This first chapter (part two)

The jitney stops at the Chapter’s edge, and you climb out and walk towards the center of Maquiogue. You walk past the gas station Esso, the Realtor’s Office with its electric turquoise hoardings, the tiny Post Office with its brass honeycombs of post boxes, the Fire Station, the Diner, the Deli, Maquiogue East Bar – for the locals – and Silver’s Stationers run by the Mr. and Mrs. De Robben (whom you would like).

Click here for This first chapter (part one)

You pass the two churches, one Canolothian – that wonderfully sanctimonious and censorious sect housed by a newish, and spare red-brick block – and the other Luserian, an older glorified white-washed clapboard house with a toy-like slatted steeple, out of which wafts electrified rinky-dink tunes which fill you with a warm glow of nostalgia.

They don’t really like each other very much, these two sects, even if they are so geographically intimate, and if each congregation gets an earful about loving your neighbor.

Everyone knows that listening to such sermons is as good as actually putting them into practice.

Nearby is the meeting house for the Canolothian Daughters of the Revolution which is infinitely more exclusive and less well-attended than the meeting house for the plain Daughters of the plain Revolution.

You won’t be invited into either place, so keep walking. You’re a city girl, however much you feel this to be your town, your Chapter.

Keep walking, past the cedar-shingled houses, some unpainted grey, simple farmhouse boxes, the larger, more well-to-do white-washed clapboard topped with cupolas and dormer windows peeping out above, flowing with net curtains. Even many of the smaller, meaner houses are encircled by a wide trellised porch.

At night a lantern or electric candle is framed in the windows of the houses, which makes you think of skeletons in closets.

Through one window, behind muslin curtains, a television flickers. A Pontiac sails through the street. A Chevrolet, a Buick or one of those “tin lizzies”, those huge and low-slung boats navigating the Main Street of your dreams. Somebody’s father, somebody’s lover, or a nobody’s husband.

It feels as if you are holding your breath, just outside the borders of some painful, yet strangely pleasurable memory. You walk on out to the edge of town, to the 7-Eleven which always used to sell your cigarettes.

“Yer lucky I still ‘ad ‘em,” says the storeowner, a very short but stocky balding Polish man with a moustache. “No one buys ‘em.”

He throws down the packet onto the counter.

The fire station siren goes off. You pause a moment, out of habit, the way everybody does when the siren sounds, to listen to its drawn-out ugly-sounding scale, the low moan sliding up to a high wail, before falling back down to that broken hoarse rumble.

“Well, I buy them,” you reply. “You can save them for me.”

“I’ve never seen you before.”

“You’re jokin’”, you say swiping the pack and cramming it into your pocket.

After all those years of working to belong in the Hamtowns.

Anyway, he’s a little confused, because you’re acting like you know this place like the back of your hand. During high summer, strangers and their strange cigarettes would be expected. The rest of the time, for any normal person, the poison is menthol Salem and Marlboro.

Now you can hear the more distant midday siren of Rivertown; time varies in Ponquattuck from Chapter to Chapter.

You wait for the siren repeat – the storekeeper’s sort of waiting too – but none sounds. This means it’s midday. This means no fires, or no fires that anyone’s yet discovered.

“Shit, it feels like the end of the day,” you say. “It’s only noon.”

“It don’t feel like the end of the day to me. Wish it did.”

Outside you light up and find out how right he is about no one ever buying your cigarettes. This one’s an antique, judging by the taste of it, the most disgusting piece of crap you’ve ever tasted.

So get off your high nostalgia horse about the good old days.

Get walking again, back into town, spying through windows along the way, trying to catch glimpses of people at dinner or in their television pose. A woman hurries out of the Post Office and turns a corner before you can ask directions. She’s familiar, someone’s mother, maybe Allen’s mother, Mrs. Sayre, the husband’s Nobody wife!

A teenager hurtles around the corner on his bike and is gone; he’s familiar too. Allen Sayre maybe, younger than he should be. But this is even more impossible than any of the other impossible things, even in the kingdom of Ponquattuck – even on Broken Island – there’s no saying what or how or with whom.

Not every kid you see belongs to you. Get off your high horse.

A little further an old woman in a wheelchair is leaning forward and murmuring to a toddler seated in a stroller pushed by a rough-looking young man.

If Allen Sayre was too young-looking - or, rather, the kid that looked like Allen Sayre – then Billy Tuttle looks older than he should be, much older and, boy, has he changed. His angelic look is gone, his blonde hair now long and greasy, his Black Sabbath tee-shirt sleeve rolled up around a pack of Marlboros. He has a skull-and-bones tattoo and there’s a cigarette dangling out of his mouth – a Marlboro of course – the smoke curling up into his squinting baby-blue eyes. They are almost scary, those sky-blue eyes.

Well, well, he made it to adulthood. With a child to carry on those genes, a child to mould and shape. A child to take after him the way he took after his father.

He doesn’t see you; not that anybody would recognize you, since everyone’s the wrong age, including you.

As you walk by you catch the woman’s voice:

“Heya, little Frankie baby,” she coos, her wrinkled hand under the toddler’s chin. “This is your Aunt Jane. You remember your granddad’s sister? Two years old and you ain’t never met your own Auntie before.”

This last, said in a voice like a sharpened blade, is directed up at Billy, who couldn’t give a flying fuck. He’s waiting for her to be through, but she’s got his nasty genes; you always expect it to have gone in the old, to have softened into something good and wise.

“You been inside again?” she barks at Billy who’s looking across the road.

She snatches the butt dangling from her own lips, hurls it into the street, where it hits the sidewalk with a small cloud of sparks, then she wheels herself off vigorously.

“Fuck’s sake,” you hear Billy mutter under his breath.

A thin-looking girl comes out from the store across the street, hardly looks both ways before she saunters across.

“Take yer time,” says Billy.

“Okay,” she says coolly, puts the buggy in motion with a jerk, causing the child to yelp.

A warming family scene.

You buy a newspaper at Mr. And Mrs. De Robben’s stationary store, that landmark: Silver’s Stationers.

She, who used to be so lively and easy for kids to talk to, who burned incense and told fortunes, fumbles around for thick glasses and even then can’t find some bit of paper she deems necessary, for some odd reason, to sell you a newspaper. It’s a relief she doesn’t recognize you.

Mr De Robben is sitting there fingering the yellowed pages of an old Maquiogue Herald, in which appears an article of his, an article about boats or bridges, an article about nature and the environment, about global forces, about pesticides and the bad guys: about Broken Island.

You walk past the Maquiogue East pub, and a bleached-blonde woman you almost recognise is perched on a barstool, the bared skin of her midriff soft and beginning to fold.

You turn off by the Fire Station and walk down Bay Avenue turning left at Foster Crossing and then right again on the dirt road which takes you past the Kovskys. The place has been painted and the lawn is immaculate. The screen porch looks new: no jagged holes or tears at the edges or dents from a boy’s consistently misthrown ball. There’s a shiny new station wagon in the driveway.

The swing is gone. There is no ice cream truck.

Not yet ready to head on, you backtrack to Bay Avenue, turn left and go as far as you can, which isn’t far. The road peters out into a dock on the expanse of still water which is Shinnewockey Bay. An osprey sails over a spit of land opposite and settles at the top of a dead tree jutting up from the end. A swan slowly makes its imperious, stately way past you, headed towards the nearby creek.

In the water the minnows flip and flutter, and the water laps against the stilts of the dock.

It’s not as if there is anything spectacular to see—no majesty of terrain or splendor. It’s just a mirror for the sky, the gentle push and pull of its slow tide, the equally slow swoop of egrets and kingfishers, a blue and wide peacefulness.

It’s a warm dusk and you can hear the purr of motor boats though none are in sight. No one cannonballs off the dock. It’s not warm enough for the hordes of summer swimmers even if you can feel the absent August baking heat. No one screams bloody murder as they’re dragged across the hot and broken tarmac to be hurled into the water like a sack of local potatoes. Round the tip of the near land, a sailboat glides into view, silent as a cat.

Aside from all this, it’s an ordinary place.

So you turn back and walk though overgrown trees and bushes, until you arrive at an old white farmhouse. Its nearby garage is twined with a mass of trumpet vine, not yet in flower.

At a slightly further distance there’s a small shed-like building which appears to be bursting with junk, and dotted around stand portions of grey cedar fence, over five feet tall, also congested with weeds and branches, probably a Dog Rose or climber of some sort. Buckling bits of the broken fence jut up from the tangled undergrowth, like marooned remnants of some crazy architect’s grand and uncompleted plan.

The paint on the weathered shingles is peeling and crumbling, eaten away by salt winds and hurricanes and baked by the heat. The whole structure slumps and sags. Surely nobody lives in this place. Rosettas of emerald moss and mould flourish round the windowsills, cascade down the sides.

You move towards the house, crouch down, and carefully peer over the windowsill, looking at the family gathered there at the table: your family. There they are! Your sister, your father and mother, a large raggedy-looking goofy cartoon of a dog, with its rough and shaggy coat, its tongue lolling out sideways.

Aw hell, there you are! You, you…interloper! Better get in there quick.

Someone is yelling at someone and the dog is helping himself to the food on the table. Get in there quick to carve out your place.

So you open the screen door, wipe your feet in a perfunctory fashion and enter the kitchen, where nobody is surprised to see you, nobody asks you where you’ve been.

“Shoes”, your mother shrieks automatically, which means get ‘em off and leave them in the vestibule.

“Aw ma”, is your equally automatic, practiced response to that request.

All this distance to have come no distance at all.

“Oh, hello everyone,” you say with some sarcasm since, as usual, they don’t appear to have missed you. You’re trying to pull off your boots but they won’t come off.

“Aw, they’re clean…”

“Please,” your mother sighs, “Not now.”

They are all very busy. Anyway, it’s not like you’d written.

It’s okay. You won’t be staying long. You didn’t go through all that time just for this, for nothing. The hell with this. You pass through the door straight ahead into the living room, open that and find yourself back at the first door again, entering the kitchen.

“Oh hello everyone,” you say, pretending everything is normal, which is what you’ve always had to get good at in this house.

This time you retreat and try another cupboard door, but you end up back in the kitchen again.

The third time you try it you end up outdoors, walking down the path to the pond, and then to Shinnewockey Bay. A few hundred feet to the right, a little way along the pebbly shore, there’s the Town Dock, where you just came from. About ten feet in front of you, sticking up from the surface of the water, there’s a door. You wade out fully dressed, open the door and step through:

Back into that kitchen.

Whatever you do, you keep returning to that same room, these same same people. Now that you know this, you’re not so glad to be back.

The truth is: were you to go to the other side of the universe, you’d still end up at this same place, at that kitchen table, with the same pictures hanging lopsided on the walls, the same arrangement of mildewed furniture, the same dog, the same everything.

You’ve got yourself there one poisoned chalice. To preserve it all – the birds, the creatures, the grass, the sea – to preserve yourself, it’s gotta be trial by fire, some kind of ordeal such as those described in fairy tales.

Which means you must want to be held frozen inside of this scene, like dried flowers under glass, like the little snow scene in a glass globe

The creatures, the grass, the sea.
The sea. The plain old sea.

There is nothing so ordinary as the extraordinary Principality of Ponquattuck.

And it is often the case that the inhabitants of a magical Principality do not recognize its magical qualities.

They may be blind to its beauty so as to be able to live there in their normal, human way.

Natives in canoes approaching Long Island (detail), William Janzoon Blaeu, 1635

Also in Shorelines, Long Island sound – three poems by Eva Salzman.