In those days Maddie’s mother had kept a produce stand on the road from East Head, and there were always plenty of tourists who bought the vegetables she grew (which were the ones George told her to grow, of course), and even though they were never exactly what her mother called ‘the Gotrocks family,’ they made out. Even in years when lobstering was bad and they had to stretch their finances even further in order to keep paying off what they owed the bank on Pop Cook’s two acres, they made out.
Jack Pace was a sweeter-tempered man than George Sullivan had ever thought of being, but his sweet temper only stretched so far, even so. Maddie suspected that he might get around to what was sometimes called home correction — the twisted arm when supper was cold, the occasional slap or downright paddling — in time; when the bloom was off the rose, so as to speak. There was even a part of her that seemed to expect and look forward to that.
The women’s magazines said marriages where the man ruled the roost were a thing of the past, and that a man who put a hard hand on a woman should be arrested for assault, even if the man in question was the woman in question’s lawful wedded husband. Maddie sometimes read articles of this sort down at the beauty shop, but doubted if the women who wrote them had the
slightest idea that places like the outer islands even existed. Little Tall had produced one writer, as a matter of fact — Selena St. George — but she wrote mostly about politics and hadn’t been back to the island, except for a single Thanksgiving dinner, in years.
‘I’m not going to be a lobsterman all my life, Maddie,’ Jack told her the week before they were married, and she believed him. A year before, when he had asked her out for the first time (she’d said yes almost before all the words could get out of his mouth, and she had blushed to the roots of her hair at the sound of her own naked eagerness), he would have said, ‘I ain’t going to be a lobsterman all my life.’ A small change . . . but all the difference in the world. He had been going to night school three evenings a week, taking the old Island Princess over and back. He would be dog-tired after a day of pulling pots, but off he’d go just the same, pausing only long enough to shower off the powerful smells of lobster and brine and to gulp two No Doz with hot coffee.
After a while, when she saw he really meant to stick to it, Maddie began putting up hot soup for him to drink on the ferry-ride over. Otherwise he would have had nothing but one of those nasty red hot-dogs they sold in the Princess’s snack-bar.
She remembered agonizing over the canned soups in the store — there were so many! Would he want tomato? Some people didn’t like tomato soup. In fact, some people hated tomato soup, even if you made it with milk instead of water. Vegetable soup? Turkey? Cream of chicken? Her helpless eyes roved the shelf display for nearly ten minutes before Charlene Nedeau asked if she could help her with something — only Charlene said it in a sarcastic way, and Maddie guessed she would tell all her friends at high school tomorrow, and they would giggle about it in the girls’
room, knowing exactly what was wrong with her — poor mousy little Maddie Sullivan, unable to make up her mind over so simple a thing as a can of soup. How she had ever been able to decide to accept Jack Pace’s proposal was a wonder and a marvel to all of them . . . but of course they didn’t know about the wheel you had to find, and about how, once you found it, you had to have someone to tell you when to stoop and where exactly to push the damned thing.
Maddie had left the store with no soup and a throbbing headache.
When she worked up nerve enough to ask Jack what his favorite soup was, he had said:
‘Chicken noodle. Kind that comes in the can.’
Were there any others he specially liked?
The answer was no, just chicken noodle — the kind that came in the can. That was all the soup Jack Pace needed in his life, and all the answer (on that particular subject, at least) that Maddie needed in hers. Light of step and cheerful of heart, Maddie climbed the warped wooden steps of the store the next day and bought the four cans of chicken noodle soup that were on the shelf.
When she asked Bob Nedeau if he had any more, he said he had a whole damn case of the stuff out back.
She bought the entire case and left him so flabbergasted that he actually carried the carton out to the truck for her and forgot all about asking why she wanted so much — a lapse for which his long-nosed wife and daughter took him sharply to task that evening.
‘You just better believe it and never forget,’ Jack had said that time not long before they tied the knot (she had believed it, and had never forgotten). ‘More than a lobsterman. My dad says I’m full of shit. He says if draggin pots was good enough for his old man, and his old man’s old man and all the way back to the friggin Garden of Eden to hear him tell it, it ought to be good enough for me. But it ain’t — isn’t, I mean — and I’m going to do better.’ His eye fell on her, and it was a stern eye, full of resolve, but it was a loving eye, full of hope and confidence, too. ‘
‘More than a lobsterman is what I mean to be, and more than a lobster-man’s wife is what I intend for you to be. You’re going to have a house on the mainland.’
‘Yes, Jack.’
‘And I’m not going to have any friggin Chevrolet.’ He drew in a deep breath and took her hands in his. ‘I’m going to have an Oldsmobile.’
He looked her dead in the eye, as if daring her to scoff at this wildly upscale ambition. She did no such thing, of course; she said yes, Jack, for the third or fourth time that evening. She had said it to him thousands of times over the year they had spent courting, and she confidently expected to say it a million times before death ended their marriage by taking one of them — or, better, both of them together. Yes, Jack; had there ever in the history of the world been two words, which made such beautiful music when laid side by side?
‘More than a friggin lobsterman, no matter what my old man thinks or how much he laughs.’
He pronounced this last word in the deeply downeast way: loffs. ‘I’m going to do it, and do you know who’s going to help me?’
‘Yes,’ Maddie had responded calmly. ‘I am.’
He had laughed and swept her into his arms. ‘You’re damned tooting, my little sweetheart,’
he’d told her.
And so they were wed, as the fairytales usually put it, and for Maddie those first few months
— months when they were greeted almost everywhere with jovial cries of ‘Here’s the newly-weds!’ — were a fairytale. She had Jack to lean on, Jack to help her make decisions, and that was the best of it. The most difficult household choice thrust upon her that first year was which curtains would look best in the living room — there were so many in the catalogue to choose from, and her mother was certainly no help. Maddie’s mother had a hard time deciding between different brands of toilet paper.
Otherwise, that year consisted mostly of joy and security — the joy of loving Jack in their deep bed while the winter wind scraped over the island like the blade of a knife across a breadboard, the security of having Jack to tell her what it was they wanted, and how they were going to get it. The loving was good — so good that sometimes when she thought of him during the days her knees would feel weak and her stomach fluttery — but his way of knowing things and her growing trust in his instincts were even better. So for a while it was a fairytale, yes.
Then Jack died and things started getting weird. Not just for Maddie, either.
For everybody.
Just before the world slid into its incomprehensible nightmare, Maddie discovered she was what her mother had always called ‘preg,’ a curt word that was like the sound you made when you had to rasp up a throatful of snot (that, at least, was how it had always sounded to Maddie). By then she and Jack had moved next to the Pulsifers on Gennesault Island, which was known simply as Jenny by its residents and those of nearby Little Tall.