Enchanted August (21 page)

T
he little notebook that held several generations' worth of recommendations for putting together the perfect lobster bake was on the mantelpiece, where it had lain for many years. Robert leafed through it. The handwriting was familiar to him, not because it evoked any member of his own family, but because he had looked in the book so many times thinking how marvelous it would be if he ever had a cottageful of friends who together might make an event like this occur.

And now he did.

Robert had taken the Whaler into the Harbor very early that morning to get the supplies they would need. He'd taken his orders right from the notebook; his father's cousin was apparently the authority. Robert recognized the name signed at the end of the entry titled “Lobster Bake for Hopewell Cottage—USE THIS ONE. July 1993.”

He did not have any recollection of having met Jim Sprague, but he had every confidence that Jim Sprague had known what he was doing. He had used Jim Sprague's shopping list as his own that morning:

Lobsters—
one each unless they're soft-shell, and in that case up to two each

Corn—
people say they can only eat one ear but get at least two a
piece

Potatoes—
Chris brings new potatoes down from his root cellar, so use those if you can. Otherwise get them at the market. Half a pound apiece.

Onions—
Deeda is no fan of onions and says they're not traditional but people eat them so get one apiece.

Steamers—
nowadays you're supposed to check the red tide levels with the Coast Guard but we just rake them up at Harrop Point Beach.

Robert had got the potatoes and corn from the farm stand in Dorset. He grudgingly bought onions, too, though like Deeda (another cousin?) he didn't think they belonged. He had remembered butter, too, which Jim Sprague had not included in the ingredients list but which featured later in the narrative. Or recipe, rather.

The fog had already burned off, and the radio—and the sky—told him the good weather would hold all day. After reading the booklet over and over last night, he figured he could just about do the whole thing by himself, but it would be so much better if they joined in and did it together.

This was about Rose, of course.

Rose was married, yes. And she came with kids, whom, granted, he had yet to meet. So it was complicated. But she had filled the cottage with her friends and changed the look and feel of it and everything now seemed possible. It could be like this every summer. He could take possession of the place. The lobster bake would be the place to start.

He imagined Jon would be the one to help on this. He was a guy who'd like to show off. They could show off together—Jon for Lottie; Robert for Rose. Robert put the feisty lobsters in the fridge and left the other food in the cart on the back boardwalk. He wondered if Jon was up yet.

Robert made coffee with the new pot Jon had bought in the Harbor; he liked being up with the birds. It was something he rarely did in New York (no birds). In Maine he woke up and smelled the coffee.

He took the coffeepot out onto the front porch and consulted the lobster bake notebook again. There were a lot of opinions as to how to go about this ritual. Many people had weighed in on the issue. Men, mostly, from the look of the handwriting. There were instructions for an all-island affair—150 lobsters! Three hundred ears of corn! That was not what he was after today. An intimate cottage lobster bake: just enough to impress. He flipped through the pages.

Start early. Don't leave it all till late in the day because for one thing you'll be tired and for another you won't get the fire hot enough and that's the whole trick of it. Hopewell has the best spot for a bake right down on the little beach with the sea glass. Pick a day when the wind is from the south so you don't get the bugs blowing in from the mainland. A day with just about no wind is good too. The fire can blow.

“Will this be a mistake?” Robert said aloud.

“Will what be a mistake?” Jon asked. He had padded onto the porch without Robert's noticing.

“The lobster bake.”

“We're doing it ourselves, right?”

“I thought we'd give it a try,” said Robert. “My ancestors had a lot of ideas on the subject. I've done it once or twice here but I didn't know there was an instruction book at the time.” He'd tried one for a bunch of early-music people the first year he came up to the house. They had pretty much winged it, and the fire hadn't been hot enough, so nothing got thoroughly steamed. They ended up boiling the corn on the stove and ditching the sandy potatoes.

The ill-suited Arlene insisted he do a lobster bake for her friends from the city, but when they were attacked by mosquitoes that bit through even their black leggings, Robert ended up bringing everything inside for what was ultimately a rather somber meal.

“Everybody's going to have ideas on the subject,” said Jon. “Even if they've never done this before. What do they say in there?”

Robert handed him the book. “This part I've done,” he said. “I picked up the lobsters in town this morning. And the other food too. Then he says to start early. It's only eight thirty, so I think we're good so far.”

“What about the wind?” asked Jon.

“I don't think we're getting much wind today. The water was pretty still this morning.”

“‘Dig yourself a pit on the beach above the high tide mark. You don't want to start your fire and then worry about the water coming too close to it,'” Jon read. “Smart. ‘Be generous with the pit. You'll be digging in sand so it won't be much work. Two foot by four foot should do it for a cottage crowd.' This whole thing is, like, a day's work.”

“We're doing work?” asked Rose.

Robert wasn't prepared for this new version of Rose. She was glowing. Had she been up for a morning swim? Or a run? She looked exhilarated, and Jon told her so, flashing his signature smile her way.

Why don't I have a smile like that? Robert wondered. His was so tentative, reserved.

“What have you been up to this early in the morning?” Jon asked.

Rose sat on the swing glider and beamed at them both. “I've been on a secret mission,” she said, “more or less because Lottie said I had to. Let's hope she's right. I think she might be.” She smiled at Robert, her pale Wyeth eyes bright. “What are you two plotting out here?”

“We're plotting the lobster bake,” said Jon. “It's a gigantic amount of work.”

“An activity for all of us,” said Robert.

“We have to dig pits and make fires and throw seaweed on top of burning coals or something.”

“It's going to be a production,” Robert added.

“I love a production,” said Rose, and she touched him gently on the shoulder. He wanted to feel it all through his body but he only felt it on his shoulder. “Weren't you going to show me the old bathhouses today, Robert? I want to see as much of the island as I can.” She seemed to be hugging an idea close to her—Robert continued to hope that it was to stay here on the island. To get to know it, intimately, and to stay forever, with him.

Rose should love this event, Robert thought. He didn't have Jon's smile and he wasn't her husband, obviously, but he had this cottage and he knew (vaguely) how to put together a lobster bake. He imagined her eyes shining as he raked the embers of the fire. “You can do anything, Robert,” she'd say. In his dreams.

“We need a galvanized tub,” she said. She was now reading the directions too. “‘Next year I would start the fire at two p.m. and cook the pot until the seaweed on top has changed color to the ochre yellow color it gets when it's cooked.' Whoever wrote this wasn't color-blind.”

“Do we have all this stuff?” Jon asked Robert. “A tarp? Seaweed? You have to soak the tarp in water.”

“The tub is under the house. The tarp, too. They should be, at least. If they're not, the whole thing is off. I should have checked.” He wished Jon would go away and he and Rose could plan this together. “There's a diagram here, I think.” He flipped the pages. “Here you go.”

“‘If you put eggs on top and they cook, check the tub after one hour!!' What does that even mean?”

“It's a test for doneness,” said Robert. “If the eggs are hard-boiled, the whole meal is cooked. But I actually think it's easier just to let it steam for an hour and twenty minutes or so. At the end you put a pot of butter on the very top. It melts fast.”

Jon had continued to flip through the lobster bake notebook. “I think we need to start hunting and gathering now. This is a lot of shit.”

Robert wanted Jon's help but he didn't want him to take charge. “I suggest we look around under the cottage and get all the stuff together. I already checked the tide chart on the dock, and low tide is at five thirty-seven tonight.”

“We'll need to eat early, though, so we can get to Caroline's play. Eight o'clock curtain.”

Robert had yet to meet Caroline. He didn't give her too much thought. Rose had described her as an out-of-work actress. He sympathized: the life of a performer was not completely in one's own control. She was probably the brassy type who sang show tunes with too much vibrato and did a lot of stretching.

“Everything will be cooked to perfection by five thirty. And we'll have plenty of beach. The water has been going way out the past couple of days.”

“That's because it's a full moon,” said Jon.

“A blue moon,” said Rose.

T
he whole day was devoted to the lobster bake. Lottie and Jon ended up digging the pit just after noon, when the tide started to go out. Robert brought the wood down to the beach. Rose was about to shuck the corn when he sweetly told her it was better to leave the husks on.

It was nice to have Robert as an admirer, even if she felt more like his big sister than like a potential lover. He needed someone to adore, that was clear.

They did everything Jim Sprague told them to do; he was almost like another participant in the preparations. Beverly cut the onions. Rose scrubbed Chris's potatoes (even though they weren't really Chris's potatoes). Jon carried the charred galvanized tub down to the beach, along with the tarp, all under the cottage as Robert had said they would be. Ethan collected seaweed. Lottie even managed to find the two bricks Jim said they had to have to support the tub.

If Fred comes up tonight for this, it will be almost too perfect, Rose thought. She didn't want to get her hopes up too high.

Caroline was absent most of the day at her play rehearsal with the kids. She wouldn't let anyone know what they were up to, but from the costumes she'd collected around the cottage, Rose surmised it was something
Peter Pan
–ish.

“Were those in your room?” Rose asked. “Our dressers were completely empty. We checked.”

“I just found them in the cottage,” Caroline said vaguely. “I'm sorry I can't help more. I'm heading out to the Little Lost Opera House.”

“Is there an opera house, too? I thought you were doing this at the assembly room.”

“We are. But we're calling it the opera house tonight,” Caroline said. “I'll be back down for my lobster. I can't believe they have the fire going already.” From the porch, the smell of the woodsmoke was strong. “I
adore
a wood fire.”

“Robert at work,” said Rose.

“Lottie says he's mad about you. He's doing this whole
production
for you.”

“Unfortunately, I'm married. And he's not my type. Too tweedy.”

“I like tweedy,” said Caroline.

“He thought I was the one who feng-shui'd the living room. I told him that was you,” Rose said. “He's not a gawper, by the way. He didn't even know who you were. I said you were an actor and he asked if you were out of work. I told him I thought you just had this island play on your plate for the moment. He was very sympathetic. He's a musician, so I'm sure he knows about being out of work. He liked that the dining room was brighter too.”

“I'll meet him at the lobster bake and take a bow,” said Caroline.

 • • • 

Robert looked for the old key for the door to the third floor. He wanted to go up there without using the trapdoor in the out-of-work actress's room. Caroline. He found the iron key where it always was, under the admittedly ugly hooked rug made from scraps by one of his more frugal relatives. He didn't have the heart to get rid of any of the ugly stuff in the cottage, and there was quite a bit of it. Even after ten seasons of ownership, he still felt more like a cottage caretaker than like a cottage owner. Robert was devoted to Hopewell, it was true, but it did feel pretty cavernous when he was there on his own. By the end of the first long September he'd spent in the house, he had quit the first two floors altogether and established himself on the top floor. He put his bed against the biggest window. He had a chair for reading and he stashed his collection of lesser-loved guitars and lutes on the walls. He was not much of a handyman but even he could hammer a couple of nails into the soft wood of the walls to hang up his collection. He unstrung most of them when the season was over, but the humidity here was good for them—even in the winter there was always moisture in the air.

He had yet to go through the many trunks and boxes and photos and papers that he'd inherited with the house. There would be time enough for that.

He could be happy here with Rose, her Helga face across from his every morning, her two kids, the boy kind and gentle, the girl rambunctious and naughty, playing on the porch. Rose herself would have time to do whatever she liked. (Robert wasn't sure what that was yet—gardening? Crossword puzzles?) And here they would grow old, looking at each other in the firelight, making plans for the future.

Even to him that fantasy sounded anemic.

He thought he had a pair of work boots up on the third floor; they were much more suited to the heavy work on the beach than his Converses, bought on a nostalgic whim some years ago, without the knowledge that they were hip. Then.

He took the stairs to the second floor two at a time. They had gathered all the spruce and oak and birch they could. This would either be another unmitigated disaster or a giant success.

The door on the north wall of the boys' dorm was still blocked by a low trunk, bright blue, from the seventies. The last time Robert looked through it he'd made a mental note to clean it out. It was filled with cottage ephemera that had clung on for years. Tin trucks and loud neon plastic sand buckets were most prominent. So many things in this cottage needed cleaning out. You could spend a lifetime doing it all. Like painting the Golden Gate Bridge.

The lock opened easily. He wanted to see how his old guitars were holding up but he didn't want to delay too much. Jon would be the type to start the fire without him. He opened the door and went up the staircase. There were the boots, on the landing. Excellent. Socks were right inside—how convenient, if unsanitary. He pulled on the boots, decided the guitars could wait till tomorrow, and closed and locked the door. Then he went back downstairs, out the screen door, and down to the beach.

 • • • 

Rose was right: Whoever had the idea for the “egg timer” did not consider that in order to test the eggs you had to roll them off a steaming hot canvas on a bed of white-hot firewood, peel them, and then decide whether the yolk was fully cooked or not. Surely easier just to say, “Cook for an hour and a half or so.” But that was not the Little Lost way.

“I'm burning my skin off!” Lottie cried. “Whose idea was this?”

“My great uncle's,” Robert said. “I figured out who he was. He was the tinkerer. The egg idea is brilliant!”

“A timer would have been a lot easier,” said Lottie. “Look, this is still runny.”

“Then it's not done!” said Robert. “Rose, tell her to stop peeling her egg and be patient.”

“Stop peeling the eggs and be patient,” said Rose. “And get away from this inferno. Come, take a dip with me.” Under her clamdiggers and T-shirt she was wearing the swimsuit that Fred liked—the old Speedo that was so worn and thin that it barely constituted fabric anymore. The fire was hot enough that it made the air ripple. The water might feel good.

“I am not going near that water,” said Lottie.

“Have you been out on Forester's Point, Rose?” asked Robert. “You'll feel like the Queen of the Western World from out there. Plus you'll have a fantastic view of the cottage. You should be able to walk the whole way on dry rock—the tides are so low. Come back soon, though. These will be done at
some
point.”

Forester's Point was over the rocks and around the bend from Sea Glass Beach, and it was a tricky climb to get there. But even there the smell of the steaming lobsters was almost too good to believe: salty, briny, sweet, sharp, pungent, hot. The sun was getting lower in the sky and her shadow here at the edge of the water was almost impossibly long. She raised her hands to make it longer still. Little Lost is making me a bigger person, she thought.

No one could see her here now, but Rose imagined how she would look from the cottage, silhouetted against the sky. I'm sure Robert wants me to see the cottage from another vantage point so I'll be smitten, she thought. I'm already smitten with Hopewell, just not with him.

She climbed to the end of the point, doing her best not to lose her footing. She imagined them calling from the beach, “Come back soon, Rose!” But she didn't want to come back. She got to the end of the point, dry and smooth and hot from the setting sun. She stretched out in the late sunlight. She was the Queen of the Western World.