The End of the Pier (5 page)

Sam's voice came through her thoughts as a low sowing of indistinguishable words; the patio on the other side of the water was a chartreuse blur. As a parent she felt disgraced.

•  •  •

“That boy's done you proud,” Shirl had said at lunchtime, taking bites from her jelly doughnut in between drags from a cigarette held in the same hand; with the other she was wiping down the top of the pastry display case—Shirl's two hands always seemed to do the work of four. And she managed at the same time to nod her head toward the far end where Joey sat mopping up brown gravy with a hunk of bread, implying, of course, that she was stuck with “the little creep.”

“Not,” she added, holding up a sticky hand for emphasis, “that I'm giving
Chad
all the credit. It's
you
you oughta be proud of, raising him the way you did. The way he turned out, that's your doing, don't forget.”

That this cause-and-effect mother-and-son relationship must also apply to Shirl and Joey was something she could blithely ignore. It was the
father
who had had the effect there—the adverse effect, of course—and Shirl loved to think Maud shared with her the total failure of their ex-husbands' ability to function as fathers. “That big creep,” she told Maud, had taken off one
fine day in May and was never heard from again. “One fine day in May,” she was always saying, making it sound like an old-fashioned song. “He's up and off, the big creep. Leaving me with the mortgage, the bills, the kid. Not one red cent did he leave me nor did he send me.”

“He pays nearly all the bills,” Maud said of Chad's father, while Shirl wound out the rag in the sink. “I'd never've been able to send him to that school. It costs a fortune. It costs eleven thousand a year for tuition.” The shake she was making done to a thick cream, she poured it into one of the ribbed glasses. It was so thick it stood up around the straw.

“So what's money, girl, I'd like to know?” asked Shirl, apparently forgetting money was her major complaint about the big creep. “It ain't money makes a kid turn out with character and personality. Is that shake for him?” Again she nodded towards Joey. “Christ, is it his birthday or something?”

Maud sighed and walked down the counter with the glass as Shirl called to Joey that he had enough zits already he looked like a potholed road and he could just kiss his chances with Louella Harper goodbye if he drank that shake because he'd sure never kiss Louella.

The six faces at the counter all turned to the object of these words, and as she set down the milk shake Maud could hear Joey mumbling into his drowned potatoes for someone to fuck off. He did not look up to see Maud giving him an encouraging smile, although he did thank her and cleave his hand to the ribbed glass as if this were some way of wreaking vengeance on his mother.

“Living well is the best revenge,” said Maud brightly, wanting to cheer him up.

This earned her a squinty-eyed look and a request for a spoon for this “shit-thick” shake.

Maud pulled an iced-tea spoon from a plastic cutlery tray and put it before him. She walked back down to get the coffee pot and refill Ulub's cup. He was extending it, his oil-black thumb holding
back the spoon. Shirl could have poured the coffee; all she was doing now was standing smoking, but she no doubt thought that concentrating on bad fathers was more important and picked up where she'd left off.

“Conscience money. That's all it is.”

Rinsing off a Coca-Cola glass, Maud said again that Chad's father paid for it, if that's what it was.

Shirl was driving home a point and she wasn't letting Maud deflect her, even though it was Maud's marriage and divorce and Shirl hadn't been there.

“I don't care if he put all the crack dealers in Detroit”—it came out “
Dee
-troit”—“through Yale, it still don't make up for walking out on your wife and baby boy”—she was shoving her close-together eyes up into Maud's face—“for a piece of ass.”

Shirl's idea of conversational discretion was lowering her usual bawl to an asplike whisper that whipped down the counter, stinging each customer into looking up before they all returned their eyes to their plates and cups.

“Tight ass at that,” Shirl hissed.

Maud's ex-husband had once actually walked into the Rainbow Café with his wife, and that had provided Shirl with a mother lode of conversational possibilities superseded only by God having been around at the Creation. Velda, the new—well, slightly used, given two prior husbands and three years of marriage to Ned—Mrs. Chadwick, was a model and once a Miss Universe contender. She had flyaway cheekbones, a mass of red-gold hair that looked windblown but you knew was actually blown by a hairdresser, a pencil-thin figure, and model's shoulders accented by shoulder pads like a football player's. Shirl said she looked like the TV antenna on top of the Rainbow Café, but Maud knew Shirl was just trying to make her feel better. The shoulder pads were stacked under a green silk designer dress. Velda glowed like neon and vibrated on and off, standing there in the Rainbow looking around at its dark booths and long counter with a “how quaint” expression, twisting this
way and that—torso, chin, neck—as if Ubub might jump up and take pictures. Probably it was unconscious posing, Maud thought later, charitably, since Velda was probably never far from the cameras and strobe lights.

When they walked in tanned like crisp toast with Chad in tow, it caused a mild sensation—as interesting an event as would ever happen in the Rainbow, Shirl had said, short of an onslaught of hooded Palestinian terrorists. Ulub and Ubub had looked up from their short stacks and eggs; Dodge Haines had nearly slid from his stool; Mayor Sims, who'd come in for a sobering cup of coffee before confronting Mrs. Sims, had stopped in the middle of delivering to Dodge what sounded like an old campaign speech on drugs. There were a few strays (as Shirl called people off the street), who'd swiveled in their booths to have a gander at Velda.

It had been just this time a year ago, a few days before Labor Day, and Ned said they'd come “on the spur” (Maud just
bet
), and Velda angled her way to the counter and cut in with this
super
idea of taking Chad on an “island hop”: Nantucket, Puget Sound, the Cape, Martha's Vineyard. And
did
Maud mind
too
very much if they carted this
wonderful
child (Chad kept his face blank, his eyes down, and looked guilty for being there) off just
four
days early and then they'd
whisk
him to school after this
whirlwind
vacation, and it sounded to Maud like they were all caught in a plane propeller; but Velda smiled and smiled, her long, tanned arm half-leaning, half-dropping across the counter as if she were already in the middle of Puget Sound doing a crawl stroke.

And Ned. All he'd done was just bunch his arm around Chad's shoulders, occasionally giving him a fatherly squeeze, playing Daddy Warbucks to a fare-thee-well.

Mind? Of course she minded. Did Mr. Blank-Face want to go? Of course he did, though she knew
he
knew this was completely rotten, Ned and Velda swooping in this way and taking his mom
by surprise. And it wasn't as if they were fighting a custody battle; it was only an “island hop.” Maud had stood behind the counter in the midst of all of this green glitter and bonhomie and felt like a cow in a field, beige and dull, chewing over her response.

She saw herself reflected in the eyes of the incandescent Velda—Maud with her shoulder-length, straight, sand-colored hair and desert-brown eyes, the ordinarily subdued freckles probably breaking out like a fresh crop of zits. Stood there with a cut-out smile while ribs of white anger shot through her.

But the anger dissolved momentarily, replaced by an empathy for Chad, who had nearly dislocated his shoulder getting away from his father's grip to go over and sit down and start a conversation with Ulub. This in itself was an act of desperation (though you'd never know it from his laid-back smile), since neither of the Woods talked. Ubub did act as main factotum sometimes, placing the orders at the counter. So Chad started up this monologue, offering them cigarettes (which they regarded as if they were strange Indian signs) in order to show Maud he was sloughing off these two tanned people and their offer if that was what his mom wanted.

Maud kept on smiling and said, sure, sure, that was fine, that was very nice, she was sure Chad would enjoy that. Would any sane nineteen-year-old not enjoy going back to college with a tan like the ones Velda and Ned were sporting? Oh, La Porte had its lake, but no sand beaches, and people didn't do much swimming, just boating of sorts. La Porte had seen better days. Once it had been a fashionable little summer resort, but it was pretty down-at-heel now.

Velda and Ned had come to town and left with Chad, who was wearing (Maud noticed) a new pair of Gucci shoes and an Italian jacket that made his eyes look like molten gold. It was so strange, Maud thought, how her own dull coloring had translated itself into that sunlit look.

And Shirl had rooted herself by the coffee machine, drinking
in the scene like her cup of coffee, enjoying every revolting minute of it.

It was the first, last, and only time Maud had ever seen Velda.

When Ned had paid for their three glasses of iced tea and called to “Velvet” they'd better be going, Maud heard Shirl make a retching noise over the cash drawer, which had sprung out to slap her in the stomach.

Ned had left a tip.

He had folded up a twenty into a little square and stuck it under the iced-tea glass. That was Ned's version of “discreet.”

No one had noticed this but Chad. He had stared at his father's departing back, plucked the bill from the counter, and looked at it as if it were a hand grenade.

It had saved what little could be saved of the encounter when Chad had shoved it back into Ned's pocket without a word.

•  •  •

Maybe Shirl had been thinking of this present Labor Day as some sort of anniversary of last year's and Velveeta's (as Shirl called her) visit, because she couldn't seem to stop talking about the haplessness and hatefulness of husbands, and what she'd have done if the big creep had come back to La Porte dragging the new Mrs. Creep along. Since she was scraping out the hard vanilla from the bottom of the ice-cream container, much of this was echoing up from the nearly empty basin. But her head and hand would emerge, the scoop dipped in warm water, and she'd call down the counter to Maud, who was trying not to pay attention, cutting up the lemon chiffon pie.

Dodge Haines, who was getting the apple pie à la mode, crusty with ice, leered over his coffee, and the others up and down the counter were equally entranced with this playback of the visit of Maud's ex-husband and his new wife; also, it gave a man like Dodge, macho to the core, a chance to exchange his witty keep-'em-barefoot-and-pregnant philosophical views with Shirl.

The only person who had the good taste at least to pretend not to listen was the tall brunette sitting at the counter, the one for whom Maud had just cut up the lemon chiffon. This was Dr. Elizabeth Hooper, a woman Maud could hardly say she knew, for Dr. Hooper didn't live in La Porte, but a woman for whom Maud felt an infinite respect and empathy.

•  •  •

Dr. Elizabeth Hooper fascinated Maud. She came through La Porte exactly once a month, every third weekend, like clockwork. She was tall and elegant, wore simple suits in cold weather, simple dresses in warm. Today she had on a frosty blue linen dress. Maud always studied her dresses and accessories. To the shoulder had been pinned a gold brooch, and she wore a gold bracelet; one long, bare arm rested on the counter, but unlike Velda's, it was pale, untanned. This alone would have sent Dr. Hooper rocketing in Maud's esteem: she was clearly a woman who had other things on her mind besides Nantucket. Maud also liked the way she sat at the counter rather than sitting in one of the dark, high-backed booths, the way the other women who came in on their own did. It bespoke to Maud a certain confidence and carelessness, that Dr. Hooper couldn't be bothered worrying over being a woman alone. For despite the entire feminist movement, Maud had seen absolutely no change in the mouselike withdrawal of any woman from fifteen to fifty, the caginess they felt over being in a
restaurant
alone, as if it were a porn movie house.

•  •  •

Since Maud considered herself terminally shy, it had been nearly two months before she got up the nerve to speak to Dr. Hooper. She could never keep up the friendly chat of Charlene or the constant complaining of Shirl as they moved down the counter and among the booths. Except for Miss Ruth Porte, who seemed so frail and quiet it would have been shameful not to be able to converse with her, Maud hardly exchanged a sentence with the customers; could not be forced to even under the constant agitating
of Dodge Haines, who considered himself La Porte's lady-killer and never seemed to look at any woman above breast level. “You'd think my tits was my eyes,” Charlene would say, but in such a salacious tone that you knew she enjoyed it. Charlene had a big smile and big breasts and bestowed herself on everyone like a basket of fruit.

All Maud could do to make up for her lack of conversation (except for her book talks with Miss Ruth) was to smile, and her smile wasn't like Charlene's—no wide red lips and flash of bleached teeth. Her smile was little more than a slight upward hook at the ends of her mouth, a shy smile. She tried to smile a lot to make up for her silences—which were at least appreciated greatly by Joey and, she thought, by Dr. Elizabeth Hooper—because otherwise the people of La Porte might think she was putting on airs. It was her college education and her being favored so much by Miss Ruth Porte, also educated and able to talk to Maud about books, that she was afraid might make people think she was uppity. But even though Maud's smile was constrained, she knew it was pleasant. An old boyfriend (a hundred years ago, when there were such things) had told her she had the prettiest smile he'd ever seen. It was the smile of a little kid, of an
infant,
even, the smile of someone who'd just learned and really meant it. It was the most sincere smile, he said, he'd come across. Maud had forgotten his name, this high school boy; but she remembered the grave look on his face, the effort that had gone into describing her smile
just right.