Tuesday

I read poetry at the Rodin museum, moving from bench to bench, following the shade.

Miriam's Story #1

Miriam

Miriam usually sat in back of Charlie’s when she was on her lunch break. The back door opened on the pier, and the back steps were sandwiched between a dumpster and the pier railing. If she leaned a little bit, she could see the water below her, sloshing against the pilings. It wasn’t much to look at, though, with all the boat fuel, some trash, and sometimes a dead fish or part of one.

Miriam reminded herself that she had to run to the bank after work. When she ran errands on her lunch break, she always felt rushed and tense. There wasn’t enough time, in half an hour, to get anything done or buy anything to eat besides food from Charlie’s, and anyway that was free. She’d be foolish not to eat there.

Today she had a salad, a variation on the Norma salad, named after one of the regulars who was on the Atkins diet. Grilled chicken, bacon, swiss cheese, salad greens, ranch dressing. Back when the Norma salad was just made for Norma, the cooks put more effort into it, cubing the chicken and cutting everything else into small pieces that mixed together perfectly with the dressing. Now that it was an actual menu item, they just sliced the chicken and laid it over the greens. They always groaned when Miriam asked them to make her a Norma salad the old way, but they did it. It was one of the perks of working there. She substituted provolone for the swiss cheese, too. The restaurant went though provolone faster, so it was fresher.

It was hard to balance the styrofoam box of salad on her knees and spear the chunks of chicken without knocking the whole thing over. Salad wasn’t the fastest thing to eat, either. But it was what Miriam liked best from Charlie’s menu. She wasn’t too picky about food in that she could eat anything that was put in front of her. But she had certain things she always went back to. Things she didn’t have to think about too much. She had tried everything when she first started working at Charlie’s in high school. She had wanted to be able to tell the customers what was good and what wasn’t. But the Charlie’s customers were rarely interested in her opinion. Either, like her, they knew exactly what they wanted, or they were tourists who might ask for an opinion and then go with the chowder or the lobster roll anyway.

She wondered what her mother was up to today. She was pretty sure Lydia would want to run off to the island as soon as possible, after that episode at Cubby’s last night. It would be nice if her mother could be a bit more sensitive, or at least care that Cubby was. Even though Cubby was her older brother, Miriam had spent a good part of her life calming him down, talking him out of being upset about little things that didn’t matter. This was not a little thing. Miriam wondered if her mother had given the house to Taylor just out of spite, or if she really felt he should have it.

Sunday Afternoon

Sarah shows me her paintings. The sun on a gold border. Suggestion of mountains. She buys paint by the quart, by the gallon. Everything’s bright: her cheeks, her eyes, the light on paint. This is art.

Bonfire

Burning old parts of the house. I see beams of sunlight in the smoke.

Orono

Spiderwebs catch the sun, all along the bridge's railing. The river is green on both sides, the water dark and calm.