The Lindas, being friendly, are helpful in this chore. Big Linda, as Lena calls her, told us about someone she knew who was bitten by a bull sea lion. “Right on the keester, kiddo. And let me tell you it made a mighty broad target,” she chortled. She told Lena that performing seals at zoos and aquariums are not seals at all but sea lions; that some sea lions work for the U.S. Navy, finding things in the ocean; and that male sea lions can be four times the size of the females—weighing, put in the other Linda, up to one thousand pounds. That’s half a ton.
Lena calls the other one Main Linda because she met her first. Main Linda goes swimming in very cold water, Lena said to me, once every year to help raise money for the Special Olympics. Lena’s resolved to join her in one of these polar bear plunges, as she calls them. I have to restrain her from practicing.
The Lindas have embraced their nicknames.
When the two of us finished at the library we walked over to the local diner to have lunch. A beefy middle-aged man sat down beside us at the counter—beside Lena, I should say, with me on her other side. He ordered a Reuben, introduced himself as John and proceeded to engage her in a conversation about her gold and silver metallic markers. He was inoffensive, on the face of it, a neighborly fellow patron, yet I thought I detected something off-color in his expression as he glanced over the top of her head at me, a hint of a leer, some glint of beady self-interest.
So I hurried Lena at her lunch a bit. We shared a piece of sickly-sweet cherry pie for dessert, leaving bright jelly smears on the plate. Then we left, with the beefy man smiling after us as the door swung to.
Big Linda was waiting for us in her bulky car; Main Linda, who was buying birdseed in the hardware store down the block, remained to be picked up.
“Big Linda?” said Lena hesitantly, as we pulled away from the curb. “Do sea lions have really sharp teeth?”
While we waited in the car again, this time outside the hardware store, the two of them discussed sea lion dentition, a subject that was, to me, of limited interest. I sank into the warm seat in a half-dream, full of the sickly-sweet pie, grown even more sickly in retrospect, and mused on my attraction to the town’s librarian, who seems out of place here. He’s good-looking; his skin is a coffee shade but the geometry of his face seems less African than Eastern, maybe Malaysian or Indian, I don’t know. It’s noteworthy mostly because there aren’t too many colorful immigrants in this part of Maine—in some parts there are Somalis and Asians but around here most everyone I’ve seen is plain old white.
When Mainers rise up against immigration it’s often been Canadians they accuse of stealing jobs; once Maine loggers blockaded the Canadian border.
I stared out the window, which was fogged up and yielded no defined shapes, only hazy panels of white and gray. I realized I was thinking of sex, of the idea of sex or rather, to be precise, the idea of no sex—no sex at all. I mulled over my asexual existence as a mother, gazing at the foggy window, mulled over the asexual existence of many mothers, whose bodies, formerly toasted politely as sex objects when not worshiped outright, had been diverted from the sexual to the post-sexual. In the natural plumpness of motherhood they were summarily dropped by male society like so much fast-food detritus in a mall food court.
I wondered if it was impossible that I would ever be a sex object again, if I should embrace that impossibility or try to reclaim my status as a sex object—by, say, enrolling in pole-dancing classes as one of my old college friends had done after her divorce, enacting a middle-aged crypto-feminist stripper fantasy that seemed to keep her entertained.
I decided I wouldn’t enroll in pole-dancing classes.
After a minute along those lines I gave up thinking. As I swiped at the condensation on the car window I caught sight of the beefy man, John, walking toward us down the sidewalk from the diner. A light snow had just begun to fall and his slab of pink face was a blur, so I couldn’t tell if the small blue eyes were pointed in our direction; before the blur resolved he turned and disappeared through a door.
The falling snow made me want to shore us up snugly for the winter and brought a pang of homesickness for our house in Alaska, which had always been more mine and Lena’s than Ned’s, for all the time he never spent there. Ned should have gone, I thought, Ned should have left.
But I myself had chosen otherwise, no one had chosen my course of action for me, and so Ned had not left the house—rather I was the one who fled. I forsook my existence, my local friends, the belongings I’d slowly and carefully amassed over the years of my life up till then, most of which would mean nothing to him . . . I left it all, except for some file cabinets of photos and documents, a few boxes of books and a handful of childhood keepsakes I’d stowed in a small storage unit. I’d given up everything to keep Lena close to me and get us clear: nothing else had mattered.