“You and Sam! Your stuff is everywhere. You know I can’t live with clutter!”
Gertie glances around. “Timothy. This isn’t clutter. If you want to see clutter, look in Sam’s bedroom. No, on second thought,don’tlook in Sam’s bedroom. Definitely do not.”
The last shred of peace from his wake-up, from his coffee, from his time on the deck dissolves. Timothy makes a noise between argh and pfffft. “I’ve been living like a bachelor for years.”
“Trust me, I know,” says Gertie.
“And suddenly I’m surrounded by females! With your—scarves, and your perfumes and your hair accessories—”
Gertie rolls her eyes. “You’re hardlysurrounded,darling. It’s only two of us.”
“I feel surrounded. How many scarves did you bring?”
“I don’t know! Some of them? Most of them?” She shrugs. “You know I like to throw a scarf on over most outfits. It’s my thing. I like to have one at the ready.”
Just then Sam comes up, also yawning prettily. She’s wearing a pajama set made up of shorts and a buttoned-up short-sleeve top, and her hair is artfully mussed. Without makeup she looks five years younger than she typically looks. She looks, in fact, like an advertisement for wholesome young adulthood, a look that beliesthe shot glasses and the bottle of Black Tot. “Morning, everyone. What’s going on?”
“Morning, sweetie,” says Gertie. “Your uncle was just lecturing me on the evils of my scarf habit.”
“I wasn’t—” says Timothy, and at the same time Sam says, “Iloveyour scarves, Gertie. They’re your thing!”
Timothy grabs a beach towel from the stack in the basket by the deck. He takes the outdoor steps down to the ground level fast, and he imagines that Gertie and Sam are watching his retreating back make its irritated way across the wide swath of emerald grass. He marches past the vegetation—scrub brush, arrowwood, goldenrod, and multiflora rose—that separates the yard from the steps that lead to the water, and he marches down the stairs. He peels off the T-shirt he slept in, drops it in a small mound near his towel, and wades into the water, which, even in July, on this side of the island, is bracing.
No matter. Better, even.
There’s a rock a good distance out and he points his body toward it and swims. As he swims he becomes not Timothy Fleming of Benedict Canyon, of Hollywood and Broadway, but Timmy Fleming of a small ranch house in the center of Block Island, fifteen again, sixteen, everything ahead of him, nothing behind, swimming for the pure joy of it, in a body that never seems to tire.
Out to the rock, then back again, and by now his chest is heaving; his arms and legs are quivering; his core, that forgotten, crucial component, softened by middle age, has awoken in a new and vital way. He lies on his towel for a good long time, letting the air dry him, the emerging sun warm him, letting his memories and his imagination feed him—remembering, even, the first girl he kissed, on a floating dock in the middle of Great Salt Pond, a girl named Gwen, with strawberry lip gloss and ocean-blue eyes.
There is something after all, he decides, to that cold-water-plunge idea.
The house is quiet when he returns: not a footstep, not a giggle, not a word. Not a scarf, he realizes, stepping stealthily into the kitchen on cat burglar feet. The scarves are gone. The shot glasses are gone. The bottle of Black Tot is closed and has been returned to the liquor cart, taking its place next to Blake’s exorbitant offering, which really, Timothy thinks, should have a sign on it that readsdo not touchorpoisonor evendo you have any idea how much even a sip of this costs. The kitchen wastebasket is empty, with a fresh, still-pleated bag inside of it. And in the middle of the kitchen table (which is now wiped clean, as is the espresso machine, as is the farmhouse sink) sits a small rectangular box tied with a chocolate-brown bow, and the wordsJOY BOMBSstamped across it in gold script. He unties the bow and lifts the cover of the box and there he sees a line of the miniature whoopie pies, six of them, each with a different-colored filling. Under the box, a note, written in Sam’s sloppy script (she, unlike Gertie, came of age when handwriting mandates had basically disappeared from school curricula):
Sorry about the mess. We will do better. Love from your two girls.
Women, he thinks, selecting a whoopie pie with vibrant pink frosting (raspberry, if he were to place a wager). First Amy, now these two. They will be the death of me, he thinks. And the life of me too.
Amy
On Monday, refreshed from a weekend at home—on Saturday they’d had their neighbors, Cathy and Bob, over for drinks by the firepit, and on Sunday they’d eaten breakfast at Amy’s favorite place, T’s—Amy spends her morning on the island but not at the rehearsal barn. Even though, as she said, she’s fine, she’smostlyfine, about the paycheck, she found over the weekend that it irked her more than she’d realized. She doesn’t want to deal with an overly solicitous Timothy, or a walking-on-eggshells Timothy, or, really, any Timothy at all. She has plenty of tasks to work on elsewhere.
In the early afternoon, while Amy is using the Wi-Fi at the library on Dodge Street to test the online ticketing system, she gets a call from the set builders. She steps outside to take it. There is a clog in one of the toilets in the men’s room, and no plunger to be found. That’s not even the worst of it. One of the guys thinks there might be a deeper problem in the pipes that will need to be fixed before the cast moves over to the theater for rehearsals in the beginning of August.A deeper problem in the pipessounds ominous.
“I’ll be over in a bit,” she tells the set builder.
“Also? One more thing. We’ve been seeing some mouse droppings backstage. And one of the guys said he thought he heard scampering.”
“Scampering?”
“Yeah. Like—mouse scampering.”
Deep breath. This is what she’s getting (over)paid for.
“Okay,” she says. “I’ve got some things to finish up here, but I’ll get over there by the late afternoon.”
You are kicking ass at this job, Amy, she tells herself later, as she drives to Island Hardware to buy a plunger and mousetraps, as she pushes open the door to the bathroom, as she holds her breath and approaches the toilet. You are kicking ass.
Twenty minutes later Amy marches out of the theater’s bathroom, carrying, in a plastic bag that she also bought at the hardware store, the plunger. There’s nowhere to store it in the bathroom so she’ll have to find another place. The set builders have left for the day, and the theater is quiet.
