fresh fish and lobster

A BATHTUB FULL OF LOBSTERS, a harbor full of yachts. Diners lined the counter of Billie’s Bistro clad in colorful attire. Red polka dots, flower prints. Some of them were speaking Swedish, others were speaking Russian. There were some Indians and Pakistanis too. There were straw hats and waffle fries. There were crisp linen blouses and dangling gold jewelry catching light. Pretty tan girls with pretty tan legs and nowhere to go. Muscle-bound men in crisp white shirts and a bad boy penchant for the surf. This was it, then, the Hamptons scene, the Sag Harbor scene, if Sag counted as a full Hampton. The verdict was still out.

“Fifty-eight? Number 58!” the owner Billie called out from behind the counter. “Three. Three? Does anybody have three? Fifty-eight? Three?” The owner turned to Laoise Burns and said, “Would you take these orders outside and find them? They are probably out there.” Platters of swordfish and grilled tuna, lobsters, wedges of lemons, plastic containers of pico de gallo and slaw. All stacked up.

Laoise went out with the platters and sought out her customers from the tables on the pier. She had on her black top and black skirt, which was her work uniform. Her dark hair was pulled back and her freckled skin was tanned by the sun. Her name tag said “Leesha,” because nobody here could pronounce her name the right way. Outside it was cooler than it was in the bistro. Her sweat felt cool as a breeze came in off the inlet. Inside it seemed as if all the infernal heat of summer had collected. The fans rotated overhead but made no difference. There was a line for the toilet now, and a bathtub full of lobsters bubbled in the corner. Her boyfriend would eat lobsters but his sister never touched the crustacean. She said they were sentient beings. Dozens of sprawled creatures awaited their fates in the bath, their claws rubberbanded. Yellow, orange, and blue rubber bands.

“Fifty-eight? Three?” Fifty-eight was a gay couple, most likely from Manhattan. Designers? Architects? One of them wore several gold rings on one hand. He looked to be Middle Eastern. Three was a family of traditional East Enders, dressed in white, the mother wore a straw hat out to dinner. She was expecting another child, but still somehow wearing a pair of high heels too. Strange people. You just didn’t see these kinds of things in Limerick on Sundays. The gay architects and East Enders tipped heavily. The husband may have taken a liking to her, with her dark hair and dark short skirt. It helped. All the money helped. That was the gig. Make the money. Take it back home. Maybe some for granny.

For generations of Irish girls like her it had been the same. They came out to Block Island, Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, Sag Harbor. Maybe even make a boyfriend, but leave him when the summer was up. A summer’s romance. There was one fellow she had met recently though whom she didn’t want to leave behind. He looked cool and had a nice car. An air of reserved mystery hung about him. She called him her “Iroquois James Bond.” He called himself Laszlo.

Laoise went back inside and Billie, a no nonsense older woman with short-cut gray hair who had grown up out east, and had hired and fired scores of Irish lasses, had already prepared up the next order. This was a special delivery for a nearby yacht docked at the pier just behind the bistro. She was supposed to deliver the platters of fresh fish and lobsters to “Pierre” aboard The Devil’s Croissant. Laoise took the order into her arms and went to the gate to the docks. She couldn’t undo the lock herself, but fortunately someone was exiting and she was able to maneuver past the front gate out onto the piers and the rows of ships.

Her first obstacle was a tall Caribbean man who stood guard, his biceps straining the fabric of a polo shirt. He looked down a long nose at the little Irish girl and the containers of late lunch which she was careful to hold at level. She told him she was looking for a ship called The Devil’s Croissant. The man nodded and told her it was at the end of the dock. She went on her way, passing boat after boat.

It was hot out here in the sun, even at 5 pm, and passengers of various vessels were out on the sunnier parts of the deck tanning themselves, or passing bottles of champagne between each other. The ultra-rich. They weren’t all bad people, but they all seemed so dumb, Laoise thought. How could they all be so vapid? She had tried to engage many, man and woman alike, in some kind of conversation, or even to talk about great literature, especially her favorite writers, but she had little success. Everyone had heard of Sally Rooney, sure. They didn’t know that one day Laoise Burns would be more famous than her. If she ever finished the novel she was working on, when she wasn’t working.

Or cruising around in Tuffdick’s Mustang.

At last she reached The Devil’s Croissant. The ship had an odd illustration of a 17th century Satan, the kind you might see on the flag of an old pirate vessel, holding aloft the French’s most famous pastry. God knows who thought of such a stupid name. A man was standing beside the great white ship, clad in a crisp, white button-down business shirt and a pair of khakis. He was bald, but somehow immaculate in his hairlessness. His teeth were perfectly while. His nails were trimmed. His features were rounded and in a way nondescript. He could be anybody. But this creature of the affluent Sag Harbor piers did have a name.

“Pierre?” Laoise asked. She held up the platters. “Number 59?”

“Yes, I’m Pierre,” said the man. He had no detectable accent. Pierre took the order over into his hands. “I already paid ahead,” he said. “That’s it, right?”

Laoise nodded.

“But I assume you will be wanting some kind of tip?”

“That’s how it is,” she said.

The man called Pierre fished a crisp $20 bill from a black wallet and handed it over to Laoise with two fingers. She put it away in the bag she carried around her waist. Each day she might haul in a few hundred dollars like this. It never ceased to surprise her how indifferent the monied class was to money. They gave it away. They gave her $20 for walking down a pier with a bunch of dead lobsters.

Just then, Laoise noticed two young girls looking at her from a window onboard. Both looked to be teenagers. Maybe 14 years old? Fifteen? One was a slender blonde, the other had what looked to be kinky red hair. She was quite striking, a beautiful girl, and she did not look happy. Both girls motioned to Laoise and then it was as if someone else had come into the room and pulled them away from the ship’s window. Laoise briefly saw the face of another man, older, with gray hair, and then the curtain was drawn back over the window. The whole scene was so perplexing, that she did not know how to react. She just zipped up her little tip bag and looked back at the bald man. He eyeballed her and leaned in closer.

“Did you see something?” the man called Pierre asked Laoise. There was a hard timbre to his voice that did not convey stress or worry, but at the same time, the threat of some brewing trouble. A lecturing tone, that of a police sergeant.

“What do you mean?”

“I think you better come with me,” said the man called Pierre. He gripped her by one arm. Laoise looked back at the Caribbean guard, but his back was turned. Still, there were people all around, up and down the piers. One shriek is all it would take to make them turn their heads from their bottles of tanning lotion and champagne. Laoise slowly touched the man’s hand and removed it. The man called Pierre looked down at her with cold blue eyes. He smelled of cologne.

“You didn’t see anything here, are we understood?” the man said to Laoise.

Laoise felt truly afraid and nodded. She was so afraid she could not even look the man in the eyes again. Instead she looked to one side and to the other. She looked down into the green waters of the harbor, and the translucent jellyfish floating at the top along the crests of the waves, as well as the green seaweed.

Then she turned and headed back to the armed guard, the gate, the bistro. Laoise went back to East Enders with expectant wives, straw hats, and big tips, and to swanky gay architect couples from the Middle East. She went back to Billie’s Bistro, to fresh fish and lobster. She almost wanted to go all the way back to Ireland, but memories of what she had left behind there, that mess, kept the thought of return away, at least until the summer’s end. That night she returned to her small shared apartment on the outskirts of town that she shared with two other girls from Cork. She curled up in her bed and watched the full moon and listened to The Cranberries on her headphones. Laoise tried to sleep but she just couldn’t. She could only recall the grip of the strange man’s hand and the frightened looks on the faces of those two girls aboard that cursed pastry ship.