SCITUATE 10/13/91
The red light on her answering machine was flashing.
She was still misty-eyed over what could only be a visitation from my grandmother. The choir at 11:30 Mass had suddenly sprang into "How Great Thou Art," a favorite hymn of hers. It was a good thing Debbie had not left early when her contacts began to irritate me.
"Hello, Miss Woman...such a sexy message, Miss Woman," the message began. Debbie recognized the voice of Madelyn, a former coworker she cashiered alongside at the grocery store. She assumed Debbie was working at the Ball & Chain, the old grind. She was on her way to Scituate and would call her tonight.
She played the message again. Had Madelyn left? Oh, no. Debbie did not feel like staying here, cooking and cleaning and reading newspapers all day.
She boiled water for more coffee. She attempted to do the huge pile of dishes in the sink, filling it with hot, sudsy water. When her bright red thumbnail broke after struggling with the milk ring inside the glass stolen from "The Red Lobster," she gave up.
The phone rang. It was Madelyn.
"Thought you left," Debbie said.
Madelyn had left a message on her answering machine, bursting into laughter about the Ball & Chain.
"Well, I didn't know I was so sexy!" Debbie shouted, in the empty, clean sunlit apartment.
Madelyn was going to Scituate to visit her parents. After a few more words, she said, Would Debbie like to come?
"Yes!" she said.
A horn honked. Debbie grabbed the Travel Section and was out the door, with her pocketbook, camera, and red nail polish.
An old man drove up the hill, passing the stop sign.
"What an asshole! Who taught him to drive? He shouldn't be driving!" Madelyn shouted, in between drags of her cigarette.
And with that, she clicked her tape deck. A country tune came on. "You're an asshole this morning, you'll be an asshole tonight, I have a feeling, you'll be an asshole the rest of your life."
They sang along and she shut it off. She clicked through one mainstream station after another. They stopped to get gas. Debbie thought of my hometown, and how she would be familiar with gas stations again soon.
A tour bus barged in front of them on the entrance to the highway. Click.
"Have you always been an asshole or have you worked at it your whole life...Someone even told me you have an asshole for a wife."
Click. Back to more mainstream stations. Mainstream disco. Mainstream rock and roll. Neil Young. Sugar Mountain. Old Man. Orange and russet and red touches in a highway foliage mostly still green.
Disco. Debbie thought of her dancing days, sometimes going out on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights. The pulsating beat. The flashing lights. The rotating silver sphere. What happened to her?
Madelyn told her about her oppressed childhood, the priest who couldn't talk to her when she lived with a Jewish man, the nuns who punished her and her sister for having a Catholic mother and a Protestant father in the days when Protestants and Catholics were taught to shun each other.
"You're lucky you're not scarred for life," Debbie said, as they drove by the austere white church across from the Cohasset town green. She drove along country roads that she knew Debbie would like.
Her parents had dinner waiting and they were served soon after they arrived in the driveway, greeting the hundred-year-old cat. Madelyn barraged her quiet mother and friendly father with tales of the highway dirvers, the asshole song, the way the judge on public TV had used the words "elongated penis," how men were always flashing Debbie. Her father showed Debbie various news clippings of maritime disasters in Scituate and the recent article about debt-laden Stop and Shop.
They burst into laughter about the asshole song, Madelyn singing all the words for the benefit of her parents.
"Relieves the tension," her father agreed.
"You just have a bag of tricks," Debbie giggled. "You have got to be the funniest person I ever met!"
"And I called his mother the other night, played my machine-gun tape and hung up. Then I laughed my ass off!" Madelyn informed her parents.
"She knew it was you," her father said quietly.
"Who else would it be?" Debbie burst into ridiculous laughter.
"Has she called you since?" her father said.
It was going to be dark soon. Madelyn's parents urged her to show Debbie Scituate.
"Oh, it's beautiful," Debbie gasped.
They were on top of a hill, overlooking cozy New England shingled houses and a cove. They drove along the small coastline, out onto "The Cliffs," beach grass and goldenrod, growing alongside the road. They stopped at a large parking lot, a shopping center on the water. Debbie stepped onto the rocks, feeling confident in the cold air and sat on a large rock on the shore of a small inlet, ducks floating behind her.Tall grass, a marsh lie beyond. Madelyn snapped a picture of her in long black boots, heavy navy sweater, aqua fringed scarf. Her face was light, her eyes barely lined with blue liner.
Natural.
They walked into a drugstore.
"You shouldn't have lent her money," Madelyn said. "Now you're up a creek. I think she gives it to one of her beaus to buy drugs and that's not right. She's a good person..."
"It's Dave," I said.
"Who is he?"
"Well, he's got a cute face. Looks young. He has kind of a slouchy look. Like a hood," she said.
The shy cashier smiled.
Madelyn fiddled with the new film on the counter, inserting it into the camera. By luck, a former roommate had left it behind, rewarding Debbie when she cleaned her room.
"Hope they come out," she worried.
She discovered the lighthouse, the buoy-laden white fence, the yellow and orange berries growing alongside it.
"We'll go to Minot Beach," Madelyn said. "There's Lover's Lighthouse." It flashed three numbers, the Morse code for "I Love You." How sweet, Debbie thought.
"I have to have a picture of it," she said. She trampled the long grass along the cement walkway, walking down to the railing and ducking to take a picture. So far away in the gray blue water, beyond the rocks and the beach. It looked small in the window of her camera.
She stopped the car at a beach, below the hill. She walked in the tall dune grass, finding a hidden path. She stooped to take a picture of this lovely, lonely beach, a small cove with waves stretching across the sand, slapping at the rocks below. Gray cottages in the distance. Silken, silver waves in the near dusk.
Onto the fishing pier. Lobsters, a gray sign with red letters said, from a distant dock beyond the boats. Across the boat-filled deserted harbor. Beside the large pond which now reflected the several houses, all in a row, in its clear pool.
"This is what contest winners are made of," Debbie said.
She liked the lovers' lighthouse and the lonely beach and the duck-filled cove the best.
