one went south, and oh dear, she had loved them both the same, everything the same.
'Stop it,' Lisey said fretfully. 'I was in time, I was, so let it go. The lung-shot was all that crazy baby ever got.' Yet in her mind's eye (where the past is always present), she saw the Ladysmith again start its swivel, and Lisey shoved herself out of the pool in an effort to physically drive the image away. It worked, but Blondie was back again as she stood in the changing room, toweling off after a quick rinsing shower, Gerd Allen Cole was back, is back, saying I got to end all this ding-dong for the freesias, and 1988-Lisey is swinging the silver spade, but this time the smucking air in Lisey-time is too thick, she's going to be just an instant too late, she will see all of the second flame-corsage instead of just a portion, and a black hole will also open on Scott's left lapel as his sportcoat becomes his deathcoat—
'Quit it!' Lisey growled, and slung her towel in the basket. 'Give it a rest!'
She marched back to the house nude, with her clothes under her arm—that's what the high board fence all the way around the backyard was for.
2
She was hungry after her swim—famished, actually—and although it was not quite five o'clock, she decided on a big skillet meal. What Darla, second-oldest of the Debusher girls, would have called comfort-food, and what Scott —with great relish— would have called eatin nasty. There was a pound of ground beef in the fridge and, lurking on a back shelf in the pantry, a wonderfully nasty selection: the Cheeseburger Pie version of Hamburger Helper. Lisey threw it together in a skillet with the ground beef. While it was simmering, she mixed herself a pitcher of lime Kool-Aid with double sugar. By five-twenty, the smells from the skillet had filled the kitchen, and all thoughts of Gerd Allen Cole had left her head, at least for the time being. She could think of nothing but food. She had two large helpings of the Hamburger Helper casserole, and two big glasses of Kool-Aid. When the second helping and the second glass were gone (all except for the white dregs of sugar in the bottom of the glass), she burped resoundingly and said: 'I wish I had a goddam smucking cigarette.'
It was true; she had rarely wanted one so badly. A Salem Light. Scott had been a smoker when they had met at the University of Maine, where he had been both a grad student and what he called The World's Youngest Writer in Residence. She was a part-time student (that didn't last long) and a fulltime waitress at Pat's Cafe downtown, slinging pizzas and burgers. She'd picked up the smoking habit from Scott, who'd been strictly a Herbert Tareyton man. They'd given up the butts together, rallying each other along. That had been in '87, the year before Gerd Allen Cole had resoundingly demonstrated that cigarettes weren't the only problem a person could have with his lungs. In the years since, Lisey went for days without thinking of them, then would fall into horrible pits of craving. Yet in a way, thinking about cigarettes was an improvement. It beat thinking about
(I got to end all this ding-dong for the freesias, says Gerd Allen Cole with perfect fretful clarity and turns his wrist slightly)
Blondie
(smoothly)
and Nashville
(so that the smoking barrel of the Ladysmith points at the left side of Scott's chest)
and smuck, here she went, doing it again.
There was store-bought poundcake for dessert, and Cool Whip— perhaps the apex of eatin nasty—to put on top of it, but Lisey was too full to consider it yet. And she was distressed to find these rotten old memories returning even after she'd taken on a gutful of hot, high-calorie food. She supposed that now she had an idea of what war veterans had to deal with. That had been her only battle, but
(no, Lisey)
'Quit it,' she whispered, and pushed her plate
(no, babyluv)
violently away from her. Christ, but she wanted
(you know better)
a cigarette. And even more than a ciggy, she wanted all these old memories to go aw—
Lisey!
That was Scott's voice, on top of her mind for a change and so clear she answered out loud over the kitchen table and with no self-consciousness at all: 'What, hon?'
Find the silver shovel and all this crap will blow away…like the smell of the mill when the wind swung around and blew from the south. Remember?
Of course she did. Her apartment had been in the little town of Cleaves Mills, just one town east of Orono. There weren't any actual mills in Cleaves by the time Lisey lived there, but there had still been plenty in Oldtown, and when the wind blew from the north—especially if the day happened to be overcast and damp—the stench was atrocious. Then, if the wind changed…God! You could smell the ocean, and it was like being born again. For awhile wait for the wind to change had become part of their marriage's interior language, like strap it on and SOWISA and smuck for fuck. Then it had fallen out of favor somewhere along the way, and she hadn't thought of it for years: wait for the wind to change, meaning hang on in there, baby. Meaning don't give up yet. Maybe it had been the sort of sweetly optimistic attitude only a young marriage can sustain. She didn't know. Scott might have been able to offer an informed opinion; he'd kept a journal even back then, in their
(EARLY YEARS!)
scuffling days, writing in it for fifteen minutes each evening while she watched sitcoms or did the household accounts. And sometimes instead of watching TV or writing checks, she watched him. She liked the way the lamplight shone in his hair and made deep triangular shadows on his cheeks as he sat there with his head bent over his looseleaf notebook. His hair had been both longer and darker in those days, unmarked by the gray that had begun to show up toward the end of his life. She liked his stories, but she liked how his hair looked in the spill of the lamplight just as much. She thought his hair in the lamplight was its own story, he just didn't know it. She liked how his skin felt under her hand, too. Forehead or foreskin, both were good. She would not have traded one for the other. What worked for her was the whole package.
Lisey! Find the shovel!
She cleared the table, then stored the remaining Cheeseburger Pie in a Tupperware dish. She was certain she'd never eat it now that her madness had passed, but there was too much to scrape down the sink-pig; how the Good Ma Debusher who still kept house in her head would scream at waste like that! Better by far to hide it in the fridge behind the asparagus and the yogurt, where it would age quietly. And as she did these simple chores, she wondered how in the name of Jesus, Mary, and JoJo the Carpenter finding that silly ceremonial shovel could do anything for her peace of mind. Something about the magical properties of silver, maybe? She remembered watching some movie on the Late Show with Darla and Cantata, some supposedly scary thing about a werewolf…only Lisey hadn't been much frightened, if at all. She'd thought the werewolf more sad than scary, and besides—you could tell the movie-making people were changing his face by stopping the camera every now and then to put on more makeup and then running it again. You had to give them high marks for effort, but the finished product wasn't all that believable, at least in her humble opinion. The story was sort of interesting, though. The first part took place in an English pub, and one of the old geezers drinking there said you could only kill a werewolf with a silver bullet. And had not Gerd Allen Cole been a kind of werewolf?
'Come on, kid,' she said, rinsing off her plate and sticking it in the almost empty dishwasher, 'maybe Scott could float that downriver in one of his books, but tall stories were never your department. Were they?' She closed the dishwasher with a thump. At the rate it was filling, she'd be ready to run the current load around July Fourth. 'If you want to look for that shovel, just go do it! Do you?'
Before she could answer this completely rhetorical question, Scott's voice came again—the clear one at the top of her mind.
I left you a note, babyluv.
Lisey froze in the act of reaching for a dishtowel to dry her hands. She knew that voice, of course she did. She still heard it three and four times a week, her voice mimicking his, a little bit of harmless company in a big empty house. Only coming so soon after all this shite about the shovel…
