Bunny stared at the bench nearest the ferry’s cabin door. An island couple sat there cooing at their baby. “I don’t want to go to the Southbys’, Ralph,” she said.
Her husband stared at his crossword puzzle.
“There’s always someone at the Southbys’ who’s eaten testicles.”
Ralph filled in a line of crossword squares. “No one at the Southbys’ has eaten testicles, Bunny.”
“That friend of Muffy’s did. The archeologist. He ate them in Mongolia.”
“Those were sheep testicles.”
“Did I say they weren’t?”
“Wow. We’re in a mood this morning, aren’t we.”
The baby in the forward seat began to wail. The glance Bunny gave her watch told her the ferry had forty minutes until it reached the island’s dock. She resigned herself to forty minutes of wailing. “You didn’t talk to Blair, Ralph. You’d be in a mood yourself if it was you who talked to him.”
Blair Southby was a friend on the Maine island that was the ferry’s destination.
“What did Blair have to say that was so terrible, Bunny?” Ralph was contemplating a clue. He tapped his pencil on his chin.
Bunny maintained a resolute silence.
“Not testicles, I trust.”
“Very funny, Ralph. Very, very funny.”
Because Bunny spoke through clenched teeth, Ralph knew better than to venture further witticisms.
* * *
It was May 22, 1971. Ralph and Bunny were two weeks early returning to their summer house in Maine. They’d come partly in answer to Blair’s call about a birthday dinner. Blair’s wife, Mary, who was to celebrate her 75th. The dinner alone would not have brought them from their home in Lincoln two weeks early. Blair, on the phone, had told Bunny their summer-people friends, the Halvorsons, had been robbed.
“They hit us, too,” Bunny told Ralph when she’d told Blair goodbye.
Ralph rolled his eyes. “What do we even have that anyone would want to steal, Bunny?”
Off the ferry and parked in the lot the ramp shared with Parkhurst’s General Store, Ralph and Bunny waved greetings to Louse Townsend. Their gangly friend bore down on them at once. “You could see where they set the highboy down,” she said. “They had to rest before they got it to their skiff.”
Ralph’s fuzzy eyebrows arched. He asked, “What highboy, Louise?”
“The Halvorsons’. It was the Halverson’s the robbers hit. God knows what all they took. Marge is sick. All she’s done the last two weeks is talk to the police.”
The Billingslys’ ponderous Land Rover came inching off the ramp. Bunny kept her eye on it. In her imagination, somebody was dragging furniture out of her own summer home.
“No one feels safe now,” Louse said in in high pitched whine.
A bray from further up the lot kept Bunny from having to hear more. She swung her gaze to a knot of youngsters swaggering down the landing’s slope. The only one she recognized was Muffy, the Southbys’ daughter. Muffy clung to the arm of a long-haired youth in a fringed vest. It was he who’d brayed. His obnoxious noise had set the fringes on his leather vest swaying. He wore no shirt, so his flapping vest revealed the brown nipples on his hairless chest.
Louise held Ralph captive with her robbery gossip. Bunny peeled off to Parkhurst’s store. There, a young clerk in Coke-bottle glasses spoke in the voice of a stage tragedienne. “They hit the Halvorsons’.”
Yes, and you love it. The robbery had thrilled the whole island. The population waited for the second act, and Bunny feared what that would be. She handed the clerk cash. The store did not take credit cards. To the girl’s thank-you, she gave only a grim nod.
* * *
From the hill above their home, Bunny saw ruts in the lawn. In the driveway itself, mulch, plowed up in waves, splayed out of the garden. Whoever had come had spun their wheels in the flower bed.
“They did the house, Ralph.”
“Wait here. I’ll see.” Ralph had parked, and when he left to sprint up to the house, Bunny locked the door. She watched him reach the stoop and search his pockets for the key. He opened the front door cautiously, as if a vandal might be lurking inside. After he vanished, Bunny squirmed sideways in her seat to take a look behind. ‘Don’t be scared,’ she told herself. The day was bright. Vandals wouldn’t do their damage in the blaze of sun.
“Don’t move anything.” She rolled down the window to yell that warning. There could be clues and Ralph might ruin them. She ventured from the car and crunched across the gravel to shout the same instruction through the open door.
Ralph, if he heard her, did not reply.
Bunny eyed the vestibule, the throw rug, the stairway, the newel post, the banister. She looked for clues to depredations, but she saw no damage inside. The house maintained its Spartan innocence. The calm interior came like a reproof to all of Bunny’s fears.
But a massacre had been done in the garden. Her blue geraniums lay mangled in wheel rut. She stooped and lifted damaged stems. A glint caught her eye. She parted a laurel’s branches and saw a foil packet in the dirt. “Silvertip Condom,” the printing said. “Sold for the prevention of disease.”
She gave her garden a shocked look, as if some scene of indecency were taking place before her eyes. On the leaf of a hosta hugging the shade, a limp something lay. It looked like the skin a slug might shed, but it was the Silvertip, used.
“Ralph.” She shouted his name again and again until she heard the pounding of her husband’s footsteps as he came running from the house.
* * *
“Marge calls it a highboy, but it’s a chest on a stand.” Mary Southby spoke from the patio steps.
Her husband, Blair, tipped more Glenfiddich into his tumbler. “William and Mary chest. 1730’s.”
“If that.” Mary smiled at Ralph, who was hurrying to relieve her of the cheese tray she carried.
Bunny had strayed to the edge of the bluff above the ocean and had trained her eyes on the speck of a boat far across the water. She expected coq au vin for dinner. It was what Mary always served. And she knew Blair would apologize about his Chardonnay.
“How’s Muffy doing, Mary? We saw her at the landing. Is she here for the summer?” Bunny didn’t know, until she turned from the vast ocean, that at her questions Mary’s face had frozen, and Blair’s look had turned glum.
“Muffy’s taking some time out, Bunny.” Mary had followed Ralph to the patio table. She stood assessing for a moment where he put the tray of cheese, then she moved it half a foot.
“Is she coming to dinner?”
“We aren’t sure.” In her friend’s tone, Bunny heard a warning not to ask more.
Blair reached for Bunny’s glass. “I can refresh that.” He wore pressed shorts and a polo shirt. The cold didn’t bother him the way it did Bunny. She had put a sweater on before she and Ralph had left their house.
“But don’t you think it’s funny,” Ralph had asked when he and Bunny had been standing among the hostas, staring at the condom on the leaf.
“You have an odd sense of humor, Ralph. Nasty people did this.”
“I’ll get rid of it in the morning, Bunny.”
“Wear gloves.”
“I’ll wear mittens,” Ralph had said. He had added, “I have an odd sense of humor,” with a bit of an edge to his voice.
Ralph now was telling Mary something droll. He was pointing at the cheese, and she was laughing. What was droll about cheese? Trust Ralph to find out. Bunny had started toward him, intending to take his arm and rest her head against his shoulder, when Muffy, the Southbys’ daughter, sashayed from the house, a boy in tow.
“We can’t make dinner. Sorry, Mom.” The boy was Mr. Show-Your-Nipples. “This is Merton, everybody. Merton Ephrem.”
“One of the boatyard Ephrems?” Ralph‘s tone was welcoming.
“My uncle has the boatyard. My dad’s a lobsterman.”
“An old island family, though.”
“I guess so.” Merton’s hand went to the top button on his shirt. If he unbuttons it, I’ll throw myself off the cliff, Bunny thought. But the young man was only nervous. His smile was uncertain, and when Muffy offered her hand to guide him forward he latched gladly onto it.
“We can’t stay to dinner, Mom. We’re running away to get married.”
It took a second for the older people to smile at Muffy’s joke.
“I’m kidding. We’re really stealing highboys. It’s the season.”
“It wasn’t a highboy.” Blair, at the drinks table, clinked ice into a glass. His daughter’s joke may not have registered with him. “You can stay and have a drink, though, can’t you? What’s your poison, Merton? Gin and tonic?” He swept his hand to call attention to his array of bottles. “We’ve got beer, too. It’s in a cooler somewhere.”
“Marge Halvorson is absolutely devastated.” Mary touched her daughter’s hair as she spoke. “Cries all the time. Doesn’t feel safe in her own house.” She had stroked a wandering strand into place. Muffy shook her head to undo the change.
“They hit us, too.” Bunny eyed the cheese plate as she spoke. She hadn’t meant to speak about the indignities their home had suffered, but something in the sauciness of her friends’ daughter made her want to flay. “They drove across the lawn. Across the flower bed. They left a condom lying on the hostas. Silvertip Condom. You ever hear of a Silvertip condom?”
Bunny directed her question at Muffy, who burst into laughter.
How about you, Mr. Nipples? Bunny turned on the young man with a fierce gaze, but Mr. Nipples only chewed his lower lip and waited for a further clue about how he was expected to react.
“You didn’t tell us, Bunny.” Mary, who had cooked the coq au vin, whose 75th birthday the evening was to celebrate, sounded shocked.
Blair had stooped to look beneath the drinks table for the cooler full of beer. He seemed to have missed the Silvertip news. “Ah, here it is.” He straightened up and spoke with a broad smile. “Bud. You want a Bud, Mert? We’ve got something German, too. Feel adventurous?”
Muffy took the beer her father offered Merton and put it down next to the cheese tray. “You guys have fun.” She linked arms with Merton. “The tide is high. We’re swimming nude.”
She and Merton jostled each other hurrying through the door, and from the house, as soon as they were out of sight, gusts of laughter floated back to the grown-ups near the cheese.
* * *
“I didn’t think you would tell.” Ralph, at the wheel, kept his eyes on the road.
“They knew already.”
“How could they?”
“Muffy knew.”
“She say something?”
“That smirk. That said it all.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Bunny.”
“Her boyfriend had Silvertip written all over him.”
“I suppose he had highboy written on him, too.”
Bunny turned toward her window and the landscape of darkness the car threaded through. On the island’s narrow roads, Ralph drove at twenty. Bunny kept her eyes on the white rails of the long fence around the Baileys’ meadow. Madge Bailey kept her gelding there.
“I’ll bet they partied at our house. We’ll find bottles if we look, Ralph.”
“Good. We can use bottles. That will be nice.”
“Fingerprints, Ralph.”
“Don’t say it was Muffy, Bunny. We don’t know who it was. Kids saw a chance to blow off steam. Our place happened to be available.”
“It wasn’t available. Nobody said it was available.”
“We haven’t seen even a beer can, Bunny.”
“I’ll find one just as soon as we get home.”
“Good. Poke around in the dark. Fall off a god-damned cliff. Haul in the Buds. Haul in the Lucky Lagers. Fill a whole suitcase. We’ll have a line-up with suspects in Silvertip condoms. We’re going to get to the bottom of this, by God.”
Ralph had let his voice rise, and it wasn’t until he’d parked and halted his tirade that he realized Bunny was crying.
* * *
She had brought her flannel nightgowns because she knew how cold the island nights could be. Ralph wore flannel, too, and when she’d said they should use the heavy comforter he hadn’t objected. He’d pulled the comforter down from a closet shelf and helped her spread it on their four-poster. Now 2 a.m. had come, and the special quiet of the island enveloped them. Bunny, in the past, had likened the island’s noiselessness to being battened in soft cotton. The silence was the silence of absence. No traffic. No engines. No fans. It was as if the island—which had its share of traffic and fans and motors—quieted all that to return the world to a primitive state.
* * *
Next morning, when Bunny got up she took extraordinary care not to disturb her sleeping husband. She slid slowly from under the comforter. She glided barefoot from the room. She didn’t even grope for her bathrobe, as if putting on a bathrobe would have been the same as putting on a suit of clanking armor.
The grass out front was dewy to her feet. The rhododendrons and azaleas stood so veiled by the dark that when she got close and they emerged, they came like wild things, like deer edging shyly up to feed. She walked with a hand extended to sweep their damp leaves, and when she reached the road she stood where she could stare down its gray calmness, as if out of the dark a car might come careening to rip across her lawn. From a buoy far off in the harbor the music of a bell, an aid to navigation, sounded. Its softness magnified the quiet of the night.
On her return—much swifter than her dreamy walk down to the road—a glassy glint she’d missed before halted her steps. A bottle lay beneath a rhododendron. Bunny wet her arm retrieving it, but the damp proved worth it. The bottle’s label said Jack Daniels. As soon as Bunny read the name she looked sharply left and right, as if she feared another bottle from some drunk fool’s arm might come sailing through the dimness of the dawn.
* * *
At seven, when Ralph came down for coffee, he stopped in the kitchen doorway and silently took in the Jack Daniels bottle. Bunny had put it on the table, like a centerpiece. She sat sipping from her mug and said nothing. Ralph went through his coffee ritual—pouring, adding milk, stirring. He avoided casting his gaze toward the bottle. The sun had reached it. Bunny knew the bottle was hard to ignore, but instead of offering some dopey, witty comment, Ralph rolled open the slider and stepped out to the sunny porch. Bunny shifted around to watch him. His gaze went to the hostas, and after a moment he returned and passed her on his way to his den. She heard him open drawers. A minute passed and he crossed through the kitchen again. He’d left his coffee mug behind but he carried a white, business-size envelope. He strode straight to the hostas. Bunny watched him fish around, not where the condom was but underneath the maple. When he straightened up, he held a stick, about a foot and a half long.
Back Ralph went, under Bunny’s intense gaze, to the hostas. He used the stick to lift the condom off the leaf where whoever had tossed it had left it, probably someone, Bunny thought, who had just finished screwing in a car. He delicately worked the damp, pale thing into his white envelope, then he threw the stick away and returned to the house.
Bunny glared. He passed her in silence. She followed him into the living room and watched him place the envelope face-out on the mantel. Bunny moved close. She read what Ralph had penned across the envelope’s white face. The top line read: Merton Ephrem Memorial Condom. Underneath that, in parenthesis: (Not Testicles).
Bunny’s laugh came in a sharp, dog-like bark. Ralph’s expression was patient. It said he expected better. He looked like the owner of a thoroughbred horse or a pedigreed dog, something of such demonstrated merit congratulations were his due. But all he really owned was his stupid joke. The real joke was looking proud because of that.
Which Bunny understood—not in the way of reason but through the lens of a long love. And though the man with his smug look, standing now with his arm resting on the mantel, was grey and stooped and sagging, she saw him also striding toward her, naked from a midnight swim, his chest, with its brown nipples, streaming water. The joke was deeper than indignities. Bunny laughed and laughed.
Most of Robert Kinerk's fiction is about people on islands, a result, he speculates, of growing up on an island in Alaska and later living on an island in Maine. 'The Merton Ephrem Memorial Condom' is from his series of Maine stories.