She’d thought that Craig and I could be friends. She used to have a lot of male friends whom she didnt sleep with.
29 These days have been cold, the hills wearing hats of fog.
The whitecaps pushing out the Narrows yesterday morning. The sea starts here. Unleashing waves that will rush to Portugal.
The first strawberries ripened this morning. I gave one to Iris on a small white plate.
Feeling still so exhausted, beaten down. Max said, It’s good to see you up in spirits. Last seven times I’ve seen you youve been in misery. I thought you’d forgotten how to be happy.
I feel worn out and unworthy. Not being strong enough. I had wanted so much to be big.
30 I ask Maisie if she sometimes found herself in an uncomfortable silence with Oliver. Often, she says, we’d be doing different things in the same room, but it was understood we were together.
But what if you were eating a meal together.
Maisie: I can remember that happening, but it’s normal for a couple – especially if they live together – to run out of things to say. Eventually you know all about them. I asked Oliver once if he felt uncomfortable with anything, and he mentioned the mealtimes. At first he’d tried to fill in the lapses of conversation, but then he realized our main reason for eating was to have food. And then he was okay with it. The way I see it, a dinner party is when you converse, and dialogue is the prime reason for being together – but regular meals are just to eat.
I tell her Oliver’s having a hard time of it.
Maisie: I’ve heard.
I confess my despair. That my journal is full of it, and Maisie says, Well, Gabe. You have to write the low points as well.
31 It’s the weekend of the food fishery, and Max invites me out.
Max: A pound a foot will hold a boat.
Meaning a forty-foot boat needs a forty-pound anchor.
He says that when he was young, he’d ask his father how he knew when to turn in to port in the fog. You couldnt see anything and they didnt have sonar. His father said, Well, son, I’m on my second chew now When that’s gone, we turn in.
He was given his father’s boat. Max has put in sonar. All the fishing boats have a metal diamond on a mast that acts as a radar reflector.
We can see the cod sitting on the sonar screen, a white mass in the blue water above the orange seabed. The caplin are just below the surface. Out on the water, the puffins are feeding on the caplin.
We throw over our jiggers. We let the line down to the bottom, and then haul in about four feet. Then we jig.
I get one quick and haul it up. It’s just a dead weight. It takes thirty seconds of hauling to bring it to the surface. I see the cod’s white belly and the arc of its black, freckled side. I’ve hooked it through the gut and it flops over the boat rail. About four pounds. It wrenches its tail up in agony.
Max jigs a sculpin. It’s yellow and green and spiny. He beats it against the side of the boat until it falls off the hook.
Those are the only fish we catch.
The cod are full of caplin, Max says. They are little purses full of silver coins.
August
1 On our way to Gallow’s Cove. Max and Lydia and me. We stop at a Mary Brown’s to eat fajitas. We sit in the parking lot to eat them. We look over the lot and across the road and over another paved lot to a Sobeys. There are about three acres of bare property that caters to automobiles. Fajitas perched on our high, bent knees. Then we wipe our fingers in the new grass and drive on.