Camille won’t do it anymore. No more pulling the lobsters from the tank. She doesn’t want that kind of responsibility. If the wash-ashores from Connecticut and New York want to eat a creature that’s just been boiled alive, let them choose it. She has no interest in playing God. She just wants to crank The Smiths and clean the goddamn dishes. That is what she was hired to do.
And she’s good at it. No one gets the plates and bowls and pint glasses gleaming like she does though sometimes the cracks are better hidden. She scrubs until her fingers are raw, pink and chapped from the combo of hot water and bleach she insists is the only way to remove the grime. When she’s out back, smoking her Kools with Danny, the chef, he tells her to put some lotion on her hands, they look like an old lady’s. Camille is 28. “What do I fucking care?” She says this often.
Danny tells Camille she’s got to pick the lobsters out because he doesn’t have time. “Then fucking fire me!” Fall is coming, which means the college kids pimping there for the summer have started to leave town. They need everyone they can get. “I’ll call Myrna myself and tell her,” Camille says. Myrna is the manager who has a thing for Camille – she likes the butch youngsters – so Danny knows Myrna will side with her. Camille gets a kick out of watching Danny walk outside where they keep the lobsters jammed in a tank of brackish water, coming back with one whose rubber banded claws are futilely waving. Camille isn’t going to intervene and help the struggling bastards. She’s not some radical PETA type. “How are things on death row?” she asks. Danny rolls his eyes.
There is something about those last hours in the tank that gets to Camille though. Do they feel anything? Do they know they’re in this shit situation together? Camille reads voraciously. None of that fiction crap. Give her real life! She checks out some books about lobsters from the Wellfleet Public Library. Late at night, with an ashtray filling with butts, she reads about these crustaceans whose carcasses she spends most days throwing away.
The crowds start to thin so Myrna makes the call to shutter Seashore Diner for the season the last weekend in October. The air has turned cool, to the delight of the staff in the hot kitchen. Myrna, who doesn’t smoke, joins Camille and Danny out back, now that the dining room is a quarter full. Camille knows the old broad likes her. Years later, Camille will laugh that she thought a 42-year-old was over the hill. But this summer, she has her hands full with a fling who has gotten too attached and wants to stick around. Winter is for photography and reading and late nights at Ray’s Canteen drinking beer with the locals which Camille recently became when Ray finally asked her name and remembered her order after five years of going there regularly.
On closing night, Myrna pulls out a cooler with beer. The staff sticks around for a celebratory drink or two though for some it’s not a special occasion. They survived another summer and now will worry about winter gigs. Camille takes her bottle of Heineken out to the back deck. Myrna and Danny follow.
The chilly air smells of burnt leaves. It’s not yet hibernation time; there’s still a chance for Camille to take photos of the cape before the snow hits but after the asshole tourists leave. It’s also a melancholy time for some, the shedding of one skin, the growing of another. Camille’s young enough to feel possibility while Danny and Myrna are mournful, as if something’s ending rather than beginning.
“So, I was reading about our lobster friends,” Camille says.
“You’ve been a real cunt about that,” Danny laughs.
“Did you know that when lobsters have sex, the girl lobster has to shed her shell first? It’s called molting.”
“I can’t imagine being out there with no covering,” Myrna says. “Life is hard enough for them with one.”
“Then the boy lobster fucks the girl. But he has to be gentle because she’s all bare flesh. And a target for predators. So, he protects her. The guy stays with her until she’s no longer exposed.”
“Until her shell grows back?” Myrna asks.
“Something like that. Can you imagine it? A world where a man actually protects a woman?”
“We’re not all that bad,” Danny says. “You should try us.”
“I don’t fucking care about that,” Camille says. “You’re not getting what I’m saying.” She has started to slur her words, from the beer and the autumn chill.
“People come in here to eat these goddamn lobsters, they’re slobbering over their soft flesh, butter dripping down their stupid chins onto the fucking bibs they’re wearing like goddamn babies. All this to eat something that knows way more than they do about how to care for their kind.”
Danny and Myrna are quiet.
“So, don’t tell me those lobsters don’t feel a thing when you throw them into the pot to die. That they aren’t scared when they sense you coming.” Camille punctuates her words with the cigarette in her right hand. “And don’t ever call me a cunt again.”
“Sorry,” Danny says.
“Maybe they knew I could have helped them but didn’t,” Camille says.
“I doubt it,” Danny says.
“Guess what the name is for male lobsters,” Camille says to Danny.
“No idea.”
“Cock.”
“Imagine that,” Myrna chuckles. “A chick crustacean protected by a cock. Now that’s an alliteration, Camille.”
Camille starts laughing; her throat is thick from the smoke so the sound is deep. Danny and Myrna laugh too.
“I do love you two weirdos, you know,” Camille says. “I was just messing with you, Danny.”
The threesome sips their beers. The condensation from their exhales forms white clouds against the backdrop of the chilly starless night.
