Hours accumulate like snow, recede like the tide. Al and I drift through our routines. Get up when we want to, go to bed when light drains from the sky. Nobody’s schedules to attend to other than our own. We hunker down in the fall and winter, slow our heartbeats to a hibernating rhythm, struggle to rouse ourselves in March. People from away arrive in cars laden with bags and boxes in June and July and head out in the opposite direction in August and September. One year melts into the next. Each season is like it was the year before, with minor variations. Our conversations often revolve around the weather: Will this summer be hotter than last; can we expect an early frost, how many inches of snow by December?
This life of ours can feel an awful lot like waiting.
In the summer I’m usually up before sunrise, lighting the Glenwood range and making porridge. (I rarely sleep through the night on my pallet; my legs throb, even in my dreams.) I’ll scoop a cup for myself and eat it in the dark, listening to the sounds of the house, the gulls cawing outside. When Al comes into the kitchen, I’ll hand him a cup of porridge and he’ll take it to the counter and sprinkle sugar on it from Mother’s cut-glass bowl.
“Well, I suppose it’s milking time,” he says when he’s finished. He carries the cup to the sink in the pantry and dredges water from the pump.
“I can wash that,” I sometimes protest. “You’ve got chores.”
But he always rinses his cup, and my cup too. “It’s no trouble.”
When Al heads out to the barn, I sit in my old chair looking out the window toward the road to town in one direction and the St. George River, and beyond it the sea, in the other. The sun shimmers on the water and the wind carves patterns in the high grass. Around mid-morning Andy usually shows up, disappears upstairs, emerges for lunch, leaves in the late afternoon. With the door propped open, Topsy and the cats come and go as they please. Sometimes a friendly porcupine climbs up the steps, waddles across the kitchen, and disappears into the pantry. I might drift to sleep and wake to purring, which sounds to my sleep-clotted brain like a faraway motor. Lolly, seeing my eyes flicker, stretches toward my face, her paws digging into my shoulder. I reach under her rib cage, feeling through her warm skin the quick thrumming of her heart.
Later in the day I’ll weed and prune my flower garden, brilliant with color—poppies and pansies and an assortment of sweet peas, pale blue, peach, magenta. Red geraniums grow fat and healthy in the window in their Spry shortening cans and old blue-painted pots. I fill vases with the white lilacs that have grown beside the shed for a hundred years alongside Al’s favorite pink roses. The cats sprawl in the sun, blinking lazily. I can’t imagine anywhere I’d rather be.
But in the winter, when it’s so cold in the early morning that you can see your breath as you lie in bed, when getting to the barn requires a hoe to cut through the icy crust on top of the snow, when the wind slices branches off the trees and the sky is as dull as a stone, it’s hard to see why anyone would live here if they have a choice. Heating this old house is like heating a lobster trap. The three woodstoves must be fed constantly or we will freeze. It takes eleven cords of wood to keep the fires burning until spring. Darkness comes early without electricity. Before turning in, Al banks the stoves high with firewood to keep the embers glowing through the night. I heat bricks in the oven to wrap in towels and slide under the covers. Many nights we are in bed by eight o’clock, staring at the ceiling in separate rooms.
Do our natures dictate the choices we make, I wonder, or do we choose to live a certain way because of circumstances beyond our control? Perhaps these questions are impossible to tease apart because, like a tangle of seaweed on a rock, they are connected at the root. I think of those long-ago Hathorns, determined beyond all reason to leave the past behind—and we, their descendants, inheritors of their contrarian tenacity, sticking it out, one generation after the next, until every last one of us ends up in the graveyard at the bottom of the field.
THE POSTCARD, STAMPED Tokyo, features a scenic view of an arched bridge leading to a mansion with a curved roof. “Nijubashi: The Main Entrance to the Imperial Palace,” the caption says, in English, on the front, next to a string of Japanese characters. Though it’s not unlike the half-dozen postcards I’ve received in the past few months of 1945, the scrawled message from John on the other side is a surprise: “Finally, Aunt Christina—I’m coming home!”
My old friend Sadie Hamm also has reason to celebrate: her son Clyde was injured, but he is coming home with only a flesh wound to his upper arm and some shrapnel in his legs. She’s teary when she tells me the news. “It could’ve been so different for us,” she says. “When I think about what others have to endure . . .”
The postmistress Bertha Dorset’s two sons were drafted into the army, and her youngest died in France. And Gertrude Gibbons’s nephew, who grew up in Rockland and was trained as a fighter pilot, was killed over the Pacific. I never would have guessed, seeing the soldiers on Boston Common all those years ago, that another world war would engulf us. I couldn’t have imagined how much more there was to lose.
“You could drop Gertrude a note, you know,” Sadie says gently. “I’m sure it would mean a lot to her.”
“I could,” I say.
“A lot of time has passed.”
“It has.”
But though I feel a pang of sadness for Gertrude, I know I won’t reach out. I am too old, too stubborn. Her meddlesome insensitivity was something I could not—cannot, in the end—forgive.
And if I’m honest, there’s something else. Gertrude has become a stand-in for anyone who ever pitied me, didn’t try to understand me, abandoned me. She gives my bitterness a place to dwell.
IT TAKES SEVERAL weeks for John to travel by boat from Japan to Treasure Island in the South Pacific and, from there, by ferry to San Francisco, and another five days on a train to Boston, where he is officially discharged from the navy on Christmas Eve, 1945. He shows up at our house in uniform on Christmas Day with a chestful of medals, colorful packets of pastel-colored hard sugar candies called Konpeito that I don’t care for, and a newly acquired, un-Olson-like propensity to hug.
John is taller, thinner, and flinty featured, but still as mild-mannered as ever. “I can’t wait to pull my lobster boat out of the shed and get out on the water,” he tells me. “I’ve missed this place.”
He doesn’t waste any time getting settled. By spring 1946 he’s engaged to a local woman named Marjorie Jordan. “You’ll come to the wedding, won’t you, Aunt Christina?” he implores, taking my hand.
How will I ever get to a wedding when I can barely walk? “My land, you don’t need me at your wedding.”
“I most certainly do. You’re coming if I have to carry you there myself.”
I motion for him to come closer. I don’t know what to say, but I want to say something. I’m touched that he wants me there. “I’m glad you survived,” I tell him when he crouches down beside me.
Laughing, he kisses me on the cheek. “I’m glad I survived, too. So you’ll come?”
“I’ll come.”
Sadie claps her hands together when I tell her the news. “What fun! All right, then, we need to find you a dress. I’ll take you into Rockland.”
“Not store-bought. I’m going to make it myself.”
She looks at me doubtfully. “How long has it been since you sewed anything?”
“A while, I guess.” I hold my gnarled hands out, palms up. “I know they look frightful, but they work just fine.”
Sighing, she says, “If you insist, I’ll take you to get some fabric.”
The next morning Sadie helps me into her cream-colored Packard sedan and drives me to Senter Crane in Rockland. On the ride I begin to worry. How is she going to maneuver me inside? When she parks the car, Sadie leans over and pats my knee. As if reading my mind, she says, “Why don’t you let me go in and get you some samples? What would you like?”
I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding. “That’s probably
best. Maybe a flowered silk?”
“You got it.”
I watch her whisk through the revolving door. She spins out ten minutes later with a dress pattern and three squares of fabric. “Thanks to rationing, no silk,” she says. “But I found some decent options.” She hands me the squares: a sky-blue dotted Swiss, a floral rayon, and light pink cotton broadcloth. I choose the pink, of course.
At home, in the dining room, I spread the fabric across the table and study the picture on the cover of the pattern: a thin, elegant woman who looks nothing like me in a dress with a fitted bodice and a long paneled skirt. I take the flimsy folded pattern out of its envelope and lay it over the cloth, find the pincushion in my sewing basket, and attempt to secure it. I’m startled to find that my fingers are shaking badly. Only with laborious effort do I manage to pin a section of the pattern to the cloth. I slice into it with my heavy silver scissors, but the line is jagged. When I open the sewing machine, I sit at it for a few minutes, running my hand over its curves, touching the still-sharp needle with my finger.
All at once I’m afraid. Afraid I’ll ruin the dress.
I sit back in my chair. It’s not just the dress, or my wretched hands; it’s all of it. I’m afraid for my future—a future of inevitable debilitation. Of increasing reliance on others. Of spending the rest of my years in this broken shell of a house.
When Sadie stops by a few days later, she runs her finger along the erratic line of the pins. Inspects the ragged cut. “You made a start,” she says gently. “Shall I take it over to Catherine Bailey in Maple Juice Cove to finish it up?” She doesn’t look in my eyes; I can tell she doesn’t want to embarrass me. When I nod, she says, “Right, then,” and carefully folds the pattern with the fabric, gathers the spools of pink thread and the instructions. Unfurling the yellow measuring tape from my sewing box, she encircles my waist, my hips, my bodice, scratches the numbers on a scrap of paper, and tucks it all into a bag.
SEVERAL WEEKS LATER I’m sitting in the kitchen, wearing my new dress, about to leave for the wedding, when Andy shows up, unannounced as usual, at the door.
Stopping abruptly in the doorway, he says, “My God, Christina.” He strides over and runs his hand down my sleeve, whispering to himself, “Magnificent. Like a faded lobster shell.”
1922–1938
In the summers, now, I make my way to the Grange Hall in Cushing most Fridays, but instead of swaying with the music and chatting with friends as they jostle on and off the dance floor, joking and laughing and carrying on, the bolder ones smoking cigarettes outside and tippling from a flask, I am consigned to the role of fruit-punch server, pound-cake cutter, molasses-cookie arranger. I pick up soiled napkins and wash dirty glasses in the sink behind a partition. Most of the women who play this role are older than I am and married. Only a few are my age: the unchosen and childless.
I have not gotten used to it. I’m not sure I ever will. For a while I continue to bring my dress shoes in a bag, as I always have, and put them on as soon as I arrive. But one evening when the hall is particularly hot, I excuse myself from the serving table, go outside, roll my stockings down, slip them off my feet, and put my flat-heeled walking shoes back on. What does it matter?
It’s a damp Friday in August and I’m walking to the Grange Hall with Fred and his fiancée, Lora, wearing a white dress I finished sewing hours earlier from a new McCall’s pattern, when I slip in a rut in the road. I put my hands out to stop my fall, but my arms aren’t stable enough to support my weight. I drop heavily into the muck and gravel, tearing my sleeves, scraping my chin.
“Oh!” Fred shouts, leaping toward me, “Are you all right?”
My chin drips blood, my wrists throb, I am facedown in the wet, soiled dress it took me weeks to sew. The skirt is bunched up round my hips, my bloomers and misshapen legs exposed. Lifting myself slowly on my elbows, I survey my torn bodice. All at once I am so tired of this—of the constant threat of humiliation and pain, the fear of exposure, of trying to act like I’m normal when I’m not—that I burst into tears. No, I am not all right, I want to say. I am fouled, degraded, ashamed. A burden and an embarrassment.
“Can you get up?” Lora asks kindly, standing over me. She crouches down. “Let me help you.”
I turn my face away.
“Doesn’t seem to be a break,” Fred murmurs, running his expert farmer’s hands over my wrists and ankles. “But you’ll have some bruises and swelling, I’m afraid. Poor thing.” He tells me to flex my hands, not the easiest maneuver even when I’m not in pain. When I grimace, he says, “Probably a nasty sprain. No fun at all, but it could be worse.”
Lora waits with me while Fred jogs back to the house to get the car. At home the two of them carry me through the front door and upstairs to my room, where Lora finds my nightgown on a peg and discreetly helps me undress and Fred gently washes my face and arms. Once they’ve shut the door behind them, I burrow into my blankets and turn toward the wall.
How did I go from being the maiden in a fairy tale to a wretched old maid so quickly? It happened almost without my realizing it, the transition to spinsterhood. Mamey said that in her day a woman who had not married by the age of thirty was called a thornback, named after a flat, spiny, prehistoric-looking fish. It’s what they called Bridget Bishop, she said. Thornback. That’s what I have become.
WHEN MOTHER’S HEALTH becomes so precarious that she and Papa need separate bedrooms, I offer to give up mine. She’s in pain; her kidney issues are worse, her legs puffed with fluid. She has started sleeping upright in a parlor chair. I move downstairs, where my bed is a pallet on the dining room floor that I roll up each morning and tuck in the closet. It’s not so bad; I’m closer to the kitchen and the privy, secretly relieved not to have to navigate the stairs.
In the mornings I prepare the noon meal and carry it through the narrow pantry to the round oak table in the dining room for Al and Papa and me, making a separate plate for Al to carry upstairs for Mother. Baked or boiled potatoes, green beans, roast chicken or turkey or ham, a stew of beef and carrots and onions and potatoes. Every few days I make bread with the sourdough starter. Watch the bread rise, punch it down, watch it rise again. In the summer and fall I can the berries Al rakes from their bushes and the strawberries he grows in the garden for jams and jellies, cakes and pies.
We mark the days by the chores that need to be done, the way farm families have always done. Al feeds the hens and horses and pigs, splits wood in the fall, slaughters a pig when the weather turns cold, cuts ice in the winter. I collect eggs from the laying hens and Al drives me into town to sell them. He times the planting so that by the Fourth of July we’ll have new peas and by September there’s a whole field of corn. Gulls lunge for a feast, ravaging the crop, so Al kills a few and hangs them from poles as warning. During haying season in midsummer, I see him from the dining room window in his visored cap, scything the hay by hand with six hired men walking abreast, forking the newly mown hay onto the hayrack. They haul the hay to the barn, where a block-and-tackle hoist lifts it into the mow. Swallows, disrupted from their nests, swoop in and out.
In late July and August, blueberry season, Al uses a heavy steel hand rake to harvest the small dark berries from their low bushes. It’s grueling work, stooping over those low bushes in the hot sun, dumping the berries into a wooden box to be winnowed and weighed, and all summer the back of his neck is burnt and peeling, his knuckles scraped and scarred, his lower back constantly sore.
Aside from the Grange Hall socials, the sewing circle I go to now and then, and the occasional visit with Sadie, I don’t see many people. Most of my old friends and acquaintances are busy with their new husbands and new lives. At any rate, I have little in common with most of the girls I went to school with who are married and having children. I can tell, when we’re together, that they are self-conscious talking about their husbands and pregnancies. But this difference only highlights what has always been true. I’ve never shared either their fluid ease of m
ovement or their quick laughter. My wit—such that it is—has always been more sardonic, stranger, harder to recognize.
Now and then I leaf through the small blue volume of Emily Dickinson poems that my teacher, Mrs. Crowley, pressed into my hand. I remember her words to me when I left school: Your mind will be your comfort.
It is, sometimes. And sometimes it isn’t.
With no one to talk to about the poems, I have to try to parse the meanings myself. It’s frustrating not to be able to discuss them with anybody, but also strangely freeing. The lines can mean anything I want.
Much Madness is divinest Sense—
To a discerning Eye—
Much Sense—the starkest Madness—
’Tis the Majority
In this, as all, prevail—
Assent—and you are sane—
Demur—you’re straightaway dangerous—
And handled with a chain—
I imagine Emily sitting at her small desk, her back to the world. She must’ve seemed very odd to those in her orbit. A little unhinged. Even dangerous, perhaps, asserting, as she does, that it’s the people who lead conventional lives who are the mad ones.
I wonder about that chain that held her. I wonder if it’s the same as mine.
MY CATS, AS cats will do, have kittens. Al takes boxes of them into town and gives away as many as he can, but before long I’m feeding a dozen. They swarm underfoot, mewling and jumping and sometimes hissing at one another. Al grouses about it, pushes them off the table with an open palm, kicks at them when they wind around his legs, mutters about solving the problem with a rock-heavy sack in the pond. “It’s too many, Christie, we’ve got to get rid of them.”
“Oh? And then what, I’ll go around talking to an empty house?”