Authors: Luanne Rice
“Even the names you give them make my mouth water,” Cass said. “I’m telling you, you should start a business. Take them to the craft fairs and set up a stand.”
“I just bake for fun,” Bonnie said. “You know my great idea, how that went over.”
“Mail-order Shore Dinners,” Cass said. “I know, that idea never got off the ground. That’s because you had too many people to convince. Mom, Dad … we’re not exactly talking avant-garde. I still think it would be great. We could all use the money.”
“You’re the only one who thinks it could work.”
“I think selling your brownies could work better. But you know how I feel about chocolate,” Cass said. “Mind if I have one more?”
“It’d kill me if you didn’t.”
The doorbell rang.
“Can you believe that?” Bonnie asked. “She goes to the front door and rings the doorbell. It’s Nora, you know.”
“I figured. She does that at my house, too.”
“So formal, so … how do you say? Genteel.” Bonnie chuckled.
“Hey, it’s the way we were raised, Bon. The back door is for servants. How did you and I ever sink this low?”
The sisters smiled.
“The front door is wide open, by the way. Feel that breeze?”
“Let’s ignore her. We’ll force her to walk in,” Cass said. “It’s for her own good. She needs to loosen up.”
The bell rang again.
“We’re in the kitchen!” Cass yelled.
High heels clicked on the hall tiles. Nora, dressed for work, entered the room. She stood back from her sisters, her lips tight, as if she knew they had been making fun of her.
“How did you wind up with all the class?” Cass asked, throwing her arms around Nora.
“What are you talking about?” Nora asked briskly. She’s hurt, Bonnie thought.
“We’re family, sistah.”
“She means you don’t have to ring the doorbell,” Bonnie said, kissing Nora. “Here, have a brownie.”
“Maybe a glass of white wine instead?” Nora asked.
“Oh, make it martinis,” Cass said. “You know how clever we get when we drink martinis. Noël Coward should write a play about us. We could also star in it.”
“Isn’t Noël Coward dead, dear?” Nora asked.
“Yes. Before he gave us our big break, the bastard,” Cass said. “A talk show, then. A roundtable discussion group with a pitcher of martinis in the middle and us discussing teenage sex.”
“Pertinent issues,” Bonnie said.
“No, I mean our
own
teenage sex,” Cass said.
“Like how we lost our virginity …”
“And how often,” Cass said.
“I thought you hated martinis,” Nora said.
“I do. Give me a Diet Coke. Never mind, Bon—I’ll get it myself.”
“This is a subject I can’t relate to,” Nora said. “I was a twenty-four-year-old virgin.”
“Well, Mom and Dad were so strict with you,” Bonnie said. “They lightened up with me, and they gave up on Cass.”
“I wouldn’t be a teenager again for anything,” Nora said. She sipped the wine Bonnie had set in front of her. “So polite, such a good girl.”
“At least we haven’t turned Belinda and Emma into good girls,” Cass said. “They’re great girls.”
“I know,” Bonnie said. “Mom and Dad were so high on good manners, I was afraid to say no. I thought it was impolite.”
Nora sipped her wine, blushing, as if Bonnie had hit a nerve. Bonnie wondered when had been the last time Nora had said no to any man. She needed a real man who would love her right, not another local playboy.
“I never wanted to say no,” Cass said.
“Well, you were always with Billy,” Nora said.
“True,” she said, nodding. She seemed about to say more, but upstairs something thumped and Josie screamed. Cass flew out the door. Bonnie and Nora stared at each other. They heard Cass taking the stairs two at a time.
“They shut me owwwwww!”
howled Josie, her words mushing together in that pitiful, familiar way.
“Then we’ll knock on the door and ask them why,” came Cass’s voice, loud and calm.
Josie screamed louder.
“That poor little thing,” Nora said.
Bonnie said nothing. Her view of the situation was unpopular. She thought the family blamed all of Josie’s difficulties on her handicap, when at least half of them could be chalked up to the simple fact that she was a four-year-old. Josie had begun to catch on, too. She knew exactly how to get her mother’s attention.
“It must be so frustrating for her, not hearing right. Imagine what will happen when she gets to school. The other kids will be brutal.”
Bonnie shook her head. “Don’t fall into that trap. Do you think that”—she pointed upstairs—“is only about deafness?”
Nora shrugged. “Doesn’t Cass like us to say ‘hearing-impaired’? Or whatever. I just know she hates ‘deaf.’”
“Belinda and Emma are thirteen. Remember being their age? Would you have wanted Cass around then? They’re not being mean
to Josie because of her hearing problem. She’s too little to play with them.”
“That’s not what I meant, exactly. I understand the girls’ kicking Josie out. But just listen to her.”
Josie was screaming louder; it sounded as if she were kicking her heels on the bare wood floor. As Josie’s volume increased, so did Cass’s. But the steadiness of her voice did not change.
“I don’t know how Cass does it,” Nora said. “I’d go insane.”
“I know,” Bonnie said. The longer the racket continued, the less certain she felt of her theory. Those shrieks weren’t coming from a manipulative toddler.
“It’s awful,” Nora said.
“I wish we could do something to help.”
“What can we do?”
“Nothing at all. I just wish we could.” She wondered how Cass kept herself from shaking Josie to make her stop. She remembered taking the Block Island ferry, one time when Emma was about Josie’s age. Standing at the rail, waving to a fishing boat, Emma had accidentally dropped her favorite doll overboard. Out of control with crying, she couldn’t be consoled, and after fifteen solid minutes of trying to calm her down, Bonnie remembered feeling an overwhelming impulse to slap her.
“This reminds me of hearing Mother and Daddy fight,” Nora said.
“Mom and Dad fought?” Bonnie asked, searching her memory. “I don’t remember that.”
“They fought all the time. I remember sitting on the stairs, listening to them fight in the dining room. Nothing violent or anything,” Nora said, seeing Bonnie’s expression. “Usually about money, the business, one of us. They didn’t know I was listening. I felt like I ought to be able to make them stop, but there was nothing I could do.”
“I never knew they fought,” Bonnie said. She was stunned by Josie’s fit, which was louder than ever. If she heard those screams coming from a neighbor’s house, she would call the police.
She remembered that when her kids were little, when one of them would skin a knee, or have a temper tantrum, everyone would
want to help. Her mother would make funny faces, her father would hold out a nickel, her sisters would hover close, making soothing sounds. But all her children ever wanted was Bonnie. She’d hold them and rock them and kiss their scrapes.
Bonnie and Nora sat silently at the kitchen table while the voices of their niece and sister rang through the house. The pitch grew higher, more frantic; Josie was clearly hysterical.
“So mean,” Josie cried. “They hate me. They hate me.”
“No they don’t, they love you,” Cass said.
“They hate me.”
“Big kids like to play alone sometimes.” Cass’s voice, though still steady, was full of tears and frustration.
Josie wept, her cries still punishingly angry, as if she hadn’t heard a word her mother said.
Bonnie yearned to stand up, grab Josie and Cass, and shake both of them. Instead, she reached for Nora’s hand. Nora gave it a squeeze, and Cass’s two older sisters sat together, holding hands, as they listened.
N
ora hardly ever felt like smoking anymore. She still carried her cigarettes with her, and occasionally she would reach for one, from habit. She would get as far as placing it between her lips before discovering she didn’t want it at all. The other day at Bonnie’s, when Cass had finally gotten Josie to calm down, Nora had lifted the child into her arms for a hug. Although she had stopped crying, Josie’s chest heaved in big, shuddering breaths. “Your hair smells pretty, like shampoo,” Josie had said, with difficulty, into Nora’s ear.
It had amazed Nora that after crying so hard for so long, Josie had any breath left to talk.
“Thank you,” Nora had said. While Bonnie sat Cass down and poured her a cup of tea, Nora had played with Josie, letting her try on her silver bracelets and jade beads, until her breathing returned almost to normal. It was the first time Nora could remember anyone telling her that her hair smelled pretty.
Nora had conditioned her hair and decided to persuade it back to its natural auburn color. She had stripped off her bright-red fingernail polish and applied shell pink. Standing before her refrigerator, looking into its open door, she felt dismayed to discover it contained only two open bottles of white wine, a six-pack of Narragansett beer, a container of clam chowder so old it was tinged blue, and the unopened currant preserves Bonnie had given her for May Day two years ago.
On her day off, Nora went grocery shopping at Almacs. She filled her cart with whole-wheat bread, boneless chicken breasts, mineral
water, cranberry juice, broccoli, carrots, one baking potato, and a lemon-scented air freshener. Grocery shopping was new for Nora; in the past, she had been known to run into a store for some peanuts, olives, or pickled onions, but she always ate her meals at Lobsterville. She wheeled her cart slowly, as if she were taking her first steps.
For a long time—years, actually—Nora had thought of herself as someone with hair of straw, a washed-out face, the body of a cornhusk doll. Bonnie had turned forty blooming like a rose, treating herself to a fabulous masquerade party to which people brought presents. That everyone loved Bonnie was obvious to Nora, who had sat in the Kenneallys’ TV room in a rented flapper costume, remembering her own fortieth birthday.
Her sisters had wanted to give her a party, but Nora had said no, that turning forty was nothing to celebrate. Instead, she and Tony Domingus had gotten drunk on his boat. They’d started on tequila, then changed to vodka. They’d ripped off their clothes—literally torn Nora’s black blouse—and tried but failed to fuck on a berth that smelled of herring. Too far gone to maneuver, Nora had spent the night onboard and had to walk down the dock the next morning, past Mount Hope’s entire jeering fishing fleet.
Now, after grocery shopping, Nora drove home. She lived at Bensons’ Mill, a condominium complex several piers down from Keating’s Wharf. Pulling her 280Z into the carport, she smiled hello at some neighbors and carried her two brown bags upstairs.
Unlocking her condo door, Nora felt a tingle of anticipation. It started on the top of her head, where she parted her hair, and shivered down the backs of her thighs. “Hello?” she called, though she didn’t actually expect anyone to be there. She had left the air conditioning on low; it hummed reassuringly. In spite of the fact that she hadn’t had a cigarette in several days, the room smelled like smoke. The first thing Nora did, even before unpacking her food, was to unwrap the air freshener and place it smack on her black marble coffee table. Breathing in the lemony scent, she sank onto her overstuffed white leather sofa and closed her eyes.
Every time Nora stopped moving, she thought of Willis Randecker. He swirled through her mind, making her head swim. In
a way, it seemed as if their time together had been much longer than simply part of one evening. She remembered the vulnerable angle of his eyebrows, his gentle southern drawl, the way he had put out her cigarette, his words when she had told him she’d never been married: “That surprises me.”
Nora remembered feeling that he wanted something from her. Her first impression of Willis had put her on guard. Now that she’d had time to consider it, she thought she knew why: because Willis had seemed to like her right off the bat. She wasn’t used to men simply liking her.
That night, after a dinner of sautéed chicken and broccoli, she wrapped herself in her peach silk robe. She stood on her balcony, facing out to sea. Across a dimly lit asphalt parking lot and the tall silhouettes of construction cranes lay Mount Hope harbor. A summer breeze fluttered Nora’s robe against her legs; it carried northward the scents of Spanish moss, azaleas, black-bean soup laced with sherry, and mud flats in the Savannah River. Halyards clanked against flagpoles and the wire stays of sailboats on their moorings; the bell buoy at Minturn Ledge Light groaned.
The sea sounds filled Nora with longing. She gazed at the sky, a blanket of gray flannel, and knew that beyond the loom of harbor lights were constellations full of bright stars. In the middle of the North Atlantic, men had filled their holds and were charting courses home by those stars. Billy, Gavin. Al, Tony, John, all the others. She wondered whether Willis Randecker knew anything about celestial navigation. She wondered whether the night sky over Willis was hazy with the lights of Savannah, or whether he had a clear view of the stars.
Independence Day always brought out the patriot in Mary Keating. Summer was the Keating family’s season, and Independence Day was summer’s best holiday. All three of her daughters worked at the restaurant that day. Every Fourth, Mary played show tunes—her idea of patriotic music—over the Lobsterville loudspeaker. All day long, the cast recordings of “The Music Man,” “South Pacific,” and “Oklahoma!” would alternate with songs by George M. Cohan, a born-and-bred Rhode Islander—“Over There,” “You’re a Grand
Old Flag,” and “Yankee Doodle Boy.” Mary would wear a red dress with a blue-and-white sailor collar; when folks ordered twin lobsters, they were served with little American flags on toothpicks clutched in their claws. After sunset she would set out complimentary fried scallops and hot cheese puffs, and people along the wharf would jockey for the best spots from which to view the fireworks.
Midway through the afternoon lull, Mary left Vinnie Fusaro in charge of the reservations phone and stole out to meet Jim and have a smoke. Walking down the dock, she peered at the sky. It had the weight and color of an old pot, mottled gray and heavy in a way that made it hard to breathe. She felt sorry for people who couldn’t be at the shore; the smog in Providence must be terrible.