by Susan Conley
I wanted to tell him that almost no one I know can pay their property taxes and that most people here are just holding on.
I’d run into Kit’s high school friend Steve Marshall in Avery earlier that week. Steve’s brother Scotty played football with Kit and had just been arrested for selling heroin. Steve told me that Avery was filled with heroin if you knew where to look, and that anyone who has a chance should leave.
The man in the lobby said, “I’ve seen some children of color coming out of the high schools around here, and it surprised me. How did they get here? By what mechanism, do you think?”
I knew he was referring to the many immigrants and refugees who’ve come to Maine in the last twenty years. How are they here?
“How are you here?” I said to the man. “By what mechanism?” Then I walked away.
DURING THE LAST YEAR of art school, my friend Lara and I lived together on the top floor of a little clapboard on Munjoy Hill in Portland. The house had a landline and a plastic shower/tub unit, and it was a castle to me. My bedroom looked out over the white oil tanks that lined the harbor. Portland was still a dirty, edgy city that smelled like the fish pier then. There were no condos in the East End or farm-to-table restaurants in 1977. We got jobs at an oyster bar on the pier and said that together the two of us made one good waitress.
The man who owned our apartment building lived on the second floor with his wife and two kids. He still does. They yell and slam things into walls. Lara and I used to have to lie down on the floor in the kitchen because our windows looked out on the driveway, and the man, Tom, would be out there pacing. Once I came home after a shift and he was pacing and told me that his wife thought he was having affairs with two girls who worked the cash registers at Shaw’s.
When Lara heard this, she said that if marriage meant being jealous of girls at the Shaw’s checkout counter, then she didn’t want any part of it.
* * *
—
WHENEVER KIT CAME TO the apartment, we hibernated. Winter fishing was harder on his body than summer fishing, and we had no money and cooked on the small electric stove and had good sex and napped. Something evened out between us. I was less in his spell and more myself, which made everything feel better and more real.
I could never tell if he was judging my life in the city. I just knew how much I liked it when he was there.
When he was gone, Lara and I went to the wharf bars and talked about what we’d do for love and honest sex. This didn’t seem like too much to ask for.
She had a rule whenever she went on a date, that if she called the landline at our apartment and let it ring once and hung up, it meant she was in trouble and someone had to come get her at the address she’d left by the phone. She was adamant about this.
She never called, and I never had to rescue her. I don’t know if I could have. I was busy back then trying to save myself.
Some of the students at school asked me if my family still used an outhouse. I hadn’t known this was a thing, making fun of people from Maine.
* * *
—
I MAJORED IN PHOTOGRAPHY. The school showed me a different way to be in the world than how I’d been raised by my parents. I’d known it was out there. This new way. But I hadn’t really seen it.
I didn’t care about learning when I got to school. Or only in the abstract. What I cared about was what I would be allowed to do by order of my class. Many of the kids there came from money and didn’t understand the paper mill or what my father did there.
But then by chance I was given a way out. My photography teacher had a brother named William Engstrom who’d been a studio-session guitar player in Nashville, and he moved to Portland to open a mixing studio on Congress Street. I started making coffee there. They paid me minimum, and I was the only girl. But no one told me I wasn’t smiling enough.
Pat Benatar came to the studio to mix her album. This was a huge thing for Portland and for the studio and for the whole state, really. Pat Benatar. William Engstrom’s genius wife, Julia, recorded a thirty-minute video with her, talking about what it was like to be a woman rock star. MTV picked it up, and people went crazy for it.
It’s quite something to say that Pat Benatar changed my life, but it’s true.
Then Julia got Nancy Wilson from Heart to do a video when she came to the studio that spring, and MTV ran that also. The videos took off. And when the semester was over, Julia asked me to fly to London with her for two months to help shoot the Chrissie Hynde video.
No one else in my family had gone to college. Now I was going to London?
* * *
—
KIT DROVE ME TO the airport the day I left, and asked me not to change who I was while I was gone. This was all he said about my leaving. I couldn’t tell if he wanted me to stay or go.
I was fractured about it. I wanted to be with him. But my mother had told me the world was waiting.
I kissed him and got out of the truck with my bag and didn’t come home for almost a year. I ended up meeting a man while I was away, and I stayed much longer than I intended.
* * *
—
JUST BEFORE I FLEW back to Maine, I called Kit from a pay phone in London and asked if he missed me. I was having a particularly bad time.
He said he did.
I knew it was a risk for him to say this. He never talked about things like missing. He didn’t do emotion that way.
Then he asked if I missed him.
I said I did. I meant it. It had been my mother’s dream for me to leave, and I’d wanted it too. But now I wanted him. He was what I kept thinking about.
He said his trawler was idling at the wharf and the crew was waiting.
I hung up. This was June of 1999. I knew he was the one.
* * *
—
I LANDED IN PORTLAND a week later and Kit picked me up in his truck. Jimmy was out lobstering when we got to the A-frame, and we went upstairs to Kit’s room, and he lit a cigarette and lay on his back on one of the twin beds and said, “You seem to think that you can just come home like this.” Then he closed his eyes.
It was hard for me not to lean over and kiss him, but I knew he wasn’t ready to let me do that yet.
“What,” he said, “did you think I’d do all that time?”
I didn’t know that he was deciding to leave the woman in Avery he’d begun sleeping with. He only told me this later.
I hadn’t expected to have to win him back. Though why I didn’t expect this is beyond me. I sat beside him on the edge of the bed.
I said I’d loved him the whole time I’d been away. It was the truth. I knew if he let me back in, I’d have to tell him the rest of the truth later.
He said he was moving to the island and did I want to go with him?
I said I did.
I had no idea of the consequences. Or what my life would be like with him. It felt urgent and rash, but I wanted to be his family.
Then we began to undress each other.
IN THE SWEET, EARLY years on the island, the town hadn’t laid underwater cable yet, and we had no electricity. We used kerosene lamps and made clearings for the gardens and built the woodpile up and fixed the house. My memory is of big rain and lightning storms that made me feel like we were shipwrecked.
We weren’t worried about rising ocean levels or warming water. There were fish, and there was none of the anxiety I have now or shame that I’m not doing enough to help stop the warming.
It was like nothing I’d ever known to live in a house with a man who was physical even when he was sleeping. Everyone I knew in art school said they were going to do daring things after they graduated, and Lara and I had made a vow not to settle. The island did not feel like settling.
For Kit the island was like going home, or going deeper back into his pas
t, I think. He liked seventies rock music and sports in that order. He took down trees and built the float and ramp and bathroom with the handheld shower contraption. He knew about tides, and the way the wind comes up from the south and hits the float, and how to fix boat engines.
I craved being around him and his salt smell. He ate on the run, grabbing slabs of cheese and meat and bread while he walked out the door. He didn’t really know how to be in a house with me. A house to him was a place to walk through in a rush, drinking coffee standing up and spilling it on his way down to the float to jump in the rowboat.
Sometimes I felt like I was making something up to him. Maybe I will always be making it up to him—the fact that I once left him.
When I told him about the man I’d met when I was away, I said it meant nothing to me, and he seemed to understand. Even though everyone matters in some way.
After his mother died, I think his grief was always just out of reach. She had a stroke in the kitchen of their A-frame on the mainland. It was May, and Jimmy was out lobstering, and Candy was down at the store. Kit tried to do CPR on the linoleum, but he was just a boy, and she died before the ambulance crew got there. I think he’s been trying to account for what happened ever since.
No one in his family speaks of it directly. Not Jimmy or Candy or the dozen cousins. Sometimes I imagine his mother lying there while Kit tries the CPR. Kit had to live it. You would never know to look at him that he’s carrying the pain. It’s invisible, like most pain is.
Kit says that Jimmy didn’t appear to flinch after Martha died. He threw himself into the lobster pound. But Jimmy keeps a framed photo of her in every room of the A-frame.
Candy says she raised Kit, because Jimmy was always on his boat.
* * *
—
KIT AND I HAVE never known money. But I’ve chosen to make the films, so we’re a different kind of poor than the poor I was before growing up. I decided to make documentaries, because I had to. There was no other path for me, really. I took a vow to pursue the truth of people’s stories, and there’s not a lot of money in documentary film in Maine, but there’s barely enough. I earn my expenses back and then some.
I believe in the films, and the people who come to see them seem to believe in them. They fill the museum screenings and the festivals and theaters and grange halls where we show them.
When I’m raising money for the films, I meet people who say they had to move to Maine, like the state possessed a physical pull over them. It makes me wonder if Maine becomes some stand-in for people’s lost innocence sometimes. Or if their longing for the past gets imposed onto the actual land here. Who knows. I don’t begrudge anyone their longings. I have them too.
Last week I heard about three brothers from Arizona who each made millions in natural gas and bought up most of the old fishermen’s houses in Pear Cove. Now the brothers want to impose a new noise ordinance. They’ve been seen at town meetings talking with straight faces about how they didn’t come to Maine to get woken at 4 a.m. by lobster boats.
I don’t know where to start with this. It’s hard to get to the water in Pear Cove now because the shoreline is all privately owned. I can’t think of a fisherman who has property there anymore.
SHORTY’S PIER SITS AT the mouth of the harbor, about a hundred feet south of Candy’s store. Years ago Shorty put the white trailer at the end near the wooden pilings, and I set my camera up in here.
I’ve come with my list of questions.
Shorty puts his feet up on the metal desk littered with Marlboro boxes and Coke cans. “What in God Almighty,” he says, “are we doing here?”
He and Kit are like brother-cousins, and they’re the only two commercial fishermen left on the peninsula. Everyone else is in lobsters. Lobster is king now.
I get the tripod set up and extend the small boom with the microphone out over the desk. Then I plug in the light with the shade made of thick black fabric so it looks like a funnel.
“Just forget about the camera and talk to me,” I tell him. “Forget the camera’s even here.”
He lights his first cigarette and starts bouncing his left knee.
I ask him what it means to him to be a commercial fisherman.
His face gets really serious. Then he says, “Okay, then. Okay. It’s easier if you think of it like a three-legged stool, Jill.”
Now he nods to himself. “You’re a good, versatile fisherman. You go for groundfish in the fall, shrimp in the winter, scallops and elvers in the spring. But when the shrimp get shut down, you lose one leg of your stool. How are you going to make it without that third leg if you don’t lobster and the price for your fish is lower now than it was twenty years ago?”
He puts both his hands in the air, and some of his cigarette ash falls on the desk. He says he’d lobster some if he could in the winters. And maybe Kit would too. But they never got lobster licenses when the state was basically giving them away. They didn’t like lobstering. It wasn’t the same as fishing. They felt like hunters when they fished, and they didn’t think they’d ever need a lobster license. Now the wait is ten years.
Shorty shakes his head and takes the last drag, then puts the cigarette out in an empty Coke can. He was his father’s only deckhand when he was twelve. Quit school at sixteen and became a boat captain at twenty-two. By the winter of ’98 he was one of the biggest fishermen around, and then he broke his back. The accident sidelined him during some of the government’s key allocation years, and his permits have such small quotas on them now.
He looks at the camera. “It comes down to price in the end. We can see the fish on the water. Last year I got $1.58 per pound. Five years ago I got $2.73. That dollar difference breaks you. You can’t cover it. So many guys have quit because they couldn’t make it. Have I said it’s a hard life? But I’m a diehard, and there’s not many of us left. Fishing is everything to me. We can’t walk away. We own the boats, for Christ’s sake. Though maybe I should move to Los Angeles and become a movie star after this.”
He laughs at his own joke.
The developer who wants to buy his pier is planning to turn it into a marina and sell lobster rolls and onion rings.
Shorty leans so far back in the wooden chair that it looks like it’s going to tip over. Then he stretches his arms out.
“I know how gentrification works,” he says. “I understand it. But you can’t condemn someone for trying to have a retirement, and you can’t tell a fisherman what to do with his land. That is not the American way.” He taps on the desk again. “When you can’t make a living fishing, you begin to consider things you never thought of before, like selling.”
He lights another cigarette. “I have to hand it to them down in Mass. They were better at thinking ahead than us. Maine doesn’t have a big enough voice at the table. How do you take a day off to go to a fishery council meeting in Mass. and lose a day on the water? But how can we get bigger quotas when we don’t have a seat at the table and the corporate boats are buying up all our permits?”
He frowns. “We should be an owner-operated fishery here. We live in the state. Not the corporate guys. So let me say this for your film, Miss Jillian. The Archers are a fishing family. And perhaps I’m full-on demented, because I’ve got so many boat repairs and I’m getting pounded by haddock coming from Iceland. But we’re staying. If we sell, we’re going to become a petting zoo here.” He shakes his head. “Maybe we already are.”
I turn the camera off and smile. Shorty and I both probably know it may just be a matter of time before something takes the village. But I can’t think like that now.
He says he got Kit on the phone yesterday and Kit didn’t sound good. “Strange voice or something. Only reason I called was to tell him I wasn’t selling and that he should get back here and help me figure out what I’m doing with this pier.”
I pack up the tripod and the camera
and microphone and tell him about Sam’s Instagram.
He says, “Do not ever underestimate the male capacity for recklessness. Do not ever.”
“The pot is what scares the hell out of me,” I say. “I think Sam loves what pot does to his brain. He has no other off switch.”
Sam worked on the pier last summer. Shorty knows what makes Sam tick.
“The best thing for Sam to do is to get back on the water. Send him down to me,” he says. “I’ve got more work here than he’ll ever be able to finish.”
I CALL LARA ON my way home to tell her Charlie wants to cook dinner with Lucy.
“What’s wrong with that?” she says.
“Isn’t that code?” I say. Mainers are good at speaking in code.
“Code for what?” Lara is the boys’ godmother, which she thinks is a joke because she’s basically pagan and the most undomesticated person I know.
“For sex,” I say.
“What’s wrong with sex?”
“There’s nothing wrong with sex. It’s just that it’s my house and he’s my son, and I haven’t met her yet.”
“Met who?”
“The girl my son is going to have sex with. Lucy. I thought we were meant to make it harder for them to have sex. I thought the idea was to put it off as long as we could.”
“What if you die and someone asks the boys what they’ll miss least about you?”
“Least?”
“Do you want them to say they’re so relieved to finally be free of your prudishness? You need to get out more. This isn’t 1995, Jilly. Kids are hooking up.”
“You are hooking up.” I make a face into the phone.
