Headlights coming toward me seemed like large ships at sea, and when I passed them I gave them such a wide berth I nearly skidded the car into the deep drifts at the side of the road. I hadn't seen that kind of snow since I was a girl. There must already have been several feet, even before the day's storm, and it surprised me that there could be such an accumulation so near the coastline. Pine trees, with their branches overladen, swept gracefully toward the ground.

  I watched for the turn onto Route One that I had been told to look for. Occasionally I could see a pinprick or a glow of light behind or between the pine trees, the only hint at all that the land was inhabited. I almost missed the warmth of the store then, the bright lights overhead, the reassurance of commonplace objects—a newspaper, a cup of coffee, a can of soup—and I understood why it was that the man with the handlebar mustache had lingered by the magazine rack, why the woman in the taupe parka had wanted to read her paper by the counter. I was looking at the pinpoints of light the way a sailor lost in a fog might strain to find the shore.

  At a bend in the road there was the stop sign and the slightly wider road to Machias. I took the right as I had been told to do, and drove for what seemed like too long—perhaps twenty minutes. I was certain that I had made a mistake—that I had missed a turn or had failed to see the motel—and so I reversed direction and retraced my journey. I was impatient; Caroline had begun to cry. I pushed the car back up to twenty-five, then thirty, then thirty-five. I was hunched forward over the steering wheel, as if that posture might help keep the car pinned to the road. But when I reached the village again—the lights surprising me too soon, it seemed—I realized I hadn't made a mistake. I sat for a minute, releasing my hands from the wheel as if they had been sprung, trying to make up my mind whether or not I ought to go back into the store for better directions. I imagined the people in the store looking up at me as I entered, and decided to turn the car around and try again. I glided along the coast road, took the right onto Route One, and looked more closely at all of the buildings I passed, just in case the motel sign hadn't been lit yet. As it happened, the motel was there, a mile or so beyond the point where I had stopped before, the script of the word Gateway outlined in lime neon. By the time I angled into the parking lot—it wasn't plowed, and the car fishtailed as I made the turn—Caroline was almost hysterical. I pulled to a stop near the only lighted window.

  The proprietor of the motel was an obese woman who was reading a women's magazine when I walked in. She stubbed out a cigarette and looked up at me. A drop of catsup or tomato sauce had congealed on her pink sweater. Her hair, a brownish gray, was permed into tight curls, with two circles caught at her temples by X's of bobby pins. On the counter in front of her was what was left of a TV dinner. In the distance, I thought I could hear a television set and the sounds of children.

  The woman breathed through her open mouth, as if her nose were stuffed by a cold. She also seemed to be out of breath. "I been waitin' on you," she said. "Everett called, said you were comin'. Nearly an hour ago, it was."

  I was surprised by this. I started to explain why I hadn't arrived sooner, but she interrupted me.

  "All I got is rooms with two single beds," the obese woman said to me. She turned back to her magazine and studied an article as if trying to concentrate all the more intensely because I had interrupted her.

  "Fine," I said. "How much?"

  "Twelve. In advance."

  A key was slapped onto the counter. A ledger with a pen was turned around. The motel owner said the words name and address as if from very far away.

  The baby began to squirm, crying fretfully. Bouncing her against my shoulder, I picked up the pen, tried not to hesitate, tried not to give myself away. I knew I must identify myself; I must now choose a name. I put the pen to the paper, beginning a slow script, composing as I wrote: Mary Amesbury, 425 Willard St., Syracuse, New York.

  I took the name of Mary; it was my aunt's. But in the forming of that M, I thought of other names: Didn't I wish for a name more intriguing than my own? An Alexandra or a Noel? But something sensible—a practical need for anonymity—stopped a possible A or an N.

  The Amesbury had come without thought. It was from my drive that day, the name of a town at the side of a highway. I didn't know if there was a 425 Willard Street. I'd never been to Syracuse.

  I put the pen down and studied the black script in the ledger. So be it, I was thinking. This is who I am now.

  "What's the baby's name?" asked the obese woman, turning the ledger around and examining it.

  The question startled me. I opened my mouth. I couldn't lie about my baby's name, couldn't call her something she wasn't. "Caroline," I said, burying the word in my baby's neck.

  "Pretty name," said the owner of the motel. "I had a sister named her daughter Caroline. Called her Caro."

  I tried to smile. I shifted t
he baby to the other arm. I put twelve dollars on the counter.

  "Number Two," said the motel owner. "I've had the heat up in Two for an hour now. Put in extra blankets. But you come get me if you and the baby get too cold. Supposed to be minus sixty with the wind chill tonight."

  ***

  Once inside the room, I locked the door. I sat on one of the beds, opened my coat and my blouse as quickly as I could, and nursed the baby. She drank thirstily, making greedy sucking sounds. I closed my eyes and tilted my head back. No one could get to me now, I thought. The realization filled my chest, expanded.

  I opened my eyes and looked at the baby. Caroline was still in her snowsuit and her woolen hat. It was freezing.

  The motel room felt crowded and dark, even with the single light on overhead. The cloth of the bedspreads and the curtains was a venomous plaid of black and green. The walls were finished with a thin paneling meant to look like knotty pine. I thought the grocer may have been exaggerating when he said the room would be clean.

  When Caroline had finished nursing, I changed her, washed my hands, ate a piece of coffee cake, and drank the milk almost as greedily as she had. Then, leaning against the headboard, I opened one of the beers, drank it quickly down. I thought fleetingly that I ought not to drink while I was nursing, but I couldn't get much beyond the thought. The baby was on her back, content, her arms and legs tickling the air. I removed her hat, stroked her head, enjoyed the feeling of the warm fuzz at the crown. My own hands, I noticed, were still trembling. I opened another beer, drank it more slowly than the first.