Prick of the Spindle: Fiction: Frank: Tarpaulin

We washed the dogs in the morning, before the kids were up. The mosquitoes filled our heads with a moronic buzz that made us irritable and quick to the job.

It was just light. There were winching sounds coming from offshore as lobstermen hauled traps. Years pulling at wet rope had mangled their palms into sockets, their fingers into cephalic sprouts.

At least the dogs were complaisant, arching their backs in loyalty when someone padded past our lawn. And they didn’t bark when Annie dug sand out from between the pads of their feet.

“This wasn’t my idea,” Annie said. She was squatting astride the dogs, two black standard poodles. They lay sodden on the lawn, writhing belly up in the suds like seals on holiday.

Annie said, “Better break out the Legos again,” and sighed as she did whenever our kids stayed inside all day, needing something to do.

Then there was a period when we said nothing and nothing passed between us. The dogs were sopping after the final rinse. I watched Annie wring out their fur in handfuls. The sky hung heavy, the same gray opacity of the tarpaulin that I used to prevent the iron deck furniture from rusting. I had always been particular about weatherproofing parts of the house, but in those days the tarpaulin was a ritual, a silk sheet covering the curves of my favorite chair like an impermeable raincoat.

I had moments of grace. They were few but they were mine. Evenings I left Annie reading the bedtime stories to fetch the tarpaulin from the shed, tapering the plastic-coated canvas along the wrought iron arms.

But on the lawn that morning my heart went a little sinister. The iron chair had disappeared. The tarpaulin, tailored to the chair only hours before, lay draped along the deck.

The moment had its shocks, like the cold shoulder of a woman at a party, but I was angry enough. I stood still in the wake of the runny hose, my slippers swelling in the soft mash of grass. Later, I would pull at the tarpaulin, hard, my hands raw and full of the need to cover something new.

The fog rolled in an hour later, coming off the shore in milky wisps. Annie and I were both inside when it came, watching it fold in on us. It smelled of brine and rain, like unshelled clams. I was reminded of Annie’s body, the bone clean smell of her skin. In the few years since her last pregnancy, neglecting her snacks of Tam Tams and whole milk had slimmed her to meticulous bones.

Annie brewed the coffee in silence, rubbing her forehead where the mosquitoes had bucked, seized with charm for her blood. She was twenty-nine that year, ten years my junior. The real royalty of having three kids so young was the license to act older, the both of us, speaking clapperclaw when we spoke at all. Moments alone like this were spare.

We colored the coffee with milk and molasses because the sugar was gone, and we stirred one at a time in the tiny kitchen, trying hard not to collide or touch each other. The dogs underfoot slipped on wet paws that left lambent streaks in the white glare from the window. And we looked out to nothing but fog, the kitchen air getting colder with each passing minute.

A towel studded with dog hair lay draped on the doorknob and lifted a little whenever a gust came through the slat. “Shouldn’t you throw that towel in the wash?” I asked, breaking radio silence.

“Paul, don’t buy chocolate with nuts,” Annie sighed, petulant. “You know I don’t eat almonds.”

Annie stood with her back to me, smoothing calamine on her forehead. “I’ll tell you another thing right now,” I continued. “I am sick and tired of having to do everything around here. Flying up every Friday to spend the whole weekend doing chores is not my idea of a vacation.”

“I’m having coffee first, Paul. You try washing dogs when you’re half-awake,” Annie said.

The dogs moved across the floor to eat. We did not speak over the sound of their chewing and in a few minutes, I put on my coat and left.

Outside, I coiled the hose and walked the perimeter of the property. Our two-story house, from which the deck projects about six feet, faced a clearing of low-growing hedge, then ocean. Mallard Mountain ascended out there, scraping the cumulonimbus. A valley of fire-prone evergreen separated Mallard from the cranberry bogs. Once, Annie and I visited the bogs to pick. It was a lonely place teeming with larvae and meek smells, unlucky as a spinster aunt. We haven’t gone back.

The chair had disappeared. I thought maybe the kids or the babysitter had dragged it nearer the hose spout and the frog-eyed kiddie pool, but found only lobster buoys the kids collected from the beach and Super Soaker squirt guns smeared across the lawn.

I had to bat the mosquitoes away from the screen door before going back inside. The towel was still there, letting black dog hair dray about the kitchen in matted bunches. And Annie was gone. She had anchored a yellow square of paper to the table, the empty glass sugar bowl leaving a crusty ring around the words:

The note, so stark a menu of the day, unnerved me. Rarely was I caught eating breakfast alone, even on the island. Sometimes the year-rounders came over carrying puff pastry and homemade strudel in shopping bags. They might talk business in their Maine twang and buy one of Annie’s island landscapes, always kissing the kids before they leave.

Annie had long since stopped inviting people over. That summer, she was losing weight. She had developed the calorie fears of adolescents and when that did not suffice, she threw up. Terror of her belly, that it was doughy or soft like a sundae, consumed her.

She sat in her room instead, alternately drinking coffee and painting her nails verbena until the kids were up, when she was obliged to heat the griddle or pour the milk. I never went in her office; the smell of acetone and boiled milk and the plaster cast she set her figures in was enough to keep me nauseous and away.

Hoping that Annie might keep me company during breakfast, I burnt the toast how she liked it, fanning the scent up the steps to her office with yesterday’s newspaper but she never emerged. Nervous, I ate too quickly, every black chew a tribute to the economy of my isolation. The glare hitting the glass of the sugar bowl magnified the words on the note beneath it. Only then did I recognize the yellow as wallpaper from Annie’s office. She had gone up to get the tools for her missive, then come back to leave me a sugared cipher—hopeful, I thought—like a margarita glass edged with salt and lime.

During the ten months of the year we weren’t on an island in Maine moored in fog, I was at the Boston office unraveling the inside whorl of a cinnamon bun that my sales assistant, Todd Gendrow, could never finish. A fastidious man, Todd kept cellophane in the file cabinet. He would wrap the bun before depositing it next to the crisp smiles of Annie and the kids that burnished the edges of my trading desk.

Beginning in 1983, I spent ten years at First Boston managing taxable fixed income, a long phrase for bonds that are not municipal or tax-free: U.S. agency and corporate bonds, mortgage paper—Freddie Mac, Ginnie Mae. Some days I was remote, dealing bonds issued offshore by countries or corporations in their own currencies. Up to 1987 I was responsible for the largest block of preferred stock ever to trade on the New York stock exchange.

I had finished eating one June morning in ‘89 when I got Quebec on the phone. “Bob,” I began, balling the cellophane into a hard lump, “I consider this in the same vein as complaining to my mother-in-law about my wife’s behavior. You know I would never come to you with this recommendation if it weren’t important. As long as water continues to run downhill, Hydro Quebec will be the finest operating utility in North America, if not in the entire world.”

The floor was large and open with offices on the outside arranged by products: bonds, stocks, retail clients, and institutions (banks, insurance companies, state funds). All the desks housed multiple phones and squawk boxes that broadcast announcements specific to locations ( London, New York, Tokyo). Around lunch it got noisy and aromatic, like a honeycomb. Women traders and secretaries drifted in and out carrying flowers and chocolate from husbands or last night’s lover. When the window washers descended from twenty on their wires, the sky looked wet even if it wasn’t raining. We touched line boards primed with neon keys to various clients, specific trading desks in New York, and incoming calls. Multiple computer screens posted live market prices, running analyses of price histories, risk/reward, and moving averages in fast white type.

By ten thirty, Frank, the best trader on the floor and one of my pals, had tread down the desk hunting for salty snacks—pretzels, chips, peanut M&Ms. He liked to drop packages over my shoulder while I was circling on the squawk box. Circle is the term for buy. Bob had come through. The syndicate desk knew my voice.

“I can use 25 million hydros in Boston,” I said through the intercom, and it was in this fashion that the entire firm worldwide could hear how my deal was going.

New York confirmed, “Paul, you’ve got 25.” Then, I validated the bonds to the account, a second phone to my ear. I was calling Annie on the island to boast about how many more years I had shaved off toward early retirement.

Mid-morning business had always been my cue to call home. Right after Gordon was born, about seven years before, when I knew she was in her studio painting and in a good mood, I used to put Annie on speakerphone.

“What are you wearing?” I’d ask. Her girlish voice would answer in singsong:

“I’m wearing a skin-tight, gold lamé body suit.” I’d say, code words for evening drinks at the University Club where Annie would arrive in velvet and long sleeves, radiant black pumps at her heels.

I said the same things to my wife for years, hoping to relive the gag. But after Natalie’s birth, Annie was always steamrolling the humor. We never went out for drinks. Our subscriptions to Bon Appetit and Simple Living, and all those glossy magazines with stuffed mushrooms on the cover and tips on arranging the best shrimp cocktail, were years expired. I used to cook elaborate meals. Chicken kiev: very labor intensive. You wrap a chicken breast that’s been hammered flat around a butter and parsley mix. Pork loin stuffed with prosciutto, basted with Dijon mustard, then rolled in brown sugar. But Annie’s zeal for those meals, too, ran out, becoming idle like the stack of saved magazines that double as toilet reading material and craft paper for the occasional kiddie collage. To this day, I can’t take a shit without some grief over lost amusement.

For two weeks after we arrived, Annie spent most of the time in her office. I percolated the coffee alone, rubbed and calmed the dogs alone that first week to the sound of her upstairs routine in the morning.

When I got tired of listening to her void water, vomit, flush, I finally braved the scent and tiptoed up the wooden steps to her office. The door stood open. It was a Sunday. I was already packed for a midnight flight back to Boston. The kids squirted water guns on the lawn at each other; I could hear them laughing. They had hiked to the beach earlier with the babysitter, and brought back pieces of lobster trap wrapped in seaweed and pith, like salami hugging a melon slice. Annie sat silent at the typewriter, blowing coolly on her nails. I entered, stooped a little by the low ceiling, and leaned in to kiss her.

“My nails,” she protested weakly, “the kids,” and began applying each finger to the keyboard one virgin green oval at a time.

Mrs. Stein, a renter and one of Annie’s buyers, called in the stolen chair the morning it went missing. That summer she lived across from the Longhorns and saw Andy heft the thing from the bed of his four-by-four through his own front window—supposedly at his wife, Hannah.

Mrs. Stein claimed she happened to be sitting down to an early four a.m. breakfast by the window—toast with blueberry jam—when she witnessed an iron claw sail through glass and doorjamb, and that the ensuing crash caused the pineapple upside down cake she was baking for the Ladies’ Aid to collapse in the oven. The sheriff, Herman Gibbons, recited the details when he phoned later that morning.

Annie fielded the call. “Andy Longhorn stole your chair, Paul,” she boasted, her nails leaving green marks all over the princess phone. We were in the kitchen where she had descended for a third cup of coffee. I had been in the bathroom cleaning my face of breakfast when the phone rang. “Mrs. Stein recognized the chair from our porch. Andy threw it at his wife.”

“Hannah is in recovery. She got hit in the head during the fight. Glass or something. Your chair, a fist. I dunno. She needed stitches.”

“Okay, shame me Paul.” She poured the coffee and shook her head when I reached for the sponge.

“You’re making more work for me.” I said. The green came off in pieces. She shrugged mid-sip, fled to the freezer, and took the stairs two at a time to her office, a box of donuts under her arm.

Herman arrived twenty minutes later, the chair teetering on the back of his RV. He towed it up to the deck and placed it there, his carnal lobsterman hands gripping the iron lazily as if it were malleable as dough cakes. We talked.

He told me that when he stopped off at the Longhorns to investigate Mrs. Stein’s call, he found Andy passed out on the floor. The chair had demolished a first floor window and some of the doorjamb, and stood unhurt in the kitchen. Hannah sat half-asleep in the chair, a hematoma on her forehead, a lithe Dalmatian bitch buried under her forearm that barked whenever anyone got near. “Come away now Sassy,” Hannah had whispered, and the dog relented, allowing Herman to lift her up and into the ambulance where Ralph Junior dressed her wound.

Herman was reciting the story when my wife came out to the porch in her painting jeans, the box of donuts in her hands. I scowled, still angry about the phone, and as she turned to Herman, her back faced me again, the knobs of her spine menacing and just out of reach.

“Defrosted these—Herman, would you like one?” she said, ignoring me completely. He accepted, holding the pastry awkwardly in the palm of his hand.

“The thing I don’t understand, Herman,” I began, my hand on the chair, “and maybe you can help me with this: is why Andy would have taken my chair.” Herman took a bite, the sugar coating his lips as he spoke. We heard Annie shut and lock the inside door against the drafts.

“Did you ask him why?” I wondered aloud, shifting tactics. He looked at me dumbly, sugar the color of polished porcelain on his chin. “You know, why the chair. Why not part of a car. A muffler. A light fixture.” I sputtered. “A knife, goddamn it! Of all things to throw, why a chair and why mine?”

“What’s the problem?” he said. “You got your chair back, end of story.” He started to walk toward the RV. “How ‘bout this fog,” he said, and drove away before I could request to ask the culprit personally. But by then, Andy had been handcuffed and escorted off the island where rumor has it he now lives with his brother and courts women at will.

A couple hours later the kids got up to crease their limbs. The dogs heard them coming and slipped again, wrestling to stand up and wag their tails at the same time. I was in the kitchen scraping still, the phone off the hook and in my hands when their feet approached the door. Gordon was wearing pajamas with feet, and Charlie wore almost nothing at all. There were marks on Natalie’s cheeks from the bedding. Gordon caught the glossy edge of the donut box hidden behind the Bisquick and whined for one.

“Mo-ooooom,” they all appealed up the stairs. “Daa-aad won’t let us have a dooh-nut!”

I produced cereal and milk. Charlie and Gordon bickered over the elephant spoon. Natalie spilled her milk. They sulked and ate little. Natalie fell back asleep in my arms. I held her by the window, kissing the strawberry mark on her yogurt thigh. It was early yet. The sun smoked in fine haze outside the front window. The fog was thick; the dogs still hadn’t dried from the washing.

I pulled on my coat. The boys palled their bickering and dropped the spoon and we all got into the car.

At the general store, Rhonda kidded the kids about still being in their sleepwear. She wore an oversized T-shirt and no shoes. Half her teeth were missing.

We bought beets, M&Ms, small green beans, a bag of walnuts, a dozen eggs, and some bug spray. Natalie picked out the kind with a frog on the cover and brought it to the counter. As we left, Rhonda handed over the beets saying “Paul, you gotta cook them for a month of Sundays.” Then she winked at me.

The babysitter was waiting for us when we got back, looking piqued. “Sorry we’re late,” I said. “Had to stop off at the store for a few things.”

Inside, they made a game out of putting the stuff away. They yelled and flapped their arms around in the kitchen like ducks, shaking the walnuts and M&Ms. I didn’t mind the noise. The babysitter peered at herself in the microwave, doing hair flips and adjusting her necklaces. I was about to put her to work, suggest that she find a book to settle them down, but sent her away instead.

“Just write down the hours you would have been here and we’ll pay you later.”

“Sweet,” she said, grabbing her jacket and, without saying goodbye to the kids, closed the door and walked back to her bike.

I used to be funny. In my early thirties when Charlie was just born and Natalie on the way, I toyed with a stand up comedy routine that was never very popular outside the work crowd. I called myself “the gardener with sex privileges” and developed a bit about how I fired the cleaning lady because I got her pregnant. “I didn’t want to pay for the abortion,” goes the monologue. “And seeing her every week getting bigger and bigger would have made me feel guilty. I felt badly, so I fired her ass.” Annie used to call it cutting-edge humor. She said I could be so wry sometimes. Gardeners can’t fire cleaning ladies, she claimed, laughing. Those who were offended just didn’t get the joke.

In truth, I fired Kathleen because she never did a good job cleaning the Boston house. Her teenager, an asthmatic princess, was always getting sick and calling collect during naptime. I caught Kathleen reading one of Annie’s college diaries, and sweeping over things instead of under them. In early June, before we left for the island, I found the kids’ fruit roll ups stuck to the floor under their beds. It took me an hour with a chisel to get them off and the work chased deep scratches into the floor that had to be filled with plastic wood, then stained mahogany.

Refurbishing the kids’ bedrooms was so much bother that from then on I vowed to practice prevention. “Risk versus reward,” I told the kids over pizza one dinner. Annie cut Natalie’s serving into choke-free slices, saying nothing. “We’re going to the island soon so I don’t want any more messes. Your mother and I agree that I spent a lot of time cleaning. Moratorium on candy in your rooms. Do you understand?” They half-listened to the decree, enough to ask what moratorium meant.

“No, honey. Quite the opposite. It means like the thing has died and you’re in mourning for it,” I said.

“Candy will never die!” Gordon yelled mock-heroic, forking away one of Natalie’s slices. She squealed at the invasion.

“Leave them on your plate sweetheart, there’re there just for color,” Annie said, throwing everyone a violent look as if to contradict my definition, which she knew I knew to be wrong.

For a minute, the kids chewed in silence sensing a break in understanding, until Annie got up to dish out dessert, humming a tune that everyone else seemed to know.

Herman had been gone a good three hours when it began to thunderstorm the way my shortwave radio predicted. I was pretty happy hearing the drops drum the sides of the house. The vinyl siding would not need to be power-washed until July, maybe early August.

So there was less to do than I expected. I thought about putting an end to the faucet drip. I would need elbow room for this. The kids were still stomping around the kitchen being goofy, dangling themselves off my arms like coat hangers. For lunch I had fried eggs. We ate them with oomph. There was toast but Annie stayed upstairs. When she did come down at noon, I was rubbing all three faces free of egg and drool. After the kids were clean I said to Annie, maybe she should eat something. She got crabby and shot me a look I couldn’t read. I toyed with the idea of kissing the transparent skin of her knuckles, then thought better of it. “There are plenty of eggs if you change your mind,” I said instead. We tickled the kids together until they tuckered and left us for their Legos.

A long nap got in the way of fixing the drip. It was dinnertime when I woke, hungry. I couldn’t wait for July yeast and pasta salad, perpetual and rich. Sometimes Annie made this killer guacamole washed in gin and juniper berries. We ate it chilled with crunchy things that accord her diet: pork rinds and salted celery sticks. There would be ice chips and tiny umbrellas fluttering in our margaritas.

The kids were having quiet time when I went downstairs, a break from the kitchen racket. Natalie colored silently in her room. As an infant, she used to spend whole mornings with a single item, content with a couple of magazines, a pair of socks. Annie had made her a dozen squiggle templates, huge poster size problems with overlapping lines. Natalie sat for hours, filling in the voids with separate colors, stopping only to scurry upstairs to her mother when she ran out of green.

“Hypothermic,” she replied. She cooked dinner while I made a fire in the living room, stepping around the Legos where Gordon and Charlie sat building ships, thrones to the tiny Lego men inside.

“That’s nice of you, Gordon,” I said absently, mashing the newspaper into balls. Then I lit the kindling, closed the stove, and went to the shed for more firewood.

I think her name was Karen. She was a senior partner at Deloid & Dersh who had an office to kill for: a corner tenement overlooking the Charles River. I had caught her eye in the cafeteria the previous spring, when we both saw waiters carrying handfuls of coleslaw into the next room where a wedding reception was taking place. It must have been around Easter because we went up to her office afterwards, where we drank coffee and ate stale Cadbury eggs. The eggs came in a package of a dozen. Her secretary, a bearded middle-aged woman named Connie, interrupted too many times to steal one or two, always rearranging the remaining eggs before leaving us. I asked if this was normal.

“They must be balanced,” said Karen, pointing to the eggs in a triptych of gold paper. “Connie wants them symmetric.”

I left after that. Connie’s unannounced visits made me feel like I was being watched, as if by something predatory, and my mouth tasted like something had died in it. A trip to the lounge with the fellows put me at ease.

“Peanut or pussy?” asked Frank. “Which would you prefer?” The guys laughed knowingly.

“Who’s in the mood for an organ implantation?” I asked, code name for a steak so big it could double as a second heart. We ate downtown. It was expensive but I offered to pick up the tab, a little too ceremoniously, both food and drink. I returned to my desk disturbed, realizing that I’d led them on.

“So this is what guilt feels like,” I said to myself, a curious infidelity pushing light and imponderable against my ribs, like angel food cake or something you buy in a vending machine to pass the time.

On Saturday nights, Annie and I sat outside to admire the mountain and drink bourbon sours while the kids clowned around with the babysitter in the backyard. Day-trippers stopped on their way to the late ferry. They leaned their bikes against the pines to marvel with us. “Is there a better view?” they would ask, adjusting their helmets and fanny packs. We pretended we were renters.

Mrs. Stein visited once, arriving just as the sun slid behind the mountains. There were strawberry shortcakes and vintage bottles of gin stowed in the deep basket of her bicycle.

“Hullo Charlie, Nattie, Gordy, how are you—this is yawr father’s stuff, don’t touch it,” she instructed the kids, motioning to the booze. When they ran off and I thanked her for the gift, she apologized to me for leaving her husband at home.

Annie and I were friendly enough with Mrs. Stein that night, but too polite. Within the hour she was openly describing her dreams to us. I remember these were anxious dreams, many of them about children. In the worst, her grandson Michael tumbled from the tallest rock on Preble cove, cracking his head open like an egg into the silt below.

“Say,” exclaimed Mrs. Stein suddenly, “doesn’t my dream remind you of Hannah’s hematoma?”

Annie chose that moment to get up for another drink, passing her nails hard across my knee to steady herself.

I knew then that my wife detested Mrs. Stein for being desperate and a little provincial, for using our porch to traffic her tetchy gossip.

I nodded absently and she immediately lapsed into rumor: how the black and blue was dripping into Hannah’s face, her eyes, and my-oh-my, all the weight, all the monstrous heavy weight she had lost. She was still talking about Hannah when Annie emerged from the house, new beer in hand.

“Yes, Hannah is still rather pear-shaped,” Annie interrupted, her voice an open chime on her third drink, and loud.

“What ah you now, dear? Five? Seven pounds?” asked Mrs. Stein. Annie giggled, unfazed. “You used to have that pregnant glow about you.”

Annie looked at her nails and said, “I spose the sun has gone down on those days.”

“What with this fog, Paul, I don’t know where the summer’s gone. I have to clean. Feels like just yesterday I was working the white elephant at the fair and now, I have to go buy a broom.”

“You know my motto, Mrs. Stein,” I said. “It should hurt when you buy something, and hurt when you sell it; in between you will probably make some money.”

We laughed, a little drunkenly, and the women gripped their glasses. When Mrs. Stein spoke again, her hands were clasped on the chair arms.

Annie didn’t look at me, slid a finger into my hand. I sensed a shared chagrin. When the old woman’s screed ended, we all said good night. Mrs. Stein stood, a little shaken, still clutching the chair. Her eyelids drooped, wet. From fog or tears I could not tell. I was covering the furniture when she finally took her leave, electing to walk instead of ride her bike the half-mile down the road.

It was suddenly very dark. The kids were up past their bedtime. Annie began hurrying them into PJs. I paid the babysitter upstairs, where my wallet was, finished my drink, and then I was ready, weirdly ready. I was ready to descend the stairs, barrel through the door and rip off the tarpaulin, dismantling the crinkled green sky I had made only moments earlier to reveal our metal furniture like white, luminescent flesh.

Our last night on the island in late August, I killed a sparrow. He was nestled beneath the restored iron chair when I removed the tarpaulin in the morning, his neck askew. I was sick on the ground, not knowing how long he had been there. Annie came from the house with the portable.

“Because it’s been so long that she knows they’re going to be long-haired. Paul? Paul, are you sick? You’re green. It’s the coffee,” she said, helping me into the iron chair. “I didn’t make it strong enough.”

I watched her pack the car, the kids’ heads lolling unconscious as she strapped them into their seats. I shook my head; letting her think it was the coffee was better than showing her the dead bird and what it did to me.

When we got to the mainland, I was sick in the public bathroom. I let Annie drive. The sun was steaming through my window, and the smell of sulfur from the turnpike bled through the open sunroof. I remember the radio warning of poor ozone, less common when so many believed global warming a hoax. The anchor spoke in a light tenor, an androgynous tickle in the static. An hour later, Gordon took the front seat from me, his thumb in his mouth. I slept in the back, the dogs close at my thighs.

It was raining when we arrived home in Boston. Everything stowed on top of the car got soaked. We kept the dogs in the kitchen until they were dry enough not to leave wet spots on the couches.

The following morning, I dropped the dogs at the groomer’s, stopping next at the physician’s office for bloodwork and a physical. The nurse, a sag-breasted matron whose name I didn’t catch, kept telling me to relax as she clenched my elbow, probing my flesh for a good spot to stick.

“Have you had anything to drink today, Mr. Hallick?” she accused, patting the pale skin vigorously with iodine til it shone orange.

“Well, your veins are collapsing. You need to drink more fluids.” She put her hands to her mouth when she spoke and murmured when she finally found a vein. I said nothing, cross at her imperious needle, the offhand way she was penetrating me. “Coffee doesn’t count,” she continued, shrugging my drawn blood into the appropriate tubes. “Too much is bad for your heart.”

At least Arlene was happy with the improvement in the dogs’ coats. She could tell, she said when I returned to Poodles ‘N Friends later that afternoon, that we had been washing them. I told her we only used superior suds and she laughed. Her teeth were a winsome disaster, crooked and white, like a picket fence painted a fine acrylic. Even in the heat, I was glad I had pulled on a sweater to hide the bruise of iodine.

I’m retired from bond trading since ’93, a whole year ago come this June. I’ll be forty-three in December but the longer I push back the date of my deferred compensation, the more I get when the time comes. Generally I do projects. I lost a piece of weight, almost thirty pounds, on the Atkins diet. I take an active interest in the kids, carpools during the week and on Thursdays Natalie attends ballet on Shoulder Road. Gordon just started sixth grade with Ms. Farnsworth, whom I met at parent teacher conferences this past Thanksgiving. Annie had a show in town so I went to the teacher meeting alone. We sat at the small tables discussing Gordon’s ADHD.

“Is he as rambunctious at home?” Ms. Farnsworth wanted to know. Her long brown hair and precise features reminded me of someone, a woman I once dated in college.

Mornings differ little. Annie takes her coffee black now as part of her dark period or blue phase or whatever. Caffeine at that hour gives me arrhythmia. My doctor recommends dandelion root, anything decaffeinated, along with selenium and various other vitamin supplements, but I still have the real thing now and then, sitting with Annie at the counter, shoulders touching. It’s how I’ve come to understand my age, hearing my pulse quicken its step and timbre, with every sip of carb-free hazelnut creamer.

Otherwise, life happens in slow motion. Annie teaches pottery lessons every day to kids who trip on the front rug mumbling hellos and never meet your gaze, their hands forming small animals and coiled vases that Annie fires every Saturday in the kiln she had installed in her studio. I ask the mothers of these children to please park on the street and leave their dogs at home. They forget from week to week, of course. There is always a nameless magenta Plymouth or a green Ford Escort Wagon blocking the exit whenever I need to go out and retrieve a child from school or a play date.

We eat Chinese every Monday night for football. I have the number on speed dial in the car and the boys and I call in our order after soccer practice: mu shu, a couple orders of dumplings, lo mein, and sweet green beans for Annie. These days I feel less responsible for her happiness. She has her work, the kids. She perches on the couch to eat, her long fingers studying one stalk at a time.

On Tuesdays I’m always reheating leftovers when the new cleaning lady comes over. Her name is Cecelia. Her thoroughness puts my scrubbed tiles to shame. She finds things to clean that I didn’t even know we owned. Antique mirrors, old family albums, the udder of Natalie’s crib full of dry weave and webbing.

“It needs dusting,” Cecelia says, always checking with me to see if Natalie is sleeping before dragging the fancy Italian vacuum, five hundred dollars at Sam’s Club, up to the nursery.

I’ve been going bird hunting with the guys up in Vermont. Frank knows a guy at a hunting lodge willing, for a little financial advice, to treat us to the weekend in separate rooms. The trip takes three hours by car; to arrive for seven on Saturday morning, I pack my guns and leave the house at four a.m., the east sun at my back. I like to drive alone at that early hour, the safety unlocked on all three guns. Only me, I tell myself, tossing the BB-sized ammo for the 20-gauge into the glove compartment. No other man will ever smell the morning breath of a child of mine.

Inside the woods we feel dispensed, without mirror. There is something buoyant in a hunting area, nutritive. The brush of fern like tissue on my leg, the sticks up to our waists impaling our skin, the guns lodged immobile in every armpit like prosthetic limbs. The guys bring beef jerky, peanut butter sandwiches, and baloney wrapped in wax paper. Frank spends twenty minutes at the lodge vending machine, pocketing salty snacks.

The woods are quiet. Besides our breath, there is only the distant cough of birds, and the swish swish of rustling plastic ushering from Frank’s pocket as we move. When the swishing sends pheasants into hiding, we cannot complain because Daisy, the hunting dog, is Frank’s bitch, a chocolate-colored Brittany spaniel that he began training as a pup six years prior with mixed success. She raises hell at home.

“Next time she shits in the house, the wife’ll throw me out,” he jokes, chewing a peanut.

But I wasn’t thinking of Daisy’s temperament when I got my first kill. Usually the dog sniffs out an area, then points, standing stock still, paw upraised, to show she has found a bird. But Daisy wasn’t pointing when the bird came flapping right over our heads, blocking the mid-day sun. Most of the birds released for hunt that weekend were ugly brown hens, but this fluke was male, a white ring around his neck. I saw the sloping rainbow in his tailfeathers—beautiful, translucent, reflective—as I fired and caught him through the heart in a single round. Daisy leapt at the sudden shot and within minutes, death still in the air, she had the bird in a heavy clench and wouldn’t let go.

“Love your bird, Daisy!” Frank kept shouting, and “Whoah” meaning don’t hurt it, stop—but he had to wrestle my kill away from her. By then, the boy body lay unsalvageable on the cold ground, flesh mottled, feathers nicked and lusterless. We had to leave the carcass for the coyotes. “Sorry, Paul,” said Frank, “I don’t know what got into her.”

“Uppity bitch,” the guys joked, commiserating the loss. Jake donated half a baloney on rye, a toast to my next kill. “Hopefully more successful,” he said.

I sat in the short grass under a spruce and ate it, every bite leaving voids in the sandwich flesh.

I want things for my kids. They’re young yet. They have sinuses to clear, orange juice to drink, elements of character to plagiarize—mine, my wife’s, colors of the country that feeds and entitles their speech. So just last year I set up Blake cottage into a trust for them, telling friends and family in our holiday letter how Mallard Mountain from our deck will continue to trump all else you see on the island through the generations—better even than the totem pole the Raffertys made out of buoys and erected at the end of Frogbrook road this past summer.

The kids went nuts when they saw the pole, riding their bikes around the helm. Back at home, Gordon got out the glue gun and his beach treasures, begging me to help fuse driftwood and lobster traps to build one. At first, I shrugged him off. But then Charlie diagrammed it with construction paper and Natalie preened a plaster doll to put on top. She brought it outside to the chair show me. The features aligned, and hair perfectly tousled, I could tell that Annie had helped her. The iron was strong under my legs. I found myself angrily reminding the whole family that compared to the natural, everlasting beauty of Mallard Mountain, the totem was just a novelty. And once the hurricanes whipped up from the south, the thing would creak and topple over, buoys sinking point first into the ground to be shamed by the fall sun.

Sarah Frank attended the University of Chicago for college and grad school. Her author interviews have appeared in Otium, (http://otium.uchicago.edu) an online literary magazine she co-founded, and she has work forthcoming in Chopper Poetry Journal. The first draft of "Tarpaulin" was written for entrance into a longer manuscript class when she was twenty-one. She would like to thank every friend, teacher, and family member who has read the story since, and offered generous comments and support.