7.
They went fishing the next morning for three hours while I sat on the porch eating Grape Nuts, worrying Will would catch something and show Dad up, or not catch anything at all and feel like a failure. He ended up catching one lonely snapper, which he threw back.
I watched Jim go into the kitchen that night with moving brown-paper bags, remembering how Mom would run screaming from the kitchen when she saw those bags. Eventually she would boycott lobster night altogether.
I pulled out some old green-glass salad plates shaped like crescents.
“I’d wash them,” Jim said sheepishly. He filled the big black pot with water.
When the water was boiling, Jim squeezed the tops of the lobsters’ heads, which he said deadened the pain, then threw them in. Will came downstairs and smiled, his back to the pot, when he heard the lobsters hissing.
The wind had died down, so we ate outside on the porch while Jim cleaned up the kitchen. Dad focused on his food, and we would have eaten in complete silence if Will hadn’t started talking.
“Did you spend a lot of time here when you were a kid, Thea?” Will asked me, his lips glistening with butter and salad dressing.
“We would come up for a week or two in the summer,” I said, “but most of the time I went to day camp in the Bronx. Mom didn’t like it here.”
“Fiona was not one for island life,” Dad said as the claw he was cracking fell into the butter. “This island, anyway.”
“That’s hard to imagine,” Will said. “It’s beautiful here. It’s one of the most beautiful spots I’ve ever seen.”
Dad stared at his plate, chewing, avoiding Will’s eyes. I begged him in my head to at least acknowledge the compliment.
“When Thea was little, she used to think lobsters were monsters,” he said. “She’d see the bags and run outside, all the way out to the end of the bluff. Remember, you wouldn’t come in until they turned red?”
“Well, it was hard to watch Mom freak out and not think something terrible was happening.”
“Thea was also afraid of rain.” Dad rose suddenly, scraping his chair, and went to the pillar in the corner. “See what I did here? I haven’t shown you, have I? I moved them.”
“Moved what?” I asked.
“Your height measurements.”
I got up and went over, followed by Will.
He turned on a lamp. “I marked it all up on a tape, so I think it’s still pretty accurate.” I looked at the markings, immediately remembering the sensation of a pencil being leveled on top of my head: the first when I was around a year old, then every few months after that, the gaps ranging from incremental to gaping, depending how much time passed in between. The original markings had been done in different-colored pens, and Mom had done some of the early ones, so the handwriting looked different from year to year, depending on which one of them wrote it. But now the markings were uniformly etched in black graphite, Dad’s script as neat and tight as a calligrapher’s.
“Why did you move them over here?” I asked.
“The chairs kept smacking against the pillar by the table, so when the porch was finally painted last fall, I transferred them over here, out of harm’s way,” Dad said. “It’s a wonder you ever grew at all, given how much you hated vegetables. Do you remember how crazy we used to get?”
I nodded, remembering the nauseating stench of corn-on-the-cob steam escaping from a jiggling lid. Nana, of course, blamed my mother and her lack of discipline in raising me.
“But now look at you,” he said. “A broccoli fanatic. And salad. Salad was the first thing you started to come around on, if I remember correctly. Salad with little cherry tomatoes.”
He looked me up and down, arms stiffly at his sides, and it was like I could read his mind: she needs to lose a few pounds. After the divorce I’d become Mom’s property and therefore vaguely distasteful to him.
“Let’s eat,” he said, steering us back to the table.
“So where do you get the lobsters?” Will asked. “Do you guys have a trap out there?” He elbowed toward the water.
“No, it’s illegal now, you need a license. Thea, why are we eating salad off ashtrays?”
“What?” I asked. “I thought they were salad plates.”
“These were Nana’s and they’re actually ashtrays,” Dad said, picking up his plate and holding it at his chest. “This gives you an indication of how much they used to smoke. They would lay these out all over the house during cocktail parties.”
“They really do look like plates,” Will mused. “Were you ever a smoker, Ted?”
Dad nodded, mashing his napkin across his mouth. “Two packs a day at one point. I’d somehow resisted temptation all through college. I raced crew and played lacrosse, so I took that very seriously. But when I met Thea’s mother, actually, that’s when I took it up.”
“Right, all her fault,” I chimed in.
“I’m not saying that, Thea,” he said, looking at me pointedly. “No one to blame but myself on that front.” He pushed his bowl of empty lobster shells away from him, toward the glass-enclosed candle in the middle of the table. “I think I got caught up in all the headiness of it, you know, the parties, the scene, all that. They all smoked.”
“What brand?” I asked. I pictured him slouched in his chair in the living room, drunk.
“Camel Lights, whatever was around. Anyway, needless to say, I hope you don’t fall down that little rabbit hole,” he said, rattling his glass of ice and draining it of water. “Nicotine addiction is no prize. It’s been, what … almost a decade? And still, I’d kill for a cigarette.”
“Really?” I laughed.
“Oh, absolutely,” he said, smiling and shaking his head. “Absolutely. It never really went away for me. And sometimes at work …” His voice trailed off.
“What about a drink?” I blurted, surprising myself. His drinking was more of a taboo subject for me than sex. To bring it up was not just embarrassing but dangerous. I still had pervasive, floating fears that he’d start again. And somewhere in my head I believed that if he started again, it would do him in. Whether it was true or not, that’s what I believed.
“That too,” he said, his face stiffening, closing up. He watched Will’s reaction, gauging how much I’d told him.
“I could see how they’d go hand in hand,” Will said.
Dad nodded, chuckled skittishly. “Not too clearly, I hope.”
“How did you stop?” Will asked.
“The same way I stopped drinking,” he said quickly. “I put my mind to it.” He leaned back in his chair and crossed his leg.
“Was it hard?” Will asked, wide-eyed, encouraging. I could hear it in his voice. He was digging for color, but I knew he wouldn’t get any. “Did you have, like, withdrawal symptoms?”
“With the drinking I did, sure,” he said. “The smokes were more of a habit. But like any smoker, I guess, a beloved one.”
“What do you miss most?” Will asked.
“What, about smoking?”
“Or the drinking, or both.”
Dad arched his eyebrows skeptically. “You’re extremely interested.…”
“I just mean a successful guy like you, you know, you had these … demons that you conquered, so to speak.” Will sat back and crossed his legs, jiggling his foot on his thigh. “The partying, you know, you and Fiona, boozing it up, getting high, it seems very glamorous from where I’m sitting.”
Dad looked at Will carefully. It was definitely crossing the line into too-personal territory and we all knew it, but for some reason Dad talked. “I wouldn’t say I miss anything about it. It’s more that I miss my youth, and the requisite recklessness. I’m in my late forties. I’m human. I feel old.”
“I’m not young.” He let out a forced, theatrical sigh. “You know what’s funny? I miss being married. It’s funny how I associate smoking with marriage.”
“You miss being married?” I asked.
“Of course I do. Does that surprise you?”
“Uh, yeah,” I answered in my best teenager voice. Mom once told me men were like dumb little pups, sitting in a window waiting for a home, any home.
“Well, it shouldn’t.” He smiled. “Enough about me and my checkered past. Who wants dessert? I think Jim picked up a Fruits of the Farm pie.”
Jim appeared silently in the kitchen doorway. I wondered what he’d heard.
“Jim, were you able to get your hands on anything at Chelmsfords?” Dad asked conspiratorially.
“I got lucky,” Jim answered.
“Music to my ears,” Dad said, rubbing his hands together as Jim brought out the pie and set it in front of him. “Who wants a slice? Food. Pie. That’s my downfall now. Who?”