The Off Season Read online

  “Just call me Cherry Ames!” he said, turning away from me to lift the lid from a pot of rice we had put up to simmer. “You know,” he said. “AIDS.” He gave the rice a stir. “I think you’ll need to soak those greens, doll. They’re full of such good vitamins, and Janelle won’t eat them if they’re gritty.”

  She didn’t simply say “dirt” anymore; she said, “cancer-dirt.”

  I should have asked Roger, tell me more, but I couldn’t, at that point, take in anything else, or think of anyone but Janelle, and what was happening to her, and to us.

  I was teaching that semester, and one afternoon, toward the end of her chemotherapy, I came home from class to find her curled in a fetal position in our bed, fully dressed, the curtains drawn against the sun, the room stuffy and dark. Trying not to wake her, I sat down carefully beside her and rested my hand on her shiny scalp, a touch she had found comforting at one time, and she cried out, “Oh! Don’t!”

  Startled, I jumped up. “Okay,” I said. “I don’t know what you want. I don’t know what to do. You hate tea. You hate food. You hate being touched. You tell me.”

  “I’m just tired,” she said into the pillow. “Just leave me alone.” I stood staring at her for a while, but she didn’t say anything else, and, wishing I had Roger’s intuition, I left the room and called him.

  “Well, obviously you should have gotten into bed too, Nora, and held her,” he said, sounding as fed up with me as Janelle was. But I didn’t think he had the right answer, either. He hadn’t heard her shriek.

  Everyone expects chemotherapy to be awful, and it was, in all the usual and unusual ways—nausea, exhaustion, strange fevers and itches, strange dreams and delusions—and when it was over, we celebrated, Janelle and Roger and me. He bought champagne and a huge bouquet of flowers, and we toasted over the peonies. Janelle and I had a brief, sunny interlude, with even a couple of mornings of slow, gentle loving. Her hair started to come in, although differently, gray and tufty, and she put away her scarves and baseball caps. Secretly I grieved for her dreadlocks.

  Then she started radiation treatments, and they were almost worse than what had gone before. I had organized my schedule so that I could accompany her to the clinic every morning, but when I told her my plan, she wouldn’t hear of it. From the very first visit, she went by herself. And although some people bond with their fellow sufferers, she refused to speak to the other patients, and spoke only when spoken to by the nurses and technicians. In the waiting room she read physics texts and worked British-style crossword puzzles, and at home she spent her afternoons e-mailing her old clients and putting her business back together. “I have to do this,” she insisted through gritted teeth, when I begged her to slow down, to take a nap or a walk around the block. “It’s not like you’re going to support us, right?”

  Right.

  Although really that wasn’t the point. The point was Janelle proving to herself she had survived, with her abilities and faculties intact. We made no toasts when she finished those treatments. In fact, she didn’t announce that they had ended, and I realized it only because she stopped running out each morning to her appointment.

  I know, I know, it’s natural to vent your feelings on the people closest to you. But I was losing faith—in myself, in Janelle, in the two of us. We had drifted so far apart, we were barely within hailing distance, and I was afraid the tide would never turn.

  It did, though—slowly. One spring morning, Janelle, who had always been an early riser, woke me with coffee in bed. I propped myself up on the pillows, and she sat down next to me and turned off my alarm.

  “Hey, thanks,” I said cautiously. “How kind.”

  “I want to be kind,” she said.

  “You haven’t not been . . .”

  She took the cup from me, put it on the nightstand, and took my hand in her cold one. “You’re warm,” she said.

  “The coffee.”

  “I’ve been such a bitch.”

  “Don’t say bitch,” I said, a little shocked. It was not a word she ever used, and I had seen her shut down others for using it. “You had cancer.”

  “A total, barking bitch,” she repeated. “And you tried to be so good to me, I realize that. I want to do better, Nora. I can’t live like this. I don’t want to be cold and resentful. It’s not me.” Her eyes filled—and Janelle was never a fluent crier, even after her diagnosis, when anyone would have excused a few tears. They gave no relief, she said, so why bother?

  “I know that, honey,” I said, and we started hugging and kissing, and even playing around a little, as the coffee on the night table got cold, and after that, we started to draw closer, and we resumed talking on our Honesty Couch in the evenings, and our life together seemed to be returning to the way it had been in the period we had started to call Before—except that the more Janelle tried to convince me that during the worst days of her illness I had not been clumsy and intrusive but on the contrary gentle and comforting, the more depressed I became. I didn’t believe her—because in fact, she was wrong. I had never succeeded in making her better.

  That August, the city air became so stifling and heavy that breathing it didn’t feel like breathing air; it felt like huffing an actual substance, composed of truck exhaust and smog and the sweat of angry pedestrians. I had intended to spend the month as usual, madly trying to prepare my classes and to finish the projects I had started back in June, when the summer months had stretched out before me like a deserted beach, with an infinity of choices about where to plant my umbrella. But I got stuck.

  I think it was the collage. I was working with tweezers and tiny pieces of paper that kept curling up and floating away, and little beads that rolled off the table and disappeared. One morning I went into my studio as usual, and a breeze, such as hadn’t puffed through the window since the middle of June, and which there had been no reason to anticipate before September, had blown the whole thing into a pile of confetti. I couldn’t bear the thought of sweeping it up and reassembling it. Instead, I sat down in my reading chair, and that’s where Janelle found me when she came home that evening. I hadn’t moved all day; it seemed pointless.

  “Are you sick?” she asked, laying a cool, gentle hand on my forehead.

  I shook my head. There was no point in discussing it, or anything, really. “This weather is rotten,” I said. “When do you think it will break?”

  “You’re crying,” said Janelle. “Oh my god. What’s going wrong now? I thought we were going to be okay, but—”

  “I’m not,” I said, but I touched my face and realized she was right. “It’s just sweat pouring down from this disgusting humidity.”

  She walked over to the work table and examined the remains of my piece.

  “What I did on my summer vacation,” I said.

  “It’s a midlife crisis,” she concluded. “First me, now you.”

  “That’s for guys. That’s not my problem. And it absolutely wasn’t yours. I just don’t want to finish my picture. It’s horrible here.” I had lived in Brooklyn all my life, and I had never thought it was horrible. I liked it, with its rough style and hodgepodge of communities, and even as other townies cursed the artists and artisans who had begun trekking over the bridges to open galleries and gastropubs, I didn’t mind them at all. I hadn’t had to leave the neighborhood to find kindred spirits; I had just stayed put and they had come to me. But that day I began to wonder if, having lived my entire life within a geographic radius no wider than that of a primitive villager, I had a sort of urban agoraphobia.

  Janelle, as though reading my thoughts, as she used to occasionally Before, coaxed me out of the studio and patted the space next to her on the Honesty Couch. “The answer is Provincetown,” she said. “We need to get away from here.”

  “Too many bad experiences, too much bad shit.”

  “Exactly.”

  We sat together for hours that night, fantasizing, and then sketching out actual, practical plans. She would charge an outrageous re
nt for the loft, enough for us to live in a little house by the sea. She would take an office in town and consult; our little house would have an extra, sunny room for a studio, and I would paint. The move came together so quickly, we kept marveling that it must have been meant to be—whatever that means. We moved after Labor Day, and at first it really did seem like everything was falling into place for us, like Provincetown was the missing piece to our puzzle, the one that revealed the whole picture.

  Trouble

  For Janelle, the beach was for walking. Even in Provincetown, surrounded by ocean and bay, she never went into the water, which she claimed did weird things to her hair. Even after she lost it all and it grew back and she started wearing it short, simple, and natural, she was just not in the habit. Instead, she liked to wander for miles, at dawn or at dusk, up and back, bending to pick up a rock, turning it over in her palm, skimming it out to sea. On our first morning, while I unpacked my studio, she found a flat, heart-shaped stone, gray, with a vein of white quartz slashing diagonally across the right auricle, and she placed it on the windowsill above the kitchen sink. Bless this home. She developed a knack for spotting sea glass, even the amber kind that comes from root beer bottles, which is rare, because how many people drink root beer to begin with, and then fling their bottles into the ocean? In the studio, I started fooling around with her finds, making some of them into jewelry.

  It wasn’t bad, either. I decided to take a booth at the annual Thanksgiving weekend craft fair at the Unitarian church. Venture into the community. My plan was to sell enough stuff to cover my share of the rent, which wasn’t very practical—even I knew that. But I had begun to worry again about the financial imbalance between me and Janelle, and to wonder if it gave her an upper hand—not that a loving relationship is a competition or anything. Janelle sat me down and calculated that if I sold every trinket I had brought, I wouldn’t clear more than a few hundred bucks. “But do what you need to do, sweetheart,” she said, helping me load my stuff into the back of our car. “I’ve got us covered.”

  I fanned out a display of earrings, and next to the table I set up an easel with a portrait I had made of Janelle that had hung on our living room wall in Brooklyn. In it, she had round, dimpled cheeks and short dreadlocks tipped here and there with a bead or a cowrie shell. I had done her in a palette of affectionate browns and cinnamons and creams, against a background of that lovely apricot color you see on stucco houses in French villages. One of my more attractive works, I thought, even if she didn’t exactly resemble it anymore, with her face so much thinner, her dimples more like hollows, her dreadlocks shorn. I propped a sign next to it: “Commissions Taken.” At the last minute I had also dragged out a stack of the old art books I had inherited from my uncle. Vintage, was what I hoped the local artists would think, cool—but really the books were just dusty and outdated, the smell of wood pulp and mildew rising from the pages enough to choke any browser who took an interest and fanned them open.

  So I set up my booth at the fair.

  And Baby Harris walked in.

  She stood for a moment in the doorway, scanning the room, then cut across the middle of it and walked right up to my table, and I thought, Here comes trouble. “I’m not looking for any,” I said.

  “Looking for any what?” said Baby.

  “Any trouble,” I said. “It’s not what I’m looking for.”

  “Then you’ve come to the wrong woman,” said Baby. “What’s your name? Where have you been all my life?”

  “Nora Griffin,” I said, sticking out my hand. She took it and held it gently. Finally, I gave her hand a couple of firm shakes and pulled away.

  “Ah, you’re blushing, Nora Griffin,” she said.

  “Well, who wouldn’t?” I said, flustered. “We just moved here a month ago. But I haven’t been in here before. I’m new to the craft fair thing.”

  “We . . . ,” Baby noted, glancing at the painting. She held one pair of earrings and then another to her cheek, and flipped through a fifties-era textbook on African sculpture. “‘Primitive,’” she snorted and glared at me briefly, as though I were responsible for the author’s colonialist attitude. “Nice bling, though. Do you have a card?”

  I fumbled through my wallet and handed her one. It was soft around the edges. I hadn’t often used them since we had arrived in Provincetown—or even back in Brooklyn, to be honest.

  “I’ll call,” said Baby.

  “No need for that,” I said. “Just buy a pair now.”

  “Forgot my money,” said Baby. She wiggled her fingers at me to say good-bye and strode back across the room. Who comes to the Unitarian church fair and doesn’t bring cash? Not Baby. She stopped at the bake sale table, picked up a cupcake, put down a couple of bills, and wandered out, licking her fingers.

  Superpowers

  Baby was autumnal, all gold and vanilla. Thick hair, too long and tangled to be stylish; strangely dark, rough skin for a blonde—she said it was the Cape Cod sun, that it had left her permanently tanned, and it was true, I later discovered; you could see the outline of her swimsuit all winter long, across her chest and back, around her shoulders and thighs. Baby was tall and she looked her age and more. She had a bosom and a muffin top and a navel that plunged deep into her soft belly. Her brown eyes, if you caught them, gazed into yours more steadily and searchingly than she led you to expect from her flirtatious manner. She favored an unflattering shade of purpley-scarlet lipstick that no one could talk her out of and wore her red cowboy boots with everything—jeans, shorts, little black dresses. Tak-tok-tak-tok. You could hear Baby Harris coming and going.

  Me, I was wintery. Black hair shot with silver, or rather, by then, silver shot with black. When you’re in your twenties, your future projections don’t include going gray—but there I was, for the first time in my life wearing blue, green, copper. Sea glass colors. By the ocean, I had decided to ditch my year-round Brooklyn black—no, I’ll be honest. It wasn’t the ocean; it was that I had had to buy new clothes. As Janelle had gotten thinner, I had filled out, finally, at age thirty-nine, developing a woman’s hips and thighs. I had had to let go even of my favorite jacket, because the bottom button wouldn’t close anymore. It was soft black velvet, the fabric of a puppeteer’s overall, light-absorbing and invisible.

  Supposedly women choose invisibility when asked whether they would prefer that or flight as a superpower—but not me. Not anymore. Who wouldn’t prefer to fly? The water at the tip of the Cape was freezing and absolutely transparent; you could see your toes among the pebbles before you took your dive, and stroking through the waves really did feel a bit like flying. Not flying like the aerialist gulls, which swoop and glide without effort, but flying like the pigeons, which have to put some muscle into it, to push themselves through the gelid air.

  “Janelle,” I said as the chill settled in. “I’ve decided to swim during every single month of the year.” Some of the year-rounders did it as a kind of spiritual, oneness-with-nature thing. I had overheard them talking about it in the checkout line at the Stop & Shop.

  “White girls,” said Janelle. “Uh-uh.” She shook her head in feigned amazement. She said the year-rounders were nuts, and I was going nuts from listening to them.

  My craft booth predictably hadn’t worked out. No commissions—there were so many artists in Provincetown needing models that everyone already had more portraits, self-portraits, and busts of themselves than they knew what to do with. I had sold five pairs of earrings and a paperback, The Letters of Vincent van Gogh. Then the next day I woke up with an irresistible compulsion to read exactly that book, immediately, although I hadn’t cracked it since my senior year of college. I had had to run out to borrow it from the library.

  And a week later, just as I thought I had succeeded in putting my interesting encounter with Baby Harris out of my mind, she called. “What kind of name is that for an adult?” I asked obnoxiously, hoping, sort of, to put her off.

  But she didn’t seem to mind the per
sonal question. “It’s the only name I’ve ever had,” she explained. “It’s on my birth certificate. They were planning to come up with something else eventually, but Baby stuck.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” I said. “What were your parents thinking?”

  “Now that,” said Baby, “is something you don’t want to know, Nora-dorable.” There was a brief silence on the line, as she waited for me to flirt back. But I didn’t respond. Somehow no one had ever come up with that particular endearment before. Baby continued cheerfully, “Hey, are you trying to psychoanalyze me or something? I’ll lie down on your couch any time.”

  “My couch.” I wasn’t ready for Baby on the couch. The you-know-what couch.

  “Don’t mind me,” said Baby. “But I’m serious about the earrings. I want to see your stuff. I have a shop, you know. In addition, of course, to my fabulous personal collection of jewels.”

  So maybe it was just about a purchase, I thought. All the better. Maybe she would become a regular customer.

  She should wear topaz, I thought. To match her eyes. Her knotted hair.

  I flipped through the pages of Van Gogh, hoping it would sound through the phone line like I was searching my date book. “Can you come by at 3:15 on Friday?” I said officiously. “I think I can fit you in then.” I could also have fit her in at 3:20, at 4:35, at 8:00 in the morning, whenever.

  “Can’t,” said Baby—although I suspected that she, too, could have come any time. “How about now?”

  When Baby showed up, she was all business. She quickly chose a pair of the amber sea glass earrings for herself, scooped up the rest of my creations for her store, placed an order for more, gave me a deposit, and left. Tak-tok-tak-tok, all the way down Commercial Street. I was disappointed. I was relieved.

  That evening, Janelle came in from her walk with three more shards of the amber glass in her pocket. “Root beer must be popular around here.”