I know she expects me to act more appreciative. But I didn’t ask for this casserole, and I don’t particularly care for chipped beef. I don’t like her haughty manner, as if she’s afraid she’ll catch a disease by sitting in a chair. And something in my nature bridles at the expectation that I must be grateful for charity I didn’t ask for. Perhaps because it tends to be accompanied by a kind of condescending judgment, a sense that the giver believes I’ve brought my condition—a condition I’m not complaining about, mind you—on myself.
Even Betsy, who understands me, is always wanting to improve my lot. She washes the dishes with her delicate hands and puts the crockery back in the wrong places. I find the broom behind the door and the dishrag drying on the back stoop. One day she showed up with a pile of blankets and sheets and plunked them on the table in the dining room. “Let me take those old rags you sleep on,” she said. “I think it’s time you had some fresh linens, don’t you?” (Everyone knows I’m proud. Betsy’s the only one I’ll tolerate speaking to me like this.) She gathered up my bedcovers—which, it’s true, had seen better days, especially the threadbare blue blanket Papa knitted—and hauled them outside, tossing them in the back of the station wagon to take to the dump.
“Don’t worry about the Pyrex,” the woman from the Baptist church assures me. “I’ll collect it next week.”
“You don’t need to keep doing this. Really. We get along just fine.”
She leans over and pats my hand. “We’re glad to help, Christina. It’s part of our mission.”
I know this woman from the Baptist church means well, and I also know she’ll sleep well tonight, believing she’s done her Christian duty. But eating her chipped beef and noodles will leave a bitter taste in my mouth.
MOST SUMMER DAYS, around midmorning, when heat thickens over the fields like a gelatin, Andy is at the door. There’s a new intensity to his demeanor; his son Nicky is almost three years old and Betsy is pregnant again, due in a month. Andy needs, he says, to produce some work that will support his growing family.
Sketch pad, paint-smeared fingers, eggs in his pocket. He kicks his boots off and roams around the house and fields in his bare feet. Makes his way to the second floor and moves from one bedroom to another, trudges up another flight to a long-closed room. I can hear him opening windows on the third floor that haven’t been cracked in years, grunting at the effort.
I think of his presence up there as a paperweight holding down this wispy old house, pinning it to the field so it doesn’t blow away.
Andy doesn’t usually bring anything, or offer to help. He doesn’t register alarm at the way we live. He doesn’t see us as a project that needs fixing. He doesn’t perch on a chair, or linger in a doorway, with the air of someone who wants to leave, who’s already halfway out the door. He just settles in and observes.
All the things that most people fret about, Andy likes. The scratches made by the dog on the blue shed door. The cracks in the white teapot. The frayed lace curtains and the cobwebbed glass in the windows. He understands why I’m content to spend my days sitting in the chair in the kitchen, feet up on the blue-painted stool, looking out at the sea, getting up to stir the soup now and then or water the plants, and letting this old house settle into the earth. There’s more grandeur in the bleached bones of a storm-rubbed house, he declares, than in drab tidiness.
Andy sketches Al doing his chores, picking vegetables and raking blueberries, tending the horse and cow, feeding the pig. Me sitting in the kitchen beside the red geraniums. Through his eyes I am newly aware of all the parts of this place, seen and unseen: late-afternoon shadows in the kitchen, fields returned to flower, the flat nails that secure the weathered clapboards, the drip of water from the rusty cistern, cold blue light through a cracked window.
The lace curtains Mamey crocheted, now torn and tattered, blow in an eternal wind. She is here, I’m sure of it, watching her life and stories transform, as stories will, into something else on Andy’s canvas.
ONE CLOUDY DAY Andy blows through the door with a grim expression and stomps up the stairs without stopping to chat as he usually does. I hear him banging around up there, slamming doors, swearing to himself.
After an hour or so of this, he plods back down to the kitchen and sinks into a chair. Mashing his palms over his eyes, he says, “Betsy is going to be the ruin of me.”
Andy can be dramatic, but I’ve never heard him complain about Betsy. I don’t know what to say.
“She’s decided she wants to restore an old cottage on Bradford Point for us to live in. Without even consulting me, I might add. Damn it all to hell.”
This doesn’t strike me as entirely unreasonable. Betsy told me they’re living in a horse barn on her parents’ property. “Do you like the cottage?”
“It’s all right.”
“Can you afford to fix it up?”
He shrugs. Yes.
“Does she want you to help?”
“Not really.”
“Then . . . .?”
He gives his shaggy head a violent shake. “I don’t want to be shackled to a house. The way we’re living is perfectly adequate.”
“You live in a barn, Andy. In two horse stalls, Betsy said.”
“They’re fixed up. It’s not like we’re sleeping on hay bales.”
“With one child and another on the way.”
“Nicky likes it!” he says.
“Hmm. Well . . . I think I can understand why Betsy might not want to live in a barn.”
Picking at a patch of dried paint on his arm, Andy mutters, “This is what happened to my father. Houses and boats and cars and a dock that needed constant repairs. . . . You get in too deep, start hemorrhaging money, and then you’re making decisions based on what will sell, what the market wants, and you’re ruined. Goddamn ruined. This is how it starts.”
“Fixing up a cottage isn’t quite the same as all that.”
Andy narrows his eyes and gives me a curious smile. Except for my unhappiness with his portrait, I’ve never really disagreed with him. I can tell it startles him.
“I’ve known Betsy since she was a girl,” I say. “She doesn’t care about material things.”
“Sure she does. Not as much as some women, maybe. But I would never have married those women. You bet she cares. She wants a nice house and a new car . . .” He sighs heavily.
“She’s not like that.”
“You don’t know, Christina.”
“I’ve known her a lot longer than you have.”
“Well, that’s true,” he concedes.
“Did she tell you how we met?”
“Sure, she was bored one summer and started coming to visit.”