It was cowardly of her to be so weirded out by the dogfish. She badly wanted to recover her pleasure in paddling the kayak, the blissful feeling of command and control, and it was truly feeble to allow a stupid fish to spoil what had been just yesterday a revelation and a joy.
She said, “You can go.”
What she really meant was that if she saw Augie putting on his life-jacket and dragging his kayak down to the water, she might be unable to resist joining him. Impossible to explain that to him, but she hoped against hope that he’d somehow get it by osmosis or something.
He didn’t. “Well, maybe I ought to follow your example and do some homework of my own. What’s yours?”
Crestfallen, she said, “Oh, we’ve got this project for Humanities.”
“What’s the project?”
“It’s on heroes. We have to pick a hero and write about them. It’s not that big a deal, and it’s not due till Friday.” Maybe he’d pick up that cue.
“So who’s your hero?”
This wasn’t going at all as she’d planned. She shrugged and said, “Anne Frank,” trying to make it sound like the most boring topic on Planet Earth.
“Anne Frank!” He swung around on his piano stool. “Yeah, she’s a fine hero. You’ve read the diary, right? You remember where she writes, ‘My first wish after the war is that I may become Dutch’?”
“Kind of.”
“That really interested me — Anne’s impatience with her own Jewishness, her longing to be just Dutch. Lot of people have tried to gloss over that part, but I think it’s important. What’s your take on it?”
“I dunno.” She didn’t have a “take.” She wanted Augie to take her kayaking.
“Remember Mr. Dussel, the dentist? Praying all the time in yarmulke and shawl? That really turned Anne off. She didn’t want to be Jewish, she wanted to be Dutch.”
“I guess so.” Alida was more interested in stuff like Anne having her first period, and her boyfriend Peter, than in this Dutch-versus-Jewish business, which she hadn’t even noticed in the book.
“What I admire so much about Anne Frank? She thought for herself. She always had her own point of view, and could be kind of spiky, which gets up the nose of all the people who’ve tried to sweetie-pie her into the classic Jewish victim. I think she was a bit like you.”
Alida blushed. In a recurrent fantasy, she liked to believe that she was Anne Frank, and that the seventh floor of the Acropolis was the secret annex at Prinsengracht 263 in Amsterdam. It was amazingly discerning of Augie to have spotted the resemblance. She said, “You’re kidding, right?”
“Alida, I wouldn’t dare to kid around with you.”
She was trembling on the edge of admitting that she’d like to go kayaking, but Augie had to be the one to take the initiative. “Well, I guess I’d better go upstairs and do my homework….”
“You gotta do what you gotta do. Hey, I’d love to read what you write about Anne Frank, if you feel like showing me.”
So Alida went up to her room, raging at herself for her own sucky chicken-heartedness. Those stupid dogfish: she really, really, really hated them — especially in daylight, with the sun on the water, where she should have been.
“OH, MY MOTHER WAS — she is! — the bane of my life.” Lucy was driving Minna to Ebey’s Landing. “She lives in Florida now, Coral Gables, two blocks from the Miracle Theatre. She’s a big theater freak. When we lived in Montana, she started this amateur company, the Miles City Players, so she could play all the plum parts. She used to rent the high school auditorium and strut her stuff as Antigone, Hedda Gabler, Cleopatra, Blanche DuBois, and God knows who else. ‘Someone has to bring culture to the West’ was how she put it. She was born in England, and though she left when she was three, she’s always liked to pretend she’s a Brit. Nobody much ever came to her plays, except for family members, and we’d sit in that vast auditorium, listening to my mom roar out her lines to a nearly empty house. I doubt if anybody else in the West did more to put people off culture for good. If you saw her play Hedda Gabler, you’d want to go off and strangle Ibsen at birth. Of course I just saw it as my own humiliation, and I’d sit there beside my dad trying to make myself invisible.”
“You sound awfully hard on your mom,” Minna said.
“Oh, I am — and how. She was a lesson in how to be a bad mother. I was just about Alida’s age when she told me I had a personality like blotting paper. Can you imagine? I think of myself saying something like that to Alida, and I have to laugh.”
“Parents were different then.”
“None was more different than my mom. She gave my dad a hell of a time, too, for dragging her out to the sticks — which he didn’t. She was on a big nature kick when they moved, reading too much Thoreau and Gene Stratton-Porter, and by the time I was in junior high he and I were in a sort of defensive alliance against her. But I still visit with her once a year. Nowadays she creeps Alida out. She’s the original Wicked Witch of the East.”
“But she is your mother.”
“Yes, and you can see how I take after her, too. Tirading on like this, I sound exactly like her.”
Minna laughed. “I sometimes like to have a good tirade myself.”
“Who do you tirade about?”
“Well, it used to be the branch manager at the bank, but now it’s Augie, mostly. Poor Augie. You know how marriage is.”
“Actually, I don’t. I’ve never been married.”
“Oh, I thought—”
“No, Alida just sort of happened. All by herself — almost.”
“But she still sees her dad?”
“No. They never…got acquainted, you could say.”
“That must have been brave of you.”
“Or just plain selfish. Like I told you, I take after my mom.”
Minna patted her leg. “I think anybody who has a baby by herself is brave.”
“Thank you, Minna.” It was the wind in the open cockpit, surely, that caused the momentary prickle of tears in Lucy’s eyes. She blinked, dropped into second, and accelerated hard out of the bend. “My one big sorrow is that my dad isn’t around to see her now.”
At the crab pen — a makeshift pond sheltered by a tent of flappy plastic sheeting — Minna was as choosy as she’d been in the produce department. In the crowded shallow water, Dungeness crabs were clambering on one another’s backs and clawing fretfully at the air with their pincers. Guiding the crabber with his net, Minna pointed — this one, no that one, or the one over there. Lucy tried and failed to figure out her principle of selection; crabs were crabs to her, though Minna clearly knew otherwise.
They came away with four, two to a bag, and even with the engine turned on, Lucy heard the dry scrabbling of claws in the trunk. Could crustaceans — in darkness, out of their element, destined for the vat of boiling water — feel terror? She was glad to get the car in gear, step on the gas, and drown the noise.
Minna said, “Do you want to talk about your dad passing?”
“Yes. Yes, I think I do. The guy who shot him was crazy. He was being treated for schizophrenia but was off his medication. He had this lousy little twelve-section ranch, a mess of rusted-up old farm machinery. He’d come back from hunting when my dad drove up, was just taking his gun out of the gun rack in his pickup. I think my dad was invisible to him. All he saw was the Bureau of Land Management Jeep, the federal government, and foreclosure. That’s what he pulled the trigger on — I’m certain of it.
“But what hurt, almost as much as losing Dad, was the trial. They held it in Billings instead of Miles City where everybody knew my dad. They started out talking murder in the first degree, then whittled the charge down to involuntary manslaughter on grounds of diminished capacity.