When Eliza was growing up, the richest people she knew were the McPhersons, who had a gorgeous house on the Point, and who came up every summer from Philadelphia.
“Remember the McPhersons?” she asked Charlie now. “That lobster bake?”
“I do,” he said. “Hell of a time.”
“Do they still have that house?”
“I believe they do. Only sandy beachfront in the town.”
Eliza remembered a Saturday, midsummer, a fog draping itself around the Point like a blanket. She was thirteen, slightly sunburned, her hair untamed, the pain and grief after her mother died still floating along the surface like a lily pad. Charlie was hired to be cook and entertainer both; he and Eliza had been there all afternoon, while Charlie dug the hole, laid the rocks, built the fire, tended it for hours. Then, when the fire was ready, he moved the rocks to the side with a shovel. He had a pile of seaweed ready to place over the pit, and pieces of tarp he would lay over the pans once they were on the pit. “Much easier,” he told Eliza, sweating over the shovel, “to cook the whole damn thing in the kitchen. But they want it authentic, so authentic is what they get.”
Then the guests started to arrive, tripping down the wide expanse of grass to the sand. The ladies left their shoes on the ground. Their toenails were painted bright red or pink, and they wore sundresses. They all wore perfume. They all carried glasses of champagne. For the men: darker cocktails in what Eliza didn’t know then were highball glasses.
“She wanted me to call her Dottie,” said Eliza now. “But I wouldn’t.”
“This is Charlie Sargent,” said Mrs. McPherson to her guests. “If you haven’t met him other years. My own personal lobsterman.” Eliza waited for Charlie to look to Eliza, to roll his eyes in her direction, so they could exchange a look that said, Can you believe this woman? But his smile got bigger and he didn’t roll his eyes, and he said, “And this is my assistant, Eliza.” She could hear the way he was dialing up his accent.
“Awww,” said the women, looking at Eliza, who scratched a mosquito bite and looked back at the women. “Isn’t she sweet.” And one of them said, “I’d kill for that hair.”
When it was time to put the food on the pit Charlie made a big show of picking through the tub of lobsters he’d brought.
“I got some quarters, I got some halfs,” he said. “This one, Mrs. Wheeler, I caught special for you. This one’s a chicken, smaller than the others. I know you have a tiny appetite.” He winked at Mrs. Wheeler, who giggled. He was laying it on thick, Eliza could see that, and they were eating it up like a square of blueberry cake.
When it came time to crack the lobsters everybody sat on big plaid blankets in the sand. They wore bibs, like overgrown children, and had hand wipes set up beside them. Charlie perched on a little stool he used for tending the fire, and held up a lobster as an example. He twisted off the tail, broke it open, pushed out the meat. “All in one piece, that’s how you want it—that’s it, Mr. Frank.” Then the claws. “Bend backwards on the claw, Mrs. Carrington, backwards, that’s it. Always backwards.” He showed them how to use the crackers, how to get the claw meat out all in one piece. When someone struggled he walked around and kneeled beside him or her, taking the claw or the tail out of the person’s hands. They dipped the lobster in the bowls of butter, ate the corn, ate the potatoes, devoured the blueberry crisp. Eliza moved closer to her father, and though she was offered food she ate none. Instead she watched the women, the way they tipped their heads back when they laughed, the way they had of putting a hand on the forearm of the person they were talking to.
When Eliza needed the bathroom, Mrs. McPherson (“Really, sweetheart, it’s Dottie, I insist, Mrs. McPherson is my mother-in-law!”) directed her to the half bath off the kitchen, but when Eliza got there she tried the knob and discovered that the door was locked. She was about to knock when she heard odd noises coming from under the door—groans, gasps. Sex noises. Carrie Simmons had told her about sex noises, but because Eliza was a young thirteen without the benefit of the internet or frequent trips to the movies she hadn’t heard those noises before. She found a different bathroom, an upstairs one, and returned to the party.
Then the sun set and darkness fell, and, in the sky, a full moon rose.
“I arranged that for you too, Mrs. McPherson,” Charlie said, nodding. “I brought you the moon and all.” And the party guests, to a person, laughed. They loved Charlie Sargent, they loved Dottie McPherson’s own personal lobsterman! They loved summer in Maine.
At the end of the night, Mrs. McPherson handed Charlie an envelope. She was flushed now, chortling and warm. She hugged Eliza. She hugged Charlie, holding him too close for too long. She said, “You, Charlie Sargent, are a treasure. It simply wouldn’t be summer in Maine without you.”
During the drive home Eliza was silent until Charlie pressed her. When she couldn’t hold it in any longer, she spat out, “Why do you let them do that?”
“Do what?”
“Put you onstage like that. Aren’t you embarrassed?”
“Embarrassed? What do I have to be embarrassed about?”
“It’s all so fake.” She thought about the sex noises. “They’re so fake. Like rich people don’t know how to crack a lobster by now, they’ve been doing it every summer for years. And you—”
“And I what?”
“You play along, play up your accent. For them.”
There was a quick flicker of hurt in his eyes; she caught it when they passed one of the main street’s only streetlights. “Doesn’t bother me, Eliza,” Charlie said. “If it doesn’t bother me I don’t see any reason why it should bother you.”
The next morning, while her father was still asleep—it was a rare morning for him to sleep in, a Sunday in summer, when you couldn’t haul anyway—Eliza opened the envelope: ten one-hundred-dollar bills, crisp in their envelope. The envelope said Ellsworth Savings and Loan on it in red. The bills were all facing the same way. Ben Franklin with his odd hairstyle, his hooded eyes, over and over again she looked at him, all ten of him. How many days of hauling did that equal, a few hours on the beach at the McPhersons’, the big show with the lobster crackers?
Later that afternoon there was a shopping trip, all the way to the mall in Bangor: a new dress for Eliza, a new pair of shoes, a shirt, and a new lunch box for Charlie because he said his old one was falling right about to pieces. A stop on the way home for burgers and root beer floats at Jordan’s, which Eliza and Charlie ate sitting side by side on the rickety picnic bench, watching the summer traffic go by, not saying much.