Flying Solo

by Linda Holmes

“I don’t know. You just…paint your walls however, whenever you want? You don’t…talk to anybody?” “I’m talking to you,” she said. “Who else would I talk to? It’s my house. They’re my walls. I can cover the entire place in zebra-stripe wallpaper if I want to. I can fill it up with sand and make a beach. Compared to that, a few goldfish walls are pretty tame.”

She took the lid off one, and inside were two Polaroid cameras. One looked older than any of the Polaroid cameras Laurie had ever seen, and one was the same kind of OneStep her parents had when she was a toddler. She unloaded all the fabric boxes, and she kept finding instant cameras. A total of five Polaroids, two Kodaks, and a Fujifilm. Some looked like they were of an 8-track vintage; others looked like they were probably made right before digital cameras upended instant photography. One or two looked practically current.

“Yes, I am a personal research concierge to a wide variety of people who hate the internet,” he said, pushing a few more buttons on his machine.

She’d been in Seattle for fifteen years, and she did think of it as home. But Maine was where she was from, where she was made. She was made as a ten-year-old asking her brother to come over and help lift up a rock so she could see the starfish and hermit crabs and sea urchins. She was made watching live lobsters wherever she could, which was practically everywhere. Not because she liked to eat them, but because the segments of their bodies and their deep brown armor were like nothing she’d ever seen outside of the world of bugs.

“I only socialize with books,” Nick added, throwing two pictures into the KEEP box in the middle of the circle. “Other than that, I’m basically a seaside hermit.”

“She takes my insurance and I had to get two root canals last year,” Nick said, straightening a stack of sorted shots.

“I just think Dot should have that, too. Even though she doesn’t have daughters. Or a librarian.” She sighed. “You know what I mean?”

“People don’t label anything, it drives me crazy.” He handed it back to Laurie. “Do me a favor, both of you. Think of the librarians, think of the historians, and label your stuff.”

“I don’t think I appreciated it at all. That you could drive out and be by the water or get in a boat and be on the water, or…you know, when I was fourteen and I was playing basketball against Freeport, it’s not like I thought about the fact that people literally took vacations here, just to be here.”