“It seemed romantic—” She began scrubbing again as she talked. “An isolated island in need of a schoolteacher. I felt—” She was laughing at herself. “I felt like one of the pioneer woman, coming here. Besides—” She turned and looked at me, smiling at my incomprehension. “I had some notion that I would find myself here, as a poet, of course, but it wasn’t just that.”
The anger was returning. There was no good reason for me to be angry but my body was filled with it, the way it used to be when Caroline was home. “And did you find yourself here on this little island?” The question was coated with sarcasm.
She chose to ignore my tone. “I found very quickly,” she scratched at something with her fingernail as she spoke, “I found there was nothing much to find.”
I exploded. It was as though she had directly insulted me by speaking so slightingly of herself. “Why? Why did you throw yourself away?” I flung my rag into the bucket, sloshing gray ammonia water all over my ankles. Then I jumped from my chair and wrung out the rag as though it were someone’s neck. “You had every chance in the world and you threw it all away for that—” and I jabbed my wrenched rag toward Grandma’s face watching us petulantly from behind the glass.
“Please, Louise.”
I turned so that I would not see either of their faces, a sob rising from deep inside me. I pounded on the side of the house to stop the tears, smashing out each syllable. “God in heaven, what a stupid waste.”
She climbed off her chair and came over to me where I stood, leaning against the clapboard, shaking with tears of anger, grief—who knew what or for whom? She came round where I could see her, her arms halfway stretched out as though she would have liked to embrace me but dared not. I jumped aside. Did I think her touch would taint me? Somehow infect me with the weakness I perceived in her? “You could have done anything, been anything you wanted.”
“But I am what I wanted to be,” she said, letting her arms fall to her sides. “I chose. No one made me become what I am.”
“That’s sickening,” I said.
“I’m not ashamed of what I have made of my life.”
“Well, just don’t try to make me like you are,” I said.
She smiled. “I can promise you I won’t.”
“I’m not going to rot here like Grandma. I’m going to get off this island and do something.” I waited for her to stop me, but she just stood there. “You’re not going to stop me, either.”
“I wouldn’t stop you,” she said. “I didn’t stop Caroline, and I certainly won’t stop you.”
“Oh, Caroline. Caroline’s different. Everything’s always been for Caroline. Caroline the delicate, the gifted, the beautiful. Of course, we must all sacrifice our lives to give her greatness to the world!”
Did I see her flinch, ever so slightly? “What do you want us to do for you, Louise?”
“Let me go. Let me leave!”
“Of course you may leave. You never said before you wanted to leave.”
And, oh, my blessed, she was right. All my dreams of leaving, but beneath them I was afraid to go. I had clung to them, to Rass, yes, even to my grandmother, afraid that if I loosened my fingers an iota, I would find myself once more cold and clean in a forgotten basket.
“I chose the island,” she said. “I chose to leave my own people and build a life for myself somewhere else. I certainly wouldn’t deny you that same choice. But,” and her eyes held me if her arms did not, “oh, Louise, we will miss you, your father and I.”
I wanted so to believe her. “Will you really?” I asked. “As much as you miss Caroline?”
“More,” she said, reaching up and ever so lightly smoothing my hair with her fingertips.
I did not press her to explain. I was too grateful for that one word that allowed me at last to leave the island and begin to build myself as a soul, separate from the long, long shadow of my twin.
19
Every spring a waterman starts out with brand clean crab pots. Crabs are particular critters, and they won’t step into your little wire house if your bait is rank or your wire rusty and clogged with sea growth. But throw down a nice shiny pot with a bait box full of alewife that’s just barely short of fresh, and they’ll come swimming in the downstairs door, and before they know it they’re snug in the upstairs and on the way to market.
That’s the way I started out that spring. Shiny as a new crab pot, all set to capture the world. At my mother’s suggestion, I wrote the county supervisor who had graded my high school exams, and he was happy to recommend me for a scholarship at the University of Maryland. My first thought was to stay home and help with the crabs until September. My father brushed the offer aside. I think my parents were afraid that if I didn’t go at once, I’d lose my nerve. I wasn’t worried about that, but I was eager to go, so I took off for College Park in April and got a room near the campus, waiting tables to pay my way until the summer session when I was able to move into the dormitory and begin my studies.
One day in the spring of my sophomore year, I found a note in my box directing me to see my advisor. It was a crisp, blue day that made me feel as I walked across the quadrangle that out near Rass the crabs were beginning to move. The air was fresh with the smell of new growth, and I went into that building and up to that office humming with the pure joy of being alive. I had forgotten that life, like a crab pot, catches a lot of trash you haven’t bargained for.
“Miss Bradshaw.” He cleaned his pipe, knocking it about the ashtray until I was ready to offer to clean it for him. “Miss Bradshaw. So.”
He coughed and then elaborately refilled and lit his pipe.
“Yes, sir?”