The Wager at Dunemouth

The tourists left Dunemouth in the middle of October, and by the first week of November the town had gone quiet in a way that took some getting used to. I had lived there three winters by then, and every year the silence arrived like a tenant moving back in. It settled over the boardwalk first, then the arcade with its plywood over the windows, then the parking lot by the museum where the seagulls had the whole asphalt to themselves.

I was thirty-six that November, and I ran the maritime museum, which is a generous word for it. Two rooms, a whale jawbone, a case of ship models, and a guest book that might get six signatures a week once the season ended. I kept the lights on and the doors open from ten to four because the town paid me to, and because the alternative was sitting at home listening to the wind work on the siding.

Viv Farley lived in the cottage next to my rental, across a strip of gravel parking that belonged to nobody. She was fifty-two, retired from marine biology, and she spent her mornings out on the seawall with binoculars counting birds that I could never see. She had been friendly from the start in a distant way. Coffee offered once or twice, help carrying a bookcase, a nod across the gravel when we both came out to scrape frost off our windshields. Her last serious relationship had been years back, with some researcher, and I knew that because Dunemouth kept no secrets, it just kept them slowly.

That first week of November was gray and low-tide smelling, and I remember it clearly because of what happened on the Thursday. I had closed the museum early, nothing dramatic, just a Thursday-level absence of visitors, and I was carrying a bag of groceries up my front steps when I heard footsteps on the gravel behind me.

Viv had two cups of coffee, one in each hand, and she was wearing a gray wool coat that she must have owned since the nineties. Her hair was short and going white at the temples and she had the wind-flushed look of somebody who had just walked the seawall.

"I brought you a peace offering," she said, holding up one cup.

"For what?"

"For the proposal I'm about to make."

I let her in, because it was cold and because I was curious, and we sat at my kitchen table with the steam rising off the cups. She wrapped both hands around hers and looked at me over the rim the way she looked at birds, steady and unbothered about being caught at it.

"I'll get to the point," she said. "I've watched you all autumn. You go to work, you come home, you buy one bag of groceries, you eat the same three dinners in rotation. You are a well-run machine and there is nothing wrong with that. But it's November and we both know what November is."

I said it was fine. November was fine. I liked the quiet.

"Nobody likes the quiet," she said. "They endure it."

Then she laid out the wager, and I want to do it justice because it was the strangest offer anyone has made me, before or since. She said that over the following week she would make her best effort, her words, to make me feel something real. She would not define what that meant and she would not explain her methods. If I could resist her completely for seven days, she would clean my gutters, which were a scandal, full of maple seeds and a small stubborn sprout, and she would also repaint my front step, which was peeling.

"And if I can't resist you?" I asked, and I laughed when I said it, because the whole thing was absurd. We were two women on a dead street in a dead season, one of us counting gulls and the other counting signatures in a guest book.

"Then I win the wager, and we find out what happens next when we get there."

I should say here that I was not naive. I knew what she was proposing, underneath the gutter talk. Viv was fifty-two and sharp-eyed and there had been a look or two across the gravel over the years that I had filed away and not acted on. But I was thirty-six and I thought of myself as someone who had her life under control. I had ended a fling at twenty-two with a visiting artist, cleanly, no wreckage, and I had built a quiet tidy existence since and I was, I told myself, attached to it.

So I said yes. Partly for the gutters, which did need doing. Partly because the winter was long and this was the most interesting thing to happen in Dunemouth since the arcade lost its roof. And partly, though I would not have admitted it that night, because I wanted to know what her best effort looked like.

She stood, put on her coat, and set some ground rules at the door like a lawyer. She would not touch me without asking. She would stop whenever I said stop, no argument, and that would end the wager on the spot with no hard feelings, and the gutters would get done either way. She said all this plainly, and I remember thinking that a woman who planned her provocation that carefully was either very serious or very bored, and possibly both.

"Seven days," she said. "Starting tomorrow. Tonight doesn't count."

"Because you've already got me alone in my kitchen?"

"Because I haven't started yet." She looked at the maple sprout visible over my shoulder in the gutter and smiled. "That's a red oak, by the way. It'll crack your fascia by spring."

She left, and I washed both cups and sat for a while with my hands around the empty one, which is a habit I have when I don't want to admit I'm thinking. The wind came off the water and pushed at the windows the way it always did. I told myself the wager was a joke and I had played along, the way you buy a raffle ticket from a neighbor to be polite.

Day one, Friday, she did nothing at all. I watched for her over the gravel and she was out on the seawall with her binoculars from nine until noon and then gone inside, and by evening I was almost annoyed. I had braced for something.

Day two, Saturday, she left a paper bag on my step. Inside was a loaf of bread still warm from the diner, and a note in handwriting that belonged in a museum itself, all loops. The note said only, enjoy, no methods were used in the production of this bread. It made me laugh, out loud, alone in my kitchen, which I suppose was the point, though she was nowhere to see it.

Day three she came to the museum.

I heard the door chime and looked up from the guest book and there she was, shaking rain off her coat, holding an umbrella she had not needed to open. She signed the guest book, deliberately, her whole name and the date, and paid the two dollar admission in coins counted out one at a time. Then she spent forty minutes reading every placard in the building, and I mean reading, lips almost moving, while I sat at the desk trying to look busy with a ledger.

At the whale jawbone she stood a while, then turned to me.

"Ask me what this is," she said.

"You know what it is. You're a marine biologist."

"Ask me anyway. It's good for morale when the curator gets to talk."

So I told her about the jawbone, the fin whale that had beached in 1971, and she listened with her head tilted, and when I finished she said it was the best two dollars she had spent all year, and walked out into the rain without another word, and I stood there at the desk feeling something I had not let myself feel in a while, and I was annoyed about it, genuinely annoyed, because the wager had only just started and she was already ahead.

So by Monday I was losing. Not to her, exactly. To my own attention, which kept drifting toward the gravel strip between our houses, toward the seawall in the mornings, toward the question of what she would do next. I closed the museum at four and walked home along the boardwalk in a wind that smelled like low tide and rain coming, and I rehearsed being unimpressed.

Day five was a Tuesday. I had just gotten the front door locked and the keys in my pocket when Viv came down her path and across the gravel with her hands in the pockets of the gray coat. She had a bottle of wine in one hand, no bag, just holding it, and she stopped at the bottom of my steps and looked up at me.

"Come play cribbage tonight," she said. "I'm bored of winning by default."

"You haven't asked anyone else."

"There is no one else. There's you and Marshall and he cheats at dominoes." She tipped the bottle. "I brought a Malbec. You can say no. I'll drink it alone, which is sadder than it sounds."

I thought it over. I didn't. I said I'd be there at seven and she said seven was fine, and she turned and walked back across the gravel like a woman who had already gotten what she came for. I went inside and stood in my hallway and told myself it was cards. It was cribbage, a peg board, fifty-two cards, a neighbor, a bottle of wine. There was nothing in that arithmetic that should have made my stomach do what it did.

Her cottage was warm in a way mine wasn't. She had the wood stove going and bookshelves on every wall and a table by the window with the cribbage board already out, two decks, the pegs set. The house smelled like woodsmoke and coffee, which is a smell I associate now with trouble.

"You found me," she said, taking my coat.

"You invited me."

"Still. Some people don't show." She poured the wine into glasses that were not wine glasses, heavy tumblers with a faint chip on the rim of one, and gave me the chipped one, which I decided was either an insult or an honor. We sat and she shuffled and cut and we dealt, and for the first twenty minutes it was exactly what I had told myself it would be. Cards. She counted fifteens under her breath and pegged with a little clicking sound and once she said my name in the middle of a hand, just Paula, as if she were trying how it fit, and I dropped my cards.

We were two games apiece when she dealt me a hand that was worthless. I mean worthless, three fives and a face card, nothing paired, nothing running, and I looked at it and looked at the board, where I was four points short of winning, and I did something I had not done since I was a child. I miscounted on purpose. I gave her the game. I laid my hand down with a shake of my head and said, well, that's that, and pegged her forward, and she let me get all the way through the ritual of losing before she set her cards flat and looked at me.

"You counted wrong," she said.

"I counted right. You won."

"You had fifteen for two and a pair. I watched you look at it. You threw the game." She said it without heat, the way she said everything, and poured the last of the wine into my glass. "Why?"

I could have lied. I considered lying. But the stove was warm and the glass was in my hand and her face made lying feel like a waste of a good evening. "Because I wanted to see what you'd do," I said. "If I lost."

Viv sat back. She turned her own glass a