July 6
The setting sun shone over the thoroughfare, lighting the sails of the ships coming home for the night; it streamed in the kitchen window. Though the view was good, Gwen hated to cook dinner, to be sequestered in the kitchen, to miss even one night of leisurely cocktails on the porch. But Libby’s laminated cooking schedule could not be ignored. It was their turn. Gwen wondered how their mother managed cooking every night, every summer of their childhood. The light shone in Gwen’s eyes and made it hard to see things on the west wall of the kitchen, the bucket in the soapstone sink, the flame under the steamer pot she had just set to boil. The sun brought the temperature up in the room, as if they were roasting chicken for dinner, not simply steaming mussels.
“Just sit there,” said Gwen. “Your job is to keep us company.”
“I could at least set the table,” said Melissa.
“It’s not your night,” said Libby. “You should relax. Danny can do it; it’s his job anyway.”
“He might like an excuse to get away from Tom. When I left them on the porch, they were both staring at a schooner, not talking. Not even making fun of the tourists.”
“See, you’re much better off here with us,” said Gwen. She was wondering about Danny. He seemed to be skating around the edges of the house. She thought of him forever camped in the rug room on the wicker chaise rotating between books and cards. But this trip she kept seeing him disappear up the road, or into the woods, not all the time but enough. She wondered if he was getting stoned and didn’t want to tempt her in her condition. Or maybe he was doing something worse, though she couldn’t imagine what that might be. If he was shooting up, he’d never leave the house; if he was doing coke, he’d never have left the city in the first place. Maybe there was a girl, someone pulled to the edge of the paved road waiting for him to emerge from their dirt track. Whatever it was, he couldn’t keep a secret from her very long.
The mussels were in a bucket in the soapstone sink. Gwen put the bucket at the center of the kitchen table, and Libby set two bowls beside it.
“So what is the order of operations here?” asked Melissa.
“How have you never done this before?” asked Gwen.
“I don’t do fish. I’m afraid of poisoning everyone.”
“I’ve already washed them,” said Libby. “Now we just need to weed out any bad ones and pull the beards.”
Mussels had been their mother’s specialty, and she had passed it on to them, the girls, teaching them to scrub and pull and tap. Then she would turn them loose to carry a beer to their father, to pass the cheese plate to guests on the porch. She would finish cooking alone in the kitchen, the windows wet with steam.
“Sounds like we’re testing fake Santas or something,” said Melissa. Gwen had already worked her way through six mussels. She enjoyed mindless tasks like this. She excelled at stuffing envelopes and filing. It was a moving meditation, like grocery shopping or folding laundry. Simple tasks gave her all the satisfaction of doing something with her hands, accomplishing a goal, but with none of the pressure of actually creating something. She found such things to be the perfect break from drawing, deliciously mindless. When things got tight, when she hadn’t been assigned any classes at the adult ed center for the fall semester, hadn’t sold any work last summer, she’d taken a temp job. By the time she couldn’t take another day of fluorescent lights, they’d offered her a full-time position. She had tried not to laugh. Then, on her last day, she filed drawings of naked women standing on desks, scaling filing cabinets, basking in the glow of a flaming photocopier.
“Like so.” Gwen took a mussel from the bucket, gave it a sharp tap with her finger, like she was playing a particularly sticky piano key, yanked off the stringy bit of fur that hung from the flattened edge of the shell, and then tossed the mussel into one of the bowls.
“Then what’s this for?” Melissa pointed to the empty bowl.
“The rejects, the ones that don’t close up tight when you tap them,” said Libby.
As they tossed the mussels on top of one another, the shellfish ticked together like walnuts. What looked like stone sounded wooden and brittle. She wished she could pause this cooking party and take out her watercolors and paint the bucket and bowls, the menacing blue-black of the mussels, their grained shells pocked with the occasional barnacle.
“They’re so prehistoric,” said Libby.
“More mystical, like black magic,” said Gwen. The place where voodoo and Norse myths might collide, the ridged fingernails of a sea witch.
When the bucket was empty Gwen and Libby stood, each with a bowl in her hands.
“I’ll get the boys to dump these,” said Libby, heading out the door. Gwen took her bowl to the stove and checked the water.
“Almost there,” she said. A watched pot. She put her hand to her belly. Then shook her hand like she wanted to wake up her fingers, realizing that they were dreaming. They were betraying her, resting there like that, searching for some seismic sign.
“Have you talked to the kids?” she asked Melissa. “The house still standing?”
“They haven’t managed to tie up their grandmother and make a break for the border yet. They’re too lazy to do anything really terrible.”
“I wish they were here,” said Gwen. “But it must be kinda great to take a break from Mommy duty.”
“Yeah, but life is so much easier now. It’s when they’re little that you really need the breaks. Now they spend half their time in their rooms with headphones on. I tried to convince them that they could do that here, but they couldn’t bear the idea of spotty cell reception.”
“I don’t know how you did it, two kids, two years apart. How did you have a life?” said Gwen.
Libby came back in and followed Gwen to the fridge. Gwen passed butter, lemons, and berries to Libby. Melissa sat at the table, slowly spinning a glass of wine from its base.
“I didn’t, really. Your old life sort of disappears, and you create a whole new one that has some of the old stuff and a lot of new stuff. It’s very phoenix-from-the-ashes,” said Melissa.
So it burns, and you are a magical bird singed and caged.
“You handled it well,” said Gwen, “Trapped in the house all the time. Parenthood seems more like being an ex-con, only you have to nurse your parole officer.” She had dated the dealer who lived across the street from her, and she referred to him as The Felon, though he had never been convicted of anything. Their relationship consisted of smoking spliffs on his front steps and making out. Eventually things regressed into more of a straightforward business arrangement. Spliffs, yes, kisses, no. That was as close to a life of crime as Gwen had ever come.