The Bay of Love and Sorrows (10 page)

There was such gaiety at everyone else’s expense — there was such disorder, fighting and cursing and nudity. There was such high revelry at nothing at all There was such a pretence of concern for their friends, the world of affairs, the marijuana laws, that seemed upon reflection to be tired and sad.

Sometimes as they sat on the sailboat, it drifted to the port side, and they could smell the Jessops’ farmyard.

“God, those horses,” Michael complained about the odour.

“Them aren’t horses, boy — them are cows. Them is the smell of money.”

Michael studied her in a particular way when she corrected him. There was just a slight look of aversion on his face. Then he just bent over, and with his hand on the inside of her thigh he kissed her. She opened her mouth slightly and felt his tongue.

He was only the second boy she had ever really kissed. Then he drew away and playfully squeezed her thigh.

“Now, stop it,” she said, “What am I going to do with you?”

And she began to laugh again, with a marked fear at doing something inappropriate, and then moved a lock of hair back from his face, and shook her head, as if she was exasperated.

She decided then to go back to Tom, where she felt she would be safe. But on her way to Tom’s the next afternoon, she came out on the road, and spied Vincent waiting for her, looking down the highway holding Maxwell Far up in the field she heard Tom’s tractor, and her heart was no longer in it. She turned quickly and ran, all the trees passing her at the same instant, and didn’t stop until she got to the bay.

“I’ll go with you — to Prince Edward Island,” she said. “If you want”

“Well — as long as we enjoy it,” Michael said in an almost ice-cold fashion. And she suddenly gave a short embarrassed laugh, and looked at Madonna.

On her birthday, Michael took her to Prince Edward Island. He had to talk to some people there, or Silver (who seemed to be upset about something) did. But while the rest went to shore, she remained on the sailboat, looking down the teakwood stairs into the cutty

She kept walking back and forth on deck hoping they would come back soon, and her attention was drawn to three young teens on the wharf who kept asking her if she owned the sailboat.

“My boyfriend does,” she said suddenly, filling a glass with white wine.

She then looked across the strait to the far-off shore she had come from, and took a drink. She promised herself she would be back home by six. When Michael came aboard again, she found herself talking about Tommie.

“Shhhh,” Michael said.

He took her hand, and led her into the cutty.

She looked at his face and it was filled with a quiet strength. She could understand why he was likable. And all the
rude
things she had thought about him. But she now felt Tom had told her those things. But she was free of Tom, if she wanted to be.

There were many things in the cutty and she tried to remember them. Bottles and small hash pipes, clothes tossed here and there, a map on the wall with pins in it, showing where he’d been in the world, a chart of the bay, and the overriding scent of suntan lotion and of a faintly soiled mattress.

Silver Brassaurd was on deck, cursing to himself about something important, and now and again he would peek down the stairs, his bottom teeth protruding from his mouth.

The sailboat rolled in the waves and Michael sat beside her, squeezing his strong slender fingers on her back. He told her a story of riding out a hurricane off the coast of Africa, while she sat and drank.

She drank almost an entire bottle of wine, and now and then as he continued rambling on, she ran to the cupboard in the cutty to pee. She kept falling back and forth laughing while the door banged open and closed. He went over, helped her to her feet, and pulled her panties up.

“I’ve never done anything like this,” she said, staggering and laughing.

Michael then got upset about something that had happened on the Island two or three weeks before, and began to hit his fist against the wall behind him. When she turned in fear to stop that fist she fell against him. There were tears in his eyes, and he was drunk as well, and she was frightened.

“Why are you fooling him?” he said, “He was the only friend I had — or is it me you are making a fool of?” He smiled.

She jumped up in a start to run away, but when he hauled her back to him she started kissing him apologetically She kept kissing him, on the mouth and teeth, on his bare chest.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry — this
wasn’t
supposed to happen between us at all” And then she said quite suddenly: “I’ll go out and get you some blueberries tomorrow — I’ll bake you a pie”

And he began to laugh, that laugh he had, which always frightened her.

Later, there was phosphorus on the green bay The swells were high and they went on deck. Actually he got up first, and went above first, leaving her alone to dress.

Far away they could see the lights from the road, and she could make out the one light over her father’s gas bar. She called Michael to show this to him, and when he came over she leaned her head against his arm. Then he smiled and gave her a squeeze, and told her he would be back in a minute.

Riding in the wooden dinghy that was being towed behind them, dead drunk, was Silver Brassaurd. It was dangerous to be out there now, with the strong wind. If the dinghy ever came loose, there would be no saving him and he didn’t even seem to care.

While she was looking at him he would roar and yell at the waves, then sing. Then as Karrie was watching he took a plastic bag from his pocket and shoved it up behind the dinghy’s rear seat. For some reason, as Karrie watched she thought of herself as a little girl hiding marbles from her cousins one Sunday afternoon. Yes, she had wanted all those marbles for herself, and perhaps, who knew, that’s what Silver was hiding as well. Some marbles for himself. Something he didn’t want to show anyone else.

When she turned around to look towards the bow, she felt that she belonged to all of them. This was a very warm feeling.

But then she caught a glance from Madonna Brassaurd, who was sitting on top of the cutty, smoking a cigarette and tipping a bottle of wine. And Karrie remembered, dizzily, that with all the wine she’d had, she’d been naked when people — both Madonna and Silver — walked in and out of the cutty.

Madonna simply stared at her now and the look unnerved her. She realized it was because she had always, as had her stepmother, felt superior to the Brassaurds, and Madonna’s look said she knew this.

Michael had to climb up at the bow to get the spinnaker out. But it had been broken on an earlier trip, and bowed under his weight. He wore old cutoffs that were very loose so that the top of his butt showed. And he was cursing about something as he seemed to swing far out over the desperate water.

She remembered when they’d been on the hard, long seat how thin his ribcage was. She had tried to stop him, at first. She remembered too how much it hurt her at first, and how she’d been unable to stop moaning, so he’d held her mouth,

Now in the dark she could only hear his voice — and for the rest of the night he didn’t speak to her. He seemed to be responsible for everything and everyone. The idea that he was Michael Skid seemed to be implicitly woven into this responsibility to care for those about him.

No one spoke to her again, and she felt very lonely. She kept trying to talk with them, but it became quickly apparent she had done something that they all thought was dishonest, or at least she felt they did. Just once, when she was moving back towards the cutty thinking she was going to be sick, Michael’s eyes caught hers, and she looked away.

From the day Tom threw the blueberries, everything about Karrie’s situation changed and was to become worse and worse from the moment she ran away from him.

When she ran from Tom that day, she did not go back to the sailboat, but the next day, she went down. As she got off the dinghy she felt that they had been having a conversation about her.

“What are youse saying about me?” she said, laughing, but her laugh was a nervous one.

Michael looked up at her and she thought his smile was cold or annoyed. She remembered his smile on the beach when she had first met him. It was the same smile.

There were other young women on the sailboat that day as well, and they were all going to Portage Island. She was angered that they would go there and not invite her.

Michael got up and moved around her, as if he were very busy. He told her they were casting off, if she wanted to come. But she stubbornly said no and asked someone to take her back in.

She went back to shore and looked out at the boat. No one waved back when she waved — so she picked up a stone and pretended to throw it at the boat and laughed. Then she yelled out to Madonna: “Madonna — I have something to tell you — wait till I see you again. But I’m not going to tell Michael — la-te-dah.”

She watched Michael disappear into the cutty, and then soon

— ten to fifteen minutes later — Silver Brassaurd pulled anchor and the sailboat began to drift, as she heard the squeak of the sail being lifted.

Going home, she borrowed her father’s car and drove quickly along the bay road, watching as the boat became a dot in the sun. Then she turned and drove into town. Town was hot and empty and silent,

She went to the bookstore and bought Michael a book. It was a book of poems by Robert Frost. She wrote in it, “All my love dear one. Karrie.” She did not know much about literature, but she did once have a part in a school play.

She was aware of herself walking back to the car, and felt a little hopeless.

And so it started. She could not help but be with, and wanted to belong with him. Or more
to
him. But everything about
them
intimidated her. She hid the book of poems in her room, waiting for the proper moment to give it to him.

She kept trying to do and say the right things, to be
irreverent
in just the right way. But she only managed to repeat what others, like Madonna Brassaurd, said and she was clumsy in repeating it. Whenever she said something it only sounded vulgar and foul

No one in the group seemed to approve of her, and she became nervous and her face started to break out. Once, when she was with Madonna, Karrie said: “I’d like to know what to do to be more like you.” And she smiled timidly.

“You have to know not only how to fuck — you got to know who to fuck,” Madonna said. “But he fucked you good, didn’t he?” Though she laughed, as if joking, and though Karrie laughed also, Karrie felt deeply humiliated.

She began to feel that belonging to someone who didn’t care at all for her was her destiny. Soon she began to feel, in a secret part of her, that she had cheated Tom, and had cheated the plans for her future with him, for nothing. It took her some weeks to begin to admit this.

The evenings began to pass, and there was never an easy moment for her. The idea that she had been dishonest came principally from Madonna Brassaurd. And no longer did Michael act in an easy way with her. There was nothing easy between them now.

Soon she hated the boat, and all of them, and yet she was forced to go there. That is, she was forced to go there in the hope that she had got all those impressions of Michael and the rest of them wrong. That they were not mean people, that Everette Hutch, when he once came by, didn’t hate her, or hold her family up to ridicule because of the shack Gail rented. That Michael didn’t take his side and glare at her as if she were a “slum landlord,” as they teased her about.

She wanted to prove to herself that it was exactly as it had been before, like the night they went to P.E.I., that Michael was an angel and she was an angel and they would fly above the world together, over the sorrowful trees.

She kept going back to the sailboat so her father and stepmother wouldn’t be disappointed. And she kept going there because as long as she was there, she had a chance to change their minds about her, to prove something to Madonna and Michael.

For days and days Michael didn’t want her. He seemed very upset with her. He told her that there were things that she didn’t understand. She could not seem to break through.

“If you only knew,” he said to her one night at his farm, “of the trouble I’m now in — you would run away.”

“What trouble?”

He moved his hand through his hair and looked at her.

“I’m in trouble — but you can’t tell”

“Is it Tommie — is he bothering you?” she said.

“Don’t you realize you’ve betrayed him?” he said.

She jumped up and ran to the door. She had just brought him down a set of sailboat chimes for the house, and had placed them near the window in the living room.

The old Mexican sombrero sat on a chair, and she picked it up and fumbled with its leather headband, her lips pouting.

The next night he was drunk and climbed up on her verandah roof and woke her. He looked worried about something, and she allowed him to rest his head on her shoulder when she opened the window, then cup her breast.

“Please don’t do that here,” she said.