3
AT THE Monday-morning editorial meeting a week and a half after publication, Art Lindsay announced that my column had riled many readers and he was thrilled. It was provocative in the perfect way: it upset subscribers but not advertisers. He had received twenty-five letters over the past ten days and at least as many phone calls. Responses were still arriving.
“I’m astonished,” I said, which was a bit of a lie. Art broke up laughing. That was a shock. Until now, I’d witnessed only faint chuckles. But his laugh was hearty; the smooth cheeks in his solemn moon-shaped face folded into deep pleats, indicating that sometime in the past (possibly before his marriage, although that assumption may reflect only my prejudice) joy had played a role. “Lily is astonished,” he told the staff, and they all laughed with him.
“I didn’t exactly expect—”
He waved me off like a pesky fly, and then shambled to the cooler, as he did many times a day, to down a miniature paper cup of bottled spring water.
The column had poured out of me. My only hesitation was whether to include the word “exciting” in describing our trip to the emergency medical center. I deleted and inserted it several times before letting it remain. A reminder of our detour. But innocuous. Harmless. Like a secret message in a Beatles song. A kind of “Hello, remember me?” I couldn’t explain the dig, however—that McKee hadn’t used good judgment when he greased up Baby. Or the popcorn business. McKee had actually said that deer like acorns and pumpkins, not acorns and popcorn.
At the time I was typing, I had been distracted by Deidre, who was becoming a permanent fixture. She walked home with Sam after school and stayed until dinner. On the weekend, she remained through the evening. Only once had Sam gone to her house, three blocks away. “Too crowded,” he said. I could not adjust to seeing her and recoiled every time I had a sighting.
She reminded me of a character in the Oz books whose arms and legs were sticks tied together at the joints and who, at least as captured in the illustrations, was always in the middle of an awkward, uncoordinated stride. Deidre usually grunted some Klingon at me before escaping to Sam’s room.
Always up for a mental leap into disaster, I imagined myself the grandmother of Sam and Deidre’s child, born sixty-six inches long, gender unknown, but irresistible nonetheless because heartbreak was guaranteed. Until now, however, I had observed only one instance of physical contact between them. Late on Saturday night, craving some chocolate bits, I’d encountered them side by side in the kitchen, inspecting the open refrigerator. Sam had his head cocked, resting it precariously on the bony shelf that was Deidre’s shoulder. He looked peaceful.
When I was writing my column, in the glassed-in porch I’d appropriated as an office, I could see them through the doorway, lounging on the living room couch. Deidre’s stilt legs stretched across the coffee table, her gigantic boots hanging over the far side, floating free. They were watching Xena, the Warrior Princess, a long-haired buxom type who did forward flips in a leather gladiator outfit. Deidre’s laugh sounded somewhere between a machine gun and a stuttering motor. I looked up from the computer to see them roaring, while they slapped great handfuls of popcorn into their mouths. So I typed “popcorn” instead of “pumpkins” by mistake. And left it.
It crossed my mind that McKee might call to correct me, although it turned out deer did eat popcorn. I had mail to prove it.
Art brought the letters in personally every day. “Dogs, deer, police, you hit all the winners,” he said as he dropped a few more on my desk.
The police chief, Ben Blocker, had composed a formal protest, which the newspaper printed. “On behalf of the entire Sakonnet Bay Police Department, I object to the contents and implications in the article, Big City Eyes, October 8th, by Lily Davis.” He listed three points.
1 1. Sergeant McKee took all necessary precautions in rescuing Baby.
2 2. Any resulting injuries were unfortunate but the consequence of Mrs. Davis’s standing in the wrong place at the wrong time.
3 3. The police responded swiftly and appropriately to the minor accident involving Gavin Sturges. At no time does the police department value animal life over human life.
The chief also registered a less civilized complaint to Art by phone, threatening to bar me from the police log. Art beckoned me into his office so I could observe his end of the conversation. He arched his eyebrows dramatically as he listened, shook his head feigning dismay, made a few disapproving sounds, then reminded the chief that I was from New York City.
Having been the picture of the week, standing in front of Claire’s Collectibles with my foot up on a bench, unobtrusively revealing my butterfly bandage, I was now a minor local celebrity. Occasionally people poked each other when I walked by. While I was buying toothpaste at Bright’s Pharmacy, the saleswoman told me that she loved my column, it was really fun. When I was stopped at a light, a man knocked on my car window. I lowered the glass and he said, “Are you a left-winger?”
“What?” I responded, floored not only by the question but by the term, which seemed archaic.
“For your information,” he said, butting his face very close to my own, “Tom McKee saved my wife’s life when she had a heart attack.”
For the next few blocks, I drove without knowing where I was going, right past my destination, The Sakonnet Times. I had not expected to be thought of as anti-McKee.
Coral Williams, owner of the Comfort Café and president of Bambi’s Friends, a group dedicated to protecting white-tailed deer, refused to accept payment for my morning coffee. She told me that she often fed deer microwave popcorn and had named every doe that visited her lawn.
I received several protests from the anti-deer people, reiterating that deer did not fall in love and that my insistence on anthropomorphizing them was contributing to the community’s inability to deal with the serious deer overpopulation problem.
At the editorial meeting, while he gloated about the mail, Art passed around a box of apple crumb muffins, his first complimentary breakfast offering since I’d worked for the paper. This weekly meeting, about as formal as it got there, was held in Art’s second-floor office in the small building, which had been someone’s house a century ago, and was the most rundown structure on Main and the only one that faced backward, into the parking lot. Whether from being hand-hewn or from enduring decades of damp, salty seaside weather, floors had slanted, walls had buckled. No architectural right angle could be found in the place. In the shabby downstairs foyer, Peg, the receptionist, answered the phone, doubled as a copy editor, and handled subscriptions with relaxed cheerfulness. “I’ve been here forever,” she’d say by way of introduction. Every day she wore the same cardigan sweater over her shoulders and the same bubble-gum-pink wedgies, with or without thin beige socks.
Design and page layout occupied the former dining room, still wallpapered in faded pink roses, and advertising had the living room. The kitchen, unchanged from the forties, had an ancient round-shouldered refrigerator, where Art stored the bag lunch he brought from home. All day, staffers poured themselves coffee from the only modern appliance, an electric drip coffeemaker that sat on the chipped tile counter.
For editorial meetings, the full-time reporting staff—Bernadette the intern, Rob (just out of college), and I—rolled our matching pedestal chairs out of our shared office and through the narrow hallway, bumping over thresholds and banging into walls, to Art’s slightly less musty space. We sat around him in a semicircle, notebooks on our laps, mugs of coffee on the floor next to our feet. This morning, we also had our muffins. We
